| Thursday, June 6, 2002 |
03:29 - Multilingual Fun
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"Brian! You took Spanish in high school, right?"
It was about 5:00 PM, and Richard was bearing down on my cubicle with that hopeful grin and desperate eyes of a man who has to call back a customer in Spain to tell him that he's ready to load the new upgraded software image onto his device and reboot it remotely, and whose only Spanish-speaking customer-ops guy had just gone home for the day.
"Uh... yeah...."
It's been seven or eight years since I've used Spanish in any practical context. I've never had the occasion, other than to listen to internal conversation of the people working at Taco Bell and to thank them when I hear them putting the proper funky decals on my complicated household-wide order. "Gracias!" I'd say, and they'd spin around, utterly startled that I could understand them and that I was paying attention.
So I was recruited to call up this guy in Spain, who spoke no English, and tell him "Hi-- we're ready to reboot the unit now and install the new image." Ya estamos listos para... er... umm.... What's "reboot" in Spanish?
Richard had the bright idea of switching one of our computers to Spanish and looking in the menus. He grabbed my Windows box and started -- well... he started out looking very purposeful and confident, but he was soon floundering and lost. Meanwhile, I fired up System Prefs in OS X, dragged Español to the top of the "preferred languages" list, quit it and reopened the app, and looked under the Apple menu, whose members were now all in Spanish. "Ah," I said. "Reiniciar."
So I call the guy up, I walk him through the reboot process in Spanish that comes freakily back to me on demand out of the depths of my brain, and we hang up amicably having done the necessary deed. At the very least, we seem not to have created an international incident. So that's good.
Anyway, this brought us into a curiosity-which-reinicié-the-cat exploration of Windows and how to change the default language. (We couldn't leave bad enough alone.) We found that the closest thing to it is the "Regional Settings" control panel, which baffled us with its odd terminology (what user has any idea what a "locale" is?), its half-explained controls and menus ("Your system is configured to read and write documents in multiple languages." That's nice. What in hell does it have to do with this list of languages with checkboxes next to them? What does checking them do? Who knows?), its impenetrably named code-page templates, and its seven or eight different places to do anything and everything. And nowhere in all this mess does it give you to understand that you don't even get any of those other languages for the OS interface; if you want Windows in Spanish, you have to install the Spanish version of Windows. Charming.
Whereas in OS X, it's all Unicode-based; so you simply drag the languages in the list into the order you prefer them in, and from then on any application you launch will go down that list until it finds a localized set of strings that matches your most preferred language, and uses that.
But that too got us thinking. I'd noticed that if you go to Google and select the "Language Tools", you get to see the Google interface in any of thirty or forty different languages, from Punjabi to Slovenian to Klingon to Elmer Fudd. Since we have Unicode fonts, we get to see things like Japanese, Russian, and Vietnamese in their native fonts, looking smooth and crisp, with all the letters beautifully rendered and accounted for.
But they're not all there. Not quite.
We couldn't help but notice that the Arabic page showed a bunch of weird, blurry squares. I'd never really paid much attention to this before; I'd assumed that it was just some kind of weird Unicode thing, a token that shows up differently in different displays. But then I noticed that the squares have what looks like an Arabic letter inside them.
Then I remembered that in the classic Mac OS, any undisplayable characters were shown as squares. So I thought, "I wonder"... and dragged a few of them over into TextEdit and cranked up the font size.
Look at that. It's squares, like always, for undisplayable characters. But now that it's all vector graphics, and because the Arabic font sets apparently aren't done yet (as they keep completing point releases of OS X, they keep adding character-set packs that fill out these blocks of letters), it's squares with cool information in them. The Unicode range that Arabic occupies, plus a central symbol to tell you what will eventually go there.
This is what it looks like when Apple isn't quite done with something.
So our curiosity was running rampant now; we switched into Unicode hex input mode (hold down Option and type four-digit hex numbers) and started entering values, to see what the ranges were like and what they were assigned to, and what symbols they had:
Mmm-mm. Isn't that insane? I love it. (And especially that Dr. Seuss-looking "Private Use" one.) Apple even makes unimplemented features look cool. These squares sit at the beginning of each block of assigned characters and define what that block is going to be, and if the characters haven't all been finished yet, they all show up as that generic identifier.
Oh, and depending on which letter you have selected, the available fonts in the font panel change. Select the Hangul character, and the six or seven dedicated Hangul fonts become available in the list.
There's always something bizarre and new lurking in an esoteric corner...
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21:02 - So much more than just turbans
http://frontpagemag.com/columnists/glazov/2002/glazov06-06-02.htm
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Jamie Glazov continues his exploration of the real Islam: the one that dynamites ancient cliffside Buddhas because they're offensive to Muhammad, that rejects all Western ideas (like art, science, and democracy) as Satanic evils, that tries to forbid people from quoting from the Koran because it "could be seen as defamatory to Islam", and that therefore is patently designed to be incompatible with any modern Earth founded on notions like democracy and innovation and change and individualism.
In the Islamic Arab world, any foreign idea is heavily suspect. Any Western notion is automatically associated with evil. Thus, if the infidels say that an object will fall because of the laws of gravity, Muslims will suspect this to be a demonic lie. But if the same laws of gravity are sanctioned by a voice that is seen as representing authentic Islam, then such laws are automatically believed.
Individualism, creativity and originality are non-existent in the Arab world. And it is no mystery why the worlds of competition and commerce have spawned economic success stories in places like Japan and other Pacific societies in the post-WWII era, while the Arab world has been ridden with falling incomes, economic lethargy and social stagnation.
The bottom line is that the very notion of any new invention or innovation (Bida) is seen in Islam as being an offense to Allah. This is why, whenever anything even remotely close to a debate occurs in the Islamic Middle East, the accusation of Bida, which remains the most popular and effective accusation in the Arab world, immediately terminates the debate. The individual accused of Bida knows where the accusation can lead.
There you have it. "Invention" is a dirty word. Accuse someone of "innovating", and you may as well have provided photographic evidence and a signed affidavit witnessing that he rapes small children. (Sounds like Bill Gates must be Muslim. Nyuk, nyuk! Anyway.)
We all learned about Islam in high school. We all heard the story of the Prophet's life, of his flight to Medina, of his revelation, of the structure of Heaven and the nature of the Prophets, of the Five Pillars of Islam and the pilgrimage to the Ka'aba, of muezzins and mithrabs and mosques. We saw and admired the art and the architecture and the history of military success, and we listened to "Rock the Casbah" and saw pictures of the grinning, sunglasses-wearing Saudi sheikhs and concluded that Islam was a very romantic, if somewhat kooky, religion that deserved every bit of the success it had won in the years since the seventh century. It was awfully hip to imagine oneself expressing one's rebellious spirit by praying five times a day on a little woven mat in a certain compass direction to a god that none of your friends really knew about. To learn Arabic-- the language that God speaks, obviously, no question about it-- was like learning Japanese for an anime fan. It's romantic, it's exotic, it's cool. Wearing turbans and white sheets and carrying scimitars would just rock.
But-- and I don't know if it was just my experience, or if everybody's exposure in school to Islam was so carefully engineered and so precariously balanced between fact and romance as to make the religion seem so attractive and humane and peaceful and empowering and misunderstood and deserving of respect as one of the Three Great Occidental Religions.
But the more we read, and the deeper we dig, the more it seems clear that Islam is like something out of a really fucked-up science-fiction novel. A race of people who believe the words of a book written in the desert fourteen hundred years ago so strictly that any questioning of or modifications to those teachings is punishable by death? That they will actively reject any outside influences and the concept of human reason which would make those outside influences seem obvious? That they will live, like robots, according to strict and arbitrary rules of movement and life and conduct and reaction? What is this, Star Trek? How did we end up sharing a planet with these people?
