Hi everybody!
Sorry for not coming back to you earlier, but the last weeks have
been a bit hectic with postgraduate exams and too many on-calls and
such. But here I am, rejuvenated after a day off and completely and
utterly baffled after that odd anticlimax that was his insanely great
Steveness' Expo keynote. There I was, sitting in my little cottage
overlooking the Loch, my two 64k ISDN channels desperately trying keep
up with the transmission of his Jobsiness trying to switch on a digital
camera (brilliant line: "Hey I need help: It's technical").
Just like everybody else in the known Mac universe I was hoping for
that revolutionary revamp of the 
aging iMacs
and what happened: nothing. Well, the well known G4s now look silver, but
everybody who had hoped for an processor speed increase above that
psychological oh-so-important gigahertz level (just to shut up the
grinning Wintel users) was bitterly disappointed.
All we know now after this presentation is that OS X slowly but
surely works as well as it should, that DVD recognition still takes too
long (brilliant: Jobs sitting in front of his Monitor and desperately
waiting for that window to pop up), and that Steve Jobs can't switch on
a digital camera (or was it a OS X flaw?). Oh yes, and Adobe and
Apple are still friends. Allegedly.
No wonder that people got angry. I certainly thought that I wasted
90 minutes of my time, and I was just sitting comfortably with a coffee
in front of my ancient iMac, not stuck in a stuffy conference hall,
shelling out bucks to see this sorry state of affairs.
Sure enough, the stock market reacted just as frustrated as the
Mac-parish, and Apple's stocks fell again. Sigh.
So, what are we going to do? Well, there's always waiting. Wait and
don't panic. The economic signs are pretty good: The CFO of Apple is
doing good work in a tough market in a electronic recession. The new
retail strategy of dedicated Appleshops will help to broaden the mass
appeal. I am sure that the iMac line will be revamped
for Christmas, so all the kids (and big ones, like me) will want the
shiny new iMac that would just fit brilliantly with the school's new
silver iBook. So, no
worries there.
Nevertheless I'll just wait a little bit longer before I buy
OS X (my Samsung laser printer is still not supported), and my
shiny new iBook that will hopefully pop through my letterbox really
soon (hey, it's supposed to be pretty slim) will continue running OS
9.1 for the time being. Amid all these optimistic soundings, the only
thing that is left for me to do is invite you all to the biggest and
best European Hacker Conference, HAL 2001 in Twente,
The Netherlands, where I will be holding a talk on the use and misuse
of medical information on the Internet. With some happy cheers from
Scotland, this is Dirk
Signing out. 
