The long weight
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Microsoft on October 18, 2007 at 10:34 am
The day after I left grammar school, in the summer before college, I started back at school but this time on the building site next door, constructing the school’s new extension. That job taught me a lot of useful lessons, such as how to drive a dumper truck, use F*** every third word and what page 3 girls look like.
Too-up
They assigned me to work with Jerry, the old bricklayer, who got me mixing his mortar, the sand and cement being measured in firkins. A firkin as used by Jerry is not a degree of quantity but of quality. For Jerry, everything had to be exactly right or he would reject the whole dumper load. As he would say, using the firkin’s binary measuring system, the mortar was either two firkin wet or two firkin dry.
The rest of the guys all tried various ways to embarrass the ‘college kid’. Not that I minded when yet another builder sent me for what they expected me to think was a ‘long weight’ or a ’sky hook’, I’d be in the tea hut, feet up, checking in their Sun’s to see how little clothing Sam Fox was wearing that day.
Conspicuous consumption
When Steve Jobs got onto the platform in his uniform black polo neck and jeans and announced Leopard was on its way, we never thought it would take Tiger so long to change its spots. Over the years I’ve had a background task in testing some of their operating systems. It’s still all dreadfully hush-hush with contracts signed in blood, promising to reveal no more. My one claim to fame has been suggesting they used types of wine as in-house code names for OS versions. I made sure I kept faith by consuming the same as I tested. It was a tough job but someone had to do it.
Needlesstosay, it has been a long wait for Mac OS X 10.5 so it had better be worth it when it arrives next Friday 26 October. Clever marketing too, getting it out on a cheap delivery day before a weekend. We can all mess up our Macs and dig ourselves out, ready to start work on Monday morning. Or, more likely, to hit the news sites looking for elusive drivers and work-arounds for reluctant, Leopard-prejudiced applications.
Preparations underway
We have started the installation preparations already, backing-up, clearing space and emptying hard disks so we can run Time Machine, the one feature we are looking forward to using. The rest of Leopard may be an improvement on ways of working we use already. Virtual desktops have been here, tried and discarded as ‘not for us’, the other new features are a definite ‘maybe, maybe not’ but as true Macolytes we’ll be installing it for sure.
But please, please, please, Apple, improve the Finder. We still choose to force quit it at times. Like when it gets its knickers in a twist if a server had the temerity to dismount without permission. Or emptying a well-stuffed trash basket slows everything to the speed of trickling treacle. Or copying a font library takes longer than Steve Ballmer to realise building Vista from the ground up is a big mistake. Maybe Microsoft should have built onto a version of Unix instead?
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