Jun 26, 2002

QNX Performance Problems

After my third and final attempt with QNX, I felt I had to write in hopes of finding others who have had similar experiences. Hopefully someone can tell me what's wrong here. QNX has left me with a very sour taste in my mouth.

The first system I tried to install QNX on was an old 100MHz Pentium with 32 megs of RAM. This was back in the Fall of 2000. Now, since QNX was supposed to be "tiny" and run on things like watches and hospital equipment, I was expecting it to breathe new life into my old Pentium. WRONG. The hard drive practically ate itself to death every time I launched a new app, and the RAM was almost always at full use. I mean what the Hell. But I gave it another try when Patch A came out. And Patch B, which killed networking entirely. I had given up and didn't want to touch Patch C when 6.1 came out.

QNX 6.1 was a lot nicer than 6.0, but it was still a resource hog. RAM allocation was no better and processor usage was actually up. I decided I might as well upgrade the system with a new motherboard and a 500MHz Pentium II, but to my chagrin the five-fold increase in speed (not to mention MMX!) did little to boost the sagging performance. Willing to do anything to clear up this performance black hole, I installed Patch A to 6.1 the minute it was available. I noticed a slight increase in screen redraws but nothing more.

To this day, even with the new 6.2 on a 2GHz Pentium 4, the QNX performance mystery boggles my mind. Either QNX doesn't really meet the defintion of a "real-time" OS, or we need to consider changing what "real-time" means. I wouldn't want my insulin drip running QNX in the middle of a surgery. I might die while it's paging in from /swap, and that's just unacceptable.

Mac OS Rumors Is Dying

Ryan Meader sat back in his fold-up chair, rocking gently back and forth with his feet under the front two legs. He ran a finger through his greasy, ratty hair and stroked his equally disgusting auburn goatée. He was deep in thought and hadn't even noticed that his burning session had ended and his new CD full of gay porn movies was ready to pack away with the dozens of others in his CD binder.

For the fifth time this month, Ryan had received a call from a collection agency demanding payment on an overdue credit card bill. This time it was on behalf of Triple XXXstacy, Inc. and his past-due amount of $1,000. A week ago it had been Apple itself demanding to know where its $28 payment was for Ryan's rev. B iMac (the one he served Mac OS Rumors from). Ryan had stopped payments on it long ago, even though he'd taken out a five year loan from Apple to pay for the system.

The Mac rumor industry just wasn't the same anymore. Back before Steve Jobs had retaken Apple, the illicit news and underground chirping was plentiful and knew no bounds. But since some time around June of 1997, everything dried up. Ryan remembered back to his last great rumor, the one about Apple and Oracle merging, and sneered. It had been a huge misinformation troll probably created by Steve himself, and Ryan had bitten. Mac OS Rumors's credibility — what little it had left — had been shot, and ever since then pickings had been slim.

Shifting in his chair to reach for the night's sixth swig of Mad Dog, Ryan wondered how the other rumor-mongers did it. AppleInsider, though now nothing more than a forum for idiotic 15 year olds, had been right or nearly so with almost all of its articles. SpyMac, a newer site, regularly featured new snippets of information that always at least showed some kernel of truth when Apple finally showed its cards. It couldn't be that no one liked Ryan anymore, could it?

Wild Eep sounded from his iMac's speakers and Ryan excitedly command-tabbed over into Mail.app. Would it be a hot tip from Tron, his mole from Cupertino? Or would it be from his hot girlfriend with more news on her liposuction surgery? Or perhaps it was from his long-time friend from Motorola with more news on the PowerPC G6?

When Mail.app finally opened and finished twirling and opening drawers and grabbing updates from the ISP's IMAP server, Ryan's shoulders slumped. It was another email from Trollaxor. Not even bothering to ponder what it would be this time, Ryan immediately opened it.

From: Trollaxor To: Ryan Meader Date: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 22:14

Subject: About Your Last Update

Hi Ryan,

Nice update last week. Thought you'd like to know almost none of it came true. In fact, the only parts of it that were true was the day-old news you included in it and the text ads you stuck in the middle of it. Why don't you just give up?

Even Steve Jobs hates you. He told me so himself.

