| Wednesday, August 7, 2002 |
14:49 - Text Handling
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I like the way the Mac handles text selection and keyboard/mouse interaction with typing.
Apple introduced the first paradigms for how GUI text selection should work: you select some text, and then whatever you type or paste replaces whatever is selected. Double-click in some text, and it selects the word; triple-click, and it selects the sentence, or the paragraph. Double-click a word and then drag to the next word, and it selects that whole word.
Then Windows came along, and decided to make it all smarter. Like, for instance, in Word, if you double-click on a word, it selects not just the word but the space following it as well, so that if you delete the word it will also delete the space and leave you with just one space between the remaining words. And if you single-click in a word and drag to the next word, it selects the next word and the entire first word as well. It's impossible to select just the part of a sentence, from the middle of a word to the middle of another word, without a lot of indeterminate mouse flailing.
It's amazing to me how thin a line there is between "software that tries so hard to be 'smart' that it interferes with your workflow" and "software that does what you tend to want".
I like, for instance, some of the pieces of "smartness" that Apple is putting into OS X. For instance: in Mail, if you're typing a list of names or e-mail addresses into the To: field, as soon as you type enough of a name for it to identify a complete address-book entry, it fills it out for you-- standard auto-complete stuff. The rest of the address, which you haven't typed yet, is selected, so anything further that you type replaces it. Just as you'd expect. But if you type a comma, it takes that to mean "I accept that address, as you've auto-completed it; rewrite the name as it appears in the Address Book, move the cursor to the end, and let me start typing a new address". It's a special-case exception to the old strike-over text-selection tactics, and it works bloody well.
And if you're typing in TextEdit or any text field, you can double-click on a word, and only that word will be selected-- not the space before or after the word. that way, if you start typing, it preserves the spaces as they were, and your new word replaces only the word that was selected. But if you delete the selected word, it also deletes one of the spaces, leaving only one. Which is what you want it to do. And meanwhile, if you place the cursor between two letters and drag to some other point in the paragraph, it won't extend the selection box beyond what you asked for-- it will select just the stuff between where you clicked and where you released. If you'd wanted it to select whole words, you'd have double-clicked before dragging.
(Oh, and everything in the system uses the same text-handling engine; there's none of this "Well, text behaves one way in Word, and another way in IE, and another way in this piece of shareware that I have" stuff. With the exception of a few Cocoa-specific things like UNIX-style keybindings, everything in OS X, from the Finder to OmniWeb to the Terminal, has the same text behaviors. It's all the same code. That's why Inkwell will work anywhere in the system, even at the command line. Yikes!)
It's this kind of stuff that makes publishing professionals and writers prefer Macs. The text behaviors make sense; they don't try to outsmart you. It's hard to tell whether it's this way because the designers within Apple use Windows sporadically and find out each time what horrible things Windows does that PC users are all to used to by now, that only Mac people will notice because they're used to a much more intuitive paradigm-- or if it's simply that they analyze how they themselves type and work with text, decide continuously that "This is the way it should be," and program in that direction.
I can tell you one thing: if I'd had to use Word on a PC for my book, I'd have gone mad before I made it three chapters.
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14:17 - Mountains out of ...mooooooooles
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2876696,00.html
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David, David, David.
This is a perfect example of an entire industry's press field finding completely non-newsworthy things to write about, presumably because there's nothing else on the radar. David Coursey is the latest high-profile tech columnist to leap onto the "Macs on Intel" bandwagon, which (you may recall) is founded upon nothing more concrete or explicit than Steve Jobs responding to a question about putting Intel CPUs into Macs with the line, "First we have to finish the transition to OS X. Then we'll be able to evaluate our options." That's it. That's all he said.
And now we have analysts like Andrew Neff of Bear Stearns saying that there is "an 80% chance" of Apple moving to Intel processors. Like it's some kind of weather forecast or earthquake prediction. Just what precisely are your indicators, Andrew? Did four out of five informants within Apple tell you that this was so? Or did you just wake up one morning and with a gasp of surprise find that number wedged up your rectum?
Moving to Intel CPUs, even if we cast it in such terms as "AMD would be the supplier" and "Just the CPUs and the basic architecture would change-- it would still be a whole-widget operation, and you wouldn't be able to run Mac OS X on random off-the-shelf PC hardware", would still be an intractable feat. This isn't just a matter of flipping a compile-time switch when building the OS. All the third-party application makers would have to rewrite their apps for Intel, and this would come hard on the heels of their being yanked through the (somewhat painful) OS X transition process. App developers aren't going to stand for that twice in a row. They'll throw up their hands and say it's not worth it.
And even if they didn't, even if they stuck with the Mac-- it's not just a matter of flipping a compile-time switch in those apps, either. Most of them are written in Carbon, not Cocoa-- which means there's a significant amount of 68000-based code in it. That kind of stuff would have to be rewritten from scratch, in what would be an even more painful process than Carbonizing an app for OS X. And what of little/big-endian-ness? The Intel architecture is little-endian, whereas the 68K and PPC chips are big-endian (actually it's settable at boot time, interestingly). The Mac OS has always been big-endian. What that means is that any applications which expect to read the bit order in a certain sequence would be completely screwed, and the ordering code would have to be rewritten. This applies to nearly all networking applications, just for starters.
Sure, Apple could just emulate PPC code on Intel CPUs, like they did when they jumped from 68K to PPC. But that jump was a tiny curb compared to what this undertaking would be. The PPC had a very similar instruction set and architecture to the 68K-series. It was mostly trivial. Most basic assumptions about the chip were the same. And yet the emulated code was still terribly slow; it took years to get it all ironed out and made native. None of those architectural similarities would be there for the leap to Intel; it would be a much more difficult job to write an effective emulation layer. And it would undoubtedly be even more hideously slow than the earlier transition was.
And finally, what kind of Intel chips are we talking about here? Pentium 4s? The chip that even Intel is trying to replace at this very moment-- the one that's hurtling toward end-of-life, not just for its model, but for its entire bloodline? Apple would be arriving on the x86 platform just as it reached the twilight of its twenty-year lifespan; we'd be opening the door just as the lights went out, and Intel would have moved on to the 64-bit Itanium (or Mauritanium, or Lusitanium, or whatever the new one is called-- the one that runs at 800MHz, clocked slower than the G4). Apple would once again be a laughingstock, and this time the Megahertz Myth could be used against them.
Kris says that he is willing to wager, one year from now, an Intel-based Power Mac against David Coursey's PPC-based Power Mac: if Apple is on Intel in a year's time, he'll buy one for David. If they haven't, David has to buy him one of whatever they have.
I fully agree. Apple has options here, and that's what Jobs said. He didn't say a word about Intel. (What we do see are indicators that IBM will figure prominently in Apple's CPU-supplier future, with PPC/POWER4 hybrids, an uber-G3 clocked super-high but sans Altivec (one source I read recently blames none other than Altivec for hampering the speed-ramping capacity of the G4-- it's apparently a big roadblock to increased clock speed), or even the true and fabled 64-bit "Book E" G5.)
Options. That's all they are. Not the biggest tech news of the day.
UPDATE: Within about 13 seconds of my posting this, reader Kurt Revis responds with the following to my comment about app developers not being able to compile for Intel because of legacy 68K code:
I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. Nobody is shipping Carbon apps for OS X with any 68k code, because 68k code no longer works in OS X native apps. (It still works in Classic, of course.)
For many apps (Carbon or Cocoa is irrelevant), it really *should* be a matter of flipping a switch to compile on x86 (or whatever other processor you like). Some apps which use their own PowerPC assembly code will need to rewrite those parts for the new processor, but that's generally a very small amount of code. And many apps (the vast majority) don't have any assembly code at all.
You point out that there may be some bad assumptions about endianness issues when reading from disk/network, or alignment issues in memory, but again these are not huge stumbling blocks (unless the code is REALLY bad). The best practices these days include macros to do byteswapping when reading from disk/network, as appropriate -- the macros do nothing on big-endian machines but swap bytes on little-endian ones, or vice versa.
I'm sure that these issues will affect some people, but it's hardly the end of the world. If the benefits of switching to a new processor architecture are high enough--like making your app run twice as fast--people will do the work. The PPC emulation issue is really the hard part; everything else you mention is trivial in comparison.
This is all more information for me to assimilate into what's admittedly a rather sketchy understanding in my mind of what constitutes software design issues in today's Mac world. It's all a big jigsaw, and I don't pretend to have all the pieces. After having added these, the picture is a bit clearer.
I still tend to think there are other options Apple would choose before Intel, though. And I still think app developers wouldn't stand for having to modify their code again so soon after painfully Carbonizing everything (and having to sell it yet again).
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13:17 - Media Bias
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You know what's funny? We in the blogosphere appear to have a pretty widespread consensus that the big media is of a liberal slant, with its continued nostalgic fascination with the Clintons, its merciless attacks upon the country's corporate upper-echelons, its pro-gun-control rhetoric, and its recent expressions of opposition to the war in Iraq and to Israel's policies, as well as being the bastion of moral-equivalence arguments and "why do they hate us?" soul-searching. The New York Times the Washington Post, CNN, Fox, CBS and so on-- they're all widely held to be disproportionate representatives of the liberal minds of Americans, claiming to speak for a great many more people than they really do.
