Disclaimer: This one is going to be fairly long, and if you've been in the Appleverse for quite a long while a lot is going to feel like review... we're going to have to hit the wayback machine™ several times when talking about certain technologies. While I'll talk a lot about them, I'm not writing a book so it's not going to be exhaustive. But it should be enough, and while we'll cover enough ground to get the gist across, google & linkage should be your friend. As it stands, this could probably have been broken up, but I feel I owe my 12 loyal readers something of length to make up my... erratic posting schedule.
So... I was having a chat recently with someone about the lack of a certain software title for the Mac, which really seemed to be cramping their style. This eventually meandered (alcohol was involved) into a much larger topic:
What the hell is going on with independent development & the Mac?
It's obvious there have been changes, as others have touched upon, such as a big influx of *nix users to their developer base. But as far as big, high-quality apps... there just aren't many, and those that are being released are from the usual suspects. Nothing much new. Isn't Cocoa a developer nirvana, and doesn't the "power of Cocoa" allow one guy to do the work of 5?
posted on April 30, 2004 at 04:28 PMIt just feels good to get stuff taken care of, even if you're finishing up at 4am. One last project off my plate for Friday and it'll be an easy weekend. White russians help immensely. I've never quite made the perfect white russian yet, although each one is enjoyable. Luckily I foresee myself having a great deal of practice. I'll update this thing with something substantial sometime tomorrow or so, promise.
Most of the furor over on my post on the G5 seems to have died down, which is... kinda nice. I've been holding off on some related posts until it did die down, so there'll be more coming in the next few days if work & life allows it.
I don't think most people would believe some of the email I got from that damn post unless I showed them, and some nice guy (24.75.137.254) who got there from a macnn thread decided it would be fun to try to hack my blog. Uncool. Noted & forwarded to your ISP. It was really kind of a trip, I'm still not sure whereall it's been posted, but geesh. 390+ emails and 80+ comments. Touched a nerve there.
Most of the people who were questioning whether or not my parents were married, or other various things seem to have gotten it out of their system early, so thanks for all the nice comments.
Since the blog was somewhat under siege, I decided to get underway on some upgrades I've been meaning to get to for, um, months, and made a little bit of headway.
So the list for things to do now stands at:
Cleanup the front page- Cleanup the left-hand side, lots of linkage not yet linked.
- Cleanup the
individual,monthly, category & search pages - Cleanup the comments
- Experiment with a richer RSS feed
- Experiment with some of the newer mt plugins
- Implement categories
I've upgraded 4 friends' installs of mt, yet mine is still running 2.6.2... should prolly look into upgrading the mt install- Add mt_blacklist to help stop comment spam
I added the mt_blacklist to the list... but the comment spam thing is insidious. It goes in spurts, so when I get nailed by several I am all up for adding getting around to adding in the blacklist, but then nothing happens for a week so I forget. I wonder if that's somewhat intentional.
Another thing of note... if your IP is 209.11.36.147, please check how you're trying to get to this RSS feed. Right now, you're trying to use /drunkenblog/index.xml several times a day, and I'm tired of looking at it in the log files. :)
Although, come to think of it, you probably aren't even seeing this message, so I'll make a file there letting you know what you're doing. When you do realize your mistake, please email me so I can remove it...
Last but not least, the last weekly snapshot of nasty things caught by clamAV over the last little while, which no one really cares about but I post them so I can have an idea over time... For your entertainment, the last few are linked here and here.
So, without further ado, the current:
Virus & Worm Count:
+++
2118 Worm.SomeFool
970 Worm.SomeFool.P
602 Worm.SomeFool.Gen-1
405 Worm.SomeFool.Gen-2
88 Worm.SomeFool.I
40 Worm.SomeFool.Q
36 Worm.Bagle.N
34 Worm.Bagle.Gen-1
24 Worm.Sober.F
22 Worm.Gibe.F
16 Worm.Klez.H
14 Worm.SomeFool.O
7 Worm.SCO.A
6 Worm.Bagle.Gen-rarpwd
5 Worm.Bagle.U
2 Worm.Dumaru.A
1 Worm.BugBear.B
+++
Worm.SomeFool just doesn't seem to be quitting. Considering how long it's been out, and how it's spread, I'm not sure whether to be saddened or impressed. Probably both.
