P3-800MHz, that's like complaining that your pocket calculator doesn't get enough FPS out of linux.
Yeah, funny how (apart from the latest insane games) everything else I want to run on this PC runs just fine. It runs XP, and isn't slow. I must have missed the meeting where profligacy with the user's computing resources was ok to the point of requiring them to buy a new PC just because the app has a small database and a big listbox in it.
Apple can't even code up a listbox that responds within a reasonable timescale to user events on a machine with a clock rate of 800,000,000 ticks per second, so I should spend £500 and upgrade?
Like I said, I use Ephpod instead. It's not dog slow like iTunes. It also requires zero pounds in hardware upgrades.
Assuming you're going to be running on a 2GHz+ machine just because your UI is so dog slow is bad engineering, plain and simple. No amount of waving new computer catalogues at me is going to change that fact.
It sticks out like a sore thumb because (battery longevity notwithstanding) the iPod is well engineered. Shipping nice hardware and backing it up with crappy software is the sort of thing Apple would sneer at PC companies for doing. Quite rightly, I would add - but the fact remains iTunes for Windows is in many ways poorly engineered.
After all apple hardware is -oh- so expensive and you could still purchase something from them.
So you're saying you know something about my bank account that I don't? How about I take that money you'd want me to spend on a new system and do something more useful with it? Like buy software, for instance.
There is quite clearly no need for me to upgrade my PC at the moment - for my purposes it works just fine. When Half-Life 2 ships, then we'll talk.
I disagree, to update an iPod, you plug it in, do nothing and unplug it.
Until you have more music than will fit onto your iPod (like I have), and you have to do it manually.
And that's when the frankly appalling sluggishness of the Windows version of iTunes comes to the fore. It is fricking painful to move songs to your iPod.
I really love it when I click on a listbox on my 800MHz Pentium III PC, and it takes >1 second to select an item. Only iTunes for Windows can do this.
Best Windows application ever written, my arse.
(And don't, whatever you do, try resizing the iTunes window when in the iTMS. It's like they dispensed with the PCI bus for video transfer, and used a postal one instead or something.)
I use Ephpod to update my iPod - I only use iTunes for ripping. Life's too short to use the iTunes UI, really.
Basically, take all those whines from Mac users about Microsoft Office 6 for Mac, and throw them right back at Apple for iTunes for Windows.
I'm no physicist (it took me two goes to even spell the word!) but there is a difference between what you're talking about (reflection) and what the parent was talking about (refraction), no?
I think he meant exactly that - it looks like it is simply transparent glass, with no magnification/lens effect - there's no distortion, so they are probably not lenses, i.e. probably fake glasses.
Then again, on my examination, there appears to be very noticeable refraction on Steve's right cheek, but I've no idea if that would occur without a lens. IANAP, as I mentioned.:-)
As for being a trained studio photographer, I think even they would have a hard time negating the effect of a lens in a scene by using filters.
This exemplifies perfectly why I have a Nokia phone, and why the next phone I buy will be Nokia, unless something big changes.
Nokia's UI is simple and easy. For instance, I leave my phone keyboard locked all the time. When I get a call, the main 'OK' button (or whatever you want to call it) is labelled 'Answer'. So I press the 'Answer' button to answer the call. No need to unlock the keyboard.
As for forgetting the unlock combination, if you try to use the phone while it's locked, it tells you what buttons to press to unlock it, even with a picture to show you where they are, and what order to press them in, so your muscle memory can kick in.
Touches like this make Nokia's phones kick everyone else's into touch. I once had to use a Motorola Timeport on a trip to the US, which was so full of sucky features/UI, it was unbelievable. A friend of mine used a Motorola phone on a business trip, and he received 6 calls. He did not manage to answer any of them, due to the poor UI. (Before you tell me he's an idiot, he is not, and is well versed in many kinds of strange (and not so strange) UI).
I've not tried Sony Ericsson phones, but they scare me - because if the expertise that Sony bring to the party is UI, then heaven help us.
Even when other manufacturer's phones have some of the nice UI that Nokia has, they always seem to cock it up in some way, in the usual Cargo Cult UI Design way.
I had a catch-all enabled, because I like to use unique addresses to sign up for various websites, etc. when they demand email addresses. It's so I can tell who sells my email address.
