Firstly Apple announcing their results. They lost only $56 million. That's quite a lot of money, their revenues were only slightly up. Taken like that it seems the beloved fruit continues to rot. But now take it in context of what media predictions were - between $77 and $122 million. Well I guess it wasn't too bad then?

So if the media had predicted a loss of between $10 and $15 million it would have been a bad result? And if they'd predicted losses of $200 to $400 million it would have been a brilliant day? Now I know they research these quite carefully and their estimates are supposed to be relatively accurate but, come on, the media are trumpeting a hint of success at Apple while they still haven't returned to profitability. Let's wait to celebrate that.

The other thing that I have to say tickled my amusement centres was the "brown out" thanks to the InterNIC database failure. I had a breathless PR executive on the phone saying how when America goes online there's gonna be chaos. Well I went online and checked out the .com domains that came to mind, some pretty obscure ones not in my cache and I disabled my proxy server. No problem. Hmmmmm....

Now I'm sure there were some problems but why had this guy bothered calling? Novell BorderManager apparently would have detected that the Internet was down and continued serving pages that had recently been accessed. Ok, fair cop, sounds handy for regularly visited sites.

But why not solve the problem at the root? If we decentralised the InterNIC services so that one company's blunder didn't brown us all out life would be a lot easier. The likelihood of something that sensible happening? You guess.

© 1997 j-dom media. contact us.

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by Jason P. Kitcat [e-mail him]