MIDN 4/C Philo T. McGiffin, USN (Ret)

…something touched me deep inside, the day the music died...

2011-10-12T23:45:00.001-04:00

I have (had) a (very) few things in common with Steve Jobs: we were born within a year of each other, we were both adopted, we were both cancer survivors (until last week), and we both worked in the computer industry.

We differed in so many different ways: Steve dropped out of a liberal arts college, embraced the counter-culture, and peppered his career with daring moves. I conformed: starting at the U.S. Naval Academy, transferring to an established (if somewhat innovative) engineering school, married young, and moved between "safe" software jobs over the years.

I had been working in software for seven years, mostly in CAD and computer graphics, when I first encountered an Apple computer — a pre-release Macintosh — as an employee at Lotus Development. I was skeptical for a short time (a few weeks), but I eventually concluded that the Mac represented a compelling vision of the future of computing, and embraced it; or, as some would say, started drinking the Kool-Aid.

I had the privilege of "meeting" Steve twice, in small-group situations. The first time, he and John Sculley met Mac developers at Lotus, shortly after Sculley had been hired by Apple. The second time, Steve visited Lotus as CEO of NeXT (with Conall Ryan, an ex-Loti who was NeXT's VP of Marketing). During that visit, Steve expressed an interest in seeing the product I was working on (Lotus Agenda) implemented for the NeXT platform; I was hooked. I eventually landed a job working on Lotus 1-2-3 for Mac at Lotus, where I was able to pursue this passion, and it was one of the most satisfying projects of my career.

After those experiences with Apple and Steve at Lotus, the Mac (and NeXT, to the extent that I understood it) became my personal reference points for how software should work for users. This orientation was not always conducive to career development. I did land a position with Symantec developing Symantec C++ for PowerPC (a descendant of THINK C for the Mac, which I had used for years), which was probably my dream job of all time; but the Mac tide was ebbing, and I had to find work in domains where my Mac experience and values were not, well, valued.

Four years ago, I landed a job to lead the implementation of a Mac version of a successful Windows product. The project was not a spectacular success, for various reasons, but I was back to the Mac, and anxious to stay. As corporate interest in that product waned, I moved on to a similar situation (a company with a successful Windows product and a desire to succeed on the Mac). I am back in my element, and determined to implement something Steve would approve of.

I am crushed by Steve's passing; in private, I have cried, uncontrollably. We have been deprived of years of his masterful guidance. I have great confidence that Apple can continue to execute as well as it has in the past, but it is undeniable that something is lost without Steve's oversight. Nonetheless, I cast my lot with Apple. (Literally: I have Apple stock I bought in 1997, and I'm still holding.)

I have only a few years left to work in this industry before retirement (I hope), and Steve's advice (as expressed in his Stanford commencement speech) rings in my ears: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life".

I am not going to waste the time I have left.

"Our Banana Republic"?

2010-11-07T23:35:00.001-05:00

In the New York Times this weekend, Nicholas Kristof asserts that the USA has become a banana republic. The piece is typical of what I see on the Gray Lady's op-ed pages lately, and why the opinions expressed in what is regarded as our "newspaper of record" have become so meaningless to me.

To me, a "banana republic" is defined by a corrupt political system, typically run by a dictator for his own benefit, where elections are rigged, and government policy is manipulated to enrich the people in power, usually leaving much of the populace in abject poverty.

Kristof chooses to define banana republics on the basis of relative income; by his standard, in the BRs, "the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie". By that standard, the USA, where "The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976", we are even worse than a typical "banana republic". And we're told that the rise of the Republicans is likely to make it "worse".

Oh, where to start?

The disconnect, for me, is the assumption that our country has a corrupt political system designed to enrich anybody, let alone the ruling clique.

Yes, a few people do get madly rich in this country. People like Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Warren Buffett, the Kennedy's, the Kerry's, Barack and Michelle Obama, Steve Jobs, etc. Yes, this list is selective, to make a point: these particular people are on the opposite side of the political spectrum from the Republicans who are supposedly driving us into BR status.

Government policy did not enrich any of these people, or anybody else, for that matter. Most of them went into business, took risks, and were rewarded. (Even the Obama's got most of their wealth by selling books; nobody was forced to buy them.) Kristof's complaint seems to be that the government did not take enough of their additional income away from them. This is not "enriching"; this is, if anything, the absence of "deriching", i.e., confiscation of income and/or wealth.

Let's look at the other end of the spectrum. Oh, wait, Kristof didn't. How are working American's doing vis a vis their standard of living? This wasn't addressed in the column. It's a treatise on wealth, not of the supposed deprivation of the non-wealthy.

I say "supposed deprivation" because I am not yet convinced that the middle, or any other, class, is being deprived on behalf of the wealthy. I have not seen a careful assessment of the challenges to the middle or working classes. Certainly housing and medical expenses are up, but the quality (and presumably the cost) of both is greatly improved, mostly as a result of government intervention in building codes and required coverage. There may be more at work, but I'm not convinced that it's a simple case of a particular class being excluded by policy.

The standard of living for the "working class" in this country -- cell phones, cable TV, housing, sanitation -- would be the envy of the working class of any country otherwise considered a "banana republic". I don't think we have to hang our heads in shame.

Having said all that, I have an open mind with respect to adjusting tax policy. But I am mindful of the difference between current income and pre-existing wealth. Whenever someone writes a column that conflates the two, I smell demagoguery, and tune it out.

Four and a half to five years ago…

2010-10-15T21:37:00.001-04:00

I speculated that Apple's Boot Camp would (OK, could; I hedged) help Apple boost market share significantly. My rationale was that Mac hardware was suddenly potentially useful to Windows users, as part-time or even full-time Windows machines, and that even a small percentage of Windows users buying Mac hardware would represent a substantial increase in Apple's market share, even if it added only a couple of percentage points to Apple's roughly 4% market share.

Anecdotally, I've seen this happening. At my last two employers, Macs, usually laptops, have regularly been purchased with the intent of running Windows at least part of the time, even by IT types who profess to hate the Mac. Many of these Mac owners started using Mac OS, sometimes for the first time in years, others for the first time ever. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but it's my informal observation that many are "switching" to Mac OS.

Quantitatively, my expectations have been wildly exceeded. This week, some reports put Apple's market share at over 10%, making it the third largest PC vendor in the US. Apple's share price is nearly 10 times what it was in June of 2005, its market cap puts it at the top of the S&P 500, and it has more cash in the bank than (almost?) any other company in the world.

To be sure, the Mac is not the only driver of this growth; the iPod, iPhone, and iPad are all game changers. But I assert that they are all inter-related; there has been much talk about the iPod (and later iPhone) "halo effect", but it all adds up to Apple's tight focus on their product line.

I see more upside. The iPad is in its first generation, and I expect it to follow the same kind of trajectory the iPhone did. The Mac (and OS X) are back on Apple's agenda next week, and I see a lot of potential there. Mac OS X is way ahead of its developers; mainstream applications that need to support OS X 10.4 (Tiger) are still unable to exploit much of the potential that Apple built into Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). I have high hopes for OS X 10.7, although I don't have many predictions to offer. A new file system seems like a possibility: ZFS was rumored for Snow Leopard, and it wouldn't surprise me if Apple has something new here this time around.

