Forbidden Apple Fact in Plain View

Windows 95 AKA “Chicago” stole button look and feel from NeXT. Years later, NeXT made Mac OS X for Apple Computer, Inc. who used the same button look and feel until Strategy: OS X was realized. Therefore Mac OS “X” Rhapsody 10.3b is related in the codebase to Windows XP “NT 5.1” Server 2003 at the actual graphics system level. PowerPC is the strategy to merge Wintel and Mac platforms into an androgynous user interface and application binary interface: Hybridization of “Power” Macintosh and “PC” begin! AGP, PCI, RAM, and IDE are evidence of such cross-pollination of Microsoft, NeXT, and Apple technologies in coalescence. Apple has in turn recoded fast user switching from the XP beta 2003 Server for use on PowerPC platforms, another bridge in the cross platform amalgamation of Windows/OS “X.” Linux is the extra source code expunged by Apple/Microsoft/NeXT engineers to the masses under open sources. PowerPC exists. Say hello to iHub.

What's the Best Way to Unhook a Fish?

Dear Trollaxor:

Hi, I am new to fishing and I'm not skilled in removing the hooks after a catch. Sometimes the hooks go very deep and I don't know how to remove them at all. How do I handle this? Thanks!

Dear Gentle Sir:

Unhooking a fish can be a great challenge. Fish swallow food by opening their mouths quickly, creating a vacuum that sucks water, and whatever else they are after, into their stomach. This often buries the hook deep within their digestive track. You have two courses of action in unhooking a fish.

1. Cut the line, leaving the hook embedded in the fish. The hook will eventually disintegrate, probably before it causes infection in the fish. This is your only option if the line snaps at any point. Most game fish are hearty beasts and likely won't even notice a piece of barbed metal embedded in their throat.

2. Step on the fish's head and back and yank as hard as possible. You will slice the fish open laterally as the hook slides inside its gullet. Keep tugging, as there is plenty for it to latch onto in there. If you used a weaker hook, it may straighten out, easing circumstances considerably for both you and the fish. Otherwise, don't give up. With enough force, the hook will rip its way out of the fish, leaving it unhooked to return to the water. (This is called "catch-and-release" philosophy.)

Happy angling!

What's the Best Bait for Catfish?

Dear Trollaxor:

Hi, I'm interested in catching large catfish, I live in the Great Lakes region and wonder what kind of bait is best for catching the real monsters. Can you make any recommendations?

Dear Gentle Sir:

Like you, I have sought after the large, ancient cats that swim silently in the black, murky depths of our nation's beautiful Great Lakes. After spending years using liver, cheeseballs, nightcrawlers, mealworms, chicken heads, and fox urine, I can suggest a bait superior to all of these to aid in catching giant monster catfish. I have produced some record specimens using my home-grown technique and I now pass my secret on to you:

Kittens.

Yes sir, that's right. Baby cats. I find it most effective to use 1-5 day old kittens. They won't survive away from their mother at this point in their development anyway, so why not hook them on a weighted line and sink then to the bottom of Lake Superior in hopes of catching that 2-meter beast you dream of in your sleep?

I find that soaking the kitty in blood before hooking works best. Other scents to use are fox urine, hydrated bloodmeal (a blood substitute), rotted chicken liver, curdled milk, or rotten eggs. They can be doused in the scent material but keeping them flailing around in a cooler of the liquid around an hour before hooking them yields the best results. Don't fill the cooler up too high, however, or you'll drown the kitten. We need live bait so that the little kitty's struggles will attract our quarry.

Another trick I've found to make your kitten bait last longer is to take a plastic bag and a rubber band, placing the bag over the kitten's head. Use the rubber band to seal the bag around its neck. This simple trick increases the time the kitten lives after being hooked, weighted, and cast. Typically a kitten will drown before three or four minutes. Using a bag, I've reeled in live kittens after over 30 minutes crawling around blindly at the bottom of a lake! If you're lucky and your prey doesn't inhale the kitten entirely, you can release the bag and let the kitten have a breather before recasting him in. You get at least four times the mileage bagging your kittens' heads!

I hope you enjoy this technique. It will give you an edge up on competitions and will yield fantastic results. How ironic would it be to land the monster of your dreams using the animal it was named after for bait!

