| Saturday, September 28, 2002 |
14:29 - iSync ho!
http://www.apple.com/isync/
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iSync is out.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but the first word from the underground is no less terse than "it rocks".
Now to find out...
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| Friday, September 27, 2002 |
17:43 - iChat gets critical thumbs-up
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1471311
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I was initially leery of how well iChat would go over in what's certainly a well-saturated market of instant-messaging clients and networks; the people who IM as a lifestyle are a demanding bunch, and while most people's choice of IM client derives from whichever one most of their friends are using, they have been known to switch clients if something clearly better presents itself. The field has its own punditry and intense critics, and one feature not "nailed" can earn an IM client an irrevocable panning.
So I'm pleased to see that Bob Woods, managing editor of a site called "InstantMessagingPlanet", has officially come out not just as a Mac user, but as a staunch supporter of iChat. He spends two pages rhapsodizing about what's good about it-- the auto-logging feature, the ease of importing "avatar" pictures, the little status messages you can set that are immediately visible, and the general cleanness and crispness of the interface. He mentions, quite rightly, that the UI isn't distracting like clients such as AIM and ICQ are (especially on Windows, where they're full of weird web links and ads and confusing UI geegaws).
But I don't think he goes quite far enough in saying just how well the UI, which reminds him of "a vertical iTunes", is pulled-off. This UI has been very carefully crafted. It has a whole suite of sound effects that, while most people swiftly turn such things off (like with that horrid CLACKETY-CLACKETY typewriter noise that someone thought would be a good thing to enable by default in ICQ), actually manages to complement the user interface rather than complicating it. An instant-messaging system does hinge on audio cues, so you know when someone's sending you a message while you're working in other windows. But instead of ICQ's nerve-grating Pokémon "Uh-oh!" noise, a new message in iChat simply pops up-- transparently, in the upper right corner-- with a soft "thPop!" sound. (It even "splats" visually onto the screen, as though it were a blob of Silly Putty flung at you from someone deep in the innards of your LCD.)
New messages during a chat session are signalled by a gentle modulated "woop" sound. And when people come and go in your Buddy List, they make a very soft "swoosh" noise as the list rearranges. (Naturally, these are all independently configurable. You can even set up custom sounds and behaviors on a per-user basis, which I think is pretty damn cool.)
It takes a great deal of inspiration and UI expertise to design a sound scheme that doesn't make me want to turn it off. I like how iChat sounds. But I wouldn't dream of running ICQ with the sound effects on, no matter how the silence cripples my ability to keep track of contacts.
The iChat workflow is also rather different from what I simply never realized was really maddening in ICQ, before it introduced the single-window message/history mode, which is still only a half solution. In ICQ (and presumably AIM and the others), you have your list of buddies, and when one of them sends you a message, an indicator by their name blinks. You don't get to see what the message is until you double-click on it. You can then use the same window to write a reply, and then you can keep it open to continue exchanging messages in that window. Once you're talking in this manner, the conceptual difference between a series of single-window messages and a "Chat" becomes rather muddled. (Chats generally can involve multiple people, and text is sent continuously, rather than in one-shot messages. But the distinction is far less meaningful than it used to be.)
In iChat, there's no indicator for when someone has sent you a message; the message simply appears in the upper-right corner of the screen, floating, and it never interrupts whatever application you're working in. If you click to bring the message forward, it solidifies and expands to offer you a "return message" box. You can close the window, or enter a message; if you do the latter, the window expands to a full-size interactive "chat" window, and Apple makes no distinction between that mode and a "Chat" as other IM clients have defined it. If you've sent more than one message in the conversation, you're "chatting"-- so the program doesn't mince words, it doesn't make you juggle multiple windows, it doesn't make you reach for extra commands to switch modes. It just does what you clearly want to do. You can add more people to an in-progress chat, and every such conversation is logged automatically if you choose (saved logs open up in iChat windows so you can scroll back through them in the same application interface). The chat keeps going, interspersing timestamps every few minutes (very helpful!), until the chat's members leave by closing the window.
This means iChat doesn't even need to have the Buddy List or Rendezvous contact list windows open, or even for the iChat program to be running. OS X keeps a "stub" version of iChat running at all times, if you configure it so (with a checkbox in Preferences), so if someone sends you a message while iChat isn't running it simply starts it and splats the message at you. You can control your availability status and send messages to other users entirely from the chat-bubble icon in the System Menus up by the clock. The only reason to pull up the contact-list windows is to see who's around.
(Incidentally, because iChat is woven into the system, it sets itself to "Idle" after there has been no activity on the computer for a set period of time, which I believe is ten minutes. Most clients can't tell whether you're working in other applications or what; but iChat can monitor keyboard and mouse input and use that to determine whether you're "idle" or not. I had iChat up, and Kris moved his machine's mouse to wake up the sleeping monitor. The iChat client running on that machine signalled mine and I heard the "swoosh" of the list rearranging before I heard the twong of his CRT turning on. Now that's slick.)
One side effect of this setup, though, is that iChat provides no mechanism for sending messages to offline users. ICQ and the rest do this; I'll be interested to see whether people find they miss this feature. Bob Woods doesn't even seem to have noticed; nor does he mind the fact that iChat's input line is only a line, rather than the full text input area that other clients give you. (This has the effect of psychologically making you limit the size of the messages you send. This may or may not be a bad thing.)
File transfer is very bloody easy; you can drag files right into the input line. Sending Web links is a little weirder; you can enter a URL or an e-mail address, and the receiver iChat will convert it into a link. Fine. But you can also use Command+K to insert a link, which gives you a window to specify a URL, and then assigns that URL to a string of clickable text (e.g. "Link") in the input window, which you can change to whatever you want. Interesting decision, there.
Woods has a few complaints about iChat; the Help is lacking in a lot of key information, which is a common source of shame for Apple-- sparse Help documentation is a perennial problem in almost all of their software. The other thing he doesn't like is that you can't group your contacts-- he uses the AIM metaphor of "folders", though I think that's ridiculous for a means of organizing people. I'd prefer the "groups" metaphor of ICQ.
The only thing keeping me from using iChat more than ICQ right now is that all my friends are on ICQ, and iChat only talks to AIM. (One would think that since AOL owns both AIM and ICQ, they'd find a way to merge the two. Huh? Huh?) Because while ICQ, after some six years of development, is still a rough-hewn and shoddy piece of poorly tested perma-alpha code that gets in my way as much as enabling me to communicate, iChat is smooth, polished, helpful, clean, and seems to be begging me to use it.
We've got an ad-hoc iChat network here at work, with all the company's Mac users popping in and out of each other's Rendezvous lists without any configuration necessary beyond running the program. (Woods wonders how iChat will interoperate with "Windows-based PCs that can use Rendezvous". Uh, isn't that kind of a moot point? You can't interoperate with something that doesn't exist...) It's very useful for telling where everybody is; whether they're "In Lab", "In Cubicle", "Away from Desk-- Back Shortly", "At Lunch", "In Meeting", and so on. Fortunately, most of my department has now made the plunge and gotten Macs, so it's actually useful in a critical-mass kind of way too.
When Microsoft decides they want to own a market, they whip out the checkbook. When Apple decides they want to get into a market, they throw out all the preconceptions and figure out what it would take to do it right. And by God, they deliver, too.
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| Thursday, September 26, 2002 |
22:57 - Failed Product Names
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"The Nerd Turd"
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22:28 - The geeks are won
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=7620/byt1032475416823/0923_bar.html
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According to this article in Byte, Mac OS X has the Linux desktop world thoroughly in rout-- and has just about captured the hearts and minds of anybody with an eye toward development, as well.
I happened to install Mac OS X on a Mac Power8500 back in 1999. That was a pre-pre-pre-beta, and not much besides the installation worked. Aqua wasn't in that version yet, and so I quickly decided that Mac OS X was going to be a nonissue for me.
Meanwhile, I continued to be generally unhappy with the Linux desktop environment. Recently I went to give a speech at a conference and was startled to see all these cool Mac iBook and PowerBook laptops. It being a Linux conference, I was convinced they all had Linux running on their notebooks. But then, a young geek of maybe 19 or 20 sitting next to me in a conference room opened up his iBook. I was immediately attracted by a very intriguing and pleasant desktop on the laptop's gorgeous screen. I looked closely and it wasn't anything I knew, certainly not Linux. The kid's wireless card worked flawlessly while Linux on my IBM Thinkpad insisted there was not enough signal where I was sitting. Then, I recognized the unmistakable dock bar of Mac OS X.
I watched in jealous disgust as the guy next to me fired up a terminal window and ssh'ed to some server and ran a pine mail session. During the conference I saw maybe 20 or 25 people running Mac OS X. They outnumbered the few people usually coming to Linux conferences with FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD on their notebooks. That's it, I decided. I am going to get a Mac OS X laptop, too. That was a few weeks ago.
Indeed.
This guy goes on to explain how a true geek can, with a certain amount of hassle, download and compile the necessary tools to turn an OS X machine into a first-rate development platform. Though I must say, this guy "gets" the Mac about as well as Kim Komando does, which is to say not at all. He sneers at the GUI mindset and the concept of only using the Terminal when you have to, instead of spending all of your time in the Terminal and only resorting to the horrors of GUI-ness when you want to try watching a DVD or using the Web or some similarly obscure task.
One thing he seems not to understand is that of most of the UNIX tools he describes obtaining, most don't have to be downloaded in source form, tweaked, supplemented with independently installed libraries, compiled, or anything. Pico, Pine, Python, Perl, and even all kinds of software that doesn't begin with P either exists by default in the OS, or can be downloaded in a packaged binary form. Even hard-core Linux and BSD types understand the convenience benefits of using packages where one can get away with it, and because the Mac is a self-contained and predictable platform (unlike Linux, which can be in any of about thirty-four thousand different distributions and OS layouts), it's a matter of downloading a disk image, opening it up, and running the installer. And even that, of course, is a whole lot uglier than the typical native Mac application, which you install by opening up the disk image and dragging the application to whatever folder in your hard disk you want to keep it in. (You can even run it from the disk image if you want.)
He also gets a number of details wrong. His own TiBook's screen isn't 14.1 inches, it's 15.2. Jaguar isn't based on FreeBSD 3.4; it's been updated to the codebase of FreeBSD 4.4 and 4.5, as you can see from the excellent Timeline of UNIX History by Éric Lévenéz (if you're a UNIX geek and you don't have a copy of this printed out and strung across your wall, you're a L0oZ3r). And he doesn't appear to "get" any of what makes Cocoa applications so cool-- he shows the three lines of code needed to create a Cocoa list box, with proper marveling awe, but he quickly retreats to the comfort of his home-grown C/C++ projects and integrating QT and such into them (Fie! Pfaugh!). Ah well.
One of these days, the hard-core geeks will all-- to one degree or another-- come to understand what having a consistent and predictable GUI with limited input options and attractive, efficient layout means to the user, even to the expert user with high demands on an OS.
What I find encouraging about all this is that for over a year now, we haven't heard any grousing about "candy-like UI buttons" or "Fisher-Price kiddie toys" when it comes to OS X. We don't hear people refusing to give the Mac a second glance because "It only has one mouse button!" Instead, all we hear is the tappity-tappity of the keyboards of iBooks and TiBooks, stretching out AirPort fingers to each other, gleefully discovering iTunes and iDVD and .Mac, whispering a furtive eulogy for the traditional derision heaped upon Apple by anybody who knows how to use a command line.
Now the only stumbling block that remains is all those Windows users...
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22:05 - Blog 54, where are you?
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Apologies-- my blogging, and my general presence and attention to e-mail and such, have all suffered this week; they're likely to continue to do so until I'm done with author review, which currently is keeping me after work for at least two hours each night.
Oh, but it'll be worth it-- why, just imagining the day when it's all done makes it all worthwhile. Because, see, then I won't have to do it anymore.
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| Tuesday, September 24, 2002 |
00:28 - Additions to the Lilexicon
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0902/090402.html#092502
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This paragraph, regarding the Gore speech, is gold:
It’s been pulled apart by wolves all over blogland today, so I’ll leave it alone. Substance aside, the speech made me glad I don’t have to listen to this man very much; he manages to combine pretentiousness and contempt in a way that demands a new word - pretemptuous, perhaps. Or goratory. He’s a better extemporaneous speaker than Bush, but that’s not exactly a rare distinction. Bush often seems distracted, as if he has just realized there is a weasel in his pants and he’d best finish up and get out of here so he can tend to this here weasel. And when he gets wound up he’s often like a man with a wheelbarrow full of rocks going down a hill, trying to keep his balance and his cargo intact. I don’t care. He’s good with a prepared speech, because he has a secret weapon: he means it.
And he goes on, and it's all bullion of one sort or another.
One doesn't have to think, by the way, that Bush is a first-class extemporaneous speaker or possessed of unusual academic intelligence to have a respect for how he's stuck to a set of ideals that one can forget are important in the moral fog brought on by our being a rich and ease-loving people.
I didn't vote for him, but I certainly wish I had-- because now we know what we'd be doing today if Gore had carried the day in November 2000.
Probably be picking up after something bigger and badder than 9/11, just on a hunch.
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23:40 - Do Not Read This Post (under penalty of law)
http://www.ilovebacon.com/092402/l.shtml
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Here is the translation of the lyrics to an unspeakably bizarre Flash animation that made the rounds a few weeks ago. I honestly wouldn't recommend following either link, incidentally, unless you have a very healthy sense of humor regarding sex.
Which, incidentally, is something I am growing to value very highly in a culture in this day and age: a sense of humor, especially one about sex.
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23:21 - A thousand words (plus a few more)
http://www.reason.com/hod/cartoon.pb090602.shtml
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Via InstaPundit, this cartoon is all kindsa cathartic.
By the way-- the ar-Rahman list recently produced a message that contained a large collection of very gruesome morgue photos of Palestinians who had evidently met very violent ends. The title was "Pictures from Jenin", and naturally anybody with an inclination to react based on gut instincts and raw emotion (rather than first-hand news reports, UN findings, and counting the actual number of distinct bodies in the photos-- it was about four) was supposed to respond with a great rush of pro-Palestinian mania and rise up to defeat the bloodthirsty Jewish menace.
But this time, after-- what, six months?-- it finally went too far. For the first time, a number of people on the list, both Muslim and otherwise, who evidently (like me) had been signed up for the list without their even knowing, piped up. Finally... at long last, people who are horrified by the list members' deep-rooted hatred for everything in the world besides themselves, and who have had enough of being told that al-Jazeera is a less biased news organ than CNN, that the US and Israel slaughter Muslims by the tens of thousands every day, that the Taliban were justified in blowing up the cliffside Buddhas because the angels can't enter the house of Allah when false idols are standing outside the door (yeah, real powerful monotheism there, guys), and that the world's destiny is for every last human to be a Muslim living under the global Caliphate and Sharia law, and won't that just be so great?
People have been grumbling things like "Better watch the anti-semitism, fellas, or this stuff you're posting just might end up in the hands of those who may hold doubts about your allegiances." (To which the response, of course, is "I have no allegiance but to Allah-- I love living in the US, but fuck America if they pursue their immoral and unfounded war in Afghanistan and Iraq, where all people are good and right and live in the service of Allah".)
I didn't want to post a message of my own saying "Too late for that". But I do have to say, the most unsatisfying thing about all this is that after they die, fundamentalists will never find out they were wrong.
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14:35 - Instant Multimedia Community Blog
http://www.dotmac.info/
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A new site has sprung up called dotmac.info; its purpose seems to be to provide a general "umbrella" site for .Mac members to publish links to all their iApp-created media-- web pages, iMovies, iPhoto galleries, and so on. It has listings for "most popular" and "most recent additions", showing the appropriate resources regardless of what sort of media they are.
With potentially the whole Mac-using community being a part of this, or at least all those Mac users who are deeply enough immersed into the whole multimedia iApp experience "thing" to see the value in paying for .Mac and using the built-in mechanisms for publishing their stuff, it seems to me that this site might well end up giving iTools/.Mac the one thing it lacks through Apple's own hosting infrastructure: visibility. Like iCalShare.com, this site lets people register and be seen and categorized by interested people just browing for content. Apple doesn't provide this functionality for privacy reasons. But a third-party site like this... it's entirely opt-in, and given the amount of creativity that it purports to concentrate into one place, the sense of "community" among Mac users is likely to skyrocket as networks like this begin to congeal.
Hmmmm. Listings of people's published screen saver slideshows... Backup and Virus-scan tips... links to relevant articles, reviews, comics, and such... personal calendars... and a customized link button. Methinks we've got the beginnings of a whole new kind of use for the Internet. E-mail, then FTP, then Usenet, then IRC, then the Web, then P2P file-sharing, then blogs... and now, the granular, homogeneous, person-by-person Web is clumping together into structured enclaves, where one person or company provides the infrastructure and the look-and-feel and the tools-- and everybody else provides the content.
I've seen this happening myself, with my own site (fanart.lionking.org). I've seen it happening with other art archives, with Blogger/BlogSpot and LiveJournal, with Yahoo Groups, and with numerous other such constructs going back as far as Geocities and AOL. It may well be that this is the form which the coming-of-age of the Internet will take.
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13:46 - Cream of the Crop
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,544315,00.asp
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Wow... this is interesting. The latest PC Magazine "Editor's Choice" comparison chart is in, and of the four machines reviewed there are two high-end workstations and two entry-level all-in-ones. Of the latter, one isn't a PC-- and it got higher marks.
Yep-- the iMac got four out of five stars, and the Gateway Profile 4 XL got three.
That part isn't really what got me, though. It's the other two machines-- the Gateway 700XL (nearly $5,000) and the Voodoo F-550 Imola Orange 2200+ Titanium XL-9000 Venus Turbo 2 (a whisker short of $6,000).
The Voodoo is orange. And translucent. And illuminated from within. Oh yeah-- it's got some good hardware specs too. (Except no LCD.)
But the Gateway.... (are you ready for this?) ... doesn't come with a floppy drive. Shock and horror! Can this be? Surely a computer company damns itself who includes not a floppy drive! Has Gateway no thought for the future?
Nah, they've finally seen the future; it just took 'em four years to admit to it.
Wow. Quite a lineup, quite a lineup. I'm gonna go get me one of those orange Voodoo things and some aftermarket spoilers and decals. Mmmmyep.
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| Monday, September 23, 2002 |
13:58 - Some things are as stupid as they seem
http://www.coldfury.com/archives/000424.php
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Great post at Cold Fury today-- a delicious juxtaposition in Mike's hometown newspaper between dueling editorialists, one of whose theses is thoroughly supported by the news of the day (in the same paper) and the other of whose winds up squashed into the ground by same. As Mike puts it:
Yep, they sometimes juxtapose Dowd's droolings with Charles Krauthammer's razor-sharp writing, and I swear it's kind of jarring, like putting a filet mignon on a dinner plate next to a steaming turd. Or really, it's more as if they present us with an annoying, buzzing, bloodsucking insect and then thoughtfully provide us with a really large flyswatter just as a favor.
He quotes both columns at length, and to my mind they speak for themselves-- it should be self-evident which side has its head in the clouds and which one is fixated, however damned pragmatically, upon planet Earth.
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09:30 - With experts like these, who needs the clueless?
http://www.cmug.org/pulpit/Komando.html
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David Lang has a withering article in CMUG that demolishes Kim Komando's lame-ass iMac review from a few days ago, the one in which she spends two months trying to get used to using Word on a Mac instead of on Windows XP, and at the end grudgingly acceding that it's competent at word-processing, though bringing nothing to the table that Windows doesn't already.
Lang quotes Steven Levy regarding the one-button mouse:
When Apple tested a two-button mouse, Tesler recalled, "people made a lot of mistakes. With two buttons, people would constantly be turning their heads from the screen and looking at the mouse. . . . When we did experiments with identical everything, except the number of buttons on the mouse, the people who used a one-button mouse said it was easier to pick up. I realized that when you used the mouse, they were pointing. Pointing, and tapping with the finger they were pointing with. There was no mental model for pointing with more than one finger. So we got rid of the second button. . . ."
In a world where Apple is ridiculed at every turn for stubbornly continuing to include a one-button mouse with their computers, even though they've spent the past twenty years fine-tuning the OS interface and applications so users won't need more than one button, and where it's generally assumed that a one-button mouse is significantly cheaper than a two-button one and therefore Apple is just being "cheap", I happen to think that it represents consummate purity of purpose for Apple not to bow to the misguided pressure and go to a multi-button mouse. Even though it's obvious in every other aspect of the computer (well, except possibly the power supply) that Apple uses no cheap parts and spares no expense (just compare the LCD screens of the iMacs to those of, say, the Profile 4), people still assume that the mouse is just a way for them to cut corners. Doesn't it seem just a little bit strange that a company so focused on User Interface would skimp so visibly on the mouse, and nothing else? Is it so hard to imagine that there's a reason behind the single button?
It probably isn't of interest to a huge number of people, this retort by Lang; but if you happened to read the Komando "review" and found yourself seething, go check this one out. You'll feel a whole lot better.
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| Sunday, September 22, 2002 |
00:29 - Eww! I got some Windows on me!
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Here's how to recognize a Mac program that has been ported from Windows by someone who really doesn't understand the Mac OS:
Huh? Whaddya mean, you "cannot find Smpl_wns.xm"? It's right here. <pointing at the screen> All I did was move it from my Desktop into a folder. And that means you can't find it anymore?
...Of course it does. The Windows filesystem doesn't have Unique File IDs; the only way to find a file is by its path. And if a path changes, any programs that try to keep track of the file are SOL. Whereas a program that was designed from the ground up with the advantages of the Mac in mind would instead keep track of files by their Unique File IDs, like iTunes does, so you can move files any which where you want to-- even while they're downloading or playing or being copied or whatever-- and nothing will go all brain-dead about not being able to find them, for God's sake.
Yeah, I know that only about 5% of the computer-using population of the world has used software that doesn't lose track of files if you move them. But if it weren't for Apple, it would be 0%.
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22:58 - Someone else noticed
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47061-2002Sep21.html
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Ah hah... via Corsair, here's evidence that the IKEA "Unböring" ad campaign is getting more attention in critical circles than just from me.
Apparently the thrust of the campaign will be a bid to get people to treat furniture as something that's more "disposable"-- something you can endlessly trade-up, discarding your old crappy stuff. IKEA vigorously denies that they're trying to promote conspicuous consumption or planned obsolescence, but... well, I don't know if there's a good way to end that sentence without being entirely self-contradictory.
While I'm not yet sure about the sentiment, I still think the ad's brilliant.
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12:51 - RADiCal ...(Okay, you do better...)
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55244,00.html
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Wow. It's only been a week since iCal was released, and there's already a Wired article about a site that's sprung up to take full advantage of iCal's ability to publish and share calendars freely, using only a standard web server. The site is iCalShare.com, and I've checked it out-- it looks pretty dang neat. Apple had already posted a few public calendars people could subscribe to (movie openings, US holidays, TV premieres), but it took someone apparently all of ten minutes to realize that anybody could run a clearing-house site to host calendars like that, and to allow individuals to post their own calendars and merge them dynamically with other people's.
This looks like a job for... The Internet!
There are calendars for shuttle launches, bible readings, Mac tradeshows, National Hockey League teams, NASCAR races, the America's Cup, soccer matches in the Netherlands and Formula One races.
There are also calendars for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Iron Chef TV show, the new Survivor series, the New York Yankees, Russian public holidays, school holidays in Luxembourg and significant dates related to Rush, the Canadian progressive-rock group -- including tour dates and band members' birthdays.
"The diversity and scope of calendars coming in continues to surprise me," said Crowley. "It's like a micropublishing revolution. Everybody's an expert on something, and they all want to share their expertise, but without all the fuss of making a Web page or website."
Thanks to Crowley's site, all the work of entering calendar dates is done by someone else who shares similar interests.
The service is free, and calendars are automatically updated when the creators make changes. Of course, you're at their mercy if they make mistakes.
The free iCal application has been available for just over one week, yet Crowley already has collected more than 100 calendars and expects to double that by the end of the week. It's likely to snowball.
"Part of Apple's recent success is its robust online community," Crowley said. "Hopefully, iCalshare will become part of that."
Boy howdy. Apple's one of those companies that understands how people want to work, and they write tools which play to just those tendencies. Lately they've seen not only how people tend to use the Internet, but how they love to use the Internet-- e.g. setting up websites for common interests and shared goals, and running them like small entrepreneurial businesses as more and more people come on board. All they were missing was the right tool.
It's like with iPhoto, which has created small businesses like one quoted on the Switch page in which a woman stays at home, has people send her collections of digital or film photos, and then organizes and edits them in iPhoto and make those hardcover photo books that she then orders through Apple. She then collects a healthy profit on the price she gets from the client. She's not the only one doing this, either.
Both Apple's and Mozilla's applications are based on an open, standard-file format called iCal, which was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
The iCal format is supported by a variety of calendaring software, including Microsoft's Outlook.
"It's another example of Apple taking an open standard and making it truly useful," Crowley said. "I'm sure other calendar vendors will shortly follow in Apple's footsteps with their own calendar-sharing stuff."
Kris was telling me last night about one of the WWDC keynote speeches from back in May, in which one of the engineering directors was talking about UNIX and Apple's vision for how to build on it. They're focusing on "smaller is better" and "open standards are good"; they're under a strict mandate not to change anything in the underlying UNIX unless they have to. Development infrastructure is geared toward fast code implementation, which is why OS X is so slow-- it's as pure an object-oriented platform as we've ever seen in widespread use. There are layers upon layers of abstraction APIs which must be called during any particular function, and while parts of this can be optimized, Apple really can't push the speed of OS X-- particularly in the user interface-- to the level of Windows without fundamentally undermining their ideals of object-based development. All they can really do is throw CPU speed at it (which we'll have, hopefully, in about a year). Personally, if the benefits are programs like iCal and iPhoto which they can whip out in a couple of months' time, then I'm all for it. I'd far rather have that-- applications whose underlying code is effectively "already written", freeing up the developers to make it robust, attractive, intuitive, and above all useful-- rather than a whole lot of talk and bluster that eventually results in yet another drab gray incomprehensible mess like Outlook.
Apple is about creating and enabling... and they do it almost without regard for their own ability to benefit from it. Jobs has always had the weakness (or strength, depending on how the company is doing at a given time) of being confident that customers will choose the better product, and that means Apple will always have a compelling business case. He figures that to succeed, he has to win the hearts-and-minds battle; even if Apple doesn't have a price edge or a performance edge, he believes that people will eventually be won over by the benefits of Macs rather than put off by the disadvantages.
Most people get less and less idealistic as they age, particularly through first-hand experience. But it doesn't appear to have happened to Jobs. He's gotten less brash and willing to take pointless risks on products that would never sell, granted-- but he does know a low-hanging fruit when he sees it, and as with Inkwell in Jaguar, he knows the value of cool.
Cool alone doesn't sell, says the Microsoft school of thought. Apple says, yes it does-- just not in the majority. But it will always have an appreciative audience.
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| Saturday, September 21, 2002 |
22:41 - Hah! Chortle, giggle, guffaw and other such utterances
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I was listening to the ever-amusing "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR on the way to the store just now. Usually the hosts manage not to let their political leanings and/or cheap-shottery bleed through into the discourse. But this time, well...
Peter, the lead guy, posed one question (the obvious answer was "Bush") in which he related, in a thick Texan accent, the recent occasion where Dubya tried to recite the old "Fool me once/fool me twice" aphorism, but mangled it rather badly. He said, apparently, "Y'know, there's an old saying down around where I'm from: 'Fool me once, shame on me... fool me-- er, fool... you can't get fooled again.'"
The hosts all guffawed, as one might imagine. Peter explained how the press has been loath to gleefully broadcast Bush's malapropisms in the course of the past year, because hey, there's a war on and all. Word is that Bush's on-camera appearances have been intentionally brief, often rebroadcast only after editing, and written transcripts of his extemporaneous speeches have been cleaned of verbal flubs.
You could just hear the scorn dripping from Peter's expertly clipped and waxed voice when he smugly tried to finish up the segment as follows:
"Of course, as we all know, the actual saying is: 'Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me... er... wait...'"