However in the past few months, the domain spamming has become ridiculous - about 500 a day, so I turned it off, and now I only accept email from addresses I've actually used. Life in my mail client is much quieter now. Thunderbird/Gmail catch most spam, and so I actually only see a couple a day, I guess.
So anyway, whilst catch-all was once a useful tool, I'd agree that now it's just too much of a hassle.
(And if you're curious, very few services/sites I've used seem to sell my email address - maybe a couple. Maybe I don't use sites run by scumbags...perhaps).
Hmm...yeah, but how well do you think that disclaimer would fly prefixing the aforementioned hypothetical article on whether light skinned people are smarter than dark skinned people?
(Hey, look at that - I use a PC and I know long words too!)
I forgot my favourite site - royalmail.com. They recently released a new cackier version, which no longer supported people who have visual disabilities, screen readers etc. When challenged on this they claimed the content they provided was too complex for that.
Too complex. They're the bloody post office. They sell stamps, and they deliver things (if you're lucky). Maybe they also sell boxes to put things in.
Anyway, in the US, I wanted to know how much a stamp was to send a card to a friend in Israel. The friends I was staying with just told me to go to the US Postal Service website. I had my wifi iPaq, so I thought I'd try it on that for a laugh. It was cramped, but it worked, and I had the right stamp value in about a minute or so.
Just to amuse myself, I tried the same exercise on the royal mail site. After a lengthy delay, PocketIE put up an error saying it was unable to display a web site with that many frames - it could only display sites with up to 11 frames.
11! And I'm not so sure the limit wasn't actually 19. But having more than 11 frames on your front page is impressively stupid, even for the Royal Mail.
Oh, their latest thing is now you have to register with them to look up a postcode. A postcode! You know, those things they're always moaning that people don't use? Register? Way to raise the barrier! I wonder how many people get to the form, and think "Sod it!" and just chuck the letter/parcel in the postbox with no postcode.
And when I did actually register, what do I find? That they have never heard of anywhere called Wood Green in London. Good job it's not a bloody tube station or anything embarrassingly well known like that, eh?
The Odeon site has annoyed me for years. I literally used to not go to Odeon cinemas because I couldn't find out what was on. Doesn't work outside IE? Doesn't work that well inside IE, if you want the truth.
The Odeon website is one of the crappiest sites I've ever seen for such a high profile company. It's annoying, arrogant and just plain stupid.
The Dracos version was bloody great - I could bookmark my local cinema (imagine that!) and easily see what films were on. It had scrollbars that (brace yourself!) acted like normal scrollbars! Can you bear it? Not like the Odeon site where they have the usual 'hover to scroll' Flash nonsense. (What is it with bloody Flash designers who feel they have to code a new slightly different scrollbar control on every freaking site?!)
Now the accessible site is gone, I'm back to the braindead Odeon site.
Bottom line? I'll go to their cinemas way less. It's too much hassle.
Damn straight. I found your post because I was searching for 'API' to see if anyone else saw the parallel.
I am sick and tired of libraries, APIs, modules etc written by people I know and people I don't know that seem to have never considered a very simple question:
* What is the most likely use of this API?
Most APIs I have seen/can think of have maybe 1-3 usage patterns which make up the vast majority of use cases. It is so rare that anyone sits down and thinks "How can we design the API so that these cases result in the client having to write the smallest amount of code possible?"
One of the first things I do when designing an API (by which I include pretty much any reusable code interface) is to write some client code first. What sort of code would I expect to write if I were trying to use this library?
In some ways, you need to apply the same "user's mental model" process that is used in user interface. As the implementor, I know how this API works internally, but how much of that does the client care about, and how much of that stuff do they want to be forced into learning/using in order to use the API? The answer is usually very little (no matter how you might rail against 'lazy programmers' - ah, what a great bozo filter that phrase is:-)). People who design and implement interfaces should be forced to write some client code early on. Alternatively, watch someone try to code with their interface.
The 'hack' was to demonstrate the insecurity of certain machines at AltaVista. The lost data was recovered in a couple days. He'd pointed out the insecurity of these machines a number of times and nothing was done about it until after he accessed the machine.
You're right that he's not got much common sense...
Federal authorities allege that Laurent Chavet, a former AltaVista employee, illegally accessed the California company's computer system in March 2002 and June 2002, after he left AltaVista
Feel free to bitch about your employer's poor security. If you're a permanent employee, and confident of your position, hack in to show it can be done and report your findings to the powers that be. (I'd still recommend telling your boss you're going to try, though.)
