Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

December 7

There's a lot of myths that are still touted by the MacJihad, but fortunately they're abating because of either the embarrasing truth about them, or the general user-community is catching on. One of the best examples of this was the great Hack-a-Mac challenge by some quasi Jihad nerd group in northern Europe. Some dopes were claiming that the Mac was the perfect server to host websites because of it's tight security. They were wrong on both counts. To prove this they offered to give away some Mac software to the first "Hacker" who could thwart their security. Oddly enough, it almost looked like they were right since for nearly months the Mac sat undisturbed - outside of routine crashes of course. The reason they overlooked in their rose-colored reality was that (a) Most sysadmins and hackers don't give a crap about Macs and wouldn't give them the time of day, and (b) Since most - if not all of them - don't use Macs themselves why would they want Mac software in the first place? The following year - last year in fact - they offered a cash prize. The mac was hacked within a day. Suddenly, after all the dammage control dust settled, the Euro-MacJihadians quietly stopped crowing about "unhackable" Macs and fell back to obscurity. The sad truth is no one in their right mind would waste time trying to put a Mac into the host server end of an ISP if they want to keep their user and subscriber base. The damn things are so unstable that two users hitting the ports at the same time will bring this "multitasking" server to it's knees. Aside from the fact that their security holes are worse than swiss-cheese, that you have to have an operator present to reset the damn thing when it goes down routinely, that it's slower than snail mail with clients, and that it's incapable of being scaled up to handle severe client loads, there's nothing even remotely compelling about a Mac to a client-server world. This is reflected in the number of ISPware tools that have never been available, or more importantly, have ceased being offered to Mac users. Even Netscape has been giving them the cold shoulder since there's no significant ISP market that is pushing the Macs. The most obvious flub you can bear witness to is when a site initally admits to using a Mac based server and then has to junk it within a month because it can't bear the load. You can actually see this problem evolve as a client, by watching the information go from a minor-flow, to a trickle as the user count increases. That's one of the reason I mirrored the Think Different parody on this site. It took a ton of time - even over a T1 - to obtain that nugget of humor. That is, once I got past the whole dozen or so clients that were maxing out the Macintosh. You may notice that it's pretty easy to get from here though. That's because I'm being hosted on a Sun.

December 8
USA Today is being crowed as a source of good news for Apple. That's not surprising since USA Today provides good news on beet recipies. In this case they are claiming 33% sales penetration for Apple in the OS software market for the 3rd quarter. Whoopie. Aside from the fact that Windows NT wasn't included in the data, this isn't anything significant because it reflects the sales surge that went with the release of OS8 that quarter. But unlike Windows 95 sales these aren't an indication of market expansion for Apple, they're just sales to an otherwise dwindling user-base. This is the same crap Steve shoveled at the press back in 1990/1991 when they claimed that with the introduction of the NeXTstation and it's 68040 chipset that over 10 thousand units had been pre-ordered in the first week of it's introduction. Notice they said chips, not NeXTstations. Of course he was insinuating the later since after all he was holding a NeXTstation at the time in front of a bigscreen showboating exercise. The reality was that more than half to 3/4 of the "pre-sold" 040's were just upgrade boards that were being snapped up by existing users of the pokey 68030 based NeXTcube. Even worse, the largest single purchase was from Businessland which was trying to salvage it's inventory with upgrades to prevent them from being caught with a warehouse of paperweights. Steve was giving the idea that now NeXT was a safe bet because the market was expanding. It wasn't in the slightest in fact. Slight being defined as the fact that 10 thousand computers sold is not really a big deal. It's an embarrasment. Just as embarrasing if Apple was forced to disclose how many sales went into current user's hands vs actually getting a toehold in a still expanding Wintel world. In fact the later was disclosed the same day to the SEC as required by law. In the disclosure, as reported by MacWeek, they indicated that they are sinking due to flagging sales of their hardware and software. Of course the fact that USA Today didn't find the wearwithal to notice this isn't surprising. But they can help you make a mean beet soup.