The laughter that rocked the studio was louder than it had been before. As it was from inside my car. Yeah, take that, you sneering so-and-so. But the best part of all, what got the biggest belly-laugh out of everybody involved, was the next line out of Peter's mouth, delivered through a mortified, self-conscious giggle:
"I guess that just goes to show, I shouldn't criticize the Predisen--aaagh!"
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15:10 - Lawyers and Computers: A Dangerous Combination
http://www.freep.com/news/locoak/checks21_20020921.htm
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You know that "Nigerian Scam Letter" thing? The one that's apparently been in circulation since the 80s, through various media, and only now becoming so much more common knowledge because of e-mail?
Well, a 59-year-old woman at a law firm in Michigan seems to have fallen for it-- big-time. Bigger-time than usual. See, she had access to her entire law firm's assets. And she drained them in order to dutifully fulfill the scam's requests (for fees, taxes, bribes, etc. that must be paid in order to secure the victim's "fee"). To the tune of $2.1 million.
If a person falls for this scam and uses his or her own money to bankrupt oneself over it, that's one thing. But if the person embezzles money from business accounts to which he or she has access, well, now they're both stupid and malicious. And all you can hope is that they haven't bred.
Now we see why it's so futile to try to educate people to not open e-mail attachments, not install every damn piece of spyware/malware that they find, to pay attention to security warnings, and so on. We'd like to think of ourselves as a society that can handle the responsibility that comes with an unfettered, unregulated, unguaranteed medium like the Internet. But the sad fact is that our society-- and that of the whole world-- is in fact full of morons, and more of them are coming online every day. Half the population, after all, has an IQ of less than 100, by definition. Up till now it's mostly been the other half, the ones with a clue, who were using computers. But you know... that was once true of the telephone and the TV.
Sooner or later someone like this-- someone intensely rich and intensely stupid-- will have something like this happen to them, and then will pull coffee-in-the-lap emotional tricks and play on the PC conscience of the public and convince everybody that it's the Internet's fault, not theirs. And you know what that means.
The free ride can't last forever. Let's enjoy it while we have it.
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| Friday, September 20, 2002 |
17:32 - So it's a wash at worst?
http://www.bcentral.com/articles/komando/104.asp?cobrand=msn&LID=3800
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Here's what happens when an MSN bCentral columnist tries out an iMac, Coursey-style, to see whether or not the "Switch" ads are just hype.
She does try to be fair, I guess. She has more than the usual share of weird misconceptions (she thinks the Mac equivalent of the Windows Explorer is called "Macintosh HD", which I guess is what an OS gets for putting its disks on the desktop where you can access them directly). And her conclusions are that the iMac suffers from the following three disadvantages:
• A one-button mouse. Actually, the entire mouse is the button. I'm used to using the right button and scroll wheel on my Windows mouse. Really, Apple, you could do better than this.
Why? What good is the right button in an OS that's designed to avoid the contextual-menu madness of Windows? The whole point of the one-button mouse is simplicity for new users, who don't know what weird functionalities lurk in the right-button menus of this or that Windows program. The Mac's big design guideline on this subject is to make all functionality available either in clear UI elements (e.g. buttons) or in the menus; contextual menus can only mirror functions that exist in the standard locations, as a shortcut-- the contextual menu can never be the only place to find something. That way, a beginning computer user won't be confused by all these bizarre buttons everywhere. Did you know that a majority of PC users don't realize what the right button is even for? A study found that most thought it was just some sort of "alternate" button for left-handed people; or they never touched it for fear of breaking something.
Scroll-wheels and multi-button mice are indeed useful. I use one myself. Support for them is built into the OS, including sensitivity controls for the scroll-wheels on third-party mice. If you gotta have one, go buy one. Apple's engineers did do better, however. They put their effort into making the extra buttons unnecessary.
• The 15-inch monitor. Apple has begun shipping iMacs with 17-inch screens. I'm used to using a 21-inch CRT monitor, and the 15-incher was just too small.
Fine, that's fair enough. So why are you complaining about the screen size on an entry-level machine, when what you're used to is a top-end monitor? Next on Non-Sequitur Review TV, we bring you a Formula 1 driver who warns buyers to stay away from the Chevy Cavalier, because the engine's too damn small.
• No floppy drive. I know 3.5-inch floppies aren't used much anymore. But the need does arise occasionally. The iMac should have a floppy drive.
And put it where? And why? The original iMac had no floppy in 1998, and we never looked back. Floppies are used so seldom these days that they're just impediments to design. If you've gotta have floppies, there are USB floppy drives to be had for dirt cheap. (Remember, that's why the iMac popularized USB in the first place-- no floppy drive, but hey, lookee here, you can hot-swap one in if you want!) But this is the 21st century. Burn a CD. Send an e-mail. The "Mac has no floppy" argument has gotten about as old as the "Xb0X iz really Hy00ge LOLOLOL!!!!11``" postulate. C'mon, people. Get over it.
She also has a beef with the iMac's speed. In fact, yes, it's her major gripe. That's a perfectly fair thing to complain about, and nobody will fault the harsh mistress that is real-world perceptual interface lag (at least, putting aside the fact that IE on Windows and IE on the Mac are completely different animals-- one's an optimized kernel process that's inextricable from the OS interface, and the other's a bloated and decidedly non-optimized application running in user space). But, hey, Apple's working on that. We've all got our drawbacks.
But I'd have liked to see her really give the iMac "every opportunity" to impress. Like, for instance, doing some multimedia stuff. The stuff that it was designed for. Surfing the Web and writing Word files is one thing, yes. But how about ripping a CD into iTunes? How about editing a movie? How about burning a DVD? How about hooking up a digital camera, no drivers necessary, and making a picture book you can order with a click?
Or did those kinds of things simply not occur to her, because she doesn't do them on her Windows machine? Huh. Wonder why that might be.
Meh. As lukewarm-on-Apple columns go, this one's pretty mild. But maybe it says something about Apple's fortunes of late, that this is the worst we're hearing.
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15:07 - Before I forget this one...
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A couple of weeks ago, I was in the lab, trying to determine what the hell kind of CPU was being used in a piece of networking equipment that I was trying to test. I was poking through the boot messages, which printed out some obscure and esoteric lines from the chip's own ID strings about how it's a Celeron/Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon, Model 8-- evidently they can't get any more specific than that.
I got up from my chair, ready to admit defeat and find someone with more hardware guruism than I possessed, to see if they could cast Identificus Intellus and give me some kind of concrete name that would map to a chip that humans without Borg implants could write a marketing release about. Johnnie was nearby in the lab; I asked him. He looked at the screen, arched his eyebrows, shook his head.
I had another idea, though.
"I know-- I'll ask Chris. He's only been a Mac user for like a week. He probably still has some hardware knowledge."
Just one of those things I said without thinking, and would have probably forgotten immediately, but for the minute-long paroxysm that it sent Johnnie into. And when I related it to Chris, he told me I should put it in my blog.
Y'know, for safekeeping. Or something.
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| Thursday, September 19, 2002 |
02:39 - Sweet Lileks eases the pain
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0902/090302.html#092002
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Another of those "Day in the Life" Bleats. I'd be hard pressed to say that these are the best kind, but they're awfully choice. Mostly because I find myself relating personally to so much of it-- my brain is surprised to find that so many of those unaccountable reactions I've grown up with weren't mine alone.
When we get fully-immersive 3d holographic TV, I want someone to redo the Beethoven’s 6th portion of “Fantasia. “I loved it as a kid, and even though it now looks kitschy as hell, the style of the animation is unforgettable - to this day I still see the Pegasus fighting the wind when I hear the storm sequence.
I know it's not widely regarded as one of his best works, and it's never gotten the respect afforded to illustrious siblings like the 5th and the 9th, but the 6th has always been my favorite of Beethoven's symphonies. Purely because of Fantasia. Because the music is so visual, just like the movie said. Because I can't disassociate the music from those visuals even if I try. Because if I hear a different recording of it, by some other orchestra, where they play that one strong sharp chord sequence too fast or without enough emphasis-- the one in which the pegasi come stomping through the clouds in the first movement-- my brain makes that Family Feud "X" noise and I have to go dig out my soundtrack to hear it "right". Maybe that impoverishes my musical appreciation capacity, or maybe it just means I'm nuts. Hey, either way I'm cool with it.
Oh, and:
“I’m running Jag on a newer iBook, and while I’m on an internet connection via Airport, I periodically get an OS 9 alert that I need to enable Apple Talk. It only happens when the connection is dropped for a half-second or so.”
He nodded, thought a second, then explained how I should reset a certain setting, and that was that. (It worked.) I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: WALK-UP TECH SUPPORT. I pidy the foo who buys a PC at Best Buy, and goes back to ask a blue-shirt a question. I’ll bet if I dragged my 512K Mac to the Genius Bar and asked for help, they’d oblige - after they stopped cooing and petting it like a long-lost pet.
Yeah, more speed would be nice. More applications and games would be nice. But neither of those things are why Mac people buy Macs. We buy Macs in spite of a clear and demonstrable disadvantage on both counts. Why? Some things are just more valuable to us than Bonzi Buddies or four-digit frame rates. Things that-- contrary to the unflappable opinion of some-- simply aren't a part of the PC experience. Like operating systems that people come to love so much that they treat a derisive comment like they would a personal insult, and a report of a bug like they would an injured family member; stores with knowledgeable, free, walk-in tech support; and well-maintained demo computers in those stores that a two-year-old can play on without a moment's confusion. I've been in one or the other of the local Apple Stores a number of times over the past year, and on every occasion the toddler's tables were full. Never once was a single kid crying or pouting or waving for help. Never once was any of them doing anything but typing and mousing and having a good time.
...No, that's it. That's all I wanted to say; nothing terribly important. Just wanted to register my pointless "me too".
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01:49 - Ultralites on the horizon
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,543317,00.asp
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Here's the word, as official as we've seen it so far, regarding the mysterious IBM/Apple dealings. In short: It's real. It's coming. It just won't be here for a year yet.
It's called GPUL, for "GigaProcessor Ultralite", and it's a POWER4-based 64-bit multicore CPU that will start production in late 2003 (possibly with four-way and eight-way cores) running at 1.4-2.0GHz. Clock-for-clock, it'll get about twice the performance of a G4; plus it has the 162-instruction VMX set, which they don't refer to as Altivec in any of the released material-- but which is evidently 100% compatible with Altivec. Which means "this transition should be less complicated than Apple's early-'90s move from 68000-series Motorola processors to the PowerPC family". And that was pretty damned smooth, as such things go.
So that's for next Christmas, and likely targeted for servers (e.g. Xserve) and top-end tower workstations, not for laptops and entry-level machines (after all, the GPUL will be power-hungry... not nearly as much so as the POWER4 or the Itanium 2, but way more than the G4). So what about the interim? It's clear that the G4 is getting too long in the tooth to really impress anymore. Commentators on the Ars Technica forum thread on this topic note that the G4 stumbled all over itself when it was released-- it had some powerful advantages, but it was hobbled by long ramp-up time and that now-infamous CPU-speed scaleback and the long stall at about 500 MHz, which seems like only yesterday. Many of the faithful have had a love-hate relationship with the G4; it's the best we've had available to us, it feels nice, it sounds right, but it just doesn't give us the chills to talk about it in mixed company anymore. We need something better, and soon.
Hence this little number:
Meanwhile, sources said, the long-awaited PowerPC G5 CPU from Motorola is likely to break cover perhaps as soon as early 2003. The G5, according to published product road maps from Motorola, should be available as 32- and 64-bit products with backward compatibility, though Motorola has provided few additional details.
In other words, a 64-bit version of the G4 at higher speeds, with the best benefits of Book E design specs and the power-stinginess that the PPC line has become known for. The G5, which may be available early next year, could take over the entire line, starting from the top down-- the G4 moving to the iBooks, and finally itself being replaced by the G5 when the GPUL takes over the top end at the conclusion of the year.
So all the contradictory rumors turn out to be (possiby) true: there's an IBM chip and a Motorola chip, and they've both got a future on the Mac. And suddenly Apple's got all kinds of options for directions to take their future development.
It's clear to me at least that this hydra of a plot has been in the works for at least a year or two. It's been kept wrapped up quite tightly for a long time. Apple evidently saw the writing on the wall back when the G4 was languishing at sub-700MHz speeds, and took the necessary steps. And now we're about to reap the rewards.
No, nothing's guaranteed. But my fingers are crossed for a very entertaining 2003.
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09:17 - iTunes 3.0.1, or something
http://www.apple.com/itunes
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One of the things released yesterday was iTunes 3.0.1, and it looks to be working fine, though I can't figure out what's different about it. The description from Apple says "includes a number of performance enhancements to iTunes 3.0, and provides improved support for Mac OS X version 10.2"... though as yet I see no evidence for the nifty Rendezvous playlist sharing that Jobs and Schiller demoed a few months back.
One thing I do see that's new is a "Provide iTunes Feedback" link under the application menu. More and more apps are getting their own Feedback pages, and I think all the iApps have them now.
One has to pull back and think about this. They provide a feedback mechanism for all of their applications. Including OS X itself. They encourage feedback. And they act on it.
When one talks about the fundamental difference in corporate attitude between Apple and Microsoft, this is the first illustrative example that leaps to mind. I think it says a helluva lot.
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| Wednesday, September 18, 2002 |
03:25 - UN arms inspector Clouseau, at your service...
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0902/090302.html#091902
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Great Bleat today. (Well, hell, they're all good-- but you know what I mean.) Not one to read just before you go to sleep, mind you, but... great nonetheless.
Compound W, indeed. You nutcase.
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01:43 - Arguing by Analogy
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Whoisourenemy.shtml
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Cap'm Den Beste (whose name I just discovered I've been miscapitalizing all this time-- damn my eyes) has posted a nutshell summary-- though it's anything but short-- of who our enemy is in this defensive war (this jihad, if you will), and he doesn't mince words. He points fingers, but the targets he finds aren't ones that the antiwar left really has any intellectual mechanism to tackle. "Cultural genocide" is what we're going to have to end up committing, he says. Naturally no good liberal will be able to read those words without bristling.
And indeed, he's taking plenty of flak from the usual suspects who have been lobbing water balloons at his arguments increasingly steadily of late. But what I've noticed is that the people who have a bone to pick with the kind of cut-to-the-chase outlining of the problems and our tedious but clear-cut proposed solutions all seem to use the same tactics to try to argue against war and against American assertiveness: they argue by analogy, using such brilliant devices as:
It's time for an intervention. Take a day or two away from your blog.
Then go back and read your manifesto again. This time substitute the words "Jew" and "Jews" for the words "Arab" and "Muslim."
If it doesn't send a chill up and down your spine, check yourself into a mental hospital, or seek professional counseling.
And I'm not being sarcastic about this.
You accuse the Arabs of living in the 14th century. Arguably, your "solution" comes right out of the 20th. Roughly from the years between 1932 and 1945 to be precise.
It's not to late to wake up and re-think things.
...This is what I meant a couple of days ago by the intellectual tendency to want to draw parallels, form analogies, and make logical leaps that one can present in the form of a paper to one's professor and appear terribly clever. "You want to defang radical Islam by gutting the culture that it exists in concert with. Well, just pretend it's Jews that you're talking about defanging, and suddenly-- voilá! You're a Nazi!" But, you know, never mind that the circumstances are about as different as they can possibly be. Never mind how many Jews you could have counted in 1932 Munich firebombing ice-cream parlors and shooting guns in the air praising Jehovah. Never mind how adamant Judaism is about establishing a global Judaic ruling order that enforces strict adherence to Talmudic law. Never mind how many skyscrapers Jews have knocked down with planes for the furtherance of their religion.
Some people are placing as their highest goal the discovery of hypocrisy in any policy decision we make: if something we do can be shown even tenuously to mirror something the Nazis did, or that the Soviets did or that the Arabs do, then it's an instant deal-breaker. Yeah, hypocrisy sucks. But in and of itself, hypocrisy-- or the accusation thereof-- does not validate or invalidate a given policy. Just because some historical parallel can be drawn and turned against us, some would have us believe that that should trump any action on our part. I say that's bunkum. What we're interested in is the problem we face in the here-and-now, and what solutions we can propose that are appropriate. We are capable of deciding upon their ethicality and their international sensitivity without the aid of delicious historical irony, thankyouverymuch.
Den Beste defends his reasoning as well has he needs to-- arguments like Hesiod's deflate themselves in the very unfolding of the metaphors by which they define themselves. And that's exactly it: nobody making these anti-war comments seems willing to do it directly, without appealing to historical parallels or diplomatic precedent. It's all got to fit into a formula, these guys seem to be saying. This situation is no different from anything else that's happened in history. We're an advanced, enlightened culture nowadays. We have international laws to cover any and all circumstances that might arise. And that's why this insane cowboy Bush is so dangerous-- he's making up his own rules as he goes along! Whereas we all know that the answer to Islamic terrorism has got to be found in poring over history books, finding ancient causes and effects, finding successful solutions to contemporary problems, and applying them to the issues at hand. Never mind that saying that if we reduce our energy consumption, recycle more, and give more aid to Central Africa, we will eliminate global poverty and end terrorism is rather like saying that a pothole in the road is best fixed by declaring roads illegal.
I remember a Trek episode in which Data, having lost his memory, found himself in the midst of a pre-warp, medieval society with a very "Greek" physical model of the world. A teacher explained to her students how all matter was made up of sky, fire, water, and stone; she said that wood contained all of these in some measure, reasoning that because the wood was heavy it contained stone, and that because it was combustible it contained fire (and the smoke released was sky that was trapped in the wood). In what was one of the more scientifically conscientious Trek moments, Data argued, correctly, that she was reasoning by analogy, and that that was a logically flawed tactic; just because wood is heavy doesn't mean it contains stone. Naturally, though, she wanted to hear none of that.
(Yes, I'm aware of the irony of using a Trek reference about reasoning by analogy, as an analogy to the current debate structure.)
Mind you, there's nothing inherently wrong with reasoning by analogy, or arguing by analogy-- but only if the analogy makes sense. At best it's a poor substitute for real direct evidence, and when that's in short supply, the temptation to analogize hockey-sticks. Some people are so eager to appear clever with their rhetoric that they'll pull a bad analogy out of their ass-- and because it lends itself to trick wording and because the audience feels so compelled to follow the same parallels so they can "get the reference", such an analogy will often get a lot more critical reaction than it deserves.
I wonder why so few people seem willing to face up to the possibility that this war is indeed something new, something entirely and fundamentally modern-- something that could only have come to light in the age of the Internet and satellite TV and their impossibly ubiquitous and never-before-seen reach in broadcasting the message of American success to the world. Countries who had previously only heard of America as a vague name on the horizon now have Baywatch episodes to download via KaZaA. This is something that could never have happened in another age. And the rules of the engagements of history, the solutions to the problems of the past, will not avail us here. We do have to make up new rules as we go. The old ones will address the wrong problems. (Although I do agree that we'll have to demolish "Arab Culture" and reconstruct it, Japan-style. It's not that it's what we should do because "it worked in Japan", but because it's the only tenable solution regardless of historical context.)
I can just hope that our government sees it in this light, and that they're not seduced by the temptation to define what this war is like, rather than what it is. After all, who are we more concerned with outsmarting-- the enemy, or each other?
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01:06 - New wave of Switchers
http://www.apple.com/switch
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There's been a new spate of Switch ads released today, presumably to coincide with the 10.2.1 OS update and the iTunes 3.0.1 release that came out today. Those aren't being made much of (except in the Software Update panel), in favor of the new Switchers-- who appear to have been picked to address some of the concerns people raised about the first wave.
These guys are about as "normal" as they come. There's a cop, a veterinarian, a trucking company owner, a couple of students, a college professor, a lawyer, and a woman whose story of Mac joy is about how she saved Christmas. "Who wants to spend Christmas afternoon downloading Windows drivers?"
The raucous pundits are going to have a hard time coming up with snide remarks to make about this latest group's geekiness, dorkiness, or alleged sexual perversions. No propellerheads or dominatrices in this batch. These are regular people-- which is the vibe that the original wave of Switchers was supposed to convey, but apparently it wasn't innocuous enough. This iteration should do the trick.
The stories are compelling and real. Students talk about why their iPods are so much better than dragging CD cases around in backpacks. Software developers talk about how fun it is to work with photos in iPhoto and make books to send home to one's parents in India. The testimonials focus on what iMovie can do, what iDVD can do, how easy everything is to network, how people can just do more now that they've made the switch. And don't miss student Jeremiah Cohick, who used to be a Mac basher (out of ignorance, he admits with a guilty grin), but who after using OS X has become a missionary with the zeal of one who feels as though he must do penance for his unwarranted sneering in the days before he took up his teacher's challenge to consider using products that didn't have the Microsoft logo on them (I love the irony of how the vicious l33t rebels insist upon the institutional choice, as though it were the gospel of the anarchist or something).
There's a new batch of textual stories posted, too. This campaign seems to be working out for Apple; they've just announced 100,000 subscribers to .Mac since it was announced-- about six weeks ago. That's a lot of people voting with their dollars for Apple's services. After all, you do have to make a conscious decision to pay for .Mac. This is a good sign.
We just had a four-hour time-management workshop at work today; at the end of it, I showed the instructor one of the "Laid Off" movies by Odd Todd-- because, hey, it seemed to be on-topic-- and he was far more interested in my iBook than in the movie. "I'm looking at getting a new laptop," he said. "I'm totally Windows-based, but there's just nothing as cool as this."
Says Jeremiah Cohick, "It doesn't freeze. It doesn't crash. It doesn't require me to reboot when I change network settings. It boots fast. Its sleep function actually works. I don't need virus software. There is no system tray. It lets me run a gazillion media and programming applications without taking a performance hit. And (even though my fellow programmers won't admit it) it is beautiful."
The Mac community has had its ups and it downs over the past twenty years. We're bound to find ourselves in a valley again sometime in the future. But it's damned nice to be in an age of incline.
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22:46 - Lotsa "lamp" ads this year, eh?
http://www.unboring.com
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I don't know why I didn't notice this before-- I did look. I really did. But the IKEA ad that I mentioned yesterday is in fact online at www.unböring.com, in either QuickTime or (if you insist) Windows Media. Click on the TV in the Flash interface thingy.
I tell you, this one should rank right up there with the "weasel attacking the guy's tongue" cell-phone/text messaging ad, and those will be battling it out come Clio time. That one wins on outright ingenious hilarity, but I still maintain that the "lamp" ad has it in the sarcasm department. In spades.
By the way: the actual "unböring.com" address doesn't exist. Looks cute, but someone evidently didn't take international encoding into account when designing DNS. D'oh.
Bear this in mind when unboring.com releases more ads, which it looks like they're planning to do.
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10:08 - C'mon, guy. You need a rest! Put your feet up! I'd like you to meet my partner in evil, Satan!
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Verysnakey.shtml
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You know, if it's true that Saddam's recent letter to the UN was crafted as "snakily" as Den Beste describes it to have been, namely in that it claims to allow the inspectors to return to Iraq "without conditions"-- but says nothing about allowing the to inspect without conditions-- and that everything hinges upon what restrictions and demands will be revealed at the "practical arrangements" discussions that Iraq proposes... and if it's the case that, as Den Beste also (earlier, before the letter) said, "Either he'll make some sort of half-way offer which will be refused immediately, or he'll actually agree to permit the inspectors to return with only slight conditions. If it's the latter, then I will be afraid, for it will mean he thinks he's within a few months of success [at realizing his nuclear program]"... well, then I'm afraid too.
One possibility is that the letter was just shakily written, and that Iraq does in fact intend to let the inspectors run willy-nilly over the country, including the Presidential Palaces and everywhere.
But another, more likely possibility seems to be that it's another delaying tactic-- intended only to last for a very short time.
After all, how long does Iraq hope to have before the "practical arrangements" discussions? How long before the inspectors go back in and find their way to the palaces barred and guards firing rifles over their heads at biochem plants? How long until everybody catches Saddam red-handed in a baldfaced lie, in other words?
For him to gamble that heavily with world opinion, and with the countries which seem to have made a doctrine out of treating Saddam's offers as genuine and assuming that he won't lie... well, it means that he might well have surprises to unveil on the order of weeks from now.
Let 'em come, he says. By the time they discover I was lying, it'll be too late for "inspectors" to do a thing about it.
Lemme put it this way: This is one case in which I hope Den Beste is wrong.
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| Tuesday, September 17, 2002 |
23:31 - Advertising Nation
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I just saw the most sarcastic goddamned ad I've ever seen in my entire life.
There are several versions of it, but the best one (naturally) is the longest cut, almost a minute long. It begins with a woman cleaning out her apartment in the caverns of the city, probably Manhattan. She takes a bag of garbage out to the sidewalk-- along with an old desk lamp. She puts them down at the edge of the street, and the piano plays a slow, heart-wrenching, drama-filled dirge as the rain begins to fall on the lamp, its stalk bent slightly like an old man on a cane, its cord wrapped carelessly around its base.
It's dark and raining hard. You can see the woman in her room on the second floor; her window is the only one lit, and she's sitting in a chair by the window, reading by the light of her new lamp. It's tall and graceful, with a clear shade; its light streams out over the sidewalk and reflects off the wet surface and into the hood of the old lamp, which looks as though it's glowing warmly with the memory of being needed, turned as though in supplication toward the window's glow. The piano continues its woeful plodding melody as the woman gets up, turns off her new lamp, and gives it a loving pat. The light shuts off, and the old lamp outside is left in the dim twilight of the driving rain.
The camera trucks slowly in. You're sure by this point that the old lamp is destined to become the subject of one of those little-tin-soldier stories with which we were all plagued as children; it will come to life, or a little girl will walk by and pick it up and make it part of an art project or a beloved new addition to her playroom, or it will fall over and die... and just as you're positive that the smarm is about to begin in deadly earnest-- you see a guy's legs step into view in front of the camera, and we pan up to his head. He's a bedraggled little Scandinavian guy with rain-wet hair and a long jacket. He peers with a peeved scowl at the camera.
"Many of you feel bad about this lamp. That is because you crazy! It has no feelings! And the new one is much better."
IKEA. www.unböring.com.
...You know, even if I cling to the conceit that I'm not influenced into buying certain products by the imagery spewed forth from the glowing phosphor tube day in and day out, that I eat at Taco Bell because I like the food rather than because they show melted cheese along with the Pavlov bell logo, that I go to see certain movies because of their own merits rather than how compelling the trailers are... there is one other level at which I find myself susceptible to a company's advances. And that is that if that company sees fit to create an ad campaign that I find irresistibly clever or artistic or genuinely funny, I find myself wanting to find some excuse to patronize that company just to support its decision to make good ads. That's largely why I like Volkswagen, and Jack in the Box, and even Apple. And now it seems I'm going to have to add IKEA to that list.
From the lowest of the low-brow mind-polluting pap to the richest, most sarcastic and inspired pieces of commentary-laden pop art, advertising is every bit as much the modern art form as, say, movies or Web pages. And it'll probably last longer, too.
I don't know what I even think about that. Especially considering how insidiously well-done that horrible "Bad Boys Bail Bonds" ad is. (Those of you not local to San Jose probably have no idea what this particular meme is like. Consider yourselves fortunate.)
It's both the price and the boon of capitalism.
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| Monday, September 16, 2002 |
20:48 - Shut up, Brian
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What would happen if Kelsey Grammer married Tori Spelling?
(Hey, shut up, at least she wouldn't be Miss Spelling anymore...)
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09:54 - 2050 History Book Illustration
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Via Tal G. and Live From Brussels:
There are certainly a lot of photos from a year ago which deserve Pulitzers; but whoever took this one gets my vote.
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| Sunday, September 15, 2002 |
16:46 - Well shut my mouth.
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Not five minutes after I posted that last entry, a member of the list sent a message through in response to the WSJ article.
"Oh good," I thought. "Finally, some condemnation."
Well, I was right: condemnation of the US. The poster wanted to make clear that the Finsbury Park gathering was a media circus that ended up conveying a very negative portrayal of what was going on in the crowd and those organizing the event. He also wanted, just by the way, to pass on and endorse a document from the event's organizer explaining how America is evil, 9/11 is all America's fault, Israel is a nation of murderers that everybody hated before 9/11 and now everyone is sympathetic to because of the evil media, etc, etc. Oh, and "Perhaps the rapid rise of Islam and Muslim converts in the West is an indication of a future under the Shariíah, where everyoneís life, wealth and honour is protected and where Muslims and non-Muslims can live side by side in under the divine justice and beauty of Islam."
