Chris Pirillo has an intersting list of Ten Reasons Your Next PC will be from Apple. Some of them are the typical, run-of-the-mill reasons you hear everytime Mac vs PC comes up but some of them are really interesting, compelling reasons.  My favorite would be:

4. Knowledge. Don't let platform bigotry get in the way of understanding and appreciating good technology. We all are better for knowing more, and that's something you should look forward to doing – not avoiding at all costs. Bury the hatchet if you think that this still is the Mac you first saw in 1984.

This is the reason I have a Windows machine and a Linux machine to complement my main OS X laptop – it lets me be knowledgeable about the three OS’s and to be able to readily make the decision about which is best for a specific tasks, particularly because swapping OSs for a single task is straight-forward. Of course, if you’re a Mac user, this is an excellent reason why you should should put a Windows box within easy reach and preferably something like Linux, BSD or Solaris as well.

Following a Jobs keynote there’s always a ton of complaining about Apple, along with a lot of lusting over the new goodies. For my part my complaint with Apple is one that has been growing since the release of OS X – I’m sick and tired of Apple trying to make me buy stuff through them.

In fact, this started with the introduction of QuickTime Pro and the nagging to upgrade. In OS X we started seeing the addition of things like Buy Printer Supplies (which I’m sure used to be in Print Center but isn’t anymore – score 1 Apple), requesting a .Mac subscription during initial configuration, print photo books from iPhoto and since the advent of the music store, a ton of different links to it scattered through iTunes.

Dave Winer complains about Apple’s photocasting RSS being broken and while I’ll agree that it’s a shame Apple didn’t put more effort into interoperability, it’s also a shame Dave had to end with:

Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship.

As if Apple have any reason to kill RSS when they’re going out of their way to leverage and promote RSS. How about letting the plain facts be enough criticism instead of having to tack on insinuating comments just to beat up the story?

I’ve been subscribed to Digg’s front page RSS feed for a few months or so and more and more I’m just skipping over all of its articles. It seems that as Digg’s popularity grows, the quality of the content drops. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise – as more people enter the community, the community’s interests vary and the signal to noise ratio for a given person probably drops.  Even when the community’s interest doesn’t spread too wide, just the increase in the number of articles is likely to mean that readers skip articles more often.

It’s amazing how unobservant people can be at times. A while back Technorati notified me of a new link to my blog from “Pete the programmer from the sink”. I didn’t have time to investigate but figured I didn’t know a Pete from the sink so wasn’t too concerned. As I passed by the WordPress Dashboard again today though it was reporting that link to me again so I decided to check it out. I failed to realize that the user “peteroyle” might just be my friend from uni – Pete Royle and missed the hitcity.com domain where Pete works. Finally just as my curiosity was satisfied and I was about to close the tab, I noticed the gem of a photo Pete has as his blog header and thought – hey, I know him!

Rich Bowen has been posting podcasts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Simply brilliant! Sadly it doesn’t look like we’ll get to the final stave by Australian Christmas so I’ll most likely have to wait until I get back in the new year to hear the end. All the same, it is a very entertaining reading of one of the classic stories and I can’t recommend you listen to it enough.

Scoble:

I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer? What’s the reciprocity of a link? (Did Graham link back and continue the conversation?)

Queensland Transport provide an online form to allow you to change your address details:    +5 brownie points

The form pops up in a new window:    -2 brownie points

The new window expands to be full screen:    -4 brownie points

The new window hides the location bar and all other window decorations:    -10 brownie points

The SSL certificate is self signed:    Do not pass GO, do not collect brownie points. Go straight home and tell your mother what you did.

I’ve caught up on the backlog of stuff to write about from the past couple of weeks where I’ve been preoccupied with moving house, mostly by dropping it off the list because it’s just too old to be worth commenting on now. So now I’m off to the Gold Coast for christmas holidays with my darling fiance and her family. It’s a tough life sometimes. Anyway, that means I won’t be posting much here for a while again, possibly until the new year. So merry christmas all!

The Boston Globe:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers’ own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.

Berin Loritsch:

I’ve discovered why I’m lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It’s tedious. It isn’t the creative part of the effort. It’s boring!

The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they’re boring to write, they’re boring to read as well – so noone does.

In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs. So instead of just anyone inserting a table into a document, now it’s Miss Piggy creating a table of Kermit’s good and bad points – complete with a picture of Miss Piggy and Kermit. At one point we actually had half the engineering team rushing off to read the specification documents just so they could laugh at the stories.

Ben Laurie:

…because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.