And there must be something for the new datacenter in North Carolina to do...

A Few Short Observations About WWDC '10 (one hint: don't sell Mac short)

2010-06-12T23:35:00.001-04:00

Of course, I'm under non-disclosure, so I'll be brief (and careful):

- The conference was light on Mac OS X, but most app developers haven't adopted some of the most powerful aspects of Snow Leopard yet: Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL to name a couple. There is a lot of goodness yet to be extracted from OS X by developers; Apple doesn't need to rev it yet.

- Apple is investing big-time in Dev Tools (Xcode), to the benefit of both iOS and OS X. All Apple devices (and OS's) are positioned to take great advantage of emerging technologies.

- Having seen Apple's development and debugging tools for iOS devices (iPhones and iPxds), I can't see how Android can its multiple manufacturer's can keep up. Sure, they can build a lot of devices and throw them at the wall to see what sticks, but will they ever be able to fine-tune these resource-constrained devices to the same extent that Apple can, with it's tightly-managed platform and well-matched tools? We'll see...

Apple, Flash, and Platform Control

2010-05-01T22:42:00.001-04:00

Gruber @ DaringFireball, as always, has already nailed this on the head, and Mark Bernstein (whom I've never encountered before), has driven it home, but I think I have $.02 and a little history to add.

From dual diagnosis to partial hospitalization to...

2009-12-14T23:34:00.001-05:00

It turned out that the second dual-diagnostic unit, at a facility specializing in substance abuse, was a "high point" in our story, even though they were more restrictive about visitation. Our son's case supervisor, Rose, who we never got to meet personally, was a caring, patient individual who spent as much time as we needed on the phone, advising us on what to expect and how to advocate for our son. We were allowed a visit with our son in the presence of another case supervisor (Michael), who clearly knew the background of our son's case and facilitated a conversation about how we could secure the best future for our son. I can't thank these people enough; Rose has been a valuable resource even after Greg left their care.

The "plan" was to move our son into a residential facility; e.g., a group home. He seemed to be looking forward to that, inasmuch as it represented a path to less restrictive setting and eventual employment.

Unfortunately, the insurance company seemed to have different ideas; the result was a move to a "partial hospitalization" program in a facility much further away from our home. In this program, our son receives therapy for six hours a day, and lives in housing on the hospital campus the rest of the day. He is able to sign himself out of the facility at will; in fact, he was required to do so, because he medication was prescribed by the facility but he was responsible for having it filled at a local pharmacy, even though he had been transferred there without his wallet, which had been taken from him much earlier in the custody chain. Fortunately, the pharmacy accommodated him until we were able to deliver his wallet, and even give him a ride to fill the prescription.

The "ride" was our first opportunity to spend unsupervised time with our son since he was arrested and subjected to the emergency evaluation. In a way, it was disappointing: he seemed very "down" on himself and unwilling to accept the diagnosis. But I think we were able to communicate to him how much we care, and much we don't blame him (any more) for our past crises.

Our major frustration with the current facility is that they seem to be insisting that our son be the point person in arranging the next stage of his own care, and, frankly, we don't think he's up to it. He's never been well-organized in arranging such things (after all, he has a thought disorder), and his communication skills are also lacking. He has been emphasizing his (history of) substance abuse as his dominant problem, mainly, we think, because it enables him to ignore his other diagnosis.

We were recently informed (by our son) that his insurance coverage for his current facility will lapse on December 22nd, before we have had any chance to discuss what the next stage of his treatment should be. We're reluctant to bring him back home without substantial support services (which we haven't been able to line up, yet). We have an appointment to talk with him and his case supervisor in a couple of days (almost a week after he arrived at this facility); we're hoping we can establish a plan for well-supervised care when and if he comes home with us.

Moving from dual diagnosis to... dual diagnosis

2009-12-02T23:24:00.001-05:00

Our son is being moved today from a dual-diagnostic unit in a psychiatric hospital to a dual-diagnostic unit in a facility that specializes in substance abuse (which we do not think is our son's primary problem), but which offers relaxed levels of care that we can hope he will move into sooner rather than later.

All I know is that the rules will change for us; stay tuned...

Early stages of treatment

2009-12-01T00:16:00.001-05:00

Where are we, and how did we get here?

As I have mentioned, my son was thrown out of two colleges, moved into (and lost) an apartment, and moved in with us. In late September, he was fired from a job at a local fast-food restaurant, and on that evening he got horribly drunk (on nearly a fifth of bourbon) and became belligerent. We eventually called the police, who placed him in protective custody for the night.

His behavior deteriorated since then: more episodes of talking to himself, often in our presence, and not interruptible. An increasing reluctance to go out of the house and be seen in public.

A couple of weeks ago, he found another reason to get drunk again (not a common occurrence), became belligerent again, and again we called the police. This time he (apparently) took a swing at a cop, and instead of protective custody, he was under arrest.

On the advice of court officers, I filed a request for evaluation for substance abuse problems (for which he has a history). It turned out that he was "pink slipped": sent to a local emergency room for a psych evaluation by a local mental health agency. Their findings (unknown to me at this time) resulted in sending him to a psychiatric hospital's "Adult dual diagnosis" unit. "Dual diagnosis" alludes to a combination of substance abuse and additional psychiatric problems; not unreasonable in my son's case.

The doctor's at the hospital applied the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, version 4), and reached a diagnosis of schizophrenia. We were shocked and in denial at the diagnosis, but when we read the diagnostic criteria, we recognized our son in 12 out of 12 criteria.

Our son was prescribed Zyprexa, one of the second generation "atypical anti-psychotic" drugs. He resisted the treatment at first, and has continued to deny that he has a condition that requires treatment, but he has markedly improved. His speech is clearer, he makes eye contact in conversations, and he will acknowledge that the treatment seems to helping, even while denying that he has a condition that requires help.

He will probably have to move out of the dual diagnosis unit (since, thankfully, he doesn't have an active substance abuse problem), but we're on pins and needles wondering where they will decide he belongs next. We don't think he should come home yet; the issues that triggered his belligerence here twice have not been resolved. And he doesn't freely acknowledge that he has a condition that requires continued treatment. But what will be proposed?

Schizophrenia is my new cause

2009-11-29T10:46:00.001-05:00

I'm a survivor of colon cancer (11 years). My wife and I have contributed liberally to the American Cancer Society since then, although it is only recently that I started to get caught up in more active support (via the Walk for Life).

It's a great cause, but I'm re-thinking my personal priorities.

As I noted in my last post, my son has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Prior to the diagnosis, he had been thrown out of two colleges, in trouble with the law, fired from several jobs, thrown out of his apartment, and unbearable to have back at home with us. He had been seeing counselors on a regular basis, but things only continued to get worse.

Since his diagnosis, which was harder to hear than my own cancer diagnosis, my wife and I have been frantically trying to learn about this illness, and we know understand that the behaviors that have disturbed and angered us are not his fault. We're also discovering that schizophrenia is badly misunderstood, ignored, and under-funded.

Some facts:

The Prevalence Rate for schizophrenia is approximately 1.1% of the population over the age of 18 (source: NIMH)

NIH research spending in the US is less than $75 per individual affected by schizophrenia, vs. about $169 per person for colorectal cancer and $2,240 per person with HIV/AIDS.