Another year. You're missed, and remembered. We aren't doing nearly as well without as we would be with you, but we're doing our best and we're doing ok. Godspeed.
If you just looked at the positive press going out on the G5, you could be forgiven for believing the G5 to be one blockbuster-selling piece of kit for Apple. However, this isn't really the case.
While it's gotten great press, when you actually look at the figures, it's pretty clear that it's been more than a little lackluster. Which isn't to dismiss the positive press, it's been pretty spectacular for a company with Apples' history. The idea of an "Apple Supercomputer" has been something of an oxymoron for a long time, especially given some of their earlier G4 advertisements. At the moment, it's not, which is super cool.
There have been some negatives, like basically being told by governments that their advertising was lying not quite truthful, or quiet articles basically saying that the G5 is not hitting expectations... but on the whole things like the Virginia Tech supercomputer have been fantastic for slowly shifting the perception of some of Apple's kit, and where it can be used.
If you'd have made a bet with most people as to whether or not Apple's towers would be powering one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet in a year, it's a bet most people would have lost (including myself, and, if some of the interviews from the VT cluster's architect are to be believed, Apple also...). Some kudo's are in order there: Apple used to have one hell of a share in the scientific market, which slowly eroded over time, but it's now making some serious inroads back into. Credit where credit is due, you can at least use the words Apple & performance in the same paragraph without feeling queasy. Credit where credit is due.
But that's being squandered. Now, some of you are going to go "Microsoft shill! The G5 is selling tons more units than the G4! How much is microsoft paying you!", and that's fine. But let's take a look at the unit numbers by quarters for their towers, in thousands of units:
- 2002Q1 213
- 2002Q2 211
- 2002Q3 167
- 2002Q4 176
- 2003Q1 157
- 2003Q2 157
- 2003Q3 133
- 2003Q4 221 (G5 intro)
- 2004Q1 206
Woo hoo! When the G5 was intro'd, there was an instant 60% jump. How can that not be good? Well, it is good. However, you have to realize just how poorly the current G4 towers were selling. It isn't hyperbole to say they were selling incredibly poorly. The G5 has basically brought them up to 2002 G4 numbers, which aren't considered to be good numbers at all, even when compared to the heyday of the 2000-esque advertising boom.
It can't be stressed how poor a level sales of the G4 towers reached. We're not talking cube-esque numbers here, but it's obvious the only people buying them were people who had to have a mac tower, and couldn't wait. Most just weren't interested, no matter how much mac users talked about the "Megahertz Myth", it's fairly obvious that the price performance ratio was way out of whack. But, but the G5 is the fastest personal computer on the planet, right? So that should be taken care of... which is part of the problem: The G5 has not only failed analyst's expectations, it's fallen far short of Apple's own estimations which it gave to the analysts.
Apple's big line to the analysts was that people weren't buying G4's because of a perceived performance problem, the lack of native software for some of their core markets, and the huge advertising slump. They basically said the 1st two were fixed, and the 3rd was turning around bigtime, so bring on the upgrade churn as they believed there is a large chunk of their base who were waiting with baited breath to move on, and that the G5 was going to sell in fantastic numbers due to this backlog.
It just hasn't happened en-mass as they'd hoped, at least not yet. Some of it is dependent on 3rd parties, some of it is unavoidable, but some assuredly rests on Apple's shoulders, and some of it, while it may not be 'their fault', is still very much their problem when it comes to 3rd parties.
Now we don't know how they are doing this quarter, but we can infer that they aren't doing very well. They've been running promotion after promotion with them lately, and the G5 hasn't left Apple's front page with lots of life-altering quotes about it from various bigwigs... sure, since it's been 9 months since a real refresh, chances are they trying to clear out inventory before a refresh soon. But that usually involves some price cuts and perhaps a quick deal or two, but they are trying really damn hard to move units. Really hard.
