🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2967@castle.ed.ac.uk> nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) writes:
>In article <16759@well.sf.ca.us>, dwt@well (dwt) writes:
>>My prediction is that that the CD-ROM Drive is the most popular
>>add-on purchase for a Serious Mac Developer in the next 12 months.
>>
>>So get real and get a CD-ROM Drive, or your only playing at
>>this game!
>
>But I WANT to just play at this game. I have a Mac at home, and I want
>to write applications for it. I paid close on $2000 for a Mac+, HD,
>THINK C and a couple of IM books. (and you don't want to know how much
>hassle I had finding the IM books.)  Are you telling me I should pay
>as much again just to find out how to program my own computer?

No, you don't have to do that. However, just like with a car, extras cost extra.
Air conditioning is *nice*, but you don't need it to drive your car. Something
like SpInside Mac is *nice*, but you don't need it to program your computer.
People have managed to scrape by without it for years now.

>Huge developers' fees are fine for commercial developers living
>in California with easy access to developer support and so on.
>Do Apple want to completely cut out the guy in Europe who bought a Mac
>for home use, and who wants to program it?

Anyone in America has the same sort of access to developer support that a
developer in California does. We take all of our questions electronically, so
it doesn't matter where you are. The exceptions to this are International
developers. We in Cupertino found ourselves being deluged by questions from all
over the world. We just couldn't handle them all without either sacrificing
quality or turn-around time. So the various International offices are taking 
up the slack by creating their own DTS departments. There is a EURO.DTS that
is the bottleneck for all European questions. There are also offices in Japan
Australia, the UK, France, Austria, Germany, etc.

I hope that not too many people consider $600 "huge". Considering what $600
gets you, and considering that it doesn't even begin to pay for our costs in
giving that support, and considering that other companies charge up to $9000
for similar support, I don't think it's too out of line. Of course, it DOES
cut out some people. I remember being in college, where $5 was food for 2 days,
and where the loose change I had in pocket was all the money I had in the 
world. But it's hard -- very hard -- to be everything for everybody. With
the situation right now, we can't support poor developers who can't afford
Apple Developer Support. On the other hand, if we opened up support to everyone,
the the big companies like Claris and MicroSoft feel slighted because we are
helping someone figure how to write an INIT that makes the the garbage can emit
funny noises when you empty it, rather than helping them on Excel 10.0 or
MacWrite III 5.2 v4. I don't think that we're kowtowing to big corporate
pressure, but we have to strive for some middle ground.

>I guess so. So much for the open software design, the Machine
>For The Rest Of Us, the Power To Be Our Best, and so on.

Depends on how you limit yourself in your own mind. Ray Lau wrote StuffIt
without any fancy aids. Look at where it got him now. The guy's...what...15?

-- 
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Keith Rollin  ---  Apple Computer, Inc.  ---  Developer Technical Support
INTERNET: keith@apple.com
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"Argue for your Apple, and sure enough, it's yours" - Keith Rollin, Contusions