From another Glazov article for which he's almost certainly under fatwa of death:
I encourage my readers to sit down and actually take the time to read the Qur’an and Hadiths (the sayings and doings of Muhammad as recorded by his companions). You will find that there is not one area of a Muslim’s life that is left open for individuality, originality and creativity.
From the moment a Muslim wakes up, he has to start going through a process of rigid procedures. First and foremost, he has to wash a certain way. He even has to clean his nose in a specific manner, and he has to do repeat this procedure three times. This is essential because Islam teaches that the devil spends the night in the cavity of the nose.
A Muslim is not to touch any utensil unless he has washed his hands three times. He is also not allowed to urinate in stagnant water.
When Muslims do "number two," they are forbidden to sit and are instructed to adopt a squatting position while leaning heavy on the left foot.
I can’t help but wonder: is there an instructional Islamic video for this? What happens if a Muslim leans on the right foot?
This goes on and on. And remember, any secular American "Muslim" that you know who does not do these things is not really a "Muslim"-- because unlike the loose definition of "Christian" (being "anybody who accepts Christ as his savior"), "Muslim" (as they will firmly tell you) strictly means someone who adheres, to the letter, to the Koran and Sharia Law. That means praying while picking your nose, three times a day.
Nor will Sharia Law countenance any other culture to exist that does not follow the same laws.
As long as Islam continues to exist in its current form, it will try to eliminate foreign demonic influences (like democracy) by attacking it in jihad. But as Glazov says, we can't change Islam, without it ceasing to be Islam-- by definition (because Islam is defined by the verbatim Koran and not changing it under any circumstances). So what do we do?
We have two choices. We can all become Muslims and live according to Sharia Law. Or we can take some kind of action which removes the warhead from the missile that is international jihad.
The question is, what possible form can that action take-- rendering Islam harmless to its neighbors-- short of lobbing a cruise missile into Mecca?
We'd better figure it out, or the world will be a very unpleasant place for a great many people for a long, long time-- after all, jihad only now, finally, has the weapons with which to wage real war against the infidels, and the motivation to do it. And every day that we don't figure it out, some potential invention from an ingenious Muslim mind is lost forever to history because it would have been Bida.
Whether it's Muslims vowing to bring death to the infidels, or Jews debating whether riding the elevator on a Saturday is forbidden because pushing the buttons is "creating fire", or Christians deciding whether priests should be celibate or whether gays are automatically denied Heaven-- this is what we mean when we say religion is such a damning influence on humanity. These are the kinds of questions it makes us have to ask ourselves.
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11:19 - I bet a lot of Senators ride
http://www.amadirectlink.com
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I just got a mailing from the American Motorcyclist Association, asking for donations and membership as usual-- but it had some interesting news to report, good news even. The tactic for trolling for bucks was to celebrate the following legislative victories that have recently been (gasp!) won in Congress:
- Motorcyclists have gained GUARANTEED access to highways - Congress has made it against the law to ban motorcycles on highways built with federal money. For example, when some politicians in Chicago tried to keep motorcyclists off one of the city's busiest streets, this law stopped them in their tracks. What's more, this means we'll have on-going access to "high occupancy vehicle" lanes-- the ones marked with a diamond. So we can still bypass regular lanes choked with traffic and ride smoother and safer.
- Motorcyclists have become part of the "Intelligent Transportation Systems" - This is special technology to create safer and more efficient roads. At our urging, the government agreed to include motorcyclists as part of the traffic "mix". (Believe it or not, before the AMA intervened, the government was about to ignore riders completely-- but now the AMA is on-hand when they test these systems, to make sure they work for motorcyclists, too.)
- Swift action is underway to make roads safer for motorcyclists - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been ordered to improfe safety by focusing on accident prevention rather than injury prevention. We've found that preventing accidents before they happen is better for riders than just figuring out how to cut down on injuries later. The result? The agency has made big grants to benefit motorcyclists-- one to promote motorist awareness of motorcycles AND the other to figure out ways to reduce alcohol-related accidents.
- $270 Million has been allocated for off-road trails - Previous legislation for these trails (for off-road motorcyclists, off-road vehicle riders, snowmobiles and 4-wheel drive enthusiasts) never got the money it needed to work. We lobbied hard, and the government is now spending over a quarter of a billion dollars to build new trails and fix up those already in use. Now we will have many more places to play!
Which I applaud-- after all, it's good to see progress in what's almost by its very nature a perpetual fight for a minority to keep from being ignored or marginalized. (I'm not wild about that fourth one, though-- how much money is that that they're spending on building off-road trails and parks? And what did they pull that money out from?) And they apparently still haven't made much progress on that "Brian gets an Aprilia SL1000 Falco" law...
But they've also included some "thank-you" postcards for us to mail to our Congresspeople. Mine, according to the postcards, are Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Zoe Lofgren. Hmm. I wonder if the Feinstein who evidently voted for these motorcyclists'-rights measures is the same one who created a handgun exchange program in San Francisco (so handgun owners could turn in their guns for money); she self-righteously turned in her own gun on stage in front of all the cameras. But then some reporter, who had done his homework, asked her whether she was going to turn in the other gun that she owned (as was a matter of public record, it having been registered)? Upon which she had her goon squad ambush the guy afterwards and... give him to understand that silence was in his best interests?
I don't have all the details on that story; Lance is the one who knows it well. But hypocrisy is, er, not unknown among our Senators, and I don't know if sending in a form-letter thank-you postcard is going to send anybody the right message, other than "The machinery is well-oiled".
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10:14 - You read Lileks now.
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0602/060202.html#060602
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Regarding the Ashcroft fingerprinting proposal:
I don’t believe it. I don’t believe most Americans who practice Islam are going to be offended by this. And if some are, let me be honest: I don’t care. I am way past caring. I have not a jot of the care-sauce left in my bones. The care tank is empty. There’s no one home in Careville. The dog ate my care. The Care Crop didn’t come up this year. Self.com/care comes up as a 404.
Would I raise an eyebrow if the government quarantined everyone with a Koran, kept them in holding cells for a week, tagged them with a microchip and sprayed them with a dye that shows up on orbiting satellites? ? Yes, I would. I’m raising an eyebrow right now, just for practice’s sake. But when these people get hysterical about co-religionist non- citizens being photographed and fingerprinted, I not only disregard what they say now but whatever they say in the future, as well as whoever cites them as an authority.
Besides, I don't seem to recall huge rallies of American Muslims congregating on the Mall in Washington to express their support for the US and their furor over the hijacking of their faith by some wackos from Saudi Arabia. We all expected it. Why wouldn't we? Who would want to be associated at a casual glance with the 9/11 hijackers and with bin Laden? Who wouldn't rise up in grass-roots protest in a show of sincere loyalty to stem any tide of public mistrust which might be turned, however wrongly, against them?
If they're going to rise up and complain now about the fingerprinting of non-US citizens, when they didn't rise up before and complain about the tarnishing of the good name of Islam, then my well of sympathy will have run dry too. The best thing may be to make the best of the situation they've made for themselves and let those immigrants be fingerprinted like the rest of us have to be when we're in elementary school. Because what I seem to remember are Muslims putting up anti-Israel "blood libel" posters and beating up Jewish students at a rally at SFSU, and thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters gathering on the Mall to denounce Israel's brutal actions in Ramallah and Jenin and the US' support for them. Now, if these guys are more concerned with defending Arafat's suicide bombers than with being treated like they were all a bunch of Mohammed Attas, well, that's fine-- it is, after all, a free country. But they'd better not act surprised when people infer that if they support one group of Islamic terrorists, they might support another too.