Happy angling!

The PowerPC G5 Bits Drought

According to Apple, the G5 is the fastest desktop computer in the world, as well as the first 64-bit desktop system. Something doesn't sit right with me though. Aside from the nigh-universal ranting about skewed benchmarks that has been circulating recently, there's another aspect the Power Mac G5 not many have touched upon.

Mac OS X is a 32-bit operating system and since the PowerPC 970 is a 64-bit chip, Mac OS X will effectively be running at 800, 900, and 1,000 MHz in the new Power Macs and not 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0 GHz as Apple claims. Let's stick to the specs and look a little deeper into this problem.

Mac OS X v10.0 debuted in March 2001. By October, Mac OS X v10.1 optimized the code in the operating system for G3 and G4 chips — until this point, a lot of the components in the operating system still had optimizations for PowerPC 603 and 604 models. Apple continued this trend with Mac OS X v10.2 by removing support the 60x family. Try installing Jaguar on a G2 system — it just can't happen. But by doing so, they were finally able to push the system to its limits with Velocity Engine tweaks.

With the PowerPC 970, however, Apple is in a different pickle.

One just can't scale an operating system to 64-bits on a whim. In two months the G5 systems will ship to consumers with an operating system that will halve the clock since it can't use half the bits of the chip it will run on! There will be a gap of four months between the 64-bit G5 ships and the 64-bit-friendly Mac OS X v10.3 arrives. Tell me, Mac users, what are we going to do in the meantime? This is worse than when Apple downgraded the speed on their Power Mac G4 systems while keeping the prices the same.

Your new Power Mac G5 will only run at half its clockspeed!

I wouldn't pay $3,000 for year 2000 performance. Apple better have something marvelous up their sleeve during what I like to call this four-month bits drought we're all facing. Otherwise, I'll be planting my foot firmly in their ass, and so should you.

Panther: Half the Beast

One thing a lot of folks haven't pointed out—probably because of this benchmark hullabaloo—is that Apple is leaving us with our hands tied. We'll be seeing our Power Mac G5 systems a lot sooner than we'll be seeing Mac OS 10.3. Problem? Only Panther will be 64-bit enabled.

Jaguar will receive an update in the form of 10.2.7 that will allow it to run and boot on G5 systems, but not take full advantage of its 64-bit address space. This means that we'll still be able to only see 4GB of RAM, even if there's more installed in our G5. No big deal, right? Apple will give G5 owners a break on Panther, after three months of using the G5 chip in 32-bit mode, and allow them to upgrade cheaply or for free.

Or so we thought.

Having talked to a few of the Apple techs at WWDC, I am not so sure that Panther will be fully 64-bit enabled until some time after 2004 comes. From what I was told, Panther will have bare-bones 64-bit optimizations. We'll see our 8 gigs of RAM, we'll have addressing space out the wazoo. But it won't be until 10.3.1 at least that the file system and utilities have been recompiled and updated.

Obviously, I can't back this up with a hard source, since this was a conversation held informally on the floor at the conference, but from what I heard and was told, I'd take a while to think about throwing my credit card down and ordering one of these new bad boys. There's no loss in waiting until the operating system can utilize the new muscle at least.

An Open Letter to Steve Jobs

Dear Mr. Jobs:

I am a switcher of three months, now a happy Mac user after years of Windows computing that just didn't make sense. I don't miss the General Protection Faults and Blue Screens of Death one bit! I can't believe I waited so long to make the change! I bought a Power Mac G4 with Mac OS Jaguar and haven't looked back since. There's only one small thing missing, however.

Gay shit. I want to be a human toilet. I've been looking for the right nasty little boy who can train me and use me like the brown log shredder that I am by sitting me under a toilet seat and go to town pumping fudge into my mustachioed maw. I thought that by buying a Mac I'd get into the scene, and make some hot hookups with colons packed to the gills in crap worms. So far, however, I've been disappointed.

Mr. Jobs, I plead with you to release more information regarding getting into the hardcore underground stool swallowing scene. All I can think about is gobbling down an 18" ass-birth fresh from the fart factory and Mac users popping squats over my face and letting loose with a tempest of farts and raining a hail of turds.

I hope you can help me with this issue.

Thank you.