But for the love of God, don't leave a company, then hack in to their systems just to show them that it can be done. You've left - your responsibility to their security has ended, and if you do it then, people will merely suspect your motives.
I wouldn't dream of hacking into an ex-employer's systems, no matter how benign or helpful I thought I was being, unless I had their express permission to try.
Maybe it's just me. And anyone else with some common sense.
For bonus points, did they do it in the style of Dilbert? i.e. when the Pointy Haired Boss announced that meeting donuts would henceforth only be provided for managers?
And concluded by saying something like, "It's not easy for me - I'm not even sure how I'm going to eat all these donuts!"
Reminds me of the story (think it was in a Dilbert book) about a company that was cutting costs and decided to stop supplying free sanitory towels/products in the women's restrooms. Various employees protested about this, but it was eventually dropped when a senior female employee (maybe a VP) pointed out in a matter-of-fact way that when she was negotiating with a company, she'd often go to the restrooms to check on the supply of sanitory towels just before the final round of negotiations. If there were no supplies, she knew the company was in trouble, and could press them hard for a better deal.
Apparently the idea was magically and silently dropped after this observation, and was never suggested again.
Which always makes me smile:)
Re:Difficulties for beginning programmers
on
Hacking Quartz
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· Score: 1
Again, I don't remember being disappointed that I couldn't produce games or apps like the ones I had on my PET right off the bat.
I was aware it would take time. Seemed quite obvious really. Anyone who thinks otherwise is going to be disappointed by a great many activities in life:)
Re:Difficulties for beginning programmers
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't buy this "it's much harder these days to start programming" bullshit. It's purely a perceived problem because apps are more complex these days, and there are lots of them. But don't expect to write complex stuff when you start.
Hell, the first program I 'wrote' on my Commodore PET was something that made a rocket fly up the screen over and over. It was very simple. You could accomplish the same these days on any machine by downloading gcc and writing a C program of frankly a very similar length and nature.
I don't actually remember my PET or my BBC Micro running ICQ or browsing the web, or doing any of these things that people seem to think they can just pick up a compiler and throw together in a few days.
Stuff has got more complicated, and people expect more features and UI. But to complain that it's hard to get started is just not true.
Hell, with the GUI toolkits around now, it's actually way easier to do some of these cool things. Think back to the early days of GUI programming. From my own experience, programming RISC OS GUI apps was horribly complex and difficult to get going with. On the other hand, I remember how cool I thought it was when I realised that the OS did stuff like those handy edit boxes for you - you didn't have to do anything!:)
Well, I for one am amused by the fact that after the posts by all the Linux fans saying "Win98 - worst accident ever! hahahahahaaaa!" there is a post from one Linux user who mistyped a command and vaped his hard drive when he was trying to copy some data onto a floppy, and someone else who accidentally installed a boot loader and disabled an OS.
Let's just say that again: accidentally installed a boot loader.
It might have needed 'special' hardware way back then - in the days of NuBus(?), but I know I personally used two PCI cards in a Mac about 4-5 years ago...and I think it was a pretty standard feature then.
Of course, Radius and people like that were doing all kinds of cool video hardware, some of which probably needed kooky gfx hardware - like the A4 portrait/landscape twisty monitor. It's scary sometimes to think about how long ago that was, and how it's still not really a mainstream feature (although it's getting there...if you can stand the bugs in the Windows drivers for the cards that support it - some nVidia cards do, I think).
Multi-monitor support? We're really reaching the bottom of the barrel now. Other OSs have also had that for yonks.
Yes, you could have it in 2000 with special cards with nicely written drivers etc. What changed in XP was that any cards, and any number of cards, AGP, PCI, etc can multimonitor. That was a new thing. I'm not 100% sure OSX has this today? I also believe OS9 didn't have it.
I don't normally bother with my computer is better than yours arguments, but I believe you're wrong. I first saw a Mac doing multi monitor stuff (one 12" monitor and one 19" monitor, iirc) in about 1989. Apple had that kind of display abstraction in the API from a very early stage. If I remember correctly, you stick in another PCI graphics card, and if MacOS supports it, you have another display.
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P3-800MHz, that's like complaining that your pocket calculator doesn't get enough FPS out of linux.