No, I'm not saying it's time we put Muslims in ghettos and hold pogroms. To my understanding, we're one of the countries on earth least likely to do such things. Acts of intimidation against Muslims in America after 9/11, while it was feared that they'd be numerous and unstoppable, have turned out to be vanishingly few. Instead, synagogues in France are burned and Jewish members of the Norwegian parliament are forbidden from wearing Stars of David on their lapels and the German government cautions Jews not to wear yarmulkes or anything that would make them "stand out" as Jews. Yeah, go on. Take that moral high ground. I dare you. Oh, wait. You did. Now I have to figure out what to do with someone to whom you say "I dare you" and then does the thing you dared him to do.
I could be wrong, but I believe tradition recommends socking him in the nose.
I'm with you, James. I care enough not to care.
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09:38 - Eww!
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-933245.html
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Yeah, I knew the Brits were squeamish about violent video games and stuff (remember what they did to Carmageddon? "You're running over... uh, zombies! Yeah, that's right!")... but I must admit I'd be a bit shaken too if they were playing this Xbox ad here:
The ad begins with a newborn child flying through a window before aging decades in seconds--then crashing and screaming into a grave as an elderly man. It was designed to illustrate the phrase: "Life is short. Play more."
Of course, what makes me shudder isn't even so much the content as the exhortation to take the best advantage of our limited time on Earth, with all the things we have here to do and see, by... uh, playing more video games.
I have friends who have lost years of their lives to MMORPGs and MUCKs and the like. They don't even consider those years "lost", either-- and while I'm not about to go pushing my values on these guys, it seems unbearably tragic to me that the headlong rush toward everybody being perpetually plugged into virtual-reality environments with head cables, with food and drink piped in, growing bulbous and hairy and losing any lingering interest in interacting with real people or accomplishing anything of material merit, is being embraced with such gusto.
Good job, Microsoft. Let's encourage it even more, hmm?
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| Wednesday, June 5, 2002 |
01:32 - Propaganda... or advertising?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/
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The authors of Penny Arcade have an entertaining and right-on-the-money take on those "US Army" video games that are out right now and being lambasted for propagandizing to impressionable youngsters who might (gasp) be brainwashed into joining the military.
Give it a read. I particularly like Safety Monkey's description of the "Anti-Fuckface" intelligence built into the game. Sounds like genius to me...
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19:02 - Steve and CNet Talk Tech
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-932419.html
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Here's a cool interview by CNet with Steve Jobs, in which he discusses Jaguar, QuickTime 6/MPEG-4, the eMac, education sales, and so on. The meat of the discussion is MPEG-4, which Jobs says is a critical milestone in getting streaming video to the next level of accessibility. He seems very bullish about the prospects, especially considering how it stacks up against the upcoming competition and all the industry buy-in that's just waiting for an excuse to take off.
What's so great about MPEG-4?
It delivers video quality as good as MPEG-2 at about one-third less the bit rate. But then you can crank down the bit rate for lower bandwidth connections and it scales down beautifully. So you can deliver incredible streaming video with MPEG-4. It has got higher quality than anything out there--including Microsoft's upcoming Corona--and it's totally scalable. Everybody's jumping on this bandwagon. We've announced we're going to switch over to MPEG-4. Real has said they're going to. All the cell phone companies are going to be using it; it is the standard for third-generation cell phone video streaming. It also features AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio, which is the best audio around. It blows away MP3 (and) Windows Media. And it also is the audio format adopted by all satellite radio (companies). So this is gathering a tremendous amount of steam, and I think everybody is going to be cutting over to MPEG-4, with the possible exception of Microsoft, which is going to try and push its Corona technology that comes out later this year. They haven't gone into a preview or beta mode yet, but they said they were going to release it sometime this year.
How important do you think MPEG-4 will be to opening the barriers that block digital media?
I think it's going to be exactly like what MPEG-2 did. It's going to create whole new industries, because it's going to create a world standard. MPEG-2 created the whole DVD industry. I think MPEG-4 is going to be really big. QuickTime 6 is the first real implementation of MPEG-4 to be released. Not only is it a client, but with QuickTime Streaming Server and QuickTime Broadcaster, which allows real-time broadcasting of MPEG-4, we're providing an end-to-end solution for MPEG-4. And of course, it's compatible with all MPEG-4-compliant players.
Getting QT6 out the door was like scraping out an arterial blockage: something that had to be done, and quickly, or it would soon turn from an annoying lack into a fatal flaw. And now it puts Apple in the extremely good position that it deserves to be, having brought the end-to-end solution to the table first.
As for the MPEG-LA licensing issues, it seems that they're proceeding on the assumption that they will cover the required royalty costs for the video codec through making people buy a new QuickTime Pro key to unlock the authoring features, which would include the codec used in iMovie and FCP and the like. I'm more than happy to do so-- it's been two major revs since we've had to do that, and it's just thirty bucks. (I do think they could stand to get rid of that "Go Pro" nag screen that pops up when you launch the player, though-- it's tacky and un-Apple.)
AAC's gonna rock the house, though. It's a true studio-quality multitrack framework, supporting up to 48 simultaneous tracks of 96KHz sound. Take that, "Joint Stereo". And if AAC is licensed under the same terms as MP3 (or even more leniently, considering that Apple managed to negotiate a royalty-free license), it'll become the successor to MP3 in every way that matters, including the democratizing nature of the format. I suspect it'll be no later than the Jaguar release that we see iTunes support for AAC, including the ability to rip into that format rather than MP3, and support on the iPod too.
AAC will thus blow away the only saving grace against the RIAA's attacks, though, which is that digital music files don't sound as good as original media. Now that a better, widely supported format is out and will soon pick up steam, they're going to have to bite the bullet and accept that digital music is here to stay-- that it's they who will have to change to fit the technology, not the other way around.
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18:28 - Well, it would have worked last time...
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/06/05/israel.arafat.compound/index.html
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Arafat seems to be a microcosm (in time and space) of Saddam.
Both commit attacks against their neighbors and exploit their own people in doing so. So the military (the US in the one case, the IDF in the other) goes in, cleans house, eliminates the immediate threat (which is in fact neutralized while the action is taking place), and comes this close to taking him out of the picture entirely.
But then the military bows to international pressure, and backs down... and in a very short time, the dictator in question is back to his old tricks.
In Saddam's case, we took a bath under world opinion because we didn't actually kill Saddam-- instead we tried to get the Iraqi people to rise up without our assistance and overthrow him themselves. This was done as a condition of our coalition with the Saudis, who insisted that we not target Saddam directly. (More fools we.) Naturally, the Iraqi people went howling into battle, but we couldn't lift a finger to help them-- so Saddam put down the uprising with extreme force, and now the US is seen as a bunch of vile betrayers by the Iraqi people. Shows what we get for trying to be multilateral.
Now, after Arafat has been beseiged by the IDF in Ramallah for a period (during which his terrorist infrastructure was disrupted fairly successfully, to the extent that there was relative peace while he was held incommunicado)-- they let him go, bowing to international opinion condemning Israel's vicious and brutal acts of self-defense. And he bought his way out of the siege with some promises and some sellings-out of key figures in the movement (which Europe still can't quite figure out what to do with or what kind of gloves to wear when touching them, after volunteering happily to give the poor dears shelter from the big nasty tanks), and now-- with as much obvious cause-and-effect as turning a light switch back on-- we're back to the suicide bombings.
