Couldn't be farther from the truth. Apple's development process revolves around their bug tracker, to an extent that I haven't seen anywhere else. If it isn't in Radar, it didn't happen.
In some circumstance, when you're healthy, you could comparison shop.
Except: you can't. Try to find out how much a major medical procedure will cost you -- if you can find anyone who gives you any numbers at all, you'll be lucky if that's what you actually get charged. (And then try to find out how much your insurance, if you have any, will pay for! And then try to complain when the final bill is different!)
This made me laugh. The words "Apple II" and "graphics chipset" don't belong in the same sentence! The Apple II graphics were a fantastic, and fantastically weird, low-hardware hack.
How soon people forget! OS X had a software-based compositor until 10.2 -- that's when "Quartz Extreme" was introduced. Pretty sure the OpenGL path was planned the whole time, but the GL drivers were not nearly stable enough to use for such a crucial piece of the system.
In practice, CGLayer is not some pixie dust that magically makes your drawing fast. It helps only in a specific instance: when you are drawing repeated instances of the same content, into the same context. Otherwise, it ends up being extra complication for no benefit.
(Note that CGLayer is not related to CALayer or CGTransparencyLayer -- they are absolutely separate things. CALayers are incredibly useful in practice; CGLayer was kind of a dead end.)
That's a bit oversimplified. The ACT approach is that goals can be useful things, in moderation, when they're serving your values. But if you get too caught up in the outcome associated with the goal -- whether you succeed or fail, whether anyone recognizes or not -- then you're likely to have problems.
For instance:
"My company failed. This is a disaster. I'm such a loser."
"We beat our sales target by 200%! We're geniuses!"
"After months of work, we finally shipped. Now I feel empty and have no enthusiasm for what's next. Why aren't I happy?"
(Of course those are oversimplified too, but you get the idea.)
No idea why this reminded you of DO -- as you say, it's a totally different thing.
DO still works in OS X. Frankly, it's a neat hack, but it's prohibitively difficult to build anything robust on top of it:
- Error handling is difficult -- what happens when the other side goes down in the middle of your method call? If you have to add extra exception and timeout handling everywhere, that dwarfs the small convenience of making the dispatch code easy.
- Hard to make it secure.
- It's impossible to interoperate with anything else -- what happens when you want to talk to your DO-based server using Java or Windows or Linux?
See "A Note On Distributed Computing" from 1994 for more caveats on this whole approach:
The problem is: Most people don't do that, especially new computer users. (Or, these days, people who are used to web apps, which don't use command-S.)
They don't learn until they've been burned, probably quite badly. If the computer doesn't HAVE to burn them in the first place, why should it?
Apple just introduced a new monospaced typeface in 10.6, Menlo. (It's the default in Terminal and Xcode.) Seems unlikely they'd want to bother changing it again so soon.
Inertia. 20 years ago, at the start of college, I got a free checking account at a smallish local bank. Which got bought by a bigger regional bank, which got bought by another bank, which merged into BofA. I had no particular reason to switch until BofA started charging ridiculous fees.
Am I just in the wrong program at the wrong school at the wrong time?
Yes. Maybe the wrong program, definitely the wrong school. (You have little choice about the time, so forget about it.)
Suggestion: Be the person you want to meet. The only person you can control is yourself, and even that ain't easy. The other students are idiots right now? Well, give them a chance to learn.
The rest is just a chaotic process; maybe you meet people that you click with, maybe you don't, maybe it comes easily, maybe it doesn't. If you get lucky, it probably won't come from a direction you expected, so stay open to all the opportunities you can find. Do what you can to improve your odds, in the meantime.
Couldn't be farther from the truth. Apple's development process revolves around their bug tracker, to an extent that I haven't seen anywhere else. If it isn't in Radar, it didn't happen.