Tell them, my song.

I just read on his website that Z.A. Recht, the author of “Plague of the dead” and “Thunder and Ashes” has passed away earlier this month.

Like many others, I love his novels and was waiting for the last part of the trilogy. His family promised to publish the manuscript once they’re past the worst, so there’s hope that his completed work will live on even after his own death.

Still, this is a reminder how suddenly and unexpectedly life, which most of us seemingly take for granted and waste as if we had another one on stock somewhere, can be over and gone forever.

Zachary wrote his books as only a true genre fan could do it. He gave us, his readers, everything we could wish for in a zombie apocalypse, from a hospital morgue with a re-animating corpse to abandoned towns and tactical air strikes on infested capitols and a fistful of survivors fighting their way through a hostile, nightmarish landscape.

Thank you for the chills, Z. And farewell. You will be missed.

To make it short: I took the Hackintosh to the office today and experienced once again the epic failure of Mac OS X in a business environment.

I spent the day using Windows apps running in VMWare Fusion because the Mac counterparts for Office 2007 simply are not compatible enough. Then OS X could not print to the Sharp MX-2300N printer which we use in our department. This resulted to a very simple realization: When you spend your work time in a virtualized system, then you obviously do not need the host system at all.

And this reminded me of the exact same experience that I had made at the United Nations a couple of years ago when I tried to use a first generation Intel iMac in the office – it was the exact same result.

Now you can say that it is not a fault of the platform per se, but rather the fault of the software and hardware companies for not supporting the Mac as it would be needed to make it a success. Well, I hate to break it to you, but a platform is only as good as the ecosystem around it and as the applications that are available for it. If Apple is unable – or unwilling – to attract and support Third Parties, then it’s no wonder that Macs are only usable as iPhone and iPod backends, light web surfing machines or as Final Cut/Logic Studio boxes.

I don’t regret the time that I spent on installing and configuring OS X on that non-Apple hardware. It was a nice learning experience and fun to show my middle finger into the direction of One Infinite Loop in Cupertino. But eventually, I wiped OS X off the hard drive today and the Dell is a pure Windows machine again. OS X just doesn’t work where I am earning my living. I’d probably get farther with an Ubuntu desktop.

Talking about Linux: I also must say that I am more and more growing tired of the two big proprietary platforms OS X and Windows and the corporations behind them. I cannot see product keys and activation procedures anymore. I fucking hate Digital Restrictions Management. Imagine how much fun computers would be (again) if those companies would spend all their efforts into customer service, customer care and product design instead of coming up with more and more ways to restrict the ways their customers can use their products. This whole control freak attitude makes me sick to the stomach and I’m reaching the point where I’m no longer accepting it in my private environment. I hate spending my money and time on things that are trying to control me instead of helping me.

Now Linux, FreeBSD and the other Open Source platforms are all epic failures in their own individual ways as well. They also lack applications and hardware support. But at least they let me breath the air freely and I have the feeling that I am in full control over my tools.