So, if we can say that the we've established that the G5 sales are "underperforming", we should probably look at why that might be? Besides some of the obvious, the G5 is a very... perplexing machine in some ways:
- Odd initial launch lineup
They launched with single 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz & dually 2GHz. That was really weird, and arguably way out of whack. The top end was outselling the low end configs combined, by a huge margin, which is a pretty big clue stick that something is really wrong in the lineup. This has happened before. There was a time when Apple was releasing their high-end as a single proc system, and the rest were duals... which didn't exactly go over so well either. In the days of OS9 there was some justification for it, but not really with OSX: most people now know that duallies have massively better ROI, especially with with an OS that does its best to take full advantage of them. In this case, for several hundred dollars more, you just got a huge amount of extra power. The 1.6's & 1.8's weren't selling well, especially the 1.8's, they were just in this no-man's land of pricing. Apple stepped in and made the 1.8's duallies during a refresh, but now you have all these single 1.8's still in the channel (check any catalog or mac site). - Forget what we told you you wanted before...
It's a slightly larger case than the G4's that came before it, yet has drastically reduced expansion options when it comes to drives. There is no way a single serial ATA drive is going to saturate that bus. I don't think two even comes close. These cry out for RAID5, which would need a minimum of 3 drives. All you can basically get is software RAID 1 & 0, which for a machine in the G5's class is just kind of odd. To get RAID5 or other hardware raids you're essentially looking at firewire, which really adds to your costs and creates its own issues or you're looking at a very pricey external ultrascsi solution. Egh. Having only two drives is just very out of place in a machine of this caliber, and is perplexing. When you realize Apple tried to sell recent revisions on increasing drive bays, as well as dual optical, it gets more perplexing. Spending $3k on a large tower with two drive bays is just odd. - Saggy GPUs
Consumer-level, and dare i say close-to-cheapo-pc-level video cards in a workstation-class machine. $50 upgrade to something reasonable, $350 upgrade to a competitive card. 64megs of VRAM in a $3k computer that may be driving 2 displays unless you pay $350? Wtf? That's perplexing, especially for who these systems are geared to. Yeah it's fine if Apple has given up on the game market, but there are other reasons to want a more future-proof GPU and lots of VRAM... especially considering Quartz. - Product overlap
It's kinda weird how Apple went through so much trouble wiping out the deadzones from its product line, and has lately been blurring the lines all over the place. Part of this was out of desperation ("we can't compete on g4 towers, but we can build a decent laptop with their lower thermals- year of the notebook!"), but there's really a lot of overlap. Apple is talking up powermac users using powerbooks instead, but I don't really know about that. While I've seen it, and I'm sure there's some of that, but for their core content creation market the capabilities between a 1.25GHz G4 powerbook with a single slower drive and a dually G5 is pretty drastic. But I have seen a lot of people picking up a 17" or 20" iMac instead of a low end G5 w/apple display. - MHz stagnation relapse
When they did refresh the line (and surprisingly quickly) it was to go to 1.6 & dually 1.8 & 2GHz, which again, was kind of weird. To keep the MHz momentum up you would have thought there would have been some progression, if nothing else to help differentiate the low end from the iMacs. As it is, the G5's have been riding on 2GHz for over 9 months, meaning you can only coast for so long. - 1st gen issues haven't been fixed
The G5 hardware is still relatively immature, and hasn't yet had a good revision b or c. Some of the pro's out there were already pulling out their hair with the later G4 models (windtunnels, etc) but were a fairly well known quantity. The G5's have lots of new stuff, and there have been problems with heat, the fans, power supplies, logic boards, line noise... it's not to say that they're a POS, but they do have their first-gen-apple-problems. It's architecture is also very new, with 10.3.3 even bringing a big speed boost, and I'd have to be other apps will see revisions that will bring big gains... there are a number of people who don't want to buy 1st gen Apple hardware anymore, and Apple hasn't given them a revision to buy into. - Regaining trust is hard
This was something I had raised to me on a list, but makes a lot of sense... There was a ton of damage done to Apple's pro lines by their price/performance problems, even going back to when Microsoft was pushing hard into the content creation markets when NT/2000 hit the scene and Apple's next-gen OS strategy was starting to look DOA. Apple was able to rebuff that fairly well, both with lots of hype around rhapsody, showing they were going to have something to compete with NT/2000, and the fact that the media creation market, especially where print & advertising is concerned, is notoriously slow to move to anything. But the MHz problems dragged on for so long that a ton of people have jumped ship, and now they just aren't buying PowerMacs. They can make headway in bringing these people back, but it's going to take a sustained push as the leader, not one press release. Show these people where the momentum is, especially with AMD's new kit hitting.
