Macintosh

In an article on PC Magazine’s Web site, John C Dvorak postulates that Apple may once again enter into the handheld PC market — remember Newton?[MacMinute.com]

ROTFLMAO! Has he ever been right in the past? Dvorak is by far the most clueless person in the entire computer industry not only with Apple but with all industry matters. He’s never been able to get any story right.

Several months ago, I joined OpenOffice.org and downloaded the source, although I haven’t done much with it. I’ve tried running the application itself (which currently runs under X11) and I find that I dread launching it. OOo is a huge application that loads the word processor, spreadsheet, and other modules when launched. It’s even bigger, slower, and more bloated than MS Office.

OOo is written mostly in Java with a huge portability layer and lots of non-native widgets. On a 1GHz G4 it takes 8-10 hours to build. I haven’t been able to build it successfully under Panther.

A successful office alternative needs to be lean, fast, and easy to use. It should be modular and easily extensible via scripting. It also needs to look & feel like a native application and should integrate & exchange data with other native applications. It should not be a huge monolithic application full of useless cruft.

Jeremiah pointed this out to me. It looks very interesting. I suggest making the interface to the database look something like the IO Registry with applications as keys.

Has anyone else noticed Safari 1.1 in Panther crashing frequently? Perhaps it’s related to URL Manager Pro 3.1’s shared menus – I’m disabling it now & I’ll see if that stops the crashes.

I installed Panther on my PowerBook after backing it up to my FireLite 60 external drive. I’ve been running 7B85 for about a week on my G4 with no problems.

Someone else has picked up the Rob Enderlestory. [Scripting News]

Here’s a choice quote:

“Right now we are getting the highest number of requests from people who are trying to migrate off of Apple,” he said. “People are incredibly concerned that these Apple machines are going to be isolated” in Windows networks.

One issue is the Unix roots in Mac OS X, which is based on the BSD operating system. “This Unix component is working against them,” Enderle said. “It’s basically Unix with an Apple front end, but from the administrators’ point of view, all they see is Unix.” (PC World, Apr. 2, 2002)

In this article quoted at MacMinute, he says:

“They’re going to have a serious problem with the Windows community. If they could have gone there first, they could have carved out a beachhead.”

I just ordered an OWC Mercury Extreme 1 GHz CPU upgrade & a SuperDrive for my old G4/500 minitower. It already has a Radeon 9000 graphics card & 768M of RAM. I still have to put a larger internal drive in it – the old 80G drive died a few months ago & I replaced it with a 45G that I removed from another system.

My server is running very fast now with 768M of RAM.

Daniel Barlow:“As many people by now have the misfortune to know, one of my pet rants about Unix as a desktop OS is the lack of decent support for scripting applications. Some apps do CORBA, some apps listen on sockets, some apps reread their config file when sent certain signals, some apps you can start twice and the second instance will communicate its command line args to the first, and some apps (e.g. GNOME, KDE stuff) use some vast framework which handles it all in a
you-shouldn’t-care-about-the-internals way. None of them have seen pervasive uptake…” [Hack the Planet]

I just increased the RAM in my server, a B&W G3/350, to 768M. It previously had only 320M. It’s running OS X Server 10.2.6, and I’m using it as a file & print server, iTunes sharing, and a test web server. The upgrade made a very big difference – it’s pretty snappy now.