Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

December 20

Apple readies it's next barrage of reality distortion for the new year with MacWorld's Janurary love fest. Proported for this round - NEW DESKTOP CASES - whoooo! Is it just me or did I forget that big shin-dig that broke out on the Comdex floor when Acer showed off the new Wintel cases designed from former NeXT and Apple industrial design team - Frogdesign? When did cosmetics become such a big deal in the computer industry in the first place? Imac? Nope. NeXT? Don't you wish! The first Mac with it's phone book specs? Uh - uh. Lisa? Not after Steve Jobs was kicked off of it. Ah - there's the hint and here's the answer. The Apple II and the Jobs of Steve. Granted making the circa 70's PC look something less than a coble of homebrew parts was nice - but after that mindblowing triumph, no one really gave a damn. Atari and Commodore followed suit - and every Wintel vendor from the late 80's to the present has thrown their twist on things to today's bulging towers and flat-screen one of those. What's wierd is that Steve is the only one who still get's credit for "pretty cases". Pitty no one really can tell the difference between a slick cased iMac, and a slick cased Sony. Although there are those software and price issues to contend with. Hmmm. In other prognostication, many news sources predict the end of SCSI and floppy drives for the new towers. Anyone who wants to use their SCSI peripherals laying around the place will need an expansion card I guess and of course that will be most pleasing to the vid-heads that are already jumping ship from the increadibly shinking PCI bus. Naturally there will be some new colors for the iMac's, but that's been covered before and isn't a breakthrough unless they juice up the chipset or memory or ANYTHING. Current word on the street points to the fact that this won't be the case, so on the whole - apart from some new industrial design, and some faster G3's for the high-end, expect a yawnfest. Of course, the Mac people will be regarding this as the thrid coming, so get ready for a month's worth of hype before - during - and after.

December 21
Other news coming out of the Apple previews for there upcoming premiere at MacWorld are of software in nature - that would be of course what the hell is Apple going to do with the NeXT tech that they spent 400 million dollars on that all the developers shot down with slings and arrows early in 1998 during all those pissing conferences where they began to jump ship in droves? Well don't look now but here comes something from the company without a sever group - MacOSx Server is here (nearly). Now I don't know about you - but how much money of your enterprise group would you lay down for an otherwise undersupported by anyone who'se name isn't AT&T server system? Considering it's early 90's and late 80's flop status - I somehow am just a little hesitant to predict a mass-migration away from Windows NT for all those critical mission clients out there. Not that Linux isn't doing that already - but in a 2 horse race - Apple and NeXTtech is starting to look like a 3rd rate pony that has yet to be put down (and I own a NeXT unlike most of you, so save the flames please!). I'm not saying that it's not possible to shore-up the ever massive 1% business community that has gone Macintosh with some badly needed client-server clout, but I just don't see this pushing NeXT out of it's backwater heyday when they could actually sell themselves to the CIA before they stopped making hardware circa 1993. After loosing those customers, I fail to see why they'd want to come back after every developer and support arm has either died or made oddball developer communes in the shape of a castle in the middle of the Southwest desert. If these are the saviors of NeXT based server clients - then I'd be running away very quickly.

December 22

Dear old (and boy are we talking a case for a massive infusion of Viagra here) Senator Orem Hatch of Utah, while pinning away for the DOJ lobbying on behalf of Mormon country's failed computer industry that was blown away by Redmond Washington like a 1950's nuclear test, failed to notice something a little more damaging to the credibility of Utah's state of mind. This would be of course the bribary scandal for the securing of the Winter Olympics for Salt Lake City. Seems the state that can't tell the difference between a religion and a cult has a little problem of hairy palms and money on their hands. While Hatch was screaming about Microsoft and those horrible grunge types making a killing at WordPerfect and Novell's expense, a little more down to earth and tangable screwing of the taxpayer dollars was happening. Now I'm not one to side with ex-Gov Dick Lamm of Colorado - but this is exactly why I'm glad my state stayed the hell away from this Olympic nonsense - and it's not just because TV coverage and investments took a bath in Japan recently. This is the kind of sorrid crap that always happens with the Olympics since the commitie is just about as on the level as the Watergate burglers. Of course, checking the obvious must have slipped Hatch's mind since - after all - he had Bill Gates' money in mind to go after. What a fucking saint - and in "God's Country" no less! Excuse me while I prevent the sparkling wine I'm drinking from blowing out my nose and all over the screen! What a hoot!