All the above are reasons why the G5 is a bit of a perplexing machine, at least to myself, for various markets... but at this point there is another very serious problem they have to contend with: the 3GHz gap.
Lots of people are trying to spin things a bit, and say "Jobs said by the end of the summer, which is technically x... they have time" or similar things. Bullox. Jobs may have said the end of the summer, later, but that's not what he said at the introduction in and what was fed to the press.
The screen capture to the right should make it fairly obvious: Jobs said 3GHz within 12 months, on June 30th I believe. Which leaves a hair under 3 months for them to go from 2GHz to 3GHz. That is one pretty damn drastic jump in power in 3 months time, especially when you consider that the G5 has been out for 9+ months.
So, we were promised 3GHz by June 30th 2004, and there's no way of getting around that. Apple is either going to keep that promise, and lurch from 2GHz to 3GHz in 3 months (chances are it will be 'announced' but not ship for several months...) or they are going to break their promise. Again. Which would be... uncool.
Lots of people are saying things along the lines of "Saying they would hit 3GHz in a specific time frame was so stupid, now people aren't buying. They never should have said that". I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with that mindset. Apple making that statement was the coolest thing they'd done in awhile, and make no mistake they said it for a reason: it was a mindshare ploy. And a needed one, and if they had kept up the momentum it would have been a great one.
Apple's performance problems had become deep-rooted, and really a part of the computer world's psyche. Oh sure, they'd have a jump here and there... and then another long plateau. 2GHz, while a big jump from where they were at, wasn't that huge in the grand scheme of things... they were practically in danger of their MHz being lapped before that. They wanted to have people talking about the G5 as a huge break with what came before, that this was the big break with their past problems of under delivering. They didn't want people thinking about the G5 as being at 2GHz, but on it's way to 3GHz. That it had momentum.
Which is a big deal, and, one could argue, a drastic change from their long-standing modus operandi which while great for hype, is really off-putting to a lot of the people they are trying to make inroads with. Actually keeping their word, and making their ship dates is another big thing with these people. It hasn't played out that way, and now we're stuck hearing pondering on what might be causing the holdup instead of how the G5 is coming on strong.
This isn't just a tower thing: take the server market. People were/are extremely leery of buying into something that won't see good support, and would be dropped at the first sign of trouble. Apple had some very, very nasty mindshare with people when it came to servers due to their past history. People have this image of them going on product flights of fancy, then dropping them dead when it doesn't seem to be working out. This is... disconcerting, and something that will take years to overcome.
Which goes back to the deep-rooted performance/price ratio Apple has been saddled with for ages. The G5 could have been a break from that image in more ways than one, as it had gotten that bad: we're more likely to believe someone has recovered when they have hit rock bottom. Instead, we're seeing signs of a relapse with the G5.
Now of course we're going to see a 3GHz G5. But here's the thing: people are already expecting them to announce it at 2004's WWDC, but actually ship it several months later. That makes me a little sad, as it feels as though an opportunity to really start to change people's perception of Apple has been squandered.