Boy, that sure makes me feel a whole lot better.
Oh, by the by-- there was another post commemorating the deaths of all Muslims who died on 9/11, giving their names and telling their stories and explaining how the survivors have been subjected to a life of unjust racial profiling and prejudice ever since.
Not a word about anybody else who died that day, though.
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16:12 - The silence hurts my ears
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A couple of days ago, someone on the Ar-Rahman list worriedly made a post which shakily asked other members of the list to comment upon a Wall Street Journal article from September 13th. This was the article that described the gathering of Muslims at the Finsbury Park mosque in London, celebrating 9/11 and calling it a great victory for the cause of global Islam.
I should clarify again that the Ar-Rahman list, to which I was subscribed a while back without my knowing, does not appear to be a hotbed of raving hardliners; nor does it appear to be a bunch of bloodthirsty youths like the ones at Clear Guidance. Its content includes stuff like cooking tips, advice on the rightness/wrongness of various lifestyle habits, repostings of articles, and so on (though it also has its fair share of hate-filled anti-Semitic propaganda that would make Goebbels proud-- and that nobody seems inclined to denounce on the list).
The poster's subtext was clear: "Please, somebody, explain that this is not actually what all Muslims want. Tell everybody here that this is wrong." This coming on the heels of the posts which I passed on here on the Eleventh, in which all the posters in question sneered at America's sadness and anger over 9/11, in light of the horrors that America had visited upon the rest of the world through its deadly Coca-Cola-- it was eye-opening. I don't know if anybody expected it, or what. But she asked those on the list who seemed to know what they were talking about to please comment. Please denounce it...
(She transcribed the article by hand; I'm not sure why.)
"A celebration of Terror"
By Farrukh Dhondy
an obscene spectacle took place in North London on Wed. A thousand Musims gathered at the Finsbury Park mosque to 'celebrate' the bombing of the World Trade Center. The metropolitan police deployed a force 500 strong to protect the meeting, called 'a towering day in history', from disruption. Adozen or so menacing-looking men with kaffiyehs over their faces stood on the mosque's steps to prevent unfriendly journalists from entering.
the 'celebration' began promptly at 1 pm so that participants could applaud the action fo the WTC bombers at exactly 1:46pm london time the exact hour a year earlier when the first plane hit its target in ny.
the gettogether wasnt just muslim solidarity either. charing the meeting was Abu Hamza, and egyptian-born engineer turnted muslim mullah, who presides ove the notorious finsbury park mosque.
Finsbury park first became known earlier this year when it came out that several of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay who were captured fighting for the taliban and al qaeda had received their theological training there.
Hamza also reportedly recruited to the jihad richard reid the wouldbe shoebomber who failed to blow up an american airlines flight from paris to miami on dece 22, 2001. and the good imam is implicated in the training of zacarias moussaoui under arrest on suspicion of conspiring iwth the 19 murderers of sept. 11.
the fbi has applied for hamza's extradition from britain for questioning in the us (the mullah has been a british subject since 1985) but he is sitll at large in london, free not only to address his congregation but to celebrate the events of 9-11. he told the press that saudi muslims financed the celebration in the hope that from it will arise an organization that represents 'the real views of muslims in britain.'
I've held off from posting this for a couple of days now, waiting to see what the responses would be. I was sure that somebody on the list would step forth and ... I don't know. Say something.
There hasn't been a word. Not one.
Now, I may be expecting too much of this list. Maybe I overreact to the things I see there. Maybe I shouldn't be treating it as anything even resembling a cross-section of popular Muslim thought.
But I would just like to see, once, just once, someone on the list say without qualification that Islam condemned what happened on 9/11 last year, and that world domination is not what most Muslims want. Yes, I've heard it from the very literate. But not from people like the ones on this list.
I don't want to be told how nice it will be when the global Caliphate is established and everybody is a Muslim. I'm not interested in hearing how all I and my fellow Americans and everybody else in the world has to do is submit to the will of Allah and everything will make sense and be good. Everything did make sense, everything was good right up until about a year ago. And it wasn't us who brought that age to an end. It wasn't elected American leaders flying those planes.
I don't want to be told that a theocracy is in our future, whether we like it or not. I just don't. Instead, I want to be told that Muslims are willing to accept a world that does not involve a global Caliphate. That's all I want to hear.
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14:32 - Radio Debut Redux
http://www.grotto11.com/pc20020508.mp3
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Well, at long last, the radio show I did on Point & Click Radio on KZYX back in May is now MP3'ed and online. (Here are the related posts from that day.) It's an hour-long show, and I haven't listened to it myself, so I don't know how much of an idiot I made of myself. But now it's public, and my idiocy belongs to the ages.
Thanks to Bob Laughton for hosting the show and for getting it archived for me!
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12:42 - Terrorism-O-Meter
http://www.ExitToShell.com/products/
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Well, this is more than a little bit morbid. It's a little OS X toolbar doodad called "Homeland Security Alert".
It gets its information from this site. Gee, swell-- now I can know whether it's safe to leave my house just by looking at my menu bar... or for that matter, whether it's safe to stay in my house.
Yeesh.
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12:29 - Reality check
http://www.instapundit.com/archives/003857.php#003857
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Anybody who thinks that our civil liberties are being unprecedentedly eroded away by the horrifically invasive legislation passed since 9/11, and that we've all become willing pawns in Ashcroft's chess-game of a budding police state, needs to read this InstaPundit post.
No wonder Europeans are leery of doing anything substantive nowaways, when they have this to contend with.
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12:20 - The lengths to which some people will go...
http://uber.nu/docs/do.cgi/20020826
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Okay, this is cute. Though it hits awfully close to home.
You know you've thought about it. You go out of your way to drive past the building on your way to work every day. For thirty minutes each morning, you feel like you work there as you wait in traffic with actual Apple employees before you head to your un-magical office park.
Most people take the conventional route of applying for an open position. This, however, does not work. Apple knows there are millions of crazed zealots around the world who dream of life in a Windows-free office (aside from their cubicles). So the company makes things more challenging. Apple only hires people who know Apple employees. So how do you meet an Apple employee? That's the tricky part.
At first I tried hanging out at the Donut Wheel across the street...
Lord knows I've felt as though I'm in this kind of boat. And the Donut Wheel is about a block down from where I work, too.
Considering the ordeal Jordan Hubbard had to go through in order to get his job working on OS X... I'm sure I don't have a ghost of a chance. But a guy can dream, can't he?
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| Friday, September 13, 2002 |
18:13 - California really isn't like this
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/09/147423_comment.php#147790
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I just got finished reading this IndyMedia thread in which some truly loathsome people have been going around San Francisco, finding cars with US flags on them, and pasting this on their bumpers:
Truly amazing. And the comments... ohh, the comments. One guy (named Brian, but not me) stands up for his rights not to have his car vandalized, especially considering that he had a relative die in the WTC-- and what reception does he get?
I am sorry that this person's act causes you pain but look at the reality of the nightmare we are continuing to create.
As for defacing your deathmobile, gee did it ever occur to you that you are defacing our planet? That your toxic emissions every day harms our lungs? That you're knowingly abusing the limited life source resources of our planet? That you've indellibly marred the social fabric?
Take a step back from your anger and start asking yourself what you will do in the honor of those loved ones you have lost. Because yes, you did it, we all did it, and we must not remain complicit in this crime.
Don't bury your head in the sand. Oil is not worth it.
Oil means blood, violence, terror, rising seas, plastic crap, undrinkable water, cancer, sprawling car culture, death of farmland, on on on. STOP!
...
And if you are Jewish Bryan, as we are all certain you must be, the sticker was particularly apt. As an American Jew YOU actually did cause the alleged 9/11 death of your relative by your blind support for Israel.
Honestly, this right here and now makes me sick to my stomach that I ever, for even the briefest of instants, dabbled in leftist/environmental leanings during high school. I feel like I've uncovered some kind of horrible repressed memory, which was then washed from my mind, of murdering babies or microwaving kittens or something.
It goes on and on, this stuff. The three or four brave ones who venture into the page, either via the InstaPundit link or from elsewhere, immediately get reamed out by people who say, "Whee! Look at the righties shriek! Look how they're getting all worked up over a little piece of paper on their deathmobiles! You'd think they'd finally seen how worthless their cause was, and they're getting desperate for some vindication-- even if it means beating the crap out of some poor guy passing out bumper stickers in order to do it!" ...Except it's never anywhere near that coherent. What's really saddening, in fact, is that nobody on this site appears to be able to write in recognizable English... though the ones threatening to defend their cars with their fists, particularly one firm-jawed Canadian, certainly come the closest.
You know what, though? Things like this are what make the rest of the world wish The Big One would just hurry up and hit California, so we could just slough off into the sea and stop polluting the rest of the nation's meme bank with hateful, incendiary crap like this. The fact that they can get away with it in a place like San Francisco, to much of the country, seems like nothing short of proof that this city is irretrievably fucked in the head.
Which I think is an immeasurable shame. San Francisco is so much more than the sheltered little sunken-cheeked waifs that have found refuge there. San Francisco is the most beautiful city in the world, in my considered opinion, and to judge it based on a wacko set of its inhabitants is to condemn a jewel of a city to indifference and rot.
The hippies never left the City. They've just taken on a new form. Unfortunately, the ones who live out here, so far from the actual epicenter of 9/11, are so removed from any sense of what's right and wrong about reacting to it that while we might look back with a nostalgic smirk to the flower children of Haight-Ashbury, cranking up John Ulyanovich Lennon songs on iTunes... their spiritual descendants have found themselves on the wrong side of a divide. They were just far enough out on the fringe that when 9/11 rolled around, it sliced through our society like a scimitar, splitting these people off from the mainstream they'd tried so hard to attach to, and now a year later they've become something completely unrecognizable to anybody with an organ that even slightly resembles a heart.
This is what they consider an intelligent response to a dissenting post:
> I agree completely. We are complicit in 911. Why? Because we did not turn IRaq into a parking lot in 1991.
Hey did you notice that 1991 is just 911 with a 1 on it?
> We did not destroy Iran in 1979. We have for the last 25 years gutted first our intelligence agencies at the behest of the Carter administration and then our military at the hands of that Reprobate Clinton.
Oh yeah it's all the Democrats' fault, not those holy Republicans who stand for only the best values. Do you forget that Reagan was in bed with the Khomeini?
> We should give Islamo-Fascists a simple ultimatum. IFANY AMERICAN INTEREST IS HARMED BY MUSLIM FANATICS, WE WILL GIVE YOU 12 HOURS TO LEAVE MECCA AND THEN IT IS A STEAMING PILE OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE.
Gee but so far we have no proof of who did it other than the clear and convincing evidence that there was U.S. government complicity (and a wide array of motives, which were very quickly CAPITALIZED on)
http://www.bushdidit.org/
> Arabs understand only power. They mistake kindness and tolerance for weakness.
Racist. Racism is ignorance. Racism is hate speech.
> By the way, POP Quiz. On whose behalf has America used its military forces during the last 12 years. ANSWER. Muslims in Kuwait in 1991, Muslims in Mogadishu in 1993, Muslims in Kosovo in 1997, and when we kill Saddam it will be for Muslims in Iraq in 2002.
These were all about oil resources. The U.S. doesn't care what dictatorship, what human rights abuser, what harm must be done to secure oil interests.
> if it was not for American and BRitish technology all the oil they have would still be in the ground while the beat women and screwed little boys in their tents.
Gee are you talking about the Catholic church here?
No, surely this is the Boy Scouts?
And of course these people are immediately tarred as homosexuals, and the threats against their person range into the realm of what would have been considered ample evidence for an FBI raid of your apartment in the days when Matthew Shepard was news. And you know what? As far from heterosexual as I am, I'm on the side of the queerbashers. Why? Why the hell? Because I know they don't mean it, not the way they say it. I'd join right the hell in with the ass-kicking. And I know I wouldn't be excluded from it on the basis of my sexuality. Because you know, some people ARE miserable little faggots.
I plead with the rest of my country, on behalf of my state: Don't judge California by what a few of these sniveling mucus-eaters say and do. They may have a home base here, and they may be able to hide behind the free-speech laws of the country they hate so very very much, but that doesn't mean we aren't watching them very damned carefully.
I love California. I've lived here all my life, and I've relished the entire experience, from the peacefulness of the Wine Country, to the historical lore of Los Angeles peeking through the smog, to the institutional newness of Orange County, to the warm misty friendliness of San Diego, to the snowpacks of the Sierras, to the fogbound Humboldt Coast with its old-school hippies who know not to blame the country that allows them to exist for an attack on it by people who would happily die if it meant they could take a few Americans with them, whether three-star generals or pungent-smoke-wreathed Deadheads, regardless of whether those people drove SUVs or EV1s or rode a bike everywhere. Those ridiculous little causes that the San Francisco penny-collectors crow about so raucously wouldn't have made a damned bit of difference. The only reason they have an excuse to screech about them now is that the world is too busy dealing with real issues to pay attention to theirs right now, and so it's soooo easy for them to claim that ignoring their causes is the root of all evil in the first place. When the world is polarized, everything's the other guy's fault.
But it's not California's fault. This is my land too, and I won't let it be hijacked by these defective subhumans any more than good Muslims won't let their religion be hijacked by al Qaeda. There's too much good in the world for us only to see the bad.
And sometimes, as we have recently been shown, and as we are about to again, an ass-whuppin' is the only way to clear out the bad and let the good shine through again.
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| Thursday, September 12, 2002 |
17:31 - Beacons of Technological Genius
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I had a rude surprise today.
In the server room, one of my servers rebooted (for reasons which remain unclear, but which aren't important). This is a Dell PowerEdge 1550, the workhorse 1U box that Dell claims to be the great value leader in the marketplace, making upper-middle-managers out of bean-counting schmoozers and forging lucrative business deals on golf courses.
Those smarmy Dell server ads never seem to mention little things like:
If you take the front panel off the machine, the BIOS detects this. It's a security feature. It warns you, upon the next boot, that "Alert! Cover was previously removed. Strike F1 to continue."
Nice. Good little feature. Useful.
Unless, of course, there is no way to CLEAR this error.
That's right. The Dell PowerEdge servers, or at the very least the 1550s, provide no way to clear the cover-removed error and boot-pause after it has occurred. Our IT architect called Dell to try to resolve this problem, to find out how we can restore the (seemingly natural) ability of our rack-mounted servers to reboot automatically and come back to full working capacity after a remote reboot or a power failure.
And Dell's tech support had no idea how to do this.
In other words, if you ever take the front cover off of your 1550, even once... from that moment on, your server will never again auto-boot.
I guess that's what makes Dell such a value leader, though. People love cheap crap-- they prefer paying less over having more quality. Always have.
Sigh. <F1>
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10:10 - Rhetorical Paralysis
http://www.tonypierce.com/blog/2002_09_08_blogarc.htm#85438971
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InstaPundit yesterday linked to this piece by Tony Pierce-- a speech "by" Bush in which he calls Osama out, WWE-style, High Noon style, American style.
Unfortunately, it has this bit:
im going to grab you with my own hands and prove to you, and to the world, that even though we are both sons of millionaire oil men, there's a difference between you and i.
you are a slimy, lying, gutless, cheap-shot artist who hides behind religion and ignorance in your sick quest to have others murder innocent people under your twisted leadership.
The trouble is that even though the author clearly tried really hard to write it so this wouldn't be possible, it's still way too easy for a reader to snort, smirk, and say, So who's saying this, anyway-- Dubya or Osama?
'Cause, like, you can apply the same statement to Bush, man. See, it's all the same.
That's the problem with finding moral clarity here. It should be so easy, considering what happened to us. If we didn't have to be so intellectual about it, if we could just react from our moral centers as dictated by our gut feelings and our hearts, we'd be able to get somewhere. And believe it or not, in this case we'd be right to do it, no matter what your ethical system. I'm not a big fan of thinking with one's guts in a general context, But for God's sake, Islamists hijacked commercial fucking jets and destroyed the two largest and most recognizable and symbolic office buildings in the world and all the people in them. I don't care what someone's personal definitions of "good" and "evil" are. It shouldn't even be necessary to decide whether 9/11 was "evil" or just "another in a long series of the same or worse perpetrated by lots of people, including the US, throughout history". None of that crap is relevant. Didn't anybody's mother tell them how "it doesn't matter who started it, what you did is wrong"?
But looking at passages like the one above, it's just too compelling to educated people-- or just those who think they're too clever for their shirt-- to twist the words around and apply them in new and deliciously ironic ways. Look, if you apply this filter to the statement, suddenly it becomes a clear condemnation of all US policy in the world at large since the War of 1812! That kind of thing is what college English and Literature classes are about. It's all about finding new angles on the same old crap, about interpreting things in new and exciting ways, and about writing papers about these observations that shakes up the academic community and makes a name for oneself.
It's just so tempting to look at 9/11 and see it as an awesome opportunity to show how un-sheep-like one is. "I don't subscribe to your traditionalist views of 'good' and 'evil'. I see this whole event in a way that you visceral, reptilian demagogues stuck in the 1940s just can't grasp." As a recent college grad myself, and as someone who tries to write his thoughts down on a fairly regular basis and make them be at least a little bit unique, believe me-- I know that feeling.
The following is going to be my personal justification and mandate for the War on Terror, and I suspect it's one of the shortest such around:
You want to talk about "root causes"? The biggest root cause of 9/11 is that the terrorists thought they could get away with it. They thought they had a real chance at realizing their sick fantasy of a goal. The only way to address this root cause is to show them that they cannot get away with it. A spanking. The rest will follow.
Our mission is clearer now than it's been since WWII-- possibly ever in history. This is a bigger war, conceptually, than fighting fascism ever was. This is war against theocracy. One of the oldest concepts on the planet.
We need to can the bullshit, pull on our wading boots, and start getting our hands dirty. Raising martinis on the lanai wearing dinner jackets and fezzes doesn't help one bit.
The war is real. Get used to it.
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09:25 - From the mouths of comic artists...
http://www.kevinandkell.com/2002/kk0911.html
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A lot of comics yesterday (of both the online and the traditional variety, though there aren't many left that are exclusively paper-based) featured commemorative 9/11 strips. Many were tasteful, but a lot more were sarcastic, petulant, eye-rolling pieces of root-causing moral-equivalencing self-blaming negativity. Yeah, thanks, guys <coughBoondockscough>. We sure needed that.
Fortunately, though, there were good ones. The best one I think I saw was Kevin & Kell:
Yeah. That's the stuff.
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| Wednesday, September 11, 2002 |
19:33 - Can't... see straight...
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The Ar-Rahman list came the hell alive today.
A day of remembrance has been called for those who died in the September 11th 2001 attacks and will be marked by a minutes silence. It is clear from this that the Western Capitalist states only remember the deaths of their own citizens whilst they ignore the hundreds of thousands killed by their hands. Indeed, it seems they have even colonised human sympathy.
Who will remember the 200,000 people killed by America when it dropped Nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? Who will remember the 200,000 people killed in 1991 during the 'Desert' Storm' campaign spearheaded by the US against Iraq? Who will remember the innocent civilians bombed in Afghanistan? Who will remember the tens of thousands killed by US corporate greed in Bhopal? Who will stand silent for the thousands of babies that have died at the hands of America in Iraq?
If we were to stand in silence for all the victims of Capitalism then we would never sit down again!
Muslims have a responsibility not to blindly follow the practices of the Capitalist West but rather to be at the forefront of exposing the contradictions of the Capitalist ideology and its colonialist worldview.
I can't say anything. I couldn't. I'm too angry.
its true how is Islam is being tarnished by false media reports ... one thing about islam, its perfect .. one should get this straight that if some one can critisize islam then he or she doesnot know about it .. islam is uncriticizable if learnt to the max or atleast understood ...
One should remeber that man is a individual .. on theday of judgement every one will be judged as individual and not a group ... The deeds count and islam does not support any thing wrong .. to summarize islam in few forward i would say EVERYTHING GOOD IS ISLAM
if a man is judged by the religion .. then what kidn of religion does support men like hitler , julius ceaser, alexzander, the romans in general, the vikibngs and napolean bonepart.. if we see things straight we will find that there were no muslims like napolean and hitler ever in the history ...
... No, still can't manage it...
Where Indonesia is concerned, it is a country
plagued with the american curse. a country forced
to accept debt from the world bank and
consequenty its downfall. plz do remember that
any country in the world that accepted loans from
the world bank has only seen its downfall, never
progress. world bank, by giving loans, enters
into the political scene of the country,
squeezing as much out for the american cause as
possible not caring about the lives of the
millions it destroys. if i, as a person, face soo
much lack of concern from someone else, i really
doubt that id feel any obligation to be nice to
them - if only for humanity. no i do not advocate
revenge but when world bank doesnt show humanity
neither does indonesia.
Let us not forget the innumerable hate crimes,
burnt mosques etc in America during the post sept
11 period. Where America advocates democracy,
sept 11 is all but farceness and greed in the
name of democracy! Afghan has oil so lets
advocate democracy there... where was this
democracy when rawanda was dying of hunger and
starvation? where is the democracy for the
starving, AIDS infested african countries? Name
me one afghani involved in the plane crash. all
names mentioned were saudi... so y afghanistan?
aboive all, the first three lists of people dead
in the aircraft sept 11 aircrafts had not ONE
saudi names. moreover, the cnn website for the
longest time carried a banner on the top
apologizing for the misprinting of names. some of
the names mentioned in the list were found to be
survivors having moved bak to saudi 4-5 years
ago. one of the names mentioned was a 7 year old
child! Studies in the last two days show that the
pentagon attacks were through american misslies.
numerous articles and pictures prove such.
try visiting these sites:
http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm
http://www.ummahnews.com/viewarticle.php?sid=4195
It's just not coming to me...
Why the entire world is waging war? u ask
yourself this. go bak in time to the ottoman
empire and even before that. the time of Mohammed
(peace be upon him) was the time where the world
prospered the greatest. all atronomical,
numerical discoveries go bak to this age through
muslim scientists. all the theories of light and
vision u study in physics today, were discovered
by musli scientists. Ibn Batoota, a muslim
traveller covered 7 times as much as his
contemporary Marco polo. Islam is not a religion
limited to sunday (friday in our case) practices.
its a whole way of life. it is a system not only
outlining our religious obligations but our
social and political practices too. This
threatens america because our system is against
capitalism which is based on non existent money.
we consider that cheating people - remember the
stock market crashes across the world? remeber
the artificially caused one in 1997 which
throttled indonesia and malaysia? our system, if
practiced, doesnt cheat people. remember that our
political leaders in most muslim coutries are
american puppets. if they were to follow islam
instead of america.. wat u see today wouldnt be!
and sitting in america u dont see american
hypocricy... try getting a a channel like al
jazeera to tell the brutal masacres in palestine,
afghanistan, kashmir etc by america! ull be
astonished!
<hyperventilate> <hyperventilate> <hyperventilate>
No, words just won't work. Not today.
Wait, I've got one:
Care for a cigarette, you odious, insufferable hypocrites?
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16:30 - iCal
http://www.apple.com/ical/
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There was a time, like about two years ago, when word was that Apple's market researchers had determined that the "i" moniker branding had reached saturation among consumers and was now on the way down in people's estimation. People were evidently sick of seeing "i"-everything. iTunes was the last thing Apple had released with such a naming scheme, and many people figured that that was the last that we'd see: we expected Apple to start phasing out the "i" names like they've been phasing out the "Think Different" slogan, and replace it with some new Next Big Thing.
Well, now it's two years later, and it seems that if anything the iBranding has only grown thicker. We now have an entire suite of iApps, to say nothing of the iPod, and little not-quite-iApp-but-interesting-nonetheless tools like iChat. The iMac is still with us. Only iTools has bit the big one, and it looks like a casualty of restructuring rather than a concerted push to eradicate the iNames.
So now we've got iCal. It's pretty slick, I must say. I'm used to Meeting Maker, in which you can't do things like drag events from one location in the week to another, and in which the horrible fugly MDI interface on Windows actively impedes my ability to get anything done. But at least it's networked, and iCal isn't.
Well, not entirely, anyway. See, iCal does have some very neato networking stuff: you can "subscribe" to various calendars, including those published by your friends via .Mac, and it will keep in sync with all of those as your friends update them. When you create a meeting and invite people, it sends out e-mail notifications via Mail, which contain attachment files which are subscription scripts that you click on-- and it inputs the meeting into your attendees' iCals. Pretty slick, I think (it uses AppleScript to send the notifications in the background). And Apple has a page full of interesting-to-the-public calendars that you can subscribe to, with things like movie/DVD release dates, US holidays (hey, you never know when those might change), music tours, SAT/ACT schedules, and so on.
You can also web-publish your calendars, so people without iCal can view them. It's all done via WebDAV, so it's not dependent upon .Mac (provided you can set up WebDAV properly). You can also import and export calendars in the standard "ical" and "vcal" formats.
Not bad, not bad indeed. But it's not really going to reach its full potential until it can do things like sync to your Palm or your iPod (which will come later this month when the beta of iSync is released, which can also sync to cellphones so your meeting reminder alarms can go off in movie theaters), and with Exchange servers. If iCal worked with Exchange, there would be a lot of happy Mac users here in the company who could do all their calendaring in an app that works really well, instead of having to use Outlook and constantly wipe off the thick layer of virus slime that it leaves upon one's skin.
It's a nice little app. Nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering, but with very clever use of what resources Apple can bring to the table (not just OS X transparency and stuff, but centralized publishing, hosting, and interconnectivity).
Who knows what the strategy looks like that this is a part of? Because surely nobody within Apple considered iCal to be a killer app that would drive Switchers. It's not that kind of thing, and it was clearly never intended to be.
But now that Phillips has begun incorporating OS X-based Rendezvous into home entertainment devices, and the big three printer makers are already on board, this could be part of a push by Apple to make big, powerful friends in the industry. And that, more than anything else, is what will keep Apple buoyant against the Redmond Tide.
Oh, and this Jobs quote was interesting:
"We're not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It's turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your e-mail? We have all the technology ourselves to do that - we just don't know whether it will be successful."
In other words, "Yeah, we know handwriting recognition is useless. But it's all there in OS X anyway, and it's really good. Just so the technology isn't dead, in case it becomes useful later. We just want to give people those kinds of options and that kind of power, if they choose to use it."
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11:46 - Better than real statistics? Maybe...
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/good_guys/macintosh.htm
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Kris pointed me to ConsumerAffairs.com, a site that claims to be a private non-non-profit watchdog group whose mission is to "watch for trends -- consumer problems that seem to be representative, so that someone can read through the site and find situations that he or she might very well encounter." No doubt this means they've got their biases. But still...
Apple's consumer-comments page, linked above, is listed as the prime link under "Good Guys" on the main page; that rarefied brotherhood only has twenty or thirty other such companies, whose customer base has consistently nominated them as examples of someone who "sells great products and provides outstanding service at reasonable prices". Apple's page is full of testimonials from satisfied customers, and nary a one complaint:
Very few Macanatics defect to the dread Wintel world and a look at the user reports below tells why -- Apple machines work right out of the box and when there's a problem Apple fixes it ... pronto. Can't beat that.
But what's really fun about this site is that if you take a look at the "Good Guys" page, Dell is listed... or, rather, Dell is listed. Click on the link, and you will discover that:
Sorry. We've had so many complaints about Dell that they've been ejected from the Good Guys section and banished to the Rogues Gallery.
Said Rogue's Gallery is unfortunately a great deal larger than the "Good Guys" page. Of course I'd rather they were all Good Guys.
But it's not a perfect world, and we've got to stick by the companies that stick by us.
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10:58 - Where do they get these people?
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Maybe I shouldn't have been listening to NPR on the way in to work today.
