Drifting away from apple
I've been elaborating on this fow a while now.
Over the years, I have been a huge fan of many apple products, I own both a desktop and a laptop macintosh, an iPod, I also bought those wierd looking round speakers, that have a proprietary cable that works only with my powermac.
Over time, however, for work and hobby reasons I have got in contact with much opensource software: online applications, Linux of course, XboxMediaCenter...
This made me think again of my Apple addiction... It's true, it's really working well. Take my laptop for example: it has different settings for different network contexts (and that's a killer feature, if you ask me), the ipod works very well and the interface is good, setting up a wireless network is a snap...
But it's all proprietary... and so many things are like my speakers... even the upcoming iPhone won't accept third party software.
ITunes sucks compared to Amarok (at least, this is my taste) (you can connect your ipod to Amarok too). the Video you can play through a new ipod (not that I own that) has to be encoded in wierd formats, then there's the DRM questions, proprietary file formats...
So, Apple is cool, Linux is even cooler. This idea that people freely contribute to it, and change things as they like, just wins me over.
Of course, this comes still with some degree of trouble, but if you feel like trying you can get a lot of satisfaction! :D (nerd alert!)
well... it's true that proprietary technologies are clearly against the rebel alliance and the jedi knights... but unless you're a nerdy techno freak (of course I'm talking about some hypothetical example only guy...) it's far better to have a bloody good machine that does exactly what you need (and you just don't have to think twice before doing anything because you're afraid to have to work 3 hours after just to have the same situation you tried to get out of) even if this means it does ONLY what you need... of course "need" is a word of floating and not stable meaning when we talk about computers and gadgets...
anyway, an example: what if not the cost makes a hacked xbox better than itv? the ability to read rss feeds and meteo?
and, and this is what really matters to non-nerdish people, what on earth could make windows media center better than itv?
if you have time and some decent computer skills, then you're absoluteely right, but otherewise...
and iTunes is better than amarok, at least if you have an account...
d
"if you have time and some decent computer skills" exactly what i meant
"iTunes better than amarok" : amarok searches for wikipedia entries on bands, displays lyrics, connects to last-fm, audioscrobbler... :D
"anyway, an example: what if not the cost makes a hacked xbox better than itv?" you don't need to get the video stuff from itunes music store... i think that's a big plus... it will read shared directories, and (if you take the time) you can put a huge hd in it.
"(and you just don't have to think twice before doing anything because you're afraid to have to work 3 hours after just to have the same situation you tried to get out of)" ah :D try kubuntu on some kind of "normal pc".
Linux has gone a long way in the last 3 years (time i've been experimenting on it).
Anyway, i like my iBook and everything...
iTunes does the same things, with plugins and widgets...
iSquint turns any video file in .mp4 embarassingly easily... the hard disk you put on your xbox could easily be an external firewire on iTv...
I'm not so much into computers to get linux... anyway I have never tried an easy way linux... linux is probably better, but it's too much for me. it's a sort of not-evil-hummer...
by the way, agostino is in urge of a nerdy friend with xbox hacking skills... what about you?
ok petalo, finiamola alla democristiana allora...
ad ognuno piace il suo! e tutti van bene! :D
:)
Invia nuovo commento