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

Ok I'm honestly not interested in a religious war (your term). I will clarify my earlier comments. For me this issue is really about developing and keeping market momentum and the impact poor momentum has on the evolution of a computer line -- if Apple were as big in the market as intel-based stuff we'd probably have better apple hw and sw. This is the feedback loop problem in my opinion. Putting up barriers to development makes no sense when launching a computer. The $5K license I referred to was required as late as 1992 (when I purchased one for an app I wrote and sold commercially), and yes was eventually dropped. But by then the damage of: - going after the K-12 education market rather than the colleges and business schools... - focusing on 'cool' and the niche graphic markets... - charging developers to develop and sell apps for the mac... ...had really taken their toll. I'm not sure, but I don't think Apple ever received more than 15% market share, right? Apple had many innovative products but they rarely evolved beyond the cpu and beyond simply adding new features or network cards, etc. (except for the messagepad which evolved quickly then suddenly died). I think early policies regarding developers really matter in a computer product launch. In contrast to apple which always had a relatively closed and proprietary system (if you remember, apple didn't release hw and io details), IBM opened up the BIOS calls almost immediately leading to TSRs, etc. Plus apple always discouraged clones (except for a brief period), so all innovation had to come from apple and the apple team is focused on consumers and not on, say, scientists and data centers so development/evolution was designed to please consumers. In contrast, the intel platforms always enjoyed clones (esp. after ibm began to license bios) and now we have dozens of specialty vendors creating motherboards, network cards, memory busses, etc. for intel platforms. There are way more vendors supporting and programming for the intel platform than the apple platform as a result (I think anyway). As for the multitasking stuff, I agree efficient multitasking is handled by the OS, but there's more to it than the OS alone. Nice HW has the design to handle several devices at once with the goal of efficiently interacting with the OS/apps. I might be wrong, but one environment this becomes clear is not the home, but the data center. My point of reference is this: I spent months working with a TV network and Apple Computer trying to get a large number of G3s to efficiently scale to handle a large streaming media event. It didn't work very well because the Macs couldn't be strung together in the way you can cluster other platforms; each machine couldn't handle their ethernet interfaces very efficiently (less than 20% efficiency was common -- try it yourself on your laptops) and the units burned a lot of time constructing/deconstructing tcp connections (which was likely a tcp/ip stack and/or multithreading problem), and of course apple lacks an application server making management and scalability pretty difficult. I tried to pull the G3s into service because i'm a fan of the open source release of the Apple quicktime streaming media material (very nice quality). And I was disappointed I couldn't scale the G3s (despite the help from apple and others). Maybe things have changed in the last 12 months, but I'm not sure about that (maybe my desgin for the streaming center was bad but the alternative design works well today). Look I hate the whole mac/pc debate because it's not interesting to me. but I do think there were mistakes/decisions made early on which have made apple what it is today in the marketplace. as for some of the technical challenges I'm not sure this list is the right forum to respond but i could provide concrete foundations for some of my generalizations (and I suspect that would be terribly boring for the others on this list). phillip btw gag me with a spoon? :) -----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks@Algebra.COM [mailto:owner-cypherpunks@Algebra.COM]On Behalf Of Tim May Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 9:31 PM To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM Subject: Mac vs. PC religious war claims At 8:17 PM -0500 2/1/01, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:

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

I don't buy this. I was at Intel when the first Macs came out, I had many friends who programmed Macs, and I myself used some of the early (c. 1986) tools like Lightspeed C. The 3-volume (then 4-volume, then 5, etc.) set of books on programming the Mac was widely available, and was inexpensive. If by "first came out" you only mean "early 1984," you are possibly right. But this is highly misleading, as by late 1985 and into '86 the tools were widely available. This all compares favorably with what was happening the DOS world (where, by the way, the only tools in the first year or two of the PC were the built-in BASIC, akin to what Apple was offering in the Apple II in 1979, the p-system from UCSD (good luck!), and the CPM-86 system. Of the three, PC-DOS, the p-system, and CPM-86, only DOS succeeded. Ergo, all "programming tools" were the scraps and pieces of crud related to DOS. Which, for the first few years of DOS, were execrable. What was happening in the DOS world at this time, at the time of the introduction of the Mac? Well, I also used to subscribe to the various PC mags of the day, including "PC Technical Journal." This was the "premier" PC programming journal of its day. (Other tidbit sources being "Dtack Grounded" and other semi-underground pubs.) Was the Mac harder to program? Probably. Was a Mac app more usable (more capable, more consistent) than the equivalent PC app of the day? One guess, and the only correct answer is "That's why MS came out with Windows." (BTW, I had Windows 1.0 before I bought my first Mac, a Mac Plus. Gag me with a spoon. I also had Windows 2.0, only _slightly_ better. It was not until Windows 3, particularly 3.1, arrived that Windows became usable. Do the math on what had passed for PC programming prior to this.)

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.

This is nonsense. Where do I begin? Multitasking is an OS feature, present in Windows only in recent years. A PC with an Intel processor running DOS is no more capable of "multitasking" than a Mac running an early Mac OS. The Intel line is not magically more multitasking-capable than the Motorola line. Look at the early Sun machines based on the 68000 and 68010 for but one illustration. As for networking and communications, you are out to lunch. Ethernet has been available, at a price, for many years on the Mac. In the last _several_ years, it has been the default on nearly all Macs. And for routine usage, all Macs since the earliest days have had usable local area networking. LocalTalk, MacTalk, whatever the jargon of the day. My Windows friends are thrilled when they get Ethernet cards working. I've had it built-in for many years. All of my Macs have been networked, first with LocalTalk, later with Ethernet, for many years. Wireless AirPort is now built in to most new Macs. My G4 Mac, my iBook, and my G3 Wall Street Powerbook all have built in Ethernet (mostly 10/100). They also have built in IEEE 1394/FireWire, USB, all the usual stuff. I don't like Mac vs. PC religious wars, but I cannot allow misrepresentations like the above to stand unchallenged. You, Phillip, should be ashamed of yourself. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

Ray Dillinger wrote:

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:

...

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 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.

Says who? I mostly run unix boxes for a living and for fun, but I also have a Mac at home for DTP and stuff like that. It's a million times preferable to windoze -- ask any of the pre-press and other graphics professionals. Mac's rule in that arena, except for those who can afford SGI.

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.

Well, as one who has to support a large number of windoze boxes (tho my staff does most of the PC stuff), I'll take Macs over windoze any day of the week. A single sys admin can support 4 times the number of Macs than windoze boxes. NT might be more stable than 95/98, but it doesn't have the multimedia and other features that Macs/windoze have, so it just doesn't make it for desktops. And 2000 is not an option for most of the 400 or so boxes we have, they barely have what it takes to run 95. Heck, one of our biggest libraries has mostly 486's. I'd trade every windoze box we have for Macs if I could. They are not just 4 times less hassle to support, but they are much, much easier to use for the non-geeks. If you have to deal with windoze a lot on a lot of different machines, it becomes pretty clear that it is just a truly disgusting piece of garbage, just endless weirdness, one app install trashes another, an uninstall trashes something else, just weird, weird, weird. Mac's just work, and work right, for the most part. Of course, nothing is as nice as unix, but at least Mac's are tolerable.

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 04:08:16PM -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:

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?

This is a close cousin of what economists call network effects. As an area of study, it has received fairly extensive scrutiny. Me, I like what Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis have written about temporary monopolies. More on both subjects: http://www.politechbot.com/p-00607.html -Declan