As many as one in five (20%) of the 2.1 million Americans in jail and prison are seriously mentally ill, far outnumbering the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals.

The vast majority of people with schizophrenia who are in jail have been charged with misdemeanors such as trespassing.

Approximately 200,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness are homeless, constituting one-third of the approximately 600,000 homeless population

I should point out that I lean right politically, and therefore might be thought of by some as a heartless bastard. But I think we, as a nation, can do much better than we have been.

In the single case of my son, we have an individual who anyone (including himself) might justifiably call a "loser". But if we had known a couple of years ago what we know now, we might have prevented the costly failures and the hours in court. Shouldn't we be trying to do that as much as possible?

I don't have any solid answers, but it seems obvious that with earlier detection and treatment, we can divert people from jails and homeless shelters into productive lives, and save a few bucks along the way.

So the American Cancer Society will be seeing a bit less of me, while I devote some time to a neglected illness that needs some positive attention.

My son has schizophrenia

2009-11-24T23:38:00.001-05:00

On Friday my wife and I learned that my son has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The first reactions were shock and grief; now we're trying to learn a whole new landscape. I'm hoping that chronicling this experience will help someone (including myself and my family).

History

My wife and I have two children, both adopted from Korea: a daughter, 25, and our son, 23. Our son was an active, happy child who seemed to light up at the simple pleasures in his childhood. He was diagnosed with ADHD in second grade, and it was sometimes a challenge to guide him through school. But what I most remember is the happy, outgoing child who charmed strangers on sight (and maybe then wore them out with his endless energy).

Eleven years ago, I was treated for late stage colon cancer. I bring this up only because I'm finding parallels in my reaction to that diagnosis and my son's.

My son made it through high school OK, although there seemed to an increase in anxiety during senior year, especially after graduation. At the time, we attributed it to the normal anxiety of choosing and preparing for college.

He entered college (a quasi-military school) and seemed to thrive, but got into disciplinary problems mid-year and was under considerable stress for the remainder of the year. He ended up flunking out, and we learned (later) that he developed a considerable substance abuse problem during that spring.

After that, he was nearly intolerable to have at home (by abusing the privilege of being at home alone), and he "couch surfed" for a while until he ended up in an apartment with a couple of friends while he held a reasonably steady job. Eventually the job and apartment situations deteriorated, and he ended up back at home.

We worked to prepare him for another try at college: he started seeing a counselor, and was accepted into a new school. We delayed his entrance until the second trimester on the school's schedule, in hopes of stabilizing him further (via counselling). The signs weren't all positive; he lost a couple of more jobs during this period.

Three weeks after starting school again, he was arrested for drug possession. We turned him out of the house; he couch-surfed a while longer until his court date. When he was given two year's probation, we helped him get a studio apartment of his own for the benefit of his probation (and our sanity), and he started getting counseling again (mostly at our expense).

After a year in the apartment, he had lost a couple of more jobs as well as the lease on his apartment (due to unacceptable behaviors on his part). We took him back into our home (mainly to keep him out of jail for probation violation). He landed a job at a local fast-food restaurant a.

In just a few months, his behavior deteriorated to the point that he lost even that job. We were starting to suspect depression or even bipolar disorder, and were encouraging him to follow up on psychiatric care referred by his counsellor, but he resisted.

Finally, we reached a breaking point where we had to call the police to our home (not for the first time), which eventually resolved itself into a court-ordered emergency psychiatric evaluation; he was referred to a psychiatric hospital for a more complete workup, which resulted in the diagnosis of schizophrenia. At this writing, he's still there, starting on medication.

Our Reaction

Many friends and family members have wondered why we had put up with so much misbehavior over the past four years. Frankly, we were at the end of our rope; we hoped to keep him from violating his probation and landing in jail, but could not envision tolerating his behavior past May (when he would have completed two years). We had even started on counseling of our own to try to figure out how to manage the situation, because May seemed a long way off...

[Thankfully, my wife and I have been mostly on the same page in dealing with our son throughout the ordeal; we've been slightly out of sync at times, but, for the most part, we've supported each other. We're lucky: I have friends whose marriages have broken up over similar ordeals.]

When we heard the diagnosis on Friday, my reaction was bewilderment (frankly, I didn't understand what "schizophrenia" really meant), and my wife's was denial; she had read up on depression and bipolar, fearing those outcomes, but had not entertained anything as serious as schizophrenia.

The next stage, as predicted by the case supervisor, was grief. Our expectations for a happy life for our son, even adjusted by his failures, were shattered. Frankly, I think we also feared how this would affect the remainder of our own lives.

At the advice of the case supervisor, we quickly purchased the book "Surviving Schizophrenia", by E. Fuller Torrey, and started some web research of our own.

Our denial was quickly dashed: on reading the informal diagnostic criteria, we realized that they described our son's recent behavior exactly.

The next stage was recrimination. Although we had suspected mental illness in some form (like depression or bipolar), we completely missed the depth of his real problem, and, in retrospect, were perhaps aggravating it by pressuring him to get out, find a job, etc.

Next came resolve: he needs help, and we're going to get it for him. The prognosis for schizophrenia can be pretty daunting, but there are treatments, and there is hope, and we are going to pursue it. I expect that this blog will be mostly about this journey.

We drifting back into recrimination: we found some journal entries and other writings by my son from the past few years, and they paint a stark picture of his dawning recognition of his mental illness, and the despair he felt when the people around him (including us) failed to recognize his pain. There is much discussion of suicide in these writings; I can't imagine the guilt I would have felt if he had acted on those impulses and we had found these writings after the fact.

Looking Ahead

My son is hospitalized and has been receiving medication for a few days. It's too early to expect any positive effects, although he is noticing the sedating effect expected in the early days and not liking it. It doesn't help that he refuses to acknowledge the diagnosis, although we understand that this is not unusual at this stage of the process.

In the next week or so he will be transferred into a different level of care (we don't know what that will be yet), with a new cast of caregivers (which will afford us a second opinion, although we have few doubts). We will continue to encounter his denial of the diagnosis and the rejection of the treatment we believe he needs.

I wish we knew how to talk to him. How do we encourage him to accept the treatment? When he resists, should we persist or back off? Is confrontation helpful or harmful at this stage?

We have tried to contact local support groups, but have had no response yet; until we can talk to someone who has been through this, we're flying blind, and I fear the consequences of well-intentioned action with unintended negative consequences.

There's lots more to talk about. I will fill in the rest of the history (hopefully in an organized manner), and provide updates on our progress.

Claim chowder(*), of sorts, in the face of WIndows 7

2009-10-30T23:22:00.001-04:00

When Apple announced the switch to Intel, I speculated that Apple would benefit from the purchase of Macs by Windows users. I was wrong about some details (like the ability to run Windows apps under OS X), but things did develop along those lines.

Apple changed the game a bit (in my favor) with the announcement of Boot Camp, and I refined my prediction a bit, speculating that Windows users would, to some degree, be inclined to buy Mac, even for the purpose of running Windows, and that even a small percentage of "switchers" would be a huge gain for Apple.

A few years later, I claim vindication, with both anecdotes and facts:

* The "Windows apps on Mac" problem has been addressed, to some extent, by Parallels and VMWare Fusion, which do not require booting into Windows (to the exclusion of OS X) to run Windows apps.

