From the brave new world of Snow Leopard, you can look forward to smart new technologically up-to-date blogposts

This is the kind of dynamic new blogpost you can expect now that I've upgraded to Mac operating system OS 10.6, fun-named "Snow Leopard." Hey, what else can you get for 29 bucks these days?

Mac OS X Snow Leopard enhances your entire Mac experience. Faster, more reliable, and easier to use., it's the Mac you know and love made even better.

-- from the outside of the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade package

by Ken

We're celebrating Snow Leopard Day here at DWT.

So I snuck out of work this afternoon and, braving the rain, hied to one of the Manhattan Apple Stores (can you believe, I had never been inside an Apple Store before?) to pony up my $29 -- or rather throw down my credit card -- for the just-out-today new version of the Mac operating system, OS 10.6, with the fun name "Snow Leopard." This is the first upgrade to the Mac OS since, um, the last one. [Note to DWT research assistant: Please check and insert date.]

Sleek new Snow Leopard is not, of course, to be confused with that pathetic old relic of an operating system, OS 10.5, fun-named just plain "Leopard," or its even more antique forebears OS 10.4 ("Tiger") and OS 10.3 ("Panther"). I actually am a Tiger user at work, where I was only recently updated from that prehistoric fossil OS 9 to the promised land of OS X. Yes, it is officially "OS X," as if it were a Super Bowl. But the decimal iterations that have represented OS upgrades since the advent of OS X have used the arabic-numeral form "10." This is just one of the mysteries of the OS X universe. Personally, I've never liked any version of the system I've used, but then, I have no idea what's going on inside the computer, and I'm prepared to concede that OS X has made possible things that I actually benefit from.

But it's been a long times since I was a first-day software upgrader. Back in the day, of course, upgrades were offered dirt-cheap to the software user base, as a way the developers kept the faith with and of their faithful users. That's before it occurred to some marketing genius that your faithful users aren't loyalists to be cosseted but captives to be exploited. Software upgrades became more frequent and more expensive, not to mention more bloated and cumbersome. And now those existing users were the prime target market. I believe the technical term is "pigeons."

So it may be the mere fact that the Snow Leopard upgrade is being offered for only $29 is what hooked me after all. (Note that this upgrade is only for current Leopard users, and at that Leopard users whose computers use Mac's now-standard Intel processor chips. Heaven forbid should be a Mac-ophile from the hoary days of the Power PC chip. However, if you bought your Mac on or after June 8, under Apple's "up-to-date" program you can get the upgrade for $9.95.) But even I noticed that, while few new features are promised in the upgrade, there is one startling development: Instead of occupying still more of your hard-drive real estate, it actually takes less space. That's right, the installation promises to return usable drive space!

I see on apple.com that NYT computer columnist David Pogue, a guy I pretty much trust (from the days before he wrote for the NYT), has enthused over “the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better -- instead of bigger, slower and more bloated," PC Magazine contributor Edward Mendelson, another really smart guy (and I do mean smart; "computer maven" is just a hobby for him -- he's a fairly brilliant scholar and literary critic, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia), has written on pcmag.com that Snow Leopard is “Apple’s fastest, most functional, and feature-rich operating system yet.”

Well, we shall see. No, I haven't installed it yet. On the way home, it occurred to me: What happens if something goes wrong? I'm committed to producing this 6pm (PT) post. That's not going to be so easy if my damned computer locks up and just blinks 12:00 at me. Oh wait, that's the VCR. Well, probably the computer would just stare defiantly at me. (Howie and I were talking about this just the other day. With advancing age I've lost my former eagerness, even cockiness with regard to hardward and software installations. I used to rip the package open on the way home, then race to the computer to put the new toy to work. Now I'm often filled with dread, having lost most of my confidence to make the thing work.)

So once I get this post posted, I'm going to rip the Snow Leopard package (a tiny little thing that fits in the palm of your hand) open and go for broke. And you, dear reader, will see the benefit. Starting tomorrow you're going to be seeing sleek new blogposts that will put those galulmphing old ones to shame. Or if not, you're welcome to use some of that extra space I'm going to be getting back after the installation.

