| Sunday, March 2, 2003 |
01:22 - Just wondering...
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/03/Avictoryintheshadowwar.shtml
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... Aren't devout Muslims supposed to wear full beards?
I'm just sayin', is all.
UPDATE: Marko notes: "Nevermind that, I'm just freaked that Ron Jeremy is the Al Qaeda mastermind!"
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00:17 - Dilemmas
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On the way home from the dog show near Fresno, I saw a line of windmills on the ridge of hills lining the pass traversed by Highway 152 from the Central Valley over to Gilroy. A few of the mills were turning lazily, but not many appeared to be doing much good.
And it reminded me: one thing about the modern "liberal" mindset that must be really galling for those who espouse it is that so many of the morally pure, honest liberal causes so frequently clash directly with other morally pure, honest liberal causes. When this happens, you've got two crusades at odds with each other, both of which spring from the same political genesis, with the other side of the traditional political spectrum left scratching its head outside the loop.
Like, for instance, wind power. A group will lobby to get windmills installed on every ridgetop in the Coastal Ranges in the Bay Area region. It's unclear whether these windmills will ever produce anywhere near enough energy to even register on the grid, but that's beside the point: it's free, clean, safe energy, and that's all that really matters.
Except that it kills birds. If I recall correctly, there's a major problem with power-generating windmills, in that birds (endangered ones in particular, it wouldn't surprise me) seem to fly into the whirling blades with astonishing frequency, getting scimitarred out of the sky with deadly efficiency. And so the liberal animal-rights groups spring up, ready to do battle-- with the liberal clean-energy force that got wind power instituted in the first place. Their enemies are their own ideological compatriots. Who will win? In either case, is it a victory or a defeat for liberal values?
The same goes for the flap a year or two ago over the sale of live turtles in shops in Chinatown in San Francisco. Traditional Chinese food stores would sell turtles to customers by hacking off the shells while the turtles were still alive. Cruel, perhaps, but it's the traditional Chinese way of doing things. It's culture, dammit-- and non-American culture to boot, which makes it worthy of protection in its most pristine form, and defense against the corrupting and miscegenating influence of American life. We can't have that, no sir.
... Except when it's animal rights we're talking about, in which case all bets are presumably off. Which liberal cause wins? Multiculturalism or animal rights? Which side should a good liberal choose?
I keep noticing these little dichotomies, and I wonder whether there's a corresponding kind of tendency on the conservative side-- I can't think of one offhand, but there must be something. If we accept the structural symmetry of left- and right-wing politics, there have got to be analogs on both sides, including these kinds of second-order phenomena. Conservative causes must clash from time to time-- business freedom versus parochialism, for instance, or patriotic fundamentalism versus government non-intrusiveness in private matters, or something. I'm sure these causes can be fit together in ways that develop the same sorts of schisms. I'm sure it happens every day.
But for some reason, it's the do-gooding leftist causes that seem to really invite disbelief and ridicule when they collide.
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23:46 - It's funniest late at night
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Van and I were just wrapping up an evening while listening to the History Channel in the next room talking about the Jesuit priests and their role as the "stormtroopers of the Counter-Reformation". It said that the Jesuits led lives that obeyed the three classical virtues: poverty, chastity, and obedience.
But we both heard it the same way, and repeated it uproariously back to each other simultaneously: Poverty, chastity, and obesity.
Boy, now, wouldn't that have made history more interesting. I'm sorry, I can't-- I've taken a vow of obesity!
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| Saturday, March 1, 2003 |
22:04 - Light Blogging
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Yeah, it's another of those "Sorry I haven't written anything for the past couple of days" posts. And I'm afraid it's not going to get much better anytime in the very near future, either-- this weekend I'm not spending a whole helluva lot of time at home. Good for my sanity, bad for blog. That's life, I guess.
Friday I spent largely in re-coding the image approval system for the Fan-Art Archive, so that now the "holding area" is a lot more tolerant of me stepping out of my duty for several days-- uploaded files have guaranteed unique filenames now, instead of the not-really-unique-but-close-enough scheme that cgi-lib uses (plus my half-assed extension to it that tries to avoid collisions). Now the info goes into an actual database table, too, instead of flat info files, so once again we're closer to sanity. Still not there yet, but every little bit helps.
And I also spent the day thinking that well, y'know, we've just about got to the point where it's all been said. The troops are in place; war is a go/no-go decision and a phone call away, and everybody has said his or her piece. Everybody's opinions are known. From protesters to bloggers to heads of state, everybody's staked their claim to a particular piece of the moral riverbank, every conceivable opinion has been registered and rebutted and counterargued, and all that remains now is to fight or not fight.
We've heard "Let's Roll" and its equivalent from Den Beste and Lileks and Reynolds and many others. The new moon is upon us. There's word of another big attack being planned for somewhere in Asia (probably Afghanistan, but you never know), to coincide with the Iraq invasion, and we've all braced for impact. We've stocked up our survival pantries. We've passed around essays explaining why not to panic in the event of an attack of any sort from chemical or biological all the way on up to a nuke. The initial cold pit-of-the-stomach dread has given way, at least among my friends and associates and myself, to a kind of grim que será, será. Bring it on. And for the love of God, let's get it over with.
Anyway-- that's a major part of why I haven't felt much like writing lately. I'm mostly just holding my breath-- doing my best to enjoy a nice pleasant day like today, exploring the southern end of Almaden Expressway and Camden Avenue with my parents, having some great Teppan food cooked by a Benihana alum, and puttering about with plans for the new house and how the landscaping will work and where we can go for walks once we've moved and how to wire the TV cable. I find myself wanting to smirk wryly at how ".Hack" is an MMORPG in which you play an MMORPG-- isn't that like taking a drug which makes you hallucinate about taking drugs?-- than to speculate about whether we'll be at war in 24 hours or 48. It seems futile now. We've all spoken. The powers that be have heard everybody's voices and weighed them against their own data, and it's their decision to make now. It's out of our hands.
So tomorrow I'll be getting up early to head over to Fresno with Lance; it'll be for a dog show, not for a lame excuse to get out of the Bay Area during a tense time or anything. I'm going to get up at 7:00 AM because it'll be a distraction, something I'm all too grateful for this weekend.
UPDATE: Yes, yes, I know .Hack is actually an RPG about playing an MMORPG. But c'mon, it was funnier my way.
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| Thursday, February 27, 2003 |
20:17 - Raed it and weep
http://www.dear_raed.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_dear_raed_archive.html#89502772
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Raed has the inside scoop on just how grateful the Iraqi man-on-the-street is to have those Western "Human Shields" running around:
One of the latest group to arrive in Baghdad, mostly Europeans, were welcomed to the Rasheed hotel , which is like the Waldorf Astoria of Baghdad, no other hotel is more expensive and exclusive. All of them were wearing T-shirts with what was supposed to be "Human Shields" in Arabic, but they had it all wrong it said "Adra'a Basharia" instead of "Duru'u Basharia" which got them a few giggles and a new name; they are now the "Adra'a" just to show how clueless they are. A lot of funny Arabic these days with all these HS's running around, a van with a foreign number plate standing near the ministry of information has "No War" written all over it in many languages the biggest in Arabic. All over the front of it is says "La Harba" which is wrong and sounds like a night club, my cousin thought that was cute. Anyway, what really got my goat this time was finding out that they get food coupons worth 15,000 dinars per meal, 3 for every day.fifteen thousan.
Do you know how much the monthly food ration for a 4 person family is worth, for a whole month not per meal (real cost, not subsidized) ? 30,000 dinars, if you get someone to buy the bad rice they give you for a decent price. 15,000. What are they eating? A whole lamb every meal? Let's put this within context. Today in the morning Raed, our friend G. and I went for a late big breakfast we had 2 tishreeb bagilas (can't explain that, you have to be an Iraqi to get it otherwise it sounds inedible) and a makhlama (which is an omelet with minced meat), tea, fizzy drinks and argila afterwards (the water-pipe-thingy) all for 4,750 dinars, and we were not going super cheap. A lunch in any above-average restaurant will not be more than 8,000 dinars and that includes everything. 15,000 thousand is a meal in a super expensive restaurant in Arasat Street, in one of those places that really almost have an "only foreigners allowed, no Iraqis welcome unless you are UN staff" sign on it. I will stop calling them tourist when they stop taking all this pampering from the Iraqi government. Did I tell you about the tours? Today was Babylon day. You are really missing it, the cheapest way to do the Iraq trip you have wanted to do but were too scared.
I love it. I wonder how these guys like wearing what amounts to Engrish t-shirts -- 100% Boys For Cotton Atlas! I just wish Raed had explained what "Adra'a Basharia" actually translates to.
Also make sure to check out his photos of Baghdad. I wonder how many of us have any idea what it actually looks like?
UPDATE: A reader points out that in this story, this line appears: "She was named al-Adra'a because Fatima never lost her virginity." So does "Adra'a Basharia" mean "Human Virgins", or what?
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09:21 - Cologne
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/news/021215colon.html
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I don't have a word to say about this.
Seriously. I can't think of thing one.
UPDATE: J Greely does, however: "Worst first date ever!"
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| Wednesday, February 26, 2003 |
17:26 - Well, okay then...
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/02/26/wtc.finalist.ap/index.html
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So this is the new World Trade Center.
Libeskind's design beat the THINK team's "World Cultural Center" plan, which envisioned two 1,665-foot latticework towers straddling the footprints of the original towers.
The new building is planned to be taller than the trade center towers, which briefly stood as the world's tallest at 1,350 feet. Libeskind's tower also would surpass Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world.
I guess it could be worse. And for what it's worth, I think I could get to like this-- at least, more so than the THINK Team's nightmarish "Skeletons in the Sky" vision.
As I've said before, I would have much preferred something big, substantial, eye-popping-- a new masthead for the nation. Maybe not something as brash as WTC2002, but something along those lines.
But they seem to have gone for something jaggy and wispy, ghostly and fragmented, like a broken window or a collapsed volcano. I mean, yes, it's tall-- at least, that one spire is. But I have to wonder just what the inspiration was for this kind of design.
I hope it's not just that this would be harder to hit with a plane.
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14:34 - Gee, mister, you're a hero
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On a mailing list I'm on, one of the members posted a question inquiring whether being gay made one ineligible for the draft.
A number of people replied, most with valuable and interesting information regarding the nature of the draft, the "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy, and how the various aspects of both could and could not interrelate.
Then the original poster responded:
wow, didnt expect such lengthy replies, thanks to all who did reply. its very valuable to know. i know that if the draft ever does come back they wont take me for various reasons, mainly because id disable myself before i go out and slaughter ppl because the gov says so.
Wow, how brave and selfless of you.
Fortunately for you, there are many people (some of which are on this very list) who are willing to take those bullets for you.
(I didn't want to air this on this list itself, but I had to get it out somewhere.)
I mean, look-- I'm no fan of war, and I don't look with longing at the lines of marching-and-heiling soldiers anonymously striding off to their state-ordered deaths in 1940s Europe. It's not my ambition to go out and take human lives purely on the say-so of a government that may or may not have my best interests at heart.
But there's conscientious objection, and then there's deliberately walling yourself off from reality. In another time, I might have been a peacenik taking whatever measure I thought necessary to avoid being sent to the front lines in Vietnam. But how determined are these people to prove to themselves that 9/11 changed nothing, that the world not only isn't fundamentally a different place, it's more the same now than ever?
I'm starting to think that 9/11 took a gouge so deep into America's collective psyche that we as a people are desperately avoiding having to look our ideological enemy in the face-- and in so doing, we deny that it exists. It's such a huge elephant-in-the-living-room that we're puttering around in the kitchen or the garage, fussing over dinner or the car, rather than even having to silently make room for the pachyderm on the couch.
There's a big task ahead of us; we've known this ever since we saw that smoke plume on CNN, but we've buried it. And now we're so intent upon keeping it buried, so we don't have to face up to it, that we're willing to take to the streets in jaw-dropping numbers and with next to zero provocation, especially compared to what was going on in, say, 1973. I mean, let's have a little perspective here. No Americans are being drafted. Our armed forces are entirely comprised of people who volunteered. Our enemy is a real, live bad guy, the world agrees from pole to pole. We are an aggrieved party, having suffered a dire attack, and the perpetrators remain at large with sources of funding and potential sources of weaponry still intact. This isn't some nebulous far-off political stunt, conscripting unwilling American youths in order to fight a proxy of a far-off "Red" menace that most of the country has stopped believing is a threat anyway. It's real this time, and it's right here. It's in our backyard. And yet we have Hollywood stars lining up to be human shields at Iraqi military targets?
How did the country that built its entire modern identity upon its victory over the Nazis ever get to this stage?
People think they're too worldly and well-informed to allow such a thing as war to happen. It's the Age of the Internet, isn't it? We've all got e-mail friends in Germany and Slovenia and China, right? Wouldn't want to do anything to piss them off! After all, they're the ones who know what's best for the world-- just look at where those infomercials all say our kitchen appliances and our exercise equipment and our body-hair-removal products and our micro-coil wood-slat mattress sleep systems come from! New from Europe! And Australia! And everywhere but here!
(Never mind that in Europe, the infomercials all say "New from America!")
It's hip to denigrate your own country, no matter where you're from. Just last night, over late-night sandwiches bought for us by our manager as we worked deep into the evening, Chris mentioned the various kinds of specialty mustards he had back at home in Oz-- and he said, with considerable embarrassment, that the kind he liked best was called Australian.
Embarrassment. At speaking the name of your own country with pride in public. Believe you me, I'm quite familiar with that state of mind.
Because that's the state to which we've gotten. The successful Western nations are so self-conscious about having succeeded that they choose self-denigration rather than risk even being accused of jingoistic patriotism. "Patriotism" itself was a mildly dirty word before 9/11; it enjoyed a resurgence in the aftermath, but now we're back to encouraging tourists in France to put red maple-leaf logos on their luggage so as to avoid being spat upon in restaurants. "Patriotism is the belief that your country is superior because you happened to have been born there," one's European pen-pals sneer. And because it's wryly ironic, it must be true.
It's this same oversensitivity that leads us to accuse ourselves of Naziism for the heinous crime of waving a flag. To be a Nazi, you see, you no longer have to round up a hated minority and gas them; you no longer have to seize dictatorial power; you no longer have to burn books, censor the press, create propaganda, or imperialistically invade one's neighbor nations. All you have to do to be a Nazi is support your country. And-- shucky darn-- all you have to do in order to fight those home-grown Nazis is invent rendingly insightful parallels to demonstrate how the country is doing all those things. Hated minority? Arabs! We're torching mosques and gassing any American named Mohammed, aren't we? Sure we are. Dictatorial power? Hey, Bush wasn't even properly elected-- he seized power, and so did all those Senators last year! Censorship and propaganda? Well, hey, CNN is working from a script, and what do you think those "Army of One" ads are all about? Let's not forget those glamorous pro-war enlistment solicitations like Three Kings and Black Hawk Down. Imperialistic invasions? Do we even need to point this one out?
The first time you hear these things, even a high-schooler who spends History class peering down the neckline of the girl in front of him can identify the crucial distinctions. But the fiftieth or hundredth or ten thousandth time, the memes are too well sown throughout the public discourse for one to argue against them. Not while maintaining any hope of making headway.
We've just gotten too sophisticated for our own good. Too soaked in history and steeped in irony to take anything at face value anymore. It's all about context now, all about cute parallels and eloquent interpretation and historical-situations-with-names-insightfully-substituted. It's the age where a four-word slogan can beat a thousand-word essay in sincerity.
Because sincerity is dead.
UPDATE: Actually Chris tells me that the deal with the "Australian" mustard was that the company had created a more-or-less synthetic blend that it thought would appeal to the "Australian" palate. And much to his chagrin, he liked it. He's embarrassed that after all his talk of his Third Rule-- I am not the target audience-- he actually turned out to be the target audience.
Fie! Fie upon the mainstream!
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09:43 - In Defense of Cowboys
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The more I hear the word "cowboy" bandied around as though it's an insult, the greater becomes my compulsion to re-read the end of the Preacher series. And I tell you, these three pages-- just a few from the end, right after Jesse has finished securing justice against a double-crossing friend, killing all the bad guys, destroying a corrupt and conniving God, and winning back the love of his life-- they're looking better and better these days.
The first time I read this, I thought it was a cheap and juvenile sort of ending-- about as trite and naked as... well, as a Vertigo comic with a main character whose initials are "J.C." But on subsequent rereadings, particularly recently, it's clearer to me that it couldn't have ended any other way.
And might I add that the script is penned by Garth Ennis, an Irish fellow, whose extensive work carries a common thread of undiluted love for America-- exemplified in Preacher by his deep affection for the cowboy romance and what it really means, but in other books realized in other ways. His Superman story in Hitman must be seen to be believed, particularly now-- as the storyline revolved around a Space Shuttle accident.
An unlikely place to find an oracle, I know, but these are unusual times, are they not?
Some across the Atlantic (and here at home) misunderstand the point of America so badly as to threaten national alliances that have stood for centuries; however, it's also true that we can look to those outside our borders to appreciate what we have and what we are a lot more deeply than we ourselves do. Some people do get it.
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| Tuesday, February 25, 2003 |
16:43 - It sure looks good...
http://wonderfuldays.co.kr/english/
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There's a new animated Korean film coming out: Wonderful Days.
In the future, after the human civilization ended by war and pollution, only those few people who had the power and technology escaped the disaster.
Those people built the last human city of Ecoban.
As its energy source is the pollutant, the people of Ecoban plan to destroy the inhabitants of Marr to get more pollutant.
Standing against Ecoban is a young man who wants only to clear the skies of the clouds to show the wonderful heavens to the girl he loves.
Hmm. Well, at least it's visually a lot more interesting than "FernGully".
Cool animation style; it's like "anime grown up", with actual facial movement and fluid speech, with a fairly traditional anime-style anatomical construction and shorthand. The line quality is curious-- almost like the characters were traced in MS Paint and colored in Flash. But the CG is excellent, the production values are awesome (this is Korea's most expensive and most ambitious animated movie ever), and it looks like every bit as rich a visual experience as anything by Miyazaki. I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if he's one of this movie's director's influences, especially considering the, er, theme.
I wanna find out more about this one.
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| Monday, February 24, 2003 |
18:44 - The People Have Spoken
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/safaritabbedbrowsing.html
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It would appear that "Nick DePlume" of Think Secret has gotten his hands on a build of Safari that addresses the single biggest shortcoming complained about by Mac users accustomed to Chimera and Mozilla: tabbed browsing.
In beta 62 of Safari, which has yet to be posted for download, tabbed browsing can be activated via the hidden debug menu. Once turned on, pressing Command-T opens a new tab. In Safari, tabs are lined up in their own bar below the toolbar, much like the bookmarks bar. When the bookmarks bar is shown, the tabs are presented below it.
Sounds as though there will be several more internal betas before we get this feature in the flesh; some other items, like form autocomplete, are reported as being not-exactly-ready-for-prime-time as yet. But this is another good sign that Safari is being designed with all the consumer attention of an open-source project and all the tightly-scheduled, well-funded oomph of a commercial one. It's a brave new world out there...
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14:42 - A tremendous EXPLOSION... in timber prices
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You know-- it occurs to me, all of a sudden, that people in the Midwest are doubly lucky.
For one thing, they're not in a high terrorism risk zone to begin with.
And for another, they get thunderstorms. Like on a regular basis.
So when the air lights up outside in a BLINDING FLASH, followed almost immediately by a TEN-SECOND-LONG BOOMING CRACKLING CATACLYSM, they don't immediately wonder whether someone snuck a tactical-nuke into the Port of Oakland in a shipping container.
Sheesh. The numbing niceness of the weather around here has its downside.
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11:53 - The more things change
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Zjonni brought over a compilation trade-paperback of The Watchmen over the weekend; I'm about a third of the way into it, and it's turning out to be a fascinating period piece, quite unexpectedly. Written in 1986, gritty in its graphic Blade Runner alleyway dimness, but still evoking the 1950s with the curious pulp-comic primary colors of hair and clothes and cars and skin (since then replaced by the Vertigo comics' more subtle and mood-altering realistic earth-tones), it's a time-capsule from the days when we still worried about the Reds while snickering knowingly about McCarthyism. With characters like Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, and the Comedian-- none of whom I'd heard of before-- it's thus far a dismal and depressing tale of the death of a society's innocence and self-confidence, terrified and intimidated by superheroes rather than comforted by them. It's prescient in a way; how long would a radioactive super-being last today without attracting a class-action lawsuit from all his past sexual partners for giving them all cancer?
Anyway, one facet of the story is a strong undercurrent of liberal-vs-conservative banter between the heroes-- the kind of thing they seemed to talk about in the 80s, but which became deeply unfashionable in 90s pop-culture, only to reappear with a bang post-9/11. That's another way in which this story is a time-capsule; it's like an old acquaintance has come back for a visit, tweaking my cheek and telling me the last time he saw me I ran naked into the living room and knocked out a tooth on the wooden couch while all the houseguests clucked and fluttered.
Dr. Manhattan, one of the characters firmly in the conservative camp, made an interesting observation: since these were all superheroes whose heyday was in the early 40s, a fad begun by Siegel and Shuster but (in the comic's storyline) deeply gauche after the concentration camps were cracked open and let out the stench of real good and evil onto the world, the whole team of heroes ("masked adventurers" in those days) found themselves disillusioned and unloved by the public. In an essay about his own genesis (centered on the media's "God is real-- and he's American!"), he made a crack about the ensuing 50s: the nation's pop focus was now on beatniks and a hip-swinging subversive musician, rather than on the black-and-white world the heroes had exemplified before the war. "We fought a war for American values-- only to have the nation turn its eyes to Elvis?" was the refrain.
Fast-forward to two or three weeks ago, when Lileks called America "The Axis of Elvis". None of the "conservative" bloggers batted an eye; in fact, they rallied around it and quoted it, much as Den Beste and Sullivan and Reynolds and Johnson are doing now, gleefully co-opting as a banner a meme that was intended as a slur. If I may invoke a Simpsons quote that's too newly broadcast to have become recognizable yet: "We're the Learn to Fart state!"
But that's the thing about America, apparently. What defines us is our ability to reinvent ourselves so quickly, so readily, rejecting the mindset that came before us but unafraid to make whatever we ourselves latch onto be even more vibrant and self-defining. Elvis was a threat to the very fabric of society at first-- but rather than suppress him, we let him tear up the fabric of our society. And the result was that society knitted itself back together in a way that was more amenable to the times, rather than stretching and straining under the load of old sensibilities as well as new. We require our elder generations to keep up with the times or risk being disenfranchised, because it's the younger generations that write the social rules. Some might see that as a lack of respect for our elders, a quality that makes us contemptible in the eyes of other peoples for whom such respect is paramount. But what I think is telling about us is that for the most part, our society does adapt as it ages; it assimilates new ways of thinking and speaking. We might giggle at cell-phone ads featuring little old ladies speaking hacker-l33t or cane-leaning men conversing in fluent hip-hop 'hood, but it's less a joke than an ideal that we seem to regard with affection. We like to think of our elders relating to us on our terms; it's our preferred mode of operation, rather than idealizing relating to them on their terms.
And perhaps that's what gives us the ability to reinvent ourselves so quickly, and to redefine what "American" means-- for Elvis to go from subversive object of derision and suspicion to beloved, nostalgic national symbol in the space of twenty or thirty years. My culture, growing up, was the 80s of Nintendo and Transformers cartoons; today, that age bracket is using cellphones and listening to progressive techno and watching anime and playing DDR, and I find myself wishing I could be a part of it rather than sneering at it and popping sour grapes. (Mmmm, sour grapes.)
Does this make us any different from other countries in the world? Perhaps, if the implication is that we continue to believe that the Golden Age is in the future, and we're inching toward it every day, sometimes even leaping and flying toward it-- rather than in an imagined past, a grace from which we're falling farther with each new fad and reinvention of the world. It's certainly true that a lot of European countries have seen better days, and aren't likely to see them again if they keep on their current track; but there are other countries in the world-- among them Russia, China, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and the United States-- for whom it still feels as though the story is building to something.
There's still a good two hundred brightly colored comic pages in my right hand. The story's pretty bleak at this point, but there's plenty more on the way-- and blood or no blood, gritty alleys or no gritty alleys, sex scandals between superheroes or no sex scandals, somehow I still expect a happy ending.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste tells me that everything I expect about what's coming is wrong. Boy oh boy.
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| Saturday, February 22, 2003 |
03:29 - Scrappleface for a day
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(I hope this hasn't been done already. More to the point, I hope it doesn't suck.)
(2003-02-23) -- UN inspectors in Iraq today announced a broadening of the scope of their group's objectives. In response to new intelligence findings, according to chief inspector Hans Blix, the team of agents will no longer be looking only for biological and chemical weapons in the country; they will now also be looking for psychological, historical, and mathematical weapons, as well as a number of other varieties.
"Our sources have indicated that Saddam Hussein's ambitions in recent years to develop weapons of mass destruction have been primarily focused upon exploiting the weaknesses in the American public education system," Dr. Blix said in a press statement Saturday, after a visit to a warehouse that was rumored to house illicit Euler equations and contour integrals, but which appeared to have been hastily emptied just prior to the team's scheduled arrival, leaving only some non-specific residues at the poles. "Saddam's top scientists have apparently been hard at work developing ways to strike at Western interests using the entire spectrum of disciplines, not just the few that we have been investigating to date."
Saddam's forays into such unconventional weaponry are not new, however. Iraqi defectors have spoken on multiple occasions of secret programs to incorporate massless pulleys and frictionless surfaces into a so-called "kinematic bomb", and there are uncorroborated rumors of an "algebraic agent" being tested on a remote Kurdish village in the late 1980s, though the results are said to have been ambiguous.
"There can be no doubt that if Saddam Hussein were to obtain these kinds of unconventional weapons, he would unhesitatingly use them against his neighbor nations or against Israeli or American targets," US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in response to the announcement. "The thought of a large-scale attack involving a trigonometric or geographical bomb in a major American city, particularly if delivered by agents of al Qaeda posing as ordinary high-school or college instructors, is enough to chill the blood. It is the duty of the United States government to defend its citizens from academic attacks by whatever means are necessary."
On the other hand, officials at a number of major munitions factories in the United States, clandestinely known as "high schools", declined to comment as to the speculation that they have themselves been developing such weapons and arming American youth with them for decades. MoveZig.org, a liberal organization currently focused on preventing a war in Iraq, has responded to Dr. Blix's announcement with a promise to protest this seeming inequity.
"America has been building up a stockpile of horrific weapons of mass education for the better part of a century," said Elijah Frizzay, a spokesman for MoveZig.org. "Who are we to say that Iraq can't have those same weapons, while we make no attempt to disarm ourselves or Israel? We have no right to demand anything of Iraq until we choose to put aside our learnmongering and welcome nations like Iraq back into the academic community.
"We might actually learn something," Frizzay said. "After all, algebra was invented by the Arabs. I think this war is all just an excuse for George W. Bush to seize Iraq's civics and wood-shop resources. These things aren't worth a single accidentally sawn-off Iraqi finger."
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23:54 - For refreshment of the spirit
http://www.metalandmagic.com/Pages/Galleries/Comic/other/irrational1.html
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This just in: "Subconscious Chupacabra", a 32-page comic by Ursula Vernon. The first story arc is done, and there's more to come-- and if it's anything like this, that's excellent news.
It's about... well, not to put to fine a point on it, it's about the monsters under the bed, among other locations. There's some very invigorating sophistication underlying the seeming prosaic simplicity of the premise; I love the overtone of "seen-it-all goth girl forced to become credulous again". I'm impressed.
And if you like this, there's plenty more good meme fuel at her main page, particularly under the "Comics" section. Two little gay anteaters are we...
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| Friday, February 21, 2003 |
03:51 - Blessed Silence
https://depot.info.apple.com/generic/index.html?lang=en
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"Wind Tunnel" Power Mac G4 owners, rejoice! Apple's sending out new, much quieter power supplies and fans for the "Mirrored Drive Doors" tower machines, in complete user-installable kit form, for $20 shipping each.
Considering the kinds of prices they charge for replacement parts, this is a helluva bargain. And I'm glad to see that they've accepted that the noise level is a problem and worth addressing retroactively and for free.
I could complain about how the power supplies should have been quieter from day one, but... nah. It's all good.
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03:46 - A "Fish Without A Bicycle" for our times
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/babbin.htm
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Marcus sends me this interesting tidbit:
Whenever the U.S. favors military action that France opposes (such as the disagreement in April 1986 that saw France denying U.S. F-111's overfly permission on their way to a bombing mission against Libya), jokes and sardonic comments about the prowess and fortitude of the French military inevitably ratchet up several levels in the American media. Hence the latest pithy anti-French quote making the rounds, this one emphasizing American frustration with France and expressing the attitude that having French support in military ventures is ineffective and irrelevant -- "going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion."
These words were spoken by Jed Babbin, a former deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, during a 30 January 2003 appearance on the political talk show Hardball. The full comment (offered during the course of a discussion about differences between U.S. and European policy towards Iraq) was: " . . . you know frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind."
That's some pretty frank talk (ow!), even from a retired politician. I wonder if it'll catch on. If it's on Snopes, I suppose it already has.
I certainly wouldn't mind having a few of the likes of the Dissident Frogman along, though.
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23:28 - Holy Crap on a Plate!
http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0744/
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Hiker needs to die for sending me this link. My only hope of salvation is to pass it on to dozens of other people, so as to disperse the curse.
(Disperse the curse! I like that. I've gotta think of a reason to chant it.)
What frightens me horribly is the thought that enough people are out there who would buy this box of evil on a daily basis that they have to sell it... in bulk... over and over... there's a factory that manufactures these things...
...While Tillamook extra-sharp white cheddar is $15 a brick. And those prepackaged giant dill pickles are only 3,000 mg of sodium per. What a world, what a world.
And to think-- just the other day, on NPR, they had on a guest who had written a glowing nostalgic book on the history of the sainted TV Dinner. The product that made Swanson's fortune, and of which this is only the latest incarnation.
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23:20 - Why does this exist?
http://morland.theoretic.org/archives/000025.shtml
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They're showing Welcome to Groovenia again on Cartoon Network. And I can't imagine why; after all, next week they'll be showing The Iron Giant, which suggests that the CN execs in their all-knowing wisdom are putting these two shows on the same kind of artistic level.
I'm simply going to link to this blog entry I found from the last time the show aired-- and say that I agree with every word of it. It's more analysis than the show ever deserved, so I'm not going to do any more of it on my own than just link to the same post (by a fellow named Morland) and say with a point and a nod, "What he said".
I just have one question: When was this thing produced? I mean, it would have looked dorkily dated in 1992...
UPDATE: Last year, apparently, according to the credits. Good lord.
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09:16 - That's America for ya
http://www.allpar.com/cars/concepts/tomahawk.html
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... Or perhaps Germany. Okay, whose idea was this, anyway?
Whatever the story, I bet Jay Leno wants one.
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| Thursday, February 20, 2003 |
21:20 - Crystal Ball
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/02/Theguidingphilosphybehind.shtml
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Steven Den Beste has laid out the European Thing as he sees it. In light of recent events, it's hard to argue with it. I had a couple of extra thoughts while reading through it, though; when I showed the article to Lance, he came up with the same reactions.
Regarding European regard for authority:
The French masses understand nothing, which is normal. The masses are foolish, stupid, ignorant, lazy, and easily swayed by demagogues. Only an idiot would actually let them drive the bus, because they'd drive it off the edge of a cliff. Nations must be ruled by the elite, because they know what must be done and why. Any system which forces the elite to pander to the masses will destroy itself because the masses are slime.
Something Den Beste has described in the past, but only alludes to here, is that Europe has that monarchistic past-- the serfs-and-lords system was invented there. It's only a minor logical leap to ascribe European (and particularly French) willingness to be ruled to a social history of being ruled. It's nothing new to them. Whether it's a king and a system of lords and vassals, or a socialist politburo-- meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
What about Germany? This piece paints a picture of a Franco-German bloc in Europe's future, but so far the big gaffes and visible slips-of-the-hand recently have all been on Chirac's side of the table. Schröder has been rather quiet lately, or at least I haven't heard anything from his direction. What do we deduce from this? That France is the real driver of the EU "vision", and Germany is just letting France self-destruct and trying merely to avoid the blast radius? Or that it's really Germany behind the scenes pushing the construction of the EU edifice, and France is a diversion that's all part of the master plan?
