Five Drops Of Orange Juice

While reading through Mark Pilgrim's comeback to John Gruber (if you haven't read his deconstruction of Mark's Un-Switching and follow-up, I recommend it wholeheartedly), there were five things that crossed my mind:

  • I what he's on about. Some of my early work (stuff I did in PageMaker and FreeHand) has gone the way of the dodo - although I can find it in my backup images, the formats themselves are about as useful as cuneiform writing on clay tablets. .
  • I, too, loathe DRM, for mostly the same reasons. I still rip all my music to high-grade for maximum portability, avoid copy-protected CDs like the plague and have yet to make a single Music Store purchase, precisely because I want to make sure that the content I buy is under my control - and that includes migrating with me to new formats, if needed be.
  • I wonder what the zealots and will make of his take on the GIMP, especially after nearly having made him an poster child.
  • Although I still think that he could accomplish all he wants atop , the sentence "Some day there will be no hardware that can run Mac OS X, and because of Apple’s DRM it will be illegal to emulate it in software." struck a chord. He's right, and I ought to know it - after all, I ran the course newspaper off System 6 and Windows 286. And all that, like my VMS and stuff, is gone (except a few PostScript files and e-mails).
  • I , but the amount of CTD involved to set up a minimally usable environment on is a hassle I don't want to face - at least not for now, and not with 's lead on usability. For now, 's is more off-putting than the software (with a stream of bad news that just keeps on coming these days), but still not quite to the point where I fancy running Xfce or Gnome on a vanilla PC. Yet.

But I must confess all of this has been on my mind of late, and more so as I wade through the minefield (deliberately, both at home and at work). I'm still committed to , but you have to experience some things to truly understand them - even the brittle, unfinished ones.

What I don't get (and probably never will) is why Mark didn't just use IMAP (with whatever sort of mailbox format) as a long-term mail store instead of trying to migrate to (and from) 's .emlx format.

Heck, he's Mark Pilgrim - I'm just a random guy, and I figured it out years ago...

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