Henk van de Goor's Bloggers@large

I'm sure that some of you must have picked up on the news that 2008 is the year that Mr. Microsoft himself - Bill Gates - will leave the company. In July this year he will be leaving day-to-day operations management at the company he founded, to devote himself to a full-time career in philanthropy, whilst remaining as a chairman. As a founder of Microsoft that company was basically the only one he ever worked at in his entire life. Off course this leaves people speculating on what might become of him once he steps down from his full time position at Microsoft.
Well, at this years Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Gates revealed a video as part of his keynote speech, that showed him attempting to be a star in rock, rap, movies and politics and features numerous Hollywood stars, as well as past and present US presidential candidates.

One thing is sure: Gates will never become an accomplished actor, but I smile at this geek among nerds. You can say or think what you want about the man, but his geek factor is way higher than Apple's CEO Steve Jobs. Not to mention Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities since 2000. That is more money than Jobs will ever make in his life.

Anyway: this whole story is just to provide myself with an alibi to show you Gates' video. So here it is :-)

Bill Gates’ swansong speech at CES 2008

I just installed Mac OS X Leopard on my PowerBook G4. Well, not really 'on' it: I actually used my external 160gb firewire disk for that. I know that some applications are not compatible with Leopard, so I try to play it save. Also I didn't know how smooth it would run on my PowerBook which is just based on a G4 and not the latest Intel platform that Apple is using nowadays. So I'm just experimenting, to put it that way. But I have to say: so far so good. It took about 2 hours before I had installed and copied my stuff, but it looks great, I love Safari 3 (I'm writing this entry with it), and I love stacks; it's makes things a lot less messy on my desktop.

I will definitely need some more time to check things out a bit more in-depth, but so far so good. I was even surprised to find out that with Leopard you get Front Row back! That was something that was not officially included with Tiger for my PowerBook. All the other stuff - Time Machine, Spaces etc - I will need to check out later. One thing that surprises me so far, is that it runs relatively smooth on my 1.5ghz G4 with 768mb ram. Even the new finder with it's "coverflow" like interface seems to work smooth. Amazing!

All I can say so far: Microsoft Vista, eat your heart out!

Yesterday I finally bought another external harddisk: an Iomega 2.5" firewire/usb 2.0, 160gb. I have a Mac PowerBook G4 and some time agao I made the mistake of splitting the internal 80gb harddisk into 2 partions: one for my applications and one for my data. Off course I always ran out of space on my application partition because of the very annoying way OS X uses swapspace. I tried to relocate that swap parttion to my Data parttition but whatever fancy utility I tried, it did not work. So I just wanted to switch back again to one big - well "biggish" - partition.

But in order to do that I had to have a bootable external disc (firewire). So I bought one and cloned my harddrive (took about 2 1/2 hours for each partition) and erased my 80gb harddrive, cloned everything back and started cleaning up as thing were messed up a bit (dock wouldn't start). But after running Applejack it worked like a charm again.

To cut a long story short; I have reclaimed my harddisk and now I have a good extra harddrive. The cool part is that I have cut the Iomega in 2 partitions, one with Apple journaling etc. and the other using NTFS. Now, as you might know OS X can read NTFS, but not write to it. Well lucky you: if you want to write to your external NTFS drive as well, just head over to Lifehack.org and read the article "How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X".

Enjoy!

I ran across some funny spoofs on the "Hello, I am a Mac. And I am a PC" commercials as it seems that Novell is now entering the market as well trying to sell SUSE Linux. Just sit back and let the movies roll :-)

Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux?

I apologize straight away for writing once more about the iPhone, but I can't help it. Yesterday it was "iDay" for the "iPhone". Some lucky bastards that shelled out enough dough and waited in line long enough, where able to get their greedy little hands on the most coveted piece of technology in years. Even the major of Philadelphia waited (more or less) hours in line to get one! Apple began selling it on Friday and it comes in two versions: a 4-gigabyte model, selling for $499, and an 8-gigabyte version for $599. It is essentially three gadgets in one: It makes calls, has a built-in iPod, and it's an Internet device. And if there is one thing that I am sure of; just like Apple was able to change the world of MP3 players with the iPod, they will change the world of cellular phones.
I have to admit that with the iPod I strongly felt that Apple was more a follower then a trendsetter. Before the iPod (and actually even now) there where MP3 devices that were a lot better (in terms of sound quality) and offered more features or a lower price. For instance: my own iRiver IHP120 (or H120) scored way better in many many tests than the iPods from that same year (2003). And the iPod did not offer any unique extra's at all.

How different it is with the iPhone. The iPhone truly represents a new generation of phones. Sure: most phones now have internet, camera's, MP3 capabilities and all that (heck: my own HTC P3300 does it all). But the one big difference is the user interface of the iPhone. It's 100% touchscreen except for an on-off button. And it's intelligent in the sense it knows when your holding the phone to your ears (so it turns off the touch screen) or when you tilt it left or right. And there are tons more of innovative stuff that Apple has put into the phone. Not to mention it has a brand new OS for a smartphone besides Windows Moibile, Symbian or the Palm OS. It's basically a version of Apple's OS X.

As I mentioned before I am so sure this thing will put the Apple stock once again through the roof. It will also spin-off a whole line of followers from other competitors that will come up with their own iPhone look-a-likes. In fact take a look at the HTC Touch! If that isn't an iPhone rip-off then what is? But it is ok I think: competition is good, choice is good.

But there will always be just "one phone to rule them all". And it will be the original. (But to be safe: just wait till the 1.1 version comes out; as usual with Apple it will save you money and the frustration of being a guinnea-pig).

Ps: Just look at some iPhone frenzy here. And look at the first video where some dumb ass mistakes a microphone for a iPhone and tries to run off with the wrong thing.. ROFL!

iDay for iPhone

Just could not resist posting these two YouTube movies. It's always great to take cheap shots at Bill Gates :-)

Gates VS Jobs


David Letterman's Tribute to Bill Gates

The waiting for the iPhone is almost over (if you're an American). Damn this thing is going to put Apple stock though the roof! Wish I bought some stock before they announced this thing. I am not kidding you: I predict this is going to be the biggest hit Apple has had so far after they came up with the iPod. Good thing is that by the time I can get a new phone (I currently own a HTC P3300), version 2.x of the iPhone will be out. Since Apple always has problems with their 1.0 versions of new products (I am not kidding you) I at least will benefit from not being an early adapter and suffer from those problems...

iPhone guided tour