Your Morning Marmalade

What side do you put your marmalade on?

Get It Try It

Looking across the kitchen table to see two key articles.

http://archive.is/ZCxjK

That's from Doctor Bob. Bob 'Dr Mac' LeVitus. Doctor Bob who owns a Fender strat with a maple fretboard.

Doctor Bob says you shouldn't upgrade to Catalina. Doctor Bob, if anyone, should know.

But what's even more interesting is what he cites as reasons to say 'Catalina no'.

'Finder in Catalina seems fragile. Mine crashes at least once a day, and as often as not, I can't force it to relaunch.'

Think about that for a moment. Let that really sink in.

Finder, like it or not, and most of our clients disable the sorry thing as soon as they get our software, is the pivotal piece of application code on that system. It used to be something else back in the days of NeXT (which didn't have a Finder, wow). But, when you cut and slash out the NeXT Workspace, what do you have left? So there it is on your Dock, whether you like it or not. It's central. It's pivotal.

In the beginning - at every boot, every login - was Finder.

And it crashes? At least once a day? And it won't relaunch?

Imagine if Sun Microsystems had done that. Imagine if IBM had.

But they didn't. And they wouldn't. Apple did.

Then there's this.

macOS developers great and tiny are now totally dependent on Apple for release of their software. Whether they give Apple a share of their revenues by selling through its App Store, or distribute independently and have to notarise their products, Apple has to approve that release one way or the other. Apple's Notary Service is therefore critical to a great many macOS developers.

Does that sound familiar?

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology where each worker may bloom secure from the pests purveying contradictory and confusing truths. Our unification of thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause! Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.

We shall prevail.

YMMV, and the future's really ours to see, but, now that Catalina is within everyone's sight and positions are locked for the time being, pundits are in agreement. It's a bluff.

Which of course was suspected all along.

But that's not the hard part. The hard part is the realisation that Apple's ultimate goal is - and has always been - precisely as described above: making everybody totally dependent on them. It's tantamount to antitrust. It is antitrust. Repressive. Totalitarian.

Totally Apple.

These are not radical thoughts. Paul Graham's been voicing them for over ten years.

We've been selling software online for over twenty years. We started a bit before NeXT came to Cupertino to bail out Apple. We have a long and egregious client list. We've never sold out.

We were once advised, by a client within the Pentagon, to, in effect, stop telling the truth about OS vendors. (No, not Apple that time.) No way. No compromise. We tell the truth. For our clients, present and future. For those who need the truth. For those who have a right to it.

No one but no one gets to tamper with our products. No one. Distributors have tried - they're immediately cut off. Our products come from our own servers, they're not tampered with by any third party, and we provide extensive MD-files so clients can verify their integrity.

No one gets past that. No one.

If you still don't trust us? Fine. Go somewhere else. Try Apple's Mac App Store. (Don't laugh. Please.) But that's our policy, and our policy is not about to change, especially for a company like Apple.

Seen this? Click it.

% xattr -csrv ~/Downloads

That's all you need. All you need to rid yourself of the Apple yoke. Be so certain that their 'XA mania' will continue - for that we have several utilities available - but they can't catch you in that trap again.

Extended attributes were heralded when they arrived, back in the days of 10.4 Tiger, as they meant that resource forks finally got run out of Dodge. XAs can be a good thing, but any technology can be perverted for evil.

Research into Apple's OS shows that their supposed 'protections' (ahem) do not protect anywhere as well as they'd have you believe. But that's not their intent. Their intent is to get you - and no more than most of you, believe it or not - to swallow it.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that Apple has become - perhaps has always been - precisely what they professed to be against.

Anya Major understands full well what that means.

Evil begets stupidity.
 - Paul Graham
The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don't have to work for a company they have qualms about.
 - Paul Graham
Programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple continues to maltreat them. They're like someone stuck in an abusive relationship.
 - Paul Graham
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally; it's IBM. IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.
 - Paul Graham
When you look at the famous 1984 ad now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer. In fact, if you read the dictator's speech it sounds uncannily like a prophecy of the App Store.
 - Paul Graham
The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.
 - Paul Graham
To all those who replied to my first piece I have this to say: Steve Wozniak is one of those I respect greatly but I don't think he ever meant to create a community of snobs around the computer he designed. He is one of the better human beings who were part of the technology revolution that has taken place over the last 30 years. The current batch of Apple users - at least most of the sample I've been exposed to - are an embarrassment to a gentleman like him.
 - Sam Varghese

About Rixstep

Stockholm/London-based Rixstep are a constellation of programmers and support staff from Radsoft Laboratories who tired of Windows vulnerabilities, Linux driver issues, and cursing x86 hardware all day long. Rixstep have many years of experience behind their efforts, with teaching and consulting credentials from the likes of British Aerospace, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Lloyds TSB, SAAB Defence Systems, British Broadcasting Corporation, Barclays Bank, IBM, Microsoft, and Sony/Ericsson.

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