Yeah, funny how (apart from the latest insane games) everything else I want to run on this PC runs just fine. It runs XP, and isn't slow. I must have missed the meeting where profligacy with the user's computing resources was ok to the point of requiring them to buy a new PC just because the app has a small database and a big listbox in it.
Apple can't even code up a listbox that responds within a reasonable timescale to user events on a machine with a clock rate of 800,000,000 ticks per second, so I should spend £500 and upgrade?
Like I said, I use Ephpod instead. It's not dog slow like iTunes. It also requires zero pounds in hardware upgrades.
Assuming you're going to be running on a 2GHz+ machine just because your UI is so dog slow is bad engineering, plain and simple. No amount of waving new computer catalogues at me is going to change that fact.
It sticks out like a sore thumb because (battery longevity notwithstanding) the iPod is well engineered. Shipping nice hardware and backing it up with crappy software is the sort of thing Apple would sneer at PC companies for doing. Quite rightly, I would add - but the fact remains iTunes for Windows is in many ways poorly engineered.
After all apple hardware is -oh- so expensive and you could still purchase something from them.
So you're saying you know something about my bank account that I don't? How about I take that money you'd want me to spend on a new system and do something more useful with it? Like buy software, for instance. There is quite clearly no need for me to upgrade my PC at the moment - for my purposes it works just fine. When Half-Life 2 ships, then we'll talk.
I disagree, to update an iPod, you plug it in, do nothing and unplug it.
Until you have more music than will fit onto your iPod (like I have), and you have to do it manually.
And that's when the frankly appalling sluggishness of the Windows version of iTunes comes to the fore. It is fricking painful to move songs to your iPod.
I really love it when I click on a listbox on my 800MHz Pentium III PC, and it takes >1 second to select an item. Only iTunes for Windows can do this.
Best Windows application ever written, my arse.
(And don't, whatever you do, try resizing the iTunes window when in the iTMS. It's like they dispensed with the PCI bus for video transfer, and used a postal one instead or something.)
I use Ephpod to update my iPod - I only use iTunes for ripping. Life's too short to use the iTunes UI, really.
Basically, take all those whines from Mac users about Microsoft Office 6 for Mac, and throw them right back at Apple for iTunes for Windows.
Hey, how did you know it is actually Steve Jobs' hand? Did you fingerprint it? It could be anybody's! :-)
You could register to pre-order it. That's like the same thing.
I'm no physicist (it took me two goes to even spell the word!) but there is a difference between what you're talking about (reflection) and what the parent was talking about (refraction), no?
:-)
I think he meant exactly that - it looks like it is simply transparent glass, with no magnification/lens effect - there's no distortion, so they are probably not lenses, i.e. probably fake glasses.
Then again, on my examination, there appears to be very noticeable refraction on Steve's right cheek, but I've no idea if that would occur without a lens. IANAP, as I mentioned.
As for being a trained studio photographer, I think even they would have a hard time negating the effect of a lens in a scene by using filters.
Ah...the famous "No offence!" defence :-)
This exemplifies perfectly why I have a Nokia phone, and why the next phone I buy will be Nokia, unless something big changes.
Nokia's UI is simple and easy. For instance, I leave my phone keyboard locked all the time. When I get a call, the main 'OK' button (or whatever you want to call it) is labelled 'Answer'. So I press the 'Answer' button to answer the call. No need to unlock the keyboard.
As for forgetting the unlock combination, if you try to use the phone while it's locked, it tells you what buttons to press to unlock it, even with a picture to show you where they are, and what order to press them in, so your muscle memory can kick in.
Touches like this make Nokia's phones kick everyone else's into touch. I once had to use a Motorola Timeport on a trip to the US, which was so full of sucky features/UI, it was unbelievable. A friend of mine used a Motorola phone on a business trip, and he received 6 calls. He did not manage to answer any of them, due to the poor UI. (Before you tell me he's an idiot, he is not, and is well versed in many kinds of strange (and not so strange) UI).
I've not tried Sony Ericsson phones, but they scare me - because if the expertise that Sony bring to the party is UI, then heaven help us.
Even when other manufacturer's phones have some of the nice UI that Nokia has, they always seem to cock it up in some way, in the usual Cargo Cult UI Design way.
Well, as they say, the definition of an audiophile is someone who listens to the equipment and not the music.
I had a catch-all enabled, because I like to use unique addresses to sign up for various websites, etc. when they demand email addresses. It's so I can tell who sells my email address.
