Trading Megahurtz For Megahertz

For the last few years Motorola has been the sole supplier of Apple's high-end chips, all from the G4 family. And for the last few years, Mac fans and industry pundits alike have expressed grief over the speed — or lack thereof — Motorola has reached with these processors. While Intel and AMD reach speeds nearing 3 GHz, or 3,000 MHz, the Motorola/Apple camp have slowly crawled to 1.25 GHz.

A cacophony of possible solutions to the Megahurtz problem have been heard from within the Mac community, and finally an end is in sight. The light at the end of the PowerPC tunnel is shining, Mac faithful, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Well, not quite yet.

Drug Use & Mac OS X

After months of painstaking research on prerelease versions of Mac OS 10.3, AKA Panther, I have proven my theory that Mac OS is really just a suite of drug tools. Steve Jobs and Apple promote drug use! After following the simple steps below, you'll see how Steve Jobs and company are promoting illegal drug abuse through Panther, the most popular Mac OS ever!

1. insert your Mac OS X Install Disc 1 CD (optionally, for you elite #macfilez pirates, mount the image of it)
2. navigate to /Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/
3. control- or right-click on the OSInstall.mpkg file you'll find in the above path, and choose the Show Package Contents option
4. double-click on the folder called Contents, and again on the Resources folder that appears next
5. see firsthand the terrible drug propaganda: the file called Pusher!!!

Another stinging clue are the dozens — if not hundreds — of files that end in .plist, which are found scattered all over a Mac OS hard drive. Obviously they are some sort of informational resources regarding replacing pee, or urine, a common technique criminals employ to pass drug tests! This is clear proof that Mac OS X is some sort of twisted junkie tool created to assist in selling drugs and subverting justice!

Let's take a look at some other aspects of Mac OS X that are clearly drug-related.

• Address Book: No drug dealer's bag of tricks is complete without an address book, filled with the names and numbers of other dealers, steady customers, and his suppliers.
• Backup (a .Mac application): If the deal ain't up to what they feel they hit the steel an' instead of gettin' jacked up, they get they backup.
• Preview: Everyone knows that drug dealers hook prospective customers by giving out "samples," otherwise known as Previews. Obviously this app was designed to make doing so easier for the dealer.
• Grab: When things get hot and shit goes down, any dealer worth his weight in marijauna won't hesitate to grab what's due to him.
• Terminal: What quicker way to make it across the city for that sweet drug deal than using the terminal? And what better way to keep track of the routes and schedules than with a Mac OS X application?

Linux vs. OpenBSD

I received the email first thing in the morning from the IT department. Our network would be undergoing a major overhaul to correct the ad hoc growth it had experienced in the last year, and starting next week Internet access would be sporadic. There would also be a new firewall and security measures, replacing the old OpenBSD system I'd managed to get installed last Spring. Happy for the heads-up, I went to work right away to make sure Linux had no place on our network. This was not the first time that I had faced this threat.

MacWorld New York '02

1. Mac OS X: 2.5 million users today. Most new Mac users don't know fuck-all about the difference between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS 10, nor do they understand the concept of "dual-booting" or the Startup Disk control panel. Apple has suckered many a Mac user into their "2.5 million" demographic tally.

2. 3,500 apps for Mac OS X: Jobs fails to mention that most of them are supplied by Apple itself in one of the various "i" apps.

3. RealOne Player for OS X: Does anyone care? I don't. It should be called RealSpammer since it dumps so much shit all over your hard disk.

4. Mac OS X Jaguar: Announced today, available August 24. Phil Schiller takes the stage to demonstrate cycling desktop pictures. Hold the show, can I pre-order it now? Jesus. Oh, yeah, ugliest packaging ever for an OS.

5. QuickTime 6.0: Released Monday, more than 1 million users already exposed to the new and imporved QuickTime 6 nag-box before using the neat new MPEG4 features. Congrats, Apple.

6. Sherlock 3: Even uglier interface than Sherlock 2, "totally rewritten" (i.e. bought from another company and rebranded). I never use Sherlock, don't care about a this new "revision." *snore*

7. Rendezvous: "No one owns it." Great. Apple implements a new technology first again. Let's walk around and see who we can connect to. Watch for Apple iDate, a blind dating package, based on this technology. I called it here first.

8. Mail.app: New version demonstrated, included in Mac OS X Jaguar. Uh, no shit. Not only have we known about this for months, but is it all that prophetic to think the mail client would be updated in the nex major OS revision?

9. Address Book: Same as above. Filler at best. Jobs likes to hear himself talk.

10. iChat: The newsest (un)productivity app from Apple. Now Mac users can chat with their friends all day at work from an OS-integrated app. IT departments and managers beware. Apple is trying to destroy your profits!

11. .Mac: Bait and switch! Goodbye iTools, our free friend, and say hello to the much more expensive .Mac. "These are trying economic times." No wonder Apple is excited about the evolution of the PC. They get to charge for shit formerly supplied for free. Damn the economy, eh, Steve?

12. iCal: Calendars for .Mac, iPod, and Palm users. Hmm. Good idea. Available for the new .mac in September (re: fork over the dollars for it).

13. iTunes 3: Hey hey hey! Awright! Finally some good shit from Apple. New features like consistent volume playback (so I won't be jolted awake when it finishes playing piano sonatas and goes into Nine Inch Nails), playlist sharing support (via Rendezvous and Audible.com), and new iPod support. New icon too! Can't wait til the servers aren't chundering forbidden messages at me so I can download it.

14. iPod news: New iPod revision 2 announced today with a tweaked form factor in 10 and 20 gigabyte sizes; new menus; iTunes 3 integration. Prices are $500/$400/$300 for the 20/10/5 gig sizes, respectively. Oh yeah, support for Windows sometime. I don't remember when, nor do I care. How long before the iPod outdoes the iBook in terms of storage? At this rate, about a year.

15. iSync: Uses XML to back up your Mac, iPod, iCal date, or Palm via the .mac service. Sounds neat, wonder where the DTD for this SyncML markup is, costs lots of dough. Yet another piece due at MacWorld NY 2002 II (September).

16. iMac: 17" screens, baby. Everyone scooped this one, even MOSR (thanks to pilfering from SpyMac and ThinkSecret). The first 17" iMac ever, unless you count that abberational eMac thing.

Phil Schiller: Under Review

This was it. The last straw. The boiling point. Critical mass. Terminal velocity. Heart palpitation city. For the last time, Phil Schiller had embarrassed Steve and his pantheon of ex-NeXT, Inc. executives at a board meeting in a series of "rotten Apple" (Steve's phrase for Apple's 1985-1996 era) antics that had caused stock to drop more than three dollars at the close of that day. Steve was doing Phil a favor by letting him stay on as president of worldwide marketing, as all other executive roles had been filled by Steve's NeXT cronies. But no more!

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.