This one's bad, too. An innovative new idea: drive a car full of bombs up alongside a bus on a freeway, and flick your Bic. That's thirteen people splattered into the breakdown lane and a flaming bus hulk careening into the distance. Not a bad deal for the gas money, eh?
Oh, of course, Arafat condemns it. But the Taliban condemned the 9/11 attacks too, remember that? I'm beginning to hate that word. "The U.N. condemned today's actions..." Yeah, like it means they did anything but sat around and frowned at each other and nodded and muttered about how much it sucks. Everybody's condemning things. Everybody feels it's necessary to go on record saying how terrible it is that someone died or that someone rolled tanks or that someone was brusquely searched for dynamite belts. But when Arafat does it, it makes it sound even more vague and offhand and "Yeah, yeah, leave me alone"-- because it means nothing. It's just another required step, another element of the formula that scripts any one of these attacks and retaliations. Next will come Israeli action to disrupt the terrorist infrastructure, followed by UN condemnation of the brutal and entirely unprovoked actions of the IDF and that warmonger Sharon. Then comes extreme pissed-off-ness on the part of bloggers who want to see the whole thing end for once. As in, making Arafat dead. You want to break the cycle of violence? That's the way to do it.
Oh, and just to kick things up a notch needlessly: the only thing missing from conspiracy-theorists' and wide-eyed religious fanatics' scenarios in all the recent action has been ringing, historical-mythological names. Well, fear no more, for the End Times are surely upon us now: the attack took place in Megiddo, otherwise popularly known as Armageddon.
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14:37 - AtAT is Back on the Air
http://www.appleturns.com/yesterday/
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After five weeks of silence, As the Apple Turns-- one of my favorite, wittiest, and most accurate sources of Mac-related reading material-- is back online and updating away with three scenes of goodness a day, just like in the days before the site's author's startled discovery that he had budded.
Hey, folks, we're back... kindasorta. Didja miss us? Well, Slim, don't go expecting much Apple-flavored melodrama just yet; consider this episode our fledgling attempt to start easing back into the swing of things, following the arrival of a significant (but exceedingly cute) broadcast interruption named Anya. Believe it or not, people, it's actually been a little tough to establish an AtAT production schedule around the needs of a newborn child. Believe us, we were just as shocked by that fact as you are!
...
And let's face it: it's a tough but true fact of life that when you do something every day for nearly five years and then stop for several weeks, it can be really hard to start back up again. Don't believe us? Try it yourself. Pick a task you've probably been performing daily for the past five years: breathing. Then stop for a month. We bet you'll have a little difficulty resuming when the time comes.
Yuh-huh. Remind me not to ever stop blogging. It's amazing how addiction and withdrawal work, isn't it?
Anyway, the events of the transpiring few weeks are, unsurprisingly, not lost on him:
We should probably mention that we're also still working through some pretty significant feelings of disappointment and betrayal, because Steve Jobs himself royally shafted us in the trust department. See, a few days prior to Anya's birth, the AtAT staff was enjoying some Aloo Gobhi in the Food Court at The Mall when His Steveness pulled up a chair, set down his tray of Chana Masala, and asked us what was shakin'. That's when we told him that we were considering putting AtAT on hiatus during the month of May to focus on the baby's needs, but were concerned that as soon as we went off the air for a while, Apple would rush to release all sorts of long-rumored products and make a slew of breathtaking announcements which we would then miss.
"No worries," said Steve; "I hereby give you my solemn pledge that while you're off the air, Apple won't introduce the long-rumored 17-inch CRT iMac, the legendary rack-mount server, integrated handwriting recognition in Mac OS X, an Apple-branded instant messaging application, or anything else dramatic that's been plot fodder on your show in the past." Uh-huh. Right. Thanks a lot, Steve. eMac, Xserve, and iChat and Ink in Jaguar-- all blown AtAT plot twist opportunities. Steve, bubbelah, we're hurt... really, we are.
This, plus the now-infamous New Year's Eve PR buzz run-up prior to the introduction of the new iMac, when I mentioned the influence of the Mac rumor sites-- only to have the next day's teaser slogan read "Beyond the Rumor Sites. Way Beyond"-- well, I'm beginning to think that Steve has a mischievous little freak-streak in him as regards the web punditry. Find some popular place where they speculate, and then boom from the heavens: AND FROM NOW ON-- STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF!
And now that AtAT is back on the air, I suppose that means we won't be seeing any more exciting announcements. Booooh. Maybe some kind of sabotage is in order...
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| Tuesday, June 4, 2002 |
19:08 - Macs in the Enterprise
http://www.mymac.com/mccormick/6.3.02.shtml
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Jaguar, says Bob McCormick, is going to not only incorporate every last piece of Windows SMB and PPTP networking functionality into Mac OS X-- it's going to make the Mac leapfrog over Windows in the number of things it can do.
During that time I tried over and over again to write a column about the possibility of switching over to a Mac entirely to do my corporate computing. It never happened, I couldn't complete that column 'cause the Mac OS wasn't complete. Don't get me wrong. The Mac has always been a viable platform for getting work done. More than viable, Macs have always had a much better total cost of ownership and their ease of use makes the return on investment better than PCs. What the Mac and OS X wasn't ready for was interoperability on a Windows enterprise. 10.1 brought us so much closer that I was chomping at the bit for it.
Recently, when Steve Jobs showed off Jaguar to Developers at WWDC we saw what Apple had hinted at but had never confirmed. They are indeed going back after the corporate market. Jaguar is so packed full of enterprise networking capabilities it isn't even funny. When Jaguar comes out you'll be able to load it on any supported Mac and put it on an enterprise network, no fuss, no muss, just equal footing for your Mac, finally.
Full browsing and printer sharing is only the first part of the story. With Rendezvous, you'll be able to walk around the building and all the available shares will be dynamically built up and connected as the OS discovers them. Who needs to poke around network paths looking for shares? Rendezvous will find them all for you. It's one of those things that computers do a lot better than people in the first place: pawing through lists of data and presenting them for human input. We've just never had this much data available before, not until Rendezvous' promise of being able to see every network-aware piece of hardware and software in the neighborhood. You'll see printers popping up next to shared SMB folders, iTunes playlists creating themselves out of nowhere along with instant-messenger chat partners. It'll all just work. The impossible dream of IT.
What IT guy would refuse the solution that does everything that's required and more? There will be a winnowing-out to separate those who shun Macs on principle from those who do so because until now the functionality hasn't been sufficient. Now there will be no excuse.
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12:09 - Yeah, they're about to go out of business any time now...
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It's a big day for Apple, it seems. There are at least three announcements, all of which I think are pretty meaningful.
- QuickTime 6 is out! Well, the Public Preview, anyway. I don't know what the story is behind the MPEG-LA licensing issues that (last time I heard) they still had yet to iron out; but evidently they've taken care of things enough to allow us to have the software they've been sitting on for a while. It's also still not final, and I don't know how that can be, considering that they've been ready to release the product for months now. I suspect they just really wanted to get it out the door, so people can start authoring MPEG-4 content and getting the traction ramped up, without having to wait for Jaguar this summer (read: September).