* I have many acquaintances who have switched to the Mac, in spite of distinct aversion to the Mac before OS X and the Intel switch.

* There are a lot of PCs at my current employer that are Macs running Windows all the time, including, I'm amused to note, machines on the desks of our IT support staff. OK, they're running Windows, but they are (high margin) sales for Apple.

* Apple is enjoying greater market share,

Windows 7 may convince Windows users to stay with Windows, but that does not exclude them from buying Macs to run Windows 7, and there are still good reasons to buy a Mac even to run Windows 7: it's elegant, high-performance hardware for your needs, and, should the need or desire arise, there is no need to buy new hardware to run OS/X.

Yes, you could buy cheaper hardware to run Windows 7, and many (most?) will, but it has been demonstrated that Apple does have a price advantage at a certain (high) level of feature specifications, and, not accidentally, high margins.

It doesn't have to be a lot; as I said way back, a small number of Windows user, even if they choose to remain Windows users, is a big percentage boost to Apple's hardware share, and to their bottom line.

(*) Apologies/tip-of-the-hat to John Gruber at Daring Fireball

The iPhone can't multi-task... yet.

2009-10-30T22:01:00.001-04:00

There seems to be a theme developing that the iPhone is at risk from Android because it "can't" run background processes.

Case in point.

C'mon; it's OS X under there. It's not that Apple couldn't support background processes, it's that they chose not to, probably for reasons related to power consumption and stability.

I see one of two likely developments:

* Android phones demonstrate longevity or reliability problems when loaded with apps running in the background, and Apple's decision looks brilliant.

* Android does OK, and Apple wakens the background capability that's always been there and they've been fine-tuning all along, and the Android advantage is nullified.

I can't accept the possibility that Apple can't support multi-tasking in an OS that's already good at it.

I have always laughed at the notion of an "ideal" laptop, because a portable, battery-powered platform is ultimately an exercise in compromises. Performance, longevity, screen size, capacity, and features are always at odds with cost, compactness and weight. The same tradeoffs apply to phones. Apple and its competitors are working under the same restrictions, and the best any of them can do is advance one set or more features at the expense of one or more limitations. Apple is demonstrably good at this game, and any time they appear to be beat on one feature axis, one should look at where the tradeoff has been made.

The Droid has not been tested in the wild yet. I'm waiting until we have a real head-to-head comparison, and Apple's response.

Pound the Quality

2009-10-27T21:40:00.001-04:00

John Gruber nails it, as he usually does.

How Should Mac Apps be Distributed?

2009-09-17T21:27:00.001-04:00

John Gruber has a thoughtful piece on Daring Fireball (easily my favorite blog), reflecting on another "thoughtful piece" by Alexander Limi; the topic is how Mac apps are installed on the Mac and how the process might be improved.

I have two thoughts on the matter, which touch on topics raised by John but which I had formed before reading his piece. (You'll have to take my word on that.)

1) The Mac should have an interface dedicated to finding and launching applications, probably accessed from the Apple menu. The interface should take guidance from the iPhone home screen(s), displaying all of the applications accessible to the user (regardless of where they are installed), organized to the user's preferences. (Maybe a third-party app opportunity. Hmmm.) It could be layered on top of the existing scheme, so none of the flexibility of the existing model would be lost.

2) How about a Mac app store? For those well-behaved Mac apps that don't require an installer, this is a no-brainer, and I suspect many of the factors that dictate an installer (contributions to the Frameworks, Application Support, or other common destinations) could be accommodated fairly easily. This would eliminate most of the room for user error cited in the two blogs.

Might be a good use of that new datacenter Apple is reportedly building...

"Let's aim for Mars"

2009-06-25T00:36:00.001-04:00

I can't say it better than Buzz Aldrin, but I can add this:

I am a member of the "Sputnik" generation: I was in elementary school during the Mercury and Gemini programs, and Neil and Buzz walked on the moon before I was a sophomore in high school. I dreamed that I could aspire to be on the first manned mission to Mars.

Now I wonder if this will happen in my lifetime; or ever. This is a damned shame, and may mean that we're squandering mankind's best chance for an almost infinite legacy, as opposed to following the dinosaurs into oblivion.

Some people bemoan the cost, and I have thoughts on that I will share at another time; for now, please just pay heed to Buzz's aspirational message.

So much for the stimulus

2009-06-06T13:43:00.001-04:00

From here, via here:

[Pardon me if the image isn't posted; MarsEdit and Flickr appear to be having a disagreement. Visit one of the linked blogs to see the chart.]

Brief explanation: The chart shows what the Obama administration expected unemployment to be without the stimulus, what the expected it to be (lower) if the stimulus passed, and what it actually became (higher) in reality.

This administration is a disaster.

Microsoft can catch up?

2009-06-01T13:52:00.001-04:00

In this interview, Steve Ballmer suggests that Microsoft can catch up to Google in search if it only persists, as it did with Windows:

A. No. No, Windows 95 was a basically mostly interesting and successful concept that came to full fruition, right? This is not Windows 95. It’s more, I don’t know —

Q. Windows 3.1?

A. 3.0 maybe even, right? It’s more, hey, we’ve had some early tries, kind of like you might call Windows 1, and I think there was something called Windows 2 in there, and Windows 386 in the late ’80s, but it’s far more like Windows 3. People say, aha, I see the vision. It pays off but it won’t fully pay off the vision in its first incarnation.

But it’s like Windows — the most important thing I just said in all of that is it’s important like Windows is important. It’s important like something that we really care about, we really think about, we’re going to stay persistent with, we’re going to invest in.

If you stop and think about it, Windows 95 came 12 years after we started working on Windows. We’ve been working on search five years. I’m not saying it should necessarily take 12 years, but in a sense what we’re trying to do is accelerate the pace, and see if we can’t get there.

This is bogus to the point of being laughable. Google (the company) dominates search. In the 80's and 90's, PC operating systems were dominated by... Microsoft.

There is a common perception that with Windows 95, Microsoft finally "caught up" to Apple and Mac OS; Ballmer seems to be referring to this.

But the reality is that the Mac was never ahead of Microsoft's OS in terms of market share. The IBM PC, running Microsoft's DOS, blew past the Apple II in 1982-1983, well before Apple rolled out the Mac. PC's outsold Mac's all along; I remember all too well, as a Mac developer (by choice, when I could) working for Lotus during those years. MS-DOS had dominance when Windows 3.x was finally able to start displacing it; that's why these were Lotus' "golden years", as a seller of MS-DOS software.

So if Windows 95 represented Microsoft "catching up" to Apple, I'm left to conclude that Ballmer is asserting what a few of us know all along in the 80's: the Mac OS was superior to Windows.

Thought for the Day

2009-05-06T09:50:00.001-04:00

From the Notebook of Lazarus Long:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”

- Robert A. Heinlein

Thoughts on the Maersk Alabama piracy case

2009-04-12T18:25:00.001-04:00

Captain Phillips is safe, and I am elated, because of incidental ties to many of the players: U.S. merchant seaman from Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and the U.S. Navy. They represent values and standards thought by many to be passe; thank goodness they are still alive and well in some parts of our society.

