Unhelpful

Five years ago, the Pentium 166Mhz was king - top of the line - and EDO RAM was its snivelling bastard syncophant. Today’s top machines exceed the 1 Gigahertz mark, and yet staple products like Microsoft Word, Quicktime, and of course Windows itself are just as prone to general flights of idiocy as they always were. Why is it that a six-times increase in speed never seems to result in a computer that performs six times as well?

Software and lazy programmers. Not to belabor the point, but years ago (say, 1985) efficient programming - good, tight code - was in the vogue. Home computers being the anemic little beasts they were at the time helped. Of course, so did market homogeny - what worked well on one Commodore 64 was going to work well on every Commodore 64: the low-end was the base machine, a known factor.

By the end of the Commodore 64’s lifespan, the base C64 was doing things that its own designers would have never believed possible when they created it in the first place. That’s what intimate familiarity and a stable platform gets you.

In 1987, if you wanted a C64 game to have better graphics than the competition, you had to push the machine past its limits, to manhandle the copper and blitter routines, to do things with sprites that simply weren’t in the Programmers’ Reference Manual.

In 2001, if you want a PC game to have better graphics than the competition, you just wait for the next generation of videocards to come out. Optimization is made increasingly difficult by the fact that there isn’t a stable “known” platform to develop on; almost every user’s computer will be different, some rather outlandishly so…

…but efficient coding isn’t just harder, it’s fucking unpopular. Why take a few extra months developing efficient code when you can just put it out when it “works” despite the memory leak, the bloated libraries that mostly go unused, and the interface graphics that take up more space than the source code of the main program loop?

So, having been kicked in the ass yet again by the “upgrade your computer for the same functionality as you’ve had for the last four years” bug, I wrote the following love letter via web-form to Apple Computer about their latest brainchild, Quicktime Five Public Beta 2.

So much for “Think Different”…

When Quicktime was updated from QT3 to QT4, I found QT4 unable to play movies well that QT3 played just fine. I’m having a similar experience from QT4 to QT5.

News flash: We don’t all have 500MHZ-1GHZ computers. The VERY SAME FILE that the older version played well should play equally well in the new version, otherwise you should be getting a participation fee from Intel for helping them sell faster and faster CPUs.

If I could, I’d go back to QT3 in a second. It worked with no excuses. Thanks for removing it.

And to think, I’m one of those people more often defending Apple against the rabid hoardes of IRQ, DMA and registry-loving Wintel partisans than not.