Check out the features. The streaming stuff is kinda clunky at home, but then, streaming over my horrible connection never worked properly-- and to its credit, this version actually recovers and keeps moving when the stream stutters. But the instant-on movies rock, the video quality is superb, and the audio is rich and clear. They have some AAC audio samples which are straight out of the FreePlay Music library, which I already have in MP3 format; listening to the two formats side by side (the file sizes are almost identical, and the bitrate is the same), I can detect some subtle textural differences, but I'm going to have to ask some audiophile friend of mine to do a blind taste-test and see which one is "better". (Maybe I should use two or three audiophile friends, so as to detect BS.) But either way, AAC is an open format, it's developed by the MPEG working group as a successor to MP3, and it definitely has a number of logistical advantages. I wonder if we'll see it start to catch on, especially now that "MP3" has taken on a life of its own as a term...
But either way, now we can get started making up some of that lost ground. MPEG-4 is here, man, and now .mp4 files written by iMovie can be played in any player, not just QuickTime. That's bound to blur the lines of contention for people who stubbornly refuse to use Apple software, of which there are plenty.
- Ever wanted proof that Apple listened to its customers? Well, here you go: the eMac is now available for all buyers. Previously, you had to be an educational buyer, and prove it; but immediately after it was released, the discussion boards and polls started filling up with discussions of how competitive a machine it was-- especially for the price-- and how Apple should sell it to regular customers too. And, well, here it is.
It's clear, at least to me, that the G3 iMac (which this is clearly descended from rather directly) is a production-line sweet spot; they'd tuned a lot of their processes toward building iMacs, and this is something they can produce at fairly minimal incremental expense. It gets G4 power onto home desktops for around a thousand bucks. It's durable, and it's got a big screen. And those cool on-screen programming controls in the Display preferences get to stick with us for a bit longer.
They've reworked the offerings, too. There used to be two models, the lower of which didn't include a modem and had a plain CD-ROM; now, there's only the one model (the one with a modem and CD-RW), plus a build-to-order one that includes... uh, a stand. So, just the one model, really. And it's about $1000. Sweet. Thanks for listening, Apple.
And they're apparently still selling the G3 iMac, too. That's quite a product lineup they've got these days...
- 20525 Mariani Avenue, Cupertino, CA.
Way back when, Apple's corporate headquarters was at this address, right across the road from where I work right now. The building was known as Mariani One. (Other buildings were strewn up and down Bandley and Valley Green; hence addresses like Bandley Three and Valley Green Five.) In the early 90s, though, when Apple was in its heyday, the landlord of the building decided to jack the rent price up. It's their corporate HQ, after all! The address is all over their letterhead! What are they gonna do-- move out, and have to change all their contact information? We've got 'em trapped!
...Well, Apple moved across the street, diagonally across the intersection from me. They built a brand-new complex, and dubbed it Infinite Loop. (How's that for fun and geeky-elegant?) And they changed their letterhead. One Infinite Loop.
But Apple was in a slump. It was that long, dark teatime of the Mac, when Jobs was in exile and Apple was producing beige boxes with numbers for names under marketing-ese category monikers (Performa, Centris, Quadra, and so on). And gradually, Apple withdrew from the buildings on Bandley and Valley Green, one by one. The little one-story, tile-roofed offices emptied out, their windows went dark. The manicured green lawns and shady bowers of trees up and down the quiet streets stayed elegantly trimmed, but the buildings lost their identities. The corporate-logo tombstones out in front of each little building went blank. Walking down Bandley became a chilling experience. It was the Apple Graveyard.
The dot-com boom of the late 90s happened, and the buildings along Bandley filled up with companies. Extreme Networks occupied Bandley Three. Three little dot-coms shared what was once the Apple company store in Bandley Seven. Apple still clung to one or two of those buildings, but it was a forlorn last stand. There was even speculation that Apple would retract its occupation of Infinite Loop and sublet out some of the five-story campus buildings there. And Mariani One, their old corporate HQ, was occupied by Sun.
But then Jobs returned, and he brought with him a nexus of energy; vitality started to flow back into the De Anza and Mariani region. The iMac and the G4 Macs began to reawaken interest in Apple; the iApps began to revolutionize the digital-device world, and Apple was back in the black. They rolled out their huge banners over the Infinite Loop buildings once again. One by one, they started moving back into the buildings on Valley Green and Bandley. As the dot-coms fell, Apple was right behind them, shuffling into place and reoccupying their old territory. Cars were scuttling up and down Bandley again, like in the old days. And every tombstone in front of every building had a different-colored Apple logo. The last time these buildings had had Apple logos, they'd been the rainbow-striped ones of yesteryear; but now, the logos were big, shiny, vibrant, and fun in the way a Ferrari is fun or Mufasa was fun. Everything's all right, they said. We're back.
A few weeks ago, Sun moved out of 20525 Mariani Avenue. For a month or so, the building stood empty, the parking lot unnaturally deserted in this newly bustling region of Cupertino. We had heard rumors. We had our theories. But we weren't sure what to expect.
Well, believe it: this morning, 20525 Mariani Avenue had a shiny purple Apple logo on its tombstone. And under it, it said in that stately old Apple Garamond font, the font that has weathered so much doubt and so much derision, the font that has kept its dignity with quiet ease all these years:
Mariani One
Like the sparrows returning to Capistrano, Kris says. And somewhere a bird sang.
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| Monday, June 3, 2002 |
19:12 - Barbie Dolls as Kryptonite
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Lance and I were recently watching cartoons, and he noted that in the toon world, one's genitals are located on the lips. That's evidently why male characters always react with such insane, explosive, wild-takey Tex-Avery-ism when they manage to get a kiss from a female character.
I had to imagine, by extrapolation, that in the TV world (or perhaps in the real world at large), one's genitals are located in the eyes. That's the only thing that could possibly explain to me this seemingly universally accepted notion of girl-watching. You know, the honest and private appreciation, for its own sake, of some appealing human form that you see going by in front of you.
Reading Steven den Beste's treatise on string bikinis (our last best hope in defeating international Wahhabism as well as both feminism and male chauvinism), I started out grinning at how silly and flip a joke it must be. But as it grew longer and longer, I started to wonder. I started looking over my shoulder to see if there was a hidden camera somewhere. I started wondering if I were being hypnotized into some kind of Matrix of bewilderment while some guy stole all my stuff.
Apparently the practice of girl-watching is not a joke. Apparently people do get honest enjoyment from staring at other people.
Now, I'm not making any declarations about the pros or cons or the ethics or morals of this practice. I don't think there's a thing wrong with it unless it makes the target uncomfortable. But I'm just confused at how universal and potent the draw seems to be. Do people really find themselves turning their heads so they can watch the movements of passing breasts or butts on the sidewalk? Do men actually sign up for aerobics classes so they can lurk at the back of the room and drool? Do people honestly like to watch girls jumping on trampolines? I've watched The Man Show enough times to understand that it's well beyond an Avery-esque slapstick joke; these guys apparently can detect some kind of up-and-down jiggle that's pleasing enough to them that they will spend a day in blistering poolside sunlight in order to stare at it.
I just don't get it. And I don't think it's only because girls aren't my thing, either. I can honestly say that I feel no magnetic force yanking my head around and making me crash into telephone poles no matter what shape any passing human is.
I'm similarly confused by celebrity worship. Right now there's an entire industry making money off the trade of illicit pictures of Pamela Anderson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and ... uh... I don't know. Fill in some supposed sex-goddess name here. Why? How can a person lust after someone they've never even met-- of whose personality they have not the slightest idea? It's just another body once the clothes are off-- those things that make people different, e.g. the face and the brain, are diluted beyond any meaning. Are these people supposed to be better in bed than the people you know in your everyday life? Are their bulbous bodily components actually orders of magnitude larger or more numerous than civilian ones? Or is it just the romance of an unattainable goal that spreads over the entire package?