But through the eyes of the Ar-Rahman list, what people keep saying is that the American media is hopelessly biased toward Israel. The exact opposite observation. They see the same media coverage that we do, of events in Jenin and Ramallah and Jerusalem, and while we might furrow our brows at the soulful camera pans across downtrodden Palestinians as the announcer explains why they feel their only choice is to blow themselves up in pizza parlors and dismiss it as liberal heart-wringing, to the Islamic viewpoint the exact opposite impression is given. To the people on the list, such coverage is nowhere near anti-Israeli enough. (I suppose this really shouldn't surprise me.) They feel they can't trust a word of what any media outlet says about the events in the Middle East. They're obviously lies and half-truths, covering up the heinous deeds of the Israelis which the biased conservative American media wants kept silent so the American people can be kept in the dark and their anger stirred to madness against the world's Muslims.
I guess it must be indicative of a certain kind of cultivated mindset to think that we in this country could possibly fail to gather the complete picture if we're really interested. This isn't the CCCP; this isn't China or Iraq. We don't have to rely on a state-run news organ to get our carefully filtered porthole into the outside world. Our big media agencies may be subject to bias, but they're private corporations-- each with their own internal agendas-- and there are a lot of them. We've got everything from Rush Limbaugh to The 700 Club to NPR. We've got the Drudge Report, we've got Stratfor.com, and we've got InstaPundit-- not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of other blogs, comprising a spectrum of opinion that-- because it's individual people speaking, not shareholder-bound companies-- is at even wider variance than what's on TV.
And when they all agree on the basic facts of something that's happening in Tel Aviv or Nablus, then I'll tell you: it's pretty safe to say it's the real story.
The people on the Ar-Rahman list are giving each other tips and advice as to which news organs are more likely to present-- well, not an unbiased view of events, but at least one that's less horrifyingly pro-Israeli than most. "Try MSNBC," says one participant, "It's a little better than CNN or Fox."
I've got a better idea. If you want news that tells you what you want to hear, go tune in al-Jazeera. But if you want to listen to what the American news agencies have to say, and you don't like what they're saying, it could just possibly be that reality is what's not on your side, not a conspiracy of biased Jew-operated anti-Islamic infidel media.
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12:21 - Ooooh.
http://talg.blogspot.com/2002_08_04_talg_archive.html#79890535
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In the responses to Tal G.'s link to the Clear Guidance message board yesterday, someone mentioned the thing about jihad really meaning simply "internal struggle".
Then someone named James said:
Of course Jihad means struggle. So does Kampf.
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11:52 - Quick! Crank up the symbolism generator...
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Hey, guess what day I get my braces off!
I'll give you a hint: it's in mid-September, and it's a Wednesday.
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10:48 - My what?
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As I was crossing the driveway heading for my car on the way to work this morning, a guy in a utility truck pulled up to the sidewalk.
"Hi! Are your mom and dad home?"
I must admit I was so taken aback that I can't remember what I said. Probably something like "Hhwhwaaaa?" Because he repeated it.
"Are your mom and dad at home?"
I'm 26. My hair is short, I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a gold watch, I'm carrying an iBook and a couple of bills to pay, and I'm holding the keys to my suburbanite econo-sport wheelbox.
"I'm, uh, not-- no," is all I can come up with.
Something hits him. "Aah, are you the man of the house?"
"Well, I'm one of them..."
"You want your yard trimmed?"
I take his business card and tell him our yard is in the shower. I'm not home alone, nuh-uh, for reals.
I suppose I should be flattered and stuff, but... geez. What a freaky way to begin the day.
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10:07 - You dipshits.
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Speaking of Ar-Rahman, someone sent a message through last night with the following pictures as attachments, as "evidence" that the Israelis are just as bad as the Nazis. "Sharon vs. Hitler," read the subject.
Ooh, yeah, it's exactly the same thing. I don't know why I wasn't totally convinced before. Such images of brutality.
(Yes, I know, this list is about preaching to the converted-- those to whom these pictures are incontrovertible proof of the parallel in the subject line.)
But doesn't anybody have the balls to question anything? Doesn't anyone have enough assurance to put this kind of position up against facts, or to approach it from a dissenting viewpoint? Or would such a thing be implicitly kufr?
"These pictures show that the Israelis are just like the Nazis." Uh huh. So let's see the pictures of Israeli soldiers lining up Palestinian civilians next to a pit and mowing them down with machine guns. Let's see the pictures of Israeli soldiers murdering little girls in their beds. Let's see the photos of the Israelis' concentration camps where they send the Palestinians en masse to be gassed. Oh, and while you're at it, show me some history with Jews blowing up German ice-cream parlors and shopping venues and commuter buses with suicide belts, killing grandmothers and babies and pregnant women, and then dancing in the streets of the Berlin and Warsaw ghettos, shooting guns in the air and praising Jehovah.
Then we'll talk.
Until then, shut the hell up.
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| Tuesday, August 6, 2002 |
02:39 - A Religion of Peace
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0802/080102.html#080702
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Children are savage little things. The jungle is in them, and the wilderness. Occasionally, one will come along in whom the jungle boils and screams, and with that one comes chaos. And with children, chaos is a thing of stones and blood.
Preacher, of course-- Allfather D'Aronique sadistically recalling to Starr the events of his own tormented childhood.
It's all I could think about while reading today's Bleat.
I saw the link to the message-board that Lileks is talking about, referred to in his usual emotionless and bewilderingly matter-of-fact way by Tal G. But I had an idea of what I might find there, and since I had no wish to spend the remainder of my workday fuming and seething, I didn't go and read it. It seems I made a good call, if only for the sake of my sanity. Lileks has taken the bullet of reading this stuff so we don't have to-- but we'd all better read it just the same, so we know what kind of primal savagery we're dealing with.
The thread is full of charming stuff; they talk about the joys of knifing Jews, and discuss the merits of a particular decapitate-the-infidel tape - who knew it was such a genre? It almost seems as if these guys trade decapitation tapes like l33t hackers swap warez...
There’s more. It’s lovely. Sample message topics: “Do Jews Drink Human Blood?” “Holocoust Never Happened!”
I’d have no interest in this website whatsoever were it not for three things:
1. When there’s a subculture out there ranking the best jihadi decapitation video, you’d best pay attention.
2. When a message board devoted to guidance for Islamic youth doesn’t delete the posts about stabbing Jews, you’d best pay attention.
3. This thread. As far as I can tell, the debate seems to be whether it’s a brother’s job to kill his sexually active sister, or the religious authority’s job.
It's a Bleat, so that means go read the whole thing.
What I find so sick and disheartening about all this is Islam is being treated by these kids as a carte blanche license for them to express-- not just without guilt, but with righteousness-- the kinds of savage and barbaric feelings of bloodlust that the rest of the world learned to rise above and leave behind many hundreds of years ago. These days, kids who want to work out their chainsaw-wielding aggressions go out and buy whatever hyper-violent video game has just hit the market, and they learn to separate such impulses from reality and the rules we live by in a healthy and self-determined way. But when there's an excuse like Islam for kids to latch onto-- one where the Law of Life flat-out encourages them to think in terms of hating infidels and killing Jews-- they're going to throw themselves into it headlong and lick up every drop of vitriol that it offers. And those are the foundational values that will inform these kids throughout the rest of their adult lives.
It's really small wonder where people like John Lindh come from-- the picture that militant Islam paints for bellicose, testosterone-pumped teenage boys is irresistible. It's like painting a naked woman on a big piece of butcher paper and then setting it up at the edge of a cliff; they're going to walk right through, drooling all the way. The evidence is right in front of us-- on this message board, and on the Ar-Rahman list I still seem to be on (where the latest discourse is from Muslim Americans pleading the others on the list to understand that the "vast majority" of Americans hate Bush and his policies, support the Palestinian cause and despise Israel, and will come to see the light of Islam if only the world gives us a chance).
As much as it might pain the students at clearguidance.com, American churches don’t give two figs for the subject of Islam one way or the other. It’s just not on their radar. There are no pained debates in church basements about how to act towards Muslim friends, or what to do when your friend’s sister comes over with a headscarf. As much as some would like to portray mainstream American religious belief as a Dangerous Ravening Force bent on establishing an Ashcroftian theocracy, most churches look inward. A dear friend of mine is part of a church-group mission to help the Truly Farked - she’s mentoring a down-and-out drug addict, helping her get on her feet. Is that addict a Christian? No idea. Doesn’t come up. Does my friend praise Jeeeeeesus every time she drops off meals or blankets for the addict? Irrelevant. The act is what matters. It’s the gift, not the wrapping.
Yes, yes, of course, I understand-- it's two entirely different ways of thinking. In the one world, religion is something you do as part of your normal day-to-day life; whereas in the other, day-to-day life is something you do as subordinate to religion, which defines all of existence. As part of a tradition in which I'm raised to consider the former to be far more natural, I can't properly understand the context or the motivation behind the latter.
But Tal G. never once has mused upon knifing a Palestinian baby. And he freely linked to the message board full of Muslim youths discussing doing exactly that to Jewish babies, and with hardly a comment by way of preamble or reaction.
I don't know what could possibly speak more succinctly than exactly that.
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19:23 - Windows Dissatisfaction at an All-Time High
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0208/06.alternatives.php
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There are a number of articles floating around today about a report by The Yankee Group, which says that:
Apple's Macintosh has found a comfortable and committed niche among enterprise customers with sophisticated graphics and production departments. Linux, meanwhile, has gained a groundswell of support in the last three to four years due to its appeal as the "un-Windows" solution, according to Yankee Group senior analyst and Report author Laura DiDio.
