So, MacOS X 10.4 is out. Sort of. Apple has been playing up for ages that the release would be Friday, April 29th.
But the product isn't actually for sale. See, you can't buy it before 6PM. Why? No reason. Steve Jobs just gets a big chubby exercising control over things. The boxes are presumably already in stores, the product just isn't available until later because, well, it makes Steve happy when people have to wait on his pleasure.
What a dweeb. Net result is, my errand-running trip to the mall was unproductive, and I feel like Apple wasted half an hour of my time by making a big deal about a release date when the product wasn't really going to be available. So, I'll stick with my developer pre-release versions a while longer.
Gotta admire any company whose business model includes "and then we just refuse to sell stuff to people out of pure spite".
A journalist commented on my third AltiVec article, saying that, for instance:
Tacking on to this theory, IBM then go on to demonstrate how you can make the spinning beach-ball of death (the 'system busy, wait a couple of minutes' OSX annoyance) more processor friendly by converting RGB pixel values. The page might as well be Microsoft showing how to make the BSOD process more memory efficient.
Read the whole article on The Inquirer's web site.
Happy April Fools', everyone.
BTW, the technical content is basically sound; all that's wrong is that the examples are more contrived than people are used to.