As my brief bio mentions, I attended the United States Naval Academy for several months in the 1970's. I entered in 1972, when respect for military service was at a low. At a time when service people were being spat on in airports, my classmates and I got our heads (nearly) shaved and started learning how far we could stretch ourselves, and the importance of being there for our classmates (and knowing it was mutual).

I got through plebe summer and the first academic semester, which I was told was "the hard part." Although I chose to leave, I left with an enduring respect for the service and the people who comprise it, reinforced by first-hand experiences with the officers and midshipmen I was privileged to know.

Fast forward thirty-plus years. My son applied to and entered Massachusetts Maritime Academy. MMA is part of the state college system, with major differences. The school is organized as a military academy: incoming freshmen endure an intense two-week orientation modeled in part on the national service academies, then continue the regimentation into the academic year, with morning formations, inspections, uniforms, and the like. The goal is to instill the responsibility and dependability into men and women who will someday have to depend on each other in trying or hazardous situations at sea.

It amazed me that non-military college students were willing to put up with it, but they do, and as civilian college students they are in a class unto themselves. MMA students are rightfully proud of their educations, and great representatives of the school with core values sadly lacking among their contemporaries from more "respected" schools.

[I'm sad to say my son flunked out of MMA, but I think he now recognizes that he learned valuable things there and earned pride in accomplishments nobody can take away from him.]

Moving to the present, I see all those ideals, treated with "derisiveness" (to quite Obama) by modern liberals, lived out by Captain Phillips and his rescuers. Captain Phillips put himself at risk on behalf of his crew, and you could see the mutual loyalty reflected in his crew after they had been freed and he was still captive. The Navy SEALs put themselves in harms way to position themselves to rescue Captain Phillips, and, when the moment came, all acted decisively and courageously.

I am thankful to live in a society that can still produce people such as these, in spite of the popular sentiments of the day, and proud to have been a member of the community even for for so short a time and so long ago. I resolve to be more worthy of the sacrifices they are willing to make, and remember, when the air conditioning isn't working right or bonuses aren't being paid, that there are more meaningful definitions of "adverse working conditions."

Dealing with the Somali pirates

2009-04-11T21:38:00.001-04:00

From the New York Times, April 11, 2009 (I'm not linking because it requires registration to read):

"But any effort to wipe out Somali pirate dens like Xarardheere or Eyl immediately conjures up the ghost of “Black Hawk Down,” the episode in 1993 when clan militiamen in flip-flops killed 18 American soldiers. Until America can get over that, and until the world can put Somalia together as a nation, another solution suggests itself: just steer clear — way clear, like 500 miles plus — of Somalia’s seas."

Fuck that; as the column points out, the U.S. Navy cut its eyeteeth on fighting the Barbary Coast pirates, and since then has never been afraid to show the flag in any international waters. We need to get over — not forget, get over — "Black Hawk Down", grow a spine, and put an end to this.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Obama administration has that kind of spine.

Can the Mac survive success?

2009-03-18T11:29:00.001-04:00

[Old entry that apparently never made it to the blog. Still relevant.]

This column, way more articulately (if somewhat obscurely), raises a point I have hoped to worry about for years.

From the beginning of the Macintosh, Apple promoted user interface guidelines to encourage developers to accept and adopt common look-and-feel for common operations. The premise was that users of applications should be presented with familiar interfaces for commonly performed operations, so that the learning curve for adopting a new application would be as shallow as possible.

A simple case in point is file-open and -save dialogs. Apple strongly promoted adopting a standard user interface to this common operation, so that users of new applications would not have to learn new ways to perform a common operation. This was drilled into early Mac developers, and accepted as common wisdom.

By contrast, when MS-DOS developers became Windows developers, there was less of an ethic for consistent user interfaces. I distinctly remember Windows developers at Lotus seeking to implement "better" file-open and -save dialogs than those standard to Windows.

This sounds trivial, but it's fundamental: in those formative days, Mac developers defined themselves by how well (and, sometimes, creatively), they could adopt the platform standards, and Windows developers focused on how they could perform common operations "better" (i.e., differently).

As time went on, the Mac community, users and developers alike, embraced the guidelines and held developers accountable. I remember this as a developer of Lotus 1-2-3 for Macintosh, presenting the product to users at MacWorld Expo and listening to their critiques. I saw it again as the architect of Symantec C++ for Power Macintosh, representing the product to our customers (other developers), and being held to the same standard.

The Macintosh community, users and developers alike, mandated adherence to platform standards, and became informed judges of what was acceptable innovation. From my point of view, this worked to benefit of all Mac users.

Today, the Mac is being adopted by large numbers of former Windows users, and there is a lot of pressure to accommodate those users by addressing their sensitivities. In other words, there is a point of view that the Mac platform should adjust itself to the expectations of the legions of former Windows user who are now adopting the Mac.

I understand the logic, but I think it's a horrible idea.

People who have been attracted to the Mac have, by definitions, accepted a certain degree of change. I don't think we, as Mac developers, should give into the temptation to accommodate the expectations of neophytes.

It isn't voter fraud unless...

2008-10-22T22:49:00.001-04:00

This is just ridiculous.

The defense offered in this story (and many others) is that "There are no known instances of fictitious people actually voting...". Are you kidding? We're supposed to shrug off bogus voter registrations as unimportant unless there's an actual vote? There's nothing suspicious about registering non-existent (or dead, or ineligible) people to vote?

So it's OK if I pollute my town's voter rolls with hundreds of false voter registrations unless (until) somebody actually votes under a false registration?

It doesn't matter that the election workers have to deal with the noise of bogus registrations? Faced with reports of bogus registrations, I would expect (hope) that election workers would be more careful vetting voters on Election Day. But maybe then we'll hear that voters are being "harassed" or "suppressed".

Try this on as a conspiracy theory:

ACORN (or somebody else) contrives to falsely register thousands of bogus voter names, and they (and the press) shrug it off as "not real voter fraud, because nobody has actually tried to vote (yet) under a bogus registration."

But election officials, faced with reports of bogus registrations, are compelled to examine voter credentials more closely on Election Day.

"Closer examination" of voter credentials is deemed by some to be "voter suppression."

So we're faced with two possible outcomes (under the assumption that massive registration fraud has taken place): many fraudulent votes are cast, and/or there are charges of "voter suppression" when thousands of voters (most or all legitimate) are subjected to unusual scrutiny (in an effort to eliminate fraudulent voters).

Consider some possibilities:

Obama wins, but there are challenges about those thousands of false registrations sponsored by ACORN, an organization he has worked with in the past and actually contracted with to foster voter registrations.

Or...

McCain wins, but there are complaints of "voter suppression" as election workers try to screen out the false voters represented by the bogus registrations.

It's a no-lose situation for ACORN, set up by themselves.

John McCain and Me

2008-10-06T01:09:00.001-04:00

I attended the United States Naval Academy for a brief time: I was inducted on July 6th, 1972, endured Plebe Summer (a sort of Basic Training for midshipmen), and the first semester of the academic year, then resigned at the beginning of second semester.

It's a complicated story: I am immensely proud of being accepted, enduring Plebe Summer, and being a part of the Class of '76, even though I decided not to continue, for complicated reasons best discussed in another post.

