Microsoft has just released the Zune (in the U.S. only). This seems to have generated a lot of buzz among geeks, even though the general public does not seem to have followed this story with the same level of interest.

I must say that I have not been particularly impressed by the Zune. This is my Top 12 list of reasons for sticking with Apple (10 was simply not enough):

1. The iPod has more accessories
2. The iPod offers better integration with cars
3. iTunes offers seamless podcast support, unlike the Zune which requires third party software
4. Apple has a clear personal digital media strategy that goes beyond the iPod, as demonstrated with products such as Airport Express and the upcoming iTV
5. iTunes is the best software to manage digital media
6. iTunes is multi-platform (Windows and Mac), unlike the Zune software that is Windows only and still does not work on Vista
7. Airlines are starting to offer iPod integration with their in-flight entertainment systems
8. iPods can play games (Hard Disk drive models)
9. The iTunes store offers more songs than any competitor
10. iPods are smaller and lighter
11. Apple offers worldwide support for the iPod
12. The songs bought on the iTunes store can be used more liberally.

So, what do you think? Did I forget something?

When Apple decided to move to Intel, most were concerned with the performance of Photoshop or Microsoft Office on the new systems. I was much more concerned with the lack of availability of a native version of MacMAME. That is why I was so glad to find out that Dave Dribin had just ported MAME (from the original source code) to OS X.

I must say that at first I was really disappointed to find out that none of my roms seemed to work. Every time I launched the program, the application would try to load the ROMs from the corresponding zip file, and quit. At first I thought that there was something wrong with the application, but after taking a look at the console, it turned out that all the ROMs that I had tested had missing files. So I decided to download some newer ROMs designed to work with MAME 0.103. However, newer ROMs did not fix the problem. Luckily there is a bulletin board to support this MAME port and David has been very active answering all the questions posted by the users. He explained that the roms have to be copied to ${HOME}/Documents/MacMAME User Data/ROMs. It worked!

While this new version of MAME is great news for Intel Mac owners, I still miss the polished interface of MacMAME. I hope that in the future, other programmers will join the project and improve on this initial version. Still, I am very grateful to David.

So, what are you waiting for? Download the binaries from sourceforge.net and start playing!

Last September, Apple’s Steve Jobs clearly explained the strategy for the iPod during a Special Event. He mentioned that people can now use their digital content on their iPod, in their cars and on their computers. The next step is to be able to access that content from the living room on large TVs through the se of the upcoming iTV device.

However, there is still one crucial piece missing, namely storage. On many PCs, specially on laptops, storage is still constraint. On my 17” Mac Book Pro I use about 25% of my internal HD with digital content, which currently is mainly music and a couple of TV shows episodes (mainly promotional content given away by the iTunes store). However, once the iTV is released, I see myself subscribing to more vlogs and probably purchasing movies, specially if Apple moves to a HDTV quality format.

The obvious question is where will I store all that content? I just checked the size of an episode of Weeds and it weights 357.6MB. In this case, the first season of this show only consisted of 10 episodes, but this is unusual, 22 to 24 episodes is what we should expect. That means that if you subscribe to just three standard 40 minutes shows, you require 25GB of free space on your hard disk drive and that is per year! This may not sound like a major problem if you have one of the new custom built iMacs equipped with a 750GB hard drive, but it should worry the owners of an 60 or 80GB iBook.

So, what is the solution? Desktop users do not have a problem, they can easyly add external hard disk drives and stack them on their desks. However, the world is shifting away from desktops, as most users value more mobility over performance. For mobile users, external drives are not very practical. Don’t get me wrong, I do have an external device for backup purposes, but I do not enjoy the process of taking it out of the drawer where I store it, connect it and later unplug it and return it to its drawer. I can live with it, but I do not enjoy the process. If I had to do that in order to watch a movie or a TV show, it would probably be a show stopper. For me, taking a DVD out of its case and insert it in the DVD player is just much easier.

Of course, there is a solution. It is called NAS (Network Attached Storage). Apple sells a NAS device for its XServe rack server, it is called XServe Raid and allows professional users to store up to 7TB of data which, combined with XSAN, can be shared by up to 64 concurrent users. However, at even under $2 per MB, this product is still clearly aimed at professional users. What home users really need is a smaller capacity wireless NAS device, where everyone at home can store their digital media. With 802.11a/b/g this was simply not possible, but now that Apple and others seem poised to adopt the much faster 802.11n, this now seems like a viable solution. With such a device turned on 24/7 in your den, you could backup your files from your laptop at any time and watch all your TV episodes without having to turn your computer on. Better still, by using RAID and hot-swappable drives, your valuable files would be totally safe.

I certainly hope that Apple is working on a Bonjour discoverable NAS, because we all know that it would transparently integrate with iTunes and the upcoming iTV device. However, should they decide not to enter the market (after all such a device could easily cost more than US$500, which puts it out of the reach of most consumers) there is an opportunity for third party manufacturers such as Linksys or Maxtor that have started dabbling in that market with some promising, though immature products like the NSLU2 and the 500GB Fusion.

In the fifties, in most countries there was a single TV channel. This made it a very coveted media for politicians, who bitterly fought over control of TV news in order to influence voters. This fight for control of mass media continued until recently. In the 90s there was much concern that a media mogul like Ruppert Murdoch could use his empire to shape public opinion and this fear prompted many democratic nations to pass laws against excessive media conglomeration.

