447 - Stuck-Inside-the-House
I’m stuck at home with a cold, so I thought that I’d write something on the old weblog. I mean, a cold in summer sucks pretty badly. Even worse is that I’m on holiday from work and I think it’s a little cheeky to take some of the time as sick leave — it’s been a low-level thing for most of the week and as such has not been too bad. It seems to have mounted a counter-attack today, however. Therefore, I thought it best to stay in for a night.
The Mac
I’ve been using the Mac all week; overall it is terribly nice. Off-hand I can’t think of any inherent problems — the few things that niggle me are related to switching from Linux and are small things (such as ctrl+arrow not moving forward or backward a word) rather than show-stoppers.
For a home-user I would recommend it whole-heartedly. Current freedom from viruses, compatibility at roughly Windows-levels with hardware, ease-of-use, supplied software (play DVDs out of the box, the iLife apps) and the well thought out hardware all conspire to produce a no-brainer choice to me — why have that big, noisy computer when you can have a tiny, quiet one?
My guess at why the mac is not more popular is that the best trick Microsoft have pulled is making people think that you need to run Windows to be an equal citizen in computer-land. Some people may point to price, but that wouldn’t explain why people with better than bargain-basement computers don’t choose the mac. Perhaps it’s harder to pirate software on a mac, though no-one who can afford software does that, do they?
Charities
Does anyone have any suggestions (along with reasons) for charities they believe are important? Emails welcome if you don’t want to use a comment. UK-based charities preferred, I’ve decided, as this is for my own donating pleasure.
Oh
Oh, I just found Alt-arrow does the word-move thing. Or it could be command-arrow, I don’t know, DoubleCommand flipped some keys around. I would estimate that most of my mac problems are probably just a need to relearn key-combinations. (If anyone knows how to get a new-tab button in Safari, I’d be a happy bunny, however.)