There appears to be a conspiracy that is drenching me in Star Trek this week. Yesterday it was Wil Wheaton; last night I channel-surfed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which I haven’t seen in its entirety since it was released in 1978. It definitely has its up and down moments. There was one period between commercials that consisted of absolutely nothing but the Enterprise flying into the V’Ger cloud, with the crew members’ jaws on the floor. About five or ten minutes worth of this…. Between that and the video-game warp effects, I had a hard time not laughing. It’s a shame. This and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan were about the only two movies in which you could still take the aging actors seriously as the crew of a starship.
Peaceful Coexistence
This morning the Register pointed to a flub on the part of Microsoft I had heard about but not seen yet: Windows XP running on an old Macintosh!
The image, apparently part of the tour video of Windows XP, shows a user looking at the XP startup wizard running on a monitor sitting next to a pre-blue and white Macintosh tower machine (the Reg thought it was an 8000 series tower, which were made when I was in college!).
The funny thing is that Microsoft has poured so much time and money into the Windows XP launch and the user experience, and yet they missed this in a very public part of the prospective user experience. There’s a Zen point to be made here: you can’t control everything, and (as the DOJ will tell you) you can’t own the whole dialog. Isn’t it better to admit there are other operating systems out there, now that you own 19 out of every 20 desktops? Can’t we all just get along?
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I, in fact, run Windows 2000 on my Mac, through the magic of Virtual PC. But only when I absolutely have to…