With the advent of the Internet, those fears are quickly fading. There are many ways to get the bare facts and blogs provide countless reactions to those facts. Following a trend that started in the 90s with News channels such as Fox that present the information clearly eschewed toward a particular point of view, it is now very easy to find information analyzed by people who think the same way you do.

Since there will be an almost infinite number of channels, people will have a better opportunity to position themselves exactly where they want to on the political spectrum, instead of having to chose from a discrete number of options, like we do today.

As a result, instead of having two or three large movements competing for power, it is likely that in the future there will be a very large amount of relatively small loosely connected groups of people who share similar opinions. It is hard to imagine that a leader from such a small group could emerge as a leader of a large enough coalition to run a country while maintaining that leadership. However, it is more likely that coalitions will form ad hoc, based on particular proposals.

This leaves me to a simple conclusion. In the future, a system based on political parties will not be aligned with the way people think about or even discuss issues. If we want to preserve democracy in such a world, we will have to change the current system.

One solution could be to ask the people to vote on each major issue through referendums (probably online, to reduce the costs associated with an increased number of elections). That means that the government will have reduced executive powers and as a result is likely to become a technocracy over time.

I do not believe that this is a very compelling scenario because a technocracy could give too much power to non-elected bureaucrats. This would therefore require some mechanism that would maintain the public servants under control and such a system could prove difficult to implement.

Of course there probably are many other options. However, we should start thinking right now about how the internet is changing our society and how this will impact the way people will want their respective countries to be run in the future. This is a nice challenge for the day after election day.

Over the last few months we have been bombarded with news of malware for the Mac. However, Macintosh users are very skeptical because despite all the noise, we still have to see one of those mythical

Don’t get me wrong, it is just a matter of time before a Trojan causes some damage on our preferred platform. But Trojans are easy to write for any platform, since they do not exploit flaws in the operating system, instead they rely on the end-user to install it voluntarily. What is really hard is to trick the users into installing the malware my making them believe that they are installing something else.

On the other hand, a virus is something totally different. It relies on defects in the OS, common applications (such as a browser or IM product) or removable devices (such as USB memory keys) to propagate by itself to other computers. This is what we haven’t seen so far on the Mac and that we are not likely to see anytime soon because of the way Mac OS X is build. Another important factor is that most Mac OS X users have broadband and quickly install security updates. Finally, Mac OS X is updated on an 18 month basis and if you believe the figures published by Omni Group, it seems that most Mac users update their OS rather quickly compared to their Windows counterparts. This makes it harder for hackers to rely on old security problems.

So, why the fuzz over possible malware on the Mac? The point is that Windows market share in the U.S. is down. Therefore if you sell software for the PC you get worried that you are not going to hit the number analysts are waiting for. The only way to grow is by selling products on the platform that is on the rise. So, Mac users do not need their products? Who cares, they will try to sell them anyway because otherwise they are screwed. This is specially true now that they will have to compete with Microsoft security products (if that sounded like an oxymoron to you, don’t worry, you are not alone) on Windows. These guys are fighting for their lives, so do not expect them to give up easily.

As expected, today Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death. The head of a regime based on terror certainly deserved a harsh punishment for his acts. The defense argument that Saddam did not order the slaughter of Kurds as a Shiites after they tried to free themselves from his ruthless rule is simply childish and unsustainable.

However, it is also true that this trial was a mockery of justice, organized by the Bush Administration and their Iraqi puppet government to justify the American intervention after other arguments presented to the American people, such as the WMD, have proven to be false. The timing of the sentence is by itself very suspicious, just a couple of days before an important U.S. election which is expected to condemn Bush over its own actions.

The truth is that we are all responsible for what is happening in Iraq today. We all knew that Saddam was a threat to his own people as well as neighbors and we never did anything to stop him until the 9/11 attack. A couple of years later, many believe that Americans should have listened to the French and not invade Iraq to avoid the countless victims that have resulted from the invasion, but that logic is also flawed because it would have left a ruthless dictator in power, even though that would probably have resulted in a much lesser evil. Of course, the foreign and local islamic extremists are also largely responsible for the suffering of Iraqis who are being slaughtered, in a war that is, in general, not theirs.

Many believe that the only way to quickly reduce the violence is to divide the country in three (this is not very easy as there are important minority enclaves). However, this is unlikely to happen since the U.S. and Europe are concerned that an oil rich Shiite South could ally, or even merge with Iran which has generated lots of justified concerns with its nuclear ambitions. They are also concerned about an oil rich Kurd country that could in the future represent a threat to Turkey which rules over a Kurd minority that has always aspired to independence. Therefore, we are trying to maintain the integrity of a country by force, much in the same way Saddam did it, even though, we can obviously not compare the U.S. forces, which try to respect human rights, to the military forces from the Baath regime.

The fact is that in Irak there is no white and black. All the players are grey, defending primarily their own interests with no real concern for the Iraqi people. While I am personally against the death penalty, which should not come as a surprise being European, the truth is that defending him is hardly one of my priorities. I am much more concerned about what we call justice. There are countless players that have shaped the current situation in Iraq and most will never get to be judged. Even worse, they will claim that they did what they did in order to help the Iraqis. Today we should all examine our conscience and see if some of our acts (supporting Bush, Blair or Aznar, turning a blind eye to the situation or simply ignoring it) have helped shape the current situation. I really believe that this exercise will help us see the gray in us.

Today, more violence is expected. More innocent Iraqis will die. For them and their families, knowing Saddam’s fate is probably totally irrelevant.