Brouhaha

Well, I had a busy week. When I wasn’t too busy putting hot peppers in my cat’s eye*, I considered writing something about Apple’s Boot Camp utility that everyone’s been losing their minds about — investors included. Why would AAPL jump nearly $10 because Macs can suddenly boot Windows? Isn’t that, like, “this Dell PC can ALSO run Linux!” Who cares? Maybe Dell’s overdue for a little stock jump of their own. Investors, if you’re reading this, buy more Dell!

Gamers care, I suppose, but if OS X starts to take off and people start using it as their main operating system, I would much prefer to see games written natively for the Mac. Then again, since the Xbox360 is becoming a decent platform for gaming, why not just use that?

Frankly, I agree with Gruber on the Boot Camp issue. Apple has positioned Windows as a “legacy” OS. You can boot into Windows if you really want to but they wouldn’t recommend it. They also point out that Windows is susceptible to all kinds of nastiness and you’re going to get burned. It’s the new Classic!

I’m much more interested in seeing virtualization take off and am hoping that Apple bundles that in with Leopard as well. In the meantime you can try Parallels’ Workstation Beta for OS X (warning: incredibly ugly page following the link). And of course, this all throws Microsoft’s Virtual PC product into serious question.

In the end, dual-booting is not something I enjoy on any machine, let alone a Mac. It’s a pain. I get quality uptimes on my machine and having to shut it down to boot into Windows to play some crap game for a half an hour is of questionable value. And the cost in disk space is high. Granted, I think Apple has made the prospect of dual booting somewhat more pleasant with a nice boot loader and utilities with System Prefs and (koff) Control Panel to select your next boot system, and they’re providing a nice disk partition utility. But still, all this and you get to run Windows! I can’t convey just how dirty that seems to me.

In closing, I would like to relate an experience I had yesterday that made me suddenly appreciate the inclusion of a volume limiter option on new iPods (firmware update released this week). I’m walking out of the house last night, iPod tuned to some Metric, when I hear a snap as my wired remote got pulled off of my hoody, likely by catching on a zipper or something. I reach down to gather up the headphone and remote wire slack when all of a sudden the volume ramps up all the way to full-blast. I flung the headset from my head as if it were on fire and tried turning down the volume. No go from the wired remote. Volume control on the iPod itself was working but kept going back up after I released the touch wheel. I returned my iPod to the vestibule in disgust and made off to my destination sans musique. I only hope that little discharge didn’t blow a driver on my headphones.

I’m assuming there’s another break in my wired remote cable. I’ve had a similar problem before and was forced to shell out $50 for another remote and another set of cheap-assed earbuds which I never use anyway. Maybe I need to look at another solution…

just say no to windows, kids!

* Don’t worry. Wally’s OK! He was underfoot while I was trying to open a jar of Dave’s Insanity Chilies and I fumbled it, allowing a small dash of pepper to escape… RIGHT INTO WALLY’s EYE! He yelped and bolted and started washing his face. His eye closed up and began watering like he’d been doused with… pepper spray. He was restored to full health within five minutes (and hungry for pepperoni).