On Forum, the discussion featured in place of prominence an Arnold Zinn, professor of God-knows-what, speaking in that kind of infuriatingly calm and knowing and smug way about how all of our reaction since 9/11 has been entirely inappropriate. Our attack on Afghanistan was "blind" and "stupid", Prof. Zinn said, and it was an entirely "arbitrary" action: We got attacked by people from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but we went and killed people in Afghanistan. Like we just pulled that target out of our ass, like we had some existing agenda there and were just looking for an excuse to go kill Afghan civilians. It could have been North Koreans launching missiles over Alaska, and we still would have gone on our murderous rampage in Afghanistan, apparently. See, the only people responsible for the 9/11 attacks were those 19 hijackers. Everybody else is innocent, because they didn't do anything, see? Attacking Aghanistan accomplished nothing-- nothing at all-- except deepening anti-American hatred in the world and killing a lot of civilians. It didn't disrupt terrorism in the slightest.
I guess all those al Qaeda corpses in Tora Bora count as "civilians", or maybe "freedom fighters", because they certainly hadn't taken part in any anti-American activities. Not until we brutally attacked them, out of the blue.
According to this guy, it's a good thing that the Taliban fell, that the women were liberated, that they have schools and medicine and music and barbershops now that the Taliban are gone. But, said he, it's all rendered a fatal failure because we did it through military action. Bombing places around the world, throwing our military weight around, being a bullying imperialist nation-- that's what causes terrorism. We should stop all that flying around the world for fun and just bombing the shit out of any old place we feel like, just for target practice. That's got to stop, man! We must become a humanitarian nation, giving food and medicine to the poor all over the world! Then nobody will hate us!
Fortunately, his opponent was a Howard Bikeman (?), whose strident shrieks of disbelief were a very welcome thing to hear. When he asked incredulously whether Zinn condoned the Taliban, or whether he thought there was any better model out there for a democracy than the US (with all its flaws), or whether the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt actively support and promote and harbor terrorism like the Taliban did, whether we should have stood back and allowed Hitler and Tojo to march all over us while we rolled over on our backs and peed on ourselves, Zinn stuttered and scrambled and tried to change the subject and reiterate his stupid points. I think Zinn came out of the discussion looking like a complete ass. As well he should have. He sat there on 9/11 and told a nation full of listeners how we were entirely wrong to go and oust the Taliban, how our obviously deliberate bombing of civilians in Afghanistan was every bit as reprehensible and unwarranted as the 9/11 attacks themselves.
The callers were equally stupid. One woman shrieked about the 9/11/73 thing in Chile. Another guy said that in ten years, we won't consider 9/11 to be any more than a footnote in history-- it'll be entirely forgotten. And another guy said that "We won't get behind a war in Iraq because we don't have George Washington, we have George Bush. And Bush wasn't even there! We don't even know where he was a year ago today! He knew this was going to happen!" Er, guy, we did know where Bush was on 9/11/01. He was at a school, talking at some event or other. We have photos of his aides coming up to him and whispering in his ear that "another plane just hit the other tower". We saw the expression on his face. We saw how terrified he looked when he addressed the nation that day at noon.
Goddamned conspiracy theorists. Except now they're on the other side of the political spectrum.
At least the US flags and banners are back up on the freeway overpasses today. Not quite in the same way that they were a year ago, but in a symbolic, evocative kind of way. Remember when we did this before? Remember how we felt?
Yeah, I'm glad somebody does.
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09:26 - True Colors
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/001943.html
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I wonder whether this is happening in France or Germany or Canada or Belgium?
Probably it is. But the degree of it is the question-- how spontaneous is it? How heartfelt? How unalloyed by suffixes of "But you have to understand..."?
I remember speeches coming out of Canada a year ago to the effect that Canada was standing by us at this time of need, and I remember Glenn Reynolds saying "When the chips are down, you learn who you can count on. I won't forget this." Britain has certainly shown the same spirit now, a year later, now that the morality is a lot more muddled. I'd be curious to know what everybody else is doing... or if it's just Britain.
Michael Drout posts this in the comments on the linked article:
"Between us there can be no word of giving or taking, nor of reward; for we are brethren... and never has any league of peoples been more blessed, so that neither has ever failed the other, nor shall fail."
--J.R.R. Tolkien
Now that's interestingly apt.
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| Tuesday, September 10, 2002 |
22:32 - Just a guess
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0902/091102.html#091102
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I don't know what I'm basing this on, but I suspect I'm not far off in thinking that Lileks' 9/11/2002 post is probably the most anticipated thing in the blogosphere. We know it's going to be art, but we don't know quite what form it will take. We know it will be poignant but reassuring, grim but in a steely kind of way, and run through with references to Jasperwood that can so easily be replaced with any reader's home address.
And so it is. It's posted now, and I suspect ol' James will have a hell of a bandwidth bill to pay come the end of the month.
Tip-jar the man.
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21:49 - Not exactly a ringing coup
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,509951,00.asp
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From what I'm hearing, the Gateway Profile 4 ads are getting just as much derision from the public as the "Switch" ads did at their unveiling, and without any of the popular grassroots support in response. The Profile 4's attack on the iMac looks even to the casual observer like a rather desparate gambit by a panicking company-- one who seems to have completely missed the point of the iMac's design, even though it's now admitted quite freely that what it's trying to do is eclipse the iMac out of existence through the force of "bigger hard drive!" and "Bigger screen!" and "Cheaper!" Anybody who has been paying any attention at all can discern that the iMac's screen and hard drives are better quality, widescreen in the case of the 17", and comes with things like-- oh, I don't know-- DVD drives. And the whole point of the design is its fully adjustable neck, not just one that scoots up and down on a tiny little angle swingarm, like a checkbox item on a spec sheet that had to be filled in on a minimal budget. It looks like a pretender, even in the eyes of someone who only knows the name "Apple" from the Ellen Feiss ad or oblique Simpsons references.
And on that note, here's a recent Stephen Katt cartoon from eWeek:
Yeah, Katt's a Mac guy. But this is still funny.
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21:28 - What am I doing here?
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It feels like I should write something for the occasion, considering what day it is and all. Everybody's doin' it. In fact, I even had a post earlier today that I was working on, but I stepped back halfway through, concluded that it was too sappy and derivative and brought nothing original to the table, and I closed down the browser window without another thought.
It's not that I'm unemotional about 9/11. Really, I'm not. I'm not one of those people who thinks we should all just "move on", like it was an earthquake or a hurricane or something-- a terrible disaster that killed a lot of people, but it's nobody's fault, really, except maybe our own, and so we'd best just pick up the pieces and maybe don't build in a floodplain next time. No, that's not me.
I guess what makes me a little uneasy-- and, simply, not in a writing mood lately-- well, except for the obvious, which is that I've been doing nothing but writing for the past two weeks, and in a not-for-fun kind of context, and I'm not out of the woods yet-- is that I don't feel like 9/11 is a blogging kind of "thing" for me. It just doesn't feel right. I wasn't writing last September. I didn't start until late December, when I had a Lileks column to tell me what blogs were and a Peter Jackson movie to babble inanely about. A year ago I wasn't posting my thoughts as events unfolded. I was watching the news, reloading cnn.com, fitfully trying to develop some database code for features that I knew still had due dates, ICQing grimly with friends, trying to keep some kind of lightness to the situation: "You know what this means? The guy selling Klau Khalash is dead."
I wasn't among those who had been writing personal columns since before there was TCP/IP. I wasn't even one of those who furiously started blogging on 9/12. On September 10th last year, on my way home from work, I stopped by Fry's and bought a PlayStation 2. I'd set it up that night, played Gran Turismo 3 for a couple of hours, and then I went to sleep. When I woke up next, everything having happened on Eastern Time and therefore before I woke up, glancing over at the PS2 told me that no matter how hard I tried, I'd never really be able to enjoy it properly, and so I got rid of it a few months later. I still have the receipt for it, though, with it's 9/10/2001 date stamp. One of those things I'll probably never have occasion to look at again, but I know it's in my receipts drawer somewhere, and that's the extent of my nostalgia for the Halcyon Days. I'm not one to weep for those things that are forever lost. I do believe in moving on, but not because I have no sensibility to what we're moving on from.
So I don't feel right about writing about 9/11 specifically, not now, not tomorrow. I'd feel too much like an outsider who comes in after the fact and tells everybody what they're doing wrong. I'd feel like the "efficiency expert" that the pointy-haired boss hires to come into the company to interview everybody and find out who can safely be fired without shooting up the place. I figure other people are already doing the event justice far better than I could.
I'll stay on the sidelines tomorrow, I think. It's what I was doing then, and if I'm going to try to commemorate what life was like last September 10th, maybe that's the best I can do.
"Blog, or the terrorists win!" At least we're not hearing that kind of crap anymore.
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10:00 - <pant pant pant>
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Last night, around 3AM, I finally finished proofing the new Databases chapter and touching up the illustration sketches, zipped them up, and shipped them off to the editor. Then I collapsed unceremoniously into bed.
This chapter took 26 hours to write this weekend, and another three to finish properly last night. (Though that wasn't the only reason I wasn't blogging-- a friend and I watched We Were Soldiers, a film we found oddly forgettable, with a confusing tactic about the usual war-movie clichés, which Randall Wallace decided to play out to the hilt rather than try to avoid even in the slightest-- we couldn't figure out whether this was intentional and ironic, or just inept. Great Lieutenant-Colonel character, though.)
So this morning I'm going to celebrate the wrapping-up of the late-evening season, which I've taken advantage of far too little this summer, by motorcycling in to work.
And I'll download iCal when I get there.
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| Sunday, September 8, 2002 |
03:01 - Best... Engrish.. Ever
http://www.anotherboutique.com/articles/art00008.html
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"Lade up with briefness, administer upwith placet not briefness oh"
My oh my. I've just been sent this link, which contains some of the best (read: worst) badly translated English I have ever yet seen. It's so bad that it leaves most of engrish.com in the dust. In fact, I'm not so sure it's "translated" at all-- this stuff has the sound of text that's been pulled at random out of a third-rate thesaurus and transliterated by someone who's never quite learned what the space bar is for, purely for the purpose of getting something that looks like English onto a product box. Because, y'know, English sells stuff.
Like this children's keychain/light thingy. And more specifically, the packaging wrapped around it. It's a work of art, I tell you. I've never seen anything quite like it. And I've seen quite a lot of this sort of thing. The only other Engrish of this caliber that I've ever run across was deliberately created as parody, and even it wasn't as stupefyingly luscious as this little glowing Korean gem.
In green text - middle of card
"Beamof light placet throw light on lock hole !!
Smallness genius too lustronsly!!"
In blue text - printed over middle of the key
"On accont of shape either thickneessk of set measures to, share key unpowered stow down."
In green text - printed at bottom of key
"Whenas key unpowered stow down chron May, forcompany commonness key-holp wield"
Believe me when I say that this is just the beginning. It only gets better from here. Go. Go and read it now. And stow down with nether pastern! D'you hear me?!
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02:38 - Ees how she is done
http://developer.apple.com/ue/switch/windows.html
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Apple's "Switch" campaign isn't just for potential customers; there's another side to the push, which has just recently (apparently) been released: a primer on Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for Windows developers seeking to start developing Mac apps. Apple's HI Guidelines have become somewhat iconic in the computer industry over the years; user-interface is one of those things that people in the industry usually grant without much complaint that Apple understands better and takes more seriously than just about any other software company.
This document, which is posted fairly prominently in the User Experience section of the Apple Developer Connection site, is a brief overview of the areas in which the Mac's user experience principles differ from those of Windows; in what must be another first for Apple, in keeping with the baldly competitive spirit of the Switch campaign, the page explicitly lays out some examples of what's wrong with Windows UI design, and how the Mac OS UI designers would have done it better.
 
There are all kinds of categories covered in the page. The reasoning behind not using the MDI interface model is given (the Mac has document-centric windows rather than application-centric), and the reasons why not to use custom UI widgets and non-standard keyboard shortcuts, and the importance of properly designed icons, and proper visually-compelling toolbars, and form layout principles, and the evils of Windows' stupid "Setup" procedure (versus a simple drag-and-drop installation, which Apple acknowledges is one of those things that Mac users cherish), and how filename extensions work nowadays. It's just a starting point for interested developers, but it's enough to make a guy get excited about designing an OS the way computers should work, and taking some pride in a good workflow and layout-- instead of just slapping some form elements on the page and never thinking about making it usable by regular people, let alone aesthetically pleasing.
Anybody who takes any interest in the field of interface design, particularly those who may be interested in designing their own apps (regardless of platform), would do well to take a look at this page. It's fairly brief (though it links off to a lot of other detailed documents), it's illustrated and compelling and full of illustrations, and it represents something that I find relieves me a great deal: Apple is finally taking direct responsibility for preaching their ideas about computer design to the technical public, instead of relying on the geeks and the Mac faithful to educate people by writing websites about them.
In Mac OS X, dialogs (including not only text but visual design) have a consistent format: Status, Reason, Action. They explain what the current situation is--and why a dialog has appeared--and offer action choices to the user. In other words, clear dialogs in Mac OS X communicate to the user: 1) what happened, 2) why it happened, and 3) what to do about it. To ensure that consistent format, Mac OS X dialogs tend to use verbs as button titles.
Aahhh. Music to my ears.
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| Saturday, September 7, 2002 |
01:38 - In Limbo This Weekend
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If anything happened today in the world, I don't know about it. I've spend the past 13 hours writing the new Databases chapter for the book, and I'm at 25 pages and counting. I'm almost ready to start talking about how to connect a database to the Web! Wooo000OOot!
The research needed for this has meant I've had every last pixel of my Cinema Display covered with windows all day, and they're still all here; getting a new browser window open to write this was like trying to dig a smaller box out of a slightly larger box into which it's been packed under a snowdrift of styrofoam peanuts, futilely pushing the peanuts aside only to have them come flooding back as soon as my hand darts in for the prize.
(Of course, I could have just thrown away the peanuts... and I could have just Splat+H'ed all these stupid TextEdit and Terminal and IE windows.)
I have to sync up the sources again and download a few more interface utilities before I move on to the next section, and besides I want a break. I'm going to eat some salsa and read some Harry Potter for a while. Catch you guys all on the flip side.
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| Friday, September 6, 2002 |
15:47 - The Isotopes are moving to Albuquerque!
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/06/offbeat.television.simpsons.reut/index.html
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Lookee here! A Triple-A minor-league team from Calgary is moving to Albuquerque, and it's going to rename itself the "Isotopes" in a nod to the "Hungry Hungry Homer" episode in which the Simpsons' favorite team planned to abandon Springfield.
Although a local newspaper poll showed strong support for the Isotopes name, the mayor of Albuquerque was not amused.
"This isn't a second-rate city that should be taking our name from a cartoon show," Mayor Marin Chavez told reporters upon hearing the name for the new local team.
Oh, lighten up, you humorless assmunch. Baseball needs some humor these days, and some reminder that it's supposed to be about fun. If the fans want to merge their memes for the sake of more enjoyment of what's supposed to be a pleasant pastime, stay the hell out of the way.
Besides, I don't recall Anaheim being so huffy about adopting a beloved (?) fictitious team name.
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15:02 - Aahhrtsy Pretensions To-nite
http://www.kino.com/metropolis/index.html
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I'm going to be seeing the all-new digitally restored version of Metropolis tonight-- the 1927 Fritz Lang one, not the Tezuka anime. I'll be at the Landmark Aquarius in Palo Alto, right down the street from Stanford, on of those good old two-screen movie temples with unique themed decor (this one's all in an underwater/Atlantis style) that's all but gone today, and lives on only in the theaters that have made themselves famous as little niche art-film houses in towns like Palo Alto and Santa Cruz that can fill them with a steady stream of youthful patrons who will be more than happy to eschew a date comprising Men In Black II in favor of a spiced-latté evening with the goth boyz centered on a showing of Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.
(Not that that describes me, or anything.)
Metropolis is making the nationwide rounds right now, and over the next few months; I missed seeing it when it was in The Castro a couple of weeks ago. (That would have been fun.) I'd seen it as part of a sci-fi film class at Caltech, which I have to say was probably one of the few times when I honestly enjoyed myself academically there. I guess that says a little something about why I'm not working as a theoretical physicist right now, and instead spend my time blogging about obscure movies.
The version I saw in that class, I think, was a fairly esoteric variant on the usual cuts that have appeared over the years (the 80s "Moroder" version being the current favorite); the one I saw had a shockingly cool jazz soundtrack, sounding like Raymond Scott amplified through the yet unborn shade of Basil Pouledoris. A heavy, insistent, driving heartbeat of a bass drum line ran through the entire introduction, and the saxophones and trumpets over the top of it developed a coherent, concise stress atmosphere that never got away from itself the way later action scores always tended to (like Goldsmith's unlistenable early outing in Planet of the Apes). The semi-mechanized workers in the power plant, frantically wrestling with the valves and the electric clock-face relays were thrown all the more into stark Borg-like surreality by this music, and it's haunted me ever since.
The new release of the film is supposed to restore the very original orchestral score, and I'm very curious to see what kind of music was originally imagined to go with those hellish scenes. If it's better than the score I saw it with, it'll be something to behold indeed.
...There. I'm done being an art-queen for now. Back to the regularly scheduled Mac-flag-waving monotony...
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| Thursday, September 5, 2002 |
18:35 - And then? No and then! And then? No and then!
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Apple just released the .Mac Slides Publisher.
I admit I hadn't thought much about .Mac since getting vaguely annoyed at Apple for converting my previously free mail/disk service into a for-pay thing, for which I grumbled a bit, paid my discounted fee, and went back about my business.
Well, now I'm starting to see I should have been paying more attention.
If you go to Screen Effects, there's a ".Mac" screen saver listed; in it, you can subscribe to slide shows published by other .Mac users. I'd seen this in passing, but never really given it more than a glance. Probably another of those things that a few camcorder-toting dads will use, after wrestling with some kind of clunky Web interface or a sluggish remote file browser, dragging files around or something.
Nyope. I should have known better. The .Mac Slides Publisher is a little "droplet" style program, which you're supposed to keep in your Dock or your Finder toolbar; if you want to share some pictures as a slide show for your friends, you select a bunch of picture files (from the Finder or iPhoto) and drag them onto the Slides Publisher icon. It then optimizes them and transfers them to your iDisk, and then gives you the option to send off an announcement e-mail telling your friends you've just set up a new slide show.
Then your friend types in your .Mac username into the Screen Effects panel, and your photos start streaming across his screen.
(He can subscribe to as many of these as he wants, too, and select which ones to show and in which order.)
I was thinking, "Okay, so now I'll bet I have to go to iDisk and manually move stuff around if I want to delete old images." And I go to look, and indeed within "Pictures" is a "Slide Shows" folder, inside which is "Public", which has the pictures and an XML config file. But I should have kept my grubby doubting fingers out of there. If you drag a new set of pictures onto the Publisher, it automatically replaces the image set and rewrites the config file. In other words, you never have to think about iDisk, and neither does your friend. To say nothing about never having to think about connection settings, file formats, folder names... bah humbug. Just drag the files to the icon, and everybody who's subscribed to you gets a new screen saver. That's it.
I'm definitely going to have to play with this some more. This is far too cool.
And then there's Backup, which rules:
I honestly don't know how this compares to other backup software, but... well, just look at this interface and see if there's anything that is not entirely sensible and clear. Usage bar (current and potential). Prepackaged "QuickPick" sets of files and their sizes. A drawer pane with details on each item in the list. The ability to add new folders and files and select them for backup. And you have options for mirroring (deletion of locally deleted files), scheduling, backing up to CD/DVD, and buying more storage space.
No way could they have provided something like this for free. And there's more like it coming, too.
I hope I've never complained too loudly about .Mac, because it looks like I'm going to regret every decibel.
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14:38 - Well, at least it's (sort of) official...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,496270,00.asp
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Can't get enough of the OS X-on-x86 rumors? Well, Nick DePlume (of Think Secret fame) has posted the mother of them all on eWeek. If we're to believe the "insiders" who have provided this information (and considering DePlume's near-perfect track record in the past, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt), the long-rumored x86 builds of OS X are indeed real, and in fact are being kept current and built in parallel with every PPC build of the OS.
According to sources, the Cupertino, Calif., Mac maker has been working steadily on maintaining current, PC-compatible builds of its Unix-based OS. The project (code-named Marklar, a reference to the race of aliens on the "South Park" cartoons) has been ongoing inside Apple since the early days of its transition to the Unix-based Mac OS X in the late '90s.
Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company's mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.
(Whatever the pros and cons of actually switching to Intel, I simply have to say that I can't get enough of Apple's internal code-name scheme. Marklar. I love it.)
We've been speculating for some time about the feasibility of Apple moving to Intel, and I'd say that rather than proving that Apple is about to jump ship to the x86 platform, this discovery merely solidifies what appears to be the game plan and its related contingency options: the IBM PPC64 is the first choice for a successor to the G4, and from what is being uncovered by the rumor mill, it's going to work out well. It's certainly preferable to the x86 in a number of ways-- SMP capabilities, vector processing, RISC architecture, and orthogonality to the existing PPC assembly language and APIs are continuations of what have always been Apple's selling points, and wouldn't force Apple to about-face on what it considers important in computing. But if something unforeseen crops up and the PPC64 effort falls through somehow, Apple has the option to roll out Marklar (heh... I sure like that better than "OSX86") in very quick order. Looks like there's plenty of method to what's going on across the street, and matters would appear to be well in hand.
Heh. Marklar.
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14:19 - Blending In
http://www.serenescreen.com
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Today's "Kevin & Kell" is the latest in a recent streak of Apple/Mac-related strips, in an engaging storyline that does justice to the wide world of Mac-happy comics (like FoxTrot and even Doonesbury-- the latter of which has an interesting entry today which lip-serves blogs and SUVs alike).
The infiltration of Macs into the Windows World goes on apace. And just as in the strip above, we've now reached another milestone: the "Marine Aquarium" screen saver, that OpenGL-based one with the rendered fish and the bubbles and lighting and everything that's always on everybody's machine in every workplace and on every monitor on display for sale at Fry's, is available for Mac OS X.
I don't know how recent a development this is-- it could have just been posted today, or maybe it's been out for months-- but it works excellently, even properly handling widescreen monitors like on Kris' TiBook, and employing Cocoa GUI elements like sheets and transparency. Drop-shadows even work right on top of the display window (in the application version of the screen saver), which means this is all being done in hardware, apparently. Kris gets about 50 fps on his machine, and I get around 25, which isn't too bad, though in standalone application mode my iMac does over 100. (And yes, there's an OS 9 version in beta as well.)
I'm probably not going to switch away from Flurry just yet. But if I ever have the need to lie low in the office and avoid the watchful eye of the Ministry of Prevention of Macs and Promotion of Aquarium Screen Savers, I'll have my camouflage ready.
UPDATE: Actually I'm getting almost 60 fps now when running the registered version. I don't know if that's because registering it unlocks more optimizations or something, or if there was just something else running earlier that was sucking up cycles. I suppose Occam's Razor applies: the keycode obviously unlocks esoteric optimizations in a fiendish plot to cripple the eyesight of deadbeats through the use of a barely perceptible jagginess in frame rate.
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12:26 - Silicon Implants
http://www.powerlogix.com/press/releases/2002/020904.html
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PowerLogix, a leading maker of CPU upgrade cards for Macs, just announced a new set of dual-CPU upgrade units in speeds up to 1GHz (with higher speeds coming soon), in both 100MHz and 133MHz bus speeds, for just about all Power Mac G4 systems. Considering that DDR RAM doesn't seem to do these machines all that much good (as we've seen, crestfallen, recently), this kind of upgrade would boost the performance of a nearly three-year-old machine like my 450MHz G4 to nearly that of the newest models. That plus a new video card would make it, in Marcus' words, quite l33t.
These upgrade cards look like a nice package. They slot in to the existing CPU daughterboard slot, and they come with a much nicer three-phase power supply than the one the machine already has. Besides, it would be a dualie, with all that implies. Not a bad deal for about a thousand bucks.
Well, there is this little tiny weensy problem. Apparently, a certain early revision of the logic board on the six-month-long-lived "AGP Graphics" generation of G4 tower machines has a bridge chip that's incompatible with dual processors. This logic board was succeeded in quick order by one that was dual-compatible, but PowerLogix provides a link with details on how to find out if your machine supports dual CPUs or not. You have to boot into OS9, run the System Profiler, generate a certain kind of report, and read off an obscure number that's supposed to read "uni-n: 7" or higher. Lower numbers won't work with the dual cards.
Guess what mine says? uni-n: 3. Aaauugh!
Ah well. I can hold out for a bit longer. (And technically I could spring for a single-CPU upgrade card to 1GHz or so, but that's just not as alluring.) And I'd have to get a new GeForce4, and a' that, and a' that.
I'm planning to wait for the Next Big Thing before I upgrade my main home machine. IBM is planning to give its dissertation on the new PPC64 in October, and sources say that they've been working on it in secret for a good long time now-- by the time they give the speech, the chip will be in live testing, and slated for release in consumer machines made by companies whose names begin with A and rhyme with "Snapple" in about July of next year-- possibly earlier, if everybody claps their hands really reaaallly loudly, and belieeeeves...
I can hold out that long. I want to spend about $3000 on a new machine, which means getting the top-end of what's available at any given time. (I plan to get more mileage out of my Cinema Display than out of my computer.) And if I'm going to be spending that within a year, I don't want to put down more than $1000 on stopgap upgrades. I can wait.
Meanwhile, 10.2.1 is rapidly on its way, according to Think Secret. This release is set to come so soon after 10.2 because from what I hear, Jaguar was rushed out the door sooner than it really deserved to be-- they cut a few spit-polish features like minimize-in-place and Rendezvous playlist-sharing/streaming in iTunes and complete Quartz Extreme optimization, so they could get it out the door and into people's hands before they were accused of promising "Summer" and then releasing on September 20, as has happened before. (And pushing it out ahead of the 9/11 season could only have been good for sales.) In software, the only way to keep from submerging under endless validation and integration testing is to cut features with brutal prejudice-- early on in the process if possible, but later and right up to release day if necessary. It's a shame to cut things you've promised, even things that are really really cool. But software is unique in its ability to surprise you with its susceptibility to the butterfly effect; wiggle this bit up here in TCP/IP, and up pops a bug down there in filesystem browsing. Den Beste has a recent piece which describes this in action better than I can.
But the upshot is that we'll be getting those features now in a point release, probably within the next week or two. This will address stability as well-- I've had very good luck so far with Jaguar, and most of the stories I've been hearing from people are extremely positive, but there are the occasional horror stories. (This one draws the gleeful finger of Glenn Reynolds-- I can certainly understand the temptation to respond to numerous people's insufferable recommendations of Macs to seek out reasons why such recommendations are horse manure; but honestly, an isolated and temporary unstable state of the OS is hardly a deal-killing indictment of a platform. Or it shouldn't be, anyway.)
That said, Think Secret notes the following:
Informants now say that one of the areas Apple is addressing in 10.2.1 is the SCSI I/O kit, which stands to provide benefits primarily to developers. "There will be major changes to it," one source said. "These changes are very welcome ... SCSI support in OS X to date has been abominable."
Good... I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed. Maybe now we'll be able to boot our machines without having to have our connected SCSI devices powered-on for it to load the proper stubs.
My SCSI scanner died again when I installed Jaguar. (Search above for "scanner" to find the tales of banshee-wailing woe surrounding my scanner over the past year.) Turns out that this wasn't because the OS became incompatible with its driver for my SCSI card or anything, because technically I can still scan using <shudder> VueScan... but now that I've been spoiled by the lusciousness that is SilverFast, I refuse to subject myself to that torment. And SilverFast's software is what's become incompatible with 10.2, through what mechanism I do not know.
Silverfast is reported to have responded to customers' complaints already on this issue, and they say they will have a fix "in a few weeks".
That's perfectly fine. I can wait.
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| Wednesday, September 4, 2002 |
18:21 - Oh, yeah, this is gonna sell...
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956285.html
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Microsoft is prepping its "Windows XP Media Center" for a release over the holidays.
...Media Center. In other words, "Center for the Media Companies". Because there's not a single customer in the world who would have wanted something like this. Unless they happened to be stockholders in Columbia Records or Disney.
Analysts and users see the built-in copy protection as a potential sales killer because it restricts the use of the built-in DVR, one of the most compelling features of the new PCs.
DVRs, which are sold as companion products for TVs by TiVo and Sonicblue's ReplayTV, are expected to become standard equipment on PCs over the next few years, say analysts.