What's wrong with me? Is it some glandular problem? Am I missing some little gall-bladdery organ that normally releases some kind of enzyme that makes people enjoy alcohol and donuts and causes them to hit themselves in the head with shoes when someone talks to them with a Mae West accent?
Maybe it's some trauma from my childhood. I remember back when I was about nine, and fascinated with cars, I would point out cool automobiles passing by our windows on the freeway whenever I saw one. "Whoah, look at that car! That was a Testarossa!" I remember my mom noting with a smirk that "One of these days, you'll be saying, 'Hey, wow! Look at that girl!' all the time." I remember going silent and internally vowing, yeah, right-- I'll show her. So maybe that's what happened.
...What? Stop laughing at me.
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17:19 - Oh, good. Now there's innovation for you.
http://club.aopen.com.tw/News/News_showAnswer_Old.asp?RecNo=713&Language=English
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Whee! Look-- it's a PC motherboard with vacuum-tube sound amplification!
AOpen Inc. announced today that it is introducing the world's first vacuum tube motherboard, coinciding with Intel's announcement of the Pentium® 4 845E chipset. The new AX4B-533Tube Motherboard incorporates the novel, modern-day adoption of an idea that was spawned by the invention of the electric light bulb by Thomas A. Edison back in 1879 - the vacuum tube. In taking this bold step towards audio perfection, AOpen's hybrid AX4B-533Tube unquestionably is targeted to a very exclusive niche market - passionate audiophiles and extreme gamers who are interested in building their own ultimate entertaining PCs. The motherboard is also certain to appeal to retailers that desire to cater to these two eccentric groups with custom-built PCs, delivered with matching speaker systems and the latest CD and DVD playback devices.
Of course... how silly of us not to recognize the vast untapped market in the extreme gaming demographic.
It seems to me that the whole vacuum-tube audiophile market is one of the best examples of a diminishing-returns equilibrium that has ever been in physical evidence. Beyond a certain linear price point, most people can't tell the difference between one high-end amp and the next-- except for a few fanatics, who will pay an exponentially higher price for a tiny, incremental improvement in audio quality. There are $10,000-per-foot speaker cables you can buy which are filled with mercury, for example, not to mention a whole lot of more-or-less snake-oil-based products-- and the companies that sell those aren't anywhere near going out of business. But if you plot all the available devices on a linear price-vs-quality graph, you can generally get 90% of the quality for 10% of the price, and anything higher-priced is the domain of a rarefied few.
Gamers are 90th-percentilers. They know they have to be, because PC hardware becomes obsolete in months. They're not going to spend $10,000 on a uber-l33t gaming rig that they know will be a road apple within a year. Technology is still leapfrogging forward in the computer market, still in revolutionary mode, whereas in audio hardware the technology is in a strictly evolutionary phase . You can expect that your ultra-top-end amp that you bought in 1995 will still sound great, and you'll consider that money well spent. Not so with gamers.
It's that same law of diminishing returns, by the way, that also tends to hurt Apple. The Mac is priced linearly higher than a comparable PC, for what most users consider to be an insignificant advantage in usability and/or performance and/or quality. Gamers will usually shun Macs because they can get almost all the same functionality (and a lot more games besides) for a materially smaller price. This alone tells me that while yes, you'll probably be able to sell tube-amp-powered PC motherboards to audiophile computer users, it's probably wildly wrong to expect the gamer market to swarm all over these. Especially if they're priced commensurately with the typical high-end tube amp.
But maybe they'll find equilibrium. More power to 'em, I guess.
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16:31 - A new kind of grim amusement
http://denbeste.nu/entries/archive-09092001-09152001.shtml
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Something I sort of silently and casually did on and around the eleventh of March was to go back through the archives of various blogs and read the entries leading up to, during, and following the 9/11 attacks, on their six-month anniversary. Just to compare the tone... to see how far we've come... to see what was predicted that would happen, and what actually did... to see what opinions have changed.
To experience it all over again, too.
This link is to USS Clueless, which I only started reading after the event (I only found out about the existence of blogs in mid-December, thanks to a mention in a Bleat). But to give you some idea of just how much has changed, an entry by den Beste on or shortly after 9/11 mentions "a guy named James in Minneapolis".
It was only a few months ago that none of these guys knew each other. This whole weird, sometimes snarky, sometimes critical, often recursive and reciprocal extended family of blogdom in its current form and strength and cast of characters is less than a year old.
So are many of the opinions we hold now. Den Beste had an essay on terrorism that posited that the Palestinian cause was every bit as justified as any nation's is that is under attack, and with severe language he said that the Israeli government would have to use tactics of compromise and appeasement in order to have any measure of peace.
That's before we all saw the video of the Palestinians celebrating in the streets.
So, as you read through this archive, note the following landmarks:
- The initial half-unbelieving, distant "Yeah, yeah, it's all over the news" kick-start, with the dark sense that it's going to get a lot worse
- The first true realization of just how big this is
- The first mention of Osama bin Laden
- The first reactions to the Taliban's statements
- The first predictions of war in Afghanistan and what form it will take
- The first mention of the Palestinian strategic loss from 9/11
- The first mention of Israel's vastly improved lot
- The first exhortation to give blood
- The first realization of how many rescue workers were in there
- The first thoughts on Flight 93 and its passengers' rebellion
- The first mention of NATO and the global implications of the attack
- The first cries of "We deserved it" from self-effacing American liberals
- The first head-shaking, tongue-clucking grandfatherly scoldings from European politicians
- The first predictions of economic devastation and ruin
- The first sighting of an exploitation of patriotic feeling for commercial gain
- The first post after the fact that was not related to the attack
Look at how quickly these all happened. All within the space of about three days.
Three days of real-time reflection of real American sentiment. Whereas the Gulf was the CNN War, today we're engaged in the Blogger War. This one has a permanent record, realized and accessible at the common-citizen level. The immediacy of it is its strength-- it still feels like a glimpse into Everyman's day and Everyman's mind, not like a CNN broadcast. We (or those of us who were alive at the time) can look at the Zapruder film and think in abstract terms of where we were when it was being shot. But blogs make it as real as a recording of a voice.
I dare you to scroll upward past the early morning hours of the Eleventh without your heart starting to race uncontrollably.
One more milestone to note:
- The first tears shed by the blogger.
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14:29 - Can I yell "FireWire" in a crowded convention hall?
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=497
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Manufacturers are already gearing up for 800Mbps FireWire enclosures at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, where FireWire is very big and buzzwordy these days. Apparently they've got a whole "FireWire Hall" for showcasing devices which take advantage of it, which include optical drives that use actual FireWire transport instead of just IDE transport with a FireWire bridge. That should really make this stuff fly.
They're also doing things like making controller chips which merge FireWire (in both 400 and 800 Mbps flavors) and USB (1 and 2) onto a single bridge. (They're calling it "SuperWire".
Sounds to me like FireWire does still have a whole lot of momentum, and it's in fact gaining. That's good to hear.
A few days ago, Chris discovered with wide-eyed awe how you could hold down "T" while booting up your iBook, and it would come up in FireWire disk mode-- just plug it in to another machine via a FireWire cable, and you can access its disks over the FireWire bus. This isn't a Mac-only thing either-- Lance's Toshiba laptop will do it too. But this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say FireWire is so much more than just a USB-esque transport protocol; people want to destroy it just because it's not favored by Microsoft and Intel, but to do so would be to demolish a great beauty out of spite. "If we can't have it, then nobody else can either!"
