Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

September 27

Microsoft president Steve Balmer is quoted by MacWeek.com, as responding that there is no economic return for developing other Microsoft products for the Mac OS. That at least explains why a lot of Microsoft's educational products and other non-contractual software isn't being developed for the Mac in spite of Apple users who are still under the duress that Apple had secured many key products in their 150 million dollar donation and agreement in 1997. Well, Apple didn't. In fact since it was a mere lawsuit settlement one of those - what "gifts" Apple got out of Microsoft weren't exactly out of love. Suffice it to say that while Microsoft will continue to support Office and IE explorer on the Mac for the next 4 years, any new emerging tools like Visual Basic, or the plethora of internet authorware and education-ware are not going to be destined for a platform that can't even post a minor profit for the time and effort spent doing so. Tough nipples Apple - Steve Balmer doesn't exactly like loosing any more than Bill Gates - and Steve is a hell of a lot more headstrong in these matters. In other news, still no word on Microsoft's response to my offer to buy them out - as Quark did with Adobe. What the hell! It's just a publically traded company worth nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. I've got some serious investors behind me - and gee - I'd like to keep my takeover friendly. Why can't the people in Redmond understand my intentions to help benefit the software industry? I wonder what Tim Gill and Fred Ebrahimi was doing at this phase of their proceedings? This is very depressing.

September 28
Schpeaking of those wacky Brits, looks like the ones behind the desk at Apple UK are fuming that their Apple Expo 98 is seeking something along the lines of credibility involving integrating Macs into typical office environments and how to manage cross-platform concerns. The NERVE! Wintels and Mac's being used together at a computer show? One that is being held to bring more businesses into the fold? How dare they fess up to the fact that Apple is an also ran, one that needs to be integrated into existing network enviroments! After all - if an all Mac OS solution was pitched unsuccesfully in 1985 - why can't the same pomacity hold true today? Well, I guess being British - AND - being a member of Apple must create a double-whammy effect, and pish-tosh, if that's the way the marketplace want's to play it - then Apple UK will go home with their toys instead. Personally - I figure it's pointless to chide them to get a clue - and figure out what computers "the rest of us" use. Either way they can take their unrealistic expectations, unattainable mission statements, and impossible sales-pitch and fuck-off until they get some perspective.

September 29

Mac the Knife reports on the latest downsizing at Apple. Seems the Learning Technologies Group is now wearing the standard slash-and-burn ready-to-wear - IE: the dirt shirt. Like everything else - dull surprise. Seems that this was the last R&D effort that was started under J.Sculley's tenure - and as luck would have it - Jobs still doesn't like anything with his former boss and can-man's signature on it. Funny thing is, think to yourself about Apple's ideal positioning in the education market next time you're finding your school district spending money on Macs rather than real-world computers. Because Microsoft is spending a shitload on educational research and R&D in general. Often with Apple's own alumni that have discovered having a steady paycheck beats the hell out of being screwed in an endless round of fashion plays and political football from the micromanagement of one particular personality defect. Besides - why not kill off the last R&D for kids anyway? All they were working on were user-friendly authorware for school kids to create webpages on the internet. After all - I guess the internet just isn't that important for school kids anyway. Having really cool looking floppy-driveless overpriced and underpowered computers would be much better instead. Even if they can't run the software that might otherwise help those kids get things like jobs - or something.

September 30

ZDnet reports that - dull surprise - Apple exaggerated just a TAD in making their outdated and otherwise useless benchmark speed claims against the PII - culled from an otherwise defunct source. It seems that even the lowley and ultracheap Celeron processors seem to blow the G3's off the map. Here's their figures from real-world tests. You know - things like how long it actually takes to do something rather than just crunch floating point calculations. Lessie - for the people on the internet using Adobe Acrobat to open and search reading material - the iMac took 11 seconds, the Celeron 333 took 7 seconds, and the PII 400 took 6. Hmm! I thought Adobe optomized their processes for Apple tech! Well lets look a little futher - how about MS software? You remember those don't you? The tools that were denied to NeXT computers and helped to put NeXT out of business by making the platform irrelevant? Lets watch MSword frollic on a search and replace. Hmm! 42 seconds on the iMac, 12 seconds on the Celeron, and 11 seconds on the PII. Wow! That really makes the iMac look like shit doesn't it? So what is it fast for anyway? Perhaps Photoshop - after all - that's what Mac people use all the time right? And let's be fair this time - let's ignore the pathetic I/O config and bottlenecks that exist on the Mac and just do some filterwork. Adobe's been optomizing their instructions for years to take advantage of the PowerMac specs, and if those floating point figures are spot on, this should be a breeze for the iMac right? Think Different - 49 seconds for a lighting effects filter on the iMac, 30 seconds for the el-cheapo Celeron, and oop! 26 seconds for the PII. That's one speedy snail huh? WOW! Aw to heck with it. Even if IDsoftware spent tons of money porting Quake to the Mac and lost their shirt - they MUST have made it optimal for it to play on the iMac - because after all - every Mac user says that the Mac version was a quantum leap over the Wintel versions right? OOOOhhh so close - you guessed wrong. Quake frames per second for the iMac? a Max Headroomesque 16.2, 26.8 for the Celeron nearly matching the refresh rate of an NTSC television (30 frames per second, 60 fields per second), and the PII - 39 FPS for those monitors that can otherwise display more than NTSC. Gosh! So, if the iMac and it's mighty G3 can't even do the most basic tasks, at a speed that would otherwise meet the bargin basement of the Intel lines, then why does the iMac cost so much? And how could Apple have been so utterly wrong and useless in it's claims? Could it be sham marketing? Or perhaps it's the cost of Bondi Blue cases? Well to tell you the truth - I don't care. Because with the upcoming release of the Korean iMac Wintel Clone, I don't have to worry about a shortage of software to use on it, I can pay half as much for double the featureset of the iMac, I can have a DVD and slots and a floppy drive - and - oh look - it comes with that 333mhz Celeron processor! That one that kicked the iMac in the nads! Now THAT's a consumer bargin for me! I think I will buy one!

