Quiddities — Musings essential and frivolous
As if Wikipedia wasn’t already confusing enough, because one doesn’t know what to trust, now some UCSC computer scientists are coloring questionable entries orange based on a calculation of author reputation. The trouble is that various intensities of orange, which indicate the degree of unreliability, can turn up in the middle of a sentence. So what do you do then?
Because PCs have always been less expensive than Macs, because businesses favor PCs over Macs, because over the years I’ve bought software for PCs that would cost a lot to buy again for Macs, because I long ago worked for GE when it decided to put a rather worthless Windows PC on everyone’s desk — we would turn it on, look at the crude Windows, sniff it as though it might be something dead that we should bury in the grass beyond the parking lot, and go back to working on our Unix-based Sun workstations — because of all of these reasons and more that I’ve forgotten, I long ago began purchasing PCs so that my home and work computers would be compatible.
Years later here I sit writing my blog on a PC, but with a change today since Steve Jobs yesterday announced that Apple’s Safari browser was available for PCs. Analysts were underwhelmed. They were looking for a big announcement, but all they got was a browser. Down the stock price went.
But wait — could there be something more here, I wonder, as I type away in a window in this new browser? For years I’ve been saddled with a marginal operating system that always manages to crash at the wrong time or that makes networking harder than it should be or that just pisses me off because the software we were using on Sun workstations was so much better, and that was many years ago. Why do I need all this Microsoft-compatible hardware and software if I can now wirelessly connect to the Internet?
I blog away. I upload pictures. I get on my browser, in this case Safari with its very classy interface with tabs, which took me a couple moments to find, and I write this on my website server, not really caring that I’m running Windows. Clearly this is the future as network bandwidths increase and more and more applications adopt a browser approach that is independent of the computer’s operating system. Sure Adobe doesn’t do it yet with their Creative Suites, but they will. And then I’ll be able to create pages using Adobe applications running on my website server.
Won’t it be grand when we can carry around a paper-thin device with a battery that lasts forever that we can use to get all our computing and networking and communications done without complaining about Microsoft? Sure I may be an old guy. Sure I may be dead when it happens. But I can look forward to the future anyway. Hope springs eternal, don’t you know.
But maybe we’re not there yet. In trying to change my WordPress options using Safari, the browser crashed. Apple made it easy for me to send an error report and Safari is still in Beta, so I’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, checking back from time to time to see how Safari’s doing, I’ll continue to use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a rebel living on the edge. Bah, humbug Microsoft.