Last night, my friend Wilhelm Fitzpatrick gave the presentation last night at SeaJUG. At the post meeting beer and pizza, I asked him to sit down and convince me to get a PowerBook as my next laptop. I found this to be somewhat ironic, since I have convinced a large number of people to buy Macs over my lifetime. So I watched MacOS 9 and iPulse and the Dock, poked around in the file system, and measured the touch of the keyboard. I've been reading the Infoworld special on Apple, reminiscing of my Macintosh days, and as an Apple employee. I'm not quite there yet. Items that still concern me are:

1. Apple's lagging on JVM versions
2. Closed source application layers (Cocoa, etc)
3. Performance -- we'll see how G5 does on this
4. Cost of hardware, although in my case the competition is the Thinkpad T40p, which is comparable or more.

And then there's the other stuff:

• The editor in chief of ComputerWorld writes a scathing editorial about the problems with Blaster/Lovsan.
• Slammer crashes a nuclear power plant monitoring system.
• SoBig brings down train signaling systems at CSX.

To top it off, read this interview with Sterling Ball, whose company was shaken down by the Business Software Alliance, and subsequently dropped all their Microsoft software for Linux.

So why am I waffling? I must be crazy. We all must be.