Already Sony ships Vaio PCs with DVRs and most of the other features found on the HP Media Center PC. But Sony does not impose copy protection. So a consumer could use Sony's GigaPocket Personal Video Recorder software to record a TV show, convert the file to MPEG-2 video with another Sony application and burn the program to a DVD.
This is like how whenever you see a country with a name like "The People's Democratic Republic of Freely Elected Democratic People", you know it's about as far from being any of those things as it's possible to be. Microsoft has once again created something that nobody needs or wants-- it has some useful functionality, but that functionality is already available, cheaply and without restrictions on the capabilities of the consumers, from other manufacturers. They're going to use the leverage of their size to sell something that differs from its competition only in being more restrictive. (Or more full of embedded ads. Why is it, by the way, that www.microsoft.com, including Windows Update, pops up an IWon.com ad banner every few pages you open? Huh? Is Microsoft having difficulty funding its website? Can't a company as successful as Microsoft grace us with the common human decency to not have pop-up ads right in the middle of its corporate website and critical upgrade mechanism?)
Encrypted hard drives, pay-for-play DiVX discs, and DRM-protected music-file formats will not fly with consumers when there's a perfectly serviceable, non-restricted alternative on the market. People won't pay to have their rights reduced. So Microsoft has decided to forgo any pretense of acting in the consumer's interest, and has thrown in its lot wholly with the media companies so they can force people to buy into the new restricted scheme. It's the only way this would have worked, and only now that they can see they have carte blanche to use their monopoly power in any way they see fit without fear of reprisal from the DoJ, they're lifting the lid on the new Iron Age of Computing.
Welcome to the future.
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18:01 - Cults is fun!
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Kris was at the Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara on August 23, the night Jaguar went on sale at 10:20 PM. The Apple Store there, like many other Apple resellers, had one of the famed "midnight madness" events in which the entire mall was kept open by security so that the droves of fans could line up for their copies of Jaguar.
This is shortly after 11:00 PM, some forty minutes after the OS went on sale. There are still hundreds of people in here-- the line started at the Apple Store (in the distance on the right), and stretched down the length of the lower level of the mall, and back. For what turned out to be hours.
The next day, Jaguar sales at places like Fry's were brisk, but it was business-as-usual. But just look at the kind of zealous energy that got discharged that night.
Yeah, I guess we're freaks. But it's so much fun.
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| Tuesday, September 3, 2002 |
02:29 - Europeans Know Best
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26939.html
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Wow. This one's one for the ol' record books. The Greek government has just banned all video games. All of 'em.
The government of Greece is making heroic efforts to humiliate the nation in front of the entire world, by banning all electronic games. That's right; something as innocent as playing computer chess on your laptop in a hotel lobby is now a crime with penalties of up to three months in stir and a fine of 10,000 euros.
The purpose behind this charming legislation is to crack down on Internet gambling (which already was illegal) -- or, rather, to enable legislators to enact their little public dance of righteous aversion to Internet gambling.
Improved enforcement of existing law is all that was needed, but there's a problem. Unfortunately, the Greek government is "incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines," according to an older article from the English-language Kathimerini newspaper, written while the bill was under consideration.
But these are the Greeks! They're just weird! Uh, yeah, but I thought the whole EU thing was about breaking down national identities and stuff. Doesn't work so well when one member state does something completely moronic, eh?
Man oh man. I'm no great fan of video games, but at least in the rest of Europe and in the US (thus far) we know the difference between Diablo and Gamblor.
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02:11 - Too Cool to Dismiss
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0209/03.xtunes.php
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Seems there's a Linux software maker called Tex9 who had created an MP3-management application expressly intended to replicate the iTunes user experience and feature set, on Linux. (Well, except for stuff that only a Mac can do, like referring to files by Unique ID instead of by path, so you can move them all over your system without the app losing track of where they are.) It was called xtunes, at least until Apple's lawyers came round the bend and shook their fingers in their faces.
So now the Tex9 guys are changing its name, and will eventually redo its UI look-and-feel. (Because after all, it looks just like iTunes, except that it sucks.) And the new name they're changing it to? sumi.
Ho ho ho. Clever. I just love the irony, so luscious it is. See, 'cause Apple's original set of System Sounds back in the 80s contained a chime called "Sosumi", in an act of defiance against Apple Records, who had tried to prevent the Mac from shipping because it turned Apple into a competing "music company" with a similar name. It's like that, y'know. It's like turned back on Apple's head now that they've become The Man, man. It's like poetic justice, man. Or something.
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure Apple is very flattered and all. And I'm very glad to see that iTunes and the iPod are being discovered by more and more people who are falling in love with the smooth flowing interface and effortless no-thought, no-mess user interface of Apple's digital music system, enough so that they've got a cute little "iPod with Tux on it" picture on the Tex9 website, and the whole organization appears to be founded on the high concept of cloning iTunes and the iPod experience for Linux users. That's very flattering, and it's a strong testament to the success of the design of those originals.
But... y'know, man, there's no need to get all moral-high-ground on Apple's ass here. I hope I don't have to explain why.
...In other unrelated news, Jaguar's opening sales weekend appears to have broken all previous records.
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19:27 - Windows Cretinism of the Day
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The rapidly forming Mac Cabal here at work just spent the past hour or so getting our Jaguar machines to behave as Windows SMB file servers on the corporate network. (See, 'cause we can do that now.) But it's not a straightforward process, or at least not as straightforward as it should be, because of a pseudo-bug in the upgrade process that's probably one of those things that they couldn't have managed any more smoothly than they did. Though they could certainly have documented it better. Like, at all.
See, here's how it goes. Mac OS X 10.2 now runs an SMB server (Samba, yes). Because this is a Windows file server, it has to keep user passwords in its equivalent of the Windows password database. When you create a new user or change your password in 10.2, it updates the encrypted password in both the OS X NetInfo database and the SMB password hash file. That's all well and good.
But what about machines that have been running OS versions prior to 10.2-- users that were created in older versions that didn't have Samba? Well, there's no SMB password file-- and there's really no way to create one, because the passwords are encrypted. The only way to create an SMB password file, seeded with the existing user passwords, is to have them re-entered in cleartext by a live human. This means that existing OS X users who have just upgraded to 10.2 must change their password (or at least refresh it by changing it to the same thing) in order to generate the SMB password file, before they can connect to their Mac from a Windows machine.
(For those curious-- just go to Accounts->Edit User, then enter your password in the "Current Password" field and press Return. This authenticates you to use all the rest of the fields on that screen. Turn on the "Allow user to log in from Windows" checkbox, and re-enter your password twice in the "New Password" boxes, and press OK. Then you can use \\ip-address in Windows to connect to your Mac, where you will get full access to the home directory of the user you just enabled. Or so goes the theory.)
It took us the better part of an hour, fiddling and tweaking and prowling the message boards and trying every combination of usernames and backslashes and forward slashes and caps/lowercase that we could think of; but at the end, after we'd figured out the trick to it and given all our machines' primary accounts the necessary refresher procedure, we were all ready to connect-- it was all set up to Windows' satisfaction, at last.
But beware the creeping Windows-ism! Our path toward discovering the light of truth was blocked by something in Windows itself that leaves us bewildered and scratching our heads, even after getting past Jaguar's unfortunate stitch-in-the-side. This is that if you try to log in multiple times from a Windows box, and you repeatedly fail (like more than three times), you will get a dialog box that immediately says "This account has been disabled".
This is on the client side.
That's right: If you're on a Windows box, and you try to log in to the same server more than three times, giving an invalid password (or otherwise failing authentication) three times, the client machine will lock you out from accessing that server. The server has nothing to say about blocking you from accessing it. The flippin' client does this.
See, 'cause you might be a h4xX0r! You can't be trusted with your own computer! That's why we've made it so it can block you from your nefarious activities. We control the horizontal! We control the vertical! We control the TCP/IP!
Fortunately, the blockage of the account goes away in about twenty minutes, leaving you free to enter your username and password, which (assuming the server is working, heh) will let you in to view your files. So now I can watch Leonard Nimoy's "Bilbo Baggins" music-video performance, hosted as it is on my Mac, within the glory of Windows.
But it's this kind of thing that perfectly encapsulates the difference between the Mac OS and Windows. Jaguar has an unfortunate wart that will become irrelevant with time and is easily understandable and explainable, but badly documented under the assumption that everyone will be buying new machines and making fresh installations, or helping each other through this piece of trivia in the forums. Whereas Windows actively intrudes upon your workflow, by design, and prevents you from doing perfectly reasonable things like trying to connect to a server, making assumptions about your intent that would make Ashcroft proud.
Pick your poison. I think I still like the taste of mine, frankly.
...Oh, and incidentally, the perverse of mind can connect over SMB from one Mac to another Mac, now. It's beyond me why you would want to-- you get to see all your files, minus their application bindings, custom icons, and filename extension masking. It's like a Q-type being, accustomed to traveling unfettered through the stars, living in five-dimensional space and beyond-- forced to exist as a four-dimensional human on earth. It's grotesque and filthy, and I don't see a reason to do it other than masochism.
But you can do it.
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| Monday, September 2, 2002 |
23:58 - Any exposure is good exposure
http://www.gateway.com/products/desktops/prf4/sweepstakes/allmedia.shtml
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Apparently there's a new ad out for the Gateway Profile 4, the machine that's specifically designed to compete with the flat-panel iMac-- and apparently the first that actually acknowledges this. Whereas the eMachines iMac lookalike back in 1999 went through its short and lawsuit-laden life insisting to its last dying breath that it was not in any way intended to resemble the iMac-- why, it had a floppy drive! How could anyone confuse the two?-- the Profile 4 appears to be going directly after the iMac, right up to and including performance-comparison spec sheets on their website and TV ads directly attacking the iMac. The ad, I'm told (though I'm apparently watching all the wrong channels), even features the Profile 4 sticking its "tongue" out at the iMac, the way the iMac did in its own ad back in January.
I'm entirely happy about this. No, really, I am.
Apple has had to spend its whole lifetime running ads which try to convince the computer buying market that Macs bring something to the table that the standard default PC doesn't. Apple ads have always had to revolve around either a comparison to a PC, or a lifestyle portrayal of a Mac as being an "alternative" platform. PC makers have never been under any pressure to do the reverse. Not since the 80s.
If Gateway is having to run a full-court press against the iMac, it can only be because they're feeling market pressure to do so. Why waste marketing dollars responding to something that's not even a threat?
So I think this campaign will only serve to increase Apple's legitimacy in consumers' eyes. It gets the Apple name out into the open. And the fact that the iMac is presented as the loser in the competition is immaterial compared to the fact that the Apple name is being mentioned in the first place-- to say nothing of the fact that it's being mentioned by someone other than Apple. The MSN ads that claim it to be "a great alternative to AOL" do AOL every bit as much a favor as a disservice purely by mentioning its name, letting it filter into people's minds subconsciously as they eat dinner.
As for the comparisons-- it's hardly surprising that the Profile 4 comes out on top in the tests they run. The Quake fps scores are pretty woeful, as is the boot-time comparison. JavaScript is certainly going to be a lot better on any Windows machine, because IE is nowhere near as optimized on the Mac as it is on its native platform (where it's all but an embedded kernel process). The numbers overall are so vastly different that I can't help concluding that if an independent third party were to conduct these tests without being commissioned by either party, they'd find results that prove both companies exaggerate their results to an insane level.
But there are things Gateway could have chosen to test that wouldn't have resulted in anywhere near as big a disparity. I'm not going to claim the infamous Photoshop filter test suite is a great example of an unbiased benchmark, but given its reliance on vector operations, the G4 is bound to have a better edge. Same with things like Media Cleaner performance, or MPEG-2 compression.
Which brings me to another interesting point. Has nobody noticed what the Profile 4 lacks? Namely, hard drive space... and DVD capabilities? Neither Profile 4 model comes with a DVD drive-- not just not a burner, but not a player. And the Profile 4 models on the Gateway site come with 20GB and 40GB drives (though the top-end test mule seemed to have a 120GB drive for some reason), whereas the iMac can be outfitted up to 80GB-- 40 is the bottom end.
To say nothing of things like the wide screen on the 17" iMac, the fact that the neck swivels as well as tilts up and down, and the fact that it runs OS X and comes with all the iApps, as opposed to the Profile 4 which comes with Microsoft Works and The Sims.
In any case, yeah-- comparisons will be comparisons, and it doesn't bother me that this one comes up spades for the iMac. Because the big win is that Apple flushed Gateway out into the open on this one-- they're no longer pretending not to be taking all their cues from Apple. They're being honest about it. And people recognize which is the pioneer and which is the imitator.
They really do.
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23:10 - Geez!
http://tribalfusion.speedera.net/m.tribalfusion.com/media/32986/popwiz.gif
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Ahh, the march of technology. Half the industry works like mad to realize the grand dreams of what the advancing state of the art can do for wide-eyed customers, and the other half... well, seems to be dedicated to working out ways to subvert the ingenuity of the first half for fun and profit.
As Marcus says, "Can you imagine being EMPLOYED to create and design these things?"
Those of us who are engineers will probably easily recognize such people as being the ones who cruised through high school on a bare minimum of effort, seemingly untouchable by the rigors of life, popular and attractive and insufferable. But we all put up with them, because we knew we'd end up with jobs where we created things, and they would end up pumping gas or something (perhaps working in a museum of ancient gas-station technology).
We were right about ourselves. But as it turns out, there's always a place in this world for the slime who can only imitate but never create. There will always be a demand for such services.
Wow, I even managed to get disillusioned on a holiday!
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| Sunday, September 1, 2002 |
00:14 - Fanatical Muslims Discover the Earth is Round
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I'm honestly not trying to mock indiscriminately, here. But... well, possibly the less said the better.
'AZAAN' - AN AMAZING DISCOVERY
Azaan: An incredible medium for the proclamation of Tawheed of Almighty Allah and Risaalat of Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam, the sound of which constantly echoes around the globe.
Amazing though it sounds, but fortunately for the Muslims of the world, it is an established fact. Have a look at a map of the world and you will find Indonesia (an Islamic country) right on the eastern side of the earth’s central landmass. Indonesia consists of numerous small islands, the principle ones amongst them being Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Saibil, all of which are well known. It is the largest country in the world, with 180 million inhabitants. The number of non-muslims here is negligible.
As soon as dawn breaks on the eastern side of Saibil, at approximately 5:30 am local time, Fajar Azaan begins. Thousands of Mu’azzins in eastern Indonesia commence proclaiming the Tawheed (oneness) of the Almighty, Omnipotent and Omniscient Allah and Risaalat (Universal Apostleship) of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam.
The process then continues and advances towards the Western Islands of Indonesia. The time difference between the eastern and western islands of Indonesia is one and a half hours. Hence, one and a half hours after the Azaan has been completed in Saibil, it echoes in Jakarta on Java island. Sumatra then follows suit and before this auspicious process of calling Azaan ends in Indonesia, it has already begun in Malaysia. Burma is next in line, and within an hour of its commencement in Jakarta, it reaches Dacca, the capital city of Bangladesh. No sooner the calling of Azaan ends in Bangladesh, it has already prevailed in western India, from Calcutta to Srinagar. It then advances towards Bombay and the environment of entire India resounds with this august proclamation.
Srinagar and Sialkot (a city in north Pakistan) have the same timing for Azaan. The time difference between Sialkot, Kota, Karachi and Gowadar (a city in Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan) is forty minutes, and within this time, Fajar Azaan is heard throughout Pakistan. Before it ends there, however, it has already begun in Afghanistan and Muscat. The time difference between Muscat and Baghdad is one hour. Azaan resounds during this one hour in the environments of Hijaaz-e-Muqaddas (Holy cities of Makkah and Madinah), Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq.
The time difference between Baghdad and Alexandria in Egypt is again one hour. Azaan continues to resound in Syria, Egypt, Somalia and Sudan during this hour. Alexandria and Istanbul are situated on the same geographical longitude. The time difference between eastern and western Turkey is one and a half hours, and during this time it is echoed with the call to prayer.
Alexandria and Tripoli (capital of Libya) are located at an hour’s difference from one another. The process of calling Azaan thus continues throughout the whole of Africa. Therefore, the proclamation of the Oneness of Allah and the Prophethood of Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam that had begun in the eastern islands of Indonesia reaches the Eastern Shore of the Atlantic ocean after nine and a half hours.
Prior to the Azaan reaching the shores of the Atlantic, the process of Zohar Azaan has already commenced in eastern Indonesia, and before it reaches Dacca, Asar Azaan has started. This has hardly reached Jakarta one and half hours later, then the time of Maghrib becomes due, and no sooner has Maghrib time reached Sumatra, then the time for calling Isha Azaan has commenced in Saibil! When the Muazzins of Indonesia are calling out Fajar Azaan, the Muazzins in Africa are calling out the Azaan for Isha.
If we were to ponder over this phenomenon seriously and studiously, we would conclude the amazing fact that: 'There is not a single moment when thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Muazzins around the world are not proclaiming the Oneness of Almighty Allah and the Apostleship of the noble Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam on the surface of this earth!' Insha-Allah, this universal and continuous calling of the Azaan shall not cease until the Day of Judgement, and we should all make du`a for the same, AMEEN.
(Translated from Tameer-e-Hayaat)
Yeah, that sure is an amazing discovery, all right. I can hardly contain myself.
Sure beats the hell out of that whole artificial cybernetic vision thing that Wired covered.
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15:14 - Who is Johnathan R. Galt?
http://www.islamic-news.co.uk/
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I've been hearing a fair amount about "cyber-terrorism" lately, on NPR and elsewhere-- in the context of a different way groups like al Qaeda could attack Western interests, ranging in severity from defacings of websites (which mostly amount to sending the message "Hey, if we can do this, think of what else we can do! Mwa ha haah!"-- even though the ability to deface a website implies nothing about someone's ability to access completely unrelated national-security resources; this isn't a movie) to being able to shut down power grids and access missile launch systems and so on.
At the very least I've expected to see some scrawlings on websites here and there, perpetrated by those doe-eyed Clear Guidance youths or some such. What I didn't see coming, though, was defacements of Jihadi websites-- like this one, which I saw linked from Tal G's blog, of www.islamic-news.co.uk.
(It's apparently remained like this for at least a day or two. If it's put back the way it was soon, I've saved a web archive of it.)
The defacement is signed by a Johnathan R. Galt, with a link to his own site, which appears to be a surprisingly comprehensive lising of Jihadi websites all over the world-- including references to their contents prior to 9/11, and lots of fascinating stuff like Egyptian year-2001 calendars printed months prior to the fact, with September's featured picture being of a jetliner crashing into Manhattan. And a ton more.
There's a worrisome angle which implicates the CIA in a lot of what's been going on, which sends off a few "conspiracy theorist" warning bells in my head:
America's CIA helped Osama and the Taliban overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan. Maybe Osama bin Laden is still on the CIA payroll? And perhaps they arranged for him and the higher-ranking Taliban to escape .
...But the links are fairly damning, as are dozens more that involve the CIA later in the site, and I'm left wondering why we haven't heard more about this guy? I can't even find a reference to his name in the InstaPundit archives.
As for the Islamic News defacement itself, it appears to be an appeal directly to Muslims, though it's far from clear how Muslim Mr. Galt is. Interspersed with quotes from what appear to be Islamic scholars doing things like debunking the Palestinians' right to the land in Israel and calling for Muslims everywhere to stand up against the hijacking of their faith by fanatics who appear to want to destroy Islam by fighting for it are lines like:
Is it any wonder that the people of the world have developed a fear and sometimes open hatred for Muslims when they see: terror videos for sale at a mosque . This is madness, it's a blasphemy against Allah, and it must be stopped.
We have decided to cooperate with the authorities here in Britain andin the USA. Britain must not be used as a base for world-wide Islamist terrorism. The evidence we have of Islamists activities against India regarding Kashmir will be given to the Indian authorities. We will help the Russians battle the evil of the Saudi-Wahhabi sponsored Chechen Mujhadeen. We will help the Israelis overcome Arafat and his goons .
(I'm not sure what all the weird extra characters are about. Maybe it's steganography. I dunno.)
I'm still looking through these links. And here I thought I'd be able to get some work done today.
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| Friday, August 30, 2002 |
01:15 - Has everybody seen this?
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/
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ConsumerFreedom.com is running the following full-page ad in Newsweek (among other places, I wouldn't doubt):
I can't describe the initial shock and eventual dawning joy I felt upon turning to this page. It felt like I was back in the 80s again-- and I only say the 80s because that's as far back as I can remember with any sentience, and this whole nothing's-my-fault thing has gone steadily downhill throughout my life. I can only look back as far as possible to have any inkling of a world where you could get away with running such a deliciously audacious ad, without having to worry about joyless middle-aged busybodies writing angry letters and getting laws passed to prevent anything so offensive from ever seeing the light of day.
An acquaintance that I had the chance to listen to as he held forth in Canada this past weekend talked about what he called "the Your Own Fucking Fault Amendment", which is the subject of a letter he has sent to his Congresspeople every year since he was eighteen. It's pretty much what it sounds like: If something happens to you that can be shown in court to be your own fucking fault, then you are divested of any right to file a lawsuit to claim damages for it.
Probably not something we'll see taken terribly seriously at any level higher than Third-Tier Coffee-Making-and-Dry-Cleaning-Picking-Up Aide, but now that sites like ConsumerFreedom.com are feeling confident enough to run ads that they know are bound to offend (or, possibly, incensed enough to no longer fear the consequences for it), there may be hope yet.
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09:38 - What didn't they enhance?
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Jeezum crow. Look what the venerable little Calculator utility does now:
...Among about a dozen other kinds of conversions (weights and masses, speed, power, temperature, etc).
It's almost pointless to talk about finding Easter eggs (like how if you write "Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!" in Ink (Rosetta was the code name for Newton's handwriting recognition system), it responds with "Hey, that's me!") when one just keeps running into goodies like this right out in the open.
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09:08 - Ball 1...
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Apparently, in preparation for eleventh-hour negotiations this morning ahead of the supposedly imminent baseball strike, three undisclosed teams called their owners and said that they wouldn't walk. Work out a deal, they said, because they're backing out on the strike.
I wish I knew which teams those were. We might still be thanking them fifty years from now.
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| Thursday, August 29, 2002 |
23:02 - Moments of Canadian Zen
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Now that I've got my USB cables all untangled from the unpacking process, I've got my big pile of photos imported into iPhoto, and once again I have to say that whatever the situation with Nikon's service department, the CoolPix 885 takes hella' sweet pictures. Kodachro-oh-ome, my ass... gimme 3.2 megapixels any day.
But that aside-- there were a few sights in Toronto that I treasured. One of them wasn't actually Canadian so much as Ford; it's what you find if you open up the trunk lid on a Ford Focus sedan.
Isn't that awesome? It reminds me of nothing so much as that "Pong: It's Not Just a Game" meme. It's like a hyperactive little video game. Pull the handle, and you pop out like Mario. Wheee!
Lance suggests that the handle is for the benefit of kids stuffed into the trunk by their deadbeat dads, so they can eject to freedom while hurtling down the interstate. I guess that makes more sense than what I had in mind-- I suppose the mob isn't going to use a whole lot of Ford Foci.
But then, in the TTC subway, there was this:
Read the text in the posted... read the small-print caption at the bottom ("Take away the anger before it takes away the girl"). Then look at the setting.
Above the third rail in the subway.
It's Humpty-frickin'-Dumpty. Whatever hideous incident of young-girl-incited violence took place that felled an innocent bystander from a precarious wall or ledge, you just gotta admire a place where a public service announcement can get away with being placed in so deliciously ironic a position.
I just couldn't let it go unphotographed, now could I?
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19:47 - Inking Well
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I sneaked over to Elite Computers today to snatch up a Wacom Graphire and plug it in.
Boy, am I glad I did. Not that I think the handwriting-recognition stuff in Jaguar is useful at all for anything but showing off-- but because that showing-off is going to be so unabashedly fun.
Pick up the pen and start writing anywhere, and a little yellow translucent college-ruled paper rectangle pops up, and you write on it. It grows as you continue writing, to whatever size you need, until you pick up the pen or pause and it renders the text into the current application.
Or, alternately, you can pop up the floating InkPad, which operates much more like the old Newton stuff: you write directly into the pad, and the words are rendered at the insertion caret as the system determines that you're done with them, using a very attractive and casual marker-style font. You can erase bits of already-rendered text by scribbling through them. And you can switch to Sketch mode and draw diagrams and doodles. When you're done, press Send, and whatever you've just drawn or written is copied into the current application.
Like the Newton system, lots of words are recognized improperly at first. But it learns. You can correct improperly rendered words by holding down the "back" side of the rocker button on the Graphire pen and tapping a word, and it will pop up a menu of likely alternative words-- arranged in order of likeliness, with capitalization alternates at the top, and a copy of your original writing at the bottom so you can see what you wrote.
(I was excessively gratified by what happened in the screen shot to the left: apparently, Elvish names from The Silmarillion have been dutifully entered into the dictionary by some sainted engineers at Apple.)
Oh, and that's not all. (Duh. Is it ever?) Both the yellow ruled "write anywhere" sheets and the InkPad (in both text and drawing modes) are fully pressure-sensitive. So the lines of your text are darker or lighter depending on how hard you're pressing, and sketches can be heavy or light-- and the edges are even "wet" and antialiased, like in Painter.
It was only after a while of aimless fiddling that I realized what I'd done: I'd written an entire e-mail to a friend at work, complete with an embedded sketch of a network diagram in smooth antialiased pencil-looking lines, entirely with a single input device and a single application. It put me in mind of the documentation for the DOS version of POVRAY back in 1991 or so, when the README tried fumblingly to explain in plain text how constructive solid geometry worked: "If this were a Mac, I could put a drawing in here to show you."
Along with the caption above that drawing, lovingly rendered: "I hove tarible Loudwriting."
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19:35 - The Price of Honesty
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When I picked up my copy of Jaguar on Tuesday at ComputerWare in Sunnyvale, my brain bubbled up from under a hazy blanket of 36 hours of non-sleep to remind me that Apple had announced a "Family Pricing" thing, where you could get a single copy of the OS which was licensed for up to five computers within a household, for $200. Since we have four machines in our house, I figured, hey-- since a single copy is $129, that's a pretty sweet deal-- $70 for peace of mind. Because otherwise, I'd almost certainly have only bought the one copy, or at most two, and installed it on multiple machines (because there's never been any Windows-esque protection in the Mac OS against that). It's one of those "I don't like doing it, but it's mostly out-of-sight/out-of-mind and seems to be condoned by the company anyway" sorts of things. After all, it's not like I'm pirating the OS outright, is it? They can't honestly expect someone to pay full price for four or five different boxed copies just to install on four or five different machines all under the same roof?
As quoted by Think Secret:
Explaining the recently-announced 5-unit family pack for Jaguar, Bereskin said that it was intended for households who "wanted to find a more affordable solution for staying legal." While the Mac OS X licensing agreement only allows installation on a single system, there is no Windows XP-style activation: "We've never put copy-protection techniques into our software."
This is an admirable attitude, I think. Rather than trying to enforce above-the-board software use through onerous and invasive anti-piracy schemes, they've chosen to give people the option to pay incrementally more for peace of mind. They've found by now that enough people who do multiple installs from a single boxed copy realize that it's not right and wish there was a better and feasible other option; and they've given them that option in the form of an officially sanctioned multi-unit package right at a pricing sweet-spot. If you're already paying $129 and you have the slightest bit of guilt about installing it on multiple machines, the $200 family pack is a bargain even if it were just for two licenses. And you get five.
He did say, however, that businesses cannot buy a family pack, and that there has been little interest shown below 10-unit licenses.
In other words, if you're a business, you can't just cleverly cut your OS upgrade outlay by 80% through this method. Way to see that loophole coming, guys.
I like it. And so did the guy at ComputerWare who pulled the family-pack box out from under the desk, noting under his breath the Windows XP Activation stuff and the $300 pricing. Yeah, I'm glad I'm not having to weigh that decision.
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| Wednesday, August 28, 2002 |
16:43 - Breathing Oregon's Second-Hand Smoke
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=4
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Okay, so the dingy brown haze that's still hovering over the Valley is in fact the result of those month-old wildfires in southern Oregon, as a Mercury News article last week confirmed with a very telling image from the National Weather Service which showed the smoke drifting very clearly southward, blown down along the coastline and pressed up against it by the prevailing ocean winds. Since we're right on the coast here, we get the easternmost swirls of that still-cohesive mass of smoke, oh joy.
