Hard News, Inc.

Google Android Store: the Mobile Goldrush is Coming...

It's going to be interesting to see if the upcoming mobile phone platform/application war & shakeout will be a repeat of the Apple vs. IBM, or Mac OS vs. Windows wars of the early 80s and early 90s ... ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and all that, you know...

Apple has done a tremendous job breaking ground in this area, popularizing the technology with great hardware that works ... well mostly works ... they have put tons of effort into conceptualizing and designing the interface, and creating the paradigm that people actually want to use.
...and now that they've done the heavy lifting, along comes the more open-source competitor, flinging open the doors of innovation and competition to take the tidy Apple walled garden and turn it into, well, pretty much what the landscape of PC-based applications has looked like for the past 28 years or so.  A loud, rude, complicated, chaotic landscape where everything is much cheaper, does kewl new things that businesses/people need to have in their lives, and that you have to be half-systems engineer yourself to keep all your various hardware & software all playing nicely together.

To stretch the "walled garden" metaphor a little, the IBM-PC space, rather than a tidy garden, more resembles a giant sandbox full of toddlers on meth. Only they're NFL lineman-size. With power tools.
 
If the past is to be our guide, the Android and Blueprint somewhat open-source projects are going to start off behind Apple, biting off what Apple does.  And the developers will be relentless.  And the hardware manufacturers will churn out warehouses full of cheap, buggy handsets to run all this on.

And they will gradually erode Apple's lead in the smartphone/app space.

Anyway, here's some interesting quotes from MSNBC:

While Android is an operating system, it is also an open-source system similar to Linux, upon which it is based. That’s creating a lot of excitement and interest in the kind of programs that will be available for users, including one that can track family members’ whereabouts in an emergency to another that offers a short cooking video, followed by information on nearby grocery stores that carry the ingredients needed for the recipe.

Since its inception, Android has been tweaked and built upon freely by developers, device designers and wireless carriers who have had complete access to Android’s Software Developer Kit. Basically, Android is whatever users and developers want it to be.

That’s in contrast to Apple’s approach with the iPhone. Nine months ago, Apple created a Software Developer Kit offering application makers the same interface and tools Apple uses to develop iPhone software.

But Apple has closely regulated and monitored every program that is being offered through the company’s online App Store.

Android will “create a new, attractive environment to foster innovation and make it easier to bring new ideas to market, ultimately ensuring consumers a richer, more personalized mobile experience,”

Quick Hits: Old Media Loses Trust in France, OC Register May Go Tabloid and Google Only Spys On You For Nine Months Now

Still up in lovely Point Reyes, decompressing and re-imagining our web presence, so the output here has been seriously cramped.  However, these three little items just beg for notice.

1. We've all seen the "MSM sucks, don't believe what it says" meme gain strength the last few years, flourishing in the fertile soil of talk hate radio hosts, and migrating over to the Kos/Firedoglake end of the spectrum.  Meanwhile, in the developing world countries that I've worked in the last few years, the people react with puzzled frowns to the thought that anyone ever would have any sort of uncritical trust in Big Media.  Well, according to the Highway Africa media conference, the 3rd world on the way up countries are starting to really dig the idea of citizen journalists.  Which makes sense, because they have the sad history of governments/revolutionaries, as their first act, seizing the TV/radio stations and firebombing the presses.

...the power of citizen journalism, in its objective and independent approach, is not to be underestimated.

“We need occasions where the actor in society gives us a very good insight
on what is going in communities, where journalists cannot be found. 

2.  Responding to "catastrophic" circulation and ad revenue projections, the OC Register, long known as the dysfunctional family of California journalism (i.e. everyone knows Weird Old Uncle Floyd is not to be trusted around children, but nobody talks about it), is reportedly studying the idea, with intentions of perhaps forming a blue-ribbon committee that will issue non-binding recommendations, of maybe perhaps justalittle changing their format from broadsheet to tabloid.

Will wonders never cease?

Other cost-cutting measure being
considered from the team reviews are Monday and Tuesday papers with
fewer pages and self-service advertising options. Horne also says the
paper may cut back on the number of distribution centers it operates,
noting that it recently reduced the outlets from seven to six.

"Studying it and doing it may be two different
things," Horne stressed about the tabloid change and other moves.
"Every newspaper needs to study driving down costs

3.  And last, for everyone out there who is concerned over those searches that were done ... late at night ... after a few beers ... y'know, just for a hoot ... that could be traced back to their IP address ... 

