Charles on… anything that comes along

Little birds tell me that the Independent [link added for American readers wondering what this “Indie” thing is] is going to - finally - upgrade its systems, bought in 2000 and which have all this time been running Mac OS 9 (released in 1999). And the upgrade? To PCs which will be running Quark 7 - something of an upgrade from the Quark 4 they’re using now.

I expect Steve will want to chip in here; the fact is that those machines have been long in the tooth and that even when I was there (until 2004) I was agitating from time to time - as were senior production staff - for them to be upgraded to newer Macs that could run OSX (since that was what the IT folk downstairs were running to do various tasks). But no. They never took the chance to build a bridge between OS9 and OSX, even though the graphics people alone would have benefited hugely from it.

Instead whenever they bought new machines, they didn’t even experiment with OSX on the editorial floor. I did, with a nod and a wink from the IT people, installing Panther, and didn’t have any problems. Quite the reverse - while a very weird crashing bug that was either caused by the (unnecessary) antivirus or some strange peculiarity of Word 2000 led to people regularly losing hours’ worth of work, I never lost a thing. Panther was rock solid, if not better. I could connect to all the necessary servers. I could use Office. I could also browse sites that nobody else could. Or indeed can even now.

In fact in the Indie now they have a PC for browsing those mystery sites such as YouTube that you can’t view on OS9 (such as Flash-heavy ones or Ajax-y ones). I wonder how spyware-infested it is by now.

One has to guess that they’re going to be going to XP, since I’d wager Quark hasn’t got a version that runs under Vista. (Goes and checks. Oh, correct and correct. You have to love the wishful thinking of the poster in the second one who says “Quark’s only system requirements for Windows is: Windows Software: * Microsoft Windows XP or later. Vista is later.” Has he never done anything around Quark?)

So that’ll be machines running XP SP2. Oh joy for that. Good luck with the spyware, antivirus, firewalls… which all, as I can attest from a family visit this weekend (which deserves a separate entry) suck up huge amounts of time. The computer might be fast, but the interface ain’t, because it’s coping with all the security software that the IT department will have to put on.

Delighted? I know people who aren’t about it, and are checking where the exits are.

Interesting: which other nationals are on PCs? The Telegraph is. Any others? The Guardian’s on Macs, so is the Express, the Mirror is on Macs.. Times? FT? Anyone know?

[slightly updated with more info and links]

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• We return to the Independent's blogs, unlike its bloggers; or its scanners (4 May 2007; score: 61.94%)
• More little birds on the Independent's move from Macs to Windows - it's XP (15 February 2007; score: 47.74%)
• Once more, with feeling: Boot Camp won't move Mac users to Windows (17 April 2006; score: 43.07%)