From: "Frank Haber" 

I made a rare visit to the general meeting of my local user group Tuesday
night, celebrity-whoring to catch David Pogue, who was both flogging his
new book and talking about Vista.  He's a smart cookie, and very
entertaining (see his NY Times videos).  He's a tad juvenile at times, but
hey, I'm still a teen-ager in lots of ways.  He's not highly technical, but
he's my interface guru.  I credit him with teaching this left-brainer about
how to use Mac OS X fluidly, the right way.

Well, Pogue gave some great demos, and good tips, and wasn't *too*
completely committed to Microsoft.  It does seem true that he who loves
Vista best is, if not a Mac fanboy, at least a Mac admirer.  His
presentation was fairly even-handed, and threw some good barbs, especially
about the  feature split among the too-many versions:

"Home users never need to send a FAX?"  "Business users
never need to edit a video?"

A brief interlude proved he really is a kind of polymath (he's an
ex-Broadway conductor).  He ran through four or five of his best songs at
the piano (!), and they were GOOD.  Not Tom Lehrer, but very good.  He
threw in a couple of magic tricks, too.

He demoed on a low-end MacBook 12 btw, mostly under Boot Camp.  Aero ran
fine on this "3.0" machine (2GB).  Things flew.  Everyone was
impressed, including me. Although we all noticed that he spent most of the
time with Aero off, and User Account Control off, too.

I then spoiled the party, piping up and complaining loudly that Microsoft's
copy protection DEEPLY OFFENDED ME, and made me feel as though I were being
treated like a street vendor in Kuala Lumpur.  Pogue was no toady; he gave
a good "Whatcha going to do?  MS is losing money" response.

Then he rebooted and ran Parallels.  No wireless in the lecture hall.  He
disabled wireless networking in Parallels.  Boom.  Up came the thievery
screen.  No more Vista for him that night.

Q.E.D.


Great show!  Glad I went.  It's good to see a show that's a show, with no apologies.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5