The picture above isn't the same one, but it's very similar. The page I've linked to has a whole lot of other pictures of the event over the past month, and it's very cool to browse through. It's a little bit hollow, though, considering what the air outside looks like.
Other than that, though, I'd say that this is extremely pleasant summer weather. Just yesterday it was 98°F outside; Lance and I spent the lunch hour prowling around a Sunnyvale outdoor shopping center, without much more than a vague sense of it being sort of warm and nice out. Try doing that in, oh, I don't know, Toronto.
I like this place. Even if we have to put up with the occasional side effect of living on the frontier.
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16:24 - Flying the Banner
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This must have been put up during the week while I was out-- most likely, over the weekend when Jaguar was released.
This is the first banner Apple has posted on their freeway-facing building since 9/11, at which point they replaced it with a huge flag that lasted at least six months. That wall has stood banner-free since then, and now they're jumping back into full swing with this puppy.
It's the first time they've really tooted the OS X horn in a major ostentatious way-- it looks to me as though Jaguar is the first release that Apple is really confident about showing off to people. And it is, really; it's so full of little goodies that a user can spend hours just fiddling with stuff and having fun, and an impartial reviewer can get so immersed in it that he might end up forgetting entirely about the WinXP machine he's supposed to be comparing it to. Presumably that's the idea.
Incidentally, the next release of OS X (10.3, I'd assume) is going to be called Panther. I wonder whether they'll keep going with this marketing-the-code-name kick...
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| Tuesday, August 27, 2002 |
19:45 - Wow-- this place looks deserted...
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Well, I'm back from my week-long annual romp through the wilds of rural Ontario, bookended by wild bouts of carousing through the suburbs of Toronto (lemme tell you, Jack Astor's makes one kickass cranberry lemonade). Those whom I was spending the time with know how good a time I had, and everybody else would likely find a recounting of the whole affair to be tedious beyond mortal words, so I won't try.
I'm also just now passing my 36th hour of awakeness, so I implore your forgiveness for any residual addlepatedness. I had a lot of fascinating conversations with Torontonian friends about Canadian history, their view of "American culture" (a concept which I only seem to hear about when I'm in Canada-- to us, it's just "stuff"), socialism, federalism, patriotism-- you know, the usual stuff a bunch of guys in a rental car talk about on their way to a Toys 'R' Us in quest for an exceptionally rare re-released Generation-1 Optimus Prime that's being held on reserve by some kindly but bemused toymonger. But that will all have to wait for another time, when I'm feeling less like I've just driven four hours from Toronto to Detroit, watched movies all night to keep from having to succumb to less than three hours of pointless sleep, then returned the car in the wee hours and puddle-jumped to Chicago and then run bleary and bag-laden through the underground passageway between O'Hare's B and C terminals (it's a law of nature: the more your first-leg flight is delayed getting into Chicago, the higher the probability that your connecting flight will be on the other side of that jangling subterranean neon tubule), and then found myself luxuriating in gape-mouthed glee at the LCD screens in the back of every single seat throughout coach on a United Boeing 777 to San Francisco-- after which ending up waiting for no less than three hours on the sidewalk while my car-equipped savior made the circuit through the airport's interior no less than four times before completely fortuitously bumping into me in the cavernous new SFO international terminal because I happened to be inside making a raspy phone call of defeated despair to another friend to come get me, just as he-- the aforementioned savior-- walked past on the way out to his car.
So, yeah. I'm a little loopy at the moment. But I did have the presence of mind to pick up a nice fresh boxed copy of Mac OS X 10.2, aka Jaguar; since installing it on my work iMac, I've been giggling in helpless glee at the new features that are of the nature typical only of the most recent of Apple design: a single keystroke that makes the screen zoom smoothly (with what should be a swoooosh sound, but isn't, dammit) to a prescribed magnification level, which centers on the magnified mouse cursor as it moves-- it has to be experienced, honestly. And the smooth white swish of the flash-and-fade screen-blink upon alert errors that is also new amongst Jaguar's accessibility features. And the recently discovered hack (now neatly encapsulated, within hours of its discovery, in a compact GUI tool by Pliris) which lets anybody with Jaguar and a hardware-accelerated OpenGL video card run the OpenGL screen savers (like Flurry or the gorgeous zooming/panning/cross-fading slideshows) as your desktop background. I'm telling you right now, run the Beach slideshow as your Desktop image and let it shine through a red-tinted Terminal window at 43% transparency, point it at your typical hard-core UNIX geek, and just watch his lip start to quiver and his skin peel away like Goldmember in Waikiki. And to say nothing of the vastly improved Mail, which has so far displayed an uncanny accuracy with the pieces of wildly disparate spam I get-- and as I fine-tune it by correcting its rare (less than 1 in 20) missteps, it's visibly improving its accuracy. This stuff just makes me want to roll around on the floor weeping. I'm serious. iTunes' UI honestly brings tears to my eyes, and this stuff is all just more of the same, if not better. Geek candy. Nerd crack.
Ah well. It'll be a few days yet before I have a cheapo Wacom tablet with which to try out Inkwell, and I have yet to see what Rendezvous can do with the playlists full of sonorous Tolkien readings with which the upstairs iMac is laden. But as compelling as that prospect is, the bed beckons me.
But so do ten-day backlogs of Lileks and den Beste. Dammit.
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| Friday, August 16, 2002 |
17:57 - Vacation
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I'm outta here, folks. I'll be up roaming the wilds of Ontario for the coming week, and I won't be back in blogging range until Tuesday the 27th. (Sure seems to be the weekend for it.)
I won't even be in news-watching range, either, so if the world blows up I probably won't know.
I'm a simple man. All I ask is that United Airlines stays in business long enough for me to get back home.
See you all later...
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16:03 - A Self-Made Country
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I wonder if the recent (and historic) alarm that the European nations have about successful countries like America and Israel has something to do with a general pandemic mistrust of earned wealth as opposed to inheritance.
In reading the "All Creatures Great and Small" books by James Herriot as a kid, one of the lines that really stuck with me was an observation Herriot made about the Yorkshire attitude about this subject, as sharply contrasted against that of his native Glasgow. He said that Yorkshiremen treated the self-made man with deep suspicion; as he put it, "Nothing was more damning than the darkly-muttered comment, He had nowt when he fust got 'ere."
I wonder how far across Europe that sentiment stretches. After all, the European powers all came from monarchies, with systems of lordships and hereditary fortunes and powerful houses who kept control banking on the strength of a name. The rich and powerful were always the rich and powerful, because the present generation was always seen as the living embodiment of the ancestral generation. You were supposed to see King Arthur in a portrait of Charles the First, or Charlemagne in Louis XVI, or Siegfried in Kaiser Wilhelm. Likewise, if you're a blacksmith in a small country hamlet, the implicit assumption is that you inherited the job from your father, and he from his great-grandfather. For it to be otherwise would mean a noble family had somehow fallen, or that a ruling lord had come from a house of cowhands. While that might have made for good Dickensian fiction, it wasn't something one wanted to see in the real, live Europe.
America is the national-scale equivalent of the self-made man. With rights and power given to the individual and equal opportunity for all, the catchphrase of being a kid in America is "Even you might grow up to be President someday." There are no hereditary lords; there is no implicit glass ceiling for advancement if someone came across the Atlantic on a tramp steamer in steerage. Sure, it took time; and sure, there were (and are) economic dynasties. But the noveau riche-- or what I liked to call the technoveau riche until a couple of years ago-- never were treated with suspicion. Quite the contrary; they were seen as heroes, embodiments of the American Dream. it was a matter of pride to be at the head of a successful company and look back with wistful fondness at an apartment in the inner city or an immigrant grandfather cast off with the wretched refuse from some distant teeming shore. That's America.
Likewise Israel. They went from a nation of victims, just out from the worst cultural disaster ever to befall a people in history, to a thriving democratic exporter of goods and technology in what? Thirty years? Twenty? Who knew that would have happened? They were supposed to go hack at the desert in the miserable sun and be a poor beggar nation, dependent upon handouts from the UN, like the other countries in the area. What went wrong? How dare they succeed! Damn this self-made-man mentality!
What Hitler had correctly guessed was that the German people still had enough respect left over for hereditary entitlements that he could parlay it into the basis for a revolution: sanctified Teutonic blood, the rightful heirs to the Holy Roman Empire, the long-haired square-jawed musclebound Viking supermen whose spears turned back the Roman legions at the height of their power. World domination was their birthright as Germans, just for being Germans. For the Americans to claim that throne-- with their grass-deep roots and their brand-new country devoid of history and their willingness to accept any old people from any old where into their melting pot-- must have seemed ludicrous.
And yet here we are. It would seem that inherited entitlement as a concept upon which to build a nation is discredited by history. This must annoy the hell out of the Europeans. If they've got any of that attitude left, leveled against the self-made man who usurps power from those who currently have it, purely through the use of something so grubby as his hands and mind-- then it would certainly help to explain the transnational progressivist mentality, the victimhood=entitlement reaction, the complete failure to understand that equal opportunity does not lead to equal results.
We would seem to have figured out stuff like that a long time ago. We realized that strength lies in diversity (call it "hybrid vigor" if you want), of the "melting pot" type rather than the "multiculturalist" type. We realized that genius makes successes of those worthy, and that wealth passes from the hands of those who can't handle it to the hands of those who can. And we realized that these things happen of their own accord-- just leave everybody alone and it all works out like magic. To force things into a different kind of structure requires constantly applied effort. It's artificial, it's wasteful, and it breaks the backs of otherwise vibrant nations with superstar potential.
Just another reason, I suppose, why we don't feel particularly inclined to take advice from people whose countries have repeatedly proven to be failures, while ours has repeatedly proven to succeed.
How did Tom Lehrer put it? "He specialized in giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was..."
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12:45 - Gateway Profile 4X
http://www.zdnet.com/supercenter/stories/overview/0,12069,562126,00.html
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Well, it's here-- and what's funny is that ZDNet's reviewers are apparently unable to review it on its own merits without comparing it to the flat-screen iMac, to which it owes a good deal of its design aesthetic. (Well, I guess.)
Actually, what's really funny is that the article which links to the review calls it "Not as cute as an iMac, but a lot cheaper"... and then says that it starts at "(gasp) $999".
I guess the fact that it's only three digits is the real selling point here. After all, the iMac starts at $1299. That's well under the median 150% price premium that I've noticed on most Mac models these days.
Consider a Profile if you're seeking a space-saving, high-style design that doesn't come from Apple, but look elsewhere for high-end graphics or maximum configuration options.
I'd consider that a pretty ringing endorsement of the iMac, but that's probably just me.
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| Thursday, August 15, 2002 |
22:50 - Seanbaby the Sorcerer's Advocate
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22182
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Huzzah! Seanbaby is back, this time with a new article in The Wave about a truly inspired piece of moronicity: a low-budget video warning Christian parents about how evil the Harry Potter books are.
Seanbaby is great at reviewing stupid videos (of which many more such articles can be found at seanbaby.com); and this one proves he's no different even when he has to hold to some level of decorum because he's being published in a Bay Area lifestyle rag. It's all so good, I had a hard time picking a paragraph to quote.
The thing that makes fundamental Christianity special is that it’s the only religion that runs smear campaigns. No voodoo witch doctors have ever put together a home video warning voodoo parents of the seductive danger of Christian rock. HP...WR:MELI takes its outrage an extra step into crazy by actually inventing most of the things they hate about Harry Potter. Of course, as the video warns, if you say witchcraft has no power, you have two problems in your line of reasoning. One: you’re ignoring all the people that do have magic powers, and two: you’re saying that God’s warning in the Bible against sorcery is actually worthless. That means that the people who made this video have set it up so that in order for them NOT to be crazy, children need to be flying on brooms and raising bodies from the dead. So say what you want about their book-burning crusade, these people have balls.
Indeed.
The people we have to share our air with...
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21:43 - Well, maybe...
http://www.macnn.com/news.php?id=15928&startNumber=30
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Posters on MaCNN are responding to the Bare Feats benchmarks by noticing that the four tests that were performed were largely pure CPU-speed tests, which would not have shown an increase in the new machines with the same speed CPU anyway.
Unfortunately, the 4 tests that he did aren't going to show an increase in performance due to the newer bus/memory at all.
PS7 MP Action File: This one is probably memory/cpu intensive, and so will only show raw bandwidth between CPU and RAM, which we know hasn't changed (since the bus from the controller to the CPU hasn't gotten significantly faster compared to the bus between the controller and RAM). Since it only involves those two components, I wouldn't expect any speed gains without a CPU speed increase.
Bryce 5 Render: Same comments as the PS7 test. Since Bryce is doing the rendering and not the video card, it's pure CPU/RAM
iTunes MP3 Convert: Bottleneck is CD-ROM to CPU to HD. Of the 3 only the CPU is actually faster than the system bus.
Altivec Fractal: This is just testing gigaflops. Would you really expect this to change? At all? The CPU hasn't after all...
As someone else said, if you get a test that more evenly balances system performance (like Quartz Extreme, a high power 3D application/game, or a network app) then you'll definately see an improvement, because the controller can basically talk to TWO devices that want to access memory at a time. non-DDR machines can't do that. None of the barefeats tests seemed to put that to it's fullest either.
And:
DMA tasks will be significantly faster. I bet your Quake 3 frame rates will be 1.5 times what they were! Also, look at how OS 10.2 uses video acceleration. Those kinds of operations will be much faster than before.
So, some more testing would appear to be in order here-- like a simple Quake fps test.
Still, this means the kinds of things they did test-- which aren't trivial in their real-world significance-- won't be faster than in the older machine. But at least it might mean there's some benefit to the new boxes after all...
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19:51 - First the Earth cooled...
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When the New World was discovered, it changed everything. ("Well, duh," you say.) Not in any concretely tangible way on the popular level, though, or even in a way that the leaders of the various nations in power at the time could really sense. It was an asteroid strike, a cataclysm in history that sent shock waves around the planet and back numerous times, and we're still feeling the tremors today.
There it was-- a huge landmass full of natural resources, whose only inhabitants were so primitive technologically compared to the Europeans that they may as well have not been there, for all the global importance anybody was willing to ascribe to them-- to any extent beyond trying to get control of the natural resources from them by words rather than by swords. Every seafaring nation struck out and planted its flags, from the jungles of Brazil and Central America to the ice-bound shores of Newfoundland; and by the luck of the draw, the ships from England managed to land on the part of the Americas that happened to be the best and most livable. This ensured that the people who would come to inhabit that region would be predominantly English-speaking WASPs, if you didn't count the slaves in the southern colonies.
Maybe it was something about the fact that the English colonies were among the first to be founded by corporations-- privately held companies under contract from the Crown to settle the land, raise crops, harvest natural resources, and make products to ship back to the mother country-- instead of by military force or bodies directly under the control of the monarchy. But there was something in the political climate of England at the time, and in its colonies, that made it so that when it came time to break free of the control of the monarchy of the mother country, as every colony in the Americas eventually did, it was a group of intellectuals with some freaky ideas about how government should work that happened to lead the charge. These people were highly placed in their various jobs and political connections, and whatever they'd been reading or smoking, they somehow came to the conclusion that instead of setting up a monarchy of their own after they won independence, the thing to do would be to experiment with federalism. They had the landmass for a distributed method of government to make sense; they had the colonial delineations which they'd inherited from the various colonial contract corporations, which gave them a convenient substrate for "State" governments. And given their recent experiences with the British crown and how it could act when it got its knickers twisted at them, they decided that the answer was to centralize in the federal government only those functions which it was exclusively a central government's business to accomplish. Anything that could be handled by the lower-level and more distributed governmental bodies, would be. States were more important than the federal government, and local jurisdictions were more important than State, and individual people had the most power of all, to the extent that they did not break laws that were universally agreed to by any of the higher levels.
What would it have been like if, instead of trying to wrestle the American colonies back under the control of the British monarchy, England had undergone its own peaceful revolution and adopted a democratic or federal form of government? Monarchies don't like to give up power, and whenever a crown has given way to a democracy in other countries since 1776, it's tended to stick around as a figurehead, clinging to the romance of past glory. It's not an easy thing to give up. Democracy is colder, more clinical. No matter how neoclassical the architecture on the government buildings, it's still a rule by reason, rather than by emotion. In many ways that's a good thing. But for the sake of national pride, it's and ugly, dirty thing. But a democratic England, with its American States across the pond, might well have become an undisputed superpower long before the 20th century.
But as it was, America was out to an early lead. Its form of government encouraged individuality and innovation, and scientific advancements were to be had almost immediately. America began its push westward. It soon became obvious that there was a vast amount of eminently livable land out there, much more temperate and pleasant than anywhere else in the Americas-- one would think it was made to be settled. And it had all kinds of natural resources. Gold and silver and bauxite and iron and everything else started flowing from the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, and immigrants rushed in from all over the world to get in on the ground floor. It was a dot-com boom whose scale dwarfs the one we've just lived through. It changed the face of nations. Not least our own-- after all, we had all that land to settle, but there were all those Indians. We did try to get the land from them as legally and as compassionately as possible; but because of overzealous cavalry, corrupt state and territorial governors, and a federal government run by Presidents like Andrew Jackson who cared little for such pussyfoot concepts as "respect for other cultures, particularly those who are at a disadvantage", it wasn't much use trying to keep things equitable. The technological difference between the two classes of people was just so immense that even if today's EU were doing the colonizing, they'd have been unable to keep themselves from flowing into those wide open spaces and taking home the riches they found there, culturally-different-concepts-of-land-ownership be damned. It was like living next to a house full of gold coins, guarded by a Corgi. Nobody is so idealistic as to just leave it be. Particularly not when you're trying to fight a Civil War and you've just invented the telegraph and the locomotive.
Because it was in America that scientific and technological innovation really took root. Because the original federalists had carefully kept religion out of the laws, they ensured that the land would be ruled in a manner than fostered scientific thought founded on practical principles; and with the best and the brightest of so many countries emigrating to the US, it's small wonder that we produced Edison and then Hollywood in such quick order, or petroleum and then Henry Ford. America was a runaway success; everyone wanted to be an American. And well before World War I, the European nations who had begotten America and given her so many expatriates with which to populate the country realized that they were in no small danger of being eclipsed.
So it was that certain megalomaniacal figures in Europe picked up on the newfound fervor for science that had been propounded by folks like Darwin, and the work of the researchers who had figured out how bacteria multiply, and the idea that nations-- national identities-- would ideally behave just like animals in nature would, obeying rules like survival-of-the-fittest. All they need is "room to grow". And while by this time most of the European nations had had their own revolutions (peaceful and otherwise) to put parliamentary democracies into place, there was still that ever-present romance of the Nation, the People-- the Chosen Land.
So when Hitler began to hitle, he did so with the idea in mind that a nation derives its strength from its national identity (easily fomentable through ideas like "racial purity" and "bloodlines" and convenient ethnic scapegoats to blame for any problems), and a strong nation with lots of room to grow could quickly rise to supremacy. America had the latter, but surely a country built on such a mishmash of different peoples with different languages and different aspirations couldn't be as strong as a people with a pure national identity. (And besides, Germany needed a pick-me-up after the humiliating WWI reparations imposed by the French.) So up comes the Ubermensch, and down go the Jews. Out come the guns, and they're trained eastward on a march toward Russia, and south toward Africa and South America-- "room to grow" indeed.
The trouble with that, naturally, was that Russia-- while it looked like America in a lot of ways, what with its artificial and brand-new-for-the-time political system and its vast spread of wide open spaces full of natural resources-- actually had a terrible climate and a low-tech populace that wasn't growing very much. Germany wouldn't have found Siberia to have made much of an agar tray for the Pure Aryan Nation to prosper, any more than the Soviet Union did.
Incidentally, communism will likely not amount to much in history but a freaky political experiment that failed-- except for a few side effects that have woven themselves into the tapestry of our shared experience. The Soviet Union was founded on the same sort of jealousy that Nazi Germany arose under: that America was successful because it had tried something new, and they'd had the wide open spaces with which to support it. But surely the American federalist/capitalist idea couldn't be the last, right one, could it? Naah. Lenin and Stalin were revolutionary intellectuals trying to reinvent government in the same way that our founding fathers did, only they took it a lot farther down the road of artificial machine-like "empowerment" of the individual-- it empowered them so much they were divested of all ability to act on their own behalf, rather than as part of a group. But they also brought a special kind of pigheadedness to the table-- a grumbling, stomping determination to succeed in spite of the lack of all those natural advantages that those English-derived American colonists had. The Soviets would beat the Americans to the pinnacle of military might, come hell or high water.
(Except that just because a political idea is nearly 200 years old doesn't make it wrong or obsolete. Sometimes the first idea we come up with actually just happens to be right. Just as the Desktop metaphor is still the most widely-used, most intuitive set of paradigms for operating systems that we've come up with-- even in the face of more recent developments that purport to be more post-modern and user-friendly, like Microsoft Bob and the Netscape "Webtop". But people don't like to accept that such an old idea can be the best one for the job, and they keep trying new things-- which is a good thing, indeed. But it reminds me of nothing so much as those cartoons where one character gets hit in the head, and then spends the next 22 minutes having hilarious amnesiac misadventures; finally, someone thinks, "Hey! All we have to do is hit him in the head again, and he'll get his memory back!" And of course it works. But you know, in the real world, lightning rarely strikes twice.)
And the result of all this was that the European, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations, post-WWII, found themselves reduced to the roles of pawns between America and the USSR-- NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The once-proud empires had dwindled to the role of allies who could be bought and sold, who represented the ebb and flow of balanced power. And as America's might continued to grow, following the same old ideals that they'd been following since Andrew Jackson, the USSR ran out of steam and collapsed in on itself. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. NATO lost its common foe and focus. And suddenly the European powers found themselves ready to self-determine again; except that by this time, they didn't have any say in world issues anymore. They'd been defined in opposition to or in alliance with either the Americans or the Russians for so long, and America had been building itself up to match the perceived thread of the USSR for so long, that from a global-influence standpoint the Europeans felt about as confident facing down the juggernaut across the Atlantic as the Indians did when they heard the hoofbeats of the US Cavalry.
So there's that: powerlessness. But there's also the issue of the Jews-- the people who as the war ended had emerged blinking from the concentration camps, those who were left, and were immediately given a homeland by the League of Nations-- soon to become the UN-- as one of their few decisively positive pieces of legislation. Although we can see right there the seeds of today's assumption, in the "transnational progressivism" camp that Steven den Beste has been covering lately with some asperity, that with victimhood comes entitlement. And it's amazing how quickly the UN and the European community changed its tune when Israel stopped being a nation of poor, poor victims and started acting like winners: making the desert bloom, developing a high-tech sector that's the envy even of Silicon Valley in many ways, de-socializing to an amazing degree, and fighting off the repeated attempts by the surrounding Arab nations to drive them into the sea (e.g. in 1967, when Israel foiled a coalition that was revving its engines for war, and responded by taking over the territories in which they're now being blown up in ice-cream parlors and on city buses by people who would far rather die as holy martyrs than live in what they consider "slavery"-- which in reality amounts to "having to live next to a country of Jews and McDonald's and Nikes and MTV"). Now that Israel looks like the oppressor, the poor innocent Palestinians are obviously the victims, and they must be given the same entitlements that the League of Nations felt compelled to give the Holocaust survivors back in 1947.
For a half-century now, Germany has been falling all over itself trying to distance itself from any suggestion that they had once been the instrument of Hitler's grand dreams. For the first few post-war decades, they were humble about it-- they had to be, after all. They were a defeated nation, occupied, divided like spoils of war. But now that they're again the strongest nation in Europe, economically rather than militarily, they're throwing their weight around again-- they have the answer and the solution, and it remains only to convince the rest of the world (read: us) of it. Sure, they decry the actions of Hitler in the strongest possible terms, and they praise the Americans for saving the German people from themselves. But now they're overcompensating. They're overcompensating something fierce.
Now the big fad is to take aim at America and at Israel-- the big winners of history, the ones whose ingenuity and innovation and dumb luck have netted them great individual happiness for all their people, at the perceived expense of billions of downtrodden peasantry worldwide-- and to use whatever words those oppressors use to describe their enemies ("terrorism", "war crimes", "rogue nation", "fascism"), and turn them back against America and Israel themselves. Oh, how delicious the irony! America is a superpower with weapons of mass destruction; they have strong national identity (= Nazi!); they overrun and set up puppet regimes in nations with which they find coexistence to be untenable (Afghanistan); they propose to unleash their arsenal at any nation who appears to be threatening their own hegemony, whether the rest of the world agrees that such action is warranted or even permissible or not (Iraq). Next to such a nation, could a nuke-armed Iraq be so bad?
I've just had the (dis)pleasure of reading a spate of discussion on a Usenet group which I peruse on occasion, one which tends to be inhabited by people whose positions in life would place them firmly on the far left: socially insecure, sexually liberated, racially diverse (indeed, completely abstracted in their own minds from any real-life physical differences between themselves at all), troglodytic, and in constant contact with friends from all over the world-- with whom they're far more familiar than the world outside their own front doors. I've heard the most amazing things come out of these people's fingers. "Iraq armed with a nuke would take out those terrorist thugs in charge of Israel, and maybe the US too-- and then we'd have a real free democracy running things! It certainly can't be any worse than what we have now," said one (though this is a paraphrase). "God bless George Galloway for having the balls to listen to what Saddam Hussein has to say, and to tell the USA that they're going way too far." And "Civilian casualties aren't just 'unavoidable', as Dubya calls them, but they're held up like a trophy by the warmongers in power-- just like at Hiroshima, they live for nothing else but to flatten whole cities full of innocent women and children who want nothing more than to live and work and play like any family man in Minneapolis with a toddler and a dog." And "Considering that Iraq is right at the top of that leaked 'potential nuke targets' list, doesn't it seem as though the 'War on Terror' is more frightening than the Terror itself?"
That last one is in fact a direct quote, more or less. And as hard as it is for me to force myself to remember this, we get so caught up in our blogging that we forget that most people in this country (and in the world-- the people who were spouting the lines I quoted above seemed to be Canadians and Germans) take very little interest in what facts are out there and what dangers the world presents, beyond what their own personal prejudices happen to be and the news items that happen to bolster those prejudices. It's amazing the number of sentiments I read that seemed to amount to little more than "Oh, why can't we all just live in a world where nobody has to raise a weapon in anger?"
Dude, I'd love to live in that kind of world too. But we don't. More's the pity. And even simpering about "root causes" isn't going to turn back the clock and raise the WTC again and turn the Arab world into a land of whimsy and light where women can run free in the streets.
The "root causes" of the situation in which we find ourselves can be traced back as far as you like: not just to Saudi oil, not just to the Gulf War, not just to the foundation of Israel, not just to WWII, not just to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, not just to the end of British colonial rule, not just to the writing of the Declaration of Independence. It goes back through direct and indirect causality to the leaders and inhabitants of a monarchial Europe bursting with technological might and a need for hegemony, sending out their ships looking for the means by which to become leaders in the real New World-- the World of Economics. The New World of America was just a discovery along the way to that road-- what was really the killer app of the day was the stock market, speculation, futures trading, promissory notes, short-selling, and bubbles-- all flowing through Antwerp, all creating a new kind of wealth for an empowered middle merchant class. If this is the "root cause" that someone wants to attack, be my guest. But taking on anything that occurred later in history is futile, because there's always something further back to blame for it. You can, if you like, consider the repulsion of Saladin and the Crusades to be germane to today's woes, or the foundations of Islam and Christianity, or the removal of the seat of the Roman Empire to Byzantium, or whatever. None of these events occurred in a vacuum. Everything had consequences that we feel echoing today.
We live in Reality Land here. It would be nice if the only place we saw people who wanted to kill us was in video games, but the real world isn't like that. And yes, America is a powerful behemoth, more powerful than the rest of the former superpowers of the world put together. But you know something? If you look through history, from 1776 on through the present day, do you know the only constant-- the only nation which has not fundamentally altered or reinvented itself, or swung from one end of the pendulum to the other, or had a bloody revolution, or faded into irrelevance, or killed millions of its own people as "dissidents", or indeed violated its own founding principles in any significant way?