...well, you only have to worry for nine months rather than 18.  As part of their "Pay no attention to the all-seeing man behind the curtain" campaign, Google is reducing the latency of their caches of your searches.  They are also supposedly working to "anonymize" the userinfo, although how that's supposed to help when all Google search&response data goes thru the big computers at the NSA anyway is beyond me.

(Note to all NSA, FBI, ATF & IRS functionaries now tracking me: Just joking. Heh. Really.  I have nothing to hide.  I'm happy that the government is vigilant against evildoers of all stripes, foreign and domestic. Go Team America!)

Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, told a meeting of
computer industry privacy experts at Microsoft Corp's Silicon Valley
offices that her company planned to "anonymize" the computer addresses
of its users more quickly.

"We're significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention
policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to
improve privacy for our users," Google officials said in a blog post
released Monday night.

(snip)

....until a year-and-a-half ago, Google had kept personally identifiable
information about its Web users on company computers for an indefinite
amount of time.

Anonymity: the Big Web Issue Everyone Keeps Missing

In all the trainings I've done over the last couple of years, the one hot-button issue guaranteed to touch off a passionate debate, even amongst the most detached, sit-on-their-hands group is the reader comments section.

See, journalists just hate them damn comments.

Yeah, yeah, notable exceptions abound, and some people "get it" that we're supposed to include our readers/users in our little game of "Hey lookee here! I done found out sumthin' kewl!" But by and large, newspaper reporters & editors have grown accustomed to their comfy positions as The Voice Of God That Brooks No Disagreement.

So when I start talking about some of the measure that newspapers around the world have taken to try to moderate & impose order on the chaotic forums, comment sections, trackbacks, etc., the journalists fairly leap out of their chairs, eyes alight, as they tick off all the awful insults and calumnies they have been forced to endure by the damn intertubes propellorheads. They talk about how their readers are crazy people who write horrible insults and lies about the reporters, and who get crafty to avoid all the various moderation/banning mechanisms.

In Chile, in Argentina, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Ukraine ... the trolls know no boundaries. In each place, the reporters and editors go on and on at great length about how they can't stand looking at the comments under their stories, because they know that some persistent readers that have an axe to grind against them are going to show up there and start yammering and flinging virtual monkey poo.

I've actually found this subject to be a godsend - when my voice is wearing out and I need a few minutes to chug water and compose myself, I toss this little conversational grenade in the room, and let the journalists vent for a while before moving on to possible solutions.

It's stunning to me that there appears to be international norms and predictable patterns to troll behavior. Vulgar sex-based insults, thread hijacking, escalating to physical threats. There's a great gallery of Flame Warriors here - I highly recommend that you check it out. If you've spent any time whatsoever in the comments sections, having conversations online, you will laugh, cry and grit your teeth in rage as you recognize the archetypes. Is there some special international brotherhood of the troll that you have to join? Do the entrance exams call for you to drive a netizen into such a frenzy of rage that he smashes his computer monitor with his fist? Hey ... that'd made a cool YouTube movie...

Anyway.

There's an interesting case coming out of the Yale Law School that might put an end to all this. How?

By making people responsible for what they say online.

At the risk of cheapening my training message, here's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, put far more elegantly in a simple chalkboard drawing than I could with multiple 2,000 word posts: 

So yeah. The reason socially retarded dimwits, 15-year-olds off their Ritalin and drunk dormrats stink up forums and comment boards is because they aren't going to have to pay the price for their actions.

The Yale lawsuit seeks to change that.

From Wired:

AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on
women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile
they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and
an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the
posters.

...lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained
AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit
posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in
court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment
trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal
challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on
for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied
nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi
connection.

We keep dancing around this problem on the internet, mainly because nobody has really found a workable solution yet. On the one hand, unfettered speech leads to such chaos that the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unworkable - my best example of this is the Yahoo News message boards. They've been down for more than a year and a half. If you ever went there, you know why.

The boards were taken over by a hard-core group of trolls with apparently limitless time, energy and hatred. No subject was too off-topic for them to use to spew their anger, obscenities and insults at ... well, it wasn't really at each other. It was basically the digital equivalent of a grubby guy in tattered clothes in a bus station screaming "AAAAAHHHHGGG! AHHHGGG!" at his socks. Even the most innocuous subjects - a story on flower arrangement or dogs, f'rinstance, would attract the trolls within about 10 posts.

