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It was revealed that a certain number of Video iPods were inadvertently shipped with a Windows virus called RavMonE.exe. Apple has put up a support page to help users affected by this problem, which is good, but in it they say:

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Wait. They’re blaming Windows for this? As one of my coworkers aptly paraphrased, this is like saying:

We’re sorry that we put this fatal poison in the chocolate cupcakes we manufactured. As you can imagine, we’re upset with the human body for not being more hardy against toxic proteins.

Apple’s general holier-than-thou attitude has been getting exceedingly tiresome for me. With their “Mac vs. PC” ads, open swipes at Microsoft during WWDC 2006, and the zealotry of the community — which, to be fair, there’s only so much Apple can do about — it’s gotten to the point where I’m actively interested in not pandering to Apple’s ego or bankroll.

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After a terribly disappointing round of announcements at WWDC, I’m giving serious reconsideration to my affiliation with Apple and the Mac OS X platform. I’ve grown weary of Apple’s constant push to upgrade – if you’re not running the latest version of Mac OS X you may as well be running DOS. I’m tired of their flirting with the server and enterprise markets – they offer some fairly decent servers in the Xserve, but they run Mac OS X Server on them, which is an excellent server operating system if you don’t mind system management practices that date back to the early Eighties and a reliance on GUI tools – almost all of which only run on a Mac OS X client, by the way – for doing things remotely. I’m not the only one leaving or considering leaving the polished white and brushed metal of the Apple camp. I agree with both Mark and Cory’s reasons, but I’ve got my own personal gripes to air.

Performance

Mac OS X is slow for a Unix. There are documented performance problems with Mac OS X, many of which stem from the Mach microkernel, from which the Mac OS X kernel XNU descends. Mach relies heavily on passing messages from one internal construct to another which levies a drastic performance cost, and this makes Mac OS X Server a lousy choice for the vast majority of what I do with servers: Web and database stuff. It also shows in the client, I believe; my PowerBook (G4 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM), while not the newest machine in the world, is sluggish, far more so than my even older Windows XP machine (Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB RAM) at home. Admittedly, you could easily argue that the Athlon in my PC is a faster chip than the G4, but that’s not what Apple would’ve had you believe back when the G4 and G5 were current chips, and the fact is my PC is still built with older components than my PowerBook. Speaking of that, Apple telling people the PowerPC chips were superior in spite of the slower clock speeds is something else that grinds my gears. Let’s go back a few years, to remember what they used to say. Clock speed is all marketing. The PowerPC is more efficient. The G4 is a supercomputer. Intel sucks. Fine, whatever. But why, Apple, are you forcing your supporters who backed your PowerPC play in the community to eat crow with the great switch to Intel chips? It doesn’t – or at least, it shouldn’t – engender a high level of grassroots support by us fans in the field.

Innovation

Furthermore, I’m tired of the “look at Microsoft copy us” rhetoric. It started at WWDC two years ago and they engaged it in again this year. Friendly rivalry is cute and generally benefits the consumer, but with these guys it’s become frothy-mouthed zealotry. The way Steve Jobs was talking at the keynote on Monday, you’d think Apple had invented two Leopard features unveiled therein:

• Time Machine – A way to get back old versions of files that you accidentally overwrote, implemented in Windows Server 2003 a few years back and in VMS decades.
• Spaces – Virtual desktops so you can have more effective screen real estate, something that Unix and X have been able to do with one window manager or another since the late 1980′s.

They tout each new feature as though they alone conceived of it and that it’s completely unique to their platform, and I’d imagine to the overwhelming majority of their users who don’t care enough to go digging, those perceived claims are upheld and Apple, once again, is the only company doing any innovation in the realm of personal computing. Apple also has a nasty tendency to take – sometimes wholesale – the work of other developers and integrate it into their own apps and system without so much as a by-your-leave. A while back it was Panther, I believe, that stole the work of Proteron’s LiteSwitch app-switcher that fired off when you hit cmd+tab, and next year it appears that Leopard will be taking DesktopManager and calling it the aforementioned “Spaces” along with – something they’re calling new and original – MailTags and its ability to create to-do items and notes from messages in Mail. These developers are small and these applications, even though they’re shareware or donation-ware, are in part or in whole how these people earn their living. They were the first, or at the very least the best, at bringing those valuable features to Mac OS X users around the world. But, if it’s a good idea, Apple might steal it. At least Microsoft has the courtesy to purchase the companies that make some of the best tools, utilities, and games for Windows and the Xbox (see the Wikipedia entry “List of companies acquired by Microsoft Corporation” for a much more complete list). Apple just takes the ideas they like from their community. With friends like that, why should a small developer innovate on Apple’s platform? I’d rather get bought by Microsoft than stolen from by Apple.

