Space Ninja

So I’m at the computer store.

It’s 8:40 AM.

Saturday.

I’m behind the service couner eating Snak Pak Cheezy Bitz Peanut Butter Crackers.

Wearing an “X … The Future Is Here” T-shirt.

There are like 50 people in this small store milling around for the OS TEN RELEASE .

Floor manager has marked a printer-paper box as a ballot receptacle for the “Win A Copy Of Os X” drawing. He used not just a permanent, but an ultra-permanent marker. I can feel my face, my eyes and lips, burning from the toluene vapors. Neurons sloughing off my medulla and puddling around my brainstem.

So I’m coming live to you from the OS Ten release and I must say I feel sorry for all these people who got up at got knows what hour to queue up in front of the store at 7:45, eighteen deep, to come look at Ten. I mean, we should at least have some carnival clowns or a ferris wheel in here to liven things up, I mean at least a monkey grinder, come on man. OOH LOOK THE “DOCK” and “AQUA” ! THE ICONS RESEMBLE POLISHED GEMS!

My boss just told me he thought it was a bust. We weren’t selling very many copies. He wouldn’t buy OS Ten. It sucks, now. It’ll be great in six months. Shrug. He walked away. Then a gum wrapper came flying through the air, caromed off my thigh and into the trash can. “Ha! Bank shot off the knee!”

My coworker fears the “weenies” who are going to be bringing their sick computers in to us, having hosed the BSD-based installations of MacOS through their insistence on tinkering with THAT WHICH THEY UNDERSTAND NOT. The Terminal (a command-line interface to OS ten’s BSD foundation) provides infinite ways for them to mess up their systems.

With MacOS 9 or earlier, you could fix almost any problem with one of three methods short of a clean install:
1 - reinstall part of the software
2 - uninstall part of the software
3 - run a disk-checking utility

With 10, excuse me, X, it’s going to be like, “Oh you’ve got malformed XML in your mtab which is causing your Zip disk to emit that horrible clicking noise. You need to renice your nohups to 0xfdeadbeef” and blood will start gushing from the customer’s ears. “What?? What are you talking about, you horrible technical person? I can’t understand you!!” Whereas before, we could just say, “reinstall the Zip software.” Well, I hope I’m wrong and you can still deal with things at that high level of installers and control panels, because otherwise the answer to every question is going to be, “bring it in. We’ll fix it.”

Whew… the very thought of building a consumer OS on BSD… it’s like some horror movie where a band of occultists form a corporation and start selling people demon powered cars.. only the customers don’t understand the black creeping power that lurks within their engine compartment and due to their throwing the salt over the wrong shoulder it bursts out one day in tentacular horror and devours them.

So yeah, I’d wait six months.