(c) 1998 Andrew C. Stone

Readers of Stone's Throw are not shy and I'm constantly flooded with excellent ideas, information and often times, corrections! The beauty of this column is that it is ostensibly an editorial, which means I can be wrong. Thinking you are right all the time is a bad "design pattern" because you never really learn anything new with that sort of attitude. So I appreciate your input, keep it coming.

What good is a bully pulpit if you can't invite your readers to step up? Here's some feedback that I thought would be interesting to the entire community:

To: andrew@stone.com
Subject: Carbon Symbolism

After reading your article on the significance of the X in Mac OS X, I was
inspired to jot down a few notes about Carbon:

Carbon is an element, a fundamental building block of matter. Though
it's subatomic constituent parts are not unique, it has its own
identity and cannot be made simpler by ordinary means. Properly
assembled carbon is quite versatile. Some carbon allotropes include:
diamonds which are hard and transparent, graphite which is soft,
slippery, and opaque, and buckyballs which have amazing properties that
mankind has only recently begun to tap the potential of.

We bleed six protons.

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To: andrew@stone.com
Subject: Funny: conjures up images

Your X column mentions playing in a 'Yellow Sand' box. Is that anything
like yellow snow? If so, I don't think that I want to play in it.
Ha Ha

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To: andrew@stone.com
Subject: First Steps to Learning Yellow Box

Hi

Another possibility is to get Linux and GNUStep. With Linux you have a very good Objective-C compiler, and GNUStep is an OpenStep clone with (very early) Yellow Box additions.

Bye.

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Here's an idea for Apple marketing:

To: andrew@stone.com
Subject: Alternative to free Rhapsody

If Apple won't give away Rhapsody, here is an alternative that might
work well: sell Rhapsody and Allegro/8.5 TOGETHER (for the price of
MacOS 8.5 alone). This would increase the user base for some of the new
features due in MacOS X, especially Yellow Box. It would also encourage
more people to try Rhapsody as a server or development platform.

Assuming the Blue Box will be up to the level of the latest MacOS,
anyone planning to upgrade to 8.5's features would have the option of
doing so via Rhapsody. Rhapsody and 8.5 could even ship on a single CD.
I don't think many people would pay separately for 8.5 and Rhapsody
anyway, especially with the two merging in the future. People who wanted
to install the standard MacOS 8.5 could ignore the Rhapsody option, but
would still have the CD and could choose to install Rhapsody at any
time.

Developers would be encouraged to know that well in advance of MacOS X,
a lot of people have Rhapsody/Yellow Box compatibility--even if they
haven't yet chosen to install it.


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Finally, I had to include this, since I receive amazingly few flames, this one's a beauty and an indication of misfiring synapses on the behalf of its author:

To: <andrew@stone.com>
Subject: The War is over?

You mac cats are really into the good drugs.

The OS war is over - and the mother of all vaporware wins? Rhapsody, the ultimate vaporware OS that apple has been trying to build under various names for over 4 years, and apple's pathetic "me-too" cross between Java and ActiveX is the big winner? Neither of the big winners actually exists beyond the chemically altered minds of MacHeads.  There is no way you could've written that piece with a straight face.

Party on dudes,
Openminded Microsoft User