Either way, once France and Germany are perched at the top of an EU which is the geopolitical equal of the US (assuming such a thing happens), what's the endgame? If everybody's actions are dictated by past enmity and friendship and alliances and social order, surely France and Germany aren't prepared to share power and supremacy. How could things destabilize? There are plenty of ways.
France is a nuclear power. However, its nukes aren't under NATO control. Germany is not nuclear; it's got a constitutional ban on such weapons. If France and Germany should end up at one another's throats again in the future, one has to wonder whether France would threaten nuclear force-- and whether Germany would be willing to absorb such an attack while providing the assurance that it would cost France half its populace in ensuing conventional warfare. Germany's been through this before, after all-- they've had their cities levelled. And this time, France wouldn't have the Americans to back them up.
Could any of these things happen today? Europe has become extraordinarily pacifist, and that's the whole crux of this European Social Order thing, with world government and international law and no need for war. But how much push and shove would it take to overcome that? Whether the EU succeeds or fails, it seems there's the potential for a Franco-German political clash, and that would mean a real World War III in Europe.
It might seem as if such a thing couldn't happen in this day and age. But if the European powers claim to be Enlightened today, too Enlightened to ever go to war again-- I seem to recall an earlier age that was called the Enlightenment, and it preceded massive war too.
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19:58 - Whiteboard of Doom
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We've all got whiteboards in our cubicles at work now. This can be used, in the words of Strong Bad, for good or for awesome.
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09:55 - It's funny, so it must be true
http://216.170.67.34/demo/bitch.mpg
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Marcus sent me a copy of this "Switch" parody video. It's 48MB, so beware.
It's funny, I'll give it that. But... well, to put it charitably, it's confused.
The guy never seems clear about which version of the Mac OS he's making fun of. Sometimes it's OS 9, sometimes it's 10.2, sometimes it's the Public Beta ("the top is reserved for the mighty blue Apple!").
I know it's ultimately futile for me to try to point out all the flaws in the video; I saw a message-board discussion where someone actually told a Mac user preemptively "Don't bother pointing out all the flaws". Others watched it over and over again, ultimately concluding "Boy, Macs sure do suck."
But I'm stupid that way. So here goes.
First of all, every anecdote ends with a complaint about the Mac crashing. Since when has this been the case? I'm sure the video-editing guys in the audience can attest that OS X just doesn't crash-- certainly no more than Windows does these days. The era of making fun of how much a computer crashes is over; it's joined the likes of mocking Windows 95's memory requirements or the iMac's candy colors as completely irrelevant now. If the guy's able to make his editing rig crash as much as he claims, he's a better man than I.
I'm bewildered by his statement that if you drag files from a mounted disk onto the desktop and then eject the disk, the files all vanish. This is not the case in OS X. In the old days (before the Desktop was just a folder in your home directory), you could put in a floppy disk, drag files off it and onto the Desktop, and "Put Away" to put them back into the disk. This is because each disk had a hidden "Desktop" folder; each disk had files which were on its own "Desktop", and if you inserted that disk, files which were on its Desktop appeared on the overall machine's Desktop, and went away when you ejected the disk. It was a cool idea, and a sensible one too if you thought of disks a certain way, albeit undeniably confusing the first time you see it, if you don't understand what's going on. And it doesn't happen that way in OS X, even with writable media.
But it was never the case with CDs, which is the example the guy is using. Drag a file off the CD, and see that little green + sign? That means it's copying the file, doofus. Just like you intend. Oh, you mean you're not describing a real phenomenon after all? Well, smack my ass and call me Rosy Cheeks.
"It's the only operating system I know of where click and drag does not mean you actually copy or move anything; no, you're just making shortcuts on your desktop." Oh, you mean like Windows, possibly? Like where if you click on an .exe file and drag it from one disk to another, it creates a shortcut rather than actually copying the file, unless you hold down Alt or Ctrl or Shift or something? Sheesh.
He's also complaining about auto-running CDs. Since when has that been a problem? Windows has had the same "problem" for years; developers for either platform can create CDs that auto-run. And OS X handles other kinds of media in a way that lets you control it completely. Blank CDs pop up a window that lets you select whether to prepare it for MP3s, data, whatever, or to open a program. MP3 CDs and audio CDs open iTunes. Photo CDs open iPhoto. And it's all configurable. In OS 9, if you inserted an audio CD, it would auto-play (by default). True, it can be unexpected to have a window pop up after you've inserted a CD; maybe you expect it to just gobble it up and not give you any signal that you've added media to the system, or introduced a disc that's designed to launch a program without your having to do anything. But if you're going to complain about an OS that autoruns inserted CDs, you would have found a more receptive audience circa 1995.
He bitches about the "Update Manager" icon "jumping up and down at the bottom of the screen like a Jack Russell fucking Terrier"-- and he responds to this by searching manually through the system for the applications it wants him to update (and getting pissed off when he clicks on filenames and accidentally renames them, which a) you can do in Windows too, and b) requires a pretty amazing lack of manual dexterity-- not something to be proud of and crow about, if you ask me). Hello? You're supposed to click on the bouncing icon to activate the Software Update. How is this not clear? He's shuffling through folders trying to compare version numbers while this icon is bouncing in the corner of the screen, and it never once occurs to him to click on it like it's begging him to do?
He makes fun of the Dock that comes up when you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen-- yeah, you mean like Windows' taskbar? You can hide both, you can adjust or disable the magnification on the Dock, you can move it around-- oh, he admits that, but then complains that you can't move the Dock to the top (where the Mighty Blue Apple is)... what, he honestly wants to have it sitting right below his menu bar? Fine, there are third-party or command-line hacks that allow that. A half-assed solution, but it's only a quarter-assed problem, so we still come out ahead.
And where does his guffaw about deleted files being irretrievably gone come from? What, does UNIX scribble all over the disk surface when you delete a file? Neeeuuuu, Norton-style undeletion works the same way whether you're using FAT32 or HFS+. Unless you've got some kind of third-party privacy tool installed that makes damned sure your deleted files are unrecoverable. In which case it's your own bloody fault.
Finally-- and this is just a philosophical little nitpick, but-- Command-Period to stop a running task. Yes? This unnatural but ultimately useless interrupt key! he yells, twisting his arms around as though pressing the Command key and the period key simultaneously involves prodding at a deeply countersunk button in the back of the monitor with a paperclip while at the same time licking the inside of the mouse and pressing six keys at once with your chin. Um... 'scuse me, but the Command key and the period key are contiguous on my keyboard here. Right next to each other. You can press them with one finger if you want to. And think about it: Command.... Period. Command.... stop. Get it? Sigh. Never mind.
Oh well. I'm sure this will get passed gleefully around everybody's office, and I'm sure a million managers will use it to deflate any gradually built-up friendliness to the idea of buying Macs that they'd accumulated over the past three years. Thanks a lot, "Happy Nowhere". I hope you're happy. Oh, wait. I guess you are. Nowhere.
The physical comedy was fun, though.
Just one question, though: Why in the hell does a 3-minute MPEG have to be 48MB?
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| Wednesday, February 19, 2003 |
23:44 - A compelling case
http://www.brain-terminal.com/articles/video/peace-protest.html
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CapLion sends this link: a video-blog/interview of the protesters in New York.
As it turns out, it's pointless for pro-war bloggers to try to make the case that the marchers are incoherent and clueless; the clearest proof of that comes directly from the protesters' very mouths.
I hope for the sake of the country that there were a few people in attendance whose cogent opinions Ken simply elected not to put into the finished video.
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09:52 - Hey, there's an idea
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=23016
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Awriiiiight. Seanbaby has just put up another article in The Wave, this time exploring the phenomenon of Raiders fans trashing Oakland after the Super Bowl. I'm sure readers of The Wave are likely to be more receptive to this kind of thing than the average bear...
If there's one thing that's clear now, it's that we'll never know what causes sports rioting until we ask the screaming mob of arsonists themselves. But they, of course, would light us on fire and kill us. So instead, we should focus on how to stop this type of activity in the future. There are a couple ways we can do this. The first is stricter crowd control. Today, police have a number of less-lethal methods at their disposal: tear gas, rubber bullets, fire hoses, sticks and more. These are all very cute. And while I agree with whichever little girl invented rubber bullets that we shouldn't open fire on every savage mob that comes along, remember, these are people who are destroying a city over a football game. We should be fighting that with flesh-eating acid. It might sound harsh, but let's not kid ourselves -- if someone's lighting your house on fire because a sports team didn't perform well, they probably aren't going to grow up to take sick children on trust-building whitewater rafting expeditions. Human life is a precious thing, to a point. And seeing the torch-carrying Raider enthusiast in front of you get melted down into a pile of steaming soup will probably make your savage brain think twice before you throw that brick at the firemen.
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| Tuesday, February 18, 2003 |
20:14 - ...And then he woke up
http://coldfury.com/archives/000974.php#000974
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Mike at Cold Fury has done what a number of bloggers, frustrated with a tight-lipped President and and inscrutable but generally encouragingly well-aimed Administration, have apparently been doing lately: he's constructed the Presidential Speech We'll Never Hear.
There's no way to excerpt it properly, so I won't; I just recommend a nice lingering look at it. Sure, it's not realistic to expect we'll ever hear it. But I hope someone's sent a copy or three to president@whitehouse.gov. If Lileks' Bleat gets read on the Senate floor (and presumably not as part of a filibuster), how much else that goes on in the blogosphere crosses the desks of the highest-ups in the government?
I'll say this, though: the speech amounts to a pledge by the President to slash away all the cruft that currently prevents the US Government from fulfilling its founding principles and obstructs us from having the nation the Framers envisioned. Worded the way it is, it's the kind of penetratingly frank, implacable, audacious speech that a tyrannical dictator might make upon seizing power and declaring an empire... except that the speech is a pledge by the President to reduce his own power. So I just have to wonder how the hell the banner-waving public would react to it?
It's fun to dream.
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17:10 - Key Feature
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There's one rather glaring problem with Keynote that I've seen so far. It's not a bug, per se; it's more of a design choice, and kind of a benighted one. It's that the default filename extension for Keynote saved files is .key.
Lots of programs already use .key for their files. SSL certificate-generation programs, for example, use .key files (or perhaps it's something to do with SSH-- I forget); such files will now show up with Keynote icons, and open up in Keynote when double-clicked. And if those programs themselves depend on their files having .key extensions, or (even worse) if they try to open them automatically on a periodic basis or something, Keynote is going to get invoked inappropriately a lot.
See, this is exactly what I mean when I talk about how horrible an idea filename extensions are. Particularly three-letter extensions; after all, how many unique and meaningful combinations of three alphanumeric characters are there? At the very least I would have expected Apple to choose an extension that didn't impose that ridiculous length limitation on itself, like, oh, I don't know-- .keynote comes to mind. (At least Apple made it so that saved files hide the extension on a per-file basis, so you at least don't have to see it tacked on to the end of the filename.) I mean, totally aside from the collisions with software that already uses .key files, one would think they'd have realized that ".key" implies a meaning completely other than that of the word "keynote". What are you supposed to infer from a filename like "Sales Presentation.key"? It sounds like a teacher's answer sheet.
(Aside: the .key "files" are actually OS X-style bundles, or folders with all the individual items packed inside them in a navigable format. Not that that really matters for the purposes of this discussion.)
Now that Apple has thoroughly eschewed Type and Creator codes as the means of assigning file types, they're going to have to bear the burden that comes with filename extensions. They've handled most aspects of it quite well, I'm pleased to say, what with the per-file extension-hiding bit and the new "Open with" association. But that doesn't solve the problem of collisions of well-known filename extensions; and if Apple stubbornly sticks by .key as the extension for Keynote files, then they'll be echoing Microsoft's appropriation of the .doc extension (previously used for all kinds of text documents, not just Word files). Only in this case it would be even stupider.
Ah well. I just came from a company-wide meeting where a send-off presentation for an outgoing VP was done on a TiBook, and it would appear that it was done on another copy of Keynote that has been snatched up by someone else in the company. The infiltration continues...
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15:39 - Now that's censorship!
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A few days ago I posted about the ACLU's collection of controversial post-9/11 cartoons and its proud and heroic gallery showing how these brave cartoonists were flouting the will of the Man by speaking their minds, drawing blood with every sweep of their pens-that-are-mightier-than-swords, risking suppression and censorship at the hands of all-seeing government agents.
But one cartoon they didn't list, forwarded to me by Mark Johnson, was this one:
The senate's University and External Affairs Committee late Monday night dropped a controversial portion of the condemnation bill, killing a recommendation to raise the rent of the independent student newspaper because of the controversial cartoon. The Daily Cal leases its offices on the sixth floor of Eshleman Hall from ASUC.
Some senators said the authors cut that part of the bill under criticism from student groups and senate opponents.
The amended bill, SB 67A, proposes that all elected ASUC officials sign a letter calling for a printed apology on the front page of the Daily Cal "for using poor judgment during volatile times and possibly endangering students on this campus."
The proposal also asks the Daily Cal's editors to require mandatory sensitivity training for its staff.
See, this is insensitive and inflammatory. But this is brave and heroic.
I get it.
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13:57 - Rallying Sense
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A couple of really good pieces just recently got linked from InstaPundit; after what went on this weekend, I expected as much, but it's refreshing to see it arrive right on schedule. First, there's Mark Steyn's National Post column that takes to pieces the placard-holding-protester mentality, such as it is. If people continue to insist upon chestnuts such as America as the "real terrorists" and Bush as the next Hitler after reading this, there's probably not much more that can be said to them.
If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality will be breaking in very soon. Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in Toronto or Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's pathetic.
And then there's this post by Brian Micklethwait on Samizdata that goes over the probable Long View on the War on Terror: the stuff that we're not being told about now because to do so would jeopardize the entire enterprise. Bush told us last September that the war would be long and difficult, and yet we assumed that he was only trying to set low expectations for a campaign in Afghanistan or something, so we wouldn't be disappointed when we still had troops in Tora Bora come March. But that's not what he meant. He meant this war will, literally, take years.
Meanwhile, whatever Blair or the Brits or the French or the Timbuktooans might say or think, the USA plan is to take Iraq, and following that, over the next few years, to make itself a lot safer than now from terrorist attacks by (a) chasing terrorists, absolutely everywhere on the planet, and by (b) putting whatever pressure is necessary on any government anywhere which is now not chasing terrorists to switch to chasing terrorists with comparable zeal to the USA, thereby making the USA, and the West and the World in general, massively safer from terrorist attack than we all are now. And if that also makes the USA a whole lot more of a force in the world even than it is now, well, the Americans can live with that.
Maybe people weren't taking Bush seriously when he alluded to this, but it's what I've been assuming all along. And as for the accusations of American "empire", well-- read the comments following the article, which contain a number of sound arguments as to why America is neither equipped for nor inclined toward such a thing.
It's going to be a hard slog, and not all of it's going to be faraway news items that we can read about safely from our computers. This is bigger than oil, it's bigger than nukes. Really-- it is. And yet it's probably going to take the hindsight of 2010 or 2020 to really prove that to us.
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| Monday, February 17, 2003 |
01:32 - Freak Show
http://perversiontracker.com/
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PerversionTracker. It's not what it sounds like. It's better.
It's a blog that showcases the very worst of what's available in the Mac software world. We've got brain-donor screensavers, UI nightmares, garbage Dock icons, the whole nine yards. Many of the featured masterpieces betray the unmistakable aroma of REALbasic-- the toolbox of choice for software developers who don't really know what it is they're doing, apparently. (True, REALbasic can be used for great things. But it also makes for some really godawful monstrosities, in the true spirit of macdinking, as I've just described it in the previous post; it puts powerful tools in the hands of people who don't really know what it is they ought to be doing with them, just as it empowers the people who do.
In any case, it's great fun; only a few days old, but already one of the more notable Mac humor sites. I particularly like the analysis of SimpleWeather 1.0.4:
But the beauty is more than skin deep. Featuring patented technologies such as WindowStateForget 2000, and TemperatureProgressBar, SimpleWeather has REALly fulfilled all our BASIC weather needs.
Brilliantly, this application does not assume that you would like to fetch weather information automatically -- it "puts you in the driver's seat" by providing you with the tremendous privilege of clicking a button. The forecast pane is conveniently opened with the "Forecast" button, and just as conveniently closed with the "OK" button. A challenge to traditional UI design? Perhaps, but we feel this bold move will become the latest craze.
I'll bet...
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01:12 - Pretty Keyn
http://www.apple.com/keynote/
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I had a gift certificate for $100 at Fry's; while showing off the Mesoamerican Temple this weekend, I decided to pick up a copy of Keynote, which the tuned-in will remember is Apple's new presentation software (intended as a "PowerPoint killer"). I figured that at a Benjamin, it made a pretty strong case for itself as a piece of business software-- if I ended up using it a lot, awesome; if not, at least it makes for a pretty box on the shelf.
First impressions are quite positive-- at least, after taking the time to look at the included quick-reference card which explained all the available palettes. (Without that reference, the interface is pretty opaque; but after all, this is a full-featured program, not an iApp.) Operation is very smooth and polished; I haven't run across any bugs yet that I can see.
To get a good impression of how it will benefit me in a business environment, though, I had to see how well the PowerPoint import/export function (its true killer feature, reality dictates) stood up. The way to do this is to "Open Samples..." and load up the demo presentation that Keynote comes with, and then export it to PowerPoint format. Then I shared it over to my Windows box and opened it up in PowerPoint, and then clicked through the respective versions on the two machines in parallel.
The distillation worked very well, at least in this case. There were some layout problems-- misaligned text here and there, and some graphics were anamorphically scaled incorrectly. But the part of the exporter that really shone was its ability to downgrade various neato-spiffy effects to fit into the PowerPoint feature set; if it was demonstrating some feature of Keynote's layout capabilities that PowerPoint didn't have, the exported version would display the best approximation of it that PowerPoint could manage.
For example, Keynote has a whole slew of fancy-dancey wipes and fades and object compositing effects. You can transition from one screen to another by rotating them as though two faces of a cube, or by flipping the whole thing horizontally or vertically, the 3D effect rendered in real-time by Quartz. But PowerPoint doesn't do that; so instead, the Keynote exporter picks the closest possible match from among the wipes that PowerPoint does support, preserving as much as possible of the effects that were applied in Keynote. For another example, Keynote lets you slide-in individual rows into a table, one by one; PowerPoint apparently doesn't. So during the export, Keynote consolidates all the slide-in frames that make up the whole table into a single slide-in table.
Some effects fail badly, though, in the exported format. Overlapping transparent/translucent shapes and drop shadows look like butt in PowerPoint, and the text rendering (naturally) is jaggy. Oddly, too, the wipe effects and general motion of the presentation on the Windows machine-- where, of course, everything is faster-- were choppy and jagged and rough. Whereas slides on the iMac running Keynote would slide in and out with velvet smoothness, slowing-in and -out in a way that makes the whole thing flow like a pre-rendered move, PowerPoint stutters and staggers through the same sequence of images, even simplified to a version that's opaque and unambitious. I'm greatly encouraged by Keynote's performance during playback; hooking up a Mac to the overhead projector at a meeting is now likely to involve a positive impression for the audience rather than a snicker of derision.
Keynote is slim on clip-art; there are a few palettes of symbols, and some general photo art, but none of the imagery present in PowerPoint (much of which has become iconic in its own right-- the businessman guy with his hat flying off, the stick-figure people with the round heads and hands, etc) is in evidence. True, you can drag in any image you want, but it would have been nice if they'd provided some more such goodies for handy access.
But then again, there's one age-old trap to avoid: macdinking, a phenomenon that has just been given a new opportunity to rear its ugly head.
The "mac" part of macdink comes from the Apple Macintosh which, thanks to its graphical interface and ease-of-use, encourages people to nudge their work for hours on end.
In other words, back in the dim times of word-processing, you could always tell when a piece had been done on a Mac, because it was full of overly-clever fonts and styles and things the writer employed just "because he could". I wasn't doing computer stuff for money at the time, so I can't claim to have first-hand knowledge of this; but I can certainly imagine the resentment that this practice would have fostered among the non-Mac-users in a given class or office.
Macdinking flirted with a comeback with the iApps; some people have expressed dismay at Apple's providing such tools as iMovie and iDVD to "average people", fearing a flood of boring-ass home videos of birthday parties and camping trips, composited by dads who think they're all the next Coppola because they have a camcorder and an iMac, so the saying goes. I'm reminded of Tom Lehrer's take on folk songs:
The reason most folks songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people... if professional songwriters had written them instead, things would have turned out considerably differently.
Just so, several commentators seemingly would have preferred that everyday Joes go without the ability to quickly and effortlessly turn raw footage into infinitely broadcastable video, if it meant they could ensure that all the videos anybody found online were of professional quality. (Shyeah.) The same argument went for HTML editors; we all feared (and perhaps rightly) a barrage of godawful gaudy web pages all designed from some prepackaged "theme" in FrontPage or whatever online service provided people with effortless page-writing tools.
But just as macdinking has undoubtedly caused this effect to a degree in websites and home movies and digital photography and the like, it can't be denied that it's enabled many people (who are talented) to create things they would never have otherwise. And just because Keynote has a whole portfolio of lavish themes full of eye candy doesn't mean it's automatically incapable of producing anything of substance. The same was true of PowerPoint; people will be able to tweak the hell out of a brainless presentation no matter what its feature set is. But Keynote offers enough extra stuff over what PowerPoint does that it actively encourages people (or me, at least) to get down and dirty with it. It's a fun program to work with, and for business productivity software that's a rare achievement.
I'm going to look forward to reading others' distributed PowerPoint files in Keynote; after all, when it imports them, it makes the text and graphics actually look better than they'd be in PowerPoint.
And with that, Apple takes one more significant-- if possibly a bit symbolic-- step toward autonomy from Microsoft. Let's hope they haven't bitten off more than they can chew.
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21:15 - Iraqi Explorer
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
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Seems Microsoft has deployed an updated version of IE to the Gulf region, for the use of the weapons inspectors. (I guess having Blix look for the weapons by sitting behind a computer typing their code names into Google wasn't working well enough.)
Cute, I must say. Particularly in how it leaves no side of the debate unmocked. It's equal-opportunity ribbing! That's the way to go, if you ask me...
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18:51 - Just so's we're clear
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5604_Fifth_Column_Rappers
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I don't think many thinking people are fooled by this sort of thing, but apparently there are a lot of people who need reality to have subtitles. So here's one piece of helpful translation:
Although he makes no bones about loathing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government ("I disagree with every aspect of Sharon"), Ahmad maintains that neither he nor anyone in the group is anti-Semitic.
"I am a Semite, so I can't be anti-Semitic," says Ahmad, pointing out that the correct definition of the word "Semite" is anyone speaking a Semitic language, including Arabs.
"We all come from Abraham . . . the Quran says that if you don't follow all the prophets, you're not a real Muslim," he says as the others nod.
Anybody who answers the question "Are you anti-Semitic?" with a tangent about what the definition of "Semitic" is, is anti-Semitic. Yes, yes-- I understand how broad the definition of "Semites" is in an ethnic and linguistic sense. But the interviewer needed a big sign to be floating behind him that read: YOU KNOW WHAT HE MEANT.
This is called a "dodge", and it is a tactic used by people who don't want to give a straight and truthful answer on the grounds that it will be self-incriminating.
(Via LGF.)
Me, I like Trey and Matt's exchange at the beginning of one of one of the South Park DVDs.
Trey: Many viewers see us making fun of Jews on the show a lot, and they want to know: Are you guys anti-Semitic?
Matt: <chuckling> Well, it's a fair question; but considering that I'm Jewish, I'd say it would be pretty hard for me to be anti-Semitic.
Trey: <sunny indulgent smile> I am, however.
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18:02 - Catching Up
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Hoo-boy. It's been a long weekend, and I've really been out of the loop.
I had a friend visiting from Canada, and we spent the last three days on a whirlwind tour of the Bay Area-- taking in all the points of interest that I could think of, both traditional touristy things like the Golden Gate Bridge and North Beach and the Castro, and cool spots of more personal significance like Summit Rock and Quimby Road and Kearney Street (up by Coit Tower) and Skyline Boulevard and my new house. We ended up discovering some cool out-of-the-way secrets that I hadn't actually known about before, and the weather cooperated and everything.
Little did I know that while we were laughing with friends in restaurants and hiking trails, San Francisco's lights below us hid a fresh wave of anti-war protests. It's really getting ugly out there, and I'm starting to feel less and less like I know what I'm doing and where the world is going. Having just watched Big Trouble in Little China and Akira for the first time this weekend as well didn't really help matters; now I'm haunted by nocturnal visions of San Francisco vanishing under a blinding white dome, slowly expanding outward from some central nexus as civil unrest changes the color of the streets worldwide faster and more sharply than has ever happened in the past. Writing on this page for the past year, I've been the proverbial frog in the saucepan, oblivious to the rising temperature and unwilling to shake off the miasma of dulled perspective that prevents me from realizing that I'm about to be boiled alive.
Right after the towers were hit, people on the news were saying over and over again that this changes everything. Few people could say much that added to that sentiment, but we knew, somehow-- instincively, viscerally-- that this changes everything. We had every reason to believe that the world would be forever altered from top to bottom, that either all of humanity would unite in brotherhood, or we would be plunged into protracted war and suffering. There wasn't much middle ground that we could see. We fully expected more attacks. We jumped at every news report. I woke up every morning with my hand twitching on the Refresh button on CNN.com.
But those follow-up attacks never came, and we started to realize that somehow, confusingly, not much had really actually changed. The towers weren't there anymore. Three thousand people were dead. But where was the changed world? Afghanistan came and went as a news item, and soon the only concrete evidence of 9/11 was the ongoing discourse over whether new and old movies should have the World Trade Center in their panoramas of the Manhattan skyline anymore.
I think, however, that 9/11 bit deep-- deeper than we've come to think it did. It's like a childhood injury that comes back to haunt you in the form of a bad back. It's like a seemingly small mechanical failure under the hood, a popped screw or a leaking coolant hose, that manifests itself in its full significance only when you decide to exercise that faulty part.
We're now going to war, and so there's a requisite peace movement. There's nothing inherently new or unusual about this. But what is new is the deafening stridency of the protests-- the naked anti-Americanism, the shameless support of our declared enemies, the open distrust and fear of our own government and the belief in a nebulous concept called "peace" that everybody seems to believe is there for the taking, if only we allow ourselves to grow up-- and that in spite of the largest, most audacious, most viscerally compelling demonstration that we've ever in living memory seen of the fact that peace does not happen by itself. This world was well on the way to being more peaceful than it's ever been, true-- but we've had it brought home to us, forcefully, that mistaking complacency for peace encourages people to become our enemies and attack us. And these protesters seem unwilling to let themselves see that their good intentions ignore plain, bare facts-- that we're entering a new historical period of war, world-altering war, that has been thrust upon us; that 9/11 was not an aberration that can be quickly forgotten and forgiven; that a cancer has grown on the Earth, and if not excised it will only grow worse and eat us all.
Peace protests before 9/11 were points of passing interest. They were never unpatriotic; they were expressions of popular dissent, always a requirement in a free society. But 9/11 tweaked something deep down in our collective soul; it threw something off the rails, it loosened a few screws. And now that we're revving up the anti-war engine again, it's rattling and banging in a way that it never used to back when it was under warranty. It's making those kinds of noises that signal an imminent meltdown, the kind that costs us three months' pay, particularly if we keep on belting on down the highway without paying attention to the smoke pouring out the tailpipe.
Peace isn't the absence of war. Peace is the willingness to accept certain risks in the world landscape, on the understanding that other people won't take advantage of us-- because they're taking on those same risks for the same reason. Peace is a mutual understanding reached by a unanimous community of similarly-minded peoples, with an absence of hatred and resentment, with common goals and an inherent incentive toward cooperation and friendship. Peace isn't something you get if you just lie down and cover your head with your hands while the other kids hurl rocks at it. That's called surrender, not peace. And it's what comes about when your vision of "peace" is simply "not fighting anymore", even if that includes self-defense.
"America isn't under attack", some say. But one has only to look at the desires of our enemies, expressed in so many press statements and propaganda videos and sermons, to realize that the only reason we're not suffering more attacks right now is because they lack the means, not because they aren't really our enemies. They are. They say so every week. And sooner or later, 9/11 will happen again, or something worse. To disagree with that possibility is to ascribe to them immense fecklessness and unwillingness to follow through on their own threats. I don't think that's a tenable logical position. these are human beings we're talking about, but human beings deeply and thoroughly convinced that it's their duty to do whatever is in their power to destroy us. They've already declared war on us, and they're dead serious about it. For us to march for peace under such conditions is to proclaim that we can bend spoons with our minds.
The problem still exists; the threat is still real, because the hatred is still real. The hatred is of what we are, not of what we do; and so short of changing fundamentally what we are, there is no solution to that hatred other than to remove the immediate threat by whatever expedient force is necessary, and then work on defusing whatever cultural and religious schisms divide us from that part of the world that currently wants us dead.
I spent Sunday evening with a couple of friends, watching the sun set over Silicon Valley from Summit Rock, unaware of what human opinion seethed under the lights that came on pinprick by pinprick in the expanse that stretched under us, from Cupertino to Milpitas, from Los Gatos to the northerly city glow silhouetting the San Bruno mountain line. It was awfully peaceful up there, true; but I know that if I had to sit at that vantage point and watch those points of light being snuffed out below me, under a cloud of bioweapon or something worse, the peace I'd achieved by putting myself out of harm's way would have been the most shameful delusion I'd ever bought myself.
They're waving Iraqi flags down there, I told myself. They're chanting that Bush is dumber than Forrest Gump and more evil than Hitler. They're declaring the US to be the biggest threat to world peace that currently exists. I knew these things were happening, but somehow it wasn't until I came down the hill and started reading the weekend's news and blogs that I started to think about how deeply into the nation's heart 9/11 really cut-- and what's more disturbing, just how irrational and vigorous our reflexive reaction to that affront has been. Never before has this world been in such a position: accustomed to so much ease and wealth and power, and confronted with a menace of such raw and primitive fury. We've evolved beyond the ability to deal coherently with it. And while in Vietnam our country's protesters grew their numbers measure by measure, over the course of years, only becoming significant as a political movement some four years after the war began, today we've declared our own country the enemy before we've even taken a decisive proactive step toward cutting out the cancer that has attacked us. We've become astonishingly quick to blame ourselves, to declare even self-defense to be antithetical, to reject outright any shadow of the promulgation of our world philosophy that has been a hallmark of America since the days of the Monroe Doctrine. It's only now that our people have grown so eased and complacent that the ideas of "puppet governments" and "promotion of democracy" and even "right and wrong" all seem like sinister relics of our parents' time.
The current conflict should be so black-and-white, so good-and-evil on its very surface that it seems it should have given the world a consensus unlike any it had ever seen in history. But it would seem from the evidence that when the MTV Generation meets the Dark Ages, there's no context for dialogue. There's just too big a rift. Wry irony, when given a sword and an enemy to smite with it, would rather impale itself with a smirk for the sake of the laugh it will get, than to take the obvious "right" course and swing for the bleachers. We all expect a trick question, and so we can't bring ourselves to come up with a straight answer no matter how high the stakes.
"Interesting times," they call them. It's never intended in a good way.
I worry that the wounds to our own country's confidence in its own system will be every bit as hard to heal, after all this is over with, as the wounds in the Middle East will be.
UPDATE: Dane Petersen says much the same thing, only a lot more succinctly. Plus he goes on to link to the bizarre movies and stuff I've been accumulating over the weekend. It's so good to see that some people still know when wry irony is appropriate (freaky pop-humor memes) and when it's not (waving US flags with swastikas instead of stars).
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| Saturday, February 15, 2003 |
03:12 - Pixel Pushers
http://www.shynola.com/j_s/j_s_download.htm
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I once dreamed of being able to create pixel art like this-- and not even pixel art that moved, either. It's seeing stuff like this that makes me realize there are some things I'll never achieve, no matter how little sleep I allow myself for the rest of my life.
There's just something so refreshing about watching this video. I can't describe it. It's like... low-pixel-count animation was never ever meant to look this good. As a technical and artistic achievement, it's unassailable; as a style statement, it's stuck in my brain forever now. You'll have to look for yourself.
