Yak

The greatness of Apple, qua marketers, is the slight-of-hand it has long operated

on the knowing consumer. It has positioned its product as avant-garde and well-designed 

and by-the-way a little expensive. An electronic product which is screamingly expensive 

will necessarily be better than one that is not. Apple, under Steve Jobs in

any event, found the way to make the consumer pay for what he really wanted:

a reliable machine. Kudos!

Microsoft, as its name indicates, is in the software business. Just as Apple made the

consumer a partner in the adventure of the personnal machine, MSoft has embarked

him/her on the wonder of the software that runs it. Putting together one’s own machine,

fighting off malware, twearking and tweeking, and endless hours on Visual Studio

watching little bits of code make things happen have been a true frontier of learning.

Kudos as well!

I bought a MacBook Pro in 2009 and at the time, thinking such a light-weight expensive

machine would be fragile, bought a $300 insurance plan for 3 years. Four years later,

haven’t had a whisper of a problem with it. Indeed, it is the Mac that looks for solutions

when my desktop hybrid running Windows gets a virus or crashes to a BSOD as just

happened. Alternatively, the Mac is becoming something of an elderly relative, by technology 

standards: can no longer watch pay movies on it in bed, because Videotron

technology has moved on. Tried to run my Wacom tablet on it yesterday. Told me

it would need a newer OS to make it run, but of course the stylus worked on it as if

it had been a wireless mouse. Reliable, as I said.

I must discipline myself to think more like a techie. For days my windows destop had

been telling me that the Wacom driver wasn’t working. (Of course its wasn’t, I had

disconnected the tablet to work with the mouse for a while) Did I take heed to all

the little warnings? Nooooo. Do I have to share my life secrets with you, Windows?

The BSOD, in its last appearance, explicitly said I needed to reconfigure and that things

weren’t right. 

So I neurotically removed my new graphics card and memory extensions, and limped back 

by running last year’s new motherboard dvd. Of course, this proves unlivealbe.

I uninstalled the Wacom completely for the time being and put back the improved

memory last night. And I doubt the morning will go by without the new graphics card

coming back on. Memory makes a huge difference to the speed of things. The Graphics 

card allows me to run the Windows Phone Emulator and play with settings and gadgets.

Windows runs a planetary phone with the possibility of a black background, which allows 

the user the conserve battery life under difficult circumstances. But it is also difficult on the 

developer/graphics person who must plan for all possibilities. So If the user ever needs 

to show koala pictures in a yak ...

image from Rutkas and Tabor, Windows Phone7 Development