The deprecation of Java is the last straw for me. My Anti-Apple sentiments has been building over the last two years but the Lion announcement and the Java blurb is enough.

When OSX first came out I remember them talking about Open systems. A first class Java platform, kernel and user land that was open source (Darwin). Safari was based on the khtml engine and became webkit.

Of course they did some nasty things back then as well:

Anybody remember Watson? Then Apple’s Sherlock? You know the complete rip off of an indie developer?

Anybody remember Konfabulator? Then Apple’s Dashboard? You know the complete rip off of an indie developer?

Anybody remember Delicious Library? Then Apple’s iBooks? You know the complete rip off of an indie developer?

Just a few examples of when I should have left Apple before but let it slide.

Then came the iPhone and it has been downhill ever since. Now don’t get me wrong the iPhone is a wondrous piece of engineering but it comes at a high price: completely closed development and walled garden.

This is a post I made on Reddit six months ago: http://bit.ly/dBqT1j and I was almost ready then to ditch Apple but I thought maybe there was a chance of things changing.

Lion and the new MacApp store shows that Apple is tightening the reigns more and more.

One more thing that really pissed me off. I have an original Apple TV and when Apple decided to not port the Netflix app to the old version I lost it. I just couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t been a victim of this before now and I wasn’t happy at all. There is NO reason to not upgrade the older Apple TVs other than to kill them off.

Apple is the new Microsoft, Google is the new IBM and Oracle is worst of both put together!

So I am putting my trust in Canonical:) (makers of Ubuntu)

What a strange time we live in.

I have played (and finished) a number of games since my last update as well:

• Final Fantasy I (PSP version)
• God of War I
• God of War: Chains of Olympus
• Saints Row II
• Puzzle Quest (PSP version)

I am current playing but haven’t finished:

• Final Fantasy VII
• God of War II
• Just Cause 2
• The Saboteur

I gave up playing:

• Final Fantasy XIII
• Bayonetta

A lot of my friends also have iPhones and most of theirs are jail broken and run the Cydia app store. I thought maybe I was missing out so I decided to take the plunge and jail break my phone.

There is a lot of documentation out there and I was a little nervous about doing it. I wanted to be sure I had the latest and most up-to-date information.

A Google query here and there revealed two primary methods. Every time I searched for “iphone unlock” ads for automaticiphoneunlocker.com were shown. Its looked good. I pay $29.99 and download a piece of software that does all the work for me.

Well there is a sucker born every minute and it was my time to be the sucker.

I paid the $29.99 and instead of getting a piece of software that does it automatically I got instructions and multiple downloads that pretty much mimicked everything else out there. Now the instructions were so detailed even a noob could follow them but still it was not automatic.

I had to follow this complicated 20 plus step process that involved wiping my phone and deleting everything on it. (I had backups so I wasn’t worried).

The whole process took about 30 minutes quite a bit longer than the five minutes the ad promised.

Okay so my phone was now unlocked and I had this Cydia app store icon – now what? Well that was the end of the instructions. At this point I had to do more googling and reading up on Cydia to see what exactly I could do with it.

In a nutshell its Debian apt-get with a nice front end similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu.

Okay what to install? Well more googling revealed something called winterboard which is a theme manager. From there I installed some different themes and a category application.

All of a sudden it was 1997 again and I was playing with Enlightenment (an awesome window manager for X). For its time there was nothing cooler. Gnome and KDE were babies and if you wanted something “cool” you ran it.

I was back in that mindset. What looks cool. Oh a neat clock. New icons! Look at that awesome wallpaper.

After about an hour playing with the themes and Cydia I realized that one of the reasons I love Apple computers and the iPhone so much is it just works (and it looks good in its own right too).

I have long since given up making my desktop and windows look “cool”. I am firmly in the function over form camp now.

I don’t want to tweak my phone endlessly. I don’t want to worry about upgrades breaking everything. I didn’t want to be cool; I just wanted an iPhone.

So I un-unlocked my phone.

Let me first say that I like all my friends and love to hang out with them in the real world. Being connected to them on Facebook wasn’t really real to me. I didn’t feel any closer to them. I didn’t feel like I didn’t need to see them because we are connected on Facebook.

I also didn’t really care what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong I like my friends and am glad I have them but I don’t really want to know the minutia of their lives. When I finally do see them or talk to them there is nothing to say because I know everything!

From my perspective most folks were more interested in playing Mafia Wars and other games like it, taking quizzes or promoting their latest cause.

Things I am interested in:

• Marriages
• Divorces
• New Babies
• New Jobs
• New addresses, phone numbers and email addresses

Other than the list above; I just don’t care. Facebook did give me the above information but lost in a sea of crap.

Some of you might call me a hypocrite because I have a blog and I can accept that however I blog for myself; not caring if anyone else reads it. I think of my blog as a journal or diary. Something to look back on in the future and reflect.

Finally I am not saying Facebook is bad for everyone – just bad for me.

What I didn’t like was they took away the Aurora screen saver – it was my favorite of any platform. Luckily I found it online.

My CPU doesn’t support hardware virtulization so I can’t run XP mode; oh well.

The upgrade took about four hours.

I avoided calling tech. support because I have never had luck with it. I am a Linux System Administrator and self-confessed geek. I can certainly fix my own stuff! (XBOX 360 RROD not withstanding).

Well I am working from home today and finally decided to call and go through the process. I had too because I was considering buying another printer and wanted to make sure I explored all my options.

So I call and was talking to a human at Brother in about three minutes after telling the computer what model I had.

The nice lady had me turn off my firewall and print out the general settings. She asked me about one line on the sheet and I told her what it said. She then instructed me to the printer and changed that one setting.

All of a sudden my printer came to life spitting out test documents I had been throwing at it for the last hour.

Turns out somehow my printer got set to only listen to print requests on the parallel port and ignore the others. She just had me set it back to AUTO and all was well.

Total call time: seven minutes.

So not only am I relieved that my printer is working and I don’t have to buy another one but I am really happy I had such a great tech. support experience with Brother; makes me glad I chose them.

So sometimes the old dog can learn new tricks and sometimes tech. support can come through.

Tech Support: 1, Me: 0.

Why would any company take a working, well received, product and shit all over it? I am not entirely sure. My guess is they didn’t want to pay developers anymore. The site is now also covered in ads – even if you have a gold subscription! They are also now competing with Direct2Drive and the other johnny-come-lately game download services.

Good-bye Gametap – it was a good run while it lasted.