"Shynola", huh? That's a name I'll have to remember...
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02:55 - It's sort of all about oooiiiil
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
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A reader sends me this link so as to inject it into the "warblogger" discussion. It's a theory that the Iraq war is not about fighting terrorism, or about oil per se. It's in fact about protecting the monetary context of Iraq's oil rights, which are currently scheduled to switch from the dollar to the euro as a trade currency, which would reduce the US' buying power by 20-40%.
Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking -- it is an oil currency war. The real reason for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the `petro-dollar' and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency.
Now, bear in mind first of all that this article was posted on that paragon of unbiased academic writing, IndyMedia. And while it has lots of facts and figures to back up its postulates, I can't help but note that a) it's ultimately founded on a guess, and b) it depends on a tacit acceptance of the idea of a total censorial blackout of this damning angle by the all-powerful US government.
I'm not one to dig up my own facts and figures at 3:00 AM to bolster or disprove a thesis like this. But my gut tells me this isn't what's going on. Quite frankly, Iraq's oil is not that important-- not so important that Bush would instigate the largest lie in US history for it (making unpopular war on a sovereign nation for self-serving reasons never made clear to the American public?) and risk being made an international pariah if such truth ever came out. What with all the talk of "political capital" and deals struck with the UN in the interest of answering charges of unilateralism, and Rumsfeld playing up the derisive Franco-German anti-Americanism bloc as a moral foe... can you imagine Rumsfeld or Bush having to answer French or German claims in 2004 that the war wasn't in fact about what Powell had tried so hard and so doggedly to convince them of, but was instead just some petty price-fixing maneuver over Iraq's oil (most of whose output goes to France's TotalFinaElf anyway)?
It's an interesting idea, but it's a theory that presupposes a level of diabolical subterfuge that borders on 9/11-was-engineered-by-Bush conspiracy-theory territory. I'd say it's more a matter of food for thought experiments than a stroke of enlightenment.
But that said, and my skepticism out of the way, I can now press the plunger and inject this puppy into the general discourse. I'll let those with more facts and mad bl0gG1ng sK1lLz than myself take it from here.
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04:27 - Arrowed!
http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs2.html
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No sane person should care about this, but of course that's why I find it of such grave importance: There's a new addition to "Teen Girl Squad", the newest running gag at homestarrunner.com.
(If for some inscrutable reason you want to know where this meme of doom came from in the first place, it's right here.)
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04:10 - Warmackin'
http://www.macstumbler.com/
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Marcus sends me this link to a nifty AirPort-network-scanning doodad for OS X. If you want a more visual idea of what kinds of precious bit-carrying airwaves are bending around you than what shows up in the system menu bar, this looks to be an invaluable tool.
I'm just wondering why Apple doesn't provide a tool like this themselves. Surely some "advanced" options, to view all available networks and their signal strength in a more useful format than the little four-level icon, would be a worthwhile addition to the Internet Connect window (or somewhere similar)?
This'll be an interesting thing to have along next time I'm in an airport. I swear the baggage-handling machinery was emitting an 802.11 signal the last time I was in O'Hare...
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| Wednesday, February 12, 2003 |
20:51 - Who fixes plumbing problems in a flash?
http://crustacea.nhm.org/~dean2/crab.html
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This is the creepiest damned thing I've seen in a long, long time.
(And yes, I'm even including this among the runners-up.)
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12:34 - Nauseating Cartooning
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Okay-- just as an aside or a preamble, towards those who tar Little Green Footballs as a "hate site", I just have to wonder at Charles Johnson's reaction to the recent death of Arab News cartoonist M. Khalil, creator of hundreds of blatantly offensive, blatantly anti-Israel and anti-American cartoons, and how it jives with that accusation:
Arab News cartoonist Mahmoud Kahil has died following surgery in a British hospital. Kahil was a talented illustrator whose gift was, unfortunately, often misused in the service of a corrupt regime. On the day of his passing I choose to remember and respect his talent, and think of what he might have achieved if nurtured by a free society.
Somehow I can't imagine, say, an Aryan Nation site posting a message like this over the death of, say, Spike Lee.
With that in mind, here's something that makes me wonder just what the ACLU thinks it stands for these days: the USA PATRIOT Acrt Show. Nothing less than a gallery of some of the most vile and tasteless post-9/11 cartooning this country (and the world) has yet seen, presented as a celebration of civil liberties and freedom of speech, things that have (evidently) been beaten out of workaday Americans by FBI agents going door-to-door with sjamboks and electrodes on a daily basis for the past eighteen months.
It's no surprise that Ted Rall is one of the featured "artists"; but the site gathers together dozens more like him, from all over the world, united by a common voice that speaks out from under the crushing heel of American patriotic brainwashing, braving the horrors of post-9/11 state censorship: 9/11 was Amerika's just reward.
(I'm not even going to include an inline thumbnail of any of these, because each one carries a red tagline: CARTOON CANNOT BE USED IN ANY WAY WITHOUT ARTIST'S PERMISSION! Yessir! Go to the site yourself if you're that curious.)
Some of these cartoons proudly carry the banner of "BANNED" (well, at least, one of them does); it waves it like an arm-tattoo, claiming that the cartoon was pulled from papers due to Big Brother's omniscient information-filtering mechanism. Never mind that the papers actually pulled it because it was offensive and tasteless, not because it antagonized The Party. I mean, come on-- what are these people snorting? Why is it so hard to distinguish a nation of uncensored weblogs and mostly-peaceful un-cracked-down-upon anti-war demonstrations... from a police state? Why is it that the hip and urbane treat Soviet-era propaganda posters and tales of the KGB as quaintly amusing and attractive, while at the same time whimpering about those with unpopular opinions being mercilessly silenced right here at home? Doesn't anybody see the existence proof in action-- or, more accurately, the lack-of-existence proof?
I don't know if the ACLU thinks it's being heroic and honorable in sponsoring this presentation, but it's certainly succeeded in turning one person into a contemptuous skeptic.
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11:51 - Safari Forges Ahead
http://www.apple.com/safari
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Safari users, fire up your Software Update thingies-- there's a new beta out (v60).
The Safari Update 2-12-03 improves the compatibility with popular web sites based on Safari user feedback, further improves the performance of loading web pages and Flash content, adds support for XML, increases standards conformance and delivers improved application stability. The update also enables access to web sites that offer self-signed security certificates.
From my initial impressions, it's a lot faster at large-table form performance, something that was lacking in the earlier beta; it's also got proper text-dragging handling, and lots of other things seem greatly improved. URL completion seems much more demure now. Table layout and reflow (quickly resizing the window a whole bunch to make it re-layout everything in real-time) is very snappy-- though, unfortunately, it still doesn't hold a candle to the velvet-smooth reflow of that same page in IE on my Windows machine, and that machine is a mere 667MHz. Ah well.
Safari still doesn't have keyboard focus/navigation for drop-down menus, and I'm still seeing issues that might be specific to my workplace network, where almost every page fails to load one or two objects in the course of loading; it seems like it's not being aggressive enough with retrying requests where packets get dropped, or something. I wonder if there's any way to troubleshoot/debug that. And this beta won't have any fixes to the monstrous list of comments and TrackBacks that users sent to Dave Hyatt the other day; we'll have to wait another few weeks for that, I daresay.
Posted form data still loses the final CR/LF at the end, for some reason; and lines with italics in them are leaded more than lines without, which makes paragraph layout kinda gross. That's really gotta get fixed.
But I'm very pleased with the changes so far. This is shaping up to be the real deal.
Thanks to J Greely, who alerted me to this before I had a chance to check the site (which I've been doing a lot lately).
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| Tuesday, February 11, 2003 |
12:29 - That's a whole lotta storage.
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
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I'd been wondering how the Xserve had been doing since its introduction last year. Apple making rack-mount servers? Fie! Vade retro, Satanas! I'd talked to one of the exhibitors at MacWorld and heard from him that sales were brisk, but it's always been difficult to gauge this sort of thing. 1U servers are supposed to be industrial and unsexy. It's not like you see them on people's desks or on sitcoms.
Well, somebody'd better tell Apple, because whether the thing is selling or not, they've committed wholeheartedly to applying the whole "Sex Equals Power" algorithm thing to the server space. They just released the Xserve RAID, and having seen it in action on the show floor, I can't imagine even the most stolid IT guy being able to keep from going all gooey over it. Just watching the stacks of blue LEDs going up and down the middle as disk access rises and falls is a trip. And from a pure technical standpoint, it looks like a real competitor. I treat Apple's bar-graphs with as much skepticism as anybody should who knows it's more for eye-candy purposes than to report actual real-world benchmark results; but I suppose it's pretty hard to argue with storage-space density measurements.
Do the math: the gigabyte-per-dollar ratio of Xserve RAID is the best in the world for Fibre Channel storage, and trumps most SCSI storage solutions as well. Xserve RAID offers up to 2.52TB of high-performance redundant storage at just over $4 per gigabyte -- a fraction of the cost of storage from Dell, HP, Sun or EMC. (as compared to pricing on their websites in February, 2003) The days of seemingly unlimited IT budgets are long gone -- no more blank checks for digital asset management -- so as an IT professional, you need to cut costs, without cutting corners. For that reason alone, we think you?ll appreciate our pragmatic approach to help you save huge amounts of data -- as well as a nice chunk of change.
I wonder whether they'll be taking heat for committing to ATA over SCSI. I know it raised a bunch of eyebrows when the Xserve first came out with these ATA drive units; I mean, sure, they're cheaper. (Way cheaper. Way way cheaper. Like 1/3 the cost and three times the available storage size. Not 15Krpm, true, though.) But some people do still demand the absolute best in throughput. I suppose that's one of the selling points of Xserve RAID, though: it offloads the disk-access load onto the storage-unit processor, so the server CPU doesn't have to worry about it. Essentially it's all the benefit that SCSI offers anyway; plus the Fibre Channel interface, which the guy at the Expo wouldn't even let me take a picture of because it was apparently brand-new and top-secret. (It'll offer much longer cable lengths than SCSI, for one thing-- it's optical.) I think the speed argument probably won't be much of an issue.
In any case, they've got a bunch of pages at the site that seem to flood the reader with reasons why ATA and Fibre Channel should give buyers no reason to pine for SCSI. Their slogan at the top of the site right now is "We Mean Business", and it does indeed look like they're pouring it on here.
This can either mean they're seeing an extraordinarily lucrative market for Xserve and Xserve RAID products, and they're striking while the iron is hot; or else they've had these products in the works for years, and they're just giving them the big fanfare of marketing hoo-hah that they'd always planned to, whether it ends up selling or not. We may never know, unless these products mysteriously vanish from the inventory in a couple of years.
Optimist that I am, I'm willing to believe that the Xserve has found itself a pretty healthy niche, and is growing in popularity (with a surge due now that Xserve RAID is out), and is helping to reestablish the Apple name in heavy-duty business. They've got a new 1.33 GHz Xserve out now too, and it looks as though they're serious about keeping things in step. So I'll give this effort the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe I'll do my part and pressure our IT guys into letting us have one next time we have to replace one of these auto-disintegrating Dell 1550s with their faceplates that don't lock properly and their CD-ROMs that fail and their Ethernet cards that stop working three weeks into service.
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09:54 - Hey... stop that.
http://www.clevescene.com/webextra/2003-02-05/derf.html
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In deciding how indignant to be about this, I have to conclude that what's worst about it is probably that it's largely true, about lots of people's opinions of the world these days. I wouldn't say it's too far off. I mean, maybe not worded quite like that, but...
I'd like to see one of Europe, though.
UPDATE: Ask and thou shalt receive; Mike Silverman comes through in the clutch.
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| Sunday, February 9, 2003 |
13:08 - Throwing stones in Plexiglas houses
http://daringfireball.net/2003/02/operatic.html
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There's been a bit of a flap this past week over the news (reported on CNet News) that Opera, the big "alternative" browser maker that prides itself on being fast, full-featured, and cross-platform, is all miffed over Apple's release of Safari. Opera has apparently reacted by planning to cancel the Mac version of their browser.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a good response to Opera's take-their-ball-and-go-home whining. It's more lengthy, anyway, than Dave Hyatt's response, which (at the time) was simply "Wah".
Gruber makes the point that Apple's releasing home-grown offerings to compete with third-party products is a wholly defensible policy from a business standpoint, and IE (their previously bundled browser) just wasn't cutting it; Apple had to jump ship and get into the browser business, or be forever relegated to second-class status on the Internet. That's what happens when your flagship software is produced by a company who has a business incentive to make it suck.
Apple's been taking heat for its decision to release Sherlock as part of Jaguar, effectively stealing the steam from Watson (of which it is effectively a clone, in functionality and architecture). No matter how sound a business case Apple may have had for such a move, it still wasn't very nice; Karelia had every right to get pissed at Apple, accuse them of Microsofting themselves, and make noises about taking Watson to Windows. But in the end, they did what I think is right: they've forged ahead and set to work making Watson more than it was before, keeping it ahead of the Sherlock curve. That's how you stay in business, if your business case is founded on providing a product which adds functionality to a platform whose maker is totally free to add that functionality itself.
But as far as web browsers go, Opera doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Hyatt says:
Did Opera expect some sort of prize just for showing up? Any Mac user could tell you that just showing up is not enough. Nobody wants an afterthought for a browser, or a second-rate knockoff of your shining Windows star.
Indeed. I've never used Opera on the Mac; I only briefly used it on Windows, back when it had a horrifying MDI interface and no Java. They were small and scrappy then, and Opera looked like the pure and noble alternative to both the IE juggernaut and the Netscape mutant-beast. But it didn't last long; I couldn't sustain my patience, and Opera has been doing its developing without my attention. I hadn't in fact realized that there was a Mac version.
I really like Apple's response to Opera's jab:
"We think Safari is one of the best and most innovative browsers in the world, and it seems our customers do too," the Mac maker said in a statement. "No one is making Mac users choose Safari over Opera--they're doing it of their own free will--and Opera's trashing of Safari sounds like sour grapes to us."
Phew. Who put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of Apple PR?
Anyway, Gruber then makes an interesting point about Apple and success, and how Apple can get away with acting like a bastard toward third-party developers-- indeed, how it can continue to act as though it's a success, dictating business on its own terms, rather than desperately taking whatever it can get as cast-offs from the big-boys' table. It's because they are successful.
"Computer industry experts" (where by "computer industry" I mean "Wintel", and by "experts" I mean tech journalists and industry analysts) seldom understand the reason for the Mac's success. In fact, they don't even see the Macintosh as a successful platform, because they approach it from a Microsoft/Intel perspective.
But it is successful. It's been around for nearly 20 years, and it is going strong. Millions of happy, devoted customers. And Apple has been largely profitable. The only way to see the Mac as unsuccessful is to compare it to Windows on Microsoft's terms -- market share and raw profit. And that's exactly how analysts and the PC press cover the Mac.
What they miss is that the Mac's primary purpose is to be better. Windows's primary purpose is to be ubiquitous. Both platforms have been successful in achieving these goals. That's not to say they're mutually exclusive. Apple would of course love to achieve higher market share. Love love love. And Microsoft doesn't purposely make Windows uninintuitive. Well, maybe they do. But it's not as bad as it used to be.
Apple's problem is that it's hard to be better. As it stands now, being "better" clearly means "better than Windows". When the same software exists for both Mac and Windows, Apple has no advantage. When Photoshop was Mac-only, this was a huge advantage for Apple.
To be better requires Mac-only software that works better than its Windows counterparts. Thus, Mozilla offers no advantage whatsoever to Apple. Chimera offers some. But Safari offers quite a bit, and has the potential for even more.
Apple's lost a lot of the bullet points that we used to use to list what made the Mac superior; I can't help but be wistful when I look back on the days of the Mac-only Photoshop. It's nowhere near as easy to convince people of the Mac's advantages by pointing out the ugliness of Photoshop's MDI box as it was to point out the abject lack of Photoshop's existence on Windows.
So they've had to keep reinventing the Mac; lately it's been the whole digital media "thing", and for a while Apple was far-and-away the leader with that. They've still got a massive entrenched base in film and A/V, and iLife (iMovie 3's bugginess notwithstanding) is a solid offering-- and combined with guaranteed built-in FireWire and the iPod, it's a Complete Lifestyle Solution-- but that's not going to last forever. Microsoft has very nearly pulled all the pieces together so as to make the same stuff available on Windows; and what Microsoft doesn't provide, HP and Sony and Intel and Creative and the rest provide in their own third-party way. Apple's going to have to branch out again.
They sort of missed the "integrated web services" boat, back in 1998 when it was really taking off. With Microsoft's relationship with the Mac sort of up in the air, with the now-infamous deal-with-the-devil by which Jobs would accept $150 million and a guarantee to keep Mac Office in production, in exchange for the promise to bundle IE-- Microsoft's second-rate Mac version of IE-- instead of Netscape... it meant that the Mac would never have the whole browser-centric OS interface that Windows has now, whether Apple wanted it or not. It's still arguable whether it was a good idea in the long run. But whether it was or not, the Mac is still much less "webby" than Windows is. And perhaps that's what Safari and WebCore are all about.
If so, it means they're playing catch-up, not striking out into new territory. I don't quite know what Jobs has in mind for the Safari team. I'm sure there's some master plan, and I'm sure it'll turn into something massively cool sooner or later. I just don't know what.
But what all this proves, and what Hyatt (speaking for himself, not as an Apple employee) and Gruber have elucidated, is that Apple has breathing room. They can afford to throw their weight around a bit. They're not hanging on by their fingernails; they're healthy enough to experiment. Their risk-taking isn't out of desperation; it's still out of the genuine desire to innovate; and as long as they're a minority, that desire to innovate can't reasonably be mistaken for cold-hearted selfishness and monopolistic paranoia, which is the usual assumption with Microsoft.
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| Saturday, February 8, 2003 |
00:37 - For God's sake, take cover
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It may be time to panic. I just heard on the radio-- the regional weather service has just issued a stern, sweeping warning; it applies to all residents of Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Sonoma counties. That includes a whole lotta people. I'm fearful of what this means for the millions in the area.
The warning?
Temperatures may drop below freezing tonight. So, uh, reserve some attention for the well-being of outdoor plants and pets.
...Just thought that was so cute. Oh, incidentally, the air was excellently clear today. Too bad I had to spend most of it indoors; bleah.
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| Friday, February 7, 2003 |
18:44 - So is anybody doing anything right?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/02/07/paglia/index.html
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Salon has this article (forwarded by Judson) which consists of a recent interview with Camille Paglia, self-styled "libertarian Democrat". I wasn't sure what to expect; and having read it, I'm not sure I know what I've just witnessed.
I almost stopped reading it halfway through, as a matter of fact. The article starts out reading like your typical anti-war, anti-Bush, ratty-old-car-covered-with-bumper-stickers diatribe:
But how are we going to counter that threat? Are we going to bomb laboratories and facilities storing dangerous chemicals and release them in the air near population centers? Are we going to poison Baghdad? This is as barbarous as what we're opposing in Saddam. We need to be going in the opposite direction -- to lower global tensions. This constant uncertainty is bad for everyone. It's bad for the economy, it's bad for people's psychic health, and it's going to endanger Americans around the world. How are we ever going to do business around the world and function in a global market, when any American traveling abroad is subject to assassination?
But Paglia then goes on to express disdain for Clinton, support for Israel (especially since the last couple of years), rejection of the Democratic party as a "bunch of weasels", a trepidation toward radical Islam as an analog to early Christianity and its own improbable rise to prominence (she's a scholar of ancient history), scorn for entertainment pinheads like Sean Penn, and disgust with today's anti-war movement and its "Bush is a poop-throwing monkey" sloganeering-based incoherence. She wants no part of Sontag or Chomsky and their reflexive anti-Americanism. She would like to see Condi Rice as Bush's 2004 running mate, apparently so as to stick it to Hillary.
Paglia doesn't like the idea of war, and she's very nervous about how our occupying Iraq is just as likely to inflame further Islamic radicals (as did our military presence in Saudi Arabia) as it is to put the fear of God into would-be terrorists. She understands the power of the latter approach-- she's an unabashed fan of bolts-from-heaven like the Predator that took out the jeep in Yemen-- but she doesn't like the idea of big old-fashioned war. And that's fine; I can understand that. Paglia's anti-war objections are something I'm fully willing to listen to because her overall political picture shows someone who's intellectually honest, unwilling to subscribe to shallow popular opinion or to paint things with the moral-equivalence brush, and equally critical of the moronic things she sees on both sides. She doesn't appear to be a big fan of Bush or Rumsfeld, but it seems she'd take them any day over Clinton.
But what I don't get is how she manages to very nearly undermine her whole argument and platform by starting out the interview with stuff like this:
As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas -- the president's home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was "weeks, not months" away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.
From the point of view of the Muslim streets, surely it looks like the hand of Allah has intervened, as with the attack on the World Trade Center. No one in the Western world would have believed that those mighty towers could fall within an hour and a half -- two of the proudest constructions in American history. And neither would anyone have predicted this eerie coincidence -- that the president's own state would become the burial ground for the Columbia mission.
Including one small town where the debris fell called Palestine, Texas.
Yes, exactly! What weird irony with an Israeli astronaut onboard who had bombed Iraq 20 years ago. To me this dreadful accident is a graphic illustration of the limitations of modern technology -- of the smallest detail that can go wrong and end up thwarting the most fail-safe plan. So I think that history will look back on this as a key moment. Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you're doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he'd call it off.
And then she goes on to talk about how attacking Iraq will play havoc with people's "psychic health". Who is this person? Is she serious? What kind of time is this, to talk about "omens" when such self-parodying superstition is exactly what fuels our enemies? She makes such a strong case, but then spreads credibility-solvents on top with a mortar trowel.
What I come away with, ultimately, is an impression that she thinks nobody's doing the right thing-- not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the Islamists, not the anti-war people, not the French, not Saddam, not anybody. We're all going about everything the wrong way. And it's not that she's just raving, either; many of her points are valid through completely understandable intellectual processes. It's just a very dismal picture she paints; it's hard to tell what she's asking anybody to do.
I think our prospects in Iraq have a better chance of success than Paglia thinks. I know she's an expert on Mesopotamia and all, but this is the modern world, and nodding knowingly about "tribal grudges" and "long memory" doesn't really get us anywhere. All it does is condemn us to the last millennium for the duration of the coming one, all because we're not willing to round up the stragglers and nudge them along.
Maybe it's idealistic to think it's possible to defuse the Middle East. Maybe taking out Saddam will make things worse. But this is still the beginning stages of the great cultural confrontation that will decide the course of the next thousand years; it's going to be painful sooner or later no matter what course we choose. I think it's likely to be resolved sooner and more cleanly if we plant our feet and roll up our sleeves than if we curl up into a ball and hope it goes away.
I don't much like the situation we've been put into either. There is no good way out; there are just bad ways and less bad ways.
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09:49 - Safari Up the River
http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/archives/2003_02.html#002472
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Phew, boy. Dave Hyatt's done it now. His "Surfing Safari" blog doesn't have an e-mail link (wisely, it seems), but he's noticed that lots and lots of people are trying to find ways of getting their bug reports and feature requests in to him; they've been resorting to really creative solutions, probably including slipping them into his morning paper and hiring skywriters to put them in the sky over his house.
Well, now he's created a designated post/comment thread where he's actually encouraging people to post their suggestions in the comments or in their own blogs via TrackBack. He promises to read them all.
As of this writing, there are 648 comments and 32 TrackBacks.
Some of the TrackBacks note, though, that if more companies took this tactic toward customer involvement in software development, it would be a great world indeed. I suppose I can't argue with that; I just wonder whether Dave will regret this. I guess it's just a nice clear illustration, if nothing else, of just how touchy the subject of web browsers is these days-- people need their browser to accomplish all their daily tasks and support all their pet features; they need to be able to depend on it. Mac users often have three or four browsers floating around their Docks, just for compatibility purposes; Safari aspires to replace all of them, but it's only now that we get to see clearly just how serious a task that will be for Hyatt and his team.
So far I've counted numerous votes for tabbed browsing, almost as many people saying how much they hate tabbed browsing, and several who propose something better than tabbed browsing...
I'm not even going to bother posting anything in the comments. I'm not enough of a CSS stud to have specific demands along the lines of what he's primarily looking for, and I've already sent in my other bug reports that I've found so far. Many people have already commented on some of those issues anyway, so I'm sure they'll be addressed.
Building a new browser from scratch for a vibrant platform that doesn't have a good single browser solution already. And then soliciting bug reports and feature requests. Can you possibly think of a better way to spike a guy's workload?
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| Thursday, February 6, 2003 |
15:47 - Testify
http://www.cmug.org/
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Marcus sent me this link a couple of days ago: the Christian Mac Users' Group.
It seems in fact to be a serious site. It even has some resources that I find interesting-- things like detailed guides to historical/religious analysis using dedicated mapping and concordance software. I don't see any nutball-ism here, just stuff of interest to a particular demographic-- with a sense of humor to boot.
Welcome to the Bully Pulpit, CMUG's colorful equivalent to an editorial page. Here you'll find "sermons," rants, and musings on a variety of subjects of interest to Christian Mac users.
But what I like best has got to be the graphic on the main page, at the top. Religious or secular, I think that's just cool.
UPDATE: This is even better: SMUG, the Satanic Mac Users Group. (With that acronym, I would have thought someone could have put together one slammin' Mac-mockery site.) Nicely done. Thanks to Chris Cooper for the pointer!
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12:10 - The definition of "is"
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So yesterday, many of us were assuming that Powell's presentation would be exactly the "smoking gun", the proof of Iraqi noncompliance and threat that so many people have been demanding, the absence of which they were using as the basis for their opposition to war. We figured that anybody who wasn't convinced by now would never be convinced by anything short of "Saddam personally driving a truck full of Sarin right through their living rooms", as Mike put it.
Well, this morning I was listening to Forum on NPR, and caller after caller expressed levels of disapproval of the war-- each person had a different reaction to the presentation, but almost none of them (aside from one Holocaust survivor, and everybody knows we can just ignore what they have to say, right?) had anything good to say about the prospects for war. Nobody appeared to have been "swayed" by the presentation; they just had different justifications now.
Some people said the presentation was rock-solid-- but war was not the answer. So what if Iraq is doing all these terrible things? If the alternative is us going in there and slaughtering millions of Iraqi civilians, destroying their already tattered infrastructure, and sending hundreds of thousands of our own young people to be killed and maimed and gassed-- it's still unacceptable! I find myself wondering whether people have World War I and the Civil War so indelibly printed in their brains that it's become the archetype of all "war" that anybody can conceive. Never mind Gulf War I and its tremendously low civilian casualty rate and absurdly low American troop loss; never mind Afghanistan, which was even more clean and one-sided, largely thanks to those big bad super-weapons we've been designing all these years which specifically avoid harming civilian populations and instead go directly for the pinpointed positions of known command figures. No, war is apparently all about killing the maximum possible number of civilians-- case closed.
Nobody's guaranteeing that the war will go smoothly. But Iraqi Kurds are asking for the US to invade, because it's better than what they're having to deal with now-- and it has a real chance of making things way better once it's over.
Callers kept saying that "there must be a peaceful solution," just as the UN delegates whose responses they so admired kept repeating. But so far the only such solution anybody has proposed is "more inspections", and if those don't work (and Powell's thesis is that they haven't), what then? Is our example of peacefulness supposed to shame them into changing their minds and disarming?
Another argument was: And how are we supposed to pay for this, anyway? My Social Security goes down the toilet to pay for oil from Iraq? Tacking the "oil and empire" argument onto this otherwise interesting thought betrays the questioner's unwillingness to listen objectively to the idea that there might be other reasons why we're going to war. Yes, the financial question is an important one (though not without answers). But the point of this presentation was indirectly to show that oil and empire are not what this is about. The War on Terrorism did not end with Afghanistan, and if we make the mistake of thinking that it did, then we plunge the Middle East back into the same self-destructive cycle of despotic oppression and dangerous anti-Western rhetoric that led to 9/11 in the first place. Does anyone think the opinions that many policymakers in the Middle East hold of the US could possibly get any worse if we attack Saddam? What's more likely to turn it around-- backing off and leaving everything the way it is, bubbling over with hatred and poverty and oppression? Or sweeping in, eliminating Saddam, and turning Iraq into a liberated nation free to join the world community and lift itself above the hell to which it's currently condemned?
I'd like to see some discussion of where the money for this war will come from, and how it will be paid for down the road. (One side effect of a takeover of Iraq will be that we will have cheaper oil, but it's just that-- a side effect. It'll help, though.) It's an important question, but I hope it doesn't boil down to Bush taking the podium to say, "Well, my fellow Americans, I'd really love to protect you all from global terrorism-- but it's just not in the budget this year. Sorry 'bout that."
Another caller said the presentation appeared damning, but calling down the line that someone else had used: "Who are you going to believe-- Saddam Hussein or the Bush administration?" --the caller linked it to the baby incubator hoax, which the earlier Bush administration used in order to drum up Congressional support for Gulf War I. Who was this caller prepared to believe? Why, Saddam, of course. After all, look what our government did.
Now, the incubator thing is a pretty serious scandal, and I'm not going to apologize for it, even if a case can be made for judicious bits of propaganda serving the greater good. But a variation on that argument is that even accepting the incubator case as a lie, once we actually went into Iraq, we did in fact find plenty of evidence for stuff that was just as bad. The incubator thing was a fiction, but one composed of truths-- it was genuine intelligence repackaged and reimagined for easy consumption. We know that stuff like that went on and continues to go in within Iraq. Presenting this story as truth galvanized Congress for the war, and after the war was over, the verbatim story wasn't vindicated, but the war was. And so the argument that we can't trust the Bush administration to tell us the truth more than we can trust Saddam to do so becomes less compelling. One lies for the right reasons, the other lies for the wrong reasons. Is the incubator lie worse than Saddam's lies that such things did not happen in Iraq? Not so easy to develop an opinion out of that, is it?
Finally, a number of callers said that they found the presentation totally unconvincing. They said it was all just propaganda and circumstantial evidence and speculation; they said "It's just a bunch of grainy photographs of trucks and buildings-- Iraq's allowed to have trucks and buildings, aren't they?-- and recordings of people talking in Arabic. How do we know what they're saying?" Most people expressing this reaction said they'd been anti-war before the presentation-- they weren't exactly coming at it from an unbiased position. But there were Arabic-speakers at the UNSC meeting; they can verify that the voices on the tapes were saying what they were saying. The satellite and U2 photos require only an acceptance of the dates and times of recording to be damning. And so either the whole presentation is a fabrication, or it shows what it purports to show; and I don't think I can take a tenable position in an argument against someone who holds the former view. It's just not a debate I'd be interested in having. Such a fabrication would, if uncovered, be such a monstrous scandal as to bring down the entire US government-- just as would be a war promoted solely by Bush's supposed crusade for oil. Either these callers will have to acknowledge that the evidence is genuine, or they're effectively accusing the entire US government of high treason. I'm not sure they recognize the implications of the scale of those claims.
Amanda mails me this analysis by Paul Ryan, who points out that the evidence Powell presented is still open to interpretation. And that's fine, but it still implies an assumption that this is the best evidence we have to justify war, and we're doing it anyway. I really don't think that's the case. There's plenty more evidence we could have presented, as Powell said, but to reveal too much would reveal too much, as it were. If the US doesn't have classified information that's way more damning to use to justify this war, then they're negligent and treasonous, and somehow I don't think the government has reached that point. (If the Bush administration were that dishonest, wouldn't they have started building that Caspian oil pipeline through Afghanistan by now, and maybe claimed that the Columbia was brought down by sabotage linked to Iraq?)
Iraq does not have the ability to attack America right now, says Ryan and several callers on Forum. No, but they've demonstrated ability to hide weapons and willingness to develop them in secret, as well as bad faith in cooperating with inspectors. If the ricin link isn't indicative of plenty more dangerous things that Saddam could and would like to indirectly do to us, then what is-- short of an actual attack that can be traced conclusively back to Iraq? It's a state that is acting in direct opposition to UN resolutions, with demonstrated willingness and motive to cause harm to the US, and demonstrated links to groups that are willing to attack us directly. If we do get attacked by Iraqi chemical weapons delivered by al Qaeda agents, won't hindsight be 20/20?