October 1

ZDnet and Mackido spar words after Mackido - that bastion of bullshit and slander (see their fucked-up and false charges against the Doomsday Clock regarding spamming ) - had the good sense to put both the Doomsday Clock and ZDnet in the same boat in their DarkSide section. This section has a nice little area for the MacJihad to read and vent and turn many shades of purple and red all at the expense of the media and their internet addresses. Well seems ZDnet got just a little bit pissed at some of the dumbshit, bullshit - and otherwise typical - Mackido rhetoric regarding their credibility. Not only do they point out that they're even-handed in their real-world tests and made every effort to throw tests at the iMac that "should" have made it look good, things like sidestepping I/O to the disk and other non-real-world gimmies, the iMac just couldn't cut the mustard to the dissapointment of the Jihad at Mackido. What a pitty Mackido - now piss off and let the professionals do their work - and take your spam crusade to China. Last I saw they had an interresting manner in dealing with fringe nutties that otherwise got in the way of the day to day tasks. It seemed to involve billy clubs, tanks, and the occasional snipe of gunfire. The Mackido camp is obviously obsessed with this kind of mindset - it appears all over their namesake and general graphic design.

October 2

Don Crabb must have missed the interview soundbites from the President of Microsoft in his plea to get the software industry behind the MacOS. He continued to beat the horse of the "develop for the Mac and make money" argument into the nether-regions. Once again - ducking the logic - that everyone who has been doing so lately has taken a resound fiscal beating for their troubles. Unless they're Quicken and have been subsidized by Apple lately. Obviously this is mostly pissing in the wind - by one of the biggest pissers in the buisiness - because any modern-day developer worth his salt isn't going to waste time making software for the fringe markets - or waste time learning how to throw their money away figuring out the Apple toolset. It's obvious everytime you open the newspaper on Sunday to the jobs section. Notice all those job openings for programmers? See any for the Mac OS? No? Then why is a lardball telling people to sell their own future short by catering to dead-weight? Possibly because Don hasn't looked in the mirror lately - and has plenty of his own to admire and reflect on perhaps. Seriously, fat jokes aside, it's just not a credible argument as developer after developer will develop for any OS that has marketshare. And now that Apple's own marketshare is being overtaken by the likes of Linux - why the hell is he still writing this cheese anyway? Personally I'm baffled - but I'm just commenting on what I see in the day to day devo story that is Apple Computers and the tiny shreeks of those still clamoring for the lifeboats.

October 3

Usually, the week runs out of steam right about here - but suffice it to say - this isn't the case. In fact there was enough scuttlebut to make two whole days, so let's get cracking. iMacintouch reports that the MacOS version 8.5 won't be discounted as an upgrade - and neither will it run on anything less than a PowerMac. Thus ends the bizzare and generally self destructive to Apple's anual sales tirades from the MacJihad camp that justified Apple Computers on their merits of longevity. Because if you have an 0X0 Mac - you're dead in the water of any future OS plans. Hear that folks? If you're chest beating that your Mac Ci can still run everything Apple puts out - you're now officially out in the cold. Game-over man! By the way - bullshit or not - Apple is stating that MacOS 8.5 won't run on Mac clones either. This does sound like steaming dung, but it's at least confirmation from Steve Jobs that if you didn't buy something with an Apple logo on it a couple of years ago - you can kindly drop dead. With friends like these, who needs DOJ inquiries? In more news, from the San Francisco Examiner no less, it's noted that the iMac - with it's flakey USB support and non-existant floppy drive as well as a dry well of software - is pretty much, "an island to itself". Well call me a castaway, but - darn it all to heck - it does get better. Seems that the Imation Superdisk is blanching at some software installs! You know? That 150 dollar drive that you have to buy if you want to do diddly with floppys? Well it seems it doesn't really like to act like a floppy drive as much as mount the 1.4 meg disk as a 1.4 meg hard drive. The sticky thing here is that most installer programs kind of like to think that floppy drives are floppy drives and do the things that floppy drives can do. In this case - run installer programs. Something I can do right now on my ThinkPad with it's all in one design! Neat huh? Well not so neat for the iMac - and not with Forrester Research's Apple analyst (where the hell do I get a job like this?) Tom Rhinelander - who said (quote), "It's the typical Apple way - which has been Apple arrogance". Gee! I almost wonder if perhaps Apple's behavior has perhaps been rubbing off on their user-base? At least it would explain the e-mail that has been piling up around here on occasion.