It was a trying time. Plebe Summer is designed to push you past limits you thought you had and recognize that you can perform at higher levels than you believed possible. Once you think you've got it under control, academic year arrives with the pressures of new upperclassmen, academics, and new responsibilities. I probably performed at the highest levels of effectiveness in my life, but received the poorest feedback (a 2.58 GPA, which wasn't half bad, in retrospect), and decided that "I wasn't good at it" and decided to bail and study Computer Science at WPI (which has worked out very nicely, as it turns out).

My time at USNA was probably the longest eight months of my life.

While I was there, we were very much aware of what was happening to previous USNA graduates, including Marines (the Marines are a branch of the Navy, and many Marine officers come from the academy), river boat ("Swift boat) forces, and, of course, Navy pilots.

Now let's compare:

John McCain was a graduate of the academy (in an era where the life of a mid was even more strenuous than mine), and had walked the same halls I had in Bancroft Hall. He had become a prisoner of war on October 26th, 1967, when I was in eighth grade. He was tortured or neglected for most of the time I was in high school. He had been a prisoner for almost five years before I started my "ordeal" at the academy, and he was released about a month after I left.

My point:

I believe that I have been tested, and succeeded to a degree, to an extent that few Americans have. I take a certain pride in that.

John McCain has been tested to an immeasurably greater degree, and passed those tests admirably.

I will follow him anywhere.

And I close my ears to those who will belittle him.

"McCain scares me"

2008-10-06T00:30:00.001-04:00

I've heard this comment from a couple of people recently, and it really bugs me.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because I hear he's a hothead? Do we want someone like that with his finger on the nuclear button?"

Please. McCain will tell you himself that he has a temper; he's even committed it to print in at least one of his books.

But how do you get from shouting an occasional epithet in a Senate anteroom to nuking a country in a fit of anger? It's absurd.

In fact, I can make a case that John McCain is one of the most forgiving people on the planet.

It is commonly accepted that McCain was abused, as were so many others, during his 5+ year ordeal as a POW in North Vietnam. (How many people have endured more than 5 years of anything as unpleasant? No marriage jokes allowed.) But McCain has been in the lead in normalizing relations between Viet Nam and the USA. The memories are still there, but he rises above them.

In 2000, McCain and his family were the target of some vicious and personal smears by pro-Bush forces during the primary campaign. After the election, McCain was able to support Bush when he found it appropriate. (I ask you to set aside the not-unreasonable question as to whether McCain should have supported Bush in those circumstances; the point here is that McCain was able to overcome his personal anger when the situation warranted.)

The bottom line: John McCain is the most tested candidate for president than we've seen for years, comparing favorably to JFK's and DDE's war experiences and exceeding everybody else since then. I can think of very few people I would trust more in a stressful situation.

The abridged version

2008-09-28T22:09:00.001-04:00

Jeff Jacoby sums it up in today's Boston Globe.

Dissecting the financial crisis

2008-09-27T09:33:00.001-04:00

This video provides an almost too-quick narrative of the path to the current financial crisis. I suspect many will be turned off by the production values or the obvious perspective of the creator, but the pattern of facts is hard to ignore.

It may not be the economy, but it's a mess; whose mess?!?

2008-09-16T23:23:00.001-04:00

The depths to which some will go

2008-09-16T23:22:00.001-04:00

This is just sick.

From my reading of history, there is maybe one truth in this garbage: the North Vietnamese did refer to McCain as "The Prince" because his father was CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief Pacific), and maybe even sought to leverage that status. But beyond one (contrived) "confession" that McCain acknowledges and regrets, the assertion than he cooperated is ludicrous, insulting, and, ultimately, reflects on the credibility of Rhodes and rest of Air America.

Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs

2008-09-16T22:21:00.001-04:00

I ask you to read this letter, multiply-derefenced through Curt Schilling's blog.

To some, it's going to sound like a lecture from Jack Nicholson's character in "A Few Good Men." But the Real People who take on the role of the sheepdog are much more human than the caricature in that movie.

Pravda

2008-09-13T00:14:00.001-04:00

For those who don't remember, "Pravda" ("The Truth") was the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party during the Cold War, and the great irony was that it frequently published flagrant distortions of fact.

Today, we were treated to a news item that Russia considers events in South Ossetia in August were somehow equivalent to 9/11:

"The world has changed and it occurred to me that August 8 2008 has become for Russia as September 11 2001 for the United States. This is an accurate comparison corresponding to Russian realities.
"Humankind has drawn lessons from September 11 tragedy and other tragic events. I would like the world to draw lessons also from these events [in South Ossetia]."

I am probably uninformed about what was happening in South Ossetia in early August, but I have some idea, and I am at a loss to understand how it somehow compares to the attempted (and somewhat successful) simultaneous attack on the economic, military, and political nerve centers of the USA in September of 2001. It strikes me as an incredibly shallow attempt to establish "moral equivalency" to the response of the 9/11 attacks, and it's all the more disturbing that the "free press" in the West is not challenging it.

Dissecting a media attack on Sarah Palin

2008-09-12T23:51:00.001-04:00

Howard Kurtz, "reporting" on Charlie Gibson's "gotcha" on Sarah Palin in his interview on "20/20":

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

On Fox, Newt Gingrich called this "a sad commentary on the growing anti-religious hostility of the news media." I would call it asking the governor about her own words.

Glenn Beck, who I'm normally not inclined to quote, addressed this canard before the interview:

There has been some hard-core journalistic malpractice on this one. The Associated Press ran this headline about a speech she gave at her church: "Palin: Iraq war 'a task that is from God'"

In the story, they omit the first part of the sentence they're quoting along with the entire previous sentence for good measure.

Here are her actual words: "Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

Palin is clearly praying that we're doing the right thing in Iraq, something sensible for an introspective woman of faith concerned about the lives of our troops to do. She's not saying that she just received a text message from heaven's BlackBerry ordering her to launch missiles. Sorry to disappoint you.

And for those of you who think politicians asking God for guidance is offensive, might I remind you of this famous politician's prayer:

"Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will." --Barack Obama

Indeed, Lincoln is reported to have said:

"Some time in the early part of the war a clergy man said in his presence that he "hoped the Lord was on our side.' "I am not at all concerned about that," replied Mr. Lincoln. 'For I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right, but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side.' "

To me, it's clear that Palin was channeling Lincoln's hope, not making an arrogant assertion. And Gibson's quote within his question was flagrantly out of context.

A final note: several sources have noted that Palin was at a disadvantage in an interview that could be (and was) aggressively edited by the network that aired it.

This needs to be seen

2008-09-12T23:19:00.001-04:00

I'm linking to Curt Schilling's blog, because he deserves the credit for calling attention to it:

Please take a minute.

Experience & Expectations

2008-09-11T22:20:00.001-04:00

[I've lost about 5 posts to issues between MarsEdit and Blogger; hopefully they're fixed.]

1) Many Obama supporters are screaming about Sarah Palin's supposed insufficient experience to be President, ranging from outraged to snarky to childish. (Matt Damon, not that I take him seriously, even postulated Palin as President.) Do they really want to have a conversation about the relative experience of the candidates? Especially comparing a proposed President-in-waiting to a proposed President-to-be? It appears that they don't, but it's going to happen if they keep challenging Palin's experience.