"Corporate user resentment and dissatisfaction with Microsoft and some of its practices are at an all-time high," DiDio said. A myriad of issues ranging from Microsoft's perceived monopolistic practices, hyperbolic marketing, ongoing security woes, and habitually slipping ship dates of major new product releases as well as confusion surrounding the overall .NET strategy have undermined corporate customer confidence. A recent joint survey of 1,500 corporations by Sunbelt Software, Inc. and the Yankee Group found that nearly 40% of the respondents were so outraged by Microsoft's new licensing scheme that they are actively seeking alternative products.
"This cumulative dissatisfaction will not necessarily translate into corporate defections to rival operating systems. But it does open the door a crack and raises the possibility that Linux and Macintosh OS X can gain new footholds in an overwhelmingly Windows world," DiDio said.
You know, it would be one thing if there were not this general sense of unease in the corporate world-- if the only reason anybody used an alternative OS was because they were rich, crazy, or a relic of an earlier era. But that's not the case. People are finding new reasons to switch from Windows all the time. It's not just a fringe group of lunatics and geeks, it's a broad-based sense that there's something "dirty" about using Microsoft products-- like filling up at the gas station, surrounded by fumes, with the numbers ticking over and the signs everywhere warning about MTBE, it makes a person feel guilty as hell to do it, even if it's a necessity for life. It's a fairly strong feeling, it seems, in the business world-- and getting stronger.
A company can't shed its past-- or at least, it can't when it follows the normal laws of nature and business. Enron, if it had survived its bankruptcy, would never again be free of the buzzword-esque meaning its name had taken on, as a cautionary tale against creative bookkeeping. Ford and GM are still wrestling with the ghosts of their abysmal build quality from the 70s and early 80s. And Microsoft, having been brought up repeatedly before courts on charges of unfair and slimy business practices, technological plagiarism, piracy of intellectual property, and monopoly-- and finally being convicted of criminal monopolistic practices, before the whole case being unceremoniously dropped by the prosecution with no provocation other than a business-friendly administration in the White House all of a sudden-- is apparently not getting off scot free in the court of public opinion. People are beginning to align "Microsoft" with "evil" in their word-association inkblot tests; at long last, it's starting to take hold.
Maybe it has to do with whether there appears to be a visible and viable alternative available. It's amazing what people will put up with, ranting and fuming and swearing, as long as they don't actually have to do anything about it (or have the ability to do anything about it). It's just Windows. Nothin' you can do. Just reinstall and hope for the best. But perhaps now that there's buzz everywhere you turn about viable alternatives-- big companies making enterprise-class software for Linux, OS X whisperings coming from every direction, Apple Stores in the most crowded malls, geeks gaining an offbeat kind of sex appeal on the screen-- people are starting to move in ways they haven't before. It's okay not to like Microsoft now, because-- well, you're not going it alone.
Personally, I've always tried to be very picky and choosy about who gets my money, and I refuse to give it to any company with whose business ethics I disagree. Since about 1996, that's meant Microsoft has received not one red cent from me. (I'm sure their accountants are quaking in their boots.) And in that time, they've done nothing to change my mind about what kind of company they are-- in fact, they've only proven over and over and over that they're a company that I can't trust to pick out a shirt for me, much less to be the government-approved gatekeeper of my personal digital information. A company that's unapologetically unethical as well as criminally incompetent, undertaking a "Trusted Computing" initiative? Give me a break.
Now that there are all these things in the news-- Open Source is a public buzzword, Apple is in everybody's face, Microsoft is failing to convince anyone of its good intentions with .NET, and too many movies lately have picked up on the notion of dystopian futures in which a devilish Umbrella Corporation controls the production of everything from computers to laser satellites-- the general public and the business community are beginning to realize that calling Microsoft for what it is isn't anti-capitalism or Luddism... it's simply what a conscientious member of a society with a fragile and malleable new technological frontier should be asking of the companies leading the way into that frontier. It's making sure that the people we give our money to are seeing into the future of the world at large, not just their own bottom line.
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17:56 - Now there's an idea...
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-080102A
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Via InstaPundit, here's another proposal for a WTC replacement that we could be proud of having built. It's a lot more subtle and quiet than the WTC2002 design, which (by the way) now has a petition/vote thing up so you can make your voice heard through some unclear means if you feel such a design is worth pursuing-- even if that means putting it at the extreme ostentatious end of the spectrum of possibilities.
But this one doesn't even necessarily have to be hideously tall. It's got real possibilities, and it's as symbolic as you could want without being pretentious or overbearing. It's a bit ungainly, perhaps, but these are just rough sketch ideas that the site has.
Hint: it's all about the roof.
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17:50 - It's that time of year
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Today was a really nice day for motorcycling.
Just thought I'd mention that.
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13:48 - Do You Believe in Love?
http://www.coldfury.com/Entries/00000262.html
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Something that has always, always befuddled me is how in movies, books, TV shows, pretty much anywhere-- there's the recurring plot element of a guy who's been dumped by his girlfriend/wife/female companion, who clearly cannot stand him anymore. And yet he spends the rest of his life trying to win her back. You know, the kind of thing that stalkers are made of. The plot of The War of the Roses. The idea that even though she clearly hates you, all you have to do-- in order to make her love you again-- is to capture her and force her to submit to your will.
What is it about this kind of situation that strips people of their sense of reality? Any sane man ought to be able to understand that if she wanted to be with him, she wouldn't be running and hiding and calling the police every time he comes near. This is not a woman who is teasing, who secretly "wants to be won over". This is a woman who wants the guy the hell out of her life, for good. If she says, "I want a divorce"-- that means she does not want to live with the guy anymore. It does not mean that the guy can reason and convince and bitch-slap his way into her heart again. What could make a guy think that love can be forced to exist? What would lead him to believe that having the companionship of one particular woman is so unique and important that he is willing to throw away all of his cherished morals and ethics and willingness to abide by law and common human decency, just to recapture it in some bizarre physical drug-like ritual-- even in the face of the obvious fact that she would rather kill him or herself than be in the same state with him?
... Okay, that's sort of a tangent from what I'd originally meant to say. But I suppose not, because it's pretty much the same ridiculous mindset that seems to drive what Mike "Cold Fury" Hendrix has begun calling the Axis of Feeble: the UN, the EU, and other international leftist bodies who seem willing to leap at even the smallest soiled handkerchief tossed from the window of a woman named Iraq who has been flinging rocks at them nonstop for the past ten years. (This is Mike's metaphor, not mine, but it works.)
Can't a guy ever learn to move on?
It's one thing to try to patch up a relationship where both parties honestly want to make it work, where both sides are willing to change and to make sacrifices and compromises and to alter their respective planned futures for the prospect of a symbiotic life that might grow to be more than the sum of its parts.
But it's quite another for one party to be continuously spurned, insulted, threatened, and attacked for years and years-- and not to ever reach the conclusion that the party doing the spurning might just be a lost cause, and not worth throwing everything away over at the first (and by no means sincere) sign that she might be softening.
What will it take to convince the world that some nations and some regimes just flat-out suck, and the onus is upon them to change-- not us? That it's their responsibility to make the unilateral concessions if they don't want to get blown up?
All I can think is that Kofi Annan has been watching too many chick-flicks lately, or something.
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| Monday, August 5, 2002 |
21:12 - A little sanity...
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On the World Affairs Council call-in show on NPR tonight, they had a member of the Spanish Parliament-- by the name, I think of Gustavo Aristide-- talking about the war on terrorism and related topics. In response to one seemingly axe-grinding caller's question about what the European stance was on America's holding terrorism suspects in Guantanamo and so on, he concluded the show with a statement to the following effect:
I think the Europeans and the Americans actually see eye-to-eye in a lot of ways, in the war on terror; and we have a lot of respect for America and its policies, as we would have for any such democracy. After all, America is one of the world's oldest democracies; and as I often tell my European friends, just as we would not expect America to interfere in European affairs, we should not presume to interfere in the internal affairs of the United States. Mutual respect is of great importance here.
Wow. I hadn't realized there were such opinions as this in European politics. If this guy is representative at all of the Spanish political landscape, I'm very encouraged that at least Spain will be someone we can count on not to go nuts on us when everything starts exploding.
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14:00 - Charming...
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Just got this lovely piece of spam:
www.carder.org
This is the best resource where you can find out how to steal a credit cards from American jerks. Also you can purchase the cc's on our site. We sell American credit cards as well as European ones. We sell dumps of American credit cards. While using them you can be absolutely sure in positive results. We sell fake id's, US/UK/French passports, driver license and so on. We sell American citizents' SSN data which can be used to open an on-line banking account. We sell e-bay accounts. Drug-dealers you can count on, fake Euro and dollars at any time,brown suger, coke.... Any illegal thing that you ever wanted is on our site. We pay money all hosting companies and that's why no one would close it. Visit us and you will be satisfied.
www.carder.org
Can someone be more audacious?
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11:32 - For Our Windows Friends
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020731BL-CNET
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Just in case anybody's an early-adopter out there and jumping on the just-released Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, well... if it isn't too late for you already, don't install it. A number of people in my office have already fallen prey.
W2KnewsFLASH: ~ Service Pack 3 for W2K! ~
But careful, it has not yet been officially announced, and the first problem reports are also already in. Some one just sent me an email with: "Downloaded and installed the final release of W2K SP3. After a clean install and a reboot I got the blue screen of death. Only after uninstalling a rare application from my desktop it worked OK."
W2K SP3 is at the moment we are writing this (Wednesday afternoon, July 31, 2002) not yet on the normal MS download site and not "acknowledged as existing for the wide world" so far. However, it was released yesterday to the MS Premier Support Customers and these are now testing with it. We have installed on a few W2K systems and it seems to be functioning correctly, but careful: TEST, TEST, TEST!. And always backup that system and make an Emergency Repair Disk. Also, always have enough disk space to allow a rollback in case of problems.
