I’ve placed my order of Tiger this evening from Amazon (actually it was Leah who placed the order since she had more items to buy verses my one). However, that also means that I’ll have to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook before it arrives. Right now it has just under 4GB of free space left which should just be enough for a upgrade install, at least according to Apple. That won’t do at all since there will be no free space to store any future digital photos, so a new 80GB drive it is. Hopefully the promised second bonus from work will materialise soon…

A lot of comments are being made on DrunkenBlog about the legal case Apple is bringing against the persons who leaked a copy Tiger (next version of OS X). Most of them seems to be in the theme of “they (the defendants) are poor students and can’t afford to defend themselves, so let’s go easy on them”, or “they didn’t mean any harm, suing them is too heavy handed by Apple”, or “Apple has made their point, these people have been punished enough already”, etc.

Speaking in a personal capacity (Adriaan, my ecto partner, had already made an ‘offical’ comment) I think everyone need to take responsibility of their own action. Whether you are poor, rich, young, old, illiterate, or educated; you are still doing wrong. Just because these people did not leak the copy of Tiger in malicious intend, that doesn’t mean they did not do wrong. If they were found guilty of their accused crime, their personal circumstances should, in an ideal world, be taken into account by the judge when sentencing is served. Not that we are living in an ideal world, mind you, but that is the concept nonetheless.

Of course one can argue that since they are poor, they are unable to hire attorney to defend themselves against a multi-billion dollars company that is Apple. Guess what? They should have thought of the possibility of being sued when they shared the file.

I doubt that if the defendants are middle aged software engineers earning 6 figure salaries, there will be as much ‘sympathy’ towards them as these young students. I think fair should be fair, no matter the circumstances.

In closing, I can’t honest believe the defendants are completely innocence about sharing any files on BitTorrent.

I made the foolish assumption that since I wasn’t a developer, and I had a copy that it would be ok if I shared it with 5 or 6 fellow mac fanatics.

“Foolish” is right and he admitted that he is a frequent BitTorrent downloader. So he must knows that once the file is in the open, there is no stopping at “5 or 6 fellow mac fanatics”. Blind trust is a great thing but the real world doesn’t work that way.

Mac mini is nice. Definitely a Cube version 2 from Apple. As someone in MacRumors forum said, “It’s not a Cube, it’s a Sandwich!” And a colleague of mine, who was never a Mac fan, ordered one yesterday as soon as it was up on Apple’s Store. I am tempted to get the mini for my mom who is still using my old PC from college (a Pentium II 166MHz running Windows 98!). She mainly uses it for email, surfing the web, fax, and QuickBook so the mini is perfect for her.

Finally an iPod that is affordable for even those cheapskate Windows users 😀 Lack of a screen may put some ignorant, narrow minded people (who think their ways of using an iPod is the only way every one in this planet will use it, i.e. you need screen to pick the songs/album/playlist to listen to) off though.

iLife ’05 is what really interest me. Particularly iPhoto 5 with its new support for RAW format means I no longer need to use Photoshop CS’s browser to manage my RAW files. How iPhoto 5 stacks up against Capture One Pro, which has a very strong file management feature, is another matter. But since I don’t use any of the other applications apart from iTunes, which is still free, the $79 price tag is a bit high for me.

iWork is definitely a step in the right direction for Apple and their customers. The lack of a spreadsheet program means I still can’t get rid of Microsoft Office from my PowerBook yet.

In typical pre-MacWorld fashion, the rumors crowd has gone wild over the Flash-based iPod (without screen apparently). This guy on the MacRumors forum hit the nail on the head though. Very true and very funny…

I’ve noticed this a few times already while blogging in ecto but just not it finally gets to me. It seems that OS X‘s native spell checker does not know about the word ‘gotten‘ in the English language! Why, I haven’t gotten a clue! May be it is trying to tell me to use simpler tenses than past participles?