There might already be an article at this site called 'Suicide Fanboys'. Whatever. If that's the case, then this is another one. Penned by me this time. Brendon C Bleebwart.
The middle initial 'C', BTW, is just that. There's no name - just an initial. C. My father wanted to call me 'The New Bartholomew', as his first-born already was a 'Bartholomew', but my mum nixed the idea: 'it's too long'.
So my father suggested 'NB' for 'The New Bartholomew', but mum nixed that too. She said it was still too long.
So my father suggested 'C', and my mum was OK with that.
I guess their next child would have been given the middle initial 'D', but they'd concluded that I was the last offspring they'd procreate. They said I'd be everything they needed, and they were right.
Anyway.
I'm watching those Apple Suicide Fanboys go off the cliff. They're really nuts. Their Queen Bee, Tim 'Mother Theresa' Cook, has just been exposed as the nuttiest of them all - and they just ignore it! All their local applications, be they on an iPhone or a watch or an iPad or a Mac, HAVE TO PHONE HOME to get approval before launching. Let that sink in for a moment. Then, once you feel it's sunk in, treat it like drip coffee - let it sink down through again. Until it's really really there and is not about to go away.
Of course there's a way around this. It's called 'Rixstep'.
Rixstep
Rixstep were great Apple pimps in the early 'innocent' days. They saw Apple as the Great White Hope. Apple - of all incongruous organisations - were going to lead homo sapiens out of the darkness, away from Microsoft and into the light of FOSS.
Don't laugh - it was their best bet. This can seem silly in retrospect - but only if that rear view mirror of yours is dusty and grimy. Apple were the darlings of the resistance.
Apple: putting the 'homo' back in 'sapiens'...
Of course we know today that this was deliberate deception. Diabolical. Apple's marketing department: they're ruthless. Destroyers of Worlds®.
Apple marketing set the course when Steve Jobs returned to Cupertino at the end of 1996. Steve had a few friends there and he followed things closely. Gil Amelio had been asked to step down from the board to save the sinking ship. He'd engaged in discussions with the Be people. They wanted USD 250 million for their BeOS. Too much money, according to Amelio, who then ended up buying the NeXT OS from Steve Jobs for USD 429 million. Makes sense, right?
The great attraction with NeXT was that it was designed to run on ANY platform. The internal application architecture? Name.app/Contents/MacOS? There was no 'MacOS' any longer, but can you conceive of a Name.app/Contents/Windows?
Yup. The world's first open source project, GNUstep, was designed as an 'add-on' to existing operating systems. So was NeXT. Which, in a subsequent iteration, became known as OPENSTEP and was licensed to Sun Microsystems. The NeXT legacy included a jewel box full to the brim with precious things. Just have a look. Tim Berners-Lee invented the fucking Web on one.
All that stuff ran on MICROSOFT WINDOWS. Where else? And WHY? Because it was on Windows one could pluck the big profits, it was with Windows one could justify the investment.
Apple marketing knew this. Nothing was said up front about NeXT cross-platform compatibility after the 'merger' in 1996. Not. A. Word. The Nexties and the fanboys waited in hushed silence for word from Steve and his Apple marketing high priests. They heard nothing. They assumed the best. They hoped for the best.
Apple marketing never intended to support cross-platform compatibility. Apple traditionally treat their indy developers like shit. This is the case since long before the NeXT era. Like shit. What's there to look different today? Nothing.
Rixstep discovered this tragedy in the annals of an OCD fanboy and published it. The whole world of Apple fandom went apples. Brent Simmons and John Gruber peed in their Pampers. Rixstep is BAAAD. And so forth. Here you have a clear-cut case of an IT company intentionally deceiving and dicking over their Apple Suicide Fanboys - and the fanboys stick with their oppressors rather than welcome the truth.
Anyone remember Jonestown?
No, seriously. Do you remember? Brainwashed fucks with a politician flying down to their location to save them and they scheme to assassinate the politician? That one ended well. Even casual students of history have a vague recollection. Kool-Aid, or Flavor-Aid actually. GRAPE FLAVOUR. They all drank it. Yum.
'On 18 Nov 1978 a mass suicide took place in Jonestown in South America. A total of 909 people died out of which nearly a quarter were children who were poisoned by their own parents.'
'This feature-length docudrama tracks the final build-up to a horrific doomsday: the infamous mass murder and suicides of Jim Jones' cult followers in the jungles of Guyana, where over 900 men, women and children died on November 18th, 1978.'
Studying Unix in the world of Apple and their Apple Suicide Fanboys is like doing an advanced degree in abnormal psychology. They're fucked up people, seriously fucked up, as in they are SERIOUSLY MENTALLY DISTURBED, and their world has little to do with Comp Sci. They actually hate Comp Sci. That's the whole point.
They're fully opposed to masculine pursuits (eg mathematics and computer science). They embraced the Mac because Guy Kawasaki, himself a technophobe, told them to. The Mac must not be intimidating. One program and one folder to put it in: that's the fanboy idea! Keep it simple like their old 'System 7'. No matter that the sorry piece of faeces, even in its final iteration 9.2.2 at the end of the last millennium, would reliably CRASH OVERNIGHT WHILST DOING NOTHING AT ALL.
Think about it. You have a system, a system that wants to be taken seriously, that runs so much SHIT in the background, EVEN WITH COOPERATIVE MULTITASKING, that, if you leave the thing to its own devices AND DO NOTHING AT ALL, IT CRASHES ALL BY ITSELF.
Don't take my word for it. That turkey-basted fanboy John Siracusa, who used to write tweenie pimp-pieces for Apple and Ars, admitted it in one of his unnecessary columns.
Siracusa's also the one who admitted, early on, that Apple were making a mess of beautiful NeXT code. But keep destroying that code, Siracusa continued. 'Keep up the good fight.' (He actually wrote that.)
The 'good fight'? The good fight for what, you stick insect?
Nexties ran management in Cupertino for a while. Steve's friends from Redwood City. But they never rooted out the fanboys. Steve's two closest allies, both from NeXT, Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian, QUIT ON THE SAME DAY so they'd not be part of Apple's anniversary celebrations. The significance was there, broadcast far and wide. The suck-up fanboy media completely did a blackout. Not. A. Mention.
The edge of the cliff is right ahead, dear fanboys. It's in sight now.
Keep up the good fight.
- BCB 2020-11-19 Oyster Bay
Brendon C Bleebwart is an event promoter living in Jersey.
'A number of years ago we made what looks today like a fatal mistake. We knew Windows was dead and we knew Unix was the answer but we perceived Apple as leading the vanguard of Unix and open source. We were wrong.' - Rixstep, 'Suicide Fanboys', 6 October 2007
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.
Rixstep and Radsoft products are or have been in use by Sweden's Royal Mail, Sony/Ericsson, the US Department of Defense, the offices of the US Supreme Court, the Government of Western Australia, the German Federal Police, Verizon Wireless, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Microsoft Corporation, the New York Times, Apple Inc, Oxford University, and hundreds of research institutes around the globe. See here.