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13:52 - Thoughts on Lilo & Stitch
http://www.chud.com/news/june02/june2lilo.php3
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They say that it's "easily the best thing Disney has done in a long time."
I had worried that their experimentation with more silly, fun styles of moviemaking (e.g. The Emperor's New Groove) would be regarded as a failure, because of the relative box-office anemia of that film and others of its era. But it looks as though economic conditions are such that those are the most favorable kinds of movies to make in the first place, and so we can expect them to stick to that experiment for a bit longer.
Jolly good, I say.
This interview is interesting, by the way-- it talks about how some emergency changes had to be made in the film when 9/11 happened, because the final chase scene involved a 747 and flying in amongst skyscrapers. Take a look, and see what it was like making those changes-- the mood and the work ethic and the sense of necessity, and what it can do for people even when they're doing something as mundane and removed from national-security matters as making an animated film.
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11:40 - The Babel Fish Lives On
http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html
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Here's an interview with Douglas Adams, from three or four years ago when he was still hanging around this unfashionable little planet (and when we thought The Hitch-Hiker's Guide was going to be released as a Disney movie in 2000). It's in American Atheist magazine, and it's a must-read for any DNA fans.
I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me “Well, you haven’t been there, have you? You haven’t seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid” - then I can’t even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don’t think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don’t think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.
Exactly.
Of course, this assumes a scientific thought process-- one that considers the burden of proof to be a valid concept, and one where arguments for the nature of faith ("Ah, but you see, that's what's so clever about it: There always has to be room for doubt, or else faith would mean nothing! That's why God didn't hand down the Ten Commandments on little titanium wallet-sized cards, even though he certainly could have!") are specious and silly. So this doesn't really forge any new ground on the matter.
But it does let us remember the guy fondly.
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| Sunday, June 2, 2002 |
01:44 - Spiwit, bwavado, and dewwing-do
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I just saw Spirit tonight. And despite the worrisome marketing angle, despite the seemingly pandering nature, despite the fact that almost none of my animation-loving friends seem to have any inclination to see it, I really enjoyed it. It was all the things that I predicted it would have, when I posted about it a couple of weeks back.
Like all such things, it has its good and bad points.
Bad points:
- Really atrocious song-soundtrack by Bryan Adams. Featureless, uninspired soft-pop-glop songs that dribble out one after another, they illustrate some of the emotion of various scenes (and act as a surrogate for elided dialogue), but if you heard these things on the radio you'd forget the damn thing was on. It wasn't sufficient that the Canadian government has apologized for Bryan Adams on several occasions; he's clearly still a threat. Maybe war-crimes accusations are in order.
- Slightly too many aaawwww moments for my taste... but then, this thing is marketed primarily at pre-teen girls, so I'll allow them this conceit. It'll probably actually be more bearable without said pre-teen girls squealing and cooing in the seats behind me throughout the whole movie.
- I take some issue with the gratuitousness of the setting changes. Sorry, but you don't get to go from Yellowstone to Monument Valley to Yosemite on foot.
- Similarly, how many horses does it take to drag a steam locomotive on sledge rails up a mountain? Would a 150-horsepower engine (like the one in my Jetta) be able to do the job? No, didn't think so.
Good points:
- Outstanding animation, probably the best and most pleasing blend of "look" I've seen to date. Since all the characters are modeled in 3D before being rendered by hand in 2D, there's a lot of camera rotations and a lot of shots that would have been very expensive before; we've lost a little bit of sharp spontaneity in the decreased pure-2D, but what it makes up in directorial freedom is immeasurable.
- Hans Zimmer's orchestral soundtrack is delicious. I think I'll have to pick this up on CD. God bless MP3 players and the ability to make playlists of just some tracks and not others.
- Gorgeous backgrounds and set pieces. This is one of the most visually stunning animated features since The Iron Giant.
- This is about the most dialogue-free animated feature I've ever seen. Most of the interaction between characters takes place in horse vocalizations and facial expressions, and it's done shockingly well. You think you wouldn't be able to tell when a horse is saying RUN? Trust me, you would.
- The resolution of the "villain" plot is both innovative and supremely satisfying. It's the least trite ending that I've seen in a long time. Katzenberg should be very proud of having pulled it off the way he did.
As I'd hoped it would be, it's a paean to the art of animation and the visual backdrop of the American West, and any allegory that might be present in it is obscured by the purity of the character piece that forms the movie's backbone. There are some nods in vague, disparate directions to larger movie-type issues: the Noble Redman, the Heartless Bloodthirsty U.S. Cavalryman, the Relentless Manifest-Destiny Push West. It's got elements of that whole Dances With Wolves milieu that makes you shudder at the sight of the Stars and Stripes. But when that resolution comes at the end, and you see into all the characters' hearts in a blinding instant and understand all of their motives and values without a single word being spoken, you can do nothing but smile-- the Indians aren't perfect after all. The Cavalry are just trying to do a job. The railroads represent a great sacrifice on the part of the pristine wilderness, but what we buy with that sacrifice-- say those wordless gazes in that blinding instant-- is well worth it. Things change, says the movie. What's important is not that you stand firm against the very concept of something you don't like or even understand. What's important is making the most of what time we have, riding the waves of change, and helping to modulate them. You can't stop a rising tide, but through your actions you can help it be a good thing rather than a bad thing.
The feeling one is left with, upon exiting the theater, is that of the nature of legends: a hero can do great things in his lifetime, but it's only after he's died and the world has changed that the true power of his legend is realized. Likewise, the wilderness that plays such an active character role in Spirit is a legend, a myth-- but we never would have appreciated it to the degree that we do now if we had never lost it.
If the World Trade Center were still standing today, we'd still be giggling at the Klau Khalash vendor in the plaza and barely giving a glance upwards at the nondescript duoliths casting those huge shadows. But now, those buildings are raised to the level of myth. Memory and legend makes them greater than they ever were.
... Anyway. It's been a pretty good weekend, all considered. Babylon 5 movie marathon, DV editing, and emulated video games. It's a rest I needed.
Oh, and Lileks is proposing a Star Trek-style "odd movies good, even numbers bad" scheme for the Indiana Jones series.
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12:58 - This isn't the time for goddamned aphorisms, either.
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It was brought rather smugly to my attention recently that Patriotism is the belief that your country is better because you were born in it.
I would counter this by re-emphasizing that the biggest American patriots seem to be those who immigrated here.
Also, in the same conversation, I was directed to a Slovenian proverb that says People should sweep their own doorsteps first; the point being that we should concern ourselves with issues like the FBI extending their e-mail surveillance powers and so on before we start doing drastic things like bombing terrorist camps and anthrax factories.
But you know, you don't worry about sweeping your doorstep when the fucking house is on fire.
Yes, it sucks that the FBI can snoop my e-mail, and that Hollings wants us to burn our MP3 players and D-A converters, and that my car is due for a frickin' wheel rotation. But Jesus Christ, man, I think we're capable of prioritizing matters here. And I think we're capable of addressing more than one issue at a time.
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11:57 - On the Burial of the WTC
http://pejmanpundit.blogspot.com/2002_05_26_pejmanpundit_archive.html#77174850
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Via Cold Fury, Pejman Yousefzadeh has a thoughtful and worthwhile post about the end of the WTC cleanup, the ceremony, and what America means to a first-generation citizen like himself.
I've always noticed that the fiercest defenders of something are always the most recent converts. Fiery young Muslim extremists come from Lindh-esque rallying for a cause. Mac zealots are easiest found among those who have just bought their first Mac. And the biggest US patriots, the ones who most clearly grasp America's founding ideals and hold them in higher regard than anyone else, seem to be the ones who have just become citizens themselves.
