SteveAndersen.com

Ok – so here is my situation: recently, like a month ago now, I purchased a shiny new 24” iMac 2.4Ghz, with 2 gigs of ram and a 500 gig drive. I bought this candy machine to replace my – wait for it – G4 DP450. That’s right baby, 450 megahertz. Slow as the day is long, of course when I bought it seven (7) years ago it was the baddest machine on the block, today it is a trusty dog, a basset hound at that. Honestly the DP450 did pretty much everything I wanted it to do, it just did it painfully slowly. Imagine getting 8fps from handbrake and you will know my pain. I was trying to wait for Leopard to come out before buying a new machine, but gave up (when Steve announced that Leopard had been postponed in order to get the iPhone out the door on time, something inside of me died) – frankly, I got tired of avoiding web sites that made moderate to heavy use of java because they completely choked my machine. You know, sites like Ebay, Amazon, and Flicker – no joke. But I am all-better now. Hmmmmm Intel inside.

So my plan had been to take my venerable old DP450 and put it in the basement with about a terabyte, or two, of storage happening, and just use it as a file server, set it to spin down the drives when they are not in use, and to sleep most of the time, but to wake up for network access. I figured I would just network it, set the drives to mount on log in and have simple painless network storage. One drive for iTunes, and MP4s, one drive for Time Machine for my machine, and one drive for Time Machine for my wife’s machine. Maybe even keep a bootable OS9 drive in there for when I get nostalgic for a less bloated, if less stable OS.

That was my beautiful plan. There are 2 things beautiful about this plan, first, I already own the computer… just buy a new drive or two, pop them in, and presto-change-o I have an easy to use NAS device. Second is that this idea does not require an external drive to be plugged directly into the computer to do regular backups. Who is really going to keep a dedicated external drive constantly plugged into their computer, just to manage backups? In true Mac fashion backups happen seamlessly, simply and behind the scenes and I don’t have to think or worry about them; or plug in a special drive every time I want to back up – it just works. Ahem.

Ok – so I have been busy sharking for new drives recently, getting ready to put my plan into action – but now that Leopard is nearing it’s release date – Apple seems to have pulled the rug out from under me. According to Apple, a Time Machine drive must be either a USB / Firewire external drive, or on a networked machine running Leopard. Not only do I not want to pay for an extra copy of Leopard for my DP450 – but it wouldn’t even run it if I was willing to fork over the extra spread. Machine too old and too slow. Yes – I could get a processor upgrade card for the DP450 that would allow it to run fast enough to support Leopard – but that is just more cash. Part of the goal here is to use what I have and not buy more stuff. Buying more stuff makes the plan less beautiful, less Mac.

OK – so what I want to know is WHY must the server machine run Leopard? Is this just another money grab, an attempt to obsolete more machines, and force users to buy more licenses, or is Leopard actually managing file sharing differently? From looking at the Leopard new features page – it doesn’t look like file sharing was changed from Tiger to Leopard. So what gives? It’s not the much heralded ZFS (which I would happily pay for both a processor upgrade and another license to get) – the drive in question must be formatted in HFS+. What gives?

Anyone know?

Joe?

A brief rant if you will indulge me. And it is my blog, so you will.

No wait, come back. I’ll be nice. Honest.

Yes I am capable. Sha.

So Woot is offering a Microsoft Zune 30GB Digital Media Player tonight for $99.00.

And yet, using any product made by Microsoft is still such a horrifying idea that I am more than willing to pay twice as much to use a quantifiably inferior product from Apple.

Why? No, I am not actually insane.

It is the non-quantifiable issues. Like usability.

I am more than happy to pay twice as much for a new iPod nano with less than a third of the drive space, a smaller screen, and no FM tuner, or WiFi. Because the iPod is usable, and the Zune… well, it will quickly become another mp3 playing brick in the bottom of my technology drawer - which makes it a waste at half the price.

See, it isn’t so much about fandom, security, stability, or even slick design - though Apple certainly has all of that in spades over Microsoft. It is about simple usability.

Though, given that one must wonder what Apple is thinking when they brick iPhones, and release the iPod touch after crippling many of it’s features. Perhaps the Steve is beginning to be affected by his own reality distortion field and needs to go away for a little while again?

/rant

Oh, and if anyone is wondering what sort of bobble I would appreciate for Christmas this year, I like the red one.