Trollaxor

Tears welling in his eyes, Ryan hoarsly whispered, "I hate you, Trollaxor," through clenched teeth. He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his Power Computing, Inc. t-shirt and looked at the screen through blurry eyes, muttering to himself about how stupid Trollaxor was. Deep down, however, Ryan knew Trollaxor was exactly right. And that's what hurt the most.

Chugging the rest of his kiwi-strawberry Mad Dog, Ryan lit up a joint and took a deep hit. Marijuana and alcohol were his only comforts anymore as Mac OS Rumors slipped deeper and deeper into the gutter. Ryan didn't know where to turn. He'd dropped out of High School when, at the tender age of 16, Mac OS Rumors had taken off. He'd never even gone back to get his GED or attended college and didn't know a thing about computers except HTML 3.2, which was now more than five years out of date. He even had to call his local Apple repair center for help with Mac OS.

His iMac now slept as Ryan walked slowly over to the mattresses in the corner of his economy apartment. Tomorrow would be another day of dodging creditors and hoping against hope for an honest-to-God hot tip, reading Mac news sites, and receiving further email abuse.

There would be no update on Mac OS Rumors tonight.

InkWell's Dark History

Recently, Microsoft announced Digital Ink, a handwriting-recognition technology that many compare to Apple's InkWell, both respectively set to debut in the next major revisions of Windows and Mac OS X. As whenever similar technologies pop up at Microsoft, Apple Mac zealots ask a few questions: Was it developed in-house at Microsoft? Was it bought from a third-party? Grabbed from a sub-licensor?

The answer is that Digital Ink came directly from Apple, but the story behind how Microsoft was able to so simply buy InkWell and rename it for use in Windows is a tale of moral depravity and sordid carnal desperation that few are privy to — until today! Read on to discover how Microsoft came to own yet another key Apple technology in the most sordid of political maneuverings.

It all began in the late Seventies. Steve Jobs, after a night of smoking marijuana and tripping on lysergic acid diethylamide, conceived of a way to interact with computers using only the mind. Well-known at Stanford for his telekinetic abilities, such as making entire fields of grass sway with but a thought, Steve wanted to move the "mouse" and "menu" (bizarre, alien concepts to anyone outside of his clique of 2600 hackers and EE alcoholics) with nothing but the power of his mind. Of course his compatriots — the peaceful, bearded Steve Wozniak and the illegally immigrated Avie Tevanian — dismissed the idea as yet another episode of harmless drug-induced rambling.

Twenty-six years after his messianic user interface vision, Steve Jobs was hard at work in the deepest part of Apple's labs, personally overseeing secret user interface experimentation. It turns out that Steve had never forgotten about his psychedelic user-interface dream and was tirelessly attempting to realize it thirty miles beneath Cupertino, California. Down here, in his dungeon, the attempts to connect silicon to carbon were in full force and without regard to their subjects.

Some men had industrial-grade alligator clamps attached to their nipples and testicles which were randomly jolted with millions of volts of electricity in order to stimulate their brains. Other men had deadly mixtures of cocaine and heroin ("eight-balls") injected into their penises while being forced to watch gay porn. Another group endured horrible procedures in which their arms, legs, and scrotums were replaced with chimpanzee equivalents. One smaller group were forced to smoke opium eight hours a day while being whipped and beaten until they managed to move the cursor a pixel or two. The most successes, however, had come from Steve's own bizarre device dubbed "handJobs."

handJobs was a series of wires and electro-sensitive pads placed on the fingertips that allowed one to manipulate elements of the Mac OS GUI with simple motions. Steve Jobs, being telekinetic from years of tripping acid, wielded it more powerfully than anyone else in his R&D dungeon. In fact, so powerful was his mind that he liked to hook the wires and pads up to his own penis and controlled his Power Mac by means of pelvic thrusts and lewd gyrations of his hairy penis and scrotum.

Bill Gates, on a visit to the Apple Campus, accidentally stumbled onto handJobs in a moment that would change UI in computing forever. Feeling that he simply owned the Apple Campus as he did the rest of the world, Mr. Gates walked into Steve Jobs's private office without knocking. Steve was in the middle of making love to thin air, pants in a puddle at his ankles, hands on hips, thrusting his engorged member at the monitor! He had decided to take his latest revision of the device to his office to test out when Mr. Gates had walked in on him! Gates knew what he liked and liked what he saw, and began immediately bargaining with Jobs.