I don't feel as though I'm beholden to anybody to feel guilty for being an American. I like this country. I know it has its faults, and I know everybody thinks of us as being the Microsoft of nations-- bulldozing our way through everybody else's culture without so much as a backwards glance. I know the transnational progressivists would like nothing more than to invent its own set of "monopoly crimes" with which to charge us, and perhaps split us up so we don't present so much of a threat to the rest of the world's ability to survive and be happy. But there's a difference here: I'm proud of the achievements of this country, in a way that I can't imagine being proud of being a part of Microsoft. We are what we are because we had a grand vision 226 years ago, and we've innovated our way to the top and vindicated that vision through our own individual accomplishments. We haven't won because we stifled competition from other countries; we've won because we did things right. Sure, I can see why other countries may well dislike or even hate us for that. I can understand what it must be like to be perpetually in someone else's shadow. But I don't buy the proposition that we're subject to punishment for our success.
No, I don't have a grand unified theory for how the world can be united in peace and brotherhood, or how the benefits of life in the USA can be conferred upon the rest of the world. (If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this blog.)
But we've done everything right that I can reasonably see being done right, and history has handed us the laurels of world domination.
I personally think the world could have done far worse.
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13:48 - Well, that's an onion in the ointment.
http://www.barefeats.com/pmddr.html
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According to Bare Feats, the new dual 1GHz Mac and the previous-generation dual 1GHz Mac are neck-and-neck in performance. As in, almost indistinguishable. Same goes for the dual 1GHz Xserve.
The site concludes, very sensibly (if disappointingly), that while the DDR machines with the faster front-side bus should show at least some marked improvement over the earlier machines, the fact is that the G4 7450 (the "Apollo" chip used in both the old machines and the new) has a very well-documented internal bus-interface limit of 1GBps. Much less than the 2.7Gps of full DDR access speed, which Apple claims the architecture can support.
On the other hand, the PPC 7470 chip-- which in February was being talked about as being slated for release this summer-- does support the full DDR access speed. So does this amount to a last-minute hardware change, a deliberate attempt by Apple to palm off some dead-weight top-end 7450s, a piece of deliberately timed pre-marketing in anticipation of a "silent rev" that puts the 7470 into the new machines, or an outright baldfaced lie?
I don't like any of those options. Unless that silent rev is forthcoming very very soon, like within two or three weeks.
Grumble.
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11:18 - The G4's Last Hurrah
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/08/Anunbelievablekludge.shtml
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...I think he's right. All the signs certainly point to this being the case. The G4 chips in the new Powermacs are 7450s, just like in the previous machines, and it's entirely possible that they've simply been overclocked and rebranded as 1.25GHz chips just for the purpose of this speed-bump.
But I don't buy the "embarrassment of engineering" angle. Depending on what one is trying to see this as, it can be an act of desperation-- or a fairly ingenious strategic interim solution, a very competitive product in a demanding market, ideally positioned for the new POWER4-derived IBM chips (the G5?) which seem to be targeted for consumer availability sometime early next year. It'll be a while in coming, but that just means we'll have to hold our breath for a while. And the current machines are far from useless.
The architecture is, after all, notable. Dual everything. Bridgeless direct PCI. Lots of L3 cache. And there's nothing inherently wrong with overclocking a chip; just ask any gamer. If they can do it and keep the chips stable, more power to 'em.
But this isn't an act of desperation, thrown together in a hasty three weeks of scrambling. This is an architecture that's been in planning for what must have been months. My guess is that as far back as January, or possibly earlier, Apple realized that the G4 was doomed as long as Motorola was so preoccupied with its business woes and seemingly uninterested in making desktop semiconductors. So they started coaxing IBM to develop the new chip as a contingency plan-- to develop the architecture, figure out the backwards-compatibility issue, make it desktop-capable, make it 64-bit Book E-compliant, try to get the power consumption down to a reasonable level, implement something to take the reins of Altivec-- and then, when the time was right, to build their new semiconductor foundry and announce the existence of the new chip. Finalize the design, get it ready to move, and meanwhile Apple would build an architecture that squeezes the last drops of juice out of their existing stock of effectively end-of-lifed G4s-- overclocking them when they run out of top-end chips that can legitimately push the speed barrier-- and put it into a machine that's designed for the new IBM chip rather than for the G4. Den Beste says it himself:
In fact, there's good reason to believe that these new machines are still going to be bottlenecked, because the processors share a single bus to the controller. PC duallies have separate buses for each CPU. Irrespective of how much L3 cache is connected to the controller, or how fast the RAM behind it runs, the data is choked on that FSB which runs 133 MHz for the 1.0GHz duallies, and 167 MHz for the 1.25 GHz duallies. The new "faster" bus merely keeps pace with the degree of choking; it doesn't relieve it. To relieve it, the G4 bus interface would have had to be redesigned, but that would have required Moto to roll the chip design, and it's clear they are not going to be doing that. If Apple was expecting a new G4 with a new FSB architecture, they would never have created these monsters.
Yes, exactly. These machines are architected for the G5, not for the G4. They'll hum along nicely with the G4 for a while, but they're overengineered in their current configuration. Put in G5s, with new memory buses, and they'll come into their own. (Likewise with the Xserve, which many are now considering to be an interim design, anticipatory of the 64-bit G5 as well.) Or that's the hope, anyway.
Some speculation (between myself and Chris, mostly) claims that the 133- and 167-MHz front-side bus speeds in the new Power Macs seem lackluster in comparison to the 266 and 333 MHz of PC motherboards-- but that this is simply because by PC-style accounting, those latter numbers are really 133 and 166, but doubled because of the effective double speed of DDR RAM, which Apple has only now received. The P4-based systems can get away with claiming such numbers because their CPUs have direct access to the RAM at such speeds, whereas Apple's don't-- yet. The front-side bus speed itself isn't crippled compared to that of PC motherboards. It's crippled by the fact that the FSB is designed for a later chip which will take full advantage of this architecture.
Apple has pulled this slow-ramp CPU trick before, incidentally. They've done things like releasing 100MHz machines when the chips could really do 120MHz, or underclocking the RAM or the FSB, often for the purposes of selling pro-vs-consumer targeted products-- but more often than not, to allow themselves a smooth ramp target. If the previous generation of machines were 60MHz, and they now had chips that could do 120, they would first release them at 100-- still a significant speed improvement, and a sales driver, but it also gave them the ability to do another speed bump three months later-- another sales driver, and it kept the speed ramp smooth. Overclockers wishing to void their warranties could often soup up their machines, and when the clone market was in existence companies like Power Computing could blow away Apple's own machines with 150MHz boxes against Apple's machines running at 120MHz and so on, but Apple kept up the smooth and behind-the-curve pace-- so that much like corporate financial officers deferring profits in a successful quarter so the company doesn't totally blow away its numbers and then predispose everybody to the same kind of success the next quarter, setting themselves up for a fall if the results are merely "normal", Apple could always ensure a predictable, on-schedule speed increase. And with a couple of notable exceptions (like the infamous downclocking of the G4s right after they were announced), they've been able to hold to that schedule throughout most of their history.
So now we're beginning to cross a desert, one in which we're unlikely to see any truly new G4 models (there's a possibility of a 7470 appearing later this year, but it's not looking good-- and the 7500, with its RapidIO architecture and longer faster-clockable pipeline, which was the subject of much optimism earlier this year, seems to be a lost dream now). I suspect that there will be room in the schedule for at least one more speed-bump between now and whenever the IBM G5s appear; rumors tell of the current 7450 G4s running at 1.4 or even 1.6GHz, and even if that's a matter of overclocking, it may well be right in with Apple's plans to do just that. It's a gamble, but if timed correctly, we could reach the other side of the sands with water left in our canteens.
As to whether IBM's chips are in fact on the way, we have no facts but a lot of speculation-- though, granted, that speculation is extremely compelling. For instance: is it a coincidence that IBM's chip will not support any 68K emulation code, and that Apple has announced that early next year new Macs will not be able to boot into OS9 at all? I doubt it. (Then again, as Kurt Revis points out, 68K emulation is all software-- it can work just as well on a new CPU as on the old.) The evidence seems to be in pretty strong supply for the idea of Apple being wholly committed to the IBM chips, and engineering around the G4 now rather than specifically for it.
The new Power Macs are very competitive machines, and they're only going to get better. That is, if our speculations pay off. Steve Jobs is rolling the dice in a major way here, but the situation isn't as dire as it can be made out to be. I still would like to see one of these machines in action; it's bound to be a significant leap past the previous generation, and it isn't because of marketing smoke-and-mirrors. There's a plan in place here, and there's good engineering going on. Considering how many rabbits Jobs has pulled out of his butt in the last few years, and how few failures, I'm inclined to put some faith in the man's ability to marshal his resources and strategize with the best of 'em.
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| Wednesday, August 14, 2002 |
09:49 - PowerMac vs. Dell
http://blog.glennf.com/gmblog/archives/00000233.htm
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Yesterday I compared the prices of the new line of Power Macs to the most comparable Dells I could find-- the P4-based Dimension 8200. I did this because it's what Apple compared its machines to in the MPEG-2 compression bake-off stats; I found that if you configured the Dell to match the Mac feature-for-feature, the Mac turned out to be priced at about 150% of what the Dell cost, from top to bottom.
But I overlooked the higher-end Xeon-based Precision 530 workstation, which might be closer in targeting to Apple's machines. Glenn Fleishman recompares the prices using the Precision instead of the Dimension. And he finds that the Mac is actually significantly cheaper, especially when you go for the lowest-end processors available.
I don't know how an 867-MHz dual G4 would fare against the Precision's dual 1.8GHz Xeons in that bake-off, but at least we now have a high-ball competitor to work against as well as a low-ball one.
Oh, and Marcus points out that the Dimension's 533 MHz system bus is actually due to RAMBUS' super-high clock speed over an 8-bit bus. So it's not as hot as it sounds (not that that matters to the number-munchers on the message boards).
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09:33 - Hey, congratulations, Apple! You've made a meme!
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,54333,00.html
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Why, look. Ellen Feiss, the "stoned" high-school girl in the online-only Switch ad that was released at MacWorld, has risen above the petty ranks of "Stupid advertising shills" and entered the rarefied stratum of "Web-wide underground obsession". She joins such hallowed figures as "WTC Tourist Man" and "Colin Mochrie" and "Domokun" as preferred clip-art at Fark.com and in the inevitable "animutation" videos that make me giggle so helplessly.
In the last couple of weeks, a number of fan sites have popped up, created by besotted devotees who think she deserves a higher profile in American pop culture.
Feiss is not yet as famous as Mahir or the "all your base" phenomenon, but her fan base is growing -- and not just among Mac users. She has unique appeal to people who use Windows PCs.
There is Ellen Feiss, the fan site and the Ellen Fan Club: beep beep beep, which has set up a Cafépress Web store to sell T-shirts, coffee mugs and flying discs adorned with her image.
The domains ellenfeis.com and ellenfeissfanclub.com have also been registered but are currently empty.
Feiss has been turned into a set of computer icons that, curiously, can be converted to display on machines running Windows XP. She is also the subject of some wallpaper pictures that decorate a computer's desktop.
Isn't advertising weird? You spend millions trying to establish an image in customers' minds, and they filter it out; but do one little throwaway clip like this, only post it online (don't even broadcast it), and suddenly your logo-- for good or for ill-- is in front of millions and millions of potential laughing customers. (After all, whether they start out liking or hating Apple, the people making Ellen Feiss fan sites will have positive thoughts and memories about her meme-- and therefore about Apple.)
Genius, or inscrutable Dame Fortune?
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| Tuesday, August 13, 2002 |
11:31 - I didn't want a headache this early.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
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Well, it seems we can now pretty much count on certain rumor sites to get the facts about upcoming announcements spot-on, even though such rumors might not be as fun to read as the big freaky blue-sky whisperings about Next Big Things or about incinerating the competition or whatever.
New Power Macs today, and the specs are just like what the rumor sites said. Though I have to say those specs are... well, mixed.
They're pumping the "Technology from the Xserve" thing quite a bit, and it's true that they're inheriting a number of advantages from the Xserve's design. Everything's dual now, for instance-- dual optical drives, dual hard-drive ATA channels (supporting up to four drives), dual video out (all digital). But the numbers... well, I'm confused. It's all dual, but it's not very symmetrical. And the specs lack some luster in a few bewildering areas.
Good things:
- DDR SDRAM (whoopee)
- Dual digital video out
- Dual optical drives
- Dual ATA channels for hard drives (supporting four drives total)
- Dual CPUs across the board
- ATI RADEON 9000 (with GeForce4 Ti option)
- AGP4x
Bad things:
- 167 MHz system bus (what is up with that? Dell's top-end systems are up to 533.
- The ATA drive channels are slow and asymmetrical: ATA-100 and ATA-66. Why not ATA-133? It's not like it hasn't been around for years.
- Video out is asymmetrical (ADC and DVI)-- though that may be a good thing
- The price.
I mean, what the hell? $3300 for the top-end system? Apple's supposed to be getting its prices down, not inching them back up to where they were in the Apple IIvx days (remember $8000 Macs? Remember?). I just went to Dell's site and priced out a similar system (well, except for that 533MHz system bus); it came out to about $2300, if you subtract the monitor and add the iApp wanna-be programs and a DVD burner. The Dell configuration is still ungainly and sloppy, but it does come to $1000 less than the Mac. And I don't know if the Mac can claim a $1000 premium for what advantages it has.
Sure, we've got DDR now. But what good is that going to do against a system bus over three times as fast? And I don't think you can buy ATA-66 drives anymore. (Though the Dell interestingly doesn't offer ATA-133 drives-- weird.)
It should be telling that Apple is no longer using Photoshop as its acid test for comparative speed analysis against Wintel PCs; it's now using MPEG-2 encoding for DVD burning. And it does show that the new G4 bests the current top-end Dell (the Dimension 8200 with a 2.53-GHz P4) by some 43%. But then again, MPEG-2 encoding is surely a heavily Altivec-optimized vector-op procedure, and it's going to show more of an advantage over the clocked-twice-as-fast Intel chip than other operations will. And besides, the Mac is dual-CPU. I daresay the numbers wouldn't look so rosy with a one-on-one comparison.
Whatever the prospects or artistic merits of this new case, the G4 in its current form isn't going to see the inside of it for terribly long, I daresay.
My reaction to the new case was that it looks like a grinning Cyclops; but jest aside, it's clear that this case is designed to ventilate better and dissipate more heat than the previous generation-- which didn't exactly have heating issues. So I think it's pretty safe to say that this will be the case design for the new CPU as well, whenever that gets here-- because presumably it's going to run hotter than the G4. (Pretty much everything does except the Crusoe.) And the case now has an all-metal latching/locking mechanism. Still no USB/FireWire on the front panel (why the hell not?), and only four PCI slots. But I do have to wonder again why anybody would need more than four-- considering that the video is AGP (in its own slot) and the sound, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and modem are all on-board.
I dunno. I like a lot of what this system has to offer, but some of the compromises and omissions bewilder me. This is a major rework of the G4 tower configuration, with a new motherboard, system controller, bridgeless direct PCI controller, and so on. I hope there's another rev of this design soon with minor improvements that correct some of the weird imbalances like drive speed, and we gotta get that system bus cranked up as well. I won't be buying a new machine for a while yet; I can wait.
I do wish they could have gotten that price down a little bit, though.
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| Monday, August 12, 2002 |
18:30 - Technology built by the lowest bidder
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Suddenly, a few minutes ago, my POP mail stopped working. Whenever the mail program checked for new messages, it popped up an error saying "POP user briant unrecognized".
Completely out of the blue. Just started happening. But I'd gotten used to stuff like this ever since we went to an Exchange server a few weeks ago. (Nary a problem beforehand, but since the changeover we've had at least one protracted period of downtime of one sort or another almost every single day.)
Naturally, the purpose of switching to Exchange was that it would be cheaper to implement-- which, one has to understand, has nothing to do with the cost of the equipment or the software. It has to do with the salary of the administrator.
A UNIX guru comes at a price. So does a security officer with real training who knows what he's doing. But Win2K admins who can set up Exchange and IIS-- well, they're a dime a dozen. And what company in its right mind would pay more for what they can get cheap?
Turns out, our Windows administrator had turned on some option in Exchange that makes it reject connections in which the password is being sent in cleartext (which we're all doing, since he'd told us not to use SSL). When Kris and I brought it to his attention that it was now rejecting us, his first reaction was "Well, it's not doing that for me..."
A few minutes later, he came to look at my setup. I showed him the error: Click, then "POP user briant unrecognized". First reaction this time: "Well, you're using a Mac. That's obviously the reason."
I point silently to Kris' NT machine running Outlook, with the same message on-screen.
The admin swears under his breath and stomps off.
I don't know how this is going to work out, but it's just such a perfect little microcosm of life in a Windows world. We refuse to pay more for extra quality, whether in our computers or in the expertise of our administrators. And when this leads us into months-long bouts of sporadic downtime, security breaches, and active attempts to thwart the needs and desires of employees, all in the name of "standardization on the system that everybody else uses", all we can do is drink heavily and escape into sports or fantasy in the miserable hours of evening, before collapsing into the dark respite of slumber with the nagging thought that death, should it visit in the wee hours, would be a welcome relief.
Just got a call: "Okay, could you try it again?"
I try again. No errors. "Yeah, it seems good now."
He seems surprised. "It does?"
"Yeah, no errors now."
His voice is pained and exasperated. "Oh, maan!"
This is going to be a long evening.
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16:46 - The Beleaguered Innovator
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The year was 1998. The Internet had reached maturity, or at least was progressing well through its awkward adolescence. All the familiar pieces were there: e-commerce, corporate sites with stock quotes, Web-based discussion boards, spam. It was the Internet of today, give or take a few million users-- and a widely-used browser or two.
Netscape was in a bad way. After hurtling to stardom with successive major releases being hustled out the door every few months, each one packed full of brand-new and desperately-needed page layout features such as background colors/images, tables, frames, and the like, the browser-- which had enjoyed almost total penetration across the Internet population-- had been brought to a standstill by Internet Explorer 4. Upon that browser's release, everything changed. The stakes were entirely different. The same old tactics would no longer suffice. Suddenly it was a fight for survival, not a frantic but exhilarating race to get new features into common usage, flinging them out like alms over the piazza. It was now deadly serious. IE4 was the browser world's 9/11.
Almost immediately, Netscape lost its way and began to flounder. As the free IE4 began to take root, and as Windows 98 began to ship with a preinstalled copy of "The Internet" on every desktop (rendering Netscape's $60 price tag ridiculous by comparison), Netscape started to stagger and crash into walls like a blindfolded dog recovering from surgery. Gone, almost overnight, were the new features that were created as a response to overwhelming clamor from the users, features with a massive popular mandate for existence. Now the key was not functionality, but survival-- and so Netscape started to cast about.
Remember the whole "Push" campaign? How browsers would integrate with your desktop and send you data unbidden, so that your entire machine would turn into a giant interactive web page-- or, more accurately, a giant interactive billboard? It would be like computing inside an ad. Your desktop wouldn't be a static picture of flowers or your car or whatever-- it would be a live Web document with links, ad banners, little games to play, everything. Microsoft's version was called Active Desktop. Netscape partnered with Marimba for theirs.
It was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, as revolutionary as tables or frames, or indeed as the browser was in the first place. But everybody looked at it, raised their eyebrows, and yawned. Push fell flat; neither company won. Active Desktop still exists in Windows, but I don't know a single person who uses it.
At the same time, there was the big DHTML/Layers thing. Layers were supposed to be the other Next Big Thing; they would make pages come alive, with dynamic in-frame content that could turn websites into fully functional applications. (Sort of like what we can do today in Flash.) It was a bold idea, but the implementations were far too cumbersome for anybody to get their minds around-- Netscape's and Microsoft's implementations of DHTML were incompatible and had complementary shortcomings, and nobody could code to a fully working standard. Besides, there just wasn't a public mandate for it, not like there was for tables or for background colors or for CSS. And DHTML died the same death as VRML: it seemed like a good idea at the time, but all it did was to send Netscape on a wild goose chase while they tried to head off Microsoft. And they succeeded. They kept Microsoft from winning in the DHTML or VRML or Push battles. Huzzah.
But the damage had been done. The vision that drove the creation of the Internet had been destroyed, taken corporate. It was now about marketing, about demographics, about product placement, about mindshare, about market penetration, about brand loyalty. It was no longer about creating functionality and features to empower wide-eyed Web geeks creating their first tentative pages about skateboarding or their favorite movies. That was all over. Because while Microsoft had led Netscape on with the illusion that what the public wanted was more new features that were as exciting as in the early days of the Web, what they were slyly doing in the background was to integrate the browser into Windows.
Netscape released a new major version about every six months, from 1995 through 1998, until version 4.0 came out. and now, in 2002, four years later, we barely have anything that can be called a successor to it.
And neither does Microsoft.
What major new empowering features has Microsoft added into IE since it became the de facto standard? Some vaguely improved CSS handling, sure; maybe some speed enhancements. But what has changed since IE4 that honestly gives us new abilities in our use of the Web as a publishing medium?
As if. IE still doesn't even have a "Show Page Info" equivalent or a JavaScript debugger. (How the hell are you supposed to write JavaScript without a JavaScript debugger, anyway?) It doesn't even have cookie management.
Which brings me to the crux of this diatribe, the feature that I just remembered suddenly last night, and which seemed now so disheartening in its tragic optimism, its violins-on-the-deck-of-the-Titanic unquenchable hopefulness that kept Netscape's vision alive right up to the very end, not unlike Bill Biggart and his D30, knowing he was doomed, but doggedly doing what he believed in anyway, right up until the masonry started crashing down.
That feature was a new technology whose name I forget-- LiveFace or RealFont or Dynamic Fonts or something-- that enabled Web developers to embed their own custom fonts into their web pages. It would be included as just another binary file to download-- a font doesn't take up much more than 50K or so, no more than your typical image file; and once it was downloaded, the browser would integrate it in-place and apply it to the text in the page. The author could include and refer to as many of these fonts as he wanted, in the same kind of structure as CSS. You wouldn't have to install the fonts in question onto your computer; you wouldn't even have to know the fonts were even there. They would be contained entirely within the browser's run-time space, and unloaded when the browser quit.
The way I remember seeing the demo page at Netscape's site working, it would lay out the entire site, and all the text would be shown in the default browser font; but then, as soon as the new font was fully downloaded, suddenly all the text would re-render smoothly into the new font, gorgeously reflowed with full kerning and leading and everything, just the way the author intended it.
This was all part of a thrust by Netscape to turn the Web into a legitimate publishing medium with real page-layout control, so people could be sure that the pages they presented would be viewed by everybody exactly the same way-- fonts and all. It was a fairly wide-reaching initiative; it wasn't just the dynamic fonts thing. It also included stuff like a "columns" specification, so you could write a big block of text and have the browser automatically render it into two or three or n columns for you, across the page, without having to worry about creating tables and splitting the text manually between the cells. (It would have been a godsend for text-heavy content that would normally get laid out in multi-column formats in print; instead, what we have now in online news services and journals and blogs are gigantic narrow single-column articles that thread their way downward between columns full of ads and links.) The new initiative also included tags to specify gutter spacing, margins, headers and footers, text wrapping around images-- in short, it would have turned the Web into a full-fledged deterministic page-layout medium. The demo page showed a newsletter-style page with two columns, ornate graphics in the gutters, a beautiful headline block, bylines, headings, initial-caps, the whole nine yards. It looked like the future, in a way that crap like Push or VRML never looked like anything remotely compellling. And it would have been available to everybody. I believe they even included a free tool which would convert any TrueType font into the format needed by the dynamic-fonts engine.
But it didn't catch on, because by the time it appeared, Netscape was irrelevant. And Microsoft has celebrated their victory over this kind of innovation by... making sure that four years later, we have no such functionality available to us.
Think of what it could have meant. Lileks could whip up a gorgeous new layout format for his Bleats, and by tagging on the fonts he used in the new dynamic-font format, he could be sure that every one of his readers would see it as he himself saw it, unless they'd specifically set their browsers to override with their own custom fonts. USS Clueless could ensure that all the relevant header text would appear in the Trekkish "Handel Gothic" font, without Steven having to link separately to the TrueType editions of that font that people currenly have to download, install, restart their browsers, and return to the site in order to see it the way the author intended. It would all "just work".
But that dream is gone now, and we're unlikely to see anything like it again, or at least not for years. The Web has matured in an environment patently unfriendly to such innovation. The time for empowerment ended with Netscape still giddily pulling rabbits out of its hat, on a crumbling stage in a theater burning to the ground.
As I've said before, innovation is the enemy of Microsoft-- it's not just that Redmond is incapable of innovating, it's that innovation is patently bad for business. They have to be able to appease their stockholders with a product that they can get away with changing and improving as little as possible, as little as they can get away with. Why should they innovate? Innovation costs money. If they could sell the same product, materially unchanged, for thirty years-- they would. That's business. And when you're a monopoly, and when innovation is seen as irrelevant as far as the public is concerned, coming up with new capabilities to deliver into your customers' hands-- new things to go wrong, new things to have to support, new complexities to add to your software-- is the last thing you want to do.
When an industry like technology solidifies, it becomes a lot more friendly to investment and to traditional business that expects the products to behave like corn flakes and detergent. Computers don't do that yet. But browsers are starting to, and that's why now that the frivolous dot-coms are gone, we've winnowed the field down to e-commerce companies that have genuinely viable business plans in a traditional sense. They can expect browsers to behave a certain way, because for some four years now there's only been one browser of note, and it's been effectively unchanged in all that time.
But because Netscape was willfully destroyed before their web-publishing initiative was fully realized, an entire arm of that potential business has been lost to us. Imagine what blogging could have been like in a world where we had that kind of layout control. Imagine what e-zines would have been like. Imagine what new fields would have been opened up by enterprising pioneers who saw an opportunity afforded by this new technological foundation, picked it up, and ran with it.
That's the kind of crime for which I will never forgive Microsoft. They are actively hostile to innovation, purely because of what they are. It is in their interest to stifle innovation. It is their goal to own an industry-- to buy up or smother the companies competing in that field, become a monopoly, and then never innovate again. The money doth flow like never before-- but progress ceases.
But because this leaves a niche open, it's up to the beleaguered underdogs with the small market shares to do the inventing. Innovation always happens first and best with companies like Apple, because they have to innovate in order to survive.
The problem is that such a position is untenable from a business standpoint. Success and failure are separated by a day's worth of work or sales or product announcements, and failure is forever.
I know it makes me old-fashioned and unrealistic to be rooting for the innovative underdog in a given field; they're bound to become irrelevant and die, and we may as well just get with the program and accept the realities of the monopoly-controlled industry. Sure, it won't ever innovate again in that field, but at least investors can make some money off it.
Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic. Maybe I'm an idealistic dunderhead. Maybe I just can't bear the thought that the ultimate fate of any scrappy entrepreneur, ingeniously inventing, following the American Dream, is to become agglomerated into a monolithic and ossified industry, devoid of personality or energy, focused only upon market share and revenue, rather than on serving-- and delighting-- the customer.
Whatever the case, I'll keep waving the flag as high as I can-- lest it drop from people's sight and we lose yet more of the magical world of invention.
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12:10 - Bill Biggart
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0111/biggart_intro.htm
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We've all seen Bill Biggart's last few photos in Newsweek and elsewhere; he's the guy who stayed under the WTC towers on 9/11, snapping pictures on his D30 right up until the buildings fell on him.
I don't know if this page is new or what, but it's worth some perusal either way. If just to refresh the imagery in our minds now that the one-year anniversary is coming up. It's not like it's that easy to forget, especially for New Yorkers. But still-- sometimes seeing something that makes us grit our teeth is more useful than reading a ten-page screed on why George Galloway is an anti-American, terrorist-supporting bogocrat and the quicker we take Baghdad the less chance we stand of getting ourselves nuked. Sometimes we just need a few photos-- and a few extraordinary circumstances under which they were taken-- to remind us what's at stake here.
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11:54 - iRresistible
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I think I just saw another iPod sell itself. And it didn't even have to show its face.
