My Love/Hate relationship with my new Mac

Slightly over 10 years ago I bought an Advent home computer in PCworld. It really served us well and never gave any real problems especially once I upgraded it from Windows XP to Ubuntu. However, I recently decided that I should upgrade to something more modern and I decided that I needed to splash out an buy reasonably good hardware if I expected this new PC to last as long as its predecessor.

I was advised by friends to consider buying Apple. I don't have very happy experiences with Mac-OS, but my Mac loving friends tell me that I just needed to be more patient and once I learn the oddities of Mac-OS I would eventually fall in love with it.

I briefly considered buying an iMac 27", but I balked at paying almost €2k for a PC. Eventually I settled on buying a Mac mini and a separate ASUS 27" screen which reduced the price down to slightly over €900. Having the screen and PC in one unit is handy, but didn't justify doubling the price. Overall I am quite happy with my purchase, but my opinion of Mac-OS has not really been a love affair.

I really only have two problems with the new system

1. I have an old HP OfficeJet 4500 which  should be capable of printring, scanning and faxing. However, due to a long standing fault in the paper feed mechanism it only works as a scanner. Linux just calls this a generic scanner and it works fine. Mac-OS recognizes it asa HP Officejet 4500, but even when I download a special driver from the HP web site it refuses to work (a helpful error message "internal error"). 
2. The computer refuses to suspend when I select sleep from the system menu, but at least it does suspend OK based on an inactivity time.

However, there are also some features of Mac-OS that continue to annoy me e.g.:

• There are a well documented set of control key combinations which are almost universally implemented in every computer system (e.g. crtl-C to cut, ctrl-V to paste etc.) It seems that Apple hate following any standard that they didn't invent themselves, but these key combinations are too well known to be ignored so they compromised by implementing them, but not with the control key. Instead they implement these with another key whose name that I don't know (it is in between the control and alt keys). This is OK once you practice using a Mac for long enough, but I still make the mistake of expecting the control key to work the same that it does in every other operating system.
• Likewise the middle scroll wheel on the mouse works the wrong way on the Mac. I know that Apple probably claim that there is some reason why the way they implemented the mouse scroll button is better than everyone else, but anyone (like me) who uses more than one type of computer will hate when they don't go with the consensus,

On the plus side I find that there are normally more help documents online for Mac than there are for Linux.

I am a pretty persistent guy so I will stick it out a while longer before I take the nuclear option and install Ubuntu on my new system.

Does everyone need to know how computers work?

I read an interesting article in today's Irish Times about how Irish schools need to do a better job of teaching children about Information and Communications Technology (ICT). I tend to agree with the author's point that his children are not getting a significantly better education about ICT than he did 30 years ago despite the fact that there are now many more computing devices in the classroom.

Naturally what matters most is how the computing devices are used for educational purposes rather than the fact that they have the latest versions of all devices. Indeed it could be argued that some of the most recent devices are not good for learning because they configure themselves and hide much of the complexity from the user.

However, when making policy, we need to keep in mind that computing devices in the classroom can be used for two distinctly different purposes:

1. Teaching pupils how computers work e.g. teaching programming skills.
2. Using computers to facilitate teaching a completely unrelated subject. For example, the Irish Times pointed out that foreign language learning can be enhanced by using Skype to converse with a native speaker of the language in question (this does not require much knowledge about how Skype works).

Even the most enthusiastic supporters of the ICT industry would admit that the majority of the school children will not end up working in ICT when they grow up and so the 2nd type of teaching is more important. While this is partly true, I do think that all children should be exposed to at least a minimal amount of the 1st type of teaching (the Coder Dojo movement is perhaps an excellent way to tackle that).

I think that this is equivalent to teaching children about cars. The majority of school children will grow up to become car drivers rather than mechanics. This means that they don't need a detailed understanding of car maintenance procedures, but at the same time potential drivers are required to show some elementary knowledge of car maintenance in order to  pass the the test to get a driving license - this is so that drivers will be able to deal with issues that may arise while they are driving. 