December 23

This isn't so much an entry for a day's rant as it's just a nit-pick I'd love to get off my back and into the website because - dammit - I can. In true Andy Rooney stature - I just gotta ask - "what with all the", MSNBC bashing going on in the various RT's and what not particularly those infested with the MacJihad? Apart from the fact that MSNBC.com has the most complete coverage of the Microsoft DOJ fete - you just gotta wonder why Apple fanboy-goy-boytoys can't seem to take Steve Jobs' (their patron saint) advice about the whole - we're not in competition with Microsoft deal. I mean after all - how do you compete with numbers like 4% and 1% respectively from your own user installed base? But I digress. So here we have Steve Jobs taking a check from Bill Gates and his 500 inch vissage on the screen in 1997 to save Apple long enough for Microsoft to sell more crap to Apple users rather than hand the largest Mac OS developer camp in the world their walking papers, and still the Apple users don't have a clue! They still hate Bill - they still hate Microsoft - and of course they hate anything that either has a hand in like MSNBC. Now before you think I'm ignoring the obvious - and aside from the 150 million dollars (get your shit together) Apple money - what would they rather have? No Microsoft support? No Microsoft software? Oh that's a great idea from the ADC's perspective! Because then Apple would die in 3 months - not 3 years. Here's a little story about a little company called - NeXT inc. It was run by Steve Jobs who still considered in 1988 himself above Bill Gates because after all - 4 years earlier, Bill was playing second fiddle to Jobs in the press. Then 4 year's later, Bill says at the NeXT cube unveiling - "develop for NeXT? I'd rather piss on it". Suddenly the entire business community canceled their orders, and no one wanted a computing platform that held hack-apps exclusively. No Word - no way. NeXT blows their opportunity window of 2 years, and kicks along for another 6 before being bailed out by Apple. Flash forward to now. Apple has it's relevance insured for another 2 years (give or take) because Microsoft assured they'd port the Office Suite for a little while longer even though Steve Balmer claims that they're loosing money supporting this contractual agreement. Trust me, Microsoft would love to dump the Mac and Apple and make all the little Jihadders happy. So would I because then you'd die faster than NeXT. So keep up the good work MacJihadders! Keep bashing Redmond. Alienate the people keeping Apple alive!Ignore the person behind the smoke and mirrors onstage in 1997 telling those that boo'ed that they were being childish. The ADC is counting on you!

December 24

The San Francisco Chronicle via www.spgate.com, makes note of Steve Jobs and his cult. It's really a fluff peice but in the middle of the cotton is an aside that the company really needs to expand beyond the hype of one single person, and sell products that everyone wants for a longer stretch rather than fashionable short bursts. It points out that Jobs is running the show for ego - not money - cleverly forgetting that Steve Jobs was given more shares after his sell-off of the NeXT shares shortly after his CEO interm title was accepted to have voting rights on the board of directors (I told you it was a fluff peice). The funny thing for me is just a mental note that MacWeek.com that provided the pointer to this pearl of wisdom actually commented that it was a good read. Aside from it being inaccurate, short, and otherwise a re-run from stuff that would see for free around here (as opposed to paying at the newstand), I can't quite fathom if this was just another slow holiday session for ZDnet's oddest offspring, or if it's another sign that the Mac Press is getting really desperate for any pop-press coverage of their favorite horse. Don't ask me, I'm just holding a death-watch.

December 25

Trust me even though this is the birthday of a nice guy who got nailed to an oak tree for telling people how great it would be if everyone went around being nice to each other for a change - I can assure you that I didn't spend it hunched over a keyboard writing this stuff. That is what weekends are for. Time warping to more recent news is Adobe's press release at MacWeek.com (must have gotten real news for a change) about their merger of GoLive and their websuite developer tools. Now this is what I'm talking about people! Good software getting eaten by a company that has the manpower and the resources to support it into the next millenia. This is the standard practice of a healthy enterprise, that is worth several billion dollars, and has a legacy of buying out good software and turing it into better software for as many operating systems as possible. Compare this to say - Quark - a Mac-centric enterprise that is both hack in size and scale. When they buy out a company the usual drill is to crash and burn worse than Stalin everything in it's path. Take Metropolis for instance. Remember that? Naturally you don't because (a) it was a Mac only multimedia development toolkit and (b) Quark bought them out. Both of these factors made them otherwise a fart on the historical landscape because after getting aquired by Quark - they were dismanteled immediately, with such tactless disregard that even the people on the west coast began jumping ship from day one into the more profitable sectors of multimedia gultch. This is what made the oddest and most outright laughable instance of 1998 - Quark's "buyout" attempt with no money, no backers, and no balls of Adobe so idiotic in the first place. The real story lied in the fact that the people that they pissed off - desktop publishers - got the chills just thinking of what the Quark death-star would do if they actually got their hands on an otherwise cool enterprise like Adobe - particularly for Adobe's customers. First word is "Fuck", second word is "You". Obviously the pussies in charge found out what a second rate opinion their own marketplace has of them and they ran off faster than Iraq from American troops. Suffice it to say that this is the basic difference between the Mac publishing mindset and the Cross-platform savvy world. It can all be summed up into one word. Class. Guess who has it - and guess who doesn't.

December 26

MacWeek.com (yes they're both a crutch for Mac news since Apple is so damn far under the radar these days), reports MacWorld Columnist David Pogue (a nice enough guy) did a little warm-up routine for people at a fireside session (what ever the hell that means) prior to the MacWorld expo. Here in an onstage moment of Dean Martin's roast retro, he joked casually about all the crap that is plauging Apple and it's customers. You know the drill, late machines, customer service from hell, crashes ad-infinitum etc. The thing that struck me as noteworthy is the context of this otherwise minor affair. After all - if a serious new entity like CNN went casual in pointing this out you'd have one hell of a PR fireball from Apple and a major flame job from the user base. Of course since this was a Mac-Savvy pub making mild jokes, the user base can go "ha,ha" over the whole thing. Pitty these problems aren't small - or aren't hurting Apple in the eye's of the real world. Sometimes you have to go back in history to the actual job of the court jester to see what the fool really meant in a contextual sense. The fool was never the one onstage - it was the one on the throne.