It might have been my imagination, but I think I saw more NO WAR bumper stickers on cars on the way to work today than I've seen in a while. The presentation seems to have won over many, many people; but the remaining anti-war forces have been galvanized into still firmer resolve. As is always the case when the moderates in an argument are won away from their side, what's left are the really hard-core believers. That means the argument over the war is likely to get more strident now, not less.
For the US not to go to war now would be a betrayal of everything the Bush administration has been saying and doing, and of everybody who has subscribed to its stance on the post-9/11 world. We've been talking about "rope-a-dope", about Bush snookering France and Germany into relegating themselves to irrelevancy and cornering the UN and NATO into writing their own death warrants.
But the US is kinda trapped too.
Staying the course is the way out; but that course is a sobering and bloody one. There will be some very non-trivial consequences. War is the right answer, I still say, or at least the least wrong answer. But it will cause more wounds in this country. That's the real legacy of 9/11.
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| Wednesday, February 5, 2003 |
03:26 - Coffin nails in the skyline
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I was going to say something about what the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has decided are the two best possible ideas for replacing the WTC-- but I knew it would be pointless to try to come up with anything that would qualify as insight, compared to the inevitable (and oh-so-welcome) analysis by Lileks.
He doesn't like either one, and I'm glad I'm not the only one. (I noticed, on the day the finalists were posted, that the CNN preference poll was evenly split 32.1%-32.1% between the two choices, and yes, it was really that close-- and another third of the participants had voted for "any design but these two". Not a ringing endorsement among the populace. While I may be cavalier about politicians' obligation to listen to opinion polls that canvass respondents who don't have anywhere near as much classified intelligence on a given matter as the politicians do, I do think the LMDC has some obligation to do what the people want to see in the WTC's place. And the people are looking at these designs and wrinkling their noses.
The two designs the LMDC has chosen were at the bottom of my preference list; both seemed very, very wrong. I'm yet more sure of that now that I've looked more closely at both, now that we're going to have to live with one of them. And that's what I think is going to be one of the sticking points here, something that ought to give New Yorkers and all Americans pause: With the WTC simply gone, there's the warm glow of hope-- hope that whatever goes in there in its place will be something to dwarf even the previous towers in grandeur and awe-inspiration. There's the element of pleasant surprise; how many of us looked at the empty skyline and said, "Well, there's nothing there now, and it looks empty, but just wait'll they build something new!" There's the assumption that whatever goes there will be something we can be proud of, something that will comfort us for the loss of the first WTC through its tastefulness and originality and its odd familiarity. We feel as though whatever we get, it'll be better than the WTC was. We're in the 21st Century now, aren't we? Surely we know how to build beautiful buildings now, after so many centuries of practice? There's no way we can go wrong, is there?
Sure there is, unfortunately. We can always try to outsmart ourselves-- if you will, to THINK the design to death.
I remain sort of reluctantly partial to the WTC2002 design-- audacious as it is, it's still a building as we understand the concept, and it works with the existing Manhattan skyline to form a sturdy anchor-- a masthead for the country, one that we can tie our nation's rigging ropes to, and one that won't snap off in the wind out of being really no more than a latticework memorial. It's a real building, with real people and real culture inside. The old WTC stood at one end of the country like a billboard, saying, "Go west beyond this point, and more of this is what you'll see. People working, building their national dream. They're all on display here, doing what they do best, thirty thousand of them in two gigantic vertical boxes. Be inspired, and go find your own box somewhere out there in that great expanse westward. Go through the gateway and seek the fortune that we wish you." The old WTC was the beginning of America, traveling westward. But these new designs do the opposite; they're the end of America, traveling eastward. They're the prows of foundering ships. They're ghosts and relics and memories. They're not vibrant celebrations of the future, they're morose fixations on the past. One evokes that past through a macabre and disturbing phantom; the other leaps so far away from the old visual mores as to reject even a contemplation of what made that place special. And neither design projects an image of strength; even if they're both potentially the world's tallest structures, neither one beckons the viewer with an impossibly thriving iteration of the familiar, as the old towers did. Instead, they make the viewer frown and wonder. They don't reassure, they disturb.
Worst of all, if one of these designs gets built, that will be it. What if it sucks? What if New York decides the building is really, really awful? They can't very well get rid of it and start over. They'll be stuck with it. Right now, there's the open-ended hope that whatever gets built will rock. But if the LMDC picks one of these, that hope will be dashed. We'll be condemned to whatever ghostly or alien vision the LMDC decides to visit upon the site, for the foreseeable future. And it'll change the character of Manhattan, and New York, and America, more than the simple lack of the old WTC already has done.
Part of me still says "Build them back exactly like before." I know it's probably not feasible. But Lileks finishes with this lament:
One of the greatest architects of the era was Raymond Hood, who also worked on two modern icons - the Daily News building, which was a glass of cold water in the face, and the gorgeous McGraw Hill building, which isn't much known outside of New York. (It's up there with the Chrysler, in my book.) But he was adept at classical styles; his American Radiator building still overlooks Bryant Park, and it's another one of my favorites. Black stone, gold crown. He was not an innovator, but he captured the essence of a style and distilled it into the best possible expression.
If only we could bring him back to life and give him this job. I think I know what he'd do - it would be restrained, severe, symmetrical, and it would strike the sky like two great swords.
Hear frickin' hear.
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10:06 - Any questions?
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.un/index.html
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Powell's laid out the evidence. (So much for "Let the inspections work", eh?) Now to sit back and see who's willing to admit they were wrong, and who will instead lash out bitterly at those who turned out to be right. (Ehh, let 'em fume. They had their fun. Now they get to do some soul-searching.)
Here's my favorite part, though:
At the other end of the table, Mohammed Aldouri, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, listened to Powell's presentation and waited for his chance to respond. .
I'm sort of expecting his response to be something along the lines of:
"You know, boys, there's an old saying down on the bayou that, uh... blah!"
And then he'll throw Ralph at Colin Powell and run away.
UPDATE: So much for "so much for 'let the inspections work'". I heard the Chilean and Angolan delegates' responses while on the way to work, and I had the same reaction that Ray did. Unbelievable. (And I didn't even get to hear what folks like Syria had to say.)
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| Tuesday, February 4, 2003 |
21:59 - A winning combination
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UNIX and TV, together at last. And with transparent layering to boot, so you don't have to shuffle windows around in order to hack and watch at the same time.
Just thought that was kinda cool.
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| Monday, February 3, 2003 |
22:37 - Ah, the mysteries of life
http://brainstorminterlude.2y.net:8409/~uec/cgi-bin/viewgallery.pl?gallery=maltplant
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Okay-- Safari question. Any web geeks out there using Safari, who might be able to suggest an insight into this?
Go to this URL; watch the image as it loads. Namely, note that it loads as a thumbnail-- about 200 pixels across. Then, as soon as it's fully downloaded, the image expands to its full natural size, re-rendering the page around it.
Why does it do this? What controls it? Is it simply that the image is large in dimensions and has no WIDTH and HEIGHT tags, and this is how Safari handles such things? The final result is a properly-rendered page, but what's the purpose of rendering the image scaled-down while it's loading?
I'm having a hard time deciding whether this is a cool and clever feature, or a bizarre and stupid bug. I'm leaning toward the former, as it's just a behavior quirk and causes no actual incorrect rendering in the end. But-- I'd love to know just what's going on.
UPDATE: Several people have e-mailed to the effect that some apps (such as Photoshop) save JPEGs with a smaller, "low-res" version of the image encapsulated within them. The idea is that the browser can load the small version first, quickly, and then load the high-res version on top of it. It's sort of like progressive JPEG functionality, especially if the browser HTML-scales the thumbnail up to the full dimensional size of the high-res image while it's loading.
Now, the high-res image is only stored in the file linearly after the low-res image, so the browser won't know the high-res image's dimensions until it's finished loading the low-res image; so it would have to do pretty much what Safari's doing, which is to load the small one at its native, small size, and then have it "pop" to the full size of the high-res version once that's loaded. But what I'm still confused about is that the small version doesn't appear to load any more quickly than the high-res version does. It loads linearly, top-to-bottom, as though it's loading a high-res JPEG that's been HTML-scaled down. As a matter of fact, what it looks to be doing is the following:
- Open image, find a low-res thumbnail version with small dimensions embedded at the top of the image
- Lay out the page according to the thumbnail image's dimensions
- By now, the thumbnail version is fully loaded, and Safari finds a high-res version in the file; however, rather than simply displaying the completed low-res version in the position that's laid out for it, Safari starts actually reading (and displaying line-by-line) the hi-res version, and HTML-scaling it to fit into the space that's been laid out for the low-res version.
- Finally, once the high-res version has been fully loaded, Safari re-renders the page layout according to the high-res version's dimensions.
If this is what's going on, then it's not a pure bug I'm seeing, but a nifty feature with a bug. What Safari probably should be doing is displaying the low-res image in its small laid-out space, and only popping to the full-size image after the JPEG has been fully loaded. Alternately, it could pop to the high-res version's full dimensions as soon as it begins reading the high-res version, but display the completed low-res version at the high-res version's size, which would make for a different kind of "progressive" behavior-- big and chunky at first, but snapping into better focus as the data loads (and meanwhile, being laid-out in the format that it would end up in).
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15:24 - The Heart of the Matter
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Talk of the Nation today on NPR covered the current debate on the whole Iraq "thing"-- the European recalcitrance on a military action, America's general support of it (or at least the acceptance of a genuine debate and a division of opinions), and the reasons for the huge ideological split that apparently has remained relatively dormant for a number of years, only now to erupt into trans-Atlantic rhetorical posturing that sounds like a bunch of people angling to be the next Patrick Henrys or Neville Chamberlains, each one hoping his writings can boil everything down into an epiphany that will rally a sphere of minds regardless of which side it's on.
When I tuned in, there was a caller who sounded American, calling from Norway. He said that the general European position is simply that they can't possibly imagine how war could make the situation in the Middle East any better; as far as they're concerned, right or wrong, if we forcibly remove Saddam from power, he'll inevitably be replaced by someone just as bad, and there'll be extra resentment and animosity layered on top of it. The possibility that we would occupy the country and guide its further development into a friendly modern nation seemed beyond the realm of contemplation; of course that won't work, seemed the sentiment. (Whether this betrays some kind of feeling that "Well, they're all just destined to be third-world forever, and no amount of Western influence will be able to convince those people to change" is a question that remains to be clearly answered.) The guy seemed to think that it would be a much better solution to lift the sanctions on Iraq, and trade with them-- put money into the country through civilized means, which would reduce animosity and raise the nation's wealth and all that, without anybody having to fire a shot in anger. (I guess Saddam's history of invading his neighbors and developing WMDs even when the UN tells him not to is all just an irrelevant side issue-- it's all about poor innocent Iraq being unnecessarily punished for some bygone provincial affront.)
While the moderator was talking to this guy, he brought up an e-mail that someone had sent in. It contained the following adage:
Americans try to solve problems; Europeans try to live with problems.
I don't think many Americans would disagree with this sentiment; they'd happily stand under a banner with this statement printed on it in foot-high letters. But oddly enough, neither would the Europeans object to it, if the Norwegian caller's positive reaction to it is any indication. He thought it was perfectly valid, something Europeans could point to proudly. Each side can use the same statement as an illustration of the shortcomings of the other and a vindication of its own position.
Isn't that veird?
It certainly would explain a lot-- from Europe's WWII appeasement to today's desire to placate Saddam rather than overthrow him, while berating the Americans' "cowboy" politics; and from all the wars in America's history to today's desire to wipe out Islamic fundamentalist terrorism rather than figure out how to hide from it.
Americans who follow the Jacksonian model, as Steven Den Beste has repeatedly said, are "magnanimous in victory"-- rebuilding the countries we flatten, making them stronger than they were before, but only after thoroughly squashing them and putting them in their place. The Norwegian caller, though, wanted to be magnanimous in tactics-- before victory is even assured, to make a big show of being "nice guys", so that nobody could possibly hate us, so they'd feel bad about continuing to attack us or something. If they're building nuclear bombs, it must be because they sense a threat from us-- and so if we take on the omega role and lie on our backs and whimper, then the adversary will see no reason to become the alpha wolf and take advantage of the situation.
I personally don't see how that follows. Nature follows a pecking order for a reason, and if an alpha wolf steps down voluntarily instead of imposing his will, then someone else will step into the alpha role-- violently, more often than not-- rather than create the world's first vegetarian pack of comrade wolves.
A woman called shortly afterwards, identifying herself as a "politically naďve" stay-at-home mom, nervously stating the case that the US has become that which we were trying to get away from in our Revolution: a colonial power, trying to impose our will and our ideals on the rest of the world. "There is no right way," she said. "The world is full of different people with different ways, and they're all right." (Especially the ones that beat women for not wearing head scarves, right. I understand.) Her thesis was that (get ready, because there needs to be fanfare-- after she said it, the studio went silent and contemplative, like nobody had ever phrased it quite like this before): The US is a bully. "It has to be said," she gasped, triumphing over her neck-implants that inject patriotism-serum into her bloodstream. You'd think half the country's freeway traffic skidded off into the medians because all the listeners had let go of the steering wheel to clap.
Fortunately, the moderator and the guys in the studio had a response, right at the close of the hour. The guy who responded had this crucial thing to say: Just because an action is taken by a country that happens to be the world's most powerful body does not necessarily mean that that action is evil. That's right. Yeah, maybe the US is a bully. Maybe we do tell the rest of the world that they'd better fall into step with us or be treated as the enemy and crushed. But we would be pursuing the same goals and in the same way if we were the fifth or sixth largest power in the world as we're doing now that we're the largest, I believe; at any time, we could choose to start erecting statues and flying flags all over the world and asserting our imperial influence in every corner of the globe. But we're not doing that, and therein lies the difference between us as a global power leader, and certain other nations in history that aspired to that power. We don't goose-step and build concentration camps. We don't have political prisons. We haven't even built that oil pipeline through Afghanistan that so many people are convinced the war there was all about. We have doomsday bombs that can level megalopoli, but do we use them to enforce our global hegemony? No, we don't-- as a matter of fact, we spend billions of dollars developing weapons that can seek out a single person and fly through his window and kill him in his sleep, leaving even his bodyguards unhurt. No, we're not perfect-- we do make mistakes, but they're honest mistakes, things that occur in spite of our ideals, not as a result of them. If our only crime and our only evil is that we are big and powerful, well, quite frankly, I have a hard time seeing how the world could do any better.
Might does not make right; it's true. However, might does not make wrong, either. The world would do well to remember that.
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12:05 - Filename Extension Depth Arms Race
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/29137.html
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Have I mentioned lately how much I hate filename extensions?
How the New Exploit Works
The exploit relies on especially crafted email headers, creating an attachment with three file-extensions. Standard email packages will not generate these headers; these emails must either be created by hand, or using hacker tools (many of which are freely available, MessageLabs warns).
The first extension (e.g. .jpg) is visible to the email user, and is intended to persuade them that the attachment is "safe". The final extension (also, for example, .jpg) is used by Outlook Express to set the icon to represent the application for opening the attachment.
However, the unusual middle extension (.EXE) is used by Outlook Express to determine how to launch the attachment, therefore an .EXE file will be executed if a user double clicks on an infected attachment. Other examples may include .COM, .PIF, .SCR, or .VBS.
Die... diiiie... <teeth cracking>
Thanks to Kris for the link.
UPDATE: John Poole did some experimentation and found that OS X's Mail.app is not susceptible to filename-extension trickery. I too am curious as to how it keeps track of the executable bit, and I wonder how it would handle a Classic-style monolithic-file executable (one that isn't a folder "package"). There's also the question of whether Apple intends to try to encapsulate OS X's per-file extension-hiding bit, and what implications that would have for virus.gif.pkg kinds of exploits...
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11:40 - Ill
http://www.homestarrunner.com/systemisdown.html
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Okay... if you're at all a devotee of Strong bad and Homestarrunner.net (It's dot com!), go look at this.
Just... look. That is all.
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09:37 - Apple's Dirty Little Secret
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/02/03/BU19749
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SFGate has a long, detailed exposé on Apple Certified Resellers and how they're being systematically screwed by Apple. This, the article says, is something that's been happening for many years, possibly as long as Apple has existed-- but it's gotten worse lately, specifically since Apple started opening its own retail stores. That's apparently when Apple's relationship with its third-party dealers went from uneasy to downright adversarial.
What angers him the most, Santos said, is that Apple's own sales representatives, when talking to customers, regularly disparage the competence and even the integrity of independent dealers, including dealers like him who have a long record of success and have been certified by Apple to service as well as sell its products.
Kohler, who is getting out of Mac sales and service after 12 years, agreed. "Our clients regularly report that when they talk to Apple, they're told they'd be better off going through the company" rather than a dealer like him, he said.
The disparagement issue that Santos and Kohler raise underlies several parts of Santos' lawsuit, including charges of unfair competition, trade libel and "intentional interference with economic relationship."
And there are tons of stories of Apple's refusal to pay enough or at all for things that should be warranty repairs, and tales of incompetence in the Apple-to-Dealer shipping channel that results in lost shipments and time-consuming inquiries. Readers of MacCentral are roundly criticizing the article as a groundless smear, but a friend who sent me this article from his job in an Apple Certified Reseller assures me that it's not even slightly exaggerated. He's got stories of his own that make my hair curl. (Or straighten, as the case may be.)
There was a big renovation of Apple's service channel a little while back, but it only resulted in more problems. My friend reports that after the shakeup, his reimbursement rates were reduced once again by a minor amount or slightly raised, but only for what Apple designated as "big-ticket items"; the reimbursement for "smaller, easier things"-- like modems and hard drives, for instance-- now netted only about a third as much.
On top of which, they now have a new, web-based tracking system called GSX that's web-based (using WebObjects), which is where the benefits end-- it's hideously slow and buggy, and actively impedes the service technician from doing his job. It seems to my friend as though it's "intentionally left unfinished right now".
Up till now, this is one of those issues that's been lurking under the surface, making the resellers mad but without much exposure anywhere else. After all, Apple seems to consistently get extremely high marks in Service in the tech press, compared to other computer makers like Dell and HP. Besides, the Apple Stores are very nice showplaces, and customers walk out of them extremely satisfied, having talked to the Geniuses and used the nice new machines and stuff, and gotten all their problems fixed and all their questions answered. It's been hard to go up to people and try to convince them that Apple's service system is cancerously broken, or to get anybody to really pay attention.
But now that this story has run in SFGate, which isn't even a tech-centric site, maybe it will get a little more attention.
Is Apple's overall goal to eradicate the third-party resellers and bring all service under its own umbrella? If so, they're going about it in an extremely Machiavellian way, and one that everybody on up to Jobs should be ashamed of. Plus I can't imagine such a move would be beneficial to Apple, particularly in a PR sense.
Sounds like it's time this story started getting tracked on a more exposed level, which maybe it will be. After all, there's a lot I really, really like about Apple; but there are obviously a lot of ways in which Apple can be improved. And if this is the only way to bring that improvement about, well: time to grab some whistles and start blowing.
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| Sunday, February 2, 2003 |
03:26 - A-suh-puh-ring is here
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Today was probably the clearest, most gorgeous day I've seen all year-- possibly for a couple of years now. Around lunchtime I went up Quimby Road to get the lay of the land, and I found to my pleasant surprise that I could see Mt. Tamalpais quite sharply from my vantage point in the East San Jose hills. I didn't have my camera with me, but-- well, here's a photo from last year, so you can get an idea of the view I'm talking about:
Today was like this, only-- see that faint mountain line along the horizon? See how it's all sort of hazy and vague? Well, pretend instead that it's as vivid and clear a panorama as anything you've seen from 30,000 feet over New Mexico. See that lump of heights over at the right, just above the house with the kickass view but the awful commute? That's Mt. Tam, and it's north of San Francisco. Today, not only could I make out the striations of treelines on the mountain's slopes; I could see individual buildings in downtown San Francisco, right in front of the mountain from my perspective. I could see where Pac Bell Park was. I could see individual neighborhoods. At sixty or seventy miles' distance as I was, I couldn't identify any particular buildings; but I'd know there was a city there, and if I were an alien visitor with the power of unassisted bodily flight, I'd beeline straight for it.
If you follow the mountain line toward the left, southward along the Peninsula, you see a couple of lowish rises-- the hills in the middle of the City, Twin Peaks and the one Sutro Tower is on-- and further left still are the San Bruno Mountains, the line of hills that form the southern boundary of the City, the bulwark that separates SF from South San Francisco: THE INDUSTRIAL CITY. Today, I could see the green of the grass on those hills. I could see the transmission towers on top of them.
I could almost see the Cow Palace, down at the foot of that ridge on the northern side, tucked away into a little sheltered valley-- a Mediterranean seaport town with rich folks living on perches overlooking the Bay from a thousand feet up, minutes from the airport (just head south around the foot of the San Brunos) and just out of reach of the bleak sprawl of the South-of-Market freeway portal that leads into the City's southern quarter. You can take a road up from the Cow Palace into the hillside balcony rows of tract homes, then let the road take you down the ridge of the foothills, aiming you eastward right across the Bay, with its blue water and the houses clinging to the steep hillsides ringing the little cove region south of Candlestick Point and north of the San Brunos. I was just up there yesterday, listening somberly to the ongoing coverage of the Shuttle cleanup and damage-control effort with Lance as we drove home from the Golden Gate Kennel Club show at the Cow Palace. (We'd been there out of more or less idle curiosity-- what with the new house and all, and the marked lack of a landlord other than myself to forbid such things, we've been thinking of getting a dog or two to add to the household. Fun show, indeed-- got to meet a lot of interesting breeds. I nearly got adopted by a Borzoi in the benching area, where he was standing up on two feet so he could match me in height, and he decided my hand was just the thing to lean his head against and force me to plant my feet under his weight like some macho guy on the subway who refuses to grab a handle when the train jolts to a stop.)
So, yeah. It's been a beautiful weekend, with skies of clearest blue, hills of lush springtime green, and trees flowering in the grocery store parking lot. There was a brisk wind blowing all day, which I'm sure is what contributed most to the clarity of the air; that's fine with me, but I wish we could have it more throughout the year, or at least to predict when it'll happen. 'Cause though the fog-rolling-over-the-Peninsula-ridgeline summertime weather patterns play a strong hand, I'm leaning like a Borzoi toward this time of year being my favorite around here.
I've got to stop leaving my camera at work.
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11:08 - Yeah, real compassionate there, guys
http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=22449
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Aziz Poonawalla sends this editorial from the Arab News, and it's encouraging: unequivocated sorrow and reflection, with nary a but to be found.
It is highly probable that yesterday's crash will cause a major setback in the ISS program. Even if another design flaw is not found to be at the heart of the Columbia wreck, it is certain that the other shuttles will be grounded for at least a year. Columbia was, in fact, the oldest ship in NASA's shuttle fleet, built in 1981, five years before the Challenger tragedy. Though extensively refitted several times, most recently with a new cockpit, some sort of structural fatigue seems a strong possibility. It may well be that scientists still have much to learn about the huge stresses placed on metal which has to endure phenomenal stresses at launch and re-entry as well as the unique pressures of life in orbital space.
The immediate lesson remains, however, that this is a tragedy for everyone, not just the United States, India and Israel. We have all lost in this disaster. A technological challenge has been thrown down and once again, a warning given that in the unforgiving region of space, nothing can be taken for granted. The solutions may be a long time coming.
They will come. The struggle to conquer the space will go on. All that we can hope for is that, when the battle is won, the knowledge gained in the process will add to human happiness, not to human misery.
Aaahhh. A breath of fresh air before diving back into the breach. With, namely, another Arab News article on the crash, posted the same day (forwarded by Steven Den Beste):
7 Astronauts die in shuttle blast over 'Palestine'
[Love the mockery-quotes. -ed]
"Once again we see that space technology can fail," Bruce Gagnon, international coordinator for the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, told Arab News last night. "I'm troubled because the Bush Administration has recently announced a program called the 'Nuclear Systems Initiative', a $1 billion research and development program to expand the launching of nuclear power into space. The problem is that as you increase the numbers of launches carrying nuclear payloads into space, but you are also going to dramatically increase the chances of a catastrophic Chernobyl in the sky."
Asked why NASA was advising extreme precaution at the crash sites, Gagnon said: "We haven't heard that there was a nuclear payload on this shuttle, but one of the great hallmarks of the Bush administration is increased secrecy. I must admit that when NASA said no one should go near a site because of the toxic potential of the fuels and 'other reasons,' I couldn't help but wonder what those reasons are."
Due to cuts in NASA's budget in recent years, NASA has been forced to turn to the Pentagon for increased funding, said Gagnon. The result is that the space shuttles are now also NASA missions and carry both military and civilian technologies.
"What you have now is the military takeover of the space program. NASA is not just about gazing at the stars, it now also has a political and military agenda." What is of concern, he said, is that the Pentagon in now working on a program called the 'Space Based Laser.' "Its nickname is the 'Death Star,' and its job is to destroy other country's satellites, and also hit targets on the Earth below. NASA hopes to have the first operational tests by 2016 or 2017," Gagnon explained.
"This would give the US full control and domination of space and the earth below, because whoever controls space will control the Earth."
C'mon, Arab News, pick a side. It's either the conspiracy theorists or the human beings.
Steven and I once joked about this. It's no joke anymore, apparently.
Criminy.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Palestinians have expressed their heartwarming condolences, via LGF.
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| Saturday, February 1, 2003 |
02:01 - Damage control
http://www.apple.com
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CapLion points out that sometime during the course of today, Apple changed the mock-up image on the Power Mac displays depicted on their official website to this nice one of Mt. Rainier.
What was it before? The Space Shuttle launch.
I'm sure glad I'm not in marketing.
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01:57 - They try so hard...
http://home.online.no/~gremmem/engrish_ttt_captions/
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This webpage celebrates the wonderful engrish subtitles featured in an asian bootleg DVD of Lord of The Rings - The Two Towers. What you see is exactly what appears on the TV screen. The first half of the movie has the most screengrabs, as there is more action than talking later on, and the subtitle writers eventually started getting the name of the characters right. Have fun!
Via Marcus. Engrish fans, don't miss this one.
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16:47 - Not In Vain
http://www.israelnewsagency.com/israelastronautilanramon.html
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If there's any consolation to be had, it's that the Shuttle's mission was in fact complete-- which means that the symbolism of Ilan Ramon's flight, including the journey into space of Petr Ginz' "Moon Landscape" drawing, remain intact. And though the experiments and research carried out during this sixteen-day mission was ground-breaking and every piece newsworthy in any less cynical a time, and every member of the crew a hero for accepting the risk inherent in the pioneering nature of the space program in the first place, Ramon's family and country can be particularly proud that he and the crew he flew with died bringing this one symbolic objective to fulfillment.
The art won't be returning to Earth, but it's met an end more poetic than any museum could give it.
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16:27 - I hate being right
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Steven Den Beste mailed me links to several sightings of exactly what I'd hoped not (but morbidly expected) to see: the dancing-in-the-streets of just about everybody who is willing to stoop to this subhuman level of pettiness just to grind their anti-US axe.
First up, as InstaPundit caught early on, was a CBC interviewer in Canada who asked the interview subject whether the accident could be pinned on American "arrogance".
I am watching coverage on different networks. CBC Newsworld just interviewed writer Robert Sawyer for his reflections on the shuttle program and potential causes of the disaster. The Newsworld interviewer asked Sawyer whether the cause was "arrogance" on the part of the U.S. government. (Sawyer said no.) This is one of the most odious questions I can imagine. It took minutes for the CBC to twist a tragedy into a politically motivated theatre of hate. Talk about manufacturing consent.
Furthermore... the interviewer linked American "arrogance" explicitly to current potential conflict in the Middle East. My only surprise is the CBC did not manage to sneer at the death of Israel's first astronaut in the same breath.
Then comes the bitter sniping from those comment-forum-dwellers who are protected from being strangled by a vengeful mob only by the fact that they live in an evil country that doesn't permit that kind of thing:
What's bush up to?
I am not afraid to say this -
I guess bush's SOTU speech went over so poorly, he needed a disaster to distract us from his horrible actions and lies.
I am getting sick of this bull. How many more Americans must die for bush to look legit? How often will he need to kill to keep up his legitimacy?
How convenient that the first Israeli citizen was on the shuttle, too. Everybody rally behind Sharon and don't question or speak against him, either.
Just how deep can someone's resentment over not getting his way possibly run? I'd thought we'd seen the worst of what acidic hatred the human frame could sustain in the course of the last couple of years, but I fear we're seeing now that the human capacity for ghoulishness knows no measurable bounds.
Finally, though I didn't really expect not to see something like this, we've got Iraq's enlightened take.
Immediate popular reaction in Baghdad on Saturday to the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew -- including the first Israeli in space -- was that its was God's retribution on Americans.
"We are happy that it broke up," government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said.
"God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us," he said.
Car mechanic Mohammed Jaber al-Tamini noted Israeli air force Colonel Ilan Ramon was among the dead when the shuttle broke up shortly before its return to earth.
"Israel launched an aggression on us when it raided our nuclear reactor without any reason (in 1981), now time has come and God has retaliated to their aggression," Tamini said.
How many Iraqi "minders" were present when these statements were taken, I wonder? Just how "popular" was this sentiment? We've been saying all along that our quarrel is with Saddam Hussein, and not with the Iraqi people; but this is not a good thing to do if you're interested in keeping the game on those terms, guys.
We'll show you some "God's vengeance," by golly, real soon now. In fact, we might stamp that phrase on some of our Saddam's-bedroom-window-seeking missiles. And I guarantee we've got more of those than we do Space Shuttles-- besides which, they're designed to explode.
Awright. Hamas? Arafat? Who's next up? How 'bout France? Yeah, we'll have to come hat-in-hand asking for some Arianes next, eh?
Christ. And here I'd thought 9-11 would have turned out to be a great unifying event which would wake up the vast majority of the world that identifies itself as human and rally it as one. How disillusioned we all must be if I can't even curb my cynicism about what opportunistic bastards some people are willing to make of themselves in response to a Space Shuttle accident.
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08:27 - Pointing fingers
http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/1997_h/hsy274160_0.htm
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How long before someone brings this up?
The specific reason for this hearing is to provide our witnesses with the opportunity to report on the shuttle and the shuttle safety in context of repeated transfers of funds from the shuttle program to the International Space Station. This spring NASA took $190 million out of the Fiscal Year 1997 shuttle budget--and that was over the objections of this Committee, I might add--and this was done to pay for Russian non-performance of the International Space Station. And just last week, the Appropriations Conference Committee on VAHUD, acting at NASA's request, cut another $50 million from the Space Shuttle Program for Fiscal Year 1998 and gave it to the International Space Station. Since most of these funds were going to be spent on upgrades which would improve the shuttle's safety and reliability, it seems self-evident that such cuts will have some impact on safety sooner or later. The only question seems to be, ''How many more times can the cookie jar be raided before we get punished?''
This won't be pretty.
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08:03 - Well...
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/01/shuttle.columbia/index.html
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Another one of "those days" for NASA. The kind of day that changes the course of the space effort-- and at least for a long time, not for the better. Unless we can use this as a reminder of the importance of properly supporting the space program at the ideological as well as the financial level, the whole idea of a space "shuttle"-- an unsexy, utilitarian mode of space travel, a space bus-- is going to be at odds with any desire to afford it the appropriate attention to prevent accidents like this.
The big question is going to be "Well, Ilan Ramon, the Israeli, was on board. Was there any terrorism-related sabotage?"
Nobody's making that claim yet; nobody's saying word one in that direction. They're explicitly denying it over and over. And that's all to the good; the circumstances (the point at which the accident occurred, after all the mission objectives had been completed; the "debris hit wing on launch" thing; and the fact that the breakup happened at the single most dangerous place in any given space flight) are such that sabotage just isn't an issue.
However... I dare anybody to dance in the streets over this.
We'll just see.
Contextual oddity: Just last night, I was watching the MST3K of 12 To the Moon, a 50s B-film about a moon shot where twelve of the World's Finest Ethnically Diverse Scientists banded together to symbolize Earth's unity in spaaaace. Now, the plot points themselves were laughable, but there was a subplot involving an Israeli scientist and a German whose father was a Nazi higher-up. The two nearly came to blows a number of times, but eventually had to reconcile and give their lives together in a maneuver to save the Earth. Clumsy writing, but a nice sentiment-- and one you probably won't see in movies made today.