The other extreme, of course, are the limp & lifeless forums & comment spaces, where moderation is imposed to such an extent that the audience just migrates elsewhere to talk to each other.

Now then.

One of the key things that helps keep internet users sociable is imposing some kind of accountability for their actions. Which is what registration is all about - trying to attach a real human identity to the screenname. The fight for newspapers has been trying to raise the hurdles for commenters to a level where it's tough enough to establish an identity so that you don't do it casually (no shelling out to create a free Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo account on the spot to establish a handy sock puppet), but not so hard that users start feeling like they're applying for a home equity line of credit a Business Visa from the Russian Consulate.

Now that there appears to be a clear legal precedent for peeling back the layers of anonymity to hold trolls accountable for their poo-flinging, I find myself of two minds about this. I have been roughed up by a fairly good cross-section of trolls over the years, and it'd be nice to be able to expose them as the pathetic, mommy's basement-dwelling loser subcreatures my wounded ego insists they must be. On the other hand ... some of my responses to said trolls (hey! I was provoked! Honest, they started it!) may have been a bit ... intemperate. So I have to wonder if there are perhaps some other sad, wounded egos out there. And, where would it stop? If you can bring an action for something someone said in a chat room, or Second Life, or the forums at AngryJournalist, well, we better just pave over the downtown areas of every major city in the U.S. and turn it all into one giant courthouse, because we're gonna need the space.

For All the Frustrated, Passive-Aggressive IT Dweebs Out There...

...the makers of this YouTube hit video (it just got Fark'd and Arrington'd) are now your patron saints.

This little NSFW gem will bring a rueful (vindictive?) smile to anyone who's had to deal with dim-bulb non-techies who can't articulate what's wrong, what they want, and least of all, understand what the solutions that they are demanding will actually do.

Great moment where the vid starts getting really brilliant comes about 1/3 of the way through - Salesguy: "Now I can't get to the home page!"

Web Dude: "What the --!?? But you said the website was down? You mean you could see the home page?"

I particularly liked the little touches in this video - as Web Dude gets more and more frustrated and annoyed, he starts taking it out on the characters in Halo, shooting them repeatedly in the crotch and attaching grenades to their faces.

I've never done IT fulltime myself, but I've usually been one of the "go-to" guys in the office when IT isn't available. Thus, I've spent my share of time ostentatiously rolling my eyes and sighing. I did like, however, how both sides took their shots - the sales dweebs are demanding, ignorant and try to evade responsibility for the chaos they cause. The IT dweebs are more interested in playing Halo than actually dealing with anything, and snort dismissively in that way that makes users retreat and get defensive.

Technorati Tags: sales guy vs web dude, video, youtube, website is down, viral video, Farked

TILT: Pinball Movie and the Future of Newspapers?

A wildly successful industry is faced with a bold challenge from scrappy digital interlopers and reacts in all the predictable ways...

Stage 1: The industry reacts with disdain - "The new digital stuff is just a fad. Look - our sales are going great. And people love us. They've always loved us. They'll be back in droves when this digital stuff blows over. It's so cheap and shoddy - where's the fun and interest in that?"

Stage 2: The industry's P&L statements can no longer be ignored. The industry reacts by trying to co-opt the new digital technology into its existing product.

2a. The existing designers and producers react with outrage and strong resistance to changing the way that they've done business for decades.

2b. The industry half-heartedly markets the new hybrid product to its existing customers. The distributors don't really understand the appeal of the new digital technology, but they glom onto the idea that the hybrid is the "same thing only different" and try to force the digital product into their same old channels and strategies.

Stage 3: The old guard loyalist customers are turned off by the hybrid product that doesn't function as well as the "pure" version, and inundates the industry with complaints and threats.

3a. The newer customers, who don't have that much loyalty, and who use both regular and digital products, try the new hybrid and find that the experience isn't really all that satisfying. It doesn't do the old thing well, and it doesn't do the new thing well. So they split their time between the new digital and old analog, trending gradually towards the new.

3b. The newest customers, who have been using digital, look at the hybrid and sneer. They don't bother using something that is so obviously lame and half-hearted.

Stage 4: The industry is relegated to a curiosity, maintained only in small niches, and used by nostalgic aficionados.

The story of newspapers? Or of pinball machines? I know, I know - the analogy breaks down at a million kajillion places along the way, but there are some interesting points of reference.