However in the past few months, the domain spamming has become ridiculous - about 500 a day, so I turned it off, and now I only accept email from addresses I've actually used. Life in my mail client is much quieter now. Thunderbird/Gmail catch most spam, and so I actually only see a couple a day, I guess.
So anyway, whilst catch-all was once a useful tool, I'd agree that now it's just too much of a hassle.
(And if you're curious, very few services/sites I've used seem to sell my email address - maybe a couple. Maybe I don't use sites run by scumbags...perhaps).
Hmm...yeah, but how well do you think that disclaimer would fly prefixing the aforementioned hypothetical article on whether light skinned people are smarter than dark skinned people?
(Hey, look at that - I use a PC and I know long words too!)
With the what now?
I forgot my favourite site - royalmail.com. They recently released a new cackier version, which no longer supported people who have visual disabilities, screen readers etc. When challenged on this they claimed the content they provided was too complex for that.
Too complex. They're the bloody post office. They sell stamps, and they deliver things (if you're lucky). Maybe they also sell boxes to put things in.
Anyway, in the US, I wanted to know how much a stamp was to send a card to a friend in Israel. The friends I was staying with just told me to go to the US Postal Service website. I had my wifi iPaq, so I thought I'd try it on that for a laugh. It was cramped, but it worked, and I had the right stamp value in about a minute or so.
Just to amuse myself, I tried the same exercise on the royal mail site. After a lengthy delay, PocketIE put up an error saying it was unable to display a web site with that many frames - it could only display sites with up to 11 frames.
11! And I'm not so sure the limit wasn't actually 19. But having more than 11 frames on your front page is impressively stupid, even for the Royal Mail.
Oh, their latest thing is now you have to register with them to look up a postcode. A postcode! You know, those things they're always moaning that people don't use? Register? Way to raise the barrier! I wonder how many people get to the form, and think "Sod it!" and just chuck the letter/parcel in the postbox with no postcode.
And when I did actually register, what do I find? That they have never heard of anywhere called Wood Green in London. Good job it's not a bloody tube station or anything embarrassingly well known like that, eh?
Ah, I feel better now.
Too many idiots. Not enough comets.
The Odeon site has annoyed me for years. I literally used to not go to Odeon cinemas because I couldn't find out what was on. Doesn't work outside IE? Doesn't work that well inside IE, if you want the truth.
The Odeon website is one of the crappiest sites I've ever seen for such a high profile company. It's annoying, arrogant and just plain stupid.
The Dracos version was bloody great - I could bookmark my local cinema (imagine that!) and easily see what films were on. It had scrollbars that (brace yourself!) acted like normal scrollbars! Can you bear it? Not like the Odeon site where they have the usual 'hover to scroll' Flash nonsense. (What is it with bloody Flash designers who feel they have to code a new slightly different scrollbar control on every freaking site?!)
Now the accessible site is gone, I'm back to the braindead Odeon site.
Bottom line? I'll go to their cinemas way less. It's too much hassle.
Great business sense.
Damn straight. I found your post because I was searching for 'API' to see if anyone else saw the parallel.
:-)). People who design and implement interfaces should be forced to write some client code early on. Alternatively, watch someone try to code with their interface.
I am sick and tired of libraries, APIs, modules etc written by people I know and people I don't know that seem to have never considered a very simple question:
* What is the most likely use of this API?
Most APIs I have seen/can think of have maybe 1-3 usage patterns which make up the vast majority of use cases. It is so rare that anyone sits down and thinks "How can we design the API so that these cases result in the client having to write the smallest amount of code possible?"
A classic example (there are many), is Brian Hook's famous Hell of Direct3D Initialisation.
One of the first things I do when designing an API (by which I include pretty much any reusable code interface) is to write some client code first. What sort of code would I expect to write if I were trying to use this library?
In some ways, you need to apply the same "user's mental model" process that is used in user interface. As the implementor, I know how this API works internally, but how much of that does the client care about, and how much of that stuff do they want to be forced into learning/using in order to use the API? The answer is usually very little (no matter how you might rail against 'lazy programmers' - ah, what a great bozo filter that phrase is
Only in a screwed up business. If those are actually requests that the person needs to deal with, I don't see how doing it via phone would be faster.
I suspect what you might mean by 'spam' is 'spam, but not including the internal business related spam'.
I'm willing to be educated otherwise though.
You're right that he's not got much common sense...