(On top of that, the French astronaut turned traitor and tried to get the German to join with him and condemn the North American continent to being frozen by the Moon people, so the old European powers could have their glory back. The German refused and the American helped subdue him. Wait, when was this movie made?
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| Friday, January 31, 2003 |
16:29 - Ask a silly question...
http://www.apple.com/ilife
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I look away from my iMac for a few minutes, turn around, and there's this:
Ah yes. There you are.
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13:00 - Get an iLife
http://www.apple.com/ilife
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So according to various sources, including Think Secret's earlier report as well as word from a friend who works in an Apple reseller store, that the new updated iLife apps will be available for download and boxed purchase today. (Apparently the boxes have been in retail stores for a week or two now, just waiting for the green-light from Cupertino.)
So where are they?
I want my new iMovie, dagnabbit.
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| Thursday, January 30, 2003 |
19:16 - It was a simpler time
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...Or perhaps a more complex one. Depends on how you look at it. Either way, it's just a memory now. And when you run across a relic from that time, as with so many dim memories, all you remember is the good.
This is a video adapter that let you use PC monitors (with standard VGA connectors) on a Mac, whose video connectors had several more pins than VGA's fifteen.
This adapter has a DIP switch, which allowed you to configure the pins which would normally (on a Mac monitor) auto-sense the display resolution and color depth and pass it from OS to monitor and back again. Those auto-sensing pins are not to be found in VGA, and so PC monitors never had the built-in configurability that in Windows had to be built into the operating system instead.
Of course, this was also the era of what a co-worker called "connector-of-the-week club" at Apple; every few weeks, it seemed, there was some trick new interface standard for all the third-party developers to have to code around, like the PDS slots and daughterboards which seemed specifically engineered so as to prevent any third party from selling any add-on components which might compete with Apple's own. (A friend who worked at one such third-party company at the time said that "Apple is no different fundamentally, from a business sense, from Microsoft. The only difference is that Microsoft pulled it off.")
But still. Look at that adapter, will you? Look at it. Damn.
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| Wednesday, January 29, 2003 |
01:16 - It was all just a dream
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This morning, when I woke up, it was with great startlement. I'd been immersed in one of those dreams that seemed utterly plausible when in progress, and even managed to retain much of its plausibility long into the day.
It started with Bush, or maybe one of the White House advisers-- actually, it was probably Rumsfeld-- on some interview show like Face the Nation. He looked tired, haggard, hunted; it was the day after the SOTU, just as in real life, but for all intents and purposes you'd think the speech had been one of surrender.
The interviewer asked a few questions, beating around the bush; the interviewee dodged them without making eye contact. Finally, whoever it was holding the microphone said, point blank: Are we going to war in Iraq?
And Rumsfeld, or Fleischer, or whoever-it-was, said: No.
This caught the interviewer by surprise. He asked for elaboration.
"We just can't go to war in good conscience," Rumsfleischerbush said. "We can't ignore the fact that so many of our own people are demonstrating so loudly outside these very doors, demanding that we stop."
I suspect I was lying in a pool of sweat at this point. But he went on:
"We still believe war is absolutely justified-- all our evidence and intelligence still tells us that the only way to secure peace in the Middle East and for the American people is to remove Saddam Hussein from power, eliminating the threat of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of al Qaeda. We believe that failing to act against him right now would be a grievous mistake and an act of reckless endangerment of our people bordering on high treason.
"But... we simply can't allow ourselves to go into the history books of future American and European children as being a government, supposedly elected by the people, who steadfastly refused to listen to those very people when their voices rang out the loudest they had done in decades. We cannot take an action that, even if it is justified by our internal classified intelligence, will be widely viewed by the public as an imperialistic power play or a grab for oil. We cannot abide the hypocrisy of our own nation for having nuclear weapons while we forbid Iraq and North Korea from having that same power. We cannot deny that action by the US military in a foreign country, no matter what the justification, is morally equivalent to any terrorist attack perpetrated against our own nation. Public opinion must be held in higher regard than the strategic recommendations of our most senior advisers and experts, and must absolutely trump any prior pledge by our President. The President serves the people, and he cannot serve the people unless he obeys their momentary demands before obeying the mandate of defending the Constitution that he assumed at his inauguration.
"Never let it be said that we dared to claim to know what was best for our own people. Never let it be said that we allowed our own privileged, insider information on world affairs take precedence over the clearly expressed wishes of huge crowds of our citizens and those of our brother nations in Europe, thronged in the streets of the world's cities. Never let it be said that the US Government presumed to know more about how to end terrorism than the university students of the world did. Never let it be said that we did what we knew was right instead of what our loudest people asserted was right."
I remember seeing news reports covering this exchange. I remember seeing unbelievable outpourings of support gush forth from the streets formerly trod by A.N.S.W.E.R. I remember seeing Bush's approval rating soar, the plummeting to zero of warbloggers' opinion of him being muffled to inconsequence by the immense flowering of goodwill from the Left.
I remember blogging about it, but I don't remember what I said. I just remember the onset of a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, along with the strange unaccountable desire to move to Montana.
It was about at this stage that I woke up.
I tell you... no more generic-label pickles before bed for me.
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| Tuesday, January 28, 2003 |
20:17 - Expelliarmus
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/28/sotu.transcript/index.html
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We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.
And while we're at it, maybe we can dis-leg him, and possibly dis-head him too.
(Sorry-- this is what happens when I get a ride home from Kris.)
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16:07 - Bringing New Meaning to "Do Not Forward"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/29073.html
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Ah yes, now we see why the logo of The Register is a vulture.
Here's a stream of internal Microsoft IT memos that circulated on Saturday the 25th, as the Slammer worm spread around the Net (including within Microsoft). How the heck did they leak? Who in Microsoft's IT department would be so willing to pass compromising info like this on to The Register of all people? (Then again, the recipient lists on a lot of these messages are fairly extensive. I'm sure there are a nonzero number of self-haters among the lot.)
It's certainly revealing to see the dynamics of how Microsoft tried to get on top of this. But as John Leyden says:
Those who blame system admins for the spread of the worm might do well to ponder on the fact even Microsoft had not applied its fix which, it's now clear, was far from easy to apply.
Plus, as CapLion wryly noted, when was the last time you heard of an Oracle or DB2 worm taking down the Net?
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11:52 - Stopping the Gap
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
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Okay, it's not a very exciting announcement-- but I suppose that's why they call it a "speed bump".
Power Macs are now up to 1.42 GHz. Whoopee, I hear you cry. Well, yeah, that's pretty respectable-- but it's still "polishing a turd", as Marcus puts it. This machine won't do much to leapfrog Apple back to the forefront of the speed game or anything, not that those who "get" what the Mac is about really mind much. Mac people understand all too well that speed does not equal usability; it's a factor, yes, but it's not the only factor. Not remotely. Well-designed, intuitive, integrated software with predictable and standardized hardware (and all the benefits that come with it, such as iPods and ColorSync) on a machine where you have to see the rainbow pinwheel occasionally is a fine alternative to spending three days trying to upgrade Windows on a machine that pops up its error dialogs instantaneously.
Where this will hurt is in potential converts. This machine still won't cut much of a dash in speed bake-offs; it won't attract gamers, nor will it woo back the graphic designers who have decided that a lack of reliable color-matching technology and a butt-ugly MDI interface on Photoshop is a small price to pay for a little more speed on Gaussian blurs. Plus the way they've lowered the price on the bottom-end machine is to make it single-CPU again, which is not the straightest pitch I've ever seen Apple hurl. No, this is no savior machine; we won't have such a thing until we can get those faster buses and faster disks (c'mon-- still ATA/100? And only on one of the channels?). And that won't happen until the 970 is ready, and that can't come soon enough. But unless it's this fall or so, there'll be problems; one more speed bump is probably all we can expect Apple to be able to squeeze out of these things.
That said, though, there are lots of nice, welcome additions to the new machines. 800 Mbps FireWire, for one thing. That'll help quell the rising tide of USB2 devices, maybe even reminding people of the benefits of having integrated power that requires no wall-leech A/C adapter, and daisy-chainability, and loopability/sharability independent of central CPU control, and so on. Or at least, maybe it'll help quell it.
And there's 802.11g ('scuse me, AirPort Extreeeeeeme!), and integrated BlueTooth, and a 4X SuperDrive, and so on. It's certainly a more attractive machine than it was before; it's just no showstopper.
What does really make me sit up and take notice, however, is the new display lineup. 17" is now as small as it gets, for $699 (formerly $1000). There's a new 20" widescreen Cinema Display, at $1299. And the 23" Cinema HD Display, the one with pixel-for-pixel HDTV compatibility for DVCAM editing and such, is now down from $3500 to $1999.
I wonder where that price break came from? Has their new Taiwanese LCD contractor had some kind of new manufacturing breakthrough? Whatever the explanation, this is damned good news. It's hard to deny, even among the most skeptical, that Apple displays are some of the best in the business. They always have been; it's a point of pride for Apple. The only sticking point has always been price: I can get a top-of-the-line Apple monitor for $1000, or I can get one that's almost as good-- and has analog inputs as well as DVI, and has picture-in-picture and integrated speakers and stuff-- for $800. It's been a hard game for Apple to play-- very much the same battle they've had to fight for so long now. Subjective quality is what they charge so much for, but subjective quality doesn't show up in the bulleted lists in the glossy brochures. From a 30,000-foot view, Apple products look like bad deals. They're not, but it's just far too easy to get the impression that they are.
But, well, whatever miracle they've pulled off to get the pricing on the displays into this range, it's a serious coup. Now Apple displays are a good deal again, even on paper.
So it's not a bad day at all.
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11:16 - Redmond Justice
http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=31168037
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Ahh, now this is the kind of thing that puts a twisted smile on my lips. It's only a partial consolation for the network's damage at the hands of the SQL Slammer worm; but it does melt the ice surrounding my wrought-iron heart just a little.
Microsoft Corp. itself was exposed to the virus-like attack that crippled global Internet activity last weekend because it failed to install crucial fixes to its own software on many Microsoft computer servers.
Although Microsoft contends its failure to keep up with its own updates did not cause major problems, security experts said it points to a larger issue: Microsoft's process for keeping customers' software secure is hugely flawed.
The virus-like attack, called "slammer" or "sapphire," exploited a known flaw in Microsoft's "SQL Server 2000" database software, used by businesses, government agencies, universities and others around the world. Microsoft had issued a patch for the flaw in July, but many _ including some units within Microsoft _ had failed to install it.
The result was that the attacking software scanned for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively that it saturated many of the Internet's largest data pipelines, slowing e-mail and Web surfing around the world.
Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller declined to say which areas or how many computers at Microsoft were affected. He acknowledged that some servers were left unfixed because administrators "didn't get around to it when they should have."
Not that this will do anything in the long term to change anybody's approach to proper administrative habits. Oh, sure, it'll put the fear of God into a few IT guys, for a few months. Lots of techs will get sent to security training seminars; lots of consultants will make lots of money.
But sooner or later, everyone will go back to the tried-and-true method of using whatever software came preinstalled on their servers, hiring MCSEs to maintain it who follow little flowcharts and leave root passwords on Post-it Notes stuck to their monitors, and relying on service contracts and lawsuits to cover their asses in the event of anything bad happening.
It's cheaper that way, of course. It's how the insurance industry works. Hope for the best, but pay a tax and gamble that it'll explode, because someone else will take care of it if it does.
Meanwhile, we on the Internet get stuck in traffic jams behind massive auto pileups, and nobody's raising the premiums.
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11:08 - The Sordid Underbelly of Video Games
http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/naughty.htm
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Seanbaby strikes again! This time, he's got a rundown of the Top Ten Naughtiest Games of All Time. The long and storied history of pornographic video games, in all their (ahem) glory.
And yes, it includes "Boong-ga Boong-ga". Though it inexplicably only came in at #2. ...Okay, well, maybe it's totally understandable, considering what won #1.
Not Safe For Work, naturally-- but more because of how loud your laughter will be than because of the illustrations and screenshots.
Getting these sluts out of their panties requires such a fantastic level of hand-eye coordination and rapid reflexes that it becomes a death trap. Because if you masturbated using your amazing dexterity, there's a good chance it'll end with a pleasure-induced brain seizure and a fucking disturbing corpse for your landlord to find.
Seanbaby rocks my world.
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| Monday, January 27, 2003 |
15:19 - Bang
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This is cute; just had it forwarded to me.
DEBATING THE WAR ON TERROR
Question You're walking down a deserted street with your wife and two small children. Suddenly, a dangerous looking man with a huge knife comes around the corner and is running at you while screaming obscenities. In your hand is a Sig .40 and you are an expert shot. You have mere seconds before he reaches you and your family. What do you do?
Liberal Answer
Well, that's not enough information to answer the question! Does the man look poor or oppressed? Have I ever done anything to him that is inspiring him to attack? Could we run away? What does my wife think? What about the kids? Could I possibly swing the gun like a club and knock the knife out of his hand? What does the law say about this situation? Is it possible he'd be happy with just killing me? Does he definitely want to kill me or would he just be content to wound me? If I were to grab his knees and hold on, could my family get away while he was stabbing me? This is all so confusing! I need to debate this with some friends for a few days to try to come to a conclusion.
Conservative Answer
BANG!
Texan's Answer
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! click... (sounds of clip being ejected and fresh clip installed)
Wife "Sweetheart, he looks like he's still moving, what do you kids think?"
Son "Mom's right Dad, I saw it too..."
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Daughter "Nice grouping Daddy!
UPDATE: Via CapLion; here's what happens when you apply this theory Oklahoma style. ('Course, just watch-- the hero will get flung in the hoosegow.)
"Westbound on Brady," though. I like that.
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09:20 - American sports fans show how mature they are
http://www.msnbc.com/news/864816.asp?0cv=CB10
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And to think I had felt self-righteous about our lack of British soccer fans trashing stadiums and crushing other fans, or of Toronto hockey fans turning downtown into a circus of drunken death. Here I'd thought hey, that could never happen here. Yeah, we have football; but at least people just sit calmly at home and drink their own beer and pass out afterwards instead of going out and killing people.
About 10 vehicles were set on fire, and crowds broke the windows of at least one television news van, police and witnesses said. One group of young men set debris on fire in the middle of a street and then posed for news photographers. Rioters broke nearly every window at a McDonald?s restaurant, which was also set on fire.
Tear gas wafted through the area, and some witnesses picked up rubber bullets fired by police.
Maybe it's because Oakland is so close to Berkeley, and the fans have picked up on their brethren's spirit of non-violent protests for peace (e.g. smashing the windows of the INS)?
What the hell country is this again?
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| Saturday, January 25, 2003 |
18:03 - I am getting very tired of this
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/01/25/internet.attack/index.html
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So I woke up this morning to hear that a lot of the Internet was tremendously slow, and that various sites were completely unusable, because of the new "SQL Slammer" worm. CNN says it doesn't actually break anything; it just wastes resources propagating from MS-SQL server to MS-SQL server.
Well, try telling that to Bank of America, as CapLion covered, or to the DNS root servers, or WorldCom. And though a cursory check reveals PacBell.net to be running Netscape Enterprise Server (which means we can conclude nothing about their database back-end), care to fathom a guess why when I checked today to see whether DSL would be available at the new house, the SQL query returned "Internal Server Error"?
Now, it's taken a supreme effort of will all day to keep from growling to myself that the %^#% companies in question deserve what they get for running MS-SQL. Don't blame the victim... don't blame the victim... don't blame the victim.
%^$%^ COMPANIES! YOU DESERVED WHAT YOU GOT!
Sorry, sorry... didn't mean that. It just slipped out.
Yes, yes, I know this kind of thing could have happened just as easily if everyone were running Linux and Apache and MySQL. However, there is something to be said for the fact that the vulnerability in question was published six months ago, and that there's a certain "just install it and go, Microsoft will take care of everything" mentality that goes with turnkey Windows-based server technology. Far too many people just plug the thing in and assume that's the end of their responsibilities as administrators. Nothing replaces genuine know-how on the part of the people in charge of the servers, and vigilance, and obsessive up-to-date-ness. And the more we trust Microsoft to take care of all the hard stuff for us, the more often this is going to happen, because people assume they don't have to be educated.
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17:40 - Not that liberal
http://bleedingbrain.blogspot.com/2003_01_19_bleedingbrain_archive.html#87999536
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Hmm. Seems Bleeding Brain took exception to my war liberalism post from a few days ago. Apparently my views are terribly discouraging to him, because I advocated different political motivations during different kinds of national situations. Liberalism for peacetime, conservatism for wartime. That kind of thing. He didn't like the insinuation that it's okay to think about liberal goals once the war is over.
Abridged version: "While war looms, let's have conservatives running things so that success can be assured, however, during times of peace, let us go back to liberalism so that societal problems can be ironed out by those who know how to iron."
Liberalism (Leftism) is what GETS US INTO WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Why would we resolve a war at so great a cost and then revert to the insane philosophy that invites attacks on freedom?
Leftist policy makers ignored or appeased Islamic threats that resulted in a sucker punch on the U.S that resulted in the present war conditions. Leftist foolishness handed nuclear weapons to N. Korea and Leftist foolishness handed missile guidance systems to China. The later two are recipes for future wars.
Even worse, leftist thinking fragments our own society and dooms humans to mediocrity and failure.
When the war is over, don?t re-embrace the Democratic Party because of its willingness to squeeze the nation?s teats.
Embrace freedom instead. Isn?t that what we are fighting for anyway?
Fair enough. But embracing freedom, when you have achieved freedom, becomes a lot less concrete a thing. That's my point. Once the world has been made safe from terrorism, do we go swagger about the streets and high-five each other and revel in the fact that we've preserved freedom? Sure. But how long can a society keep that up before it just starts to get masturbatory? At what point does it start sounding vaguely silly and alarming, like striptease night at the Springfield Retirement Castle? At what point does it become a parody of itself, like Mexico's "Revolutionary" PRI and the "Democratic People's Republic" of North Korea? (After all, the best proof of the strength of our republic, I think, is that we don't feel the need to advertise like that.) At what point is it appropriate to simply cool it?
Eventually there comes a time when a people has to recognize that their revolution has been successfully defended and the enemy has been dispersed. At that point, it's no longer productive to wave flags and revel in the victory of the people's ideals; it's more productive to look around and see what kind of domestic and diplomatic problems there are that can be tackled, and tackled in such a way as to provide maximum benefit to society while minimizing impact on taxes, the military, guns, and so on. And that's where peacetime liberalism comes from.
I'm not saying we should ignore the Founding Fathers' principles once we're back in stable times. Far from it. If anything, we should study them all the more intently. There's never any call to marginalize our country's core beliefs because they seem like dowdy relics of another time. But there is a time when it doesn't have to always take center stage, because we're confident that it's sturdy enough to stand on its own.
But liberalism can go too far, yes; that is, as Bleeding Brain says, the reason why we're in the shit we're in now with Iraq and al Qaeda and North Korea. I acknowledge that. It's a situation we can lay a lot more firmly at the feet of unthinking, overidealistic, one-world-one-people liberalism with a lot clearer conscience than we could heave it in the face of Reagan and Bush and Lincoln and McDonald's. We show ourselves to value freedom so little that we're willing to compromise it for the sake of more understanding and coexistence, and that sends a much clearer message to humanity's predators than the understanding and coexistence itself does. We show ourselves to be more wussy than principled, which speaks more loudly than our being more friendly than isolationist. We show the world we're a bunch of rich queeny city boys who like to go slumming for a thrill, not a haloed Mother Teresa healing the sick with a touch out of the goodness of our hearts. (Which seems more realistic, anyway, to a non-American viewpoint?) Then we get our skyscrapers knocked down.
The best way to preserve freedom as we know it appears to keep the central government small, firm, and non-intrusive. There are times when such a conservative government ought to allow liberal interests some rein here and there in order to accomplish some advancement that everybody can benefit from; but it'd be a mistake for that government to take the opportunity to itself grow large or liberal. That leads to ruinous policy decisions both foreign and domestic. That way lie dragons.
In any case, I've learned one thing: You try to oversimplify something in order to establish common ground, and you end up pissing off people from both sides.
I'm spending the weekend at a convention full of people who are naturally predilected toward the Left. A midnight comedian (who was excellent in every other way) kept coming back to what he found was his biggest heartfelt laugh-getter: knee-jerk Bush jokes. And every time he made some riff on Bush's stupidity or other far-too-common mocking point, he got thunderous applause from EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the audience. (Except me. I stood there and sullenly stared at the floor, looking for a good and visibly dramatic opportunity to swish my cape about my shoulders, elevate my nose, and exit.)
I worry that the nation's public simply isn't paying attention, and isn't thinking about anything beyond whose jokes are best. So in my attempt to simplify the situation, in my earlier post I was speaking more to a liberal audience than not-- trying to berate those I knew for their knee-jerk-ism while not making it sound like I was rejecting all the admirable goals that do exist on the Left (though, for the more reasonable of them, they're goals which the entire political spectrum ought to agree is worth fighting for). I wanted to present the image of a Way Out for the lefties that I know, a way to break out of the cycle of stupid Bush jokes and take an intelligent position on world politics without facing the inevitable criticism for "joining the Bible-thumpin' rednecks" that they'd probably have to contend with. You know-- it's an "I found an intellectually satisfying, morally consistent and courageous platform that doesn't depend on cutesy slogans and wry irony from comedians for fuel. Why can't you?" kind of thing.
I personally have no interest in flip-flopping my politics back to the way I was in high school, as soon as the war is over. But I don't imagine that I will remain rock-steady as times change, either. My whole point is that politics and the appropriateness of various viewpoints ebb and flow over time. Stubborn insistence upon a particular platform can make a guy look steadfast, yes... but add it to the popular predilections of society at a given time, and the reaction can range from healthy checking-and-balancing all the way up to full-blown revolutionary insanity. We've got to be Greenspan-like with our rhetoric. We have to know when to let it have free rein, and know when to reel it back in. We've got to recognize when liberalism is getting to dangerous levels and smack it back down; we've also got to understand when conservatism is running too high to prevent social good from being done, and lower its profile a bit. And we have to recognize those times when one side or the other really ought to be pumped up to its fullest strength in order to accomplish the greatest benefit available to it at a given time.
Sure, perhaps this is just mealy-mouthed refusal on my part to take a stand. But I am looking for common ground here, and I do believe I have a consistent set of principles that I think are appropriate to these times. That's what I'm saying-- I think more people would be attracted to the anti-idiotarian platform if they were freer to subscribe to the idea that politics can change; that refusing to be scandalized by the Monica Lewinsky thing doesn't mean an automatic and permanent contract stipulating hatred of all Republicans; that wanting to see better environmental controls and more gay rights during the 90s does not mean it's okay to put I CAUSED 9/11 bumper stickers on SUVs; that just because Bush can't pronounce "nuclear" or distinguish in public speech between "prosecute" and "persecute" does not mean that the entire premise of a war in Iraq is invalid. (Want to know who else was so miserable a public speaker that he seldom or never did it himself, but instead gave his speeches to a professional orator in order to deliver them? Thomas Jefferson.)
I fully expect those who identify themselves as anti-Idiotarian today will persist in their unity of thought well after the war is over. But how long do people think it'll be before the various factions begin again to drift apart to their respective poles?
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| Friday, January 24, 2003 |
14:39 - Help! I'm trapped inside a fortune cookie factory!
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Josh Ellison forwards me this interesting screen shot from OS X's Print Center: "Perhaps someone at Apple is trying to get a message out..."
Those poor, poor people. Trapped in a sweatshop by a megalomaniac. Maybe we should start marching around Infinite Loop carrying signs: NO BLOOD FOR MACS... MICROSOFT IS THE VICTIM... 17" LAPTOPS BAD FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS...
'Course, I'm rather partial to this subliminal message, myself:
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09:33 - Must... have... poster-sized... version...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2003-01-24&res=l
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In response to the apparent securing by somebody of the movie rights to Metroid.
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| Thursday, January 23, 2003 |
01:49 - Totally sweet
http://www.duke-kim.com/korean/
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Okay. So, like... you know the Real Ultimate Power site, the one about ninjas? The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people. An Internet legend in its own time. You know the one.
Well, apparently, it now has spin-offs. Marcus sends me this link: The Official KOREAN GUY page-- part of the new and burgeoning Real Ultimate Power Network! After you finish giggling at the page itself, notice at the bottom that there are links to RealUltimateSororityGirls, RealUltimateBums, and RealUltimateLiquorStoreClerks. (None of these are remotely as funny, however. More's the pity.)
I don't think I've seen one of these proto-web-ring-things-that-got-away-from-people since the old Mr. T Ate My Balls phenomenon, which seemed to peak in around 1997...
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| Wednesday, January 22, 2003 |
22:11 - Distraction
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Well, my blogging might be curtailed a bit in the coming few days and weeks, because of this seemingly innocuous object:
(No, that's not me with the tape measure.)
Lots of paperwork, naturally... lots of juggling of sums with unaccustomed numbers of digits in them. It's already been an adventure. But it's officially begun now, and I'm about to discover just what kind of hell it is I've let myself in for.
With any luck at all, it'll be one of those really cool hells I've heard such tell about. So, here's hoping that luck holds out... like for the next thirty years.
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15:42 - Any idealistic programmers in the house?
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You know what I'd like to see?
A music file format, similar to MP3 or AAC, with support for multiple channels and ID3 fields and so on... but more than that, and crucially, with support for embedded song lyrics.
Lyrics wouldn't take up more than a couple of kilobytes; they might even fit into a pre-existing ID3 field. But more than just bare text-- how about the ability to have the embedded lyrics keyed into the music on a word-for-word basis? At certain time-points in the song, it would have a callout to the textual lyric representation of whatever's being sung. Hello, follow-the-little-bouncing-ball audio players! Farewell, the era of not knowing what in the hell such-and-such an artist was singing about! It'd be the beginning of a whole new way of enjoying music, I think-- easily the equal of the advent of portable MP3 players as a milestone in music-consuming technology.
Now let's talk logistics. You know that the RIAA would be all over this; they already pounce on any large high-profile site that attempts to publish song lyrics from commercial music. And if there were to be some kind of centralized song-lyrics database, working like CDDB/Gracenote does for ID3 tags, you can be sure that it would only be available by the RIAA's blessing, and on a paid subscription basis at best.
But who says that has to be a fundamental part of the file format's vision? Users should be able to insert their own lyrics, and to mark their own keying points, using freely available software (or shareware) like what allows them to create MP3s today. Then the onus would be on the RIAA to step up to bat and provide centralized song data, and they wouldn't be starting from a position of power, either.
So the file format itself could be something totally open; call it "MP3-L" or something. And since there's nothing fundamentally illegal about the format, there's nothing to stop open-source developers from creating something like this, and no reason why it should have to be (for instance) Microsoft or Apple or Real that creates this standard. If this format were to become popular (and I think it does provide valuable functionality that many, including myself, would love to have available), then it'd be another chance for the various companies to show their respective attitudes toward open standards and the spirit of grass-roots development that would be behind this kind of idea in the first place.
Has this already been done? It quite possibly has, and I just haven't noticed. But if it hasn't, why not? Wouldn't it be cool?
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15:26 - Really Mobile Computing
http://www.powerpage.org/story.lasso?newsID=10473
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First Lioness, and now this. Someone spread the word that Apple is dooomed, remember?
Thought you might like to know that the Honda Studio E concept vehicle has an LCD panel inside the back running Mac OS X. I've enclosed two images...
Inside, Studio E features front bench seating and two rear pod seats that flip down from the sides, yet store in a minimum amount of space when not in use. The mobile entertainment system uses a personal audio computer and can mix multiple inputs simultaneously, i.e. turntables and an effects generator or a more traditional guitar, drum machine or microphone could also be attached.
The personal audio computer has its own workstation with keyboard, mouse and a 17-inch liquid crystal display. To play to a larger crowd, a motorized 42-inch plasma screen rotates down from the ceiling and interfaces with the audio computer to display custom visual patterns in step with the music out the back of the vehicle, or it can play DVDs.
OS X on a 42-inch plasma screen in a hip neo-SUV, huh? Sounds like someone has some kind of demographic in mind, just possibly...
Still, this is a pretty sweet sighting.
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09:40 - The Terrible Secret of Parody
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5353
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There's got to be a lesson in here somewhere.
I wondered, when Charles Johnson posted this parody news item about the Arab League condemning the launching of Israeli Ilan Ramon into space (along with that drawing of the Earth from space by that kid who died in the Holocaust), whether he should have been just a bit more clear about the fact that it was a parody.
In Gaza City today, thousands of Palestinians marched in the streets, many firing weapons into the air. "With our blood and our souls, we will strike the orbital Zionists," chanted the protestors. Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, "It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens? How can this be permitted?" Palestinian youths also took to the streets in Nablus, chanting, "One! two! Where's the Arab manned space program?" In Nablus, three Palestinian youths were dragged through the streets by members of the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, who accused them of being "collaborators." Witnesses said that the teenagers were heard making positive statements about the American science fiction program Star Trek, several of whose main characters were played by Jewish actors. Reports of the teenagers having received "atomic wedgies" were unconfirmed.
After all, the human ability to fail to identify satire is something that's always amazed me. And it's all made the worse by the fact that so many news items these days have to carry disclaimers to assure readers that they're not parodies. Some things are just too ridiculous to take seriously-- even when they're true.
Case in point: Remember this?
July 24, 1997
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for invading Mars.
The three say they own the red planet, and claim they have documents to prove it.
"We inherited the planet from our ancestors 3,000 years ago," they told the weekly Arabic-language newspaper Al-Thawri, which published the report Thursday.
Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil and Abdullah al-Umari filed the lawsuit in San'a, Yemen, and presented documents to the country's prosecutor general which they say proves their claim. There was no word on whether they had paid the appropriate inheritance taxes.
And no, that was not a parody. Which should go without saying-- it was, after all, on CNN.
But apparently people as highly placed as Israel's ambassador to France were taken in by Johnson's ruse, and are citing it in interviews for news columns.
But as usual the Arab League which during its history and since the day of its foundation never missed an occasion, to miss an occasion which would contribute to the peace, hastened to publish a press release whose its silly thing seems to have reached paroxysm and a level of stupidity which exceeds all its preceding records.
You know... much has been made about the advantages bloggers have over traditional media, in terms of speed of coverage, and willingness to tackle certain issues before the old media is able to overcome whatever bias it has in order to cover them properly. Bloggers had the Muhammad/Malvo story and Trent Lott's gaffe and countless other developments covered long before they resolved themselves in national headlines.
But this, I guess, would be the downside: people who can't tell the difference between bloggers and traditional media, mixed with bloggers who are perhaps a little more willing than they should be to post parody items with little in the way of disclaimers. Don't get me wrong-- I certainly don't want to see bloggers have to hold themselves to some kind of universal standard of journalistic integrity or whatever-- the lack of such a thing is what makes blogs what they are. But we all just have to bear in mind: there are idiots in the world, and easily confused people, and people who love to jump to conclusions. And there's no telling how high a misunderstanding might go-- or how much damage it might cause-- before someone figures it out.
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| Monday, January 20, 2003 |
23:03 - Seanbaby, Watching While You Sleep
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22887
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To help get this year started off right, the inimitable Seanbaby has been inspired to action (or maybe coerced), and now has a roundup of truly mind-bending frivolous lawsuits to guffaw at.
Eighteen years ago, John Duggan was convicted to life in prison for beating his wife to death. And how did the prison staff reward him for this? By putting his money into a zero-interest prison account! This wicked deed will not go unpunished, and with justice on his side, John is now suing the prison system for an undisclosed amount of money he feels he would have earned through proper investment. Despite the possible loss of funds, the prison is still finding new ways to improve conditions. In fact, right after the announcement of the lawsuit, the prison guards announced a new holiday, Free Knife For Everyone Except John Duggan Day.
This guy frightens me, he's so good.
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12:19 - The Dell from Hell
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28913.html
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(...I had to use the title from the e-mail from Kris that contained this link.)
The 15-year-old-girl in South Africa who suffered second-degree burns to her hands and thighs after her laptop exploded was using a Dell machine, it's been revealed.
iafrica.com reports that the laptop was a Dell Inspiron.
The story also quotes the girl's father as saying: "It would appear the battery pack had exploded and disintegrated and set fire to the room."