December 9

As people push the bounderies of crass holiday consumerism, the computer companies are making out like bandits again. That is except for Apple. While Compaq moves it's new under 1000 line of computers, with monitor and all the doo-dads, Apple is skipping the party. The G3 line of workstations are more affordable than I expected from Steve's past conduct. Problem is, they're still not even in the current defenition of what the market is capable of bearing. When you outfit decent memory, a monitor and a keyboard (Apple still refuses to bundle keyboards!), you're pushing at least 1 grand outside of what there is to offer from the Wintel side of the fence. These aren't no-name kit-jobs either. Compaq, Dell, IBM, Sony - all of these people are offering respectible low-end/first time machines for under a grand - with a monitor - that outfit the average consumer with all the bells and whistles they can use. The argument that the MacJihad used for ages was you had to add bits and pieces to get the same functionality of a Mac - which made Wintels more expensive, and justified prices in the rip-off scale. I've seen nothing resembling this outdated mantra when parousing the shelves. I see free speakers, soundcard capabilities, NTSC tv out, and a host of other add-ons that bring value to the cut-throat market that is the active world of consumer computing. In reality, Apple has turned it's back on the general conumer market, yet again. That's why the arguments that you hear on the boards and on the street sound nerdier, and nerdier because the average Joe doesn't care. For him, there's only one machine at work, and his machine at home. Then occasionly he goes online and finds himself awash in pointless debating. Well, if it's pointless debating that you want - look no futher than here. Yahoo has already had a nice, unsolvable series of diatribes from both camps running since September about Wintel vs the Mac. It's always worth a dumb giggle on a slow day because every now and again, you find really well worded arguments. Mind you, although it's an unresolvable one for both sides, it's the closest form to watching classic debate tactics whenever the posts are more intellectual than "Mac Rules" or other approaches you might find on your average Nintendo/Sony usenet newsgroup. These arguments are in danger now because the Guy Kawasaki evangelist has tipped off the MacJihad to it's existance. I just checked, and they've gone from being a balanced debate to a one sided passion-nerdfest. Pitty. Well, to help out now - or very soon - I'll have a BBS area set up so you too can carry-on the pointless argument that is Mac vs Wintel. Here's the catch. If you can't write above the level of a 6 year old - you're messages are gonna be zapped. Otherwise, enjoy!

December 10

While I bash Apple all the time, I'd probably go after Be Inc., more since it's founder is one of the prime people responsible for getting Apple into the mess they're in now with his greedhead stance on licensing back in the late 1980's. However, the geek side of me appreciates his efforts. New stuff is neat. It's easy for me to bash the Mac because it's about as current as a Mustang 2, or Pinto. BeOS is a model series 1998 Volkswagon Bug. Not as racy as anything else out there, but cute, new, and overall neat to play with. It's just been announced that the developer release of BeOS for intel is WAY ahead of schedule. I'm droolin' now because once I slap a larger drive in my Thinkpad, I can't wait to partition the sucker and take the newest release for a spin. Granted you can't do much with it now - like print - but it's got some of the microdeveloper set playing with it, and that's good enough for me. Besides it doesn't take up more than 100 megs or so of the hard disk for checking out purposes. So what the heck does this have to do with Apple? Besides the fact that they're very dated in comparrison, besides the fact that Rhapsody is moldy when placed next to BeOS, there's the fact that BeOS for intel was inspired by Apple in the first place. You see, BeOS commited itself to the Power PC only because at the time, Apple supported limited licensing. In fact you could have even ordered Power Computing Power PC's and have them chuck MacOS and replace it with BeOS. Now that Apple holds all the cards close to their chest again, they have denied Be any developer specs to the G3 series - thus shutting them out of the game. Well screw those rules, Be has gone where every serious contender goes. Following the footsteps of Linux, X windows, and Windows 95, out comes BeOS for Intel. Of course even Be knows that they're not going to upsurp Microsoft. That's not the point. Apple and it's legions of morons wants to see this happen but Be fanatics, like Linuix fanatics know better. They just want to hack around and have fun. Why not? Be isn't some bloated enterprise like Apple, they can bide their time and throw around OS partitions to people who like different flavors. Apple had one previous chance to go the BeOS route earlier, but even I admit, it would be a stretch to have expected an OS without print drivers to close the deal and compete with Steve's reality distortion field at the same time. I do think that Be could have had an interresting spin that would have given Apple users the same choice that Intel users enjoy. You don't have to get a box to run Windows in the Intel world. You can goof around with as many fringe OS's as you want. No one's forcing you to keep Windows 95 when you get the Intel (or Cyrix, or AMD) hardware. Even the DOJ doesn't believe this, but you can nuke Windows and install as many OS's as your geeky heart disires. Apple too could have played to this advantage. But with their greedy, shallow tact on the market, Be lost out on the opportunity to add another bullet to the Power PC's gun. Instead Steve threw a fit, and the whole thing is now backfiring as they loose another interresting developer to the real world. Welcome Be! Can't wait to see what you've got in store for me!

