I added a few more external publications yesterday and today. Here are some highlights.

I got a lot of flak for "The Difference Between Piracy and Stealing". I still think it's ridiculously underhanded for the record companies to equate piracy with shoplifting, when there are clear consequences to shoplifting that piracy does not have. (See the article for more details.) I also outlined 7 steps that Mac game companies, in particular, can do to mitigate piracy in a more reasonable manner. I still don't understand why the "spawn install" model that StarCraft used hasn't caught on.

"My Last 2 Hours Enduring Mac OS 9" was a reactionary article that was supposed to be really pedantic. Matthew Thomas posted an article entitled "My first 48 hours enduring Mac OS X" that basically amounted to saying that Apple's quality with their operating system was on the decline. I sarcastically mimicked his article, pointing out equally pedantic problems with Mac OS 9. I still am annoyed with those who think that Mac OS 9 was so much better usability-wise.

"The Myth of Convergence" talks about all the predictions that cell phones, PDAs, and music players are going to converge in single do-it-all devices. I predict that this won't happen anytime soon, because it's almost impossible to integrate the three well without making major sacrifices in the usability of the device. I mean, the major input operations for the three devices are all different; just figuring out an intuitive input mechanism for all three is difficult. (And it's not like cell phone companies are any good at making interfaces, anyway.) I'm still right two and a half years later.

Here's an article I did where I qualitatively and quantitatively measured the performance of Panther on a bondi blue iMac, the absolute oldest officially supported computer for that version of Mac OS X. (Sadly, Tiger is not officially supported on the bondi blue iMac.) That iMac was my first computer -- I didn't buy the whole thing, but it was the first one that only I used, rather than being a "family" computer. It's back at my dad's school I think, after a brief stint as a home server.

I've also added the first few articles of my previously weekly column called "Question Time", where I outlined a bunch of Mac OS X tips every week, based on reader questions. Feel free to browse those on your own, they are all prefaced "Question Time" in the title. (This is where being able to put an article into two categories would be useful.)

And finally, here are some quick links to some reviews I did: Ambrosia Software's Aki and pop-pop, Freeverse's Squabble, GarageGames' Marble Blast, Apple's 4G iPod, and RadTech's Ice Creme. I have a few more I've done which I'll post later, specifically the comparison between the Shure E4c and Etymotic Research ER4-P headphones -- of which the latter are still my primary earphones.