Ah, for the halcyon days when batteries only caught fire in lab conditions, and when that was the basis for Mac laptops getting a burning reputation.
Good ol' Perspirons...
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11:46 - On the War
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Before 9/11, I was about as liberal as they come. I was all about environmentalism, racial equality, sexual equality, negative population growth, government-mandated everything, eradication of all religion, gun control. I listened to David Lanz music, for crying-out-loud.
What changed all that? Was it 9/11 itself? No, I do like to think that most of these positions were high-school fantasies; reading Walden was my little form of nerdy rebellion against the status quo, and once I got to college-- notably, a college without any jocks or even hardly any liberal-arts department, or anybody who got less than a 1500 on their SAT-- I found compelling arguments from various sources that softened me on many of these issues. Yet for my own purposes, and because of my own interests and needs, and the social groups I found myself gravitating towards, I remained (and remain today) staunchly liberal in a lot of ways-- except I've learned to temper idealism with rationality. Gay rights, yes; but not now, not universal. Environmental awareness, yes; but not at the expense of economic strength and our accustomed standard of living. Abortion rights, yes; but it's far better to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place by any means possible. Mistrust of religion, yes; but a respect for the good things it means for people's lives and world cultures.
But 9/11 and its aftermath made me turn around completely on many other issues. A deeper understanding of American history and the country's founding ideals gave me a deep respect for gun freedoms, though I still don't like shooting them or memorizing bullet dimensions or making things blow up. A review of communism in practice made me understand how something like McCarthyism could have come about as the result of concerned action by rational people. Documentaries and period pop-culture showed me what fascism really was and how it can get started, and let me understand the fundamental differences that stand between whatever the US is today and what Germany or Japan were in the 30s. And a rejection of sloganeering and moral equivalence, and a willingness to draw a line in the sand and reject certain kinds of actions as inexcusable under any circumstances and evil by any moral measure, erased all the (considerable) sympathy I had previously felt toward the Palestinian cause. What 9/11 did for me was to remind me, though I had convinced myself that this wasn't the case, that there is unequivocal evil in the world, and sometimes evil can grip an entire people or culture, to the extent where they cannot coexist with what we think of as the civilized world. And whereas prior to 9/11 I might have offered up the kind of knee-jerk reaction that this weekend's protesters might give-- that if they can't coexist with us, then maybe we should cease to exist!-- after 9/11 I realized that there is such a thing as defense of one's own. It is not evil to try to preserve your own way of life when it comes under attack. It is not evil to oppose hegemony by an aggressive force, even if that force is made up of a minority (which in my earlier years I might have agreed was a factor which gave any group carte blanche to commit any and all kinds of atrocities. It's only fair, right?)
And though war is still evil, it is a necessary evil; it's an evil which is better than the alternative evil, that of surrender out of pure self-loathing.
How do I feel about the war? Well, never having really lived through one, it's hard to say. The only "war" that occurred during my lifetime was Gulf War I, and the extent of the impact that that war had on American life was that they talked about it on Saturday Night Live. It was over in weeks. There wasn't really anything to lead up to it. I was only about fifteen at the time, but the rationale for the war seemed sound but distant. Iraq invaded Kuwait, they said. Now they've seized the oil fields. To regain them (which is why we care), and to liberate Kuwait, we must send troops and our best technology. And we'll broadcast it live on CNN. I thought, hey-- sounds good to me. I might have been too young to notice, but there didn't seem to be much in the way of anti-war demonstrations then. It's just this thing we did. It didn't affect most people much, except as a point of interest on the nightly news.
So what's different now? The fact that we were attacked, possibly. That brought out a huge groundswell of patriotism from just about everybody, except the usual suspects on the far left; but I suppose I should have expected that such raw expression of a sentiment that I (and others of my generation) had been brought up to regard with such mistrust would eventually spur a backlash. It was the sugar crash. After a year of Stars and Stripes flying from every storefront, people were sick of seeing them-- and they remembered their old grudges and their old ideals. Once 9/11 was relegated to memory, and Afghanistan (our one stroke of just retaliation, in many people's eyes) was over and done with, patriotism suddenly became suspect again. People flying the flag went from being aggrieved citizens to being warmongering fascists. Just like before.
I seem to recall that in the 60s, the hippies wrapped themselves in American flags. They disapproved of American foreign policy, but they still identified themselves as Americans. Their beef was with the war and its motives, not with America itself. Their point was that this war was not what America was all about.
Well, today you don't see a whole helluva lot of that. This weekend we saw GOD BLESS SADDAM signs and people waving Iraqi flags. We saw endless slogans and puns on Bush's presumed stupidity. We saw claims that Saddam's election was more fair and just than Bush's was. We saw the entirety of Hollywood register its opposition to the war on grounds just as shaky as what propped up those slogan signs. What we've seen, I think, is what happens when an entire generation-- increasingly identifying itself as part of a world community, thanks to the Internet and widespread pop-culture, and brought up in an environment of anti-establishment and anti-authority memes spread through that same pop-culture-- finds itself asked to take sides on a conflict in which one side is black-and-white and good-and-evil, and the other side is tantalizingly jam-packed with wry ironic semi-observational humor and gags and puns. The latter is so much more attractive to people who define their lives by quoting pithy statements from subversive TV shows-- people for whom the term subversive itself has become the mark of a piece of culture worth absorbing. Steeped in that kind of culture, for a person to take the side of defending our 200-year-old national ideals against a distant, third-world evil seems ludicrous. Of course they're going to oppose Bush. Just look at all the "stupid" jokes, and listen to all those people saying oooiiil with knowing smirks. The side with the best gags has got to be the right one. It always has been in movies and TV, right?
A lot of the news coverage on Saturday made mention of the fact that the anti-Vietnam-war movement only really got started after we'd been fighting for four years; but now it's happening before hostilities have even been declared. Was it because in the 60s, the word subversive was something to be frowned upon in entertainment just as it was in politics? Was it because the hippies were shaking off the authoritarianism of the 50s, whereas we have no such respect-for-authority to stand in our way?
Now, I'll be the first to admit to loving the stuffing out of wry, ironic, subversive TV shows. That's what I'm all about. But it's a mistake to apply the same kind of sensibility to war and politics as we apply to entertainment. Just as the liberal and conservative viewpoints each have their place; but at some times, one is more appropriate than the other.
Liberal goals are fine things to have around. They're progressive. They drive us toward a better world. They seek to make little tweaks here and there to the human experience, making the air a little cleaner here, alleviating this bit of oppression there, fostering a little more friendship with those guys over there. That's awesome. I'm wholly in favor of that.
But not when there's a war on.
Liberal goals are admirable things to pursue in a stable society, when you're not under attack, when you have the resources to spare to make those kinds of fine-tuning tweaks. But if there's turmoil, if your nation is being attacked on the basis of its very core ideology, all you're doing is polishing the brass on the Titanic, as Tyler Durden put it. When you're fighting to alleviate minor wrongs at the edges of the debate, it's fine to have a liberal bent to your populace and in your government. But if it's your very founding ideals which are under attack, the very things that make your country what it is, then there is no time for liberal goals. They can wait. Things will settle down, and then those progressive goals can be taken up once again. But right now, while the war is still going on, we need leadership that stands true to those founding ideals, fully understanding them and defending them even at the expense of some of the advances that the progressives have made at the fringe lately. Those things are important, but I'll sacrifice them if it means the core upon which they're built can remain intact.
Conservatives seem backward, jingoistic, and supportive of the status quo. In stable and progressive times, that's easily a bad thing. But not when that status quo itself is what's under attack. We take it for granted in stable times, and so we keep the conservative ideals on the shelf. But there are times when we have to take them down, dust them off, and shelve the liberal ideals for a time; and that time is now.
Stable, progressive times are when you need deal-makers in office. Wartime is when you need a champion for your founding ideals. Clinton was a deal-maker. And while he made great strides for those progressive goals, his weak hand in defending our founding ideals-- and in recognizing Islamic terrorism for what it was-- was what convinced Osama bin Laden and his cohorts that the West was weak and decadent and ripe for the reaping.
But Bush is a champion; galling though it might be to those who hold firmly to those progressive ideals and watch in horror as he ignores them, and as inappropriate and disappointing as his ignoring those ideals might have been prior to 9/11, today he's exactly what we need. He's willing to earmark some battles as superfluous to our times, and to concentrate on what will ensure our survival so that we can get back to those stable times. He'll make sure our founding ideals don't get compromised the way a deal-maker might compromise them. He will recognize what we must defend, and defend it at all costs, willing to make the statement that preserving our national identity and the ideals laid out in the Constitution is preferable to compromising those things for the sake of cooperation and coexistence with those who have defined themselves as our enemies.
One day, this war will be over; we will win, and we'll be able to get back to our modern lives, essentially unchanged. We'll still have baseball and Mom and apple pie, and we'll still have gas-guzzling SUVs and economic woes and smoggy air and oppressed minorities. When that time comes, we can get back to tackling those issues.
But if we fixate on them right now, and refuse to accept that this war might in fact be both just and essential, we won't have those issues to face after the war is over. We'll have much worse things to face. Like anthrax in DC, VX in LA, a nuke in New York. Like fanatical theocracy. Like half the world who has proven reason to believe that terrorism works-- that terrorism can bring even the largest superpower to its knees. Like the end, quite frankly, of everything we take for granted and think of as components of "civilization".
War is an ugly and dirty and terrible business. But if we don't fight this one, the world will be a worse place in the future than if we do.
Even if that means the US remaining the largest superpower. Believe it or not, that is not the worst evil that could ever befall the world.
UPDATE: Now, true, the above ramble is a simplification; Mike Silverman notes that liberal ideals can't ever be fully ignored, even in wartime, particularly now that "wartime" is so much less well-defined a concept as it was, say, fifty years ago. And he's right; we're all trying in our own way to draw boxes into which to put the world, and all such boxes are flawed in one way or another.
UPDATE: And here's a neat little observation to counter the presumption that conservatives are jingoistic, stodgy, backward Luddites who hate change; sent via John Wiedner. Dear God, how many people are reading this thing?
What I find so funny is that on one hand I'm now being described as a "war liberal", whereas a couple of weeks ago someone told me approvingly that I was "more conservative than Den Beste." Yikes!
I think I'll take "South Park Republican", if that's all right with everybody.
UPDATE: Mike and Robert Jones have both linked to this post with favorable comments. Salutations and thanks to you, as well as to those who have e-mailed positive feedback-- and to those whose e-mail feedback was less complimentary, too. :)
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| Saturday, January 18, 2003 |
02:51 - What a Day
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So I spent the day today out with friends-- hiking and taking photos, seeking out interesting restaurants, and hanging around with the guys while they drew comics and let me write sarcastic commentary in the panel boundaries. The evening's auditory accompaniment was mostly hours of insane laughter.
But it started out not too auspiciously; a peek at one friend's blog (which I won't link here) showed me his ultra-clever juxtaposition of Bush's head with a compost heap ("the only post Bush is fit for"). So I was morose and tight-lipped for a good half an hour, until I managed to put it out of my mind with an effort of will, as well as the thought that in San Francisco and DC and Europe and Iraq and the West Bank and Syria and everywhere, every last gunport of the knee-jerk anti-war, anti-Bush activism machine would today be flung wide open. And yet I somehow knew that it would turn out to be so incoherent, vapid, morally shallow, and generally based on nothing more than inane slogans ("Bush iz st00pid!!!11!``") as to be unlikely to really put forth any real unified platform that meant anything. (Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I was up in San Francisco last night, discovering afresh the hell-for-any-kind-of-motor-vehicle-that-isn't-a-bus that is Market Street, trapped at each no-left-turn-here arrow while trying desperately to find a way to get left, with nothing to do but look at the signs exhorting participants to the coming rally that would convene there in the morning, and to listen to NPR's coverage of the Freedom Riders heading up to DC from Mississippi. They passed the phone around the bus, from a guy who thinks Bush is a shrieking monkey who obviously can't tie his own shoelaces, to a girl who opposes war because violence is bad and stuff, and plus she has a husband in the army, to a 60-year-old lady who is convinced that there are better ways to solve our problems than fisticuffs. The interviewer tried to pose some interesting questions, like why the hell they're riding a bus to the nation's capital to wave signs demanding love and respect for Saddam Hussein and the deposition of our own President, when we know exactly what kind of hell we'd be condeming the Iraqi people to if we did nothing; but their best response was that those kinds of things were best dealt with at the political level, not by blowing up innocent civilians. And then they hung up.)
So I had the feeling that the world would have its little day of insanity, but then it would end, and everything would go back to normal. And I was able to relax and have fun for the remainder of the day.
So it turns out that the protests turned out pretty much as I expected; a bunch of sloganeers out for a good ol' protestin' day like they heard their parents had back in the Sixties, with such oh-so-clever sentiments as GOD BLESS IRAQ and NO BLOOD FOR OIL. The best that can be said for them, apparently, is that some of them pledged to be open to the idea of war if proof of Iraq's threat were produced. That's the most coherent facet of the whole movement, and the whole movement's credibility will hinge on how that facet gleams when it's turned toward the light. Put up or shut up, in other words.
Meanwhile, France appears to have found a new way to surrender-- devoting tons of government money towards subsidies of mosques, trading the separation of church and state for a little bit of appeasement. Oh, how that warms the cockles of my heart.
All this-- the protests everywhere, the slogans, the vitriol, Saddam's speech thanking his friends on Market Street and the Mall, and so on are contingent upon the US being wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and a secret nuclear program. We must be wrong, after all. We in the US have such a terrible track record when it comes to choosing sides on big, world-altering issues. We were wrong about rule by royalty, choosing the losing side of democracy. We were wrong about crushing the Confederacy and ending slavery. We were wrong about fascism, it would seem. We were wrong about communism. We continue to be wrong about global markets, socialism, gun freedom, and all those other little things we continue to be so misguided about, while the rest of the world-- who has country-by country made so many right choices over the years when it came to things like Hitler and Stalinism-- gets to lecture us sternly on our inexperienced, presumptuous ways. We can't possibly know what we're doing. Just because the world has eventually come to agree on our values and decisions in just about every major area doesn't mean a thing, you see; America is still wrong, and the rest of the world is right. Because they said so, that's why.
And they say Iraq is peachy-keen. Saddam doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction, they say; and besides, even if he did, which they're not saying he does, he deserves them! Hey, someone's got to give those Yanks the come-uppance they've been cruising for all these many years? Someone's got to take the wind out of their sails! Who do they think they are, traipsing in here and showing the world how a nation goes about being successful and prosperous without ever having to undergo a violent revolution or reversal of any of the basic principles upon which it was founded, ever since the first President took office? Just because it's unique among nations in being the same sort of country today as it was in 1776, does that mean it's doing anything right? Shyeah. As if.
Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, Cowboy Buddy. Trust us.
Well, we say: No.
I tell ya. If only the world were in more capable hands than ours, huh?
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| Friday, January 17, 2003 |
15:59 - Stubbornly San Franciscan
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Well, I'm going to be incommunicado for a few hours-- I'll be up in North Beach for a performance of Beach Blanket Babylon. While the civilized world's opinion of San Francisco crumbles around us, I'll be clinging to one of the most bizarre memes to ever have attempted to define the city experience. Westward ho!
UPDATE: Okay, well, then again... perhaps BBB doesn't so much attempt to define the San Francisco experience as... uh, as just do a bunch of stuff with really huge elaborate hats. Fair enough... now I know better. And I've also got a better idea of the geography of North Beach/Little Italy... which I'm sure will stand me in good stead should I have a need to show someone around.
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09:18 - The Fall of iCommunism
http://www.icommune.net/
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The makers of iCommune, an iTunes plug-in which allows users to share music over the network with a group of friends, has just been C&D'ed by Apple Legal.
Uh oh... I just received a "Notice of Breach and Termination of License" letter from Apple, stating that I violated my license to the Device Plug-in API which iCommune uses. For the time being, I'm making the download unavailable, while I try to sort things out with Apple. Sorry about this folks. Any good lawyers in the house?
I have a theory as to what happened, though. I'll echo something I just sent Aziz in e-mail:
What iCommune does is pretty similar to something Apple demoed as part of Jaguar (the ability to auto-discover and share other people's playlists via Rendezvous and stream music over the LAN); but Apple was compelled to back out of it silently under pressure from the RIAA and similar groups. (At least, that's the insinuation that I got out of one of the floor employees at MacWorld.) They called the demo a "technology preview", but I highly suspect that that's not what Jobs and Schiller intended it to be when they showed their playlists popping up on each other's iTunes on stage.
And since iCommune does the same kind of thing, I suspect that maybe Apple is under the same kind of pressure, being made to accept liability for that kind of functionality being added to iTunes. I'll bet the RIAA is already steamed at Apple for banking on the future of MP3s and device-shifting (patently flouting the RIAA's wishes); Jobs came out a while back, while accepting his Grammy for FireWire, firmly on the side of MP3 players and consumer rights. So the RIAA has probably just been waiting for the opportunity to claim that something of Apple's is a music-file-sharing application and put the squeeze on them.
Sure, it's not actually Apple technology that's creating the file-sharing functionality. But I imagine they're worried that if the RIAA were to start poking at them with a sharp stick, what they'd demand would be for iTunes itself to be axed. And that's not a legal battle Apple's interesting in fighting-- not a technological distinction they look forward to proving in court.
It's just speculation, but I think the pieces sorta fit...
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| Thursday, January 16, 2003 |
01:53 - Oh, right, it's that time of year again...
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One more thing before I turn in. (Closing time for my inbox just never seems to roll around.)
As most of my friends know, the end of January sees me trying harder than at any other time of the year to dig up pretexts for rebelling against the football-fueled fervor of loud cacophonic whooping caroming its way up the stairs while I hide out in the crawl space. Each year I try a new tack, hoping for better results than last time. Well, here we go-- a little something from a posting on the ever-entertaining Ar-Rahman list:
A Religious Injunction Regarding Football Given by a Particular Jurist
This is an extremely fine matter to comment on. Many jurists, such as Mufti-e-Azam of Pakistan, Moulana Rashid Ahmed Ludhyanwi have gone to the extreme. His point of view is as follows:
Firstly, he defines the words `physical exercise' into two.
a) One which is apparently linked with jihad.
b) And one which has no apparent link.
Mufti Rashid Saheb places football in the latter category. He then goes on to state, "For football to be permissible, due to it being linked with the latter group of physical activities, there are many pre-requital conditions, which need to be studied.
Firstly, there are three conditions:
1. There should be no physical or financial loss.
2. The person who takes part in such activities, himself, should not be encountering any loss, nor those who are participating with him.
3. The aspect of futile entertainment should not be dominant.
For the former two conditions he puts forward two ahaadith from which he puts forward his deductions.
The Holy Prophet has stated:
"Every play from which pleasure is gained is baseless (impermissible) apart from the practicing of bows and the training of horses or playing with his wife. Verily, these are permissible."
I'll be sure to let the guys in the living room know this on Super Bowl Sunday. I'm sure it'll go over real well.
UPDATE: Ayn Rand wouldn't make a very good mufti. (Thanks to Josh Ellison for the link!)
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01:35 - Wait a minute
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Curse EyeTV for snagging me a copy of tonight's Home Movies, forcing me to have to watch it time-shifted before collapsing into bed.
And curse Home Movies for having an extra dimension of blinkworthiness, over and beyond the "retro-scripting" ad-lib scene development and the subversiveness of the subtle character interplay for which I'd already come to respect it despite (or perhaps in addition to) the deliberate crudity of the animation and art. I refer to the fact that each of the early episodes, which they're running nightly as part of the across-the-board rollout of the new and massively expanded Adult Swim block, seems to feature a different underground comic as a writer and bit character.
Last night's episode had Shannon, the squeaky-voiced and oddly articulate bully kid with the Dubya-like mind (which I mean in the sense in which Den Beste would mean it-- it's a compliment). That voice definitely sounded familiar, though; sure enough, when the credits rolled, they listed Emo Phillips. Of course! And tonight was the rabid-cat one: So when you're searching for something, don't find it. Because when you find it... it has rabies. And I couldn't help but think that the Rastafarian minister giving the eulogy over Alexandre's funeral in the pet cemetery sounded just like Mitch Hedberg. And lo and behold...
I wonder what other guest-stars I missed noticing the first time around?
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00:35 - PunditPundit
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You know all those little questionnaire things you find online that allow you to look up your porn-star name, your Jedi name, your gangsta name, and so on? (According to which I'm respectively known as Christopher Colony, Tiebr Feuki, and Stupid-ass Pond Swimma?)
Well, why not a Blogger Name Generator? You know, like _____Pundit. We'd get such worthy entries as CitricAcidPundit, TartarControlDuffPundit, CrimeanWarPundit, PottedPalmPundit, uh... PakledPundit...
Okay, maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. C'mon, gimme a break.
I guess it seems like it's the night for experimentation. Lileks is doing it, at least-- he's Bleating in blog format this time, and if anyone ought to be able to get away with calling himself SpringfieldPundit or something along those lines, it's him.
(Good show, but I think James forgot to note that when you do things in blog format, you can't do things like make sense and have internal consistency and throw and catch your literary devices. This is like watching Jose Canseco get picked for one of the teams in a Little League game. Or something.)
For my part, even with all the world's events, I couldn't work up a head of steam to write anything today; but I did add a link icon to Dave Hyatt's Safari blog (at right) so I can have some thematic baggage to carry around with me. As a gun-rights supporter who can't tell a Glock from a bottle of Smith & Wesson oil, I'm right out of the running for the more popular blog bumper stickers (at least, popular in the linkage circles in which I seem to travel). So I gotta take what opportunities for personality I can get.
Maybe I should try to put up more "grotto 11" stuff, and maybe even elucidate just what the hell it is that means. (Trust me, you wouldn't be any more enlightened if I told you.)
Or maybe I just need some sleep. Yeah. That sounds like one helluvan idea.
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| Wednesday, January 15, 2003 |
18:39 - Lisa, it's your birthday; happy birthday, Lisa
http://204.248.48.2/Main.html
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Thanks to Mike, here's a Lisa fan page. That's the Apple Lisa, the 1983 forerunner of the Mac. The top-end workstation machine to which the original Mac was intended to be the little brother, the entry-level consumer machine.
A fan site for a computer, you say? How far-fetched! Shyeah. Well, okay, how about a 1983 computer that's a fully functional web server?
Lots of cool Lisa info here, showing off the various ways in which the machine can trot along with the computers of today and all their functionality. And this from a computer that's twenty years old this week.
Yeah, but can she get 200 fps on Quake III Arena?
Bahh.
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18:17 - What decade is this again?
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Lance and I were down in the Cambrian area of San Jose today over lunch, for reasons which I will probably opt out of clarifying until a little further down the road. This is the area south of I-85, in the Camden Road/Almaden Expwy region. Right up against the southern foothills that rim the Valley. Too far east to be among the artifical yuppie quaintness of Saratoga; too far west to be immersed in the modern sterility of Southeast San Jose, with its wide swathes of recent dot-com-spurred development and its Camazotz of houses trying desperately to look like they have personality.
We stopped by the neighborhood's Round Table Pizza. Now, Round Table is something about which I've rhapsodized numerous times; it's far and away the best chain pizza I've ever had, and it's one of those things the Western US has going for it that even the angriest critics of California must admit are treasures without which the world would be much poorer. If the San Andreas Fault tosses up its hands in surrender and the California coast goes sloughing off into the sea, among all the good-riddance braying from the bloggers we'll see a few discreet tears being shed for In-N-Out, Apple, and Round Table.
One of the things I like best about Round Table, in any case, is the fact that it's in no way a cookie-cutter establishment. Every Round Table is different. Some of them are little holes-in-the-wall in strip malls and downtown urban sidewalk stops; these are often dark inside, like good pizza places in my experience always have been, lit with candles on dark hardwood tables in decaying old booths. Some even have fireplaces. Other Round Tables are newer and less distinctive; they might have free-standing tables or metal chairs, or too much light. It's infinitely variable. And in Southern California, where it's a physical impossibility to get good pizza (I know, I tried for four years), you can find the worst Round Tables ever. Putting lie to the chain's claim to only use fresh ingredients, and to the silly cutesy ads of the 80s with that pallish fat guy with glasses who apparently owned the business, LA's Round Tables tended to have no personality whatsoever and even less quality in the pizza. Dry, poorly spread pepperoni. Brash, stupid sauce. Cheese with that spent-too-much-time-in-the-oven brown blotchiness. Greasy crust.
Pretty much like what you get at most other pizza places, in other words.
Anyway, the Round Table near where I live is one of the less inspired ones. It's in a supermarket/drugstore-type corner strip mall; it's got a fairly sterile interior. The pizza is highly variable. Some days it's excellent (and the best such cases are when I have someone from Boston or elsewhere on the East Coast visiting, and they take a skeptical bite only to be suddenly transported by rapturous waves of spicy sauce and oh-so-perfectly-textured cheese); other days it's uninspired. The place is staffed by high-school kids, mostly.
But this one place off Camden where we spent lunch today... man. I don't know-- it could well be the best one yet. It's not dark like the award-winning one from my youth in Ukiah, with its grinning signed photo of the chain's bespectacled owner behind the bar; instead, the interior is laid out with lots of interesting partitions and wall hangings and other decor. We got a Chicken Rostadoro with a pan crust; I'd never had that one before. It was in the middle of the afternoon, so there weren't any other customers, but when someone-- whose identity I didn't pay any attention to at the time-- came to the table to ask how it was (an unusual event in itself), we fell all over ourselves to tell her how phenomenal it was. I've never had anything quite like it. Hot chunks of roma tomatoes covered with garlic-- mmmh! Yes indeedy.
When we finished, we found ourselves shaking hands with the proprietors: an aged couple with a very thick, indeterminate accent. (They seemed to be from Eastern Europe or somewhere, but there's no telling.) Both were effusive and gushingly friendly. We introduced ourselves and talked about the neighborhood and the pizza and the store. The woman told us they'd just finished remodeling the whole place; I said I'm a fan of Round Table, but that this one really seemed to have something special going for it. She beamed, seemed to be on the verge of tears, and said it's all worth every penny she and her husband have put into it, to keep getting sweet customers like us.
It's a good sign.
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17:30 - Someone smell something?
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The other day on NPR I heard a rather odd story. It was a recounting of the events portrayed in a new book out of France, written by (or from the perspective of) someone working with an aid group whose purpose is to find children in Afghanistan who have life-threatening illnesses which can be treated with Western medicine-- such as heart and pulmonary conditions-- and select a few lucky children to be taken to France for the life-saving surgery.
Along the way, though, the kids were to get a taste of good old-fashioned immersive culture-clash. The very kind of traumatic plunge into an utterly alien, painfully decadent and soulless world-- so unlike the honor and purity of the native soil-- that I'd thought had been made to seem so hateful and colonialistic in recent years.
The kids in question, aged 8-12 and thereabouts, obviously had never so much as flown in an airplane. They'd learned some French phrases, which the tale recounts as being the basis of a heartwarming introduction to the kids' new French foster parents. Bonjour, Madame! Merci beaucoup, s'il vous plait! Le plume est sur la table! Precocious, eager to please, obviously intelligent little jewels of human beings. This took place, however, only after the kids had been beseiged by the foster parents advancing on them with open arms, brandishing teddy bears. They'd never seen toys before, let alone adult women wearing t-shirts and jeans. It took ages before they were able to bring themselves to recite their memorized phrases.
Settling in to French life was rocky. The account took pains to point out how the kids refused to eat, pushing away proffered croissants, saying that everything was so strange here-- how could they be sure the food was safe to eat?
The account then shifted to the kids' impressions of urban France. On this front is where the ruminations on culture-clash seemed so surprising. the foster parents took the kids downtown, showed them the crowded plate-glass toy-store display windows, but (the narrator said) the kid in question simply furrowed his brows. This country is so odd, he said. All the houses have roofs. There is no dust, no broken-down buildings. He pondered for a moment; then he brightened. I wonder who built this country? Perhaps whoever it was could help Afghanistan!
Now... I don't know about you, but when I hear stuff like this, I have to wonder just how precocious a kid has to be in order to say the exact things that someone would make up in order to further an agenda of guilt-for-being-Western and shaming-the-rich-West-into-rebuilding-war-torn-bombed-out-Afghanistan. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for doing whatever we can to rehabilitate Afghanistan and any other country where we have had to clean house; it's what we do, and have done, after nearly every war where we've accomplished our aims; besides which, we have a vested interest in making sure the people we've been trying to liberate actually get to keep their newfound opportunity. (We just can't erode their sovereignty in order to do it, or else we'll end up making them feel "occupied", like in South Korea, after the antebellum days have been forgotten.) But-- and maybe I'm just being a cynic here-- it seems just a little too convenient that these sentiments would be falling so irresistibly from the lips of bewildered little heart patients in a land far from home.
I wish I remembered the title of the book in question, so I could get a closer look. Maybe it's entirely legit; I don't know from my offhand recollection. But I'm suspicious of anything that seems to be trying to pluck the strings of the aawwww reflex.
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| Tuesday, January 14, 2003 |
14:21 - Put On a Happy Face
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Here's the new banner for the freeway-facing side of 3 Infinite Loop, which they just put up yesterday:
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13:47 - Stuff like this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28724.html
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On the other hand, Microsoft seems not to be having any trouble coming up with innovative new ways to show what a collective asshole it's capable of being.
They forged a partnership with Sendo, maker of digital phones; Microsoft promised to provide the StingerOS, Sendo promised to deliver the phones, and they'd go to market in summer 2001.
Summer 2001 rolls around; Sendo has the phones, but Microsoft has no StingerOS. But they keep trickling in the money. Time marches on. Sendo gets hung out to dry, with no product to ship; Microsoft keeps stalling.
Finally, Microsoft declares it's never heard of Sendo, and cuts off Sendo's VC funding, driving them bankrupt. But!
"Under the SDMA, in the event of a Sendo bankruptcy, Microsoft would obtain an irrevocable, royalty free license to use Sendo's Z100 intellectual property, including rights to make, use, or copy the Sendo Smartphone to create other to create other Smartphones and to, most importantly for Microsoft, sublicense those rights to third parties."
So Microsoft now has all of Sendo's IP, for free. Did they ever intend to develop StingerOS? Was there ever even anything coded? Did they keep telling the Sendo reps "Oh, sorry, those engineers are all out at Six Flags today," and "Ooh, no, that wing of the building's been blocked off for fire-code inspection"?
They must have been doing something, because now Microsoft has the Orange SPV to promote. With a mysteriously rich background of technology and IP to bolster it.
How anybody can gaze with reverential awe at this company is utterly beyond me.
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13:28 - Browser Detente
http://www.punning_pundit.blogspot.com/2003_01_12_punning_pundit_archive.html#873736
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Who ever said the Browser War was over? Sure, maybe the big Netscape-vs-IE siege broke a long time ago, but somehow that's failed to matter much to the other makers of alternative browsers.
What makes it possible for small-time browser makers like Opera and Mozilla (and on the Mac, OmniWeb, Chimera, iCab, and Safari for that matter) to compete for desktop space? Monopoly power at its finest, I'd say. Once IE had "won", there was no more incentive for it to improve. No need to incorporate new features, even if they were useful. As far as Microsoft was concerned, if they'd developed IE to the point where it could marginalize Netscape out of the picture, then it was good enough forever.
Hence bugs like the "images with XML data in the headers cause the entire rest of the browser's process life to hang" thing, which hasn't been fixed in two major versions and seems to be keeping nobody at Microsoft up at night, despite how widespread images created by modern XML-header-writing Adobe software are getting. As Andrew the Punning Pundit says:
IE sucks. It has none of the standard features that I like (pop-up blockers, for instance), encourages some sort of lame-ass I-can’t-believe-its-not-HTML that other browsers can not learn to read, has 2 settings for cookies (on and off) and seems to just beg for security holes to be exploited. On the other wrist: It does file-management. File management is one of the most unsexy things software can do, and it is only a browser function because MS was trying to evade the law, BUT it is just about the most important thing one can do with one’s computer. IE does it, nothing else does. And for that reason alone, it stays on my hard drive.
Not exactly a strong endorsement. This is the purest case of "good enough" that I've seen in a bloody long time, and the strongest endorsement of marketplace competition-- even at the expense of standardization-- to boot.