December 11

You'd think I'd make comment on the Judge who threw out the DOJ fines and upsurped his authority with a continued inquirey into Microsoft's business practices - by handing the whole thing to a special investigator who now holds more power than the judge - and was never elected by anyone to wield such power. Nope, it's so dopey and far from being played out that I'm not going to waste my time with it until something even more moronic develops. No instead I'm going to cover the latest rumors about Rhapsody for Windows NT. Big deal. This is getting really nutty when the MacJihad and the rumor mills jump up and down when they announce that they'll take on another shell approach by piggybacking on Windows NT - and that this approach will save the company. Why should it? It didn't save NeXT. But this is Apple's Rhapsody! Apple's Rhapsody is becoming more and more a direct non-tweaked port of Openstep/NeXTstep every day. Openstep was available for Black hardware - IE: the rotting microfleet of NeXT hardware - Windows NT, and Solaris. This isn't news, or a revelation. It's a rerun. And this rerun didn't even get a fart in ratings the last time it was marketed. Why is this going to work now? I don't know, but if you read MacOS or other boards you'd notice them freaking out like this is the best thing since sliced bread. The reason it didn't work before is that Windows NT and Solaris are just doing fine by themselves thank you very much. The idea of spending hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars to make a very expensive emulator run on top of these OS's didn't exactly create a stampede in the market. It's even more absurd to consider the following pitch. Buy Rhapsody for Windows NT and run MacOS programs. Uhhh, yeah right. You're going to upgrade your NT box, to accomodate two additional layers of bloatware, to run software that is no longer cutting edge or hasn't been already ported to NT. If that isn't technology for technology's sake, then I don't know what is.

December 12

Steve Jobs has more than once touted the fact that he's running the show as interm CEO of Apple and is only collecting one dollar in salary out of the goodness of his heart. Of course you may think that the money he's gotten from Apple is restricted to the shares of NeXT/Apple he dumped around last summer. You'd be wrong again boobie. MacWeek indicated that, in reality, after he got the CEO position, Apple lavashed another 750 thousand dollars worth of stock options which amount to 30 thousand shares. Of course these shares are tanking as we speak, but it does put a new light on what is becoming another popular myth for the MacJihad to revel in. While they trumpet that Steve is back to save the day, rolling up his sleeves and toiling for a paltry 1 buck a year - there's 3/4 of a million dollars lining the Steve Jobs fouton. Granted, he's not fleecing Apple as badly as Gil - the former CEO - did, but since his current paycheck is wrapped up in Apple stock, look to news of him dumping it (yet again) to get a feel for both how Apple is doing, and when the last death knell has begun.

December 13

Last bit of computer show diatribes. This time it's not Comdex, but Internet World. Boy if you want coffin nails, this is the best indication that Apple is really out to lunch. This is NOT the expensive end-all be-all show that sucks money out of your pocket than Clinton at a coffee table. This is the hottest, newest - and oddly enough - cheapest show to poke your head out and scream - I'm alive! look what I'm doing with the internet! Since there's tons of people making and loosing money on the internet, the floor space is packed and cheap with start-up after start-up showing how they're pushing forward new programs of commerce, and new ways to suck our money out the monitor. Where's Apple? Not here! I suspected that with Steve's return, that Apple "could" go the way of NeXT and avoid any love-fest that he doesn't have total control over as mentioned before. This clinches the argument. It's now painfully obvious that Steve Jobs, like Rush Limbaugh, refuses to attend any event that he can't screen for hecklers or anyone else who might otherwise pose questions that the real-world would come-up with in it's efforts to judge a solution for their enterprise, and businesses. Instead Steve wants nothing but adoration from a bunch of lemmings that will soak up whatever contrived hype that he dishes out. Well we won't have to wait long for the next pile of Jobsian dung to be shoveled on this one. It's less than a month away. Pitty he couldn't try to stay relevent in the public eye today.