In a similar vein I think everyone who uses computers in their daily life needs a basic understanding of how computers work so that they can work around issues that occur when they sometimes don't work as expected.  Since everyone needs to use computers in the modern world, this is means that everyone needs to learn a little about how computers work. Primary schools are an ideal place to impart these skills.

Regional restrictions on media license are fundamentally unfair and hence doomed to become obselete

The recent launch of the netflix service in the UK and Ireland was initially greeted with great enthusiasm, but this enthusiasm quickly turned to disappointment when people realized that the aomount of movies and TV shows available on this service was going to be much reduced compared to what was on offer in the USA (for essentially the same monthly price). This brings into focus the fundamental unfairness of regional restrictions on media rights.
 

In the pre-digital world, the owners of the copyright on work with a global appeal were forced to work with local partners in each grography to help get their content distributed. Typically they negotiated different licnese terms for each region based upon the market reality. This tradition has become entrenched in the media indistry and some players are trying to implement a similar scheme on the internet, but it is doomed to failure for three reasons:

1. It is technically hard to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, because the architecture of the internet was designed to make the user's geographic location invisible. Most sites that implement geographic restrictions do so by accessing databases that map IP addresses to geographic locations, but these are not notoriously inaccurate. For example, when I access the internet from work, most sites seem to think that I am in the UK since we get internet connectivity from a UK based ISP. This means that sites like RTÉ Player provide only a restricted service since they claim I am not in Ireland.
2. In the pre-digital era, movies were promoted on TV stations and in newspapers and other outlets that only had a regional reach. Therefore they would not tend to be very aware of what entertainment offerings were available in other countries. However, now people typically learn about new media offerings on the internet which has a global reach and when they read about wonderful new services they tend to get frustrated when they can't access them.
3. The majority of people see regional restrictions on media usage as fundamentally unfair. While their conscience might trouble them if they were sharing pirated track via BitTorrent,so they have no moral objection to using any of the freely available tools that make them appear to be located in a different country than they are.

The first generation of  digital distribution for movies was on DVDs. The movie industry tried to continue implementing a different distribution model for different regions by implementing a system of DVD region locking this system was widely circumvented because people believed that it was morally unfair that someone should try to stop them playing DVD movies at home that they had legitimately bought while on holiday in another country. This system gradually lost it effectiveness because consumers rebelled against it and began to buy region-free DVD players, I think the same thing will happen to the regional restrictions on streaming media services and the sooner the industry wakes up to this fact the better.

Can you run 64bit Virtual Machines on a 32 bit host operating system

I was recently trying to use VMWARE Player to run some 64 bit virtual machines which a colleague had built for me. I used Google to find out if it would be possible to run the 64 bit guest OS on a 32 bit host - unfortunately the results seemed to be split almost 50-50 between saying yes and no, so I had to try it for myself.

When I tried to power on the virtual machine I got the following error screen. I went to the link suggested by the error page and I downloaded the utility to see if my CPU was capable of running in 64 bit mode. The tool from VMWARE told me that my CPU was not capable of running a 64 bit operating system. This puzzled me because until recently I was running a 64 bit operating system (RHEL6) on the same laptop.

I still thought that the problem might be that it is not possible to run a 64 bit guest operating system on a 32 bit host operating system. Then I remembered that I still had kept the boot partition for the 64 bit OS, so I booted this partition and tried again to run the virtual machines. Puzzlingly I still got the same result. The VMWARE test utility was also still telling me that my CPU was not capable of operating in 64 bit mode which was deifnietly not true since it was running in 64 bit mode when I ran the test.

I did a bit more digging and I found a utility from KVM which is supposed to check if your system can run 64bit virtual machines. It also told me that I couldn't, but it gave a very different error message. As the error message suggested, I went into my BIOS settings and enabled support for "Intel Virtualized Technology" and hey-presto I was able to run the 64 bit virtual machines. Unfortunately I don't really know what "Intel Virtualized Technology" is, but this article seems to have a feasible explanation.