Full disclosure: I was a pinball nerd back in the day. After every big mid-term test, I'd go to the student union, and take out my frustrations and anxieties by banging around Pinbot, Black Knight, Eight Ball, Centaur and others. Sure, there were other video games there, and every once in a while, I'd goof off with one of them to pass the time. But there was something therapeutic about the way that you could actually get physical and bang on a pinball machine to get results - either to get the damn shiny sphere to go down the right ramp, or to get a revenge "Tilt" when the damn thing kept draining on you...

I remember the machines that started appearing that tried to include video games into the back panel. You'd make a shot, and then a short cut scene would come up and you'd have to take your hands off the flippers and yank on the controls for a bit.

The game sucked. The pinball game was shoddy and ugly and didn't really play well. The video game was light-years behind the competition that was specifically designed to be a video game. Worse, it cost far more than either one, and the damn thing was always either out of order, or the arcade owners had its guts all over the floor and were wrenching on it.

In later years, the pinball industry was relegated to producing super-expensive movie tie-in games for Terminator, Lethal Weapon, Addams Family, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the video game industry migrated from the arcades to the game consoles in every living room. The technology kept improving from the simple move-and-shoot games like Asteroids and Space Invaders to the current MMPORPGs like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Guild Wars and all the first-person shooters like Halo 3, Resistance: Fall of Man, and whatever iteration of Doom/Quake we're now up to...

Not only have video games far outstripped the wildest dreams of the old arcade makers (who could have ever predicted one-day sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars), but the industry has also spun off all kinds of related industries: cheat codes, bulletin boards, wikipedias, blogs, fansites, contests for best fan art, etc.

The lessons for newspapers here are not clear-cut. But I'd like to believe that it is possible for a whole new thriving economic ecosystem to arise when a new technology invades an existing content space. I've spent the last couple of years staring into the crystal ball, trying to discern hints of what the future info-media-news landscape is going to look like ... all of which may be as futile and doomed to error as it would have been for a Bally or Williams pinball game designer back in 1983 to have predicted that someday, a teenager in a basement could play a 3-D immersive game with other kids from all over the world, and then run his own business connected to said game...

Seesmic: Video Comments on Blogs?

Not sure if I want to have to make sure that my hair is all on the correct tangent from my head, and that there's no broccoli in my teeth before participating in my next online pie-fight in the comments section of Sadly, No!

Then again, it's only a matter of time before people start offering plug-ins to do the video commenting, and we get animated snowmen (like in the CNN Democratic debate last summer), World of Warcraft avatars or Second Life furries chiming in ...

Anyway, check out Seesmic - the webnoscenti are saying that it's the "next Twitter" - which I guess, means that all the early adopters will ooh and aah over it, as it suffers weekly outages from lack of scalability, while the rest of the webmob blithely ignores it in favor of seeing the latest Pirate Bay porno.

UPDATE: It appears that there is a use for this - Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, used it to interview Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford. 

VIz:

Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss was one of the Seesmic community members who asked questions to Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett. Here is how Jemima describes the experience (you can see here all Jemima questions and reactions):

 

"It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too - like most people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage."

TV as We Know It is Dead: Shift to Web-based Video Costs Producers 88% of Ad Revenues

Can you say "Doomed"?

Apparently, a report called "And Now for the News," written by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, came out this week, and it's got both Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and, not coincidentally, HDNet, and the pundits at Digital Media Wire all atwitter over the stark economic realities.

Cuban made billions of dollars in the internet video game, and, while he's acted the fool at various Maverick games over the years, nobody has ever accused him of either being stupid or lacking passion. So when he starts winding up the air-raid siren, it gets my attention.

From Cuban's blog:

Starting with the disappointing but expected news that journalism is no
longer a service consumers desire to pay for, he moves on to the
problems facing Internet video.

(snip)

Five years into the video-over-the-Internet revolution, we have learned
two things. First; consumers won't pay for content on the web, so it
will have to be ad supported. And second; it won't be ad supported.

Oh, shit. (*stomach lurches*)

On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out –
click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of
advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over
the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been
lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising
for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a
typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for
web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30
minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields
approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer.

Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs...by 88%?

In fact, the actual economics of web-based video are far, far worse than this.

Sweetie, can you get me a hemlock cocktail, please? Easy on the ice. And see if there are any razor blades in the junk drawer?