Because, you know, browsers have not reached the limit of their potential. Many companies are coming up with plenty of good new features and streamlined behaviors for next-generation browsers, as well as ground-up rethinking of certain metaphors that have been efffectively unchanged since the days of Netscape 2.0. Why does every browser handle bookmarks/favorites exactly the same way, with a drop-down menu? Why does every browser have to have a "throbber" which indicates activity and provides a link back to the browser's home page? These are concepts that date back to the heyday of the Big Blue Breathing N, and the fact that they haven't changed since then is not an indication that they can't be improved. Hence Safari's completely different handling of both of those things-- with resultant behavior that I think is a lot better in many ways.
"Don't rock the boat," says Microsoft. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Well, that doesn't tend to fly on the Mac, where IE is much less tied into the system than on Windows (read: not at all). Pretty much every Mac user I know has at least dabbled in another browser at some time, and most actually use something else, whether OmniWeb, Chimera, Mozilla, or Safari. IE is nice and compatible, but it's slow and ugly. It has some nice features that other browsers lack (type-buffering seeking on drop-down menus, auction tracking, sidebar features), but other browsers bring still more to the table: popup-ad blocking, animated-GIF looping control (nice!), regexp-based content-refusal, deep and detailed cookie management, JavaScript debuggers, helper-app configuration that isn't completely brain-dead. Plus speed. Plus gorgeous text rendering. And on it goes.
(It remains unclear whether Microsoft's MacBU has in fact internally end-of-lifed IE for the Mac, or whether such a decision-- if true-- is the cause or the effect of Apple's development of Safari.)
So at least on the Mac side, the browser sampler platter is still pretty well stocked-- more so than it ever has been in the past, in fact-- and almost all the selections have an appeal all their own. OmniWeb looks gorgeous and has the best OS X-ish design, plus the best debugging and information-discovery and content-control tools. Chimera has (possibly) the best rendering engine and nice convenience/privacy features. IE has a solid rendering engine and good navigational features. Safari has speed, rendering accuracy, slick operational concepts, and great looks. Lots of us use more than one of these, each for when we need to take advantage of a particular strength.
Now that website design has become so broadly standardized, compatibility isn't even so much of a problem anymore-- even when talking about stuff like DHTML and CSS. There's nothing new happening on the HTML side of things, which leaves the alternative browsers free to catch up with what's become standard practice. The marginal benefit of using IE for compatibility's sake is growing thinner and thinner, and there's nothing to hand Microsoft an advantage in that field anytime soon. So for any company or organization willing to put in the effort, there's some market share out there to be had. Browser users (particularly on the Mac) tend to treat browsers like chairs; they'll keep trying new ones, shifting around until the ass-groove is just-so, then getting up and trying the next one, until they find just the right one that suits their posterior. And if Microsoft isn't willing to go the distance and respond to the shapes of people's butts, fine-tuning and tweaking and improving, then other chair makers will rise to the challenge.
This is one of the odd, intangible benefits of using a minority platform. There's always excitement. There's always hope. There's never complacency or resignation. The war never really ended here.
UPDATE: Kris forwards me a CNET story on Safari and the reasoning behind using KHTML instead of Gecko for the rendering engine. It's a great read, full of little details that CNET seems to have done a good job in getting right. Sounds as though Apple's choice of KHTML was the right one, considering the reaction of some of the Gecko team members:
"I guess I'm supposed to be mortally offended--or at least embarrassed--that they went with KHTML instead of our Gecko engine, but I'm having trouble working up the indignation," wrote Mike Shaver in a Web log posting. "We've all known forever that Gecko missed its 'small-and-lean' target by an area code, and we've been slogging back towards the goal, dragging our profilers and benchmarks behind us, for years."
Shaver, who left Netscape three years ago but retained his position on the small Mozilla staff, said that in Apple's shoes he might have made a similar decision.
"If I had to write a new browser, and I was going to have to touch the layout code in a serious way, I would think about Mozilla alternatives," Shaver wrote. "I really, really hope that Mozilla will learn from Safari/KHTML, because they've done a lot of great work in about a tenth of the code."
That's certainly forthright. And it's further proof, to me at least, that Apple has its head screwed on straight when making sure that its technical decisions are the right ones rather than whatever's politically most expedient.
UPDATE: On second thought, maybe the article isn't as responsible a piece of journalism as it seemed; MozillaZine has the scoop on cheesed-off and misquoted developers.
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| Monday, January 13, 2003 |
18:24 - Okay, joke's over
http://www.robgalbraith.com/diginews/2003-01/2003_01_07_macpc.html
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Via Den Beste (though it's all over the Mac boards)-- here's a very detailed benchmark test suite done by a professional digital photographer, comparing the fastest Macs available to a couple of top-end PC laptops. He's doing all kinds of conversions and filtering and image manipulations, and the Macs find themselves dressed in shorts and t-shirts at a tuxedo party.
What's more, the author-- Rob Galbraith-- is a Mac-head. He understands all about the Mac mystique, the Megahertz Myth, and all the cultish vibes you get in a crowd with a few hundred other Mac people in line for an Apple Store opening, or with a few thousand other Mac people at a MacWorld. He's no Mac-basher. He's just honest.
Now, I've been saying for quite a while now that speed is not something that Apple can claim as a prime marketing bullet point. They've backed off significantly on the superlatives over the past year; even Jobs apparently realizes that there's not even any vapor in the tank when he stomps on the "Shorter Pipelines is Better" pedal. Hence the 970 project, which had better come to fruition sooner than later. Because we're on the edge of a meltdown here. The new PowerBooks and iLife will tide us over for maybe six months, but beyond that-- it's got to be more megahertz, or Apple gets put back in the pariah box.
What's encouraging is that there's a lot of really good discussion in forums attached to this article, with lots of very techno-savvy people discussing the ramifications of these findings. That in itself isn't what's encouraging; what's good is that so many of the posters are avowed PC people, who nonetheless get the Mac. They cite not only the coolness of the industrial design, but the genuine quality of the LCD screens, the design of the iMac, the indispensability of ColorSync (though many seem to think that similar technology must exist on Windows-- sorry, not the case), and most importantly of all: the importance of software/hardware integration and the UI design on the iApps and other software. They might be PC users tried and true, but not a one of them is derisive of Apple. They see what's good about Apple in the face of doom, rather than seeing only what's bad about Apple in the face of coolness (as is so often lamentably the case).
It's this kind of mutual respect that I think has a chance to hold things together until the 970-based machines get here. People know about the new chips; they realize they're on the way. But more importantly, they understand that Apple's strength is not simply in raw speed and power; it never has been. They understand that what Apple does bring to the table-- a vision for what user-interface should be, and for how to run a company that sacrifices market-share for the sake of deeply felt ideals-- is worth having around. To quote "otto" from the comments:
If Apple is indeed on a backslide, I have to say that it doesn´t amuse me as a pc user, because the tough competition they put up is one reason for the incredible personal computer development we have seen in these past 15 years.
Yeah. And if this is the attitude of respect that Apple's fostered in the PC community through this rather astonishing marathon comeback they've staged in the past five years since Jobs' return, then they can be proud indeed. And it may have been the right decision, too, if Jobs had seen this situation coming years ago, which he may in fact have done. It might all be part of the plan.
Imagine: You're Steve Jobs, and the year is 1998. You know that Motorola is standing on a downward slope, they're falling behind Intel, and you know that they're not going to leapfrog to the fore with no reason to make microprocessors except to power Macs. Apple makes what amount to boring beige boxes, no better outwardly than the PCs they're up against. They cost a lot more, yet their software and hardware hasn't done much that's exciting or revolutionary in years. What do you do?
First things first: You release some computers that make the world trip over their feet and fall flat on their faces. That would be the translucent ("visible") iMac and its candy-colored second-gen iterations. Sure, they aren't all that exciting inside; they even include a few controversial excisions, like the floppy drive. Instead, it's a machine that embraces the Internet and USB; it's a small, feature-lean, almost portable computer that's sexy and cute and has personality; it's no speed demon, but it can be expanded via this new hot-swappable port format, and it looks good enough to appear in every movie that wants to look techno-cool in 1999-2000. Much of the feedback is negative and derisive; but that's par for the course. (Even bad publicity is still publicity.) But still more of the feedback is positive or indirectly bandwagoning; the other manufacturers all take note and start doing translucent and candy-colored equipment, and soon it spreads to non-computer devices too, from lamps to water coolers. And most importantly: Apple is back on the map.
But that's just the first step. While the world is poking and prodding at the honeypot that is the iMac, you get to work on the lifecycle of the new G4 processor: something that you know from Day One will be Motorola's last desktop-computer microprocessor. You map out a four-year period during which you will milk the G4 for all it's worth, and then some. You realize that it will be overextended; but you know this is the price you pay when you're given the hand you're dealt, inheriting a company that never chose to jump ship to a different CPU in the early 90s. So you've got the G4; you deliberately plan out the milestones to be widely spaced and modest, and you send out all the feelers you possibly can. You forge alliances in the shadows. You make appeals and counter-offers. You keep an iron in Motorola's fire, just to keep them aware of the importance to Apple of the lifeline of the G4 that they hold in their corporate hands. And sooner or later, you know, you'll find someone who's willing to play ball. Maybe SGI. Maybe Sun. Maybe IBM. Yeah. IBM; that's the ticket.
The iMac's appeal will wear thin, though, you realize; and so you whip the cover off a much bigger project, one that's designed to restore not so much Apple's presence as the savvy public's respect for Apple: OS X. You know that most people think Macs are toys, and the iMacs didn't help that any. You've played the iMac card, and it did its job. But now your task is to prove that Apple really can set its mind to something that will make everybody from Redmond to Slashdot blink audibly a few times and start to keep a few cycles available each day to pay attention to what Apple's doing.
Out comes OS X, and it's a rocky start in many ways-- but a resounding success in many others. It takes a while to shake off the fetters of the old system, but eventually it happens. And by the time that's done-- only a year or two-- assuming you put all your resources where they need to go, and make all the right decisions with this new OS, you've got yourself a ready-made audience in the computing public: people who respect a well-made UNIX, people who will forgive a company its past role as a doddering also-ran if it actually manages to pull off the impossible: a sneaky stealth end-run that puts a real, live, non-crippled, honest-to-God UNIX on the desks of millions of everyday men and women. To the mind of the idealistic UNIX geek, Apple's balls in slipping UNIX in under the door, there to self-inflate like a punch-clown, are basketball-sized. And that's something they respect. It's a piece of political maneuvering that appeals to anybody who has harbored a secret desire not to see Windows ruling every computer on the planet, and to anybody who has wished to see UNIX get a foothold in corporate America and the chance it deserves to compete against Microsoft in a fair fight. And this isn't just rhetoric, either, or the repackaging of ready-made technology; not just anybody can do this, after all. It takes a company like Apple to turn UNIX into an OS for the masses. It takes years of work, thousands of mythical man-months, and every drop of the intensity with which Apple's visionaries adhere to their ideals about computing in order to pull this off. And pull it off you can.
But that's not all you have to do. You have to make OS X into something that attracts people in a way that Windows doesn't. You need to find an angle, something you can do with your whole-widget engineering approach that Wintel PC makers can't. You need to appeal to a certain kind of "lifestyle", something that will present a genuine value to people browsing casually through malls. Something that nobody's really been able to do before; something that you're in a unique position to tackle. How about, say, for instance... digital media? You've got this FireWire thing kicking around; that can do for high-speed media transfer what USB did for peripherals. You've got Unique File IDs and a robust meta-data-rich filesystem; use that to create a new breed of applications that let people interact with their media without the need for non-intuitive metaphors. Launch Internet services that encourage people to use these new applications to create digital media of their own, and share it with the world. Make an MP3 player that takes advantage of all these things and is cool enough to become an icon in its own right; make it available to Windows users if it gains enough mindshare. Empower people. Give them what they want. Give them more than what they want. Make things possible. Make them want more from their computers. And deliver that too.
Again, all this is still smoke and mirrors. You know the G4 is still sluggish; it's getting passed by on the inside track, first on the merit of raw numbers with their semi-meaningful implications, and then on the merit of actual real-world benchmarks that can't be disputed. But by the time that second black flag gets thrown, you'll have re-established yourself. You'll be a real, valuable brand. You'll be a cool company. You'll be a desirable commodity. You'll be something that people want in order to be seen with it. And if you've got that, you've got the public's forgiveness for that bitterly crucial six-month-to-a-year window during which you have to develop the new hardware platform with which you will save your company's butt.
Now, granted-- that's all in the future. This is 1998, remember? Maybe none of this will ever come about. But you've got to proceed on the gamble that it will, and you have to play on the strengths of your company-- the things it does best-- to develop that goodwill for when you need a cushion of time in order to do the things your company does less well. Want to rehabilitate a run-down section of a city? First gentrify a neighborhood, then another. Get people coming back. Get some funding. Get some face-time. Get some "turnaround" headlines. And then, when you've built up some brownie points, cash 'em in on the dirty work: the real cleanup. The industry. The environmental disasters. The human misery. Those aren't sexy projects that you can undertake when you don't have the people's goodwill behind you; but if you parlay your PR properly, you can do a lot of it on credit after all.
This is all speculation. Maybe it has nothing to do with what's been going on in Jobs' head for the past five years. Maybe he's been sitting in his immaculate office, playing with those little dangly-steel-balls-in-a-row things and thinking the world is beating a path to his door, and wondering why he sees so few mentions of Apple in the Mercury News. But somehow what I've seen lately is a little more encouraging than that.
I think Apple does have a plan. They've pulled off so much cool stuff over the past few years that I simply can't believe it not to be the case. A company with no plan and no direction doesn't make iApps and iPods and 17-inch laptops; it doesn't explicitly set out to piss off Microsoft and Adobe with competitor products; it doesn't push itself beyond the extra mile each time it releases something new. There's a method under all this madness. And I'm not at all prepared to believe that CPU speed is not part of the long-term master plan.
Time will tell, indeed. But it just had better not be much time.
UPDATE: Den Beste has some appropriately depressing facts and figures. I still say they don't tell the whole story, but then, neither does a lit candle outside Infinite Loop.
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09:51 - The Future is Already Installed
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0103/010303.html#011303
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Whoo. Lileks has devoted most of today's Bleatage to detailing his experience with a piece of benighted PC movie-editing software. Usually he seems to try to keep the direct specific software-fisking of post-iApp PC software to oblique sidelong references, and I don't blame him; given his experiences, and those of any Mac user who knows, who knows from first-hand experience that there is a better way than the fighting and swearing and throwing up of hands in frustration reported over drinks by one's dinner partners... and given the all-too common reaction of said dinner partners if you meekly raise your hand and say, "Um... 'scuse me, but... Macs aren't like that," he has every reason to be discreet about it like we've all learned to be in order to maintain mealtime civility and avoid getting a "ETYLOCAM" branding iron in the ass.
But the iMovie-pretender software he talks about, it seems to me, is the kind of thing to bring a guy's defenses down, come hell or derision. Software like this does that to a guy. This is the product of a wasted afternoon devoted to learning useless crap about an application that shouldn't have any such useless crap to learn about it, if it had been designed properly. And yet, it's interesting: so many PC users are so resigned to this kind of wrestling with their software, on a daily basis, that it doesn't make them anywhere near as pissed-off as someone steeped in Mac software gets when venturing into that world, armed with some technical know-how but handicapped by a presumption-- completely flawed in the PC world, it seems-- that the software maker is not malicious, that the app developers aren't trying to take out their own frustrations on the user, that the companies in question actually want to help the user do something.
It's a perfectly reasonable assumption out here in the ghetto, but it leads to nuclear explosions of the head when you cross over. And, oddly, it's the PC users who are afraid of the unaccustomed weirdness of Macs, not the other way around.
Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month talked about how software development flouted the traditional rules of manufacturing and R&D, how if you threw more men at a job, it became more late, not less-- largely because software is something that only highly savvy individuals with an intimate knowledge of other highly savvy individuals' areas of expertise can produce, where cooperation and willingness to code to a standard must wrestle with each engineer's personal flair and cleverness. No semi-skilled labor here. It's a bunch of mavericks all trying to write to their own visions of the future, and the more such people you fling into an already-late project, it'll just make it worse.
Eventually every manager and CS student in the world had read that book, and it became standard operating practice. But it still only addressed the side of developing functionality, shipping on time, that sort of thing. Its lessons-- that software is something inherently different, that has to be developed with priorities that aren't obvious or intuitive to the manager-- haven't been taken to heart yet in so much of the computer industry, in the areas of usability and design. Software makers still seem to assume that focusing on user-interface, writing software that abstracts itself toward enabling an ability rather than on remaining software that the user has to learn, is still a luxury that's unnecessary to invest in. And they're right, really, because the PC market doesn't follow Brooks' observations either: it moves and ebbs and flows based on price and feature set, qualities that seem intuitively obvious to most consumers as being of paramount importance, because they are of paramount importance in every other kind of product. And what that leads to, tragically, is companies that write software toward the goals of price and feature set while shelving the whole making it easy and enjoyable to use and obscuring unnecessary technical esoterica from the user chimaerae. They're not necessary. Customers will learn to cope. They'll buy the software 'cause it's cheaper and has more checkboxes and more function buttons on the main screen; sure, they'll only use the software once and then abandon their digital filmmaking careers. But that's not our concern! We just gotta sell 'em that one boxed copy and make it just useful enough that he'll feel too guilty to return it for a refund.
Computers are something different. They have to be treated differently. Price and checkboxes will only get you a half-solution, and traditional solutions on the R&D end will only solve more price-and-checkboxes problems. Not the usability problem.
In order to create usability, you've got to invest in UI development-- an enterprise that probably won't directly earn you any money, because most of the industry's consumers don't buy software based on usability, much though they might caw about wanting software to be "easy". (People get software with their scanners or cameras, and that's what they learn to use. Or don't.) You've got to make the decision to write not to the known money-making goals of price and checkbox items, but instead to the intagible goal of making the software do stuff intuitively and correctly. Now, this won't necessarily make your company any more money, and it'll cost a lot. It's not necessarily good business. But it is what serves the customer, whether it be good business or not. To put it into "prisoner's dilemma" terms, you've got to "collaborate" in order to serve the customer; you've got to take a hit for the team. You've got to invest in an area where it's not intuitively beneficial to the company to invest. And if all the companies in the world did that, they'd be subject to being undercut by one company that "cheated"-- selling software that it chose to write toward price and checkboxes. Guess which product customers will buy?
A company that chooses to stick to the intangibles and make products that only 5% of the public can properly appreciate is "collaborating" even when the whole rest of the world is "cheating"; they know they're dooming themselves to a tiny sliver of the market. But they do have the right idea, and as long as they continue to exist, there's some reason to believe there's hope for the industry-- that some people, some engineers and managers and designers in the field, do care enough about usability and serving the consumer as to forgo large market share and profits in favor of those elusive ideals.
People wonder why we Mac users are so obnoxiously self-satisfied and smug when we talk about this sort of thing. Well, I'm sure everybody's been in some position or other at some point in life where you see that Hey! Everybody's doing everything all wrong! Can't they see that?! -- and yet you can't wave your arms and yell enough to get anybody's attention. The best you can hope for is to be called a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, a malcontent, some snobby geek who's living in a dream world.
But you can't just remain silent, knowing what you know, can you?
I'll say this for his machine, though: if he ever wants to back up that 3.3 GB movie file on floppy disks, he's all set.
Yep. It's sure got that checkbox nailed.
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| Sunday, January 12, 2003 |
02:29 - Adult Swim is Reborn
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Ahh yes. Tonight begins the new, refreshed, second-generation version of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. And I'm ready to EyeTV it all. (Screenshots! Instant screenshots! They are mine, all mine! Bwa ha haah!)
This is the Adult Swim that has scored Futurama for its lead-off position, and is starting the whole thing tonight-- apparently-- from the premiere episode. Now I'll be able to catch up on all the gems I missed out on while I was so fortuitously at college and away from access to TV.
On top of that, they've launched a whole new look for the block: gone is the familiar "old people in a pool" interstitial-card selection. Now they have newly-done-up "coming up" spots for each individual show, with the characters from that show featured as parts of twisted versions of those emergency-techniques posters you find in public pools. Brak's Heimlich Maneuver rapidly devolves into a "Ride 'em, cowboy!" Ahh, yes. I approve. Life is good! Everybody dance! Yaaay!
And it was a good Sunday overall, too. Saw The Two Towers again; charged up the Silver Creek Valley Road hill with a friend (and gathered me eyes-- or, rather, some sweet landscape photos of the clouds and the sunset); and managed to avoid the day's incessant marathon of football that took over the living room. Hey, escape is wherever you make it.
So, yeah-- there hasn't been much in the way of blogging this weekend, though, and for that I feel that twinge of compulsion to apologize. But, hey-- sometimes we all gotta just kick back and do some serious heavy-duty recharging.
Ooh, Mission Hill. I'll get back to you.
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| Friday, January 10, 2003 |
02:44 - Culture, Doing No Harm
http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/03q1/mwsf/mwsf-1.html
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Ars Technica, as brought to my attention by Steven Den Beste, serves up a scathing report on the hallucinatory free-for-all that is MacWorld in a "WankerDesk" article written from the perspective of one of those Mac fanatics who's not so serious about it as to be unable to point and laugh into a mirror.
It's deliciously politically-incorrect; it's infuriating and uproarious at the same time, and thoroughly enjoyable if you make sure to put on a divide-by-zero suit and keep a bottle of chill-pills handy.
Gays: Ignore the guy that was snap-kicked out of the picture and think about this: New York and San Francisco have the largest homosexual populations as percentage in the country. Where are the Macworld Expos held? The truth will finally be out of the closet should Macworld pull out of New York, so to speak, and, rather than return to Boston, move to the third gayest city: Lakewood, Ohio. Strange, but true, the North Coast burb is the best kept secret in the bath house. How do I know? I was born there. And what's wrong with being gay? It's the ultimate juvenile PC slur, so why not embrace it? By the way, though the guy in the picture might look gay, he is obviously not...powder blue and primary colors, I think not, and leotards and boxers?shudder. The gay Mac user is about as harmless as you can get and should be treated with respect, while avoiding discussion of sexual practices...unless we are talking lesbians like in Mulholland Drive. Those chicks should have a booth and a QT streaming setup.
I wonder, though, if the author (Jade) realizes that the picture accompanying this paragraph-- the one of the guy in the leotarded butterfly suit-- is the MSN mascot.
Anyway, the conclusion paragraph of this piece, where the author tries to pin to a board just what the whole Mac "thing" is all about, is pretty much spot-on:
I both watched the keynote and did not watch the keynote, and by that I mean I watched other attendees like myself, too poor or too cheap for an auditorium seat, watching The Steve on a QT stream and wondering what next. They cheered Safari. We cheered the PowerBooks. It was strange. A very great human being, Clive Staples Lewis, once posited that, at best, culture should do no harm. He looked very suspiciously upon those activities and diversions by which we while away the hours of our days, and yet he was not so sure of the place of culture, and its bastard pop-culture, to reason them utterly destructive. I liked being with all these people who liked the same thing I did, who waited with anticipation for one more thing, and did it really hurt anyone? I think not. That is why Mac, too.
I had my own nomination categories for notable features of the show as well (Chris and I went up to the festivities for a couple of hours today), to say nothing of a set of useless observations and justifications for having a camera along:
The info kiosks that dot the streetcorners all around the Market area of downtown SF had this design on them. I always wonder: how do they handle the secrecy on the first day? Do they wait until the Stevenote is over, then send out runners to whisk the black cloths off of 300 kiosks in a ten-block radius?
The show floor. The edges of the exhibit halls had been pulled in a little from last year-- the really small exhibitors seemed fewer in number-- but the bigger exhibitors, like HP and FileMaker and Canon, seemed to have bigger and more robust showpieces. The expo even seemed a bit more lively and energetic than last year; and hey, there was good reason. Last year's big thing was the iMac, but that was about it; the year before was when things like the TiBook and the SuperDrive were announced, and things were hopping that year.
The 17" PowerBook banner stretched across most of the Moscone Center entryway.
Life-size stand-up poster of Apple's two newest soulless shills. I shoulda had Chris stand next to it. That guy is really huge. And that guy is really small.
 
The two new PowerBook models in relation to my head. But the centibrianhead is not widely accepted as a standard unit of measure.
This is that dorktastic "easel" display at the Corel pavilion, which Jade mentioned. Okaaay, we get the cute metaphor. How about some technology that actually makes it somewhat real?
Exhibitor Most Confused About Its Whereabouts: Andersen Windows & Doors. (Actually the guys in this booth explained that Andersen's elegant wood designs actually go very well with the Mac visual aesthetic, and people with money to burn on Macs tend also to like designer windows and doors. Apparently they've been collecting a brisk trade in contacts. Hey, far be it from me to argue!)
And... Most Oxymoronic Exhibit of the Expo.
 
Here's that "iGo" thing. Check this out. It has stainless steel frame members the exact same thickness and shape as the neck of the iMac itself; it has round cups for the speakers, a keyboard/mouse tray, and a hemispherical platform for the machine itself that completes the iMac's base's sphere as well as lighting the keyboard. It rolls, too. Check out the white chairs and the white clothes and surgically sterile white smile on the exhibitorette; I felt like I was in Sleeper, or maybe THX1138.
 
Racked Xserves and Xserve RAID. You have no idea what these things look like in action unless you've seen them in person; the camera simply doesn't do them justice. The lights are deep rich blues and greens and oranges, and they make the boxes literally light up like animated Christmas trees. When the Xserve RAID's central two columns of blue lights go pegging up toward the top under heavy access load, you feel like you're in command of NORAD or Jurassic Park or something. Note: We couldn't open up the back of the cabinet to get a close look at the superfly cable-management arms on the Xserves, because (the guy on duty said) the Xserve RAID, which is just a technology preview at this stage, is using some kind of super-secret FiberChannel card that they don't want people taking pictures of and posting on their blogs. Okay, fine-- fair enough. It'd better rock, though, guy, because Apple owes me a photo-op.
Speaking of technology previews, though-- I talked to one of the iApp specialists at the alley where all the new iLife apps were being test-driven (I am so seriously looking forward to iMovie 3, by the way-- and less so, but still significantly, to iPhoto 2); I wanted to know what the story was with that nifty Rendezvous/iTunes feature that Steve and Phil showed off as part of the Jaguar pre-release hype. You know-- where they could each have iTunes open, and both machines would recognize each other via Rendezvous as they came within range, and share their playlists with each other and stream the audio between them over AirPort. This feature was notably absent in Jaguar or in iTunes 3; the guy clarified for us that the feature was really just a "technology demo", not intended for actual release (because iChat wasn't out yet, and other uses for Rendezvous weren't particularly sexy). On top of which is the potential stickiness about how the RIAA would react to software that let you stream music unfettered through the air. (This, I'm led to believe, was the real stumbling block-- and thus it will remain for the foreseeable future. Damn and blast. But I understand Apple's decision.)
But at any rate, for the couple of hours's worth of the expo that I saw, it certainly seemed to be hoppin'. If the primary purpose of the event were to gather people together to sing Kumbaya over their Macs, without any of the lucrative potential business contacts that drive the attendance of the big-name exhibitors and their showy dedication to the Mac philosophy (at least in the light under which they exhibit at this particular event), it would still be pretty darn successful. And as it is, it's seemingly every bit as vibrant as it needs to be in order to keep this ol' barge trundling along. Pod People and Forsakens and Portable Losers or no, this honestly isn't so much a cult as it is an industry, and one that it's hard to deny being excited about watching, once you're in on the floor.
But Jade's right: a little reality-distortion-field-induced irrational exuberance never hurt anybody either.
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20:49 - Long Overdue Safari Update
http://www.apple.com/safari
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There's a new Safari beta out-- b51. God damn, it took them forever to get this release out the door.
SSL works now, for what I think is the biggest showstopper bug that's fixed. I'm not sure what else has changed, as there doesn't seem to be a changelog in the package anywhere. But the CSS1 test suite problem-- namely, that it doesn't recognize the "text/html" MIME type properly in CSS (something Dave Hyatt knows about), is not fixed yet. So it'll be another agonizing three days before that's fixed, probably.
Anyway-- while downloading the new beta, watch the "Downloads" monitor window. Keep an eye on the status messages, after it finishes transferring the .dmg disk image file. Watch how it displays all the Disk Copy status messages right in the Downloads window, such as "Displaying software license agreement" and "Mounting", after which it mounts the resulting application object on the desktop and replaces the .dmg file in the Downloads window with the final product. So you're left with a single clean entry, and no interim archive file to worry about.
(You can prevent it from doing this, by the way, by turning off the "Open 'safe' files after downloading" option in the General preferences.)
Squeee!
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09:51 - Nice little feature
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Make sure to turn on the Status Bar in Safari. It's what gives you visibility into what you mouse-over, but it's off by default.
But I just noticed that it tells you whether the link will open in a new window or not. It changes depending on what the TARGET attribute says, and on what modifier keys you're pressing. How come nobody else has done this?
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09:29 - Make no mistake! Okay, maybe a few.
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current/default.html
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Judson forwards me this list of LSSU's Banished Words for 2003. I'm gonna be looking forward to these every year; last year's were lots of fun as well. Give it a look; I absolutely agree with the nominations of "Make no mistake", as well as "Extreme" (you listening, Apple? Better than Togo's, though, who say "Make your lunch extreeeeeme! ... which means putting avocado on your sandwich), and "as per".
Judson would add "At the end of the day" and "the fact of the matter". Yeah, good call. (Hey, maybe "good call" should be in there too.)
As for myself, I'd love to see a ban on the inappropriate use of "apropos", which outnumbers appropriate usage in the media by about 90/10. But I disagree with the inclusion of "branding"-- while it sounds like a hijacked term being used for a trumped-up purpose, I'd argue that it actually means something concrete these days, a whole branch of business. Someone on NPR yesterday was talking about the difference between a "brand" and a "company"-- the former is fun, hip, and has loyal customers; the latter is work, boring, and has employees and shareholders. Might be the only way to save the New Economy companies from falling prey to a new return to strict control of non-work-related conversation and activities and lax dress codes and work hours, as is already happening in a German design firm, under the tutelage of a woman whose book Fun is Out is apparently taking the business world by storm.
I'll keep my friendly work environment and my "branding", thank you very much.
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| Thursday, January 9, 2003 |
03:12 - Next Stop: Premium Blend
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A while back, I noted the marked lack in the Islamic world of that staple of modern society that we take so much for granted here and now, self-effacing humor. I said (or implied) that a social group has only really "arrived" when it produces a universally-known celebrity figure who uses self-referential humor to mock his very group, and thus to validate its strength and resiliency. If you know your group can stand up to the acid test of a home-grown stand-up comic's roasting, then you give it that roasting and let the world see how well it does. I wondered where the Muslim version of Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, and Yakov Smirnoff was.
Well, just now I got an e-mail from Shahed of the alt.muslim newsgroup/website; he passed me two links as evidence of Muslim comics who are gaining an appreciative following. The first one has a number of links to various comics and humor sites, inclding a Muslim version of The Onion. (Really.) And the other one focuses on comedienne Shazia Mirza, whose act evidently is a big hit in Europe (particularly in Germany, where audiences reportedly like her because she reminds them of Hitler; ohh-kay).
Mirza's background necessitates finding new ground - after all, you can't do many gags about being drunk and stoned when your religion demands abstention - and the material based on that culture is easily the strongest. She does have other gags that do not rely on her faith, but these are not always as assured.
Interesting. I'd like to see this.
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02:38 - FireWire 800-- more than the sum of two 400's
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CapLion had the following to say about FireWire 800, as included in the new RealUltimatePowerBook:
By the by.. I recall you wondering why firewire 800 needs a different connector. It does because there are nine pins, and it uses an optical interface.
Biggest difference: Cable ranges over 100 meters.
It was designed primarily to fill the need of producers who run digital studios, and need cable runs longer than 5 meters, with no signal degradation.
It also has double the usable bandwidth of USB2, with no cable EM noise. Aaah, elegance.
It's quite surreal to plug a FireWire hard drive into a FireWire video camera and have it download it's data. What computer? :)
He also told me that FireWire 800 can be looped; you can do something like:
So if a cable link goes down somewhere in the loop, you'd still have access to both devices. You can also terminate the loop to a second machine, and share the devices between the machines. (The devices can be FW400 devices too.)