By the end of the day, Jobs had created a new technology agreement with Gates. Apple would begin partnering with Microsoft on alternative input technologies, and by late June MS would announce Digital Ink for Windows. In reality Digital Ink was a front, and both it and InkWell for Mac OS were place-holders for what handJobs would eventually become. Until handJobs was ready, however, the masses would be fed OCR capabilities from the operating system. Before the ink on the contract was signed, however, Jobs had finagled Gates into receiving a "technology preview" of handJobs, with Jobs attempting to control Gate's breathing with nothing but his leathery scrotal sack and Gates's chin as a touch pad.

Now you know the immoral, homo-erotic history behind InkWell, Digital Ink, and the next generation of OCR and handwriting-recogntion. I hope that Apple Macintosh zealots everywhere think about this before they blindly evangelize their operating system of choice, inadvertently infecting the minds of the masses with years of sweating gay R&D and bleeding edge (of anus) techno-faggotry.

Jun 24, 2002

REASON With Trent Reznor

It had been less than 24 hours since Propellerheads had announced the long-awaited-for, ground-breaking REASON 2. The studio in a box had finally been released for Mac OS X and Trent Reznor was in a state of delirium over it. He'd been looking for it all over the Internet when he'd come across a comment on MacSlash that was of particular interest to him:

REASON 2, Isn't It Great? (Score:-1, Troll) by Trollaxor on Monday June 24, @16:40 (#5) (User Info)

Damn, the guys on #macfilez are pricks but I finally managed to download REASON 2 from one of their bots.

Why don't you all stop in there and tell them Trollaxor sent ya. Make sure to tell all your friends about the channel too.

His eyes glazing over, Trent fired up his IRC client and furiously logged onto newnet, deadly intent upon downloading the new REASON. He was sick and tired of running Mac OS 9.2 with its constant crashes, hangs, and Type 11 errors. REASON 2 would allow him to run Mac OS X on his gaggle of Power Mac G4s. He drooled a little at the prospect. Finally, having logged successfully into the server, he joined #macfilez and began looking for a bot to download from.

As he tirelessly searched bot after bot, Trent noticed a flamewar erupting in the channel. It looked like the channel ops were ganging up on a recent joiner — it appeared to be the same Trollaxor from the MacSlash that had led him here in the first place. Without further ado, he queried Trollaxor in hopes of being able to DCC REASON 2 from him instead of hunting bots all night. He had a new album and numerous production projects to work on.

Trent Reznor: hey trollaxor, can i dcc a copy of REASON 2 from you? this is trent, i really want to get started with the new version but i can't find it in #macfilez.

Trollaxor: how do i know this is really trent reznor?

Trent Reznor: i wanna fuck you like an animal, trollaxor.

Trollaxor: damn, it is you. i'd be glad to send you a copy. hopefully i can send it before i get klined from the server. the ops in here are really dickheads.

Trent Reznor: great! i'll owe you one for this.

Trollaxor: just stick my name in the credits of your next album and we'll call it even.

Trent Reznor: deal! thanks, man.

Trollaxor: np.

A few seconds later, Trent was downloading a copy of REASON 2 and watching the angry, bitter #macfilez ops kickban Trollaxor from #macfilez. Trent smiled. He'd definitely include Trollaxor in the credits of his next album.

Opening his CD binder, Trent grabbed a burnt copy of the latest Mac OS 10.2 beta and got ready to install it on of his other Macs in the studio. In no time flat he'd be working on his new album in a modern OS with the latest musical packages. Life could get no better and he smiled in contentment. He just hoped he'd be able to get depressed enough to actually make the album now.

Jun 20, 2002

The AppleScript Experience

Apple's AppleScript and AppleScript Studio are powerful programming tools; they give me the power to write programs, utilities, and scripts that would otherwise take considerable skill, time, energy, experience, and effort. Apple has done it once again with this editor and language that allow me to eschew the traditional route to writing programs.

Jun 7, 2002

Empty Lies, Broken Promises, and Free Software.

I bet she pays for everything of his and all he gives her in return are empty lies, broken promises, and Free software.