Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Wednesday, 24 April 2002

# 10 PM

apple with one bite missing

Back from the Mac OS X talk. It's really technically spiffy, but I don't see it as serious competition for Windows. This only because they, as a company, still don't have a clue how to position themselves to be competition.

Case in point: If they were willing to consider giving up just a smidge more control, by porting the operating system to stock PC hardware, they would suddenly have a much bigger market. They insist that it isn't worth it, because they can offer a user experience that's just so much better by controlling the hardware platform, but I don't buy it. Users would be content with better than what they already have. The drivers don't have to be perfect, nor the mobility, nor whatever.

Perhaps they have some slick long-term strategy which requires them to not look like serious competition for Microsoft right now. But that just smells like conspiracy theory to me.

city life

There's an old guy with a beard, in dirty overalls, doing something with a plumber's snake on the roof of the building next door. (One would assume he is a plumber.)

# 7:30 PM

I've redone the layout again, mainly so that I can put a mug shot in the upper right-hand corner. (If it's not there, your browser doesn't support CSS. Have you considered upgrading to Mozilla?)

The original photo was taken by David Dyer-Bennet at Minicon 37.

The observant will note that I gave up on doing all the layout in CSS and am using tables again. This is because it's impossible to specify the layout I want in CSS. Or at any rate I have not been able to manage it. If you know how to make the right column be exactly as wide as it needs to be, the left column stretch to take up the entire rest of the page, and the yellow background not smear across part of the left column, please contact me.

Now off to see a talk on Mac OS X.

# 3 PM

Random linkage: Book-A-Minute. Hilarious but only if you've read the books, or attempted to, first.

Panix has a system administrator who does nothing (as far as I know) but install and upgrade software packages. This makes me feel somewhat less pathetic for having nearly killed myself doing the same thing way back in 1996 except on top of a full load of college courses.