I don't know what conditions cause the conflict, but it's clearly something that's fairly widespread, considering how many people here at work are staring furiously at bootup screens and ScanDisk recovery processes. Too late to see the IT warning that went around admonishing us all not to install SP3, on pain of death.
I'm just sayin', is all.
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| Sunday, August 4, 2002 |
23:51 - My Goldmember Review
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I went to see Austin Powers: Goldmember tonight.
And after seeing this movie, I can safely say that I am now willing and prepared to go on a one-man personal worldwide crusade against cellphones. For you see, not one person on the face of the Earth appears to be capable of shutting off his blasted phone on the way in to the theater.
I am going to go to the entrance to each theater room at the multiplex, pat each person down as he or she enters, take any and all cellphones that they might be carrying, and put them all into a large wooden crate. Then I will fill the crate with quick-drying post-hole concrete, and then take the crate outside to the parking lot, remove the wooden crate sides, and then begin to slowly and methodically demolish the concrete block with a sledgehammer, singing "Steel Drivin' Man" and various chain-gang pick-swingin' songs like from the beginning of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
Then I will seek out every person who has ever made a call to someone's cell phone, when the recipient of the call was in the middle of a heartfelt, involved, or otherwise valuable personal conversation with another person in real life, just so that the caller could say, in that hideous whining wheedling voice of piteous sycophancy, "What'cha dooooooooIN'?" And I will take each phone from each such caller, and I will reprogram it so that when he tries to dial any number, it will instead play back a detailed verbal description of the Persian Boat Torture-- the one that involves strapping someone naked and covered with honey onto a boat floating in the middle of a swamp full of hatching mosquitoes and flies, under the blazing sun, so that the person dies under the torment of about fifteen different horrific forms of pain that are otherwise undescribable in any kind of polite company. And just to be extra cruel, I'll put it on a randomizer so that one in ten calls, instead of the Persian Boat Torture, the caller gets a recording of William Shatner's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" or Leonard Nimoy's "Bilbo Baggins".
And then I will seek out the people behind the cell-phone service commercials-- the Verizon "Can you hear me now?" guy, and Carrot Top, and Mr. T, and Alf, and everybody who has shilled for these bloody long-distance phone ads which can't ever seem to take the hint and get their damn selves off my TV-- and I don't care if it gets me on Seanbaby's shit list to want to do this to Mr. T, but I will hire whatever muscle I'll need to in order to subdue these people, tie them down, force-feed them asparagus, and then wait until they fall asleep and put their hands in pans of warm water so that they pee in their sleep and wake up in a miasma of smell so horrible that they die of embarrassment and revulsion, and nevermore influence anybody who is going to be at a movie that I am seeing, or in a car where I am talking to them, or in line at Taco Bell where I am planning to get food, to spend that entire time with their bloody bleeding bloody blasted billions of blistering blue bloody barnacles on a cell phone ringing at top volume with whatever kick-in-the-head-inducing ring tone they've programmed it with, over and over and over and over and over again. If they can't wait until the movie is over before they have to call their friends to ask "What'cha dooooooIN'?", then they can consider themselves duly warned of my intentions.
Oh-- the movie. It was funny.
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| Saturday, August 3, 2002 |
03:58 - Hope for Rationality
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One other NPR point-of-interest that I passed like a ship in the night on the way home was the always-interesting This American Life segment, which this time was a fairly in-depth look at life in the West Bank, from both the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. They got Israeli high-school students dishing about dating; they got Palestinian blue-collar workers grumbling about being cooped up day after day due to the imposed-at-gunpoint curfews; they got a look in at the Knesset, where the right-wing Likud party HQ was full of supporters and life and energy, whereas the pro-peace-process Labor wing was all but abandoned, and the phones silent; they got a Palestinian-American developer working on building a large glass-walled shopping mall in a West Bank town, who spoke with careful nonchalance about how the Palestinian Authority and the big shareholders of the regional phone company had looted the company by splitting off the lucrative cellular division into a new company in which the PA and the bigwigs were the only shareholders-- on the very same day that the PA was pledging to the Europeans that the PA would be divesting itself of its private holdings in a show of good faith towards an honest free market. And then he had to hurry to hail a cab for the reporter and zoom off so he wouldn't get shot when a curfew was suddenly re-imposed.
But most interesting to me was the street-interview segment where they talked about a politically high-profile doctor named Mustafa Barghouti, who has built up quite a reputation for himself as the leader of a volunteer medical task force providing emergency care to people in the West Bank. To a man, every single person interviewed described Barghouti as "a good man-- a good, good guy". Presented as a "third alternative" (next to Arafat and the leader of Hamas), he seemed to be an ideal candidate, at least in our eyes, for filling Arafat's political shoes. He's moderate (he advocates non-violence and opposes suicide bombings on moral grounds as well as tactical ones); he's reasonable (he wants to see a return to 1967 borders, but his is a two-state solution that doesn't eventually end up being a one-state and Israeli-minority solution, the way other "moderates" want it); and he's secular. He's run for office before, and he's only lost because his opponent (his brother Marwan, who is much more extreme in his views, sort of a Malcolm X figure) was said to have fixed the elections-- which he only narrowly won anyway. It would seem that Barghouti would be an ideal horse to back.
Except for what the street interviewees had to say. Though they all loved Barghouti, none of them seemed willing to vote for him if he were to run. When asked who they would vote for if given a choice between Arafat and Barghouti, those interviewed said they'd pick Arafat. When pressed for why, they repeated the same phrase: He is our father; he is our symbol. (This could well be the result of fear of secret-police inquisitions, but considering how much stock these folks seem to put in symbols, I'm not at all sure that these sentiments aren't genuine.) And if given a choice between Barghouti and one of the Hamas mucky-mucks, the interviewees said they'd take the Hamas guy. Why? Because Hamas is religious, and Barghouti is secular. "Everything Hamas does is based on our religion," said one interviewee.
So there we have it. If we can take this as any kind of representative sample, a true democratic vote-- if taken tomorrow-- would probably still turn up Arafat as a winner. Even if people distrust him and find him to be corrupt and ineffectual, he's our father and our symbol. Opinions are opinions. But change? Nooo... we can't have that. I've seen this kind of mentality before. People will complain about a situation that is just bad enough to make them complain but not bad enough to make them want to do something about it. It's the art of keeping people on a knife edge. Microsoft has mastered it, and so has Arafat, apparently.
So on one hand, I'm cheered that people like Barghouti-- with blue jeans and a pin-striped shirt, leading non-violent chanting protests against curfew conditions-- exist in the occupied Palestinian areas. But on the other, I'm discouraged at the thought that the Palestinians are more concerned with preserving symbols than with forging themselves a better life.
But at least those poll numbers keep fluctuating. If a shakeup occurs, at least there's some nonzero chance of a rational, charismatic, secular leader taking the reins.
Not a large one. But larger than it used to be.
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01:50 - Oh, do shut up...
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The quote that everybody on all the world-conscious news reports today kept repeating was by George Bush at a Republican Party fundraiser saying:
We cannot allow the world's worst leaders to develop, and thereby hold hostage freedom-loving countries with the world's worst weapons.
Some MP by the name of Galloway then went on air to publicly call America's leadership akin to "a giant with the mind of a child"; and as was even more insufferable, he claimed that such a characterization should be obvious to "anybody who has heard President Bush speak just now".
You could cut the arrogant paternalistic superiority with a knife.
The BBC spent the rest of the report covering (and repeating four times) the breaking story that the WTC firefighters on 9/11 were not actually as heroic as they had heretofore been made out to be-- that on that day they were actually hampered by critical communications failures, out-of-date radio systems, supervision by incompetents who hadn't had refresher training in fifteen years, hierarchical chaos, internecine bickering, inter-office opacity, and any number of other accusations that, while nobody even in the FDNY would deny them, were... well, feel free to draw your own conclusions about the tastefulness of the glee with which the BBC World Service returned to the story. (Four times.)
Afterwards, on the domestic news, evidence was uncovered that the firefighters working in the South Tower had managed to penetrate higher into it than previously had been thought. Drawing on evidence from tapes of emergency transmissions made during the rescue operation, it was revealed that at least two firefighters were in fact able to reach the crash site on the 78th floor, prior to the building's collapse.
If we're being told not to attack Iraq by people like Galloway and the BBC World Service, then I for one consider that to be just as valid a reason for us to attack as any of Steven den Beste's best arguments.
If we attack, one of two things will happen: 1) The moment we start bombing, Tel Aviv will disappear under a nuke, or meteorologists in New York or Chicago would have to invent a new icon for "Anthrax clouds" or "Smallpox fronts"; or 2) we will take Baghdad without such a thing happening, but we'll discover that the WMD switches were armed and everything ready to go off, armed and loaded and fully operational. Either way, we'll be proved right, and either way, we'll be taking the risks upon ourselves.
So the nay-sayers can just jolly well butt out.
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13:47 - Just to cite an example...
http://www.dockfun.com
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As the philosophical battle rages over Watson and Sherlock 3, I have to call up the example of software like DockFun!.
This thing is the coolest piece of OS X-specific shareware I've run across. I haven't tried it out myself, but people who have used it tell me it's indispensable and oh-so-much-fun. Just watch the Flash intro on the website and see what I mean.
