Choice

Write a reasonably complicated web application and the testers only complain about missing links and faulty graphics. This is great because these problems are easy to solve, if problems at all. Worse is that it takes the time that was needed to find and fix the real bug you know there must be out there.

This week saw Apple switch to Intel and Jamie Zawinski switch to Apple. Both worry me a little. I agree with Robert Cringely that the leakage of MacOSX for Intel is probably a plot to bait more switchers. For me the worriest thought though is that my main platform will be mainstream one day. The decision where to switch my primary web server to became much more complex this week, but most probably it will be a Mini Mac anyway, but I am seriously doubting MacOSX server in favour of Yellow Dog Linux; read some discouraging statistics on Mach-BSD thread forking in MacOSX Server. Not that it will ever be a high performance server anyway, but give me a break: 5 times more overhead on threading? It certainly calls for hyperthreading ;-).

Lets hope all turns out well. I am pro choice, so it would be better if Apple would just have introduced a parallel line of hardware architecture, giving people the choice to, for example, keep on buying the PPC machines for high end machines, for example with added reliability features like parity memory and a service processor. Or run OSX on IBM’s rock solid RS/6000 and other POWER hardware, so I won't have to complain in every post about how much more trust we can put in a mainframe compared to the dinky machines we trust our data with nowadays.