The Careers section spotlights David Mindell, an associate professor of the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT. He's taken his engineering degree into a rather unusual job: exploring undersea shipwrecks. Specializing in small undersea preprogrammed robots, it's a challenging job that allows him to work with a topic that interests him, how engineering has changed throughout history. I like the profiles since I like reading about other people.

There's a review of Mac OS X which I didn't like. First it knocks cooperative multitasking and points to the superiority of preemptive multitasking. To me they're just two different ways of doing things. With cooperative you can write applications that hog the processor, but sometimes you want that. Preemptive has a higher overhead than cooperative, but it's much harder to freeze the whole system. With both though, it really comes down to the apps that you're using. Use a stable set of applications and you won't have any problems with either cooperative or preemptive multitasking systems.

Then he knocks the memory management scheme of older Mac OSes. Again, two different philosophies. I can fine tune the memory partitions of Mac OS 9 apps, which I can't do with Mac OS X. Not necessarily a good thing, but very power user friendly. With Mac OS X I can't specify that an application should not use Virtual Memory at all.

He really doesn't like the multiple Mac OS X environments: Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, and Java. They're inconsistent and confusing. And Classic especially has many problems. Err, every major system upgrade has legacy software problems, Mac OS X is not unusual in this regard. As I've said before, I don't use Classic at all for the last four or five months and I haven't missed it.

Finally, the reviewer really doesn't appreciate Aqua. The Dock is unintuitive and 128 x 128 icons are pointless. He may be right about the dock. I don't use it as my all-in-one application launcher, I use it much like the tasks tear-off menu in Mac OS 9. I don't think big icons are bad, they're not that confusing when you make them small (like in the Mac OS 9 task menu again). Look at the Apple icons, beautiful whether small or large. Aqua is of course great, even if it is a bit processor heavy. I really like being able to save any document as a PDF file

I don't deny that the problems he sees are problems to him. Everyone has their own concepts of what they want and what they'll accept. I want to believe in Apple and Mac OS X so I overlook the flaws or I see that they're not flaws at all but different design decisions. One of the complaints with Mac OS X 10.1 is that the DVD player doesn't work with anything older than the more recent models. Hey, I haven't used the DVD player since I installed Mac OS X and I don't really miss it, though it will be nice to be able to play the DVDs that I bought and never had a chance to see.

Finally, Spectrum ends with an article by Robert W Lucky, "The Precious Radio Spectrum". It's funny that the radio spectrum used to be free and then government started subdividing it for different purposes to today where governments sell a few precious bits of spectrum for billions. It's something that always been there and basically free for all intents and purposes and it's only by government fiat that they can sell it...

So New York City Mayor Giuliani has a plan for remaining mayor for a couple of months in 2002. He doesn't want to give up power on January 1st even though NYC has a term limit law, citing that it would be more comfortable to the citizens of New York if he remained in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack. Puh-leeze! It would be just as comforting if Giuliani stressed more that the laws have to be obeyed and that he's lending his full support to whomever the new mayor is. If he fights it, especially in public like this, of course it'll be a bad transition. Just goes to show that term limits are a good idea...