But while I was watching it, the only thing that was running through my mind was, "Wouldn't it be cool if Apple were to integrate this kind of functionality right into the system?"
Why would this leap to my mind? Why would I want to see something created by an innovative, fun-loving third-party shareware developer subsumed into the default OS, presumably without any recognition or compensation?
Because it seems like an obvious thing for people to want. And it's squarely in Apple's development path to incorporate this kind of technology.
When I think rationally about it, no, I wouldn't want to see the developer's efforts brought low by a corporate edict rendering it meaningless. But deep down, viscerally, all development of this type for the Mac community seems to me to be a part of a continuum-- whether it's by Apple or by an independent developer, it all seems to be toward the same goal: making the Mac rock.
And when that presents itself to be the goal, I just want to see it implemented in the most streamlined and elegant way possible (as an Apple-menu option, for instance, like the Location Manager, which switches your TCP/IP settings from location to location-- rather than as a Dock item taking up room)... and in the way that gets it in front of the most people possible. Everybody should have functionality like this. Just like everybody should have a menu-bar clock, WindowShade, and SOAP-based XML database access in customized client panes.
It'll take time, though. And just as I'm waiting still for Apple to incorporate all of the functionality that the Location Manager had under OS9 into OS X (adjusting your volume and power-management settings, as well as a whole bunch of other preferences, depending on whether you're at home or in the quiet office, for example), I'll wait however long it takes for them to enhance the Dock in this way. They've already put in the foundations, responding to customer requests-- allowing you to put the dock on the left or right, or to change the minimize behavior. So it's only a matter of time.
And until then, the DockFun! guy gets the vote of my money.
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| Friday, August 2, 2002 |
19:24 - Once again, we're stuck with cheaper instead of better
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Kris just noticed an external DVD-RW drive hooked up to a computer in IT as he walked by. Upon close inspection, he noticed that it was connected via USB. USB 2.0, to be exact. And a good thing, too, because if it were USB 1.1, DVD write speed would be so slow as to be unusable.
So USB 2.0 has now arrived, and what it means is that FireWire's speed advantage over USB has now been more or less nullified. Its early lead over USB in fields such as DV camcorders and mass storage was valuable, and now a lot of those devices have been built and entrenched; but now that USB 2.0 can match FireWire's speed for one-way downloading of data such as digital photos or to-be-burned DVD data, and because USB 2.0 will now be the shipping default on all new PCs, FireWire will cease to have a clear advantage, and will be relegated to a second-class status and eventually die in obscurity. Like all good things crowded out by something cheaper, uglier, but backed by more companies bent on smashing all competition at all costs.
Those USB cables, as Kris explained, have to have ferrite beads-- those big, heavy, metal chokes-- clamped around each end, if they're going to carry large amounts of data. You know the kind. It's like having a huge bullet strapped to each end of the cable. Why is it there? Because USB only has four wires, and is an unbalanced specification. Your four wires are power, ground, transmit, and receive. The data wires are driven independently of each other, and their states are read relative to the ground wire. This means that you have to run it at a high voltage, like RS-232 (which operates at 12V). It means you've created a radio transmitter. Two unbalanced data signals oscillating relative to ground. Hence the big slugs of metal to try to shield the transmission effects.
Whereas FireWire has six wires-- power, ground, a pair for transmit, and a pair for receive. Each data pair is complementary to itself. When one wire is positive, the other wire is negative-- and they average to ground. The difference between them is read as the signal, not their relative voltage to ground like USB, which means FireWire can operate at a much lower voltage than USB, like in the neighborhood of 2V. And the two pairs are twisted, as in Ethernet, which cancels out any transmitter effects. So what you've got is a balanced design, one where the signals all average out to nothing. The four-wire i.Link version of FireWire just has the two pairs for send and receive, and no power. It's still nice and balanced, and noise-free.
But six wires means more expensive controllers at the endpoints, so everybody sticks with USB. And that means transmitter noise, which means we have to strap these chunks of metal onto them in order to keep them from scrambling everything FCC-regulated in the house.
FireWire's native speed is 400Mbps, and USB 2.0's is 480Mbps. FireWire's speed can be bumped up by a factor of two, four, eight, and so on-- by using the same tricks Ethernet has been able to get away with, in order to jump from 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1000Mbps. Signal can be sent on different pairs of wires with more complex components at the ends. But USB can only be sped up by clocking it higher, which makes the noise characteristics leap into the unmanageable. Sooner or later we'll have USB cables that have to be sheathed from end to end in lead, because hey-- we gotta have that speed, but we can't use FireWire. That's not the standard.
FireWire will get faster, doubling and quadrupling in speed in very short order-- but it won't matter, now that USB 2.0 is at the level that we all oohed and aahed at when FireWire let us put 150 CDs onto an iPod in five minutes.
(And this is aside from other stuff that I haven't gotten into-- like how FireWire is a peer-to-peer/daisy-chainable protocol, meaning you can hook up all kinds of devices end-to-end-- camcorder to DV bridge to hard drive-- without even having a computer in the mix. You can even put your PC into FireWire target disk mode and access its disks from another machine. But USB is host/hub-based, meaning that if you want to hook up more devices than you have ports in your hub-bearing devices (PC, monitor, keyboard), you have to buy a USB hub and use up another A/C adapter slot in your power strip. And it has to go through a computer in order to work. But for most people's purposes, that's close enough to being a good design.)
It pisses me off no end to see an elegant and effective design shouldered aside by the big, dumb, lumbering competitor with fewer features, worse expandability, and significant engineering drawbacks-- just because it has the trump-card of lower price and corporate-backed ubiquity on its side. Power over the market is so much more important than putting the best solution into people's hands, after all.
No, I'm not jaded by this industry yet. But some days...
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12:30 - My dear Holmes, stick it in your ear
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/07/29.7.shtml
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I've been trying to stay out of this argument. The accusation that Apple's new Sherlock 3, as included in Jaguar, is a technological duplicate of Karelia's truly groundbreaking Watson application, has very neatly split the Mac community down the middle, and I'm still teetering on the fence.
One one hand you've got the backers of Watson, including its developer, Dan Wood. Their contention is that Apple has pulled a tactic that's Microsoftian in the extreme: they acknowledged the innovative nature of Watson, which is a consolidated and extensible framework for SOAP/XML tools which let you get movie showtimes/trailers, TV listings, package tracking information, flight times, eBay auction listings, weather, baseball scores, and a host of other pieces of functionality that harnesses the design advantages of dedicated client software layout rather than the inherent clunkiness of the Web to access publicly accessible XML databases-- by awarding Karelia Software, the maker of Watson, the coveted Apple Design Award for "Most Innovative Mac OS X Software". And then, on the very same day that the award was given, Apple announced Sherlock 3. Which is almost exactly the same thing.
The contingent who are indignant over this, and quite understandably so, see this as a betrayal by Apple. They could have compensated Dan Wood to some degree, or even just put a credit to Karelia in the About page on Sherlock 3. They liken this action to Microsoft giving Marc Andreesen a coveted design award for Netscape, and then immediately turning around and releasing Internet Explorer.
But then there's the other side of the argument, which is fairly well represented. These people say that Apple was perfectly well within their rights to develop Sherlock, which already had a fairly long history as a web-wide information-gathering tool, into a SOAP-based information browser with customized interfaces for each tool. Design-wise, it's really not that much different from Sherlock 2-- it's just that the information it presents is more useful and better laid out. It leverages the same technological foundations, developed by Apple in Cocoa, that Watson does-- it just takes publicly available XML data, furnished by other companies, and formats them in a nice way. There's a minimal amount of effort involved in putting this stuff together. That's the whole point of Cocoa. It was a no-brainer for Apple to redesign Sherlock to take advantage of this new functionality, and they would have done so even if Watson weren't around. (In fact, if Karelia hadn't done it, this stuff is so easy that somebody would have created something just like Watson.)
Or even (say these people) if Watson was inspirational to Apple, Apple has a long history of gradually folding into its OS the little tweaks and advancements made by third-party shareware developers. The menu-bar clock, WindowShade, and the Internet Control Panel were all third-party developments that Apple realized were so useful that they would be remiss if they did not include them in the core operating system. Sometimes they compensated the original developers, but usually they didn't. There was always a little bit of grumbling, but it was quickly forgotten as the new features came to benefit all users and be thought of as an indispensable part of the OS. Apple should be praised for seeing an opportunity for enhancing the user experience in an obvious new direction, rather than vilified for taking advantage of the poor third-party innovators.
These guys are accused by the first group of being Apple shills, of holding Apple to a double standard-- exonerating them of guilt for what they decry Microsoft for doing. And there's something to be said for that.
But there's a question one has to ask oneself. Does Apple have an obligation to sit on its hands and not develop some piece of technology, if there's an existing implementation of it out there that they might be stepping on? Or is third-party development inherently fraught with the danger that at any moment the OS maker might incorporate their functionality into the product (which, as long as it's not patented, is perfectly legal)-- and that it's their obligation to simply keep ahead of the curve?
iPhoto undoubtedly took some sales away from existing photo-manipulation apps and camera managers; iTunes has undisputably hurt the ability of MP3-player authors to sell their products. But in the latter case, Audion is a perfect example of a piece of shareware that keeps ahead of the curve. When a lot of their core functionality was co-opted by iTunes being integrated into the OS, they simply made their own product better. And now, while iTunes provides core music-playing functionality in an outstanding way, Audion is the only game in town if you want stuff like skins, album art, and alternative encoders and codecs. The makers of Audion understand what life is like in the shareware development world. You've got to stay hungry, or else you'll get eaten yourself.
