This week we conclude our interview from TidBITS-304 with Peter Lewis <peter@mail.peter.com.au>, one of the best-known Macintosh Internet programmers.
[Peter] I'm not particularly fond of either. They seem to announce new things they are going to roll into the browser every week. The last thing I want in a Web client is for it to be larger than a full Microsoft Office install! I'm also not sure who the target audience is for Web versions of VRML, Acrobat, etc. Most people I know are limited to modem speeds. I don't even let it download pictures; it's just too slow, and even text is too slow most of the time. Maybe in a decade or so we'll all have ISDN or a T-1 to our houses, but in the meantime?
On top of that, I don't want to see any one company have too much control over the commercial use of the net, and Netscape would certainly love to control the whole game.
Personally, I use MacWeb. It's the most Mac-like browser available. It's getting a bit old these days, but I've heard there is a new version that's very cool, so I'm looking forward to that.
[Peter] Do you think that's limited to the U.S.A.? We already have our state government rushing to enact legislation before the federal government does (our state and federal governments are involved in a bitter feud).
For myself, I'm opposed to any form of censorship. On top of that, any legislation is obviously going to be unenforceable, and I'm very much against unenforceable legislation - it puts too much power in the police force to choose who they want to pick on.
[Peter] It's a joke. Of course I have a copy of MacPGP (I don't use it much, my communications are very rarely secret enough to require that kind of messing around). I saw a great signature the other day, it was a three line chunk of Perl code that did RSA encryption (although, naturally, the code looked like it had already been encrypted). The whole thing seems to be caused by amazing egotism on the part of the U.S. government - do they really think only U.S. mathematicians can write encryption algorithms? What's even more insane is the fact that it's legal to export the algorithm, just not the code, so they obviously think there are no programmers outside the U.S.A. Weird.
[Peter] The normal C argument goes like this: "Everyone else is using C, so therefore it must be good." Every Mac user should recognize that statement in a slightly different form, "Everyone else is using PCs, so therefore they must be good."
Basically, I continue to use Pascal because I'm more productive in it. I consider using Pascal to be a strategic advantage, doubly so when compared to C++. I've been reading a C++ book recently (know thy enemy), and every time I turn the page I see new ways to make tiny errors that are catastrophic and impossible to debug. I'm amazed that anyone can produce a working C++ program.
However, programming in Pascal does cause occasional problems. The Apple interfaces tend to be quite broken. I wanted to try out QuickDraw GX, and it took a year of new versions before they finally got one that I could hack to work with Pascal. By then I'd given up on GX. In some ways this is actually a good thing for me: I have way too many projects and not enough time to do them all, so not being able to work with GX or OpenDoc is helpful for limiting my options.
[Peter] I've never really had a favorite model. I quite like my current 7100/66 (the best price/performance ever - Apple gave it to me for free). I have a theory that people become fond of the models they own. I don't pine for a new machine, I want more disk space more than anything else at the moment.
[Peter] Absolutely. It would be interesting to survey the eleven people who won last year's award and see how their Macs affected their development. My 7100 is now the center point of my home office - without it I would probably have to have stayed working for Curtin for several more months before I could set up my office. I'm sure that's exactly what Apple had in mind when they made those awards.
[Peter] In future models I'd like to see more colours; grey and beige are so boring. Apple needs to sell computers the same way the car industry sells cars. Have you noticed how lots of Apple's new Macs have started looking like PCs (OK, not quite that bad). The Mac is just a silly box to hold the monitor. I like some of Apple's innovations in the CPUs with built-in monitors, but I prefer the monitor separate (since they're unlikely to build one-piece computers with large monitors). Apple should have more fun with their designs - Macs are fun to use, they should be fun to look at.
[Peter] From what I've seen, the clones are even more boring, most of them look like PCs. Maybe in a few years when (if?) Apple loosens up a bit on their clone deals we'll see some small companies producing designer Macs.
I can't buy a clone Mac yet, since they haven't set up in Australia as far as I know. I'd also be concerned about their ability to support remote locations like Perth at this early stage. I think I'll wait and let them build up some infrastructure first. That said, I had the opportunity to visit the Power Computing folks in Austin earlier this year. They seem to be well in control of the situation, and very much into providing good service and value for money. I recently asked several smart people about their Power Computing machines, and they all said that the machines were as good as Apple's. So if you live a bit closer to the action than I do, I think you should definitely look in to it and compare the prices.
[Peter] Well, my personal Internet connection is a 28.8 Kbps modem, permanently connected to the Western Australian hub. I have an Ethernet running around my house, and a 386 running Linux as my Ethernet-to-PPP gateway (another interesting project that might have been funded by higher shareware response is a Mac-based Ethernet-to-PPP router).
Of course, it doesn't much help having a 28.8 Kbps link while Australia's international link is completely saturated. Right now it's running at 20 bytes/second, which is pretty painful.
[Peter] The Australian backbone charges at a rate of about U.S. $0.70 per megabyte. I compared that against an international phone call at 28.8 Kbps, which comes out around $2 per megabyte. So it's about three times more expensive, but on the other hand, a 1 MB file might take six minutes instead of 14 hours. I've been thinking of going back to the bad old days of using an email-to-FTP gateway to retrieve files across the link. Fortunately most FTP sites are mirrored in Australia so it's not an impossible situation, and eventually Telstra will get around to improving the situation.
[Several people wrote in last week to point out the URL we published last week for Peter's Web site was broken (the FTP URL worked just fine). Problems with that server seem to have been resolved and both links are currently working correctly. -Geoff]
ftp://ftp.share.com/pub/peterlewis/
http://www.share.com/peterlewis/