88%? Are you freakin' kidding me? That kind of revenue restructuring would be in line with what newspapers have experienced since classified ads migrated to the web (i.e. the "Craigslist effect"). And yeah, I know, there are some shellshocked newspaper reporters/editors who will nod wearily, taking schadenfreude satisfaction that the arrogant pacotillos in local TV are about to take the bollocking that print has taken these last 10 years.


Over at Digital Media Wire, Paul Sweeting explains the problem that video producers here in Hollywood face, seeing as how they're making the same goddam mistakes that music labels made when the internet came calling:

There's no reason to believe that video producers' experience will be
any different. Like it or not, the web simply isn't very kind to
publishers, packagers and distributors. It rewards enablers. Search is
an enabling technology--perhaps the ultimate enabling technology. And
as Google shareholders can tell you, it's been rewarded. The challenge
for publishers is not to figure out how to force the web to reward
them. It's to figure out how to capture the value created by enabling
technology.



In that sense, Cuban is right. It may not make sense for the networks
simply to make their schedules available for free on the Internet. That
doesn't really create any new value; it mostly just drains value from
linear platforms.



What the networks need is to figure out how to capture the value
created by enabling consumers to access, select, aggregate, transform,
embed and share content--in a word, to use it. Anything else is just TV with buffering.

For scripted TV entertainment, well, I'm not sure what the survival strategy is yet. I do know that there is not much love in the ad world for a CPM rate hike for online video that would bridge that 88% gap. There's just too much other product out there screaming for attention ... not to mention the fact that the scripted TV content (and movie content, for that matter) is a melting sandcastle to the surging broadband tide. Trying to make back a $160 million budget from some exotic cocktail of online subscription, advertising and branded sponsorship ... well, let's just say that I'm glad I'm not writing the checks on that one. I don't know how you can possibly monetize the budgets that Hollywood is used to.

And folks, we know - dammit, we know all too well - how the media megalopalies react to revenue reductions. For a time, they throw money at the problem. And then come the cutbacks. "We have to do more with less."


It comes down to our old friends, supply and demand. If there is
demand for the kind of spectacle that you get in Iron Man or Raiders 4,
or whatever, there will be someone out there that will supply it ...
but at the price point that the people on the demand side set.

Kiss those expense-account lunches at The Ivy goodbye. All the little perks that pampered writers, directors, producers and stars have gotten used to over the years. There is going to be a lot of screaming and whining hereabouts in the next decade or so.

I think that my clients over in newspapers have actually got a significant advantage in this arena. The future of video is going to be like the future of news: disaggregated and hyperlocal. Papers can do this. Papers ARE doing this.

I can't figure out how to take a 2 1/2 hour piece of video - hell, video of any length, from a blipvert to the entire back catalog of the Museum of Radio and TV - and make it pay off a $320 million opening weekend return.

But I can teach you how to monetize short clips shot by reporters that go along with local news stories. That's do-able.
One last thing: in the comments was this gem, sure to be included in my next series of trainings for newspapers migrating to video on the web:

I've never seen ABC.com and the rest put an RSS, Email, or text message subscribe/alert button on their video pages. Instead they want us all to *remember* show schedules, come back, and sit through ads. They're blowing a huge chance to have a relationship with the audience. The sad truth is that TV networks don't want a relationship. They want us all to sit around the glowing box together on *their* schedule as if it were 1966.

June 1 Protest for Photographer's Rights

As someone who has spent much, much more than my share of time being hassled by cops for doing my job, face jammed onto the hot, stinking hood of a patrol car, I felt it necessary just to acknowledge this protest event being held at Hollywood & Highland on June 1.

More and more, I find that the police have been infected by the "well, we're just trying to be cautious" bug, spread by the geeks at Homeland Security that show up every six months with their PowerPoints demonstrating how the eeee-vil Mooslim terr'rists are going to set of a nuke right here in River City if the beat cops slack up even for a second. Sheesh. Mostly, the induced paranoia is nothing more than a fig leaf for some overzealous freaks to throw their weight around.

So yeah, join the group, send some supportive e-mails, whatever it takes. Taking a picture in a public place is not a crime. Should not be a crime. Idiots that want to clamp down on people obeying the law because they feel justified ... that is the bigger danger to our republic.

I particularly liked this question from the comments on the blog: "what if a bunch of art students sat down and sketched a public place? would that be a crime?"





This image of a shirt was posted on Flickr - go there and join the group, even if you don't plan to show up

Crashed the Mac

OK, someone up in Computer Heaven HATES me.

I managed to completely crash the Mac. as in, "The little pinwheel just spins on the screen, and none of the buttons, clicks to key-combos does the least little thing."