And in any case, Apple's turning Sherlock into a Watson-like application for gathering Web-accesible data, and incorporating file search back into a quick adjunct to the Finder itself-- the way it always used to be, which is why it's called the Finder, for crying-out-loud-- is an excellent step. One thing that has pissed me off ever since OS 8 is that pressing Command-F to find a file fires up this big clunky application, rather than an instant search box. I think this is a perfectly reasonable direction for the design of the system to go, and the only unfortunate thing is that Watson predates it.
The Watson community, both developers and users, is lively and enthusiastic, and it's full of great minds and innovative thinkers. Naturally they feel slighted that Watson has been shafted by Apple-- or at least, the way they see it. Honestly, I agree to a certain extent. But I don't agree that Apple is under an obligation to acknowledge the influence of third-party developers upon their own development, especially when that development is an "obvious" direction for them to take. How does this differ from Microsoft seizing control of the Web by writing a browser and incorporating it into their OS? Not by much in the technical sense, but by quite a bit in the business sense. Microsoft consciously wanted to kill Netscape, because they saw the commercial potential in owning the Web. But Apple doesn't want to harm Karelia-- they want shareware developers like Karelia to keep innovating with new products like Watson which take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by OS X and Cocoa. But the direction in which they want to take Sherlock is one that they genuinely feel they'd be remiss in ignoring, and while committing to a new version of Sherlock that does what Watson does is sure to be a blow to Karelia, Apple considers that to be a regrettable but necessary sacrifice. There's no malice involved. Apple's actions are about functionality, not power. This is an argument about intent. That's where the difference lies, to me, though it's a nebulous and almost impossible-to-prove distinction.
Dan Wood can be proud that his innovation has influenced the development of Apple's core software. I know that's small comfort to him and to his loyal following, of which I'm a part. But if Watson were to be developed with the same fervor and the same love of creation that drives Audion, then a blow like Sherlock 3 or iTunes will not hurt so much-- it will just make the shareware community all the more innovative, by necessity as much as by desire.
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| Thursday, August 1, 2002 |
17:35 - Digital hub? Pshaw!
http://lowendmac.com/maclife/02/0801.html
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Some Mac columnists fail to "get it" even worse than the PC-centric tech pundits. Like Jason Walsh of Low End Mac.
The digital hub always struck me as a ropey idea. It's not that I object in principle to people connecting digital cameras and camcorders to their Macs, it's just that I don't want to be forced to sit through the dross that they subsequently create.
The Apple propaganda machine has been going full tilt for the last while, informing us of the wonderful free iApps that come with every Mac. So what? I like to think that for an investment of over ¤1,000 I'd get something other than an operating system thrown into the box.
When Jobs announced iPhoto, I dutifully went to the Apple site and downloaded it. I looked at it -- and erased it. Yes, it's very nice, but I'm not going to give up Photoshop any time soon.
iMovie? Sorry, my Adobe Premier habit is too ingrained.
Where do I begin? This reads more like a troll than a serious opinion piece. How far removed is this guy from modern computing reality? For him to dismiss the value of the iApps, just because they don't appeal to him and his needs, and particularly on the basis of faulty assumptions about what the iApps are for, is just clueless arrogance.
Who ever said, for instance, that iPhoto was supposed to be an alternative to Photoshop? If that was the assumption under which he downloaded it, he was apparently reading his LCD monitor through polarized glasses at 90° angles to the polarity of the screen, because one doesn't have to look too far to find clear descriptions of what it is for. iPhoto is supposed to work in tandem with Photoshop. Photoshop is a high-end image manipulation and compositing application. iPhoto is a digital camera manager. The two have a very limited function set overlap. iPhoto provides the most rudimentary of editing features, like red-eye removal and cropping and rotating, but for more complex stuff-- well, that's what Photoshop is for. But can Photoshop automatically read in all the photos on your digital camera into a named and dated "film roll", and browse through them all visually or search by assignable and user-definable parameters? Does Photoshop let you order prints online or design and order a hardbound book of your pictures?
I use Photoshop all the time. I also use iPhoto all the time. I don't have to be some kind of computing genius to realize that they are designed for different purposes. Adobe GoLive isn't intended as a replacement for Microsoft Word, for Frith's sake.
And, okay, it's great that you use Premiere. Fine. I'm glad you do such in-depth work that you require the features it provides for a paltry $600. But, again, Premiere and iMovie are not intended for the same purposes. Premiere is widely used as a professional video-editing tool for creating finished contract work in many high-end studios. (Well, except for most of them, which use either Final Cut Pro or Avid.)
But iMovie isn't for that. It's intended to allow Mr. Husband to make home movies, and iDVD is intended to allow him to send them to Grandma. What do you think all those low-end camcorders are intended for, that have sold so well since the mid-80s? What about all those little film cameras that people used in the 50s and 60s? They're for home users who fancy themselves amateur filmmakers-- people who want to capture their families' memories, to immortalize the moments of their lives.
iMovie does that bloody well. And it's free.
What exactly is the cognitive dissonance coming from? Apple provides consumer-level applications for doing genuinely useful, in-demand things, for free, on all their machines. And this guy is bitching about it? Look, just because you've apparently never used a digital camera doesn't mean you get to ruin it for the rest of us.
If Apple want to impress me, then they'd better write a HyperCard style iMedia and Homepage style iWeb tout suite.
... Excuse me? I'm sure this comes as just as much of a surprise to Apple as it does to me.
Totally leaving aside arguments like Final Cut Pro and all the high-end audio/video companies that Apple has been buying up left and right, and their outright ownership of much of that industry, where does this kind of demand fit into Apple's business plan? He's demanding that Cisco build a tractor, or Microsoft get into the lava-lamp business. (Well, maybe the latter isn't so far-fetched.)
The problem with the iApps is this -- they're not powerful enough. Okay, you say, but they're not aimed at commercial users. This is absolutely correct, and it's also the nub of my argument. I am genuinely concerned that Apple is beginning to neglect its core professional user base in the graphics and media industries. If Adobe ever pulls Photoshop, then the party's over. Macs will be stone dead as far as designers go, and mine will go out the window. Literally.
People talk about the "empowering" potential of the iApps, but having tools available to edit photos and video does not a professional make. The effect is more likely to be similar to that of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint -- where people like me were once paid embarrassingly small amounts of money to produce professional presentations and stationery, offices are now awash with printouts and presentations made by people who think that combining double underlining, bold, and italics is a good thing.
Ahh, here we see the problem. The guy is bitter about creative technology being given into the hands of the plebs. He thinks the functionality in iMovie and iPhoto should be enhanced and brought up to a "professional" product level, and sold at a high price. (Kinda like they're already doing. Except he wants that to be the only sales point.) He once had the kind of expertise that would have earned him a high salary, and now Apple is giving away what used to cost him thousands of dollars and lots of education time-- for free, with every Mac. This makes him fume.
Look, man, I feel for you. I really do. I understand your mindset. I know what it's like to have your bailiwick become democratized. How do you think I felt about the obviation of knowing how to write bare HTML, in the presence of WYSIWYG web-page editors? How do you think I felt when AOL users got access to USENET, or when the ISP I worked for had to stop requiring people to have at least six months' experience working with computers before we would allow them to sign up for Internet accounts? How do you think car tweakers from the 60s felt when cars became something as reliable as the phone company, something you didn't have to install new starters into every three weeks or spend every weekend under the hood tinkering? Why do you think PC users throughout the world were so disdainful of the Mac when it first came out? Because what was once to them a secret, esoteric art-- "using a computer"-- was now something that was accessible to the common man. That can play hell with a guy's insecurities.
These very same arguments were made back when Apple introduced the first WYSIWYG text editor, MacWrite. Look at all those damn fonts! Look-- you can do underlines, italics, shadows, outlines-- gawd damn! My next English paper's gonna look like a ransom note! And many did.
But jealously guarding a piece of technology from getting into the hands of people who might be able to use it well and tastefully-- especially as the market comes to mature-- is elitist and arrogant in the extreme. It's empire-building. It's backwards-facing banana-republic power-hoarding. And it's exceedingly distasteful.
Apple made a conscious decision when they decided to bring out the iApps and support the digital hub strategy: they wanted to turn the home computer into an extension of the geek toys that every male person in the 18-55 age bracket buys. They're not ignoring the pro market-- far from it; one has to look no further than FCP, DVD Studio Pro, and Cinema Tools to see that (and if Walsh thinks iPhoto is intended as some kind of land-grab from Photoshop, that Adobe might take offense at and leave the Mac platform in a huff, he's simply not done his research). But Apple's core market, the one where they make all their money, and the one where they stand to present an attractive value proposition to potential converts from Windows PCs, is in the home consumer-- the guy with a digital camera, a DV camcorder, and two kids on a tricycle and a dog to wash and a vacation to Disney World coming up in the summer. This is where Apple saw an opportunity to make people happy.
That is what Apple is all about.
And if that happiness comes at the expense of grumblings from a few bitter techno-trolls who see their mystique slipping away into oblivion, then-- frankly-- so much the better.
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13:09 - What is wrong with these people?
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4745
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A particularly uninspired swipe at Apple from Andrew Thomas of The Inquirer:
PORTLY APPLE SUPREMO Steve iJobs today announced a new initiative which he claimed will consign the WinTel PC to history.
"The iDiot™ scheme is brilliant in its conceptual elegance and is available in six exciting colours," said Jobs at iApple iExpo i2002 at iNew iYork.
