Category: Life

My bite on Apple

Love it or hate it, it’s the kind of company that leaves no one indifferent. It showed the world (at least to the masses) the personal computer, the graphic interface, the decent portable music player, a real smartphone and what a tablet should be like. All very nice and disruptive. All products are incredible well made, beautiful design and taste, and they just work out of the box like no other in the market. I should love it. But the sad true is i don’t.

Company culture runs top down, and Steve Jobs was indeed a visionary and incredible smart person, but also a manipulative, control freak, indifferent to his own child’s, cruel kind of person (probably a big jerk). Unfortunately a lot of that spilled over to Apple.

Lot’s of (unnecessary) proprietary stuff.
Long story of conflicts with other companies and standards. Adobe, Google, just to name a couple.
Closing the market with all kind of patents and legal tricks.
Mac OS X has a huge portion of FreeBSD on it but i don’t see a cent donated by Apple (list of donors include Cisco, Google, Juniper, NetApp, McAfee, Dell, etc).
I see Google doing some incredible work at a social level, Google foundation, X-Prize. In counterpart is there an Apple foundation?
One buys an Iphone/Ipad and must pay a developer account or jail brake. The SDK is only available for Apple computers.
One must get his OWN files to his OWN device trough Itunes…

And the list goes on and on… does the profit, a vision, or whatever justify this kind of policies? Do the ends justify the means? For Steve Jobs sure, for Apple sure, but not for me. So me choices are rather obvious (check here, here and here).

FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM bitch!

One more thing 🙂 … it’s kind of sad that all those geeks that were upset some ten years ago by Microsoft monopolistic actions and autism, most of all switched to Apple, giving their love and support to an even worse company in that matter. You can get in a meeting with IT staff and 90% of those that were running Windows laptops some years ago now proudly show their Apple gear… talk about brainwash… i can only recall the old Apple motto “Think different”… probably will glue this to my Linux laptop one of those days.

Mud, Sweat and Tears by Bear Grylls

Just finished reading “Mud, Sweat and Tears” by Bear Grylls. Everything comes with a cost, and he payed with lots of mud and sweat. I believe most of the tears were dropped by happiness. I liked it.

It starts really slow and dull, about his roots, from the ancestors (great grandfathers and so) to parents and sister. All the people that were influential through childhood to manhood… i understand that he wants to give a good background about himself, but it’s rather too much of it, as one actions are much more important that one background.

Anyway down the line it starts to pay off, from the SAS training (the failed first attempt to the successful second go), the parachute accident, his faith and recovery, and of course it climaxes with the climb to the summit of Everest.

It’s an inspirational book, lots and lots of details (the summit ascend alone is around 200 pages) and funny stories. It has a simple life pattern: do what you want/love, work hard, give that extra to the ordinary, take risks, and with a bit of luck it all comes together.

Here’s to capitalism

For sure it has a zillion faults, but in other hand it can supply all kinds of material goods, both essential and non essential ones. It has been glorified or vilified by people all over the world.

But i wonder, what other system could provide me with a full spec, technology loaded, big 50″ TV screen for just a tiny fraction more than the country minimal wage (delivery included) ?