After all, to change one's nationality means a pretty drastic idealistic decision. Someone willing to make that decision will tend to have the force of conviction behind it.
I said in the past that I have a practice of viewing American society as an outsider. I have been an American all my life, but as a first-generation American, I cannot help but set myself apart at times, and view my country and my compatriots the way an outsider might. And I repeatedly find that Americans are a curious lot. Andrew Sullivan pointed out that we don't want to be bothered, really. We want to pursue this particular dream that we have, and we would like it if the world left us alone to pursue it. We don't particularly lust for an empire, or for hegemony--we take up the task of superpower out of a sense of obligation, not out of a desire to bestride the world like a Colossus. There is no song exhorting "Rule Americana." Many of us would be perfectly happy to be able to drop all of this superpower stuff, and take our society closer to the principles and ideals that bind us as a nation.
Then, something invariably intrudes on that dream. Something inevitably threatens those ideals. Something unfailingly presents itself as a mortal peril to America.
And almost immediately, this introspective American society turns to face that intrusion, that threat, that mortal peril, and wages a singleminded, passionate war to defeat it. The transformation in the national mood is akin to the transformation from night to day. Whether that war is fought with guns and tanks, or with stealth and diplomacy, it is fought by Americans with ardor, strength, intelligence and vigor. There are defeats, setbacks, botched schemes and foolish plans in the course of that war, but in the end, America ends up winning. Those who attack America and those who underestimate Americans, end up being astonished at the speed of America's response, annihilated by the ferocity of America's power, and ultimately aided by America's magnanimous generosity.
We don't like making war as a nation. And we despise it as individuals. Some people foolishly pronounce Americans as warlike. In the Blogosphere, we "warbloggers" have even been stupidly called "bloodthirsty" by those who just don't understand. No one I know covets a state of war. We would all prefer peace. Were I to find anyone who lusts for war, for war's sake alone, I would recommend their institutionalization--after I finish giving them a sound and deserved thrashing.
But we understand, especially on days like this, that we may have no choice. That there are enemies out in the world who wish nothing for us other than ultimate and absolute destruction. They will not be bought off, they cannot be negotiated with, they cannot be charmed or converted into being friends. They must be destroyed before they destroy more of us. No other way is possible. It is sad, regretful, and profoundly unfortunate that such a state of affairs exists. But exist it does. And we must face it.
I'm sick of America being critized for not being more involved in world affairs, and then reluctantly dragging itself into some provincial conflict that affects us not at all-- and then America gets criticized for playing "the world's policeman". Remember the Monroe Doctrine-- and pre-WWI isolationism? The dwarfs are for the dwarfs. But we got pulled into WWI to remember our friendship with our European allies, and WWII because we'd done so before. After WWII, it was expected that we'd do so every time. After all, we've got the biggest army anywhere, right? What could it possibly be for other than to defend the rest of the world against tyranny?
That's so cute... but it's wrong! The US Government exists to protect Americans, not to rule the world; and the US Army exists to defend our interests, not everybody else's who rubs their summon-the-Americans magic lamp.
And so it's mystifying to us to learn that Europeans have little sympathy for 9/11, because we didn't immediately leap to the defense of the thousands of victims of genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo, or that we're not in force defending East Timor or Rwanda from their own civil wars. It's like we were sitting there quietly doing our homework, and then some professor calls up demanding to know why we didn't turn in our Underwater Basket-Weaving final. Huh? I don't remember signing up for Underwater Basket-Weaving.
And then when 9/11 happened, you know what? We didn't really expect sympathy either. We just expected people to get out of our way while we went and kicked the requisite amount of ass. We knew who was responsible, we knew what needed to be done about it. We expected Europe to realize that we might possibly have our wits about us, that we didn't need to consult them and get their unanimous approval before acting, allowing al Qaeda to plan their followup attack in the time we spent waiting. I humbly submit that bin Laden was banking on the US response being held up by European dithering, just as Churchill had thought that America would turn out to be ineffectual in WWII. (The full quote is at PejmanPundit; follow the link.) But we swooped right in, and that second blow never fell. Yes, I know it might still. But I'm certain that it would have already, if we had done nothing.
Those who look at 9/11 and say, "Yes, it's terrible, but..." inevitably have some argument about perspective, or moral equivalence, or the big picture, or some conspiracy theory about how the US just wants an excuse to bomb Saudi Arabia so we can take over the oil fields to shake their fingers at us over. Listen: bullshit. I realize you may consider it to be a liability that the US is strong enough to act quickly and decisively to protect its own interests, but you know, we consider it to be a virtue. And the fact that it works is a powerful argument against our changing our minds.
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11:48 - A tired weekend...
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No bloggage yesterday, I know-- I was helping someone move all day, and when I got home (and after spending about six hours having a slow, drawn-out dinner and talking with friends) I inexplicably felt compelled to play Secret of Mana on a Super NES emulator rather than to do any of the things I'd slated for this weekend:
- Unpack from last weekend
- DV-edit the footage from the Kinetic Sculpture Race and burn some DVDs
- Address three pending art-theft reports
- Add two new user accounts
- Review and approve 200 fan-art uploads
- Write some blog entries
Something tells me that I'm only going to get to the last of those today.
Oh, and because I also spent Friday and yesterday privately defending US policy in one of those recurring "You Americans never take any interest in the outside world, except to kill people... oh, and you need to become perfect and eradicate all your own problems before you are allowed to take any interest in the outside world" arguments that every blogger in the world seems to have taken part in lately. So if I blog today, it'll probably be along the lines of "USA A-OK!" Hope you don't mind terribly.
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| Friday, May 31, 2002 |
18:23 - The really important topics...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/05/StringBikinis.shtml
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Steven den Beste is back from Vegas, and it would seem that he had himself a good time.
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15:16 - Designing the iPod
http://www.designchain.com/coverstory.asp?issue=summer02
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The iPod is such a marvel of design and engineering, apparently, that it's become the subject of a case-study article at Electronics Design Chain, and held up as a prime example of "design done right" for others to emulate.
It would be a huge mistake to assume that all the design work happened elsewhere and that Apple had no substantial input. A reference design is far from having a finished product, even electronically. The ultimate circuit design was still Apple's, as far as any outsider can tell.
"The value is putting it all together and optimizing the design to eek out the best performance, get the best power utilization, the best audio performance," says Wolfson's Hayes. "That is not a trivial task by any means. Sometimes it's very difficult in a cost constrained [situation] and small form factor to get the performance." Factors that can influence the final sound can be the circuit board layout, the circuit design itself, the handling of the power supply and the overall implementation.
"It's a combination of all those things that create that high-quality performance," Hayes adds.
In his opinion, and in that of many reviewers, Apple hit a home run. "Certainly I think it's about the best audio quality we've come across for that type of product in the marketplace in terms of intrinsic audio quality and delivered audio quality," Hayes says.
Sounds pretty accurate to me. The iPod is another one of those things, like OS X, that even people who dislike Apple are having to admit is a pretty damned sweet piece of kit. Oh, and another employee at my company just bought one. He'll be using it with Windows, but it just couldn't itself be resisted.
Sure, it's good that there's a Windows compatibility option out there. But you know, it's rather nice for once to be on the "have" side of one of these technological-divide situations for once, and to have the Windows users coming to us with their hats in their hands for a change. It's quite nice for our biggest problem to be avoiding saying "I told you so".
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Brian Tiemann
