Home » Resources » Red Hat Diaries
 Red Hat Diaries/006f
Subtotals III
- The Omni Group are the darlings of Apple. They're supposed to be the experts on programming the Apple API. Yet their web browser, Omniweb, which costs $30, is known to crash all the time. I've tried it, and it didn't last ten minutes before going down - on an editing 'undo' operation to boot. The bruised and abused Apple underdogs - many of which have paid Omni for this program - shrug their shoulders and say 'yes we know - it's unusable, and that's a shame.'
- Aaron Hillegass claims to be an expert on the Apple API. He has a book, and he has a course. The book costs $50, the course costs - get ready - $3500. Both the book and the course cover the same materials. I used one of Aaron's programs to show how paraplegic the Apple API is. The results were even more scandalous than I had expected. Radsoft have a programming course too, and it doesn't cost anything like what Aaron's course costs, but the programming therein 'just works', in contrast to Aaron's 'guru' code.
- Raymond 'Scott' Anguish has a book out too, yet most of the programs were written by his colleague Don Yacktman. Despite hosting an Apple development portal, Raymond Anguish has yet, after all these years, to sport any software of his own at the site.
- Transmit, perhaps the flashiest FTP client for the Apple, can't even control how it creates local directories. You just click away and the program displays it all - despite the fact that it never shows up on disk. And simple things like showing file sizes and times on a remote server - you have to knock the program for a loop to get it to do that. Panic Software, which sells Transmit, has verified the bugs and announced that they will go into their 'bug pool'. The bugs - elementary programming blunders which could get you kicked out of college - go unfixed, and Panic still want $25 for their program, bugs and all.
- Fetch, the classic FTP client for the Mac, can't even list files locally, and doesn't even know what the FTP transfer mode 'binary' means. Fetch is not free either - money spent here is money wasted here.
- TinkerTool, the system configuration tool David Pogue loves, takes a megabyte (1MB) on disk to adjust a number of configuration files.
- Network Utility, the standard Apple IP bundle, can't even use its own code, but hooks into the standard Unix command line tools instead. When Network Utility was tested on a network, a colleague remarked 'Was that you? That's the slowest network utility I have ever seen!'
- The Preferences directory is one of the biggest directories on the Mac. It normally contains about 100 files. Yet the Mac Finder has to struggle to list them all. What would that Finder do with a Windows system32 directory? One shudders at the thought.
- The Apple 'dot app' executable package architecture defies description. Every program on disk wastes at least 24KB in unnecessary directories. That's 24KB of bloat for every program you write or use. That's a lot of bloat.
- The Apple 'dot app' executable package architecture is going to be an easy one for the hackers out there, if they ever get around to the Apple platform. Subverting Apple will be like shooting ducks in a pond.
- The Apple API is not even thread-safe. The year is 2002, and soon will be 2003, but Apple don't seem to realise it.
- There are less than two dozen Apple applications on a Mac. Only a few of these are actually written in NextStep/Cocoa. This after 18 (eighteen) years of development, and 5 (five) years at Apple.
- A quick comparison of screen shots for the old NeXTcube and today's Mac shows that almost all of the 'old' programs are alive and look almost exactly the same. There have been no major changes in almost twenty years. Most of the time has been spent porting to new platforms, as the old platforms abandoned support and lost interest.
- Be was destined to be the successor to MacOS until Steve Jobs stepped in. Most people who have used Be say it's the finest operating system ever made. It booted in 15 (fifteen) seconds. It needed only 32MB RAM.
- The underbody of the Apple is a mess. It has legacy spaghetti code and design that used to crash Macs all over the place. They have resource forks where they ended up putting 'fat' executables; they have so many EXE file formats it's dizzying; and on top of this they want to run 'Cocoa' - NextStep. Pray for rain.
- Ross Perot was one of the principal investors in NextStep. He was later to claim it was the dumbest investment he ever made.
- I was in the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) for ten years. I hobnobbed with Microsofties. Not a one of them had a sunburned nose or ever carried around an 'attitude'. Not a one of them ever acted the ass, the insufferable twit, or the obnoxious snob. Ceteris paribus, they were all A-OK.
- I have never before seen experienced programmers harassing the less experienced ones. I have seen dedication, but I have never seen what the Apple crowd do.
- Noah Wiley said it all. Bill Gates might be a crook, but he doesn't treat people the way Steve Jobs does. For Bill Gates's mongrel we get a freaked-out fanatic who's taken too much LSD.
- Apple's head design engineer was designing English bathrooms before he came to Apple. You no longer need to wonder why Apple computers look the way they do, or why most of them are all in white.
- Apple developers recently spent weeks debating whether the brushed steel look of programs like iTunes was 'appropriate'. They said they needed to find a 'justification' for such a stylistic twist. In other words, they're a bunch of fanatics breathing extremely stratified air and who can't even keep the peace amongst themselves.
- The 'ordinary' people on the Apple developers mailing list cower in the presence of Apple. They're scared and intimidated - literally. And this because, over the months and the years, they've been scared and intimidated - literally. Sound bizarre? You bet. But it's the truth.
- Almost every Mac to ever come out had at least one fatal engineering flaw. The original iBook looked like a toilet seat. The PowerBook overheats, mars easily, and has a noisy fan that won't turn off. The Power Mac has an even noisier fan. The 'cube' starting cracking and looking really ugly, and was finally taken off the market.
- Before NextStep, Mac users had to manually configure how much RAM they would let each application run. They had tons of so-called 'kernel extensions' which launched at boot time and which were notorious for crashing their machines. Windows was never that bad.
- Before Jaguar, before OS X, all Mac operating systems were 16-bit. Which means they did not have protected memory; which means any badly behaved application could crash or hang the entire operating system and force a power-down; which means that the whole ball of wax was basically running a single thread of execution. Microsoft left 16-bit computing behind ten years earlier.
- I see similar attitudes in al Qaeda and the Apple crowd. They're both envious and bitter; they're both cruel. They will both resort to any action to promote their agenda, whether it be moral, ethical, heroic - or not.
Click here »
|