Silence on the Economic Front?

Several friends have asked me “Why have you not written more articles on economics? To which my answer is simple: nothing has changed. The central banks of the major economies are still engaged in a money-printing race to debase their currencies. Leaders in the EU continue to kick the economic can down the road and to lie to their public as they move to emasculate each country's tenuous grip on democracy and put European government in the hands of the EU bureaucracy, a group of elitists who are not answerable to an electorate. In the US, legislators and bureaucrats with no concept of economic reality are pushing the United States past a point of no return. So, rather than continue to write repetitive articles on an unchanging and demoralizing economic situation, I have decided to write about something else.

Computer Operating Systems, Part 1: Mac OS X vs. Microsoft Windows

One of my new projects: explore options to replace Microsoft Windows. Earlier this year, my company-provided laptop experienced multiple Windows 7 crashes each week, including the infamous Blue Screen of Death, or “BSD” as it's known in the computer community. One night I came home to learn that both our primary computer and my wife's laptop had crashed with BSD's following a Microsoft Windows update. Even more exciting, neither would boot from the hard drive; even Safe Mode was unavailable. I spent the next weekend working through alternatives and finally restored our primary PC to semi-functionality late Sunday night. It still hangs about 30-50% of the time when trying to bring up Windows, but aside from that it's relatively stable. The laptop restoration went much quicker since I could bypass the trial and error, and subsequently returned to a normal level of MS Windows “reliability”.

My disgust with this situation led me to purchase a MacBook Pro for work in August. We had tested a MacBook at home a few years ago, but at the time my wife was not ready to move to OS X's heavily mouse-driven environment so the MacBook ended up in the hands of our daughter. Because of that experience, I knew going in that I would lose most of my keyboard shortcuts. However, Microsoft had already butchered many of those in the transition from Office 2003 to Office 2007, and of course the Mac OS has many of its own keyboard shortcuts.

The initial learning curve on the Mac was extremely short; I was largely functional on MS Office immediately, for instance. Setting up access to a couple of Corporate programs with no Mac clients was a one-time event with Parallels and Windows 7. I have experienced a few inconsistencies with MS Office documents created on Windows machines, but none have been show-stoppers. The integration of the hardware and operating system is superb – the great benefit of Apple's closed system design. I was so impressed that for a time I considered replacing all the computers at home with Mac's. However, three factors prevented me from making that decision: first, the selection of Mac's is very limited compared to the non-Apple world; second, the hardware is nose-bleed expensive. Third, Apple's overall business practice philosophy is not supportive of the user base. Essentially, Apple is telling the world: “We know what you need. Shut up and do what we tell you.”

One other point of interest on the Mac. Apple specifies a “Style” doctrine that programs for the Mac should follow. If software developers follow the style guide, their programs share a common look, feel, and command structure with other Mac programs. For the most part, Microsoft's Office suite ignores the Apple style. Interestingly, though, they ignore the style of MS Windows' Office as well. So a new user coming from Windows gets the opportunity to learn a new operating system while learning a new set of commands for their productivity suite as well.

Other major developers provide programs for the Mac that fall far short of the Windows version. Intuit, for example, offers only a brain-damaged version of Quicken for the Mac, and no support for QuickBooks Enterprise Edition. Those considering the Mac should definitely research their key programs for Mac versions or alternatives before making the leap. For most users, however, I think the Mac is a viable, easy-to-use, and stable alternative to MS Windows, for those that can afford it. I purchased a MacBook Pro for my oldest son to take to college, and have recommended Macs to friends frustrated with Windows.

Computer Operating Systems, Part 2: Other Alternatives to Microsoft Windows

Out of the box the Mac will not play Windows movie files, so I found an open-source application that would handle them: VLC. (There's a saying in the computer world that if VLC can't play a file then it isn't meant to be played.) Then I checked up on OpenOffice, an open-source replacement for MS Office, and found its Mac-specific variant called NeoOffice. Microsoft does not offer Access for the Mac, but you can get a free database program as part of either OpenOffice or NeoOffice. As I explored the open-source world, I read a great deal about Linux, which I'd not looked at in years. So I decided to spend some time in the Linux world to see if it was a viable alternative to Windows, not just for me but for less technical users.

Between Thanksgiving and New Years, I tried at least 10 variants of Linux, most on a three- or four-year-old HP 311 netbook. (Note that 10 is a small fraction of the number of Linux variants available.) I used the netbook as my primary testbed because it is not a mission-critical computer for me, and because I have a couple of spare 2.5” hard drives I can easily swap in and out. I focused on popular distributions that were identified to be easy to install and use. They ranged from CentOS, an open-source version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux used by corporations to run critical tasks, to several distributions designed for non-technical people switching from Windows. Some were easy to install, others needed more effort, but eventually I was able to get every variant operational.

I won't go into any depth in this article on the various distributions I have tried. For the time being I have settled on two systems I intend to test in greater depth: I have Linux Mint Debian (LMDE) running the Cinnamon desktop environment on my netbook, and I've installed PC-BSD Unix on our main computer with the KDE desktop environment. BSD Unix is a robust and stable operating system developed in a very different manner than Linux, so it will be interesting to explore how the different design philosophies affect the user experience.

My goals for a replacement system include:

1. Support for key hardware and my home network,
2. Stability and ease of maintenance,
3. Easy to teach to non-technical users, and
4. Adequate replacements for our key applications

• Office suite (LibreOffice)
• Personal finance
• MP3 library/iPod sync
• Photo editing & organization
• Video player (VLC)

Some applications are easy – web browsing and email, for instance. In the spreadsheet/word processor/presentation category, LibreOffice is closer to the best (2003) version of Microsoft Office than the last two versions Microsoft has sold. And it comes with an excellent database program. Other categories have a number of options to explore, like the alternatives to Quicken.

And so the journey begins.