2) Likewise, they are screaming that Palin must submit to press interviews immediately, clearly because they expect her to fail the test. In doing so, they are lowering expectations, and a merely competent performance by Palin will seem like a brilliant success.

2007-09-12T23:05:00.000-04:00

Lots of catching up to do...

Apple has been very busy, and I can't avoid politics any more. Where to start...?

2007-09-12T22:57:00.000-04:00

Test Post

Trying to get MarsEdit to recognize my account.

2006-04-07T01:12:00.000-04:00

Is Boot Camp As Ingenious As I Think It Might Be?

I blogged this on 6/14/05:

On the other hand, if Apple ships boxes that can run OS X and Windows XP, but generic PCs are precluded from running OS X, Apple keeps (virtually) all of its existing hardware customer base, and adds to that Windows users who either a) are attracted to Apple's better hardware designs, or b) want the option of migrating to OS X later. All upside, no downside, excluding the Mac users that Apple loses to Windows, which I believe to be a very small number, and even some of them will hedge their bets with dual-purpose hardware.

Let's look at what Boot Camp has done with respect to that scenario. Basically, Boot Camp provides a quintessentially Apple approach to configuring a dual boot system: partition the disk, set up a boot loader to choose a boot volume, and install the alternate OS (Windows) on the new partition. The Apple touches: most of the installation runs in the familiar application mode (as opposed to a character-based installer), and you can re-partition your disk without destroying your existing data (it's been done before, but it's not common).

The interesting nuances: the process pretty much assumes that you are only going to install at most two OS's, and one of them is always OS X.

The bottom line is that Apple has made it very easy to buy Apple hardware and run Windows on it, but OS X always remains as a boot option. These constituencies are served:

Committed Mac users don't care; they don't use Boot Camp, and continue to use their Macs to run OS X.

People who would prefer to use OS X but need to use Windows in a pinch use Boot Camp to set up their Windows environment on their Mac hardware, and re-boot as needed to switch environments (as dual boot users do for other permutations, such as Windows/Linux).

People who would prefer to use Windows but are attracted to Apple's elegant hardware buy the hardware, configure it for dual boot, then set Windows as the default.

Apple has already made a killing: the loyal Mac base doesn't notice the change, a very small percentage of people who want to run the two OS's and are willing to deal with the complexities can do so, but the killing lies in the people who buy Apple hardware to run Windows. If you stipulate that Apple currently has 4% market share in system sales, if 1% of Windows users buy Apple hardware, that's a nearly 25% increase in Apple's hardware sales (where all the margins are). That's a compelling number all by itself, but there's more.

Remember, under normal circumstances, even those Apple machines that are running Windows all the time have retained their ability to boot into OS X, even if their owners aren't planning on doing so. The only downside for those users is that some portion of their hard-drive space is "wasted" on the OS X partition; but these days, hard drives are typically so big that this isn't likely to be an issue for a while.

Now suppose that at some point in the future, Apple introduces something akin to Wine, which enables Windows executables to be run from within the OS X environment. This is not wild speculation; Wine is already pretty robust under Linux.

At this speculative stage, we have people running Windows on Apple hardware who now have the option to boot their previously dormant OS X partitions and continue to use the applications and data that they have been using via Windows. All of a sudden, a Windows user who happens to own Apple hardware now finds it almost completely painless to boot into OS X and continue to use the Windows applications and documents on their Windows partition. These users lose (practically) none of the capabilities or data that they were using under Windows, and gain the additional (and, IMHO, attractive) capabilities of OS X. For these users, there is little or no downside to configuring their machines to boot into OS X instead of Windows, and if they find a problem, they can switch back to Windows without having lost anything.

As an admitted Mac zealot, I assume that a substantial percentage of Windows-centric Apple owners would choose to start booting into OS X, and start pointing out to their Wintel-using friends that they've achieved full compatibility on Apple hardware. And the already-beneficial trend would continue.

2006-03-28T07:48:00.000-05:00

My Cup Runneth Over

I've had the MacBook Pro for about a month now, and it was worth every day of the wait. For most things, the perceived performance is on a par with my dual 2GHz G5, and there's no perceived difference when I run PowerPC binaries under Rosetta. (It should be noted that none of my performance-intensive work is done under Rosetta.)

In my spare time, I'm trying to get the MacBook set up to work with my HDTV:

- I've got the video connected with a DVI cable. The MacBook is capable of driving the built-in display and the HDTV separately, but FrontRow seems to require configuring the Mac to mirror the displays. Makes sense, assuming the long-term goal is to sell the Mini or something like it as a set-top box where the TV is the only display.

(By the way, what's with the price of DVI cables? Radio Shack had them listed online for about $12, and there was even an empty hook at the store so marked, but all I could find in stock at RS, Circuit City, etc. was $100+ DVI cables. Methinks someone is artificially jacking up the price as an "anti-piracy" initiative...)

- I still don't have sound figured out. The MacBook and the TV both purportedly support digital audio, but the only input jacks available on the set are what look like a normal pair of RCA jacks for analog audio. I used a cheap analog mini-plug-to-RCA-pair cable, but the sound quality is terrible, as expected.

This could become a dream setup: set-top box via Front Row, or settle in to the leather recliner with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a 50" display for "work"...

2006-02-14T22:12:00.000-05:00

The Glass is Half Empty

It's not quite that bad, but I just learned that the ship date for my Mac Book Pro has been moved from February 15th to February 28th (with the processor speed increased, of course).

I'm disappointed, but the completely unrelated good news is that I was able to repair the G3 that was rapidly becoming unusable. The display had been crapping out (black was being displayed as red), and QuickTime display was illegible, but I found a replacement display on eBay for $75 (promising no red "washout"), and I was able to disassemble and reassemble the G3 in a couple of hours today and it's as good as its six-year-old new.

2006-02-14T09:12:00.000-05:00

Obsolete before it ships?

Not really, but...

It's a running joke (or sometimes a genuine complaint) in the PC business that PCs become obsolete too fast, almost as quickly as you buy them.

I ordered a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago, and have been waiting for to ship "by February 15th", according to the estimate on the Apple Store.

Today, Apple announced that the new MacBook Pros are shipping, and a higher speed processor is available as a build-to-order option. If I had wanted the fastest possible processor, the machine that hasn't shipped yet would be less than I wanted.

On the other hand, I had opted for the slower (1.67 GHz) processor vs. the faster 1.83 GHz, and Apple's announcement includes the news that I'll be getting a 1.83 GHz model instead.

The glass is definitely half full.

Why did I opt for the slower processor? A few reasons:

My current laptop is a 400 MHz G3 (Pismo). Relatively speaking, the 1.67 GHz Core Duo would have seemed blindingly fast. (My other regularly used machine is a dual 2 GHz G5, so I think I can handle it.)

I deliberately ordered the G3 just a few weeks before it was end-of-lifed by what turned out to be the G4 Titanium PowerBook, and caught the price drop as Apple cleared the inventory. The G3 suited me perfectly, and cost me nearly $1,000 less than a new TiBook would have. Not that I didn't drool over the TiBook, but I was on a budget. I'm just not convinced you get the best bang for the buck at the very top end. (Don't ask about the G5...)

Similarly, I had economized on the Pismo and bought the 400 GHz model instead of the available 500 MHz; again, I never regretted it.