Cost and Value

The common catcall from the anti-Mac crowd for many years has been “Macs cost more.” The party line response from Apple’s fans has been something to the effect of “You get what you pay for. BMWs cost more than Hondas, but you don’t hear BMW owners complaining.” At least, until it comes time for an oil change. Or a radiator repair. That’s kind of been my experience with the Mac, to a large degree, as well. Apple has a constant upgrade cycle, for all their software including Mac OS X, and it grows old having to shell out $70-$130 every year for new applications. That’s also not including their .Mac service, which is a guaranteed $100 a year for something that lots of people claim isn’t that good anyway. I used to have a .Mac account, but I stopped paying for it after I started working for Apple and got it for free, and when I moved to my current employer I didn’t feel that it was in any worth picking back up. But, if you want to synchronize your data easily between two Macs, or use their Backup tool to its full extent, or make one-click iPhoto albums, you have to pay for their walled Internet garden. I’ve already got a web host, Apple. It works well. It provides me with WebDav access to my site, which is the same protocol your apps use to access .Mac. Why do you want more money from me to pay for a service I’ve already got, for far less, from someone else? Apple tries to claim that I don’t need to upgrade. I don’t need to do a lot of things, but if I want to have software updates and enhancements beyond security updates then, yeah, I do need to upgrade. It also doesn’t hurt them that as they introduce new features and subsystems into their OS, application developers pick up on them, and suddenly you need Mac OS X v10.latest just to run a text editor.

Progress

One of the hallmarks of Apple and of Mac OS X for a few years were the constant state of improvements and progress in the OS. It got more stable, faster, better looking, and more supported as time went by. The user base grew accustomed to this dynamism, and so its present absence is quite striking. I suppose it’s inevitable, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. With the Leopard preview at WWDC, I was really hoping to see some improvements to Finder which is so very, very terrible in its current state in Mac OS X. It’s a pale imitation of the predictability and cleanliness of the Finder in Mac OS 9; that Finder was so solid from a usability standpoint that the GNOME project’s Nautilus file manager was patterned after it and it’s spatial paradigm, where the window displaying a folder is, for all intents and purposes, the folder. It was easy for users to understand, and it makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Mac OS X’s Finder has more in common with NeXT’s file manager, and is just a mess. Here’s some other people who criticize Finder: John Gruber – Daring Fireball, John Siracusa – Ars Technica (and here where he talks about how Leopard might be our chance), and Daniel Eran – RoughlyDrafted here, here, and here.

I was really hoping to see fixes for my two big issues with it:

1. It’s Brushed Metal, unless you click the pill-shaped icon in the upper-right corner of the window, in which case it looks like the older, better Finder windows, but just that one window. There doesn’t appear to be a good way to set this globally.
2. It’s unstable. Not counting beta software – OmniWeb and Opera, I’m looking at you – it’s the least stable and trustworthy app on my Mac, which is sad considering the important job it has.
3. It’s inconsistent. If I’ve got a folder open in three different windows, with three different views – icon view, list view, and column view – then does the order in which I close those windows determine what they’ll show when they last open? That’s kinda dumb, and is a problem solved by the spatial metaphor – when you open a folder in a spatial file manager, it opens the window for that folder, and subsequent openings of that folder simply bring its window to the front.

These three problems combine to make one crappy application, and since most people think of the Finder as “the computer” since it’s what’s running when they start it up, it doesn’t exactly look good for it when they can’t even figure out why it’s displaying their data the way it is.

Loving the Journey?

I want to love Mac OS X. For a few years, I did love it. But Apple’s become distracted by iPods, as near as I can tell, and is rapidly forgetting the operating system that put them back in the computing game. It could be so good. It’s a solid Unix, despite its flaws, there are loads and loads of good applications for it, people adore the systems on which it runs, and it’s Not Microsoftâ„¢. But it feels like in spite of how far they’ve come, they’ve still got a long, long way to go, and I’m wondering if it’s time to stop paying them to get there since I’ve been doing that for a while now and we’re still not at our destination.

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Found this interesting link in Gamasutra about how World of Warcraft is teaching and encouraging the wrong goals. I concur, so read on: World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

While I don’t necessarily agree with or subscribe to his points in their entirety, nor do I place Street Fighter on the high pedestal that the author does — quite likely because I suck at it — I do think he’s somewhat on the ball about the general “dumbing-down” of MMORPGs. In general I’ve found the “theme park” play style that WoW uses to be somewhat bland and unexciting for me long-term, which is one reason why I’m giving serious consideration to going back to EVE Online. They recently made a major hardware upgrade, and CCP continues to be one of the most responsive and active developers I’ve yet seen in the MMOG space.

I’ve also got a couple of ideas to bring to EVE, one of which is here: The EVE Documentation Project. I hope to be able to take the community’s drive for compiling information about EVE and put it in a wiki where they can do a better job of maintaining and producing it. The forums (EVE account required) are trying to fill that purpose now, but they’re really not an ideal vehicle or tool for such documentation. I’ll hopefully be making a post to said forums at some point in the near future and we’ll see how things go.

