The Haversian Canal

Apple is saying on its site that with Vista out, the next time you get a computer, you might as well get a Mac. Well, I suggest that you should get an empty laptop and get Ubuntu, SuSE, or another Linux of your choice. You can skin it like Mac OS X (Ubuntu is fairly similar to begin with) and, if you're going to use a UN*X-like system, you might as well use one that's free and independent of the platform (OS X originally only ran on PowerPC processors, which are pretty much made exclusively for Apple, but OS X now runs on Intel and PowerPC processors (hanks go to Professor Merz for correcting me).

Microsoft is weak and broken beyond repair.

Apple is nice.

Linux works; it's free, it's powerful, and if you don't like it, throw it out and get another one, for free. Professor Merz, in e-mail, made the very valid point that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are not available in Linux and the GIMP is a poor second. I concur with that, but if you don't use Photoshop and Illustrator already, I see no reason not to start with the GIMP and help grow that program through user feedback. If you publish, Photoshop and Illustrator are very, very nice. I will note that, though the interface options are buried, I can use my Wacom tablet in Linux also.

1) Go to http://hscrooms.tulane.edu/. This is a link on the HSC Data Systems website. Select the room you want and view the calendar. This step is to check for availability of the room prior to making your request. If the space you want to use is not listed, send a description of the space (for example, the 1430 Tulane Building Lobby/Atrium).

2) Email a request with specific date, time and AV requirements, for usage of the room you want to somav-l@tulane.edu. The request should be sent from a Tulane employee or student using their Tulane email address. Requests coming from non-Tulane emails may be delayed or put to the back of the request queue while Tulane requests are filled.

3) It may take a day or so to get through the system. Give it time. It is not automatic. A person has to read the email and then complete the request.

4) If you don’t hear anything back, after a day or so, go back to :\\hscrooms.tulane.edu to verify that your request was entered correctly on the calendar/room you requested.

[Note the email address: somav-l@tulane.edu. The "-l" is a lowercase L, not a one (1). This stands for School of Medicine Audio Visual-List.]

A new service called Bandwagon is launching soon that automatically backs up the music libraries of iTunes users to Amazon S3 for a flat rate. It looks very cleanly-designed; if only they did it for your whole hard drive.

Disclosure: By posting this blog post, they're giving me a free one-year account.

I just got Adobe Lightroom 1.0 and it seems to be better than the betas. More stable, and further distillation of choices available in the sidebar. I recently got a used iBook G4 and I put another GB of RAM in it today, and after reading this thread I thought I'd give Aperture a look. Unfortunately, my 1.2 GHz G4 with 1.25 GB RAM doesn't meet the technical specs. Apple specifies at least 1 GB of RAM and recommends 2GB. Lightroom, on the other hand, looks to be very similar but only specifies 768 MB RAM; they recommend 1 GB.

I'm no programmer, but it seems to me that putting a minimum RAM inherently restricts your market so there's a clear advantage, predictable before writing the first line of code, to respect RAM. The opposing market force is to deliver promised performance. If the program need more RAM, tell the customer they need more RAM. In this case Adobe seems to win on both. Maybe a decade of developing Photoshop gave Adobe a real advantage in the code despite being later to market.

While the GUI in Windows and OS X seems to be the same, the Mac version, predictably, works a little harder to avoid exposing the user to the filesystem.

Edward Tufte, the guru of information design and a devout Mac addict, has complained bitterly about Aperture's performance:

Aperture crashes all the time on my highend Mac (for example, 5 times today in editing at about ten 20MB images) taking the entire computer down. In the last 12 months, I've sent several heartfelt requests to the Apple Aperture "Provide Feedback" link without result or reply.

Ouch.