The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You Know You're DOOMED When...

Your manager describes Hitler as a misunderstood visionary.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

This Crapolla is sponsored by...

In This Issue...

We solve all of Apple's problems, plus reach the saturation point on disgust.

A Change of Seasons

Not so long ago, she who will soon be Mrs. Fek'Lar mentioned that she was putting into storage her winter wardrobe and bringing out her summer wardrobe. This naturally started the little wheels in my head spinning. Wardrobes? Is it time for me to pack my earth-tone t-shirts and get out my bright pastel t-shirts? I don't have bright pastel t-shirts, and those aren't earth-tones, they're barbeque sauce stains!

Adventure, heh! Excitement, heh! A Geek is not a fashion magnet!

Guess Who's a Daddy!

Actually, this is what happens when you let your baby smoke cigars.

Congratulations Bob!

Completely Disgusted

The media has once again completely disgusted me. The events of May 14 were just too much. As you might recall this was the last Seinfeld episode. Even competing networks were trying to tie into the hype. If you can't beat them, be them. News organizations were acting like this was worthy of air time. It's not news it's a sitcom! After it was all over, the news directors were wondering what they were going to do next. God forbid they actually find some real news to report. Had any of them noticed all the corpses rotting in the streets of Indonesia?

Just as the newsroom impotence limps in, Frank Sinatra dies and becomes their next dose of Viagra. Remember when Princess Di croaked? It was like Chevy Chase doing the news. "This just in, she's still dead." Since Di didn't sing, they had to have Elton John rewrite a song to drone into our brains. Sinatra made over 1300 recordings, so at 11PM, the music began.

Ever stay up all night watching TV? Some of us insomniacs get to see late night TV a lot. In the wee hours of May 15, it was wall to wall Sinatra. All I could think was, "Poor Elton, he'll have nothing to do."

I'm not saying Sinatra's death isn't news, but it's not the only news either. By 7 AM on the 15th, you couldn't flip channels without hearing a Sinatra song. Even hard hitting radio talk shows who were still debating the merits of the Sienfeld finale used Sinatra bumpers to go to and come back from commercials.

In an effort to make the "news" shorter so perhaps we could also get some real news, I have compiled the following headlines.

Now lets' pay attention to the really important news; like why are these two clowns so happy?

I think the one on the right just learned he's dating a venture capitalist. I could be wrong about that. Maybe the guy on the left just got out of Auschwitz. You don't know, it could be true.

What's the story with Apple?

You may or may not have noticed Apple has announced a number of new products. You have to realize that Apple is both a software and a hardware company. Apple has more in common with SGI than it does with The Redmond Company.

Apple announced a few new computers, and later started to talk about it's OS future. The new hardware looks good, and the OS is better than what is out there now, but it's not going to save the Mac from extinction. An email conversation with an old friend brought these thoughts to the forefront.

Let's face it, without radical change at Apple, the Mac OS is DOOMED. Why? Because Apple screwed the pooch a long time ago and never listened to what the corporate IS people were telling them was needed in an enterprise wide OS. The Redmond Company did. It doesn't matter that Winders 95 is a piece of shit, it's what IS people wanted. IS people decide what computer systems will be purchased and supported. If you don't give IS people what they want, your stuff doesn't get in the door.

Apple, on the other hand, decided to become Moonies. They disconnected from the real world, and really thought the real world would bend over for them. WRONG! This was their strategic mistake.

Unless Reverend Sun Myung Jobs does exactly what I'm about to describe, the Mac OS is going to die. Least you think I'm in The Redmond Company's camp, I'm not. I've left a company that was killed by them. But it ain't their fault Apple is screwed, it's Apple's.

To save the Mac OS a new machine must be built. I call it the Unified Mac Platform (UMP). Here is what the UMP must do.

  1. It must run Mac OS.
  2. It must run Windows without some wacky program translating between the OS and the processor. That means it needs a Pentium II on the motherboard and the Mac OS side needs to be running Pentium II native. Anything else, and you're screwed on speed.
  3. It needs to run Java natively. By that I mean Java on a rom. Double click a class file and it runs blazingly fast.
  4. It must have a buttload of ram, and hard drive for days. It must have a 56K modem, and 24X cdrom.

Apple must fire the morons who are doing their advertising. Every Apple ad for the past six months would not sell one more computer. If your company has settled for the Intel platform, then telling you that a Pentium is a snail is stupid. Having the fastest computer in the world that has no software being developed for it is just plain worthless.

Instead, Apple needs a campaign that pushes the Mac as the platform that runs more titles than any other computer. It runs Mac, it runs Windows, it runs Java, and with the Raphsody OS Unix programs will run on the Mac. The Mac has to be about bringing more to the table, not about constraining the customer to only using Apple products.

All of this creating a platform that doesn't intimidate that normal human being who wasn't born with a daughter board shoved up their ass.

With the Mac, cards really do just plug in and play. There are no jumpers, no IRQ's, and no pesky memory addresses for humans to figure out. The hardware manager inside the machine tackles this. That alone will propel the Intel architecture decades ahead of where it is now.

The machine I just described could be done. It would be hard, but there is a lot of coffee in Cupertino. The hardest point will be the price. $1300.00 to begin, then Apple would need to go to EVERY computer maker out there and get them to build the UMP and drive the price into the floor.

Not only could Apple come back from the dead, but it could start asserting itself in the computing business like it hasn't in about five years. The Redmond Company couldn't steal the ideas in the UMP because the UMP would have already assimilated the Borg.

But if Apple won't do this, it might as well keep shipping Newtons. Until the number of titles that run on the Mac drasticly increases, no one who does not already use the Mac is going to buy one. I don't care what the snail says.

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"I did NOT touch the Wookie!"

"I Suck!"

"He's saying nothing in lots of paragraphs."

"Great, I got the suction cup all slimly."

Excuse Me

I've got to toss some snail bait out in the garden.


Fek'Lar
(Destroyer of Laptops - Morale Officer - The Last Honest Geek)

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