P.C. Shannon

On Tuesday, I complained about Apple’s Quicktime technology. But my problems with Apple don’t end there.

This semester, I’m taking a class with a bunch of evolutionary biologists (more about this in a future post), who are all way into Macs. I suspect they love Macs for the reason that any group or professional class, like graphic artists, loves Macs—purely an accident of history. But at any rate, I’ve been using Macs a bit lately, and they drive me up the wall.

Bear in mind, I owned a PowerMac all through college, so this isn’t just a complaint of someone who’s resistant to change. The user interface is very pretty, I’ll grant that, but it’s annoyingly inefficient. The biggest problem is this: the mouse only has one freaking button! But the MacOS has the equivalent of a right-click menu. So how do you get to it? You have to hold down a button on the keyboard whilst clicking on an icon. So dumb.

The MacOS X windowing system doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. There’s no way to make a window full-screen. The icon bar at the bottom is transparent, but you can’t put anything behind it, although sometimes a program will open part of its window back there. That means you can’t click on it. But the only way to resize a window is to click on its lower right-hand corner, so if that corner is behind the menu bar, I hope you like your window size.

Plus, closing all of a program’s windows does not exit the program. That’s retarded. And if you want to change between windows in one program but can’t see them all, you have to use the “Window” menu. There’s no list of windows in the task bar as Windows has.

Now, if you want to rename a file, you can’t just do the equivalent of a right-click and pick “Rename” from the pop-up menu. That would just make too much sense. Instead, you have to choose the “Get Info” option and rename the file in there. There are some parts of Windows XP that are like this—getting to an option takes 5 steps versus 2 in the previous versions—but these are very technical items that most users never need to get at. Renaming a file is a basic, routine operation, and it shouldn’t take backflips to get to it.

Apple’s computers have always been slower and more expensive than the equivalent “wintel” machine. Now they’re also harder to use. But gee, the interface sure is pretty. Whatever. Apple has the market share it deserves—there will always be suckers and accidents of history.

QuickTime is one of those Internet technologies that I generally refuse to use as a matter of principle. Until recently, I couldn’t say why I loathe it so, which is not the case with RealPlayer. When I was working in IT, I saw several machines rendered completely unusable by bugs and crashes in the Real software. Admittedly, this was several years ago and on computers running either Windows 95 or NT; I have downloaded and used more recent version on XP and suffered no ill effects. Still, I’m hesitant to give it a ringing endorsement.

QuickTime, by comparison, just seems superfluous. I mean, I already have software on my computer that will play movies on websites. Why should I have to install something additional? But I did just that recently, because Intuit’s support site required it, for no apparent reason.

Of course, you can’t just install QuickTime any more. No, you have to install iTunes, which includes QuickTime. Apple is leveraging one of its “free” technologies to explicitly promote a pay service.

The QuickTime installer also gave me another surprise—something called Bonjour. It never asked me if I wanted Bonjour, it just knew what was best for me. Nice. Bonjour is a network setup technology that “lets you create an instant network of computers and smart devices just by getting them connected to each other.” Wonderful. It’s an integral part of MacOS X, but how many Windows users have it? Everyone with QuickTime, apparently. How many actually use it? Zero, I’d say.

Having this software sitting on your computer, just waiting for another Bonjour-enabled device to show up, seems like a big security risk to me. Considering how widespread QuickTime is, what’s to stop an enterprising virus writer from co-opting the protocol to help his baby spread across LANs, circumventing e-mail virus protection?

Hyperbole aside, Apple is also leveraging its “free” technology to surreptitiously install its own networking technology that may or may not be very secure. (I suspect Apple doesn’t worry too much about computer security because there’s never been a virus written for Apple computers. There just aren’t enough Macs around for it to spread very far or have much of an impact (virus writers crave media coverage). Biologists call this “heard immunity.”)

Plus it broke my installation of Java, which resulted in a moment of panic when my CS assignment was due.

A simple uninstall cleared all of these problems up. Of course, it wasn’t that simple since QuickTime and iTunes are separate uninstalls in spite of being installed as a single package.

Here’s the bottom line: Apple’s leveraging of QuickTime to promote its other technologies and services is an awfully Gates-esque move for the supposed “good guys.” In the age of Google and its “Don’t be evil” mantra, Apple fails that simple test.

Here’s a cool site that uses Google maps to show you where you can find cheap gasoline in your neighborhood. I have used it quite successfully. But don’t be surprised if you find long lines at the after using this site. I had to wait about 10 minutes, but I only paid $2.52 per gallon, so it’s a small price to pay.

The sequencing of the human genome project took ten years and cost millions and millions of dollars. It was coordinated effort of researchers around the world. But the technology used to sequence DNA developed so quickly during the project that it finished five years ahead of schedule. And the technology continues to improve.

In fact, it generally follows Moore’s Law, which states that computer processor power will double every 18-months but has been applied to many areas of technology. As price comes down and speed and accuracy increase, some in the field have projected that in ten years, a single individual will be able to have her own genome sequenced for $1000.

That day is getting closer. A recent paper in Nature (PubMed; subscription required for summary and article) demonstrates a new sequencing technology that allows a single technician to sequence 25 million bases in just four hours. By comparison, the sequencers that I used when I worked on the Human Genome Project could each produce about 10,000 bases in the same time frame. The authors of the paper assembled an entire bacterial genome in a single run.

The advent of individualized genomic medicine will be a boon to health care, provided that safeguards are put in place to protect patients’ privacy. Otherwise, it may just further corrupt our already-crippled health insurance system.

Technology like this and the Internet always remind me of my 8th grade history teacher (who was also a football coach) who told us that, unlike every previous generation of Americans, our standard of living would not increase dramatically from what our parents experienced. It makes me chuckle.

I’ve been building a collection of interesting links on my desktop, so I thought I’d dispense them a single deluge. Enjoy!

Students for an Orwellian Society — Because 2005 is 21 years too late!

Find-A-Human — Offers steps for cutting through the automated phone trees to get to a real live person for a large number of major companies. But AT&T customers are screwed.

The Science in Science Fiction — Nothing I haven’t seen before, but nonetheless good coverage of space elevators, nanotechnology, and so on.

Firefox Hacks — Speed up your browser.

Writing Sensible E-mail — Tips for getting your e-mail read by people who probably have better things to do.

Millions of Games — Find fun web games.

Engrish.com — Me talk good. Very funny, especially the copious misuse of “fuck”.

I was reading an article in the New York Times the other day about the damage to offshore drilling platforms caused by hurricane Katrina. The platforms are built to survive a hundred-year storm. Hurricane Ivan, a couple years ago, was classified as a 2500-year storm, and Katrina rates as at least a 100-year storm. When one engineer remarked that these powerful storms were becoming more common, I couldn’t help but think to myself that since hurricanes are powered by warm water, the increase clearly indictes a rise in global temps, if not proof outright of global warming.

So it was no shock today when I found another article in the Times that says, “Storms with the power of Hurricane Katrina are becoming more common, in part because of global warming, according to a report from a team of researchers that will be published Friday.”

Then there’s this really encouraging piece from the UK’s Independent:

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

Here’s the think about global warming: This increase in global temperature may just be part of the planet’s natural cycle of minor climate shifts. Or it may be very very bad. And by the time we have enough evidence to make a convincing argument one way or another, it will be too late. So doesn’t it seem like we should do all we can now to minimize our impact on the environment (notice I didn’t say, reverse the climate shift), just to be safe? I know it’s important for everyone to drive a bigass fucking truck, but wouldn’t it be nice for your great-grandchildren to be able to play in the ocean?