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Lots of my friends and colleagues use various different databases for different things, as do I. One thing that I keep coming across is people using MySQL. I’ve never much liked MySQL; its transaction system is fairly new and is not enabled in the default table type, it’s really fast for read queries but slow for writes, the online documentation covers the beta version so it’s not necessarily in sync with the stable releases, and I distrust their somewhat ambiguous, non-OSI-approved license.

I’m of the opinion that if you need something small and fast, SQLite. If you need something bigger than that, PostgreSQL. If you need something really big, Oracle or DB2.

I’ve come across enough technical and philosophical problems with MySQL that I no longer endorse its use. It’s unfortunate that so many people write software that only works with it, including the software that powers this website, Textpattern. But I don’t write or maintain Textpattern’s code, nor do I maintain its database. I leave that up to the more-than-competent administrators who run this fabulous web hosting firm known as TextDrive.

Here’s a little document I came across that has a feature comparison of several top databases, and from a cursory look it appears to be pretty complete.

I’m going to keep adding stuff to this entry as I feel and find it, so I’ll have somewhere to which I can refer people when they say, “Why don’t you like MySQL.” Keep your eyes peeled.

Update: Jan 19, 2005

A friend of mine pointed me to this list of MySQL gotchas that’s pretty telling, too. Although I’m not as staunchly anti-MySQL as I used to be; I’ve been using it for a couple of projects where it was the default and I didn’t feel the need to invest the time in a better solution and it’s not as bad as it used to be. And it is pretty fast, despite its other glaring flaws. I still don’t consider it to be an enterprise-class RDBMS, though.

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Those of you who know me are probably aware of my long-standing boycott on Wal-Mart. I’ve never liked the retail juggernaut’s business practices, their stance towards unions, their purchasing methods, or their major role in homogenizing the American landscape. I just think they’re a bunch of assholes, basically, and I do not shop there.

A report on the company was run recently on PBS’s show Frontline. They’ve got a bunch of stuff up already on the site for Tuesday night’s show and will have the full show online on Friday. Check it out.

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There are several aspects of Mac OS X, both from a system level and an application level, that handily make it the best system for web browsing and development on the market today.

First and foremost is the plethora of web browsers available for it:

• Apple’s Safari
• The Mozilla Project’s Firefox
• Omni Group’s OmniWeb
• The Mozilla Project’s Camino
• Opera Software’s Opera
• The Mozilla Project’s Mozilla

All of these browsers are significantly better at rendering standards-compliant HTML and CSS; they’re fast and easy to use; and, with notable exceptions, are available free of charge. A few of them are also Open Source applications meaning anyone can download, look at, or even modify the source code from which the applications are built, and can potentially return their contributions to the world by having them added to the project.

You may have noticed that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was missing from that list; I didn’t forget about it but, boy, am I trying to. Internet Explorer is a relic from a long-dead era in the Mac’s history. It was brought forward from Mac OS 8 and 9 to Mac OS X and it really hasn’t changed much in several years. Basically, it suffered from the same fate as it did on the Windows side – everyone was using it anyway, so why bother advancing the state of the art? Heck, shortly after Apple released Safari, Microsoft declared Internet Explorer a dead-end product line and released one last version. Internet Explorer is the single worst web browser available for the Mac and should be avoided at all costs.

The other two major aspects of Mac OS X that make it the best web platform on the market are similar enough that I can group them here. Mac OS X has a centralized plug-ins location, /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/, and any plug-ins which you install to that location are available for all Mac OS X browsers. You don’t have to manage and maintain two (or more) sets of plug-ins, which saves time, effort, and disk space. It also has a centralized password share, so usernames and passwords that you elect to save for a site to make future logging-in easier in one browser are available to all other browsers. You need do nothing extra. You have full freedom to switch browsers at will or as needed. Windows can do this, but it does not. I have no idea why; it’s not like the Internet and web browsers were new concepts when Windows XP was released.

The freedom to do the work I want and need to do using the tools I prefer easily makes Mac OS X the platform of choice for web-related work, hands down.

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So in my apartment complex there are apparently a sizable number of Duke undergrads. This isn’t a problem, per se, except that they’re extraordinarily loud and completely inconsiderate of others living in the complex.

Last night, shortly after 2:00 AM, I had to go out into the hallway to ask the 20 or so people out there to keep the noise down, “for fuck’s sake.” They were just sorta casually having a party in the hallway. Hallways reverberate well, and my front door is thin, so it sounded like I had a bunch of drunk, ignorant kids standing right outside my door. Actually, at one point I did — I opened the door to tell some guys to be more quiet and they were literally standing right outside my door. One had even decided to use my door mat as a coaster for his presumably shitty beer.

Now, last night was a weekend, so I’m not as hung up on being quiet at night, but tonight’s a weeknight, and there are more dipshits making too much God-damned noise. It never ceases to amaze me how self-centered, crass, and rude some people are. These kids’ parents have not done a very good job, but that’s hardly unique or odd in our country today.