Happened when I tried to close out of Firefox. The whole system just hung.  Had to do a "Hard Quit" of holding down the power button until the machine went dead.  And now that I've been trying to work with Premiere Pro to import footage from the NAS, the Mac has gotten downright cranky.

I did, however, manage to install 4 extra Gigs of RAM from Crucial - for those of you shambling around wearing Apple t-shirts and mumbling "braiiiinnnssss .... brrrraaaaiiinnnssss " - a much better option than buying memory from the gottverdammt total rip-off Apple stores. 

Not that all that extra mem seems to have pepped the system up much.  (sigh)

I guess this is a case of the "grass = greener over in the Mac pasture."  FAIL.

All Hail the New Mac

I have bowed to the inevitable, and bought a Great Big Expensive Mac Pro.  This is a dual quad-core machine, and I just got an extra 4 gigs of RAM from Crucial (NOT the Mac store - their prices are nothing short of absurd) so that I can really work on post-production on my short film.

It struck me that every computer I've bought has been about 10x as fast as the previous machine.  My first computer was the old TRS-80, with 4K (later 16k) of RAM.  Programs were loaded in via a cassette tape drive, and later we all freaked out when there were actual floppy disks.  Which, back then, were really floppy - the 5 1/4 size, and the big TRS disks were about 8 inches across. 

Yes, children, you're reading that right. Shut up and go play with your terabyte iTouches.

Next, was a PC-AT that sped along at 4.77 mHz. This had dual disk drives, and a sickly green monochrome display.  My sister Sara and I played some kind of lame "Adventure" game on it for hours and hours, wandering around in a lame dungeon and shooting arrows into green slimy blobs.

In the early 90s, I made the decision to go whole hog to the PC platform - at the time, a Mac SE30 was about the size of a boom box, a monochrome screen the size of my hand, and a tiny 30 meg hard disk.  By comparison, my old Zeos desktop had 4 megs of RAM, a 120 meg hard drive and a 14" color display.  Whee!

I still remember the cover of the old PC Magazine, back when the mag was fat as a phone book with all the clone makers who had been unleashed on the landscape, packing the mag with ads ... the big splash headline said: "25 Megahertz Screamers Unleashed."

Yeah, a lot of things are quaint in retrospect.

Next, in '98, I got a Dell laptop that ran at 233 mHz.  This had a 3 gig hard drive and could actually connect to the internet. 

In '02, I got the Fry's Electronics desktop - 2.53 gHz, 120 gig hard drive, dual DVD drives.

This Octocore has 8 cores, all running at 3 gHz, which specs out to 32 gHz.  The hard drive is a puny 250 gigs, but I have a gigabit connection to my NAS (which has decided this week to play nice with the rest of the network), and a Superdrive.  I'm still trying to reconcile myself to the change in the way that I navigate around from program to program, and I am really hating not being able to use my keyboard (typing on a regular keyboard hurts like a bitch after about 5 minutes - I need the split keyboard because of my 2XL hand size). 

Still, Vista had made my life into such a living hell for the last year that I could not in good conscience keep banging my head against the wall. The crashes, the constant updates, the security holes, the unexplained way that multimedia content JUST WOULDN'T WORK no matter what I did ...

If I am going to actually produce video content for the web, I need something that actually works.  Vista did not.  It just didn't.  I spent hours and hours on the phone with customer service reps who painfully tried to walk me through all the steps to troubleshoot Vista, and on more than one occasion, they just threw up their hands and said, "Well, we don't know."

That can't happen.

Or, when I was doing a presentation in Cucuta, I arrived in front of a room full of expectant journalists, tried to fire up my machine ... only to stand there, sweating, in dismay, as the computer took more than 25 minutes to install what Microsoft called "Critical updates."  For 25 minutes, the screen was blank as the disk light just lit up and kept on, and I head the clicking and grinding from inside the Vaio (and don't get me started about the for-shit quality of the hard disks in the Vaio). 

You try standing in front of a room that's expecting to see demonstrations of how multimedia can change their lives when your computer won't even wake up and there is no way to make it work. 

So I have embarked on this adventure with the Mac. It is my hope that I can learn how to deal with all the quirks and differences with the Mac fast enough so that my productivity doesn't take a massive hit.  So far, I am not encouraged.  Despite the promises of how the Mac makes things so easy, it is impossible to add a printer in any way that makes the slightest bit of sense to me.