News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
	Mail Starting 4/24/97

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From: shellyj@wagged.com (Shelly Julien);
Sent at 4/25/97; 1:29:00 PM;
Re:No Theories Needed

Thanks for this report and the perspective. Regarding publishers and their current discomfort, I have a couple of observations:

1) The first is the obvious one about new forms of communication/media not wiping out the old ones. Not only did tv not eliminate radio, but the printing press did not eliminate cave paintings -- it's just that now it's called graffiti!

2) The second is that in 7/95 I heard Norm Pearlstine of Time-Warner talk at the Spotlight conference about new media and what they could do with Pathfinder and he came across as really bullish and excited about publishing online. I heard him again 2/97 at TED7 and boy, had he changed his tune! Really pessimistic, said that journalism is not meant to be an absorbed in an interactive format and that he's not seeing much real journalism in new media. Worried about business models that don't work -- he said overall he's just not "cheerful" about much related to new media these days.

A final note: I heard positive noises at WWW6 conference from W3C folks about CDF because it's based on their XML proposal. If this is the case, then since XML is still being specified a lag on CDF wouldn't surprise me. But I'm not an insider on this and so don't know for sure.

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From: jshields@direct.ca (Jody K. Shields);
Sent at 4/21/97; 9:00:45 PM;
Can Apple Survive?

Hi Dave! Read your Apple piece tonight. I'm 28 years old and I bought my first Apple back in 1983 (Apple IIe) and I've owned Mac's throughout the last 14 years. I recently went a couple rounds with Apple over a PB I bought. Funny thing, I didn't feel so good about Apple after that. I felt like they just didn't care anymore. They weren't willing to admit that the PB 190 and 5300 were plagued with problems. I think great companies are derived from the people who work for the company...I believe vision and visionaries enspire the masses to dream.

The person I delt with at Apple didn't dream. If they did it was in black and white. Everytime someone buys an Apple they are buying into an alternative vision of the world. I really believe this. They have made a decision to stand with the smaller kids. To play for the team that may not win. I really think Apple needs more than anything to focuss on what they do well but more anything they need to stop making shitty unrealiable Powerbooks! I'm on my second or third one and I still have problems.

So what's my point? I have always ignored DOS and Windows. I use to work for Tandy but I used a Mac. I'm likely to buy the last Mac the day it rolls off the line if it should come to that. But I don't think Apple cares or treats it's customers like it ought to. They'll never survive unless they change this.

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From: miko@miko.com (Miko);
Sent at 4/21/97; 4:53:48 PM;
Re:Can Apple Survive?

Hey dave. about your last line, I"m about one in maybe 8 people here who DO use macintosh, I've got a 7500... There are others...

Miko Matsumura
Java Evangelist, JavaSoft
www.miko.com

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From: benoit@be.com (Benoit Schillings);
Sent at 4/21/97; 3:31:34 PM;
OuiJa...

This is an interesting name... Oui is of course the french for Yes, but Ja is also yes but in Flamish... this must be a Belgian invention !

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From: Christian.Jacobsen@Eng.Sun.COM (Christian Jacobsen);
Sent at 4/21/97; 1:54:52 PM;
Re:Can Apple Survive?

Seriously, we have a lot of Macs here, but more Sun boxes. We also have a lot of ex-Apple people, but more people that have worked for other Sun opcodes. People use the computers that they are comfortable with.

A lot of us here use the Mac proudly,

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From: charlesf@MICROSOFT.com (Charles Fitzgerald);
Sent at 4/21/97; 10:46:21 AM;
Sun and Apple

Dave,

Your recent musings on the Apple and Sun have been interesting. I am amazed by the degree to which Apple is willing to be repeatedly and concretely screwed by Sun in order to get the intangible benefits of membership in Sun's "we don't like Microsoft" club.

If Sun is such a good friend to the Mac, how come JDK 1.1 is not available for the Mac yet? How come the JDK that is available for the Mac is one of the buggiest pieces of software on the planet. For all the talk about commitment to cross platform, how come the Mac gets pimped in terms of features, time to market and quality by many vendors of browsers, tools, Java, etc.? How come the cross platform rhetoric is not matched by action? If Sun is interested in making Java successful, why are they doing Solaris before the Mac? Solaris helps Sun, but it doesn't help Java nearly as much as a good Mac implementation would.

If Java is such a good technology for Apple, how come JDK 1.1 is not available for the Mac yet? How much money is Apple paying Sun for a Java license in order to do the work themselves? How does Apple ever catch up to the pace of Java investment on Win32? It sure would be embarassing for Apple and Sun if Microsoft is the first to support JDK 1.1 on the Mac. We already are way ahead on performance and robustness with Java on the Mac.

Charles Fitzgerald
Microsoft Java Team
http://www.microsoft.com/java

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From: george@knucklehead.phat.com (George T. Talbot);
Sent at 4/21/97; 1:31:19 PM;
Re:Can Apple Survive?

Another piece of advice for a Mr. Ellison...

One of the things I've seen happen over the years developing for the Mac is that there is a core group of designers there who think that designing multithreaded software is to do the work of the devil. Witness the years with an inadequate ThreadsLib, their latest multithreaded API which they got from Daystar which won't allow MacOS calls in threads, and the steadfast refusal of their own designers to consider designing, for example, a multithreaded Finder. I saw prototypes of a real multi-process, multi-threaded MacOS three years ago. Where is it now? Dead. Why? Because when multithreaded versions of some of their software was demonstrated on the early 68000 & 68020 it was sluggish and the GUI designers wouldn't allow sluggishness in the interface (and rightly so).

Well, now there's a CPU in there that can run circles around a Pentium at the same clock speed and I still have a debugger which runs in the same address space, cooperatively, with the program I'm trying to debug. This is nonsense. So is having to design everything as a damn state machine. We developers have been asking for the same two things for years:

o Real protected memory.
o Real multitasking.

This stuff isn't hard. It's not rocket science. It's called taking care of business.

While they're at it a native file system would be nice too.