Look people, I really appreciate your various emails about that TROU group, and what an asshat "Joe Ferguson" seems to be. Yes, he seems to be a bit shifty, and yes, he seems to be lying about things I've said or taken them out of context and his hitting on random women from the list seems to be pretty lame, and yeah they seem to be money grubbing and untrustworthy. But let it go, he's just an asshat and leave it at that. While I think it's amusing & I appreciate the thought, please don't send me messages from their list or things he is saying about me, and if how he seems to be acting bothers you, find a new list.
It isn't something I've really thought twice about, considering I was barely on the list and I didn't know any of you. Although I'll admit some of the messages that have been forwarded on were kind of funny, and I'm kind of touched that some of you seemed to really think I was done wrong, I just don't care about them enough to devote any mental effort to refuting any of them, I'm working some pretty hefty hours here. So let it go, if it's not bothering me it shouldn't bother you. There's an old saying that goes something like "When you wrestle with pigs..." that seems applicable.
Feel free to keep in touch & all, but don't message me about that group anymore, I've forgotten about it and moved on. It's all just kind of weird, as far as I'm concerned it was just a small list I posted on from time to time when people needed better info than what was offered, and the list owner turned out to be a bit of a creep, and that was that. So if you are reading through their archives, come upon the creepiness and have a problem with it, don't post to their list about it, and don't message me about it, just unsubscribe, find a better list, and move on.
It's not something I have time for or an interest in, but again, thanks for the thought.
I hadn't had this hit in awhile... but I just got to spend the last 10 minutes removing 11 comment spam's from dev@null.com. These were odd in that they only hit posts on the front page, whereas they usually hit way older posts.
Which unfortunately means I'm going to have to go googling for a way to stop it, as it's not easy to batch delete comments with movabletype. It's really quite a drag. I was hoping the upgrade to 2.661 would take care of it.
:(
Been following the whole gmail thing for the last few days... what a stroke of genius to release that on April 1st. They not only whole get huge buzz going for it, but they get a whole second round of press that are simply "Turns out gmail isn't april fools. Google is launching...". Brilliant, somebody should be getting a bonus.
If you haven't followed, gmail is google's new email service hitting public beta in just a short while. The three big things that set it apart are:
- 1 gigabyte of storage
- (Hopefully!)Innovative interface built on google's search tech
- Possibly some new anti-spam tech
There's a whole wealth of information out there regarding why much of this is a very cool & very interesting shot across the market... much of it revolving around their competition generally offering between 2 to 6 megabytes of storage. Since there's a whole wealth of information out there about that aspect, no point in rehashing except to say "Woa.".
But, there has been something sticking in my craw, and that's lots of people throwing out numbers to show how it is either fiscally possible for google to do this (apparently google is claiming this will cost them $2 per user on average) or fiscally impossible. Stop it. If I read one more thing about this I could very well scream, and that's not pretty as I don't have a very manly scream... it's a tad girlie. Basically, all these numbers & figures people are working through are utter crap.
What google is employing is a concept called "overselling", meaning you are selling more than you actually have to sell, with the expectation that the vast majority of users will not use the service to full capacity. If a company oversells, and their customers do use the full capacity of what they've been sold, by & large that company has screwed the pooch.
For that reason, overselling is dangerous. It can (and has) get a lot of companies into trouble (um, ever notice how some of those very cheap hosting companies that offer incredible bandwidth and space are slow as hell? they've oversold their bandwidth and miscalculated on what they actually needed to be available, or just don't care). This type of thing happens all the time. But many a company is able to sit down and figure out that while they're overselling, what resources they do need on hand in order to meet the service requirements.
I.E., if a hosting company is selling plans with 10gigs of space, and weren't overselling, they'd need to allot 10gigs of space for every hosting account. If you have a 100gigabyte hard drive for use by the accounts, that would mean they could only take on 10 clients. But, after some time goes by, they notice that while a few users do use gobs of storage, the vast majority aren't simply because they don't have that much data, and probably never will come close.
