Multithreaded

A post by Fake Steve Jobs led me to Jason D. O’Grady over at ZDNet who has blogged about how much he hates the new Apple keyboards. I bought one when they came out to try it out and since then I have replaced they keyboards on all my Macs with the new ones.

It seems that the feel and design is something you either love or hate. I really love the low-profile light touch on the keys. I am a programmer and I use my keyboard probably 10 hours a day. Whenever I use an old-style keyboard now all I can think is how clunky and heavy it feels. It feels like I’m using an original IBM PC keyboard. Interestingly, my Mac Book Pro keyboard, which always used to feel light, now feels quite solid and I actually enjoy using it more now that I’m using the new desktop keyboards.

I don’t mind that Jason doesn’t like them. It really comes down to a matte of taste. His other objections centre around the design and here I think he is on shakier ground. I love the low-throw of the keys. They give enough click sound to give me the feedback I need without the tactile feedback. And objections to the change in the location of they various function keys are really just complaints about change. Millions of new Mac users in the coming year will never care about that and it’s something that most people can easily adapt to.

But most importantly, the keyboard and mouse are two of the most easily replaceable components on a computer. Okay, there may not be as many Mac-specific keyboards on the market as there are for PCs, but there are still plenty to choose from, so if you don’t like the one that Apple puts in the box then go get another one. Personally, although I love the design of the Mighty Mouse, I don’t really like using it so I use a Microsoft Intellimouse (actually, I’ve always felt that MS were a far better at hardware than software) which, of course, works fine.

I agree that it would be nice to see a full-sized bluetooth keyboard, but I’m still looking forward to receiving the cut-down one when it finally ships to me here in the UK.

My point in all of this is that I’m fine with Jason hating the new keyboard, but please don’t try and justify it with opinions dressed up as objective design complaints. There’s far too much of that already in the world.

Well, they’ve finally reaped the full value of their actions. SCO have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 5 years after making claims that Linux violated their patents because of code supplied by IBM. They never produced any evidence in court of the violations and carried out a cynical campaign to try and extract money from companies using Linux with the promise of not suing them if their claims were upheld. This was pure protection racketeering and only a few paid up - not even enough to cover their massive legal bills.

Many people seem unaware that this SCO has nothing to do with the Santa Cruise Operation that once contributed hugely to the development of Unix back in the 80’s. That company was bought out a long time ago and the purchaser changed their name to SCO to try and reap some of the positive image, but they’ve never really been anything other than a destroyer of value and never done anything except threaten people with lawsuits.

The final blow was when a court ruled that, although they bought UNIX from Novell in 1993, somehow they did not buy the copyrights along with it (leaving open the question of what they did actually buy.) A company of lawyers, and not very good ones at that.

RIP SCO.

This week alone I have coded in Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Flex, Actionscript, Antlr and a domain-specific-language of my own that describes optimizations in ASTs, not to mention a variety of XML document formats.

The syntax gets very confused after a while :-)

I’ve decided to change the name of my blog. The old name, “What did you learn at the office today?” always seemed a bit clunky and I was never very happy with it.

The new name, “Multithreaded” seems to describe my life these days much more accurately. I’ve got a number of different things going on at the moment and need somewhere to keep track of all the threads.