Of like is me.
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02:24 - "Missiled about Islam?"
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While I was down in Atlanta over the weekend, I saw that at the LaVista Road exit near where my brother lives, there's a huge billboard towering over the freeway interchange. Against a backdrop of a US flag, it said in enormous letters, "Misled about Islam?" (My brother's wife said she always sees that first word as "Missiled" for some reason.)
The billboard was an ad for the site WhyIslam.org, and purported to present the facts regarding Islam as a countermeasure against the ill-founded rumors and assumptions being spread in the post-9/11 world. This is the kind of thing I've been hoping to see for a long time: an "outreach" site with large, mainstream advertisement, presenting a clear message for average-Joe consumption.
And I checked out the site; as a matter of fact, it does seem to be what it claims to be. It's nice and friendly, speaking to an American non-Muslim audience, and seems to make a game attempt to be fair and balanced in the facts it presents. Certainly the face it puts on Islam is a very smiley one, but I suppose that's par for the course.
I found myself thinking, though: How far would I have to look through the site before I ran into the inevitable moral-equivalence rhetoric? How many clicks does it take to get to the center of an Islamic outreach website? One... two-hoo-hoo... thrrree...
Turns out the answer is one. Click on the "More>>>" link at the bottom of the main page, and you get an essay centered on the following charming sentiment:
The word terrorism came into wide usage only a few decades ago. One of the unfortunate results of this new terminology is that it limits the definition of terrorism to that perpetrated by small groups or individuals. Terrorism, in fact, spans the entire world, and manifests itself in various forms. Its perpetrators do not fit any stereotype. Those who hold human lives cheap, and have the power to expend human lives, appear at different levels in our societies. The frustrated employee who kills his colleagues in cold-blood or the oppressed citizen of an occupied land who vents his anger by blowing up a school bus are terrorists who provoke our anger and revulsion. Ironically however, the politician who uses age-old ethnic animosities between peoples to consolidate his position, the head of state who orders “carpet bombing” of entire cities, the exalted councils that choke millions of civilians to death by wielding the insidious weapon of sanctions, are rarely punished for their crimes against humanity.
Sigh.
But aside from that, the site is pretty even-handed, and in any case I'm glad to see that this kind of outreach is taking place, even though I had to go to Georgia to find it. I wonder why that is? I'm sure it isn't simply that huge billboards are more common down there...
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19:47 - Bring On the Cultural Studies
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It was only a matter of time after the hippie movements of the 60s became the subject of master's theses by people who were too young to have lived through it.
Now, it seems, it's become the "in thing" in journalism and academia to latch onto any old phenomenon/fad/movement and elevate it to the level of Transcendentalism or Socratic philosophy.
I refer to the report which was on NPR this afternoon, on All Things Considered, on otaku-- anime fans. It centered on the manga-zine Shonen Jump, which is launching a US-produced, fully English-language edition (though it still reads right-to-left, so as not to offend the purists) to sell to a new generation of anime consumers in the West.
Now, this is fine: I have no problem with anime as a genre or an art form. I myself don't like the art style-- it's a point against any given anime show or movie, not a point in favor of it, and I'll watch a good piece of anime in spite of the art style, as long as the story is good. The anime I enjoy most is the stuff that doesn't look so much like anime: Miyazaki films, Cowboy Bebop, that sort of thing.
But what I don't understand is this: Why is it that what so many people absolutely adore about anime, even among the supposedly intellectual youth who make up the biggest lump in the money-to-be-made distribution curve, is so pathetically insipid?
Maybe the report was focusing on the wrong part of the anime convention it covered; it wouldn't be the first time. But in quoting its financial figures for the mainstreaming of anime, it cited the fact that what we now had was a generation who had spent their pre-teen years watching Pokémon... and now they'd outgrown it, and now were watching Yu-Gi-Oh, which obviously is a much more grown-up show.
Um. 'Scuse me? Do these journalists realize what Yu-Gi-Oh is? It's a show about a bunch of kids who have duels using magical playing cards. Playing cards. As in, cards that you can go and buy and collect. Each episode (though I'll admit only to having seen a brief glimpse) is just another set of duels, with canned power-up sequences and florid taunting language and statistics that make it clear which cards to buy-- no story any deeper than that. No grander vision. It's an even more blatant piece of manufactured merchandising pap than Pokémon was, and that's saying something. Coupled with the report's characterization of the anime convention being filled with 15-to-17-year-olds blowing their life savings on Yu-Gi-Oh stuff, this thing even makes the "Chinpokomon" episode of South Park look like yesterday's news.
And naturally, the whole otaku movement was being presented as the Next Big Thing: in an onrush of sociopolital irony, today's disaffected youth are reaching out for a non-American art form to call their own, a culture that's patently alien to adopt instead of the bland and boring one they were spoon-fed before the Saturday-morning saviors came to call. Now they have a generational identity! They have a language all their own! They have a culture that's defined as a wilful mixture of influences, and isn't that remarkable? Isn't that meaningful? Isn't this somehow a microcosm of our whole lack-of-direction-as-a-people-in-the-world-community thing? Can we write our master theses on this yet?
Now, far be it from me to rag on the devotees of some obsession that I don't understand, nor on their self-fulfilling behavior at conventions full of like-minded souls. Believe me, I understand it all too well.
But I'm just at a loss to understand one little thing: When was it that I became so old and out of touch with the minds of my fellow human beings that I can't even begin to comprehend the attraction of something utterly vapid that makes slobbering acolytes out of otherwise fully functional humans of at least average intelligence? When did Yu-Gi-Oh become a surrogate for C.S. Lewis or Walden?
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14:04 - Pilgrim's Progress
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Safari may have a long way to go before it's ready for prime-time, but it's already overcoming its initial limitations by leaps and bounds-- it's only been out for two days, and apparently most of the biggest rendering/CSS issues have already been addressed in the internal builds.
This is largely thanks to the unaccustomed transparency with which Apple has flung itself into the Safari project. (And I'm not talking about the Quartz kind.) Via LGF comes Dave Hyatt's blog-- he's a Safari developer posting the details of the project's progress on his MozillaZine site. He's apparently already found and fixed the primary reason why Safari hasn't been able to run the standard CSS1 test suite; he's also providing an illuminating look into Safari's behavior choices, which seem (as with so many things Apple) to all have some kind of sane reasoning behind them:
A number of people have commented on Safari's UA string, which is as follows:
Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48
The portion of the UA string that seems to be stirring up controversy is the portion that says (like Gecko). The reason it is there is that in order to work with real-world DHTML sites you have essentially two options: you can claim to be MSIE or you can claim to be Gecko. We found that any other choice that we tried led to a significant portion of DHTML malfunctioning. You would not believe (well, maybe you would) how much DHTML exists out there that works only with MSIE or Gecko, and that uses proprietary extensions of each to accomplish the DHTML effects.
Had we released a browser with a UA string that did not superficially match either MSIE or Gecko, users would have downloaded Safari and experienced many malfunctioning Web sites. If anyone thinks that would have been a good idea, please step forward in your blog and explain why. I'm willing to listen.
Our solution was a compromise. We produced a user agent string that is different from Gecko's and easily distinguishable if you choose to sniff for it, but that at this time will pass most UA checks that sniff for Gecko. It may be that enough sites will start sniffing directly for our string that we can drop the "(like Gecko)" from our user agent string, but I'm not optimistic.
We chose to be more like Gecko than like MSIE because we wanted to be lumped into the standards compliant category, because fundamentally we are committed to supporting DOM 1&2, CSS1&2, and enough proprietary MSIE extensions and Gecko extensions (innerHTML, createContextualFragment, offsetWidth/Height, etc.) that we could be placed in a similar category.
Now, the fact that Apple has blessed a project with this much transparency represents a major break from tradition-- typically, Apple's software projects have been opaque to the outside world and very secretive. But they've evidently realized that when it comes to web browsers, there's no substitute for the grass-roots input of millions of demanding users with their own stringent standards. This certainly can't hurt Apple's credibility any. After all, what so many engineers (and others) crave-- even above proper immediate functionality-- is transparency into the process. This is something with which we contend daily at work; management looks at our team's products as a rock, and they don't dispute that we deliver a great rock, or that we do so consistently. But the problem is that this rock-- good though it might be-- just seems to drop out of the sky, with no warning, no prior milestones. You can't plan around it. Sure, all the rocks have been good so far, but without the ability to predict from observation how good the next rock will be, how can you risk banking on it following the pattern? Many managers will take a mediocre rock that they can watch being made over a stupendous rock that just falls out of a chute into the Shipping department one fine day.
Part of the mistrust that so much of the computer industry has built up for Apple over the years has to do with Apple's inscrutability and opacity. Sure, they have to keep things secret in order to do all the Insanely Great showmanship and everything; that showmanship is integral to the "style" side of the business, without which Apple wouldn't have the business case it does, like it or not. But there are some projects where they just can't afford to be opaque. Web browsers aren't sexy things; and while Safari is a great-looking piece of work, with a super-cool paint job and awesome handling in the canyon twisties, all that stuff doesn't mean a thing if it can't satisfy the needs of the millions of people for whom web browsers have become indispensable, utilitarian pieces of equipment. Those kinds of products rely critically upon user confidence; and that confidence won't come about, and especially not quickly, if the project is shrouded in secrecy. It's transparency itself, even more so than product quality, that will give people the reassurance they so desperately want.
Hence the almost puppy-like fawning contact with the KDE team two days ago, and the pledges for bidirectional open-source cooperation, and now Hyatt's blog (which I'm sure isn't the only such portal into the development team's brains). It looks to me as though Safari has nowhere to go but up; much of the initial derision of "just another marginal browser" and "another also-ran doohickey from Apple" has faded in favor of genuine well-wishing, for which I think we can credit this conscious public pledge of good faith. It seems that more people are arriving at the opinion that if some browser is going to turn out to be a heavyweight contender against IE, and one with a real chance of gaining some ground, they wouldn't mind it being Safari.
The grass roots are digging ever deeper...
BY THE WAY: Safari is fully AppleScriptable, as J Greely points out.
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| Wednesday, January 8, 2003 |
21:57 - Peter Jackson, you are worse than Satan himself
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Okay.
Hang on... lemme catch my breath.
Okay.... okay. Right.
Now: get out your Fellowship of the Ring extended special-edition DVD set.
Take out the first movie disc. Put it in; do scene selection.
Scroll through the pages of scenes until you get to the one with the Council of Elrond scene. Scroll the cursor down the page until you see it "split" and place part of the cursor down at the bottom of the screen.
Hit Play.
Then, after a few minutes, try to regain your sanity. This is the most difficult part.
Seriously. The fact that the man can pull off stuff like this is testimony to his eventual glorious legend. I genuflect in his general direction.
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13:48 - Hammer and Tongs
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/07.html#safari_review
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Aimed at web designers and CSS-heads, Mark Pilgrim has posted a detailed set of observations on Safari and what it does and does not do properly. It looks as though it might become sort of a clearing-house page for these kinds of observations, as it has links to numerous test cases and other sites' reviews, as well as updates from readers (which include Safari developers, who are clearly very interested in following-up on any compliance test cases they can find to work on).
So far, what I've seen encourages me quite a bit. It turns out that most of the bugginess I've seen only occurs on the first run-time; subsequent times you run the program, after it's created its various pref files and things, are much smoother. And I'm seeing mounting evidence that Apple is ravenous about gathering feedback about this thing so they can improve it to prime-time quality before release.
All I really need is some kind of text focus and navigability in drop-down <SELECT> menus, and I'll be able to use it just fine.
Incidentally: it turns out that the problem with my own blog page in Safari was that the <PRE> block up above had the following form:
<FONT SIZE=-2><PRE>
...
</PRE></FONT>
But Safari is more strict about style than IE or other browsers, on this issue; it interprets <PRE> as a complete font override, and so it ignored my <FONT> setting. (This happens in <TT> blocks as well.) I changed it to:
<PRE><FONT SIZE=-2>
...
</FONT></PRE>
...And now it's fine.
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09:54 - TrackBack SmackBack
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So here's what Safari's bug-report function looks like:
Checkboxes for automatically including a screenshot of the current page, and/or its source. Categories for different problem areas.
Looks to me like they've got a pretty serious outlook on making this thing shipshape, if the mechanism on the receiving end of these bug reports is anything like as streamlined as this is.
Then again, there's something to be said for the idea that we users shouldn't be the ones doing Apple's beta testing, no matter how nice the tools are. I mean, c'mon-- I get paid for that sort of thing normally.
(On the other other hand, Apple is making all kinds of brand-new software these days, and they depend on user feedback in order to know in which directions to take it, which I applaud wholeheartedly; and web browsers are one of those things that can only really be properly wrung out en masse-- so this whole "Massive Multiplayer Online QA" thing does make a certain kind of sense. It's probably the only way they can do this much development in this little time. It certainly helps that Mac users tend to be forgiving of Apple's controversial moves-- and willing to bend over backward to help Apple succeed...)
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| Tuesday, January 7, 2003 |
02:38 - Dooooomed
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0103/010302.html#010803
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Lileks has a much more entertaining take on the day's Stevenote offerings than I can hope to produce. But it's not as though that should surprise anybody.
Apple came out with a batch of apps today, and they’re all niftily spiffy, but the company is doomed because the computers aren’t fast enough, and people will always prefer PCs which let them do Apple-type things half as well but twice as fast, and besides, there are no games for the Apple, which is why I threw out my camcorder because it couldn’t play chess.
There. I think that covers it.
To a T.
Not that it'll keep me from continuing to harp on the same old blather for the foreseeable future, trying to convey the same familiar thoughts in a different set of words each day until I've worn a trough into the pathways of my brain and convinced the online world that I'm a certifiable loony. I'm kinda stubborn that way.
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02:18 - Hi! You don't know me, but...
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2
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Hee. Kris forwards me this e-mail, evidently sent to the developers of the KDE/KHTML rendering engine, then reposted to the KDE developer list, by the chief engineer on the Safari project.
I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser
built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my
development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to
open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back
to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue
among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.
Phew. Imagine getting that in your inbox, eh? Strikes me as a bit presumptuous and weird-- somehow there seems to be something a bit sneaky about waiting until you've released a Public Beta of your product before introducing yourself to the developers whose code you'll be using, even if you're pledging at the same time to re-release the source with its changes and additions back into the community. It's how open-source works (nobody has to disclose any of these projects to anybody else, as long as it's compliant with the license in question); but it must be awkward for the KDE guys to have to live with Apple's strict policy of not releasing any official word about future products until the day they're officially unveiled. (Hence the secrecy, and presumably the reason why the guy chose today to send this e-mail, dispatching it-- as he says-- from the MacWorld Expo show floor; he couldn't even wait until he got back to the campus. Must have been aching to send it...! Or else company policy was to send the message the instant it was NDA-ishly feasible to do so. But if that's the case, I doubt they'd have been relying on the guy to post it from the Expo floor, instead of making sure it went through actual official channels from within the company...)
Ah, speculation. Why is there always so much more of it after the keynote than before?
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01:35 - A little something else...
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Something I saw happening with the iSync and iCal updates, and now too with Safari, is that Apple is taking fuller advantage of how Disk Copy can present a user-friendly "installation" procedure.
It used to be the case that disk images were versatile, but unnecessarily esoteric to casual users. You'd download a .dmg file, double-click on it, enter a password if necessary, maybe sign a EULA, and then... you'd have a virtual disk mounted on your desktop, which you then had to open up, drag the contents from it into your Applications folder (or wherever), and then trash the disk and the .dmg file. Lots of functionality, but not a whole lot of sense.
Well, now they're taking a more classy approach. I don't know if this is a new feature in Disk Copy (the current version is 10.2.3, dated 12/17/02, and evidently came with the 10.2.3 OS update)-- but it certainly makes things smoother. Disk Copy prompts you for whatever it's going to prompt you for. Then it "mounts" the disk image, with the progress bar and details and stuff. But then, instead of displaying a virtual disk on the desktop, Disk Copy actually mounts the contents-- or copies the contents off, right onto the desktop-- with the result that you're left with nothing but the application (a single object, as with Safari, or single folder, depending on how it's packaged) and the original archive file (which evidently can be a .dmg.bin file, which StuffIt Expander passes off invisibly to Disk Copy with no interim decoded file). That's just two easily understood items, and people know what to do with both-- if not instinctively, at least a lot more intuitively than with the virtual-disk step.
So you get all the packaging features of Disk Copy, with the straightforwardness of a vanilla archiver. Pretty sweet. Never let it be said that they let "good enough" alone.
Now to hope they're serious enough about Safari to act smartly on all the bug reports and usability feedback that I and others will be sending in over the next few weeks. After all, browsers are perhaps unique in being used universally by everyone from novices to total power users. They can't cater to one without supporting the other, and that's a big hunk of chaw to bite off...
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01:15 - Celebrate Midgets
http://www.apple.com/hardware/video/powerbookg4bigandsmall.html
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You know, I've got to say this for Verne Troyer: he's got to be the biggest (one might say) champion for the anti-political-correctness movement that I've seen in a long time.
Five years ago, I daresay an ad like this would never have been feasible. Too many delicate sensibilities would have been hurt. Someone would have accused someone of insensitive exploitation. Someone would have sued. Someone would have paid up.
But Troyer says, "Hey: I'm small, I'm funny-looking... let's have some fun!" And for that I say he deserves every penny he makes, and then some.
As for the ad itself: as Lance said when he first saw it tonight, it's perhaps one of the most effective ones they've done in ages. It's not derisive of any other company or its products, it's not belittling to its potential users. It's just funny and engaging, and by God it gets its point across. And perhaps most importantly, there's not much that can be mocked about it.
(Though I'm sure some enterprising souls will find a way.)
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01:04 - The March of Technology
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You know, it wasn't so very long ago that this was absolutely cutting-edge:
Then again, every chunk of parts on the back of this 1992-era HP workstation is a discrete module, and each of the seven modules (power supply, networking, disks, display, etc) un-thumbscrews and slides out. Not a bad design, as these things went...
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00:20 - Damn you, Peter Jacksonstein!
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/01/jaromir.html
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Perhaps it's best that I say nothing about this one. The damage is too intractable already.
Wellington, New Zealand - A recently leaked trailer for The Return of the King has Tolkien fans outraged over the apparent addition of a new character - Jar-Jaromir. The scene depicted in the trailer shows Jar-Jaromir shouting, "Gondora gonna fallsa";
he then trips over a corpse and knocks down a couple of Uruk-hai.
Ah, good ol' BBspot.
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00:17 - Long Day
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Up early this morning to catch the Stevenote, and up to the City this evening for what has to have been the fastest-passing three hours of my life: the dinner with the Bay Area bloggers and others who happen to be in the neighborhood for MacWorld and such.
So I got to meet Mike Silverman, Bill Quick, Stefan Sharkansky, Andrew the Punning Pundit, and a couple of heaping handfuls of other notables whose names eluded me over the course of the steak (which was, by the way, excellent). And it was a blast. The discussions ranged all over, from vegetarianism to Macs to Bush to Simpsons quotes and back. A pretty broad spectrum of opinions were in evidence, and I would have loved to see a transcription of the multitude of threads flowing back and forth across the table, occasionally rising to shrill cries of "That's because you're a fucking socialist!" and "That is the most wrong thing I've ever heard in my entire life!" My most treasusured memory, though, will have to be that whenever one of these good-natured near-explosions about rent control or public transit or welfare or slaughterhouses rocked the table, someone would meekly interject, "So-- how about those Palestinians?" You know, steering it back to a nice safe topic on which we could all agree.
We oughtta do this kind of thing more often.
UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky has posted photos.
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13:15 - "This is why we do the things we do"
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Okay-- so. That was a pretty ballsy keynote, all things considered. Steve evidently noticed as well that the rumor sites had gotten the idea that this would be a lackluster and unsurprising address, and he even joked about that toward the end. Good thing he had a lot of stuff with which to counter that claim.
The biggest news, politically, is the new browser-- Safari. Now, it's absolutely a good thing that Apple has thrown its weight behind creating a browsing experience that's undeniably fast; browsing speed is one of the things Apple has been dinged on many times in benchmarks lately, and while part of that is attributable to the CPU speed itself, a lot more of it has to do with the fact that IE on the Mac is sloooow. Microsoft's MacBU did put together a pretty nice package, but it's always been a bit gawky and non-native-feeling, and it was never properly optimized. And it doesn't help matters that the alternative browsers like OmniWeb tend to be even slower (though they do look and feel a whole lot smoother). I've been using Chimera for a while now, and it's actually a good deal faster than IE in a number of key ways (plus it has that tabbed-browsing feature that I've come to enjoy quite a lot), and on top of that it's Gecko/Mozilla-based, which means largely guaranteed compatibility with everything. But it too is buggy and incomplete, and it's not everything I wish it to be.
So now there's Safari, and its big thing is speed. Thus far I'm impressed on that front. It loads fast, renders fast, and even downloads fast (it's a 3MB archive file). Nice and small and efficient. Plus it looks excellent-- very subtle visual look, with unobtrusive buttons that break away from the mold by refusing to be big picture buttons, instead content to be utilitarian but elegant navigational controls that take up very little space. And the whole thing is in the brushed-metal metaphor, which I find lends an interesting "70s" kind of feel to the whole thing.
There are a lot of pleasant surprises. Bookmarks seem to sort themselves intelligently. Popup windows obey the programmatic values I've coded in the server software on my various sites more predictably than most other browsers I've seen (popup windows with images in them look very, very nice). And it's got unrequested-popup-window blocking, much like in Chimera. Interestingly, Safari is open-source (which works both ways-- Apple will be posting its code to the public domain, if I understand what Steve said correctly); but it's not Gecko-based. Instead it's based on KHTML, the KDE rendering engine used in Konqueror. I wonder what prompted that move? It's potentially a politically charged one. KHTML is a very well-organized engine, but it's not too well tested to date, having existed really only for Linux users. (It also hasn't had full coverage on all compatibility areas.) We'll see how well this works in terms of compatibility; Safari has a handy "submit bug" icon in the upper right, though, so you can send non-compliant URLs to Apple to get them to tweak the engine into proper behavior.
But... well, there are a number of things about Safari that tell me immediately that it's not ready for prime time. It's very buggy. Within the first five minutes of use, I'd noticed that a) many pages don't load all the way, leaving the trick blue progress bar (that overlays on top of the URL) unfinished, and there's no visible activity indicator; b) mousing-over the "Bookmark Library" icon makes it disappear, under certain circumstances; c) the Preferences window opened up with no icons, no window contents, and a debug message about "Please select a button first!"; and d) it crashed while I was testing one of my sites. It has no text focus on drop-down menus, so you can't go directly to an item by typing its text partially (something only IE does "correctly" at this point). It doesn't display the contents of non-parsed-header scripts progressively, which is essential for one of my maintenance tools. And the contextual menus are sparse and non-modal, a far cry from the uber-contextuality of OmniWeb's CM's. Plus it makes my own blog page look like ass. (Crank down the text size a whole bunch and it starts to look a little better, but still.)
Something tells me I'll be using the "submit bug to Apple" function a whole lot in the next few days. If Apple is willing to fire this shot across Microsoft's bow-- one more step in the emancipation-from-Microsoft push that's been going on for a couple of years now-- then they'd better be willing to make Safari into a world-class browser that does everything IE does and more. Being fast isn't good enough... particularly when browser speed is one of those things that's only an issue on the Mac. (Saurabh was watching the keynote over my shoulder; his first reaction to the news that Apple was releasing a browser to compete with IE was "They're out of their minds." Because he didn't realize that web browsing on the Mac is slow. On the Windows side, browsing has long since become so well optimized that launch and render times have vanished into the noise, and browsing speed is bottlenecked only by bandwidth.) Safari has great potential to bolster Apple's ability to direct its own future; but this thing has a long way to go yet. Good thing it's just a Public Beta.
But Safari wasn't the centerpiece of the keynote; there wasn't really a single "centerpiece". There were lots of cool things. Chief among the remaining candidates would have to be the new PowerBook-- all 17 inches of PowerBook. They're calling it "the world's first 17-inch notebook"; that'd better be true, because someone here was saying that Sony already had one. (A quick look through Sony's VAIO page doesn't seem to indicate that they have anything bigger than 16", though.) But even if there's a factual bloop there, this is a pretty sweet package. It's even thinner than the current TiBook (1"); it's got rounded edges, like the iBook; it's got a slot-load SuperDrive standard; it's got a GeForce4 with 64MB of RAM; it's even got a trick back-lit keyboard with ambient light detection so the letters light up when it gets dark. The screen is straight out of the 17" iMac (which is not discontinued, much though that might surprise a whole lot of Slashdot readers who were led to believe that the fact that Apple would no longer be buying 17" widescreen LCDs from LG Electronics meant that the 17" iMac was cancelled, rather than that they were simply switching suppliers because LG wasn't going to be making the screens anymore). Oh, and it's got FireWire 800-- quite a silent little rev there. It needs a different connector than FireWire 400 does; I wonder why that is. (More pins?) No USB 2.0, though; it's certainly not lacking in ports, however. Crikey. Everything from on-board BlueTooth to DVI to line-in to S-Video to USB on both sides is in here.
Plus 802.11g-- er, excuse me: AirPort Extreme. They've gone up to the new 54Mbps standard, the one that's backwards-compatible with 802.11b (802.11a is not). It's a bigger card, which is interesting; no more PCMCIA version, at least not yet. But the new 802.11g Base Station has a whole heap of new features, including automatic bridging, USB printing, and 50 simultaneous real users-- for 2/3 the prior price. It's now down to $200. I'd say there's been a major stair-step here in value. I may in fact have to get one of these monster laptops. Steve did say that one of Apple's explicit goals is to get more people off of desktop computers and onto laptops; that does seem a sound plan, since Apple seems to have a knack for producing kickass laptops that don't have as much potential for attendant derision as their desktops do. It's a market they seem to be a bit better in. Aziz Poonawalla suggested to me in e-mail a while back that Apple might do well to stop making desktops-- or at least de-emphasize them-- and focus their efforts on their laptop line, where they seem to have more of a natural advantage these days. I was skeptical, but Steve appears to have the same idea after all.
To say nothing of the new 12-inch PowerBook. Yikes. Okay, at $1799, it's no iBook-killer; but damn, that's small. They had some pro photographers in the promo video who were talking about how this is exactly what they'd been hoping for: a full-featured, top-end laptop that's really damned small. And the contrast in what's now an extremely well-positioned notebook line is quite a kicker; wait'll you see the new TV ad starring NBA star Yao Ming and Verne Troyer (Mini-Me) on an airplane with their respective PowerBooks. There were about three people in my cubicle when the ad came on; by the time it was over, we had a roaring party of six or seven, attracted by the gales of laughter rolling across the floor. The jubilant MacWorld spirit was in high gear by that point, and even the Mac skeptics here at work were really getting into it. Nicely played, Steve.
So then there's the new "iLife" packaging for the iApps, with new major versions of iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD, as well as the unlocking of cool new stuff in iTunes. This won't be ready until later this month, but judging by the demos, it'll all be well worth waiting for. Microsoft has been making great strides trying to catch up with Apple's "digital hub" stuff, and we've been left to speculate about the "media-based interface" metaphors and concepts that seem to be apparent in the various apps. It's all been speculation, though; but now it's clear that this is where Apple wants to go. Until now, each iApp worked independently; you had to know how to get into iTunes for your music, or iPhoto for your pictures, and only then would your media-specific metaphors become useful. But now, each iApp has visibility and interaction into each of the other iApps; iMovie can list and import your songs and photos directly, iPhoto and iMovie can burn straight to DVD, and so on. There's no no longer the need to rely on the old standby "files and folders" metaphors when you have to take your data out of one context and import it into another. Now you can stay within the media-based context of your task and simply do it, without having to export anything to Quicktime files or create folders full of pictures. This was an essential stepping-stone toward the media-based strategy being comprehensive and genuinely useful, and it looks like they've taken it that last mile now. And once again Apple has taken a clear lead in showing where this market ought to go. I can't wait to get my boxed copy ($50 for all four apps, or a free download for everything except iDVD, which has an ass-load of new transitions which now incorporate your own video into their funky artsy effects). Color me impressed, and impatient at that.
Speaking of video, the first thing Jobs (actually, Schiller) showed off was Final Cut Express: a lite version of FCP whose purpose would appear to be to apply a pincers movement to Premiere. Adobe can't be all that happy with Apple right about now; Premiere has the bottom rung at the $600 slot, FCP comes in mid-range at $1000, and Avid fits at the top-end at $1500 and up. But now that FCE will be sitting below Premiere-- with most of the critical FCP features-- Premiere is going to have a hard time making its case. FCP is already fast amassing an industry all its own, and now there's going to be a low-ball $300 version that will eliminate the price-based reasons to go with Premiere instead of FCP. Adobe will have to counter this move with a "Premiere Elements" or something. Ballsy move by Apple here. No way could they have done this before Photoshop 7 was released.
And then there's Keynote, which I can imagine getting a copy of just to screw around with. It looks so fun. The fact that it has import/export compatibility with PowerPoint is the linchpin, but far more important to me is the fact that we finally now have an app that gleefully shows off all those cool Quartz tricks that were part of all the early Mac OS X demos, but that the standard apps never really took advantage of or gave users control over. Now we see why Jobs touted such things so much: he got to use them all the time, considering that this is the very tool that he's apparently been using to put together these keynote presentations. The text and graphics compositing tools alone look like the stuff with which one can waste days on end, and then there are those insane transitions and themes. At $100, this looks like one of those things that they just thought was too much fun not to release and let everybody play with. Considering the unusually long and loud applause Jobs got when he announced that everybody in attendance at the keynote would get their own free copy on their way out the door, it would seem he called that one pretty much on the mark.
So yeah-- it wasn't by any means a downer of a keynote, and I'm feeling that all-too-familiar tug on my wallet. Yeah, I do need a new laptop. I suppose it would make some sense for me to go drop $3K on a laptop with a bigger screen than my desktop machine here at work. Or at least I can convince myself of that, I'm confident.
I'm sure I'll get to discuss all this in person tonight at the blogger bash in San Francisco. I hope to get to match up some faces with well-known opinions; and there'll be plenty to talk about, even without such things as international terrorism to occupy the conversation.
Whew.
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| Monday, January 6, 2003 |
20:21 - Open your QuickTime and say your prayers, 'cause Stevie Jobs comes tonight...
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Tomorrow morning's the keynote, and it's anybody's guess what treats it will bring. The rumor sites have been pretty quiet for a while-- well, maybe quiet isn't the word. Perhaps confused. there's nothing substantive to be heard. Whether it's wireless keyboards, new iApps (or new versions of old iApps, some of which are indeed due), new iPod-type stuff, or a revamp of the TiBook (also due), nobody seems to really know.
There are new versions of iCal and iSync posted already, though, so those aren't going to be big keynote surprises. I'm kinda inclined to see this as a good thing; if these are being "silently" released the day before the keynote, then in order for the keynote to have any substance it's going to have to center on other stuff. (It'd have to do so anyway; iCal is much faster now, and iSync is much smoother, but neither of those are keynote material.) So there's likely to be something big on the way. No massive day-by-day appetite-whetting like they gave us last year in anticipation of the iMac's release, but that means nothing historically either. So, we'll see.
In any case, it means I'll be up at 9AM to catch the live feed. Last year, our annual sales conference occurred on Keynote Day, so we could only catch the first half-hour or so (which saw the iMac's unveiling and the first few minutes of iPhoto) before they packed us up onto buses and drove us into the hill resorts to hobnob with the international sales force. But this time, the conference isn't till next week; so we'll get to see the whole thing.
Chances are that it'll be obvious within the first twenty minutes or so whether this will be an upper or a downer of a keynote. (This time around, it's not quite so cut-and-dried; the CPU situation in particular has got a lot of us feeling a bit bleak.) I'll have to come up with some cutesy superstitious things to do in order to ensure a bountiful harvest.
Fingers crossed...
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| Sunday, January 5, 2003 |
01:10 - Shut up, Brian
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You know how they tend to create names for literary genres by taking a word that describes what makes up a genre and adding "a"-- like "erotica", "Americana", "Judaica", and so on?
I think they should have one of those genres for autobiographies, diaries, personal journals, and the like.
They could call it "diarya".
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01:03 - | | |
Brian Tiemann
