Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

August 17

The hype has finally cooled down somewhat and people are getting back to the business of wondering what the hell Apple thinks it's doing. The OS 8 license to clone vendors - or the lack thereof - has doomsayers back on track. So far only Power Computing is the one crying foul the loudest. Personally I don't think anyone outside of the few cloners that are out there give a fig. I mean when you're pushing 2.7 scant margin points on the market - perhaps the rest are leeches. Certainly the mac market isn't big enough for anyone but Apple to make any money off of with the overhead that Apple is running with it's daily operations. The sad part is that those who want to see the Mac continue knows that serious purchases need at least 2 vendors to tango for IS support. That would probably explain why every issue of MacWeek has at least one letter writer saying that if they pull the plug officially they're going to dump the platform. Don't wait - turn rogue now. You'll only feel better once you're secure behind a real OS, with a real market following, once the Amiga ball drops.

August 18
The licensing thing is heating up. Word from Jobs on high reportedly is now way beyond the "leeches" bit. Now it's along the lines of "the issue of licensing is a dead one - it's now not a matter of when - but how much it will cost to get out of the contracts". Of course if you check with MacWorld, you'd see that they cling to the idea that the agreement is just a few short weeks away. Ohhh-kay. It might be fun to note that the above updated quote was from July. Use the force MacWorld - let go!

August 19

You know to see how healthy and robust your interest is, all you have to do is pick up a magazine at your local newstand. Stop. Don't even open the magazine. Just feel it's weight. If you're a MacUser did you notice how thin and light it is compared to a PC journal? In fact with the merger of MacWorld and MacUser it seems that only a major cut in circulation can keep the average MacMag from turning into a pamphlet. One only needs to see how thin all the Amiga and Atari rags were when those platforms hit the skids to know that this does not bode well for the future. Face it - the only thing that keeps journals afloat is readership. Perhaps that 2.7 percent margin, and the amount of advertisers willing to shell out bucks from the development community point to something a little more bottem-line than the MacJihad. If you subscribed to their view, you might believe that the millions of Apple users could keep something as simple as a magazine afloat. That is until you wonder how many of those users are still users, as opposed to being flea-market vendors of dead tech. Perhaps there's a whole new magazine just waiting in the wings after all. The orphan mac buyers guide?

August 20

The numbers have been coming in from the MacWorld Expo and the attendence was down, as was the vendors. Dull surprise there. In fact I noticed that some of the talk was about BEos, and their commitment to the Intel platform. Now after being shut out by Steve Jobs I wonder why they were even allowed to attend unless they were truly desperate. Nothing like having a sore looser in your midst telling everyone they are ditching the Power Computing and Power PC camp altogether right on the doorstep of the Apple lovefest. Guess they really needed to bulk up the vendor booths precence eh?

August 21

In the game of smoke and mirrors nothing speaks volumes like a good shell game with names. Personally I can't keep tabs on all the project code-names that are out there describing everything that Apple is supposed to unleash on a public that can't keep up on such nonsense. I suppose it's intended to give the feeling that something is really hot going on at Apple and that we should stick around to see what finally comes out instead of getting work done in the here and now. At least with Windows, and the rest of Microsoft's product line you only have to look at the numbers following the names that have been used for years. Rhapsody and all the other poetic project labels are cute names, but then so is the Terminator. Perhaps we should introduce them sometime.

August 22

Going through the local rags I noticed that the IQ level of most Apple users seems to be abating at a rate faster than I suspected. The current fave was someone who went on a tirade about Internet Explorer 4.0 and how it changed the look and feel of the desktop in a manner that he couldn't stand. After going on for the length of the column about the wierdness of only single clicking links instead of files-and wondering how to rename those same links, you knew instantly that it was a Mac user. Window users know that there's a second mouse button that allows you to call up renaming and such low-level functions irregardless. The creme de la creme was after going on about questioning the logic of making an app into an operating system you suspected right away that if he actually saw the beta - then why in the world didn't he notice the preferences that allowed you to turn off the various browser/OS features? Could it have been another niave Apple user who didn't know the ins and outs of what he was talking about? You tell me.

August 23

Got my hands on OS8 today, and took an account of the multitasking while downloading 600 megs from the NT server to tranfer to CDrom. After setting a 2 hour transfer into motion two things were of interrest. First WHY 2 FRGGIN HOURS? I put the same 600 megs on the server from my PC and it took nowhere close to that long! The second thing was I figured while the transfer was taking place I'd test the "multitasking" of this improved OS. Lets double check another dir while this big honkin tranfer takes place. What? I can't do anything else while it does? That's curious because when I put it up from my PC I also dumped my entire remote internet server's contents onto my hard disk, and grabbed two software downloads from the web via an open browser all at the same time while batch editing 40 index pages with various search and replaces. The upshot was while I was running various I/O ops out of every port, and actually did real work, the Mac was an effective paperweight outside of it's pokey 2 hour transfer. Oh yeah, they really worked out that multi-tasking thing and converted the Mac into a real modern tool. Yep. Looking fine Apple. Let me know when you get with the rest of the real world.