"Put simply, we've realised that our products are bought by people with money to burn who aren't interested in tawdry things like value, compatibility, software choice or performance. What our users want is to pay over the odds for colourful tat. They'll buy anything as long as it's purple, pink, misty buff or moonlight indigo, provided it costs twice as much as the PC equivalent.
Look, if you're going to make fun of Apple, fine. But can't you do it without looking like a complete barking moron?
Hasn't anybody noticed that it's been like two years since Apple offered any computers in multiple colors? And when they did, those machines were the iMacs and iBooks-- consumer machines priced almost exactly competitively with entry-level PCs of similar capability. And is this guy trying to claim that it was an unsuccessful scheme? Hasn't he noticed that it's only just now that the rest of the PC world has finally stopped thrashing about in their efforts to provide colored faceplates for their monitors and keyboards and speakers, and that multiple candy-colored and translucent products like water coolers and desk fans are still commonly to be found? As a sales gimmick, at the time, it was one of the most wildly successful ones of all time-- particularly in the sense that it became de rigeur throughout the entire industry almost overnight. Companies that were about to publicly sneer at Apple for their moronic publicity stunt had to backpedal quickly when it became clear just how badly people wanted their computers to come in colors.
But almost as soon as multicolored iMacs peaked in popularity, Apple was already moving on to new color schemes and beginning to phase out the multicolored thing in favor of frosted white and stainless steel. I always enjoyed pointing out that in the year 2000, the only things in the world that you could not get in iMac colors... were iMacs.
Is it so much for these people to accept that the reason people are willing to spend more for a Mac is that the Mac offers them a better value or a technological advantage, rather than simply assuming that the only reason anybody would ever buy a Mac was because he had more dollars than sense?
Evidently so. After all, everybody who didn't make the same choice you did must be an idiot. Otherwise it might mean you might possibly have made an imperfect choice.
At least this guy has a "Flame Author" link at the bottom of the page. Not that I think it's worth using or anything.
...Oh, and just when exactly in the blistering hell did Steve Jobs become "portly"?
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| Wednesday, July 31, 2002 |
18:39 - The winners write the history books, but the pioneers come up with the names
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It's been seeming more and more strange to me lately how we have developed within the framework of the technology industry as it has been passed down to us, using terminology and vocabulary that is completely ideographic-- having no bearing at all upon what it is intended to represent or describe.
I'm referring to things like file formats. Because of one circumstance and another, and what formats happened to be public-domain and which ones were easy to implement and provided good quality/compression tradeoffs and features, we now find ourselves dealing in a market where we do not talk about "picture files", but instead we refer to "JPEGs" and "GIFs" and "PNGs" and "BMPs". Similarly, the movie files we use are "AVIs" and "WMVs" and "MPEGs" and "RMs".
Just put yourself in the shoes of someone who's new to computers. Does any of this make even a tiny bit of sense? Is someone really expected to learn all these acronyms, and which ones mean "pictures" and which ones mean "movies" and which ones mean "music"?
We've inherited these oddly-named formats because of circumstance. But they weren't the first formats to become widely used; far from it.
As should hardly come as a surprise, Apple was the first company to scout the uncharted fields of image and movie and sound media, and so they were the first to give names to what their customers would be using.
What did they call their picture files? Why, PICTs. As in, PICTures. Not some funky acronym, not something referring to a standards body or a working group or a company that popularized it. Nobody had to think about what it stood for or what kind of file it represented. It was a PICTure. No filename extensions, either-- just an icon that clearly demonstrated that this was a picture. Take a screen shot on a Mac, and you'd get an output file called "Picture 1". There was never any question about what format it was in. It was just a picture.
And PICT wasn't an inflexible format, either. Like TIFF, it could incorporate a variety of encodings and compression algorithms, and you could have PICTs with internal JPEG compression at arbitrary levels, or with color depth from 1-bit to 32-bit, including alpha.
PICT didn't catch on in the world at large, though. I'm not entirely sure why.
At any rate, QuickTime was the first movie-file format to really enable the desktop computer user to do video. Apple referred to the files as "movies", and so the filename extension that the files received (when saved for cross-platform use) was ".mov". As in, movie. (The Type code for the file, incidentally, was MooV.) There wasn't any question what kind of file it was; rather than giving it an implementation-specific extension like ".qt", Apple got to lay claim to the "movie" moniker because, well, they were there first.
Same with sound files. .WAV? .AIFF? No, the native Apple sound file was known as "SND". Sound. (UNIX vendors tried to do the same sort of thing, referring to them as "audio" files, with an extension of ".au".)
Leave it to the company whose computers don't need filename extensions to lay claim to the choicest plain-language extensions, eh?
But that's just it, though. It's a perfect illustration of the philosophical difference between the two schools of thought. Apple wanted to think everything through, to overengineer the user experience so nobody would have to deal with any technical trivia that computers should be able to deal with better than humans can anyway, and automatically. They designed everything so extensions would never interfere with a person's ability to freely name a file, without fear that it would break some mysterious app-binding spell deep in the bowels of the machine. And they wanted to make sure people thought in terms of pictures and movies and sounds, not in terms of JPEG and GIF and MPEG and WAV. Who needs to put up with that kind of useless trivia? Shouldn't computers be doing that sort of thing for us?
I've written before about how today we're entering a new phase of the same philosophy, where Windows XP has espoused a newly-discovered "task-based interface" concept, something that can be pretty well described in the same terms as I've already just covered: thinking in terms of your content, not in terms of file-formats or in terms of applications. Apple's iApps illustrate the new, modern incarnation of that same philosophy, the one they've been promoting all these years but now applied to modern media: iTunes lets you think in terms of music, in terms of songs and artists and albums, instead of in terms of MP3 files and folders and encoding and filenames.mp3. Likewise, iPhoto lets you think in terms of pictures, browsing them visually as well as by assigned meta-data and descriptions, not by obscure filenames with .JPG extensions. They're grouped into albums and named and dated "film rolls", not by anonymous folders. This is the task-based interface, as envisioned back in the early 80s with the first Mac OS.
Apple's job, as they see it, is to deliver abilities to their customers, not just features. They refuse to do anything half-assed. If they can't obscure the technical trivialities entirely, except to those who want to work with them, they don't bother trying-- because they know what they uniquely bring to the table. What they offer the technological community is a philosophy, a way of designing computers so that those who use them can quite literally just sit down and get things done-- the operating system takes care of the most trivialities that it possibly can, and leaves to the user only those things that a human is uniquely equipped to do. And that's the actual creating and enjoying.
Apple has had to jettison some of its cherished ideals on some fronts; PICT is now relegated to the ash-heap of history in favor of TIFF for client-side uncompressed image manipulation, and JPEG and PNG and GIF are fully supported for export. QuickTime will play AVI and MPEG files as well as its own MooVies, and it will faithfully tack on filename extensions so Windows users won't choke on video content created on a Mac. And as ungainly as the MP3 name is, Apple has recognized the ubiquity of the format and adopted it in its own unique way: letting iTunes make MP3 files from CDs, filename extensions and everything, but pushing the organizational aspects of dealing with those files upward into iTunes itself, where the interface is all about the contents of the ID3 tags and querying the song database rather than filenames and folders. iTunes keeps the files and folders dutifully organized and named to match the ID3 tags as the user changes them in iTunes itself, and even numbers them according to your chosen name scheme so you can export them efficiently onto MP3 CDs for use with Windows... but during normal everyday use, it's not MP3s-- its music. It floats through the fabric of the computer like electricity. It makes listening to music into a complete no-brainer, without the slightest hint of technical expertise required in order to use it. All it takes to operate iTunes is the ability to move a mouse and manipulate scrollbars. You don't ever have to have seen a folder before. You never have to think about one.
The conquistadors gave the names of their Catholic saints to the towns they founded throughout the Southwest, even though today they're filled with McDonald's and Blockbusters and Wal-Marts. Half the South and half the East Coast is named after Indian place-names and tribal monikers, though the ones who gave those names are now long gone.
And if the computer industry ever comes to understand how important it is to design software that human beings don't have to think of as software, they will owe that discovery to Apple-- or else if they stumble upon it entirely independently, they will have embarked upon a laudable but ultimately unprofitable journey, one that has been traveled before and found to be no match for the marketability of unusable, if gaudy, fluffware.
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14:24 - So now there's a liquor store involved...
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-947358.html
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Well, well. IBM seems to be building a new chip foundry.
According to this article, brought to my attention by J. Karl Armstrong, IBM wants to refocus its business away from money-losing arms (like its hard-drive manufacturing sector, which I would guess is the IBM Microelectronics they mention as being a money pit, and which I have heard they'll be dumping quite soon-- though not their consistently cutting-edge research into drive mechanisms which always seems to develop the best new miniaturization and data-density technologies) and bolster its chipmaking prospects with a new foundry for forging chips "for other companies".
The article doesn't explicitly mention Apple, but I would have to see a fair bit more negative punditry before I dismiss the possibility that the thrust of this venture might be to ramp G4 production and G5 development back up to the pace that it needs to be in, following a buyback of Altivec from Motorola by Apple. Or it could as well be for the possible POWER4 chimaera that we're hearing about in sidelong whispers.
I've also heard whisperings that there is a mysterious new manufacturing facility being built at the Apple campus in Cupertino, and that Motorola employees have been spotted going in and out of it. I don't know if I buy that one as easily, since I walk past most of the Apple campus on a daily basis here at work, and I've seen no such black-shrouded construction. I hope it isn't simply that someone saw the Peppermill having been bulldozed down (good riddance to awful food, I say), and assumed that the new building going up in its place-- with its de Anza frontage and its across-the-parking-lot proximity to One Infinite Loop-- was a mysterious new Apple lab.