For those 10 users, they could very well be only using 30gigs of space. Since they have another 70 gigs they aren't using, they could have three times the original base by overselling, with 10gigs left over for padding to allow for unusual circumstances. Assuming they have done some testing and gathered some decent metrics, they've probably run the numbers and found it doable.
This is a pretty rampant practice in lots of markets, and isn't exactly unethical... it would only be such if you actually tried to use the full capacity and were then rebuffed. I wouldn't be surprised if google is going to be using much of the public beta to fine tune this metric... I think it's fairly obvious that the vast majority of people out there don't have a gigabyte of email.
So, please, no more "How can they do this? The biggest drives are x gigabytes!". It's not possible to run that kind of calc, too many variables are missing. Hell, they could be running a compression routine on all non-binary mail for an average 4x space savings on files that aren't things like .jpg's... without knowing, it not really an equation you can run.
So stop!
I've come to the conclusion that children and I just don't mix. There are various degrees of this: before they are walking & talking and all it is a lost cause, they just freak me out... once they're past a certain age, all is well and by & large they do well with me as well, I treat kids like short me's, which is fine and all until something annoys me and I look over to see their shocked expressions... usually caused by me swearing like a sailor over something trivial, which I'm prone to doing.
But, like I said, I'm a little better once they are old enough to actually have a conversation with, even if you feel like you're talking to Andy Rooney sometimes. It can be entertaining and all, and even a lot of fun. But that larval stage scares the hell out of me. It just puts me on edge... even puppies generally know that when they see a cliff (or in this case, stairs, or a balcony) it's prolly not a good idea to go jumping off. Not kids at this stage. They see stairs, they are throwing themselves headfirst off of them. Electrical sockets are made for tongues. Sharp objects are made for bashing into their face at the most destructive angle possible. It's amazing that we don't have more one-eyed people walking around.
And you know, the parents kinda get used to this stuff, and are "oh, don't worry about it" as their kid is trying to gnaw on a rock. Not me, knowing myself, and what others know about me, I'm deathly afraid something is going to happen. And, due to my proximity, and past experience, I'm reasonably sure I'll somehow be held as responsible. I just find it exhausting.
I just don't operate in "kid mode", which be a bit of a problem considering so many of my damn friends are reproducing. It's really not amusing, although I think it's great for the actual people involved. And their kids are adorable, but the mindset that changes is just... case in point:
I call to check in with a friend, and the conversation basically ends up like this:
Me: "...Aw, that's cool. So how is (small childs' name) doing?"Her: "Ok, but she's sick again.She has some kind of weird disease."
Me: *chuckles* "Weird disease? What the hell?"
Her: "Serious! The doctor says it is some weird thing called 'hand, foot, & mouth' disease. But she only has it on her mouth."
I dunno why, but the sentence above just cracks me up. It just happens, and again I'm not sure why it's so funny... prolly because it is so outside my frame of reference that it appears to be this random absurd thing. I just find that sentence to be amusing.
Rule of thumb™: Never, ever laugh when a woman's child is involved. Even if the kid does something funny, wait until she laughs, and then laugh. With the father it's perfectly fine, but not the mother. Evar. Just don't go there. If you do, chances are you'll get that dreaded silence, followed by the blank "What kind of cold hearted bastard are you?".
I'm generally find the safest course of action to be a furrowed brow followed by an "AwwwOoH" sound, which is a mix between an "Awww" sound for finding something adorable, and an "OooOOh" sound for when you're having sympathy for someone. Since it's fairly ambiguous, your chances of them interpreting it in a way that doesn't involve sudden silence and the death-stare goes way, way up.
But, I can't really help it. Your mindset just changes when you've had a child, and you either have it or you don't. I'm missing a gene I think. There's a reason why all my friends are reproducing, and I'm not being asked to be a godfather.* And you know, I can't really blame them.
*In all fairness, there are, quite probably, about 10+ reasons I'll never be asked to be a godfather, and in their defense, they would all be very valid reasons.