Our IT guy came into the break room where I was toasting a bagel with my iPod earbuds disappearing into my shirt. (He knew, just from the color of the wires evidently, what it was-- even though the iPod was hidden in my shirt pocket.) With a vague smirk and just a hint of a sneer, he asked me if there was any way to use those things with anything other than a Mac yet?
"Well, yeah," I told him. "You always could."
I explained about XPlay and EphPod, which he apparently hadn't heard of. "And anyway, there's now a real native Windows version available."
But, of course, he balked again at the fact that it was FireWire, which means that he'd have to get a FireWire card to use it. "I just haven't had anything yet that needs one," he said.
"What-- not a camcorder, even?"
"Oh, no, nothing like that." (This from a cutting-edge techy-geek type. I always have to remind myself that just because we've had FireWire for like three years now, and been making DV movies for about that long, it's still the realm of the idle rich on the Windows side.)
"But," he continued, "an iPod might just be reason enough for me to get one."
The peer pressure is impossible to withstand...
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11:35 - That's that good ol' entrepreneurial spirit...
http://www.origamiboulder.com/
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A few days ago, Corsair the Rational Pirate pointed me towards this site, which in the grand old tradition of Ninja Burger and the "totally sweet" Real Ultimate Power Ninja site, sticks a shuriken in the eye of the reverent mystique of Japanese art and tradition.
It does a damned fine job of it, too. I may have to buy one of these, just to exhibit my support for this guy's spirit.
Site is beautiful
Sekimori would be proud
But-- the content? Naaah.
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| Sunday, August 11, 2002 |
02:07 - Just a little note there, Greg.
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Just caught the Greg Proops stand-up routine on Comedy Central. It was kinda subdued; true, he was following a completely frenetic ball of crack named Mario something who struck me as being like a ferret racing in circles around a room while constantly emitting an ear-splitting Gilbert Gottfried scream-- but somehow I got the feeling Greg was expecting to get more laughs than he actually got. Perhaps he's just been doing Whose Line? for too long, and he's lost the touch for stand-up. Ah well-- it was still a very entertaining set.
There was one bit of material, though, that I had to raise a finger and clear my throat at, though I know that doing so would have effectively eliminated his ability to do that series of jokes. This was his thing about California's ban on smoking in bars.
Greg's point was, "Hey! This is a bar we're talking about here! These people are already involved in consuming a lifespan-shortening chemical as quickly as possible in the hopes of making unprotected sexual contact with someone they've never met before. What the hell's the point of making them make sure that while they're destroying their livers and making fools of themselves before staggering out to their cars with anonymous floozies on their arms, they're not going to end up with lung cancer on top of it all? They're not worried about second-hand smoke!"
Uh... no, but the bartender is. And the waitresses. That is who the law is for.
Otherwise, yeah, it was funny. But I'm just sayin'.
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22:45 - I'm preordering this book...
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0802/080202.html#081202
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Great payoff on today's Bleat. It's long and artsy, and you have to stick with it-- but it ends in a LOL. (Not a LOLOLOL or a LOOOOL or an OMFG, but still-- excellent.)
I wonder why I haven't picked up the print version of the Gallery of Regrettable Food yet. I've been showing it to people with great relish since I first discovered it in about 1997. I should get me a copy.
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16:59 - Uh, guys...
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The latest charming missive from the Ar-Rahman list, which hardly requires comment (not that I can refrain from it):
Now, again, I realize that this list is about preaching-to-the-choir. But listen, guys: not just Allah, but the world is watching you now, very damned closely. And stuff like this does not exactly drum up sympathy. You don't get to mass-mail pictures of Sharon as a baby-murdering butcher-shop owner dealing in human sausages, and then take horrified offense at a picture like this, no matter who created it. (I would venture to guess that the Koran has unflattering things to say about hypocrisy, just like eveybody else does.) And it does not raise sympathy for your cause either to lead it off with Juden Raus slogans.
("From a jewish site". Yeah? Which one? Got a URL? Any facts at all?)
I've got news for you: it's not just "Jews and Indians" who are creating pictures like this. They're not the only ones who are desperate to see an end to this bloodthirsty Wahhabi madness.
Besides, in the midst of all this shrill virulent indignance on the list, I have yet to see a single condemnation of violence committed by Muslims, let alone of 9/11. Which, I hardly need to explain, actually happened. The Ka'aba is still standing. It's only because of the West's common human decency and unwillingness to damage sites of religious significance or antiquity that that is the case, but I hope would-be mass terrorists are bearing in mind that such decency is bound to have limits. Should another 9/11 happen, the scenario this image depicts might well become a very real and justified measure in the minds of Americans (and even Europeans, if they get attacked, perish the thought). No matter how many US cities they manage to take out with suitcase nukes or anthrax, all it takes is a press of a button to send a cruise missile into Mecca. I hope that keeps them up at night.
I wonder if the Islamic world has at least accepted that Muslims were actually behind the 9/11 attacks, and that it wasn't just a Jewish plot as they so stubbornly maintained for months afterwards?
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| Saturday, August 10, 2002 |
19:33 - So who's been screwing with the lighting out there?
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I don't often drive westward through San Jose towards work in the late summer evening, as the sun is descending into the Peninsula mountains, so I don't know if it's always like this. If it is, I should do it more often.
It's been very hot all day today-- well over 100, and still and close, unlike the usual windy summer days we usually get around here-- carrying the haze out of the valley and drawing humidity away from one's skin, so if it's 95 out you can just open a window and you'd have an occasional gusty breeze all day that prevents the heat from being uncomfortable.
But today's heat was different; it was the kind of heat in which the entire color of the sky changes. And not in a Midwestern, opaque whiteness kind of way; it was sort of a dingy, smoky, gray veil over the sun. Looking towards the mountains and the lines of trees, I kept expecting to see them shrouded by a murky brown LA-like haze. But I didn't. The sun was falling on leaves and turning them to clear gold. It was reflecting off buildings and railing the contrast slider, enhancing the vividness of everything, even though the sky itself seemed as dull as though we were in the middle of an eclipse.
There was a big, heavy, ponderous swath of cloud across the horizon, right above the mountains, that the sun was punching through on it way down as I made my way westward towards it. It seemed to be in one fringe or the other the whole time. And the result was that the long evening shadows on the ground blended into gold and bright blue rather than into grays and browns. The sun has by now emerged out the bottom of those clouds, and the colors are returning to something more closely approaching normal, but I don't think it'll get all the way there-- the air is just in a really weird mood today.
Ah well. I've spent the day recording Invader Zim episodes and watching the Season Two DVDs of the Simpsons, so I figured I'd better get in to work or else I'd feel humomgously guilty about having wasted a day with a sky like this.
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| Friday, August 9, 2002 |
21:42 - The Almighty Dollar
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So I was just watching a Dell commercial selling PowerEdge servers, in which they're (naturally) put forth as the premier examples of 1U/2U server hardware; the servers in the ad that the IT person so wisely replaced are now employed as the components of a BattleBots-esque mechanical free-for-all in the parking lot. For the insight it takes to buy the cheapest solutions in the world, from the ubiquitous name Dell which covers him in the event of any mishaps, he's the Man of the Hour.
Well, guys, I've now had some experience with PowerEdge servers, and I feel I can with some authority state that price isn't everything-- as I've said here so many times before-- even if it comes from a company that's big enough to sue if the products turn out to suck.
I installed a PowerEdge 1500 server into our data-center about six months ago. About three weeks after installation, the gigabit Ethernet card failed; the kernel kept overflowing with checksum errors, and eventually it stopped responding altogether and I had to plug the server into another switch via one of its 10/100 cards.
This week, I discovered that now it no longer can see that it has a CD-ROM drive. (At least it had the decency to say "No CD-ROM drive found" at the BIOS screen, where it also helpfully told me "The cover was previously removed" and forced me to press F1 to continue, not that this cleared the error or anything.) This caused me some displeasure as I tried to install the Legato client via the installation CD. But again, not fatal, as I was able to copy the RPM off the disc (using another machine) and FTP it over. I'm starting to get the feeling that this machine is slowly deteriorating, component by component, before it has even reached a year of age.
Couple this with the fact that in our entire data-center full of rack-mount PowerEdge servers, each of which has an intricate front-panel locking mechanism which anchors in on one side and snaps into place on the other, and then locks in via a notch in the server's body when you turn the key, not a single machine has the front panel on properly. Every last one has been sort of awkwardly smushed into place and left there, in the hopes that nobody jostles the cabinet and all the front panels fall off. The panels are designed so ingeniously that even with the best efforts of our entire IT department and myself, it's impossible to get them attached properly.
The IBM NetFinity servers that we used to use are so much better, in almost every way. No brain-dead front panel. No self-induced decrepitude in component quality. Cable-management arms and sturdy rails. (Hell, if it had a few more drive bays, a separate IDE channel per drive, an AGP4x slot, dual gigabit Ethernet, hot-swappable fans, and about half the heat signature and power consumption, it might even pass for an Xserve.)
But no, the Dell costs like $100 less, so we have to standardize on it instead.
I am so sick of this world being run by the attitude that quality and features are immaterial compared to cost, even (and especially) in the context of business. It's so much more effective, after all, to buy whatever's cheapest and then relegate the recovery from any potential failures to the legal department. Hey, you might even get rich off a settlement from the vendor! How's that for a one-time receivable to list in a non-pro-forma quarterly report?
It's sickening enough when private individuals play the hot-coffee-in-the-lap card. But it's loathsome when entire industry sectors base their entire business plans on it.
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| Thursday, August 8, 2002 |
01:40 - "What is possible has now exceeded what is desirable"
http://www.mobileblocker.com/info/information.asp
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That's a quote from Bob Lutz of GM, in reference to monstrously overdone pieces of in-car technology like BMW's atrocious iDrive system, on which I just heard a scathing piece as part of tonight's All Things Considered on NPR (it's terribly funny to listen to, and I recommend it).
And now that we've got more technology than we know what to do with, particularly in the case of things like cell phones, we're as a society going to have to face a decision sooner or later: at what point does technology and its seductive charms become too convenient? At what point does one invoke Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' statement that "My right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins"-- and apply it to technology that provides convenience to one person at the expense of the comfort or well-being or safety of another?
I'm speaking, of course, of cell-phones. Having just sat through a staff meeting in which I counted an average of one ringing phone per ninety seconds, some of which were from the same person, most of which were loud, with a ring tone seemingly selected to be as piercing and bone-grindingly annoying as possible-- I would like to know when there will be some actual consequences laid upon the people who profess to "own" those phones (rather than being owned by them). Sure, I'm aware that there are many people who use cell-phones responsibly and sanely. I'm sure there are also plenty of Muslims who are non-violent and don't want to stab Jews in the eye. But in both those cases, I insist that the onus lies upon that "silent majority" to lay the smack down on the vocal and hideous minority, to let the world know that these kinds of statistical outliers are not to give a bad name to the community as a whole. (And if that doesn't happen, sometimes there's no choice but to assume that the only voice we hear representing such a community is the only one that there is to listen to.)
For instance, one could take the example of cell-phone use in cars. Some states (such as New York) have already passed laws forbidding people to use phones in cars without some kind of hands-free gear; but Paul tells me that such laws are so lax in their enforcement that they may as well not be there. Some might argue that "Hey, what's the big deal?" Whereas to me, it suggests that if the law is there but it's not acting as a deterrent, then someone needs to be made an example of.
Why, I might ask, is cell-phone use in cars not treated with the same severity as DUI? To my mind, it's the same exact thing. Driving Under the Influence. The implication is of "alcohol" or "drugs", but let's not be pedantic about this: the spirit of the DUI laws are to prevent people from driving after or while committing a willful act which actively hampers their own abilities to drive a car safely. And talking on a cell-phone while driving is at least as distracting as being drunk. I'm sure any highway patrolman who has overseen his share of T-bone accidents at intersections where the person on the phone "didn't see the other guy coming", or who has shoveled up one too many SUVs that have drifted off into the median of the freeway while the driver was busy yapping, and jerked his wheel back onto the road, causing the vehicle to fishtail and the wheels to knuckle over and the car to roll side-over-side into the grass, would be all to ready to agree. Particularly considering the number of the latter such cases in which the driver, strapped into his or her seat upside-down in the supine car, is still talking on the phone when the cop reaches the door.
I'm honestly interested in knowing: what makes non-hands-free in-car cell-phone use different from DUI? If the answer is "nothing", then why aren't the laws enacted and enforced in such a way that makes it no less undesirable or risky to do it than to drink and drive? And if the answer is something like "C'mon-- you can't honestly expect people to give up their cell-phones!", then I would ask to see some proceedings from the 30s, or whenever it was when the modern DUI/DWI laws were solidified; I would be not at all surprised to discover that there was a significant, vocal outcry from motorists: "Hey, c'mon! You can't seriously be asking us to give up drinking in the car, or driving home plastered from the bar! What kind of fascist government would ask such things of us?"
Shifting gears for a moment-- iDrive represents a forward-thinking step toward the greater integration of technology into our cars, for the betterment of drivers everywhere. But as it's implemented by BMW, it's a joke-- and not a very funny one. It's easy to see what the designers were trying to do-- they thought, "Hey-- we've got computers that can watch DVDs and download the Encyclopedia Brittanica at the same time; in-car technology surpassed that of the lunar lander so long ago it's a wonder our cars can't fly to the moon themselves. So why the hell are we still making people fiddle with specialized, one-function knobs and buttons? We should make everything work like a computer!" ... Except that nobody seems to understand that operating a computer, with a mouse-like device and contextual menus and no tactile feedback, is a process that requires cognitive processing and complete visual attention. (This is acceptable at a desk because we can afford to devote our whole attention to navigating an operating system. But in a car, it can be fatal.) The human body is wired to understand spatial relationships, rather than abstract algorithms such as "last-modified date" (as in the much-ballyhooed and now much-discredited "Diary metaphor") or "functional groupings" (as with iDrive's hierarchical menuing system). We like to be able to reach for controls that we know how to operate without looking, or even thinking. In fact, that's crucial to survival in a car.
Some things that were designed in the 1930s had better UI principles that things that are being designed in 2002. That's because sometimes, the best ideas are the first ones we come up with-- despite the lack of certain kinds of technology which could have influenced those ideas.
That's why, for instance, one can't argue that cell-phones are perfectly safe because pilots have been flying airplanes for decades while talking on the radio, and that's never caused a crash. No-- it's a totally different thing. Airplanes and their radios were designed to work together-- so that the reaction time required in flying a plane would intermingle with the terse command language flowing back and forth; pilots don't have to react nearly as fast as motorists do, and when they do, their attention is focused on the radio conversation and the plane's controls as a unit. It's all the same machine. It's designed to channel one's attention efficiently toward where it needs to be. But automobile controls are a technology and an operation paradigm that precede cell-phones by a hundred years. The cadences of movement and the rhythms of reaction are incompatible. They don't play nice together.
But cell-phones are cool, and they're so hard to say no to. The race to put more and more functionality into phones is every bit as intense and fast-moving as the race to add features to Netscape back in 1996. There seems to be no limit to the things we can do, or the functions that a cell-phone can serve.
But in the midst of that race, it's very easy to lose sight of those basic tenets of civilized living that have served us so well for so long: public courtesy, driving safety, and the idea that talking on the phone-- to someone who can't see when someone is about to merge into your lane or when your wheels are about to stray onto the shoulder, and therefore doesn't know to shut up so you can concentrate on driving-- is something that should occur when you're stationary and in private.
The ability to break those guidelines of common sense does not confer a license to do so.
If I could get one of these MobileBlocker devices to carry around with me, I would. And if Apple were to release something called iMeltYourCellPhone (regardless of how unlikely it would be that Sony-Ericsson would be a strategic partner), I'd preorder the first one off the assembly line.
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21:08 - Top off your iPod's coolness tank
http://www.apple.com/ipod/download/
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The iPod firmware update to version 1.2 just came out today, and it rocks da house.
Now that iTunes can keep track of the play-count and last-played time of your songs, the iPod can now do the same thing-- play a bunch of music as you ramble around the town, and then when you sync it back up to your Mac, all the last-played times and play-counts are updated in iTunes to reflect what you've heard via the iPod as well as what you've played on the local machine. I love that. (It will also apparently handle Audible books-on-tape by keeping track of where you paused a file mid-track, then resume it there when you use your iPod-- and then update it back to your PC when you re-sync it.)
Other new updated features include support for the new Sound Check thing, so your ears won't get blown out by an MP3 that's recorded at a level twice as high as the previous track you'd listened to. It also has a new Clock screen, and a Date/Time setting-- so it can do the last-played times properly, as well as to support the also-new Calendar feature. This doesn't serve as a PDA-style appointment-reminder yet, because iCal isn't ready until next month; but until then, we've now got a cool little pocket calendar, which is non-trivial functionality.
It's also been reorganized slightly-- there's now a "Browse" option that gets you to the Artists/Albums/Songs/Genres/Composers selection menu (the latter two are new), and there are new updated graphics that make it clearer when it's not safe to disconnect the iPod from FireWire and when it's okay. There also seem to be a lot more languages supported.
This stuff's just so damn cool. Having Mac hardware is like having a car with a gas tank that you get to fill up with software coolness every few months; just when you've gotten used to what functionality you have in the current versions, along comes an update that's always geared more towards making it even more fun and cool than before, rather than just fixing bugs. It really does feel like my love for technology gets a new booster shot every time they do something like this.
Today at lunch, I was in a car with a friend who was searching for a song on the Discman-like MP3/CD player that was in the car. Because the player could only sort by filename, and because the guy didn't know whether the filename began with "Azar Habib" or "Hatten är Din" or what, he spent a good ten minutes skipping around blindly looking for it.
I couldn't resist peeking my iPod out of my pocket, so I could point out how much less tedious and more fun it is to be able to paw through one's songs on the basis of artist name, song title, genre, album, composer, or playlist-- without the slightest regard for what the filenames or folder names containing the actual MP3 files might be. His reaction was a pained whimper. "Everybody has an iPod except for me!"
(He also mentioned how software like WinAmp is supposed to let you manipulate the ID3 tags and sort the songs by them, but it doesn't often work very well-- some files simply won't let you edit the fields. Whereas with iTunes, it's simply a matter of clicking on a field and typing. And it even updates the filenames and folders accordingly, now-- just in case anyone cares to delve into the filesystem for some reason. But otherwise it's a purely ID3-tag-driven interface.)
And now that it's available for Windows too, it takes a whole lot of effort to come up with a reason to dislike the iPod.
Unless it's the FireWire issue... and now that Apple has released a free SDK for FireWire to developers of embedded devices, the counterarguments are getting thinner instead of multiplying.
Maybe I should buy stock in a clothing maker who sells shirts with breast pockets.
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18:18 - Snapz Pro X Updated
http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/utilities/snapzprox/
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For anybody who cares, Snapz Pro X-- the coolest screen-capture utility in the inner planets of this solar system-- has been updated to version 1.0.6. This version adds some interesting features like the ability to grab individual objects (e.g. windows or menus) and drop-shadow them against white, using the native Quartz window-layering APIs, as though they were displayed against a white desktop background. Perfect for things like documentation screenshots, and (heh) blog illustrations.
Like this one, in which I once again sing my praises to the way you install programs on a Mac:
(And it's not as though you have to put it in the Applications folder, either. You can put it anywhere you want. But just for neatness' sake...)
Life without a Registry. It's like lemonade on a white-sand beach.
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11:47 - Yay-- I have my camera back!
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I guess bitching really pays off.
In mid-May, my Nikon CoolPix 885 abruptly broke. I say "broke" because even though it appeared to be an unrecoverable software error of some sort (when I unplugged it from my computer one day, it said "SYSTEM ERROR" and refused to come back to life or retract its lens), when I shipped it to the repair facility they told me it required "major parts replacement" and would cost me $181. Since I didn't have the receipt and couldn't prove I was still in the warranty period, I didn't have much of a choice.
Over two months later, having spent the intervening time glumly watching their Service page report my case as being stuck in PARTS HOLD mode and repeately trying to call them for information (being told every time that the approximate wait time was ten minutes, only to spend the subsequent hour waiting and listening to the same unchanging theme-song jingle, and never reaching a human), I finally managed to reach someone in late July. I explained that I needed this camera for a trip in August, and that although I was perhaps overly optimistic in thinking that sending it in for repair in May would give them ample time to do such a repair-- particularly considering that I was paying over a third of the camera's retail price for this service, which should have been under warranty anyway-- I'd surely waited long enough that I should have some basis for complaint by now.
Of course, none of the databases at Nikon can communicate with any of the other databases at Nikon, so the only thing the service rep could tell me that it was in PARTS HOLD. Oh, great. The only information they have in the service department is the same information we have available over the Web. (I hope she isn't just using the same website to look up the camera status as I was.)
But she said she would make a call and find out. (When I told her I needed it in mid-August, she seemed to brighten-- "Give me an exact date, and I'll put it on here. That'll really bump up the priority.") She called back the next day to tell me that they'd been expecting a new shipment of parts from Japan, but it hadn't arrived the previous month, and it hadn't arrived this month either. So they were starting to ship out replacement units to customers who had cameras with pending parts service.
She called back again the following Monday (that would be this week) to tell me that she didn't have any new information, but that they would ship out a new camera to me as soon as possible. I guess having that specific date on the work order really does expedite things.
Because today there was a box sitting on my chair. A brand-new Coolpix 885. Huzzah!
It seems to be a little bit cooler than it was before, too. I think this model is nearing the end of its lifespan, and they're sweetening the deal a bit so they can clear out stock. For instance, the box now includes a rechargeable battery and charger-- something that would have cost me about $120 extra if I'd bought it with the old camera. And there seem to be a few new features in the camera's OS-- like the ability to order prints directly from the CompactFlash card (you do all the print-ordering stuff right in the camera, it stores those settings on the card, and then you take the card to the photo-finisher where he plugs it into a machine and out come prints). Plus I now have a redundant USB cable (ferrite beads and all) and power cable, so I can use it at work. I think I ended up getting a pretty sweet deal out of all this.
Oh, and one final note:
The slip on the left is a release note regarding Mac OS X. The one on the right is a release note regarding Windows XP.
The OS X one says that the bundled "Nikon View 5" software "may not function as expected" on a dual-processor Power Mac G4. It says to run it in OS 9 instead. (Shyeah, right-- I'll just use iPhoto.)
The Windows XP one says that you'd better not use the operating system's built-in Rotate functions, in the Thumbnail View mode, because doing so will blank out all the EXIF image meta-data-- shutter speed, aperture size, exposure time, and so on. So will choosing "Simple" from the Summary tab of the Properties dialog box for any of the files-- it will rewrite the file and erase all the associated meta-data. Yeah, great implementation there, guys.
You're also not supposed to format the CompactFlash card under Windows XP, or it will no longer be compatible with the camera-- you'll have to reformat it using the camera's OS.
...Tell me again which platform is supposed to be more hassle-free?
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09:33 - I was not aware of that.
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Apparently, we're all Muslims-- we just don't know it. See, you don't convert to Islam-- you revert.
Salaam.. everyone person born is a muslim at birth, since it is the true religion. After time, whether it be parents, where we live whatever, that changes, and people have then conform to their different religions. So I have reverted back to Islam. Most people that I have talked to, do not like the word converted. That means you made an entire switch, which is not true. Since you start off as Muslim, you are just reverting or coming back to it. I truly hope i have said this correctly. If I have not please forgive me and correct me.
Boy... the things I learn about myself from this Ar-Rahman list.
Seriously, it's every bit as important to hear this kind of stuff as it is to hear the intelligent discourse from sane Muslims who have a grip on reality. We can't blind ourselves to either side.
By the way-- yeah, I know this kind of thinking is hardly unique to Islam. I've heard the same kinds of things out of the mouths of everybody from Baptists to Branch Davidians. I just find it awfully silly, though, regardless of the person's background who's saying it.
I spent my entire freshman year arguing with my devoutly Christian roommate, plastering written re-re-rebuttals all over the interior of our room and spilling over outside into the hallway. (We never actually discussed it face to face-- we just posted these long dissertations at each other and never mentioned them out loud.) One thing he said was that "Atheists don't go to Hell-- they just return to the dirt from which they came." In other words, you had to be a Christian and an apostate in order to go to Hell.
Interesting fairy-tale semantics, but that's all it is. To someone who doesn't subscribe to them.
Besides, Aziz points out that there's a "No compulsion in religion" clause in Islam that this person seems to be ignoring, and a verse (109:6) that says "To you be your Faith, and to me mine." So, well, it's not like contradictory behavior to what's in the text is unique to Islam either; but at least this person's either wrong, or simply walled off by context. And either way, it's just wordplay.
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09:21 - Well well well.
http://www.mdronline.com/mpf/conf.html
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Confirmation of Rumor Time: IBM has just made it official. They're prepping a new 64-bit PPC chip. Who could this possibly be for?
As reported by MaCNN:
IBM is expected to disclose the technical details of its new 64-bit PowerPC microprocessor designed for desktops and entry-level servers at the upcoming Microprocessor Forum in October. The design, based on the Power4 design which the company uses in high-end servers, is an 8-way superscalar design that fully design supports Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP). The chip also has an AtliVec-like vector processing unit that implements over 160 specialized vector instructions and implements a system interface capable of up to 6.4GB/s.
In other words: Toodles, Moto. <Austin Powers theme plays>
I like the sound of this.
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| Wednesday, August 7, 2002 |
22:40 - Did I really just see that?
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I just saw a Barbie doll commercial on TV. At the end of the ad, they mentioned the Barbie website and the stuff that you can do on it if you're the kind of kid who would find such things compelling. Naturally, such a pitch has to have a disclaimer on it that says you should be over 18 to go online and gain access to the site, a stricture traditionally conveyed with statements like "Your parents put it together" and "You must have your parents' permission to visit the website".
But this one-- though I only saw it for a fraction of a second, I'm sure I saw it correctly. It said:
"Help Mom or Dad to get online."
Genius.
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22:37 - Things that defy description
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/wtc.html
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Has this site already been discussed and beaten to death in the blog world? And I'm just late to the game? Or is it actually enjoying a wave of popularity?
The site, called "The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism", comes to us as the "Awful Link of the Day" from somethingawful.com. It seems to be the definitive 9/11 conspiracy-theory treatise, purporting to explain how the whole thing was a massive hoax perpetrated by the CIA, the top-level government, and the Jews. The goal of all this is hard to discern-- the main thrust of the site appears to be to discredit the idea that Islamic terrorists hijacked the planes, and instead that the attacks were carried out by remote-controlled drone planes, demolition bombs, high explosives (in the case of the Pentagon), or perhaps even a high-powered laser weapon. But if anything in the site proposes any kind of goal to this whole conspiracy thing, it's the closing paragraphs:
And what if the U.S. warmongers achieve their aims of gaining control of all sources of oil in Asia (and the Middle East and North Africa), and of the mineral wealth of Central Asia? Will the Europeans, Japanese and Chinese feel secure in the knowledge that the United States will surely sell them whatever they need to maintain their industrial economies — and their military capabilities? (The Russian and Chinese leaders surely understand the long-term threat to their national sovereignty, and are acting accordingly.)
Or is there something even more sinister going on? Is the goal "at the highest level" the extinction of the human species? If so, will the American people prove to be "useful idiots" facilitating the attainment of this goal? Or, on the contrary, might they yet awaken from their ignorance, their stupidity, their greed and their egoism, take a hard look at themselves, understand what their lying, vicious, rapacious, hypocritical government is doing in the name of "freedom and democracy", and rein in and reform that government, reconstitute their nation as a republic as the authors of the Constitution intended, and save the world, as they believe (or used to believe) is their manifest destiny?
Ah, good. The goal of this conspiracy is to enslave and/or exterminate the human race. Why this would benefit anybody more than a prosperous and free society (like the one we have now) would is left unclear.
Read through this page, if you feel like shaking your head in disbelief at something, but you want a change of pace from the current Jew-stabbing-teens message boards and would rather see a Libertarian-who-gives-Libertarians-a-bad-name set of allegations supported by Chomsky quotes and barbs at "the Jew-controlled media", hosted in Switzerland because-- well, it's Switzerland.
I could say a lot more about this, but... it's really not worth my time.
Draw your own conclusions.
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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, doubl | | |
Brian Tiemann