Feel free to bitch about your employer's poor security. If you're a permanent employee, and confident of your position, hack in to show it can be done and report your findings to the powers that be. (I'd still recommend telling your boss you're going to try, though.)
But for the love of God, don't leave a company, then hack in to their systems just to show them that it can be done. You've left - your responsibility to their security has ended, and if you do it then, people will merely suspect your motives.
I wouldn't dream of hacking into an ex-employer's systems, no matter how benign or helpful I thought I was being, unless I had their express permission to try.
Maybe it's just me. And anyone else with some common sense.
For bonus points, did they do it in the style of Dilbert? i.e. when the Pointy Haired Boss announced that meeting donuts would henceforth only be provided for managers?
And concluded by saying something like, "It's not easy for me - I'm not even sure how I'm going to eat all these donuts!"
Reminds me of the story (think it was in a Dilbert book) about a company that was cutting costs and decided to stop supplying free sanitory towels/products in the women's restrooms. Various employees protested about this, but it was eventually dropped when a senior female employee (maybe a VP) pointed out in a matter-of-fact way that when she was negotiating with a company, she'd often go to the restrooms to check on the supply of sanitory towels just before the final round of negotiations. If there were no supplies, she knew the company was in trouble, and could press them hard for a better deal.
:)
Apparently the idea was magically and silently dropped after this observation, and was never suggested again.
Which always makes me smile
Again, I don't remember being disappointed that I couldn't produce games or apps like the ones I had on my PET right off the bat.
:)
I was aware it would take time. Seemed quite obvious really. Anyone who thinks otherwise is going to be disappointed by a great many activities in life
I don't buy this "it's much harder these days to start programming" bullshit. It's purely a perceived problem because apps are more complex these days, and there are lots of them. But don't expect to write complex stuff when you start.
:)
Hell, the first program I 'wrote' on my Commodore PET was something that made a rocket fly up the screen over and over. It was very simple. You could accomplish the same these days on any machine by downloading gcc and writing a C program of frankly a very similar length and nature.
I don't actually remember my PET or my BBC Micro running ICQ or browsing the web, or doing any of these things that people seem to think they can just pick up a compiler and throw together in a few days.
Stuff has got more complicated, and people expect more features and UI. But to complain that it's hard to get started is just not true.
Hell, with the GUI toolkits around now, it's actually way easier to do some of these cool things. Think back to the early days of GUI programming. From my own experience, programming RISC OS GUI apps was horribly complex and difficult to get going with. On the other hand, I remember how cool I thought it was when I realised that the OS did stuff like those handy edit boxes for you - you didn't have to do anything!
Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've used fdisk or sys when I'm trying to copy some data onto my floppy drive... :-)
</sarcasm>
Well, I for one am amused by the fact that after the posts by all the Linux fans saying "Win98 - worst accident ever! hahahahahaaaa!" there is a post from one Linux user who mistyped a command and vaped his hard drive when he was trying to copy some data onto a floppy, and someone else who accidentally installed a boot loader and disabled an OS.
;-)
Let's just say that again: accidentally installed a boot loader.
But Win9X is the big accident, oh yes
It might have needed 'special' hardware way back then - in the days of NuBus(?), but I know I personally used two PCI cards in a Mac about 4-5 years ago...and I think it was a pretty standard feature then.
Of course, Radius and people like that were doing all kinds of cool video hardware, some of which probably needed kooky gfx hardware - like the A4 portrait/landscape twisty monitor. It's scary sometimes to think about how long ago that was, and how it's still not really a mainstream feature (although it's getting there...if you can stand the bugs in the Windows drivers for the cards that support it - some nVidia cards do, I think).
Yes, you could have it in 2000 with special cards with nicely written drivers etc. What changed in XP was that any cards, and any number of cards, AGP, PCI, etc can multimonitor. That was a new thing. I'm not 100% sure OSX has this today? I also believe OS9 didn't have it.
I don't normally bother with my computer is better than yours arguments, but I believe you're wrong. I first saw a Mac doing multi monitor stuff (one 12" monitor and one 19" monitor, iirc) in about 1989. Apple had that kind of display abstraction in the API from a very early stage. If I remember correctly, you stick in another PCI graphics card, and if MacOS supports it, you have another display.
Yes, ActiveX controls are OCX controls, which arrived on the OLE 2 boat, which was a year or two before Java, I think.
You remember the raging success of OLE 2, surely? :-)