UPDATE: INSTALLATION SUCCESSFUL

So far I can't tell any difference, but just give it some time and I'll bet I'll be blogging up a storm.

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Are ballads and epic poems written to celebrate renegades who stand defiantly outside the reach of a mandatory software upgrade?

No, this isn't my office computer -- and it won't
be after I'm mandatorily upgraded either.

by Anonymous
[see? they can't prove nuttin'!]

I thought you folks might enjoy this tale of life in My Company. It even comes with a surprise twist at the end!

Since our office move last fall into the belly of the New York Stock Exchange security-zone beast, we peons who don't have offices are just about completely exposed to everyone's view -- when you walk down the aisle between cubicle row, it's almost impossible not to look in everyone's cubicle as you pass. As a result, I have established that, unless I've missed somebody somewhere, I am the only person in the office still using a CRT monitor, as opposed to a flat panel screen. From which I conclude(rather proudly, I must say) that I have the privilege of having the oldest and crappiest computer still in use on the premises.

OK, "crappiest" is perhaps a bit judgmental. The fact is, it's perfectly adequate to my job needs, and I've learned to live with the limitation that I can't make any changes of any kind to the software on it, all of which would require a password known only to IT. And so, while the rest of the Mac world has marched on through the operating-system world of Tiger (OS 10.4) and on into the paradise of Leopard (OS 10.5), I'm still firmly grounded in yesteryear's Panther (the final version of it, OS 10.3.9). Which also means that I can't use most any current-release software, which increasingly requires OS 10.4 or later -- even if I could install such software, which I can't.

(True, I could ask for luxuries like a more recent version of Flash, to enable me to open Web pages that my old version won't. Yes, I could ask. Maybe the answer would be yes, maybe it would be no, but either way my permanent record would indicate that I was the troublemaker who asked. One of our highest-ranking officers is a gentleman whose principal, er, gift is remembering such things.)

Now, to the story. We began hearing awhile back that we were all going to be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008. This is actually not much of a deal for me, since I hardly ever use any of the components of whatever version of MS Office I've got. When the HR director circulates attached documents, they're usually in MS Word format -- that's about the extent of my excursions into Office.

Nevertheless, we soon began to hear about commencement of the "mandatory upgrade" to Office 2008 -- are there other companies where a software upgrade can be made to sound like a punishment? The memo drumbeat indicated that the upgrade was closing in on us. From our IT guy in, apparently, San Francisco (we have a SF office?) comes word of arrangements made with Microsoft for free online training courses!

Then came the memo from the IT guy in our Las Vegas office (now, I knew we had one of them!) who is apparently in charge of Mandatory Upgrades, asking us in the New York office please to leave our computers on when we left the next few nights, since it will be easier for him to perform the upgrades while we're out of the office. The procedure should take 20 minutes, Mr. Las Vegas says.

Of course, since the memo wasn't sent till 5:53pm our time, and as the clock ticks down to 6 I don't usually keep checking for e-mail, I didn't see the memo till the next morning. (It's true that I would know I had an e-mail waiting if I kept my "dock" permanently displayed, but unlike all my coworkers with their bigger monitors, I can't afford to give up that chunk of screen real estate, since I'm trying to display magazine pages in readable form.) But I figured I wasn't likely to be in the "chosen" group of First NY Upgradees.

And then it occurred to me: Can my computer even run the "mandatory upgrade" software? I figure there's no way it will run in poor old OS 10.3.9, and sure enough, Office 2008 is a member of the OS 10.4 or Later Club. (OS 10.3 is the now-antique Panther; OS 10.4, the already-aging Tiger; and OS 10.5, the still-current Leopard. Here comes Snow Leopard! And no, I'm not making that up.) And while my mind has detoured into wondering if my computer has enough RAM to handle an OS upgrade (the leaps in memory requirement for successive iterations of the Mac OS have been so enormous that I believe Apple is now measuring it in gazillionbytes), my eye, continuing to rummage through the system requirements for Office 2008, notices that if your computer processor happens to be of the heirloom G4 species, it has to be at least 500 MHz. I have no idea what mine is, but I check and discover that it is -- ta-da! -- a 450 MHz G4!

