Apple is a pretty computer and everything, but there's so much to be desired from their os programmers (not saying microsoft is the best, just saying
I completely concur there's a feedback loop problem, but its Apple's fault I think. I remember when the first MACs came out you had to pay $5K just for the privilege of programming for it. What numbskulls! The intel platforms were the first to encourage development because bios ref. guides were cheap and most could afford the $100 of a pascal, c or asm compiler. Plus the intel-platform hw (ibm, compaq, etc.) was really designed to handle multitasking and simultaneous networking/communications. Apple only recently started to get the hint and improve the hardware. As for the P2P stuff, I think you're right here too: it should be everywhere all the time. Every linux distro, etc. should include it. That's a great way to hit critical mass. But I do think that a really useful app will find its way across the internet. Remember ICQ before AOL bought it? It was one of the few things that hit big and hit fast (partly because AOL's IM service wasn't available yet.) Napster hit the same way. Gnutella was never the kind of thing the average non-programmer 19 year old cares about so it has, and will continue to have, a small user base. As for the open source comments, I do believe Linux is a truly powerful force, but I am skeptical that most of the people 'peer reviewing' code actually know what they're talking about. Do they really know what threading is? I'm always surprised to find script kiddies borrowing code frankenstein-style ('frankensteining code' in my own description) to piece together really poor stuff that 'works' but not very well. I'm less worried about malicious code in linux than I worry about getting code that works. In contrast openbsd has a more targeted programmer base and seems to be developing in a more stable fashion. Anyway I'll continue to work with linux because i recognize the market drives technology but i do wish we'd find better programmers for linux. phillip -----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks@Algebra.COM [mailto:owner-cypherpunks@Algebra.COM]On Behalf Of Ray Dillinger Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 7:08 PM To: Phillip H. Zakas Cc: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com Subject: Re: RE: The Register - There are still crypto reg's... On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Phillip H. Zakas wrote: the
mac os really stinks.)
There's kind of a feedback loop here; Windows achieved critical mass and Apple didn't. Hence, MS can afford to hire lots more engineers to work on their CRAPPY os than Apple can hire to work on their mediocre os. So, after a while, Windows got better than the MacOS. I remember how hard Win3.11 sucked compared to MacOS 5. But once true multitasking was under WinNT3.51, it was about Neck-and-neck for quality with MacOS 7. And like Mr. Zakas, I'm pretty convinced that even though MacOS 10 has true multitasking, it has definitely fallen behind WinNT 4. ObCryptoStuff; this same kind of "critical mass" phenomenon affects lots and lots of the stuff we're looking at. Freenet, Mojo Nation, Napster, Gnutella, Digital Cash, etc, even PGP and GPG - All have a value that depends directly on how many other people are using them. If they don't grow beyond a certain threshold size, they remain less useful than the disk space they occupy. But where is the threshold and when is it passed? And how do you get there? If P2P agents were distributed with a couple of the major linux distributions (say Red Hat and SuSE) they'd probably achieve critical mass fairly fast (especially if they were set up and configured during install, the way Apache increasingly is). And if they were opensource, they'd probably get into ALL linux distributions within a few years. But so far most of the people doing P2P are trying to make a buck off of it, so with the exception of gnutella, there aren't open- source agents. Bear