Editors note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on April 8th.  We have republished it here with his permission.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.

Paul Graham has written a good article on the “death” of Microsoft. He argues that Microsoft, while going nowhere soon, is a shell of its former self and just doesn’t scare people any more, partly because of the new kid on the block who also has lots of money: Google (for football fans out there, this is akin to Manchester United and Chelsea).

However, this isn’t the point of this post. There is one small thing that he mentions, almost in passing, in his article and it is something I strongly disagree with:

“Everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop.”

He links to a site called Snipshot, which is a very cool site, allowing you to edit pictures online. However, it is about as close to an online Photoshop as Blogger is to an online Word. There seems to be a slightly delusional…
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Donald Rumsfeld took a lot a flak in his term as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps one of his best quotes was also his most amusing:

“As we know, there are known knowns are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say,we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Rumsfeld’s quote aptly describes the world of computer security.

Known knowns

As it stands today, Windows has been, by far, the biggest malware target, partially due to its large market share and partially due to legitimate security problems, especially before Windows XP Service Pack 2. Apple’s Mac OS X has yet to see anything more than a couple sporadic minor malware threats (mostly proof-of-concepts). OS X’s lack of malware is believed to be due to Apple’s relatively small market share and OS X’s inherently better security. Security experts are apparently puzzled as to why Mac OS X hasn’t seen more hacks. Also, it’s debatable whether Mac OS X itself is really any more secure than Windows or if Mac OS X’s good malware record so far is…
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Editors note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on February 26th.  He agreed to republish it here at our request.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.

If you pay any attention to the web hosting world you will have noticed there has been a bit of a stir over DreamHost this past week. One of the data centres they use had to completely power down, resulting in a few hours of downtime. Unfortunately, this meant M Cubed and this blog were both down for several hours Sunday morning. This has prompted me look at other hosts. I moved to DreamHost enticed by their amazing package for an amazingly low price. After years of preaching to PC users that you get what you pay for when it comes to quality on the Mac, I seem to have fallen into the trap of buying the “just good enough” of web hosting.

All credit to DreamHost though. They do offer a great package; it gives me everything I need: multiple websites, PHP, MySQL, Subversion, Ruby on Rails and near infinite bandwidth and storage space. And you can’t fault the price:…
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As some of you may know, in addition to my work here on Deep Thought, I also contribute to TheMacMind. Even though I am officially editor-in-chief there too, I am a good deal more involved in the operations of Deep Thought than TheMacMind, so much so that I am probably more of a contributions writer there than a full fledged editor (just look at the number of articles I’ve written for DT compared to TMM).

TheMacMind received some rather harsh criticism over a review that Anthony Cole wrote recently. The meat of the criticism is that Anthony’s review was little more than an attempt to scam software developers in order to get free software.

Anthony took over TheMacMind late last year after it had sat idle, proclaiming, “A new look coming soon” for over a year. Anthony is 16 years old. When I was 16, I certainly wasn’t running a web site. (Now that I think of it, when I was 16, it was last century. Yikes!) Anthony is still very green at this; TheMacMind relaunched just under three months ago. It represents his first real attempt at journalistic work. He is very much learning on the job.

As I…
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Okay, it’s the middle of February. Macworld Expo and CES are long over. Windows Vista has been out for more than two weeks. Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Music has been discussed so much that it’s been beaten to a bloody pulp. That’s right, it’s the tech doldrums right now. What’s a techie to do?

Why, write an article about what irks him, of course! A good number of the coolest geek toys out there involve Web 2.0. Not surprisingly, elements of Web 2.0 come up on this list quite a lot! Let’s get started. Here are some of the most worn out, most obnoxious trends in the tech universe.

Beta, beta everywhere...

It seems like no site or product churned out these days can be considered hip unless it has a “beta” tag somewhere on the page. Flickr is a great example, and has actually gone above and beyond “beta” and is now “Gamma”! Whoa! I don’t know what Flickr is trying to accomplish with “gamma,” as the site seems pretty polished to me. Maybe they are parodying the “Beta” tags everywhere?

Speaking of Flickr…

Stp drppng vowls frm wrds

Okay, I’ll admit, RAZR was a cool name at first.…
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