So now I know: My company has "mandated" a software upgrade that, as best I can tell, won't run on the computer it has mandated me, even if it's possible to run a more nearly current OS on it. I add this newly discovered info to the memo I have begun writing to Mr. Las Vegas pointing out that my computer is still running in OS 10.3.9, and I really can't afford to have it further slowed down by an OS upgrade if I'm to get any work done. I finish the memo by promising to leave my computer on as requested, apologizing for having shut it off the night before and explaining about not having seen the 5:53pm memo.

I don't know how many more nights I'm supposed to leave my computer on, but heck, I'm not the one paying the electric bill. I haven't heard anything more from anybody in IT, in Las Vegas or San Francisco or even New York. (Yes, yes, it has occurred to me that perhaps I should have brought this whole thing to the attention of our IT guy here, who's a good guy. But if he's not already in the loop on this, I'm afraid that dragging him into it may just result in my being ratted out to the Chief Punishment Officer in the head office in Florida.

I can't help wondering if the "mandatory upgrade" is turning out to be perhaps not absolutely, unmitigatedly mandatory.

NOW FOR THE SURPRISE TWIST!

The above was in fact written on Monday of this week -- that is to say, the 16th. I held off posting, or even thinking seriously about whether I really wanted to go ahead and post it, because later that day I got word from our NY IT guy -- who's both a good guy and utterly competent -- that the next day I and a colleague who does basically the same job (putting us pretty near the bottom of our food chain, it seems) would be upgraded to G5 computers. I have to guess that our great IT minds had collectively spotted this chink in the MS Office "mandatory upgrade" project.

There was some e-discussion of when our schedules would make it easiest for the NY IT guy to get at our computers. I explained that I don't really go out at any set time, but could almost surely work around his schedule, provided I knew when it was going to happen. A couple of hours' notice is what I was offered, and I responded that that should work.

So with developments developing on Monday, and theoretically scheduled to finish the process on Tuesday, I shelved the whole question of this post. After all, if and when the promised computer upgrade was to happen, there was still the question of what kind of equipment I would actually wind up with.

For one thing, I already knew that the equipment wasn't going to be new, and around here when we get a recycled computer, there's always the risk that it came from someone, like from the Art Dept., who had been upgraded because he/she had beaten the living daylights out of the old beast by performing the computer equivalent of mechanical-bull-riding.

I was once "upgraded" to one of these poor victim machines, which it turned out our IT folks at that time already suspected of being a victim of such abuse. Apparently it was easier to recycle and hope for the best than to actually check it out. That poor thing was swapped out for a hardier survivor, and presumably set aside for reassignment to some even sappier sucker. (Of course, at the moment the likeliest source of recycled equipment hereabouts would be stuff left behind by the fallen comrades from our January round of layoffs.)

Perhaps more important, while the software would undoubtedly be more up-to-date, there seemed no reason to assume that I would be equipped with stuff that enhances my actual computer use, at least not without asking, and having "troublemaker" notations added to my permanent record etc. etc.

These were all issues it seemed most prudent to deal with after I got my "new" computer. And who's to say that after being so gifted I might not feel churlish airing such unkind sentiments?

That was Monday, you'll recall. By my count this is Saturday. Monday's "tomorrow" has long since gone the way of the emu, leaving me still waiting for that famous couple of hours' notice. I guess I can suspend the wait for today and tomorrow. But starting Monday (again), it could happen at any time, with just those couple of hours' notice.

Meanwhile, I retain my "rogue" status in the face of the "mandatory upgrade" crusade. A rebel, or just a troublemaker?

POSTSCRIPT

Rode down in the elevator with the IT guy. He says Monday, only he can't tell exactly when. Says he'll give me an hour's notice. The old "couple of hours" window seems to have shrunk.

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