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Hacking Mac OS X
Bill Hamm writes "DB is carrying a deep interview with Jonathan Rentzsch, who created an open source technology to allow other developers to inject their code into any running process to alter its functions and written papers for IBM to program the PowerPC correctly. The interview is huge and technical, and all over the place in terms of content. Some of the things discussed are the reasons for corporate America's resistance to buying from Apple, software optimization, the importance and history of 10.4's Core Data, why WebObjects is no longer relevant, the status of PowerPC compilers, and why Mac OS X's Finder should be killed off."
...that the "hacking" in "Hacking Mac OS X" is referring to "hacking" in the traditional sense, not "cracking".
And for more on mach_inject, referred to in the summary, see Jonathan Rentzsch's website...and an interesting list of mach_inject and mach_override users.
As for the Finder, it may be true it was a "compromise" of sorts between the NeXT world and the Mac OS world. But it wasn't necessarily the social compromise between "personalities" within Apple it's pained to be; it was likely more of a technical one. It's not perfect, and it's woefully inadequate for some tasks that involve managing thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of files. But it's still more than sufficient, and there's no reason to completely junk it: it can continue to evolve and be improved upon.
The interviewee argues that WebObjects is still relevant, and the fastest way of coding Web Applications, but is in danger of becoming irrevelevant if Apple do not update it soon!
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To understand the basic complaint about the OS X Finder look at this ArsTechnica article.
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No it didn't.
That's not what Automator does. It's understandable why you'd get this wrong, but please check out "Working with Automator."
Short version: Automator lets you chain together very small bits of code called Actions to create Workflows.
Think of Actions as being like UNIX tools, and Workflows as being like command pipelines, and you'll have the idea.
Automator is not a general-purpose AppleScript tool. You can write Actions in AppleScript if you want -- though Objective-C is better, in my opinion -- but you can't use Automator to just talk to any application with an AppleScript dictionary. That's not its job.
XLC only writes code that's compatible with the G4+ processors, Apple can't use it as long as they need to support G3's too. There are also issues with the fact that it doesn't behave exactly like GCC, so Apple would have to deal with this when building apps that are based on OSS software(i.e. most of the BSDness of the OS), and they'd need to pay to include a copy with every copy of OS X or be stuck in an odd situation of users using GCC while Apple uses XLC.
You can make it stop the nagging if you turn the date to some amount of years in the future (say, 2030), open quicktime and say "ask me later", then quit quicktime & turn the date back to normal. It'll ask you again in 2030. I'm not saying that it's not annoying, but thankfully there's an easy way to stop it.
For years Mac's windowing/subwindowing functions required multiple open windows on a screen to explore subdirectories.
... um ... WRONG.
This has been untrue since System 5, circa 1989. Certainly pre Windows 3.0.
Mac designers were so proud of multitasking that windows didn't maximize automatically -- hardly making efficient use of screen real-estate.
This is a bizarre remark... drug induced?
1) Macs had overlapping Windows before they had threading.
2) The first multi-tasking implementation (beyond desk accessories) involved multiple virtual screens (no overlapping applications).
Many applications remember the state you set them in when you last used them and reinstate it when launched. Some don't. The same applies in Windows, with the exception that (a) it's easy to force maximization if you know a bit, and (b) Windows maximizes windows to fill the screen whereas the Mac maximizes windows to show as much as possible, but no more than required. I don't see how the latter is a less efficient use of screen real estate than filling the screen with a largely empty window.
So
Mac never attempted to price their machines competitively for corporate America
I assume by "Mac" the writer means "Apple". In fact, Apple has offered many price-competitive computers, e.g. the Classic, the SE, the IIcx, the IIsi (the Mac mini being the most extreme example). It's not like the IBM XT was priced under the Apple II.
In any study of TCO I've read (e.g. from Gartner) you'll see Macs have a lower TCO than Wintel boxes. I would assume TCO matters to corporate America -- but only when comparing non-Apple options.
They don't, for the most part, stock replacement parts. They don't do anything but the most basic repairs.
I have to chime in here. I have a refurbished dual G5 in which one of the processors stopped showing up. The guy at the Genius bar told me it could be anything from an improperly seated processor to a bad CPU or logic board -- both of which were parts that they had in stock and could fix within a day or two. Luckily, it the processor wasn't firmly "in place" and it just took a bit of reassembly.
They had it diagnosed and back to me in less than 24 hours, no charge. And I don't have Applecare on the machine. My opinion is that Apple hardware is great, but regardless, I've had few occasions to have to get repairs over the years. And when I have, it's been a relatively painless experience. I never had to ship anything in or wait for some obscure supply-chain hopscotch to get a part.
A number of other comments in this post give me pause, but I'm not qualified to respond so I'll just say "hmmm...OK, whatever" to the rest, and admit people's experiences vary.