Whatever ends up happening in the near future with Apple's chip supplier juggling, I'm less and less convinced that Motorola will remain a player of any note.
Unless a miracle happens.
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13:48 - File Sharing-- the way it was meant to be
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This morning, I was copying an image file-- a silly Photoshopped gag image-- from my desktop machine at home (where I had originally saved it off the Web) to my iMac in the office so that I could show it off to my friends there. In the middle of doing so, I realized that there's a whole lot about that process that I take for granted as a Mac user.
Long ago, back around 1985, when "workgroups" were a pie-in-the-sky office networking dream, and long before anybody had ever considered running FTP or Web servers on their desktop computers, Apple was creating something called AppleTalk. This was a zero-configuration, transport-independent, routable, point-to-point networking protocol that could support file servers and printer sharing with the click of a single button. In the age when only the elite of the computer industry had ever programmed TCP/IP settings or assigned an IP address, AppleTalk pointed toward something light-years beyond what IPv4 promised.
Imagine-- you open up your server browser, and every server in your current routing zone would automatically show up, listed by its plain-English name; you could switch to a different zone if you wanted, or double-click on one of the servers and be prompted for either guest access (which would give you limited access to the resources there) or authenticated user access (giving you free rein over those resources, as configured by the server owner). Then, once you had access, the server's resource would appear on your desktop as though it were another disk, and you could drag files to and from it to your heart's content.
This wasn't just a simple file transfer mechanism either, like FTP or HTTP. This was a complete meta-data-preserving protocol, in which custom icons and resource forks would be dutifully copied, Type and Creator bindings would be maintained, and date stamps would be preserved as made sense. You weren't simply opening a new file with the same name as some file on a remote system and then dumping data into it; you were making a total duplicate of the resource, with all its attendant details, that you could use on your local system just as though you had copied the file there using a floppy disk. Remote resources became part of the local system while the remote server was mounted; files created by applications on remote servers, when double-clicked, would automatically connect to the server and find the application in order to open in it. You could even create aliases to remote resources which would automatically dial the modem, connect to a remote network, mount the resource, and open it with your stored privileges.
AppleTalk machines, when they came online, would automatically assign themselves an address from the available space, and through broadcasts would immediately appear in everybody else's browse lists. Stories abounded about how fun the testing of this protocol was; Kris tells of how at one point, a lab full of several dozen machines were all artificially preprogrammed with a zeroed-out AppleTalk address, and then they were all brought online at once. Every machine broadcast to see whether their own addresses were unique-- and got back replies to the effect that no, they certainly were not. Every machine simultaneously jumped to a random new address, and broadcast again. Some inevitably still had collisions, and had to jump two or three times. But, as the story goes, everything had all settled out within about eight seconds; everybody was on a unique address and ready to talk.
All this back in 1985.
If you had a collection of pictures on one Mac, you effectively had them on all your Macs-- because you could always access them from any of the machines.
Other companies recognized the importance of this kind of connectivity; Microsoft built AppleTalk server support into Windows NT, and AppleTalk routers became entrenched into college campuses the world over. A student could spend many happy hours perusing the various zones throughout the campus and giggling at the clever names other students had assigned to their Macs. (My favorite, at Caltech, was "Bhoutros Bhoutros Duo".)
Eventually, though, two things happened to render AppleTalk irrelevant except among Mac users. The first was the widespread adoption of TCP/IP. And the second was Windows SMB/CIFS file sharing.
TCP/IP became the default Internet protocol because of its easily scalable routability. While AppleTalk was indeed routable, its address space-- designed for browsing rather than for direct connections-- became cumbersome and imprecise for widespread connectivity to really take hold. (Besides, it only really applied to Macs.) All the major services powering the nascent Internet ran on UNIX servers, which meant TCP/IP was the language of FTP and the Web and e-mail, and soon both Windows and the Mac had full TCP/IP implementations in their operating systems; on the Mac this was in addition to AppleTalk, which remained on board for LAN networking-- nice and convenient, and a lot easier than having to deal with TCP/IP settings, but only useful for talking Mac-to-Mac within an office environment.
And by this time, Windows had incorporated SMB into its networking suite, enabling its users to do just about everything that Mac users could do with AppleTalk. (Almost.) SMB shares in a zone could be browsed; remote apps could be run without being installed locally (well, unless they wanted to muck with the Registry, which they often did); users could set up multiple shares on their machines and define labels for them and for the entire networked computer; shortcuts could point to remote shares and mount them automatically.
But SMB, like AppleTalk, was not easily scalable, and routing between zones was nearly impossible. SMB was designed to be much more flat than AppleTalk ever was, and while hierarchies of domains and workgroups could be set up, routing SMB traffic outside the LAN was (and remains) the subject of night sweats among IT administrators all over. You can't file-share to your Windows machine at home, for instance, from your Windows machine at work.
Apple realized that the world had sidestepped their plans for networking and had gone down a different road. They knew that AppleTalk would not survive as a non-IP protocol, because more and more new routers being implemented didn't support (or the administrators didn't bother to configure) AppleTalk routing. The elegant hierarchical zone approach, with its named lists of servers, wasn't going to work in a world of direct point-to-point client-server connectivity. So, in Mac OS 8, they shifted gears, and out came AppleTalk/IP.
It worked just like AppleTalk, as far as the file-sharing and the authentication parts were concerned. The big difference was that instead of having to browse through a list of machines on the LAN, you could now specify a direct IP address or hostname, and it would connect directly to that machine-- no matter where on the real, live, TCP/IP-based Internet it was. Mount a friend's drive in Rhode Island from your laptop in the San Francisco airport? No problem. Grab those movie files off your home machine's desktop and show them to people at work? Go right ahead. While Windows users had to install FTP servers and wrestle with IIS and move files around to get them into the right place for sharing before leaving the machine's presence if they wanted to fetch files off them remotely, Mac users simply connected to the remote machine and mounted the share they needed.
And in Mac OS X, it became even simpler-- setting up shares became nearly irrelevant, as the system's multi-user nature asserted its dominance over what had previously been a confusing mess of assignable per-user privileges. Now, a guest user (if allowed access) could only mount each user's Public folder, inside which was a Drop Box that he could copy files into (but could not open); a neat way for users without accounts on the server to be able to send files to the server's owner or to other users without any risk. But an authenticated user could mount not only other users' Public folders, but also his own complete Home folder, or (if he had Administrator privileges) the entire disk. Or other disks in the system. And once that share was mounted on the remote user's desktop, he could copy files to and from it as though it were a local disk.
With AppleTalk/IP, Mac users have their long-time capabilities back, scaled to match the modern Internet. If we have files on one Mac, we have those same files on any Mac-- regardless, now, of what transport connects those machines, or even where in the country they might respectively be. I can sit on the couch downstairs with my iBook, browsing the image files from my desktop machine upstairs while connected wirelessly via AirPort. I can grab my in-progress book chapters from the home machine and copy them to my computer at work without having to do anything to the home machine but connect to it. The only configuration involved in AppleTalk is flipping the "on" switch, as always.
And now it's just part of a pantheon. We've also got "on" switches for the Web and FTP servers, for SSH connections, and even for impersonating an SMB server to other Windows machines (when Jaguar arrives).
But it's still not quite good enough for Apple. You see, it's flexible-- but it's not elegant. It's not truly zero-configuration, like AppleTalk was back in its early conception. It still has to deal with DHCP servers, TCP/IP settings, gateways, masquerading, leases-- it's just not as seamless as it could be.
Well, good news: it's all coming full circle, with Rendezvous.
We're on our way back to the original promise of networking that we had in front of us in 1985. When Rendezvous is here, not only will we not have to configure any network settings (all the machines will negotiate working settings between them all whenever anybody appears on the network), but sharable services will build themselves into browseable lists for everybody on the network to peruse. Within the local zone, iTunes playlists and iChat partners will automatically make themselves available to each other's machines, Mail will notify us when someone who has sent us a message is on the network and available to contact directly, printers will automatically configure themselves without any setup beyond plugging them in-- and that's just the first iteration, before we've discovered what this can really mean for us.
Meanwhile, I don't find myself deprived at all of functionality and ease, since I was able to simply hop over to my home machine and grab that picture off the desktop. I'm sure this capability will eventually make it into Windows, and when it does, everybody will hail it as a great advancement that they're not sure how they were ever able to get by without; but I've taken it for granted all these years. It's easy to lose sight of the magic of a piece of technology if you use it every day of your life, enough so that you come to depend on it.
Every time someone tries to send me a file over the fitful and crash-prone ICQ transfer protocol, or has to put a file up on a Web server somewhere, or has to fire up Gnutella or KaZaA to try to get a reliable cross-network point-to-point transfer going, I'm struck by the wistful feeling of something beautiful that we'll never be able to enjoy to its full potential-- and it's made all the more stark every time Marcus tells me "Hey, check your Drop Box-- I put another couple of files in there for you".
It could all be this easy. Somewhere out there, there's an alternate Earth where it is.
UPDATE: As clarified by Kris, the big AppleTalk settling-out test actually occurred in 1989, when the new Ethernet-based implementation of AppleTalk (called EtherTalk) was being developed. Prior to that, AppleTalk was designed to operate over serial cables, and because of the characteristics and limitations of serial topologies, the settling-out behavior wouldn't have been anywhere near as dramatic as it was over Ethernet.
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Brian Tiemann