One of the best performance improvements I applied to the G3 was to replace the hard drive with a faster (and quieter) 5400 RPM drive. On the basis of that lesson, I paid for a 7200 RPM drive (vs. the now-standard 5400) for the MacBook.

I also decided that money was better spent on more RAM than GHz, so I upgraded to 1 GB on a single DIMM (to leave room for expansion). (The G3 was eventually upgraded to 640MB, a little beyond the Apple-specified "maximum" of 512MB.)

We'll see how it turns out. Soon, I hope.

2006-02-14T07:45:00.000-05:00

b r r r e e e p o r t

Not sure why I'm playing along, but Scoble is asking for blogs containing "brrreeeport" to test blog search engines. Maybe we'll also get a sense of how many people really care...

2006-02-09T09:52:00.000-05:00

Google and Privacy

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch notes with alarm the release of Google Desktop 3.0, which enables desktop search from across computers by maintaining a search index of your local files on Google servers. (It should be noted that use of the feature is optional).

Arrington links to a Gillmor Daily discussion about the privacy implications of this. I usually like listening to these guys, but I thought their opposing positions both missed the point, badly.

Arrington seems to be most worried about the potential for abuse by The Government, especially in the wake of Google's agreement to share information with the Big Bad Bush Administration.

Gillmor scoffs at the concern, not because he doesn't think the current administration is indeed The BogeyMan, but because (if I understand him correctly) They have more and better means to abuse our privacy anyway, and the value of storing our data in the internet cloud is so compelling that the way to deal with it is to manage how we manage ownership of that data, and specifically asks why Google's storage of indices is worse than storage of private data via online backup.

What I Find Troubling About This

To take the last point first, here's the fundamental difference from my point of view: in the case of backup, I build a package of my backup data locally, encrypt it to make in (hopefully) impenetrable, then move it into the cloud. In the case of Google Desktop, my data is moved to Google's servers in a form where they can peek into it, in the name of search.

I find this troubling. Google promises not to share my data with anyone. Fine, let's accept that and hope that Google is better at protecting it than the Boston Globe, of whose idiocy I was affected.

Being able to search my data and affirmatively determine whether it contains references to certain keywords conveys information about me, even if the content of that data is not explicitly shared. Google does not do this, as far as I know; they certainly don't let anyone to ask "who has references to Al Qaeda or Barry Manilow" in their index?" But there's a spectrum of possibilities between complete privacy and outright sharing.

As for government surveillance, challenging the government on its exercise of power is always healthy, but Arrington and Gillmor are so focused on it that they race each other to proudly label themselves as unpatriotic for wanting to retain their privacy; it's actually comical.

While it's legitimate to be vigilant to ensure that we don't become a police state over the next 20 years, I also try to make sure that many small, annoying things aren't done to me on a daily basis between now and then.

Up to now, Google has commercialized what they know about your interest as expressed by your search queries, and there's an strong element of fairness to this. If you go to Google and type "Barry Manilow" into the search box, you're transmitting your interest in the subject to Google, and they use this to deliver discreet ads with your search results that reflect your expressed interest.

But increasingly, Google has the ability to color their interactions with you based not on your expressed intentions, but on the interests implied by the content of your email (if you use GMail), and now, the content of your private files. I don't think they are doing that now, but the potential is there, and I don't see that their current privacy policy prevents that. Even if they don't publish lists that say "RetiredMidn is interested in these topics" or "RetiredMidn is one of the people interested in this one topic", my interactions with Google can now be adjusted based on the electronic equivalent of the contents of my underwear drawer.

Controlling Attention Data

Gillmor is an advocate of giving the user control of this information about themselves, as exemplified by the principles espoused by AttentionTrust.org, with which he is intimately involved. Their notion is that the user ought to have control of the information about their attention, what is included in it, and how it is shared.

In the discussion with Arrington, Gillmor seems content that users can exclude specific folders from Google's net-based indexing, and that this event will trigger the concern and discussions necessary to convince Google that they need to provide better control of this information. I'm less confident about this. Desktop search is most valuable when it can help you find stuff in obscure places, and constraining the search indexing reduces the usefulness. It also places the burden on the user to proactively identify all the places sensitive data is now or might possibly land in the future, and I don't think this is realistic. In theory, the user has the control; in practice, it's too easy not to exercise it.

Capability May Not Be Intent, But That Hasn't Stopped Us Before

Years ago, ActiveX came into being because the techies at Microsoft (and elsewhere) thought it would be cool and powerful to enable program code to be embedded in emails (and later, web pages). There were some clever ideas; when someone received an email requesting them to perform an action, the email could embed code that would perform, or support the user's performance, of the requested actions. There were all sorts of scenarios drawn up where this could be a significant productivity enhancement.

In hindsight, most people agree that this was a Bad Idea: used maliciously, this capability became a conduit, perhaps the most exploited one, for spreading malware. The consequences are that the innocent have been inconvenienced. For example, my wife is an elementary school teacher, and in the name of security she is now prevented from installing and trying out many potentially useful pieces of new software, which is what is supposed to make computers flexible and powerful.

Like Microsoft, Google is, I think, optimistically focusing on the potential value of desktop search across the network, and in their enthusiasm is blind to the potential for abuse. I hope I'm wrong.

To those who think, like Steve Gillmor, that it's alarmist to worry about the potential for abuse instead of the deed itself, I would point out that wiretapping and gun control laws are based on the same premise: good intentions aren't sufficient protection.

I'm not proposing that Google Desktop be outlawed. (When Google is outlawed, only outlaws will Google.) But I'm not installing Google Desktop (I use Macs anyway; small sacrifice), and I don't use GMail for my personal correspondence. (*)

(*) I do use GMail to collect the traffic from related public mailing lists, so I can search them in one place.

2006-01-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

Apple with Intel Inside - The Beginning

Okay, Apple has rolled out the first two Intel-based Macs (and I've got a MacBook Pro -- that name's gonna take some getting used to -- configured in my shopping cart), but some of the real fun hasn't started yet.

Watch for solutions to run Windows Apps on Mac OS X

As Andy Ihnatko pointed out way back in June, you know somebody will devise a way to run Windows apps under OS X.

It could be a solution along the lines of VirtualPC or its predecessor, SoftPC. Although Microsoft acquired and now sells VirtualPC, both of these products were spawned from relatively small development efforts, and the technical challenge was much greater than it is now: both of these products had to run Intel binaries on non-Intel CPUs (the 680x0 and later the PowerPC). It will be much easier to build a solution where the code can run natively, not to mention much faster.

Another approach is Darwine, which is a derivative of Wine. Wine enables (many) Windows application binaries to run under Linux on x86 architectures by implementing Windows APIs. It avoids the processor emulation challenge, although I would think that keeping up with Redmond's creation of new APIs isn't all that easy, either. Most notable about Wine is that it does not require a Windows license to run Windows apps.

Darwine started out as a port of Wine to Darwin, the open source Unix foundation of Mac OS X. The project was challenged by the architectural differences between Linux and Darwin/Unix, as well as the processor emulation problem that Wine does not address. With the introduction of Intel-based Macs, some of that challenge goes away.

And, of course, there's always the option of dual-booting Macs into OS X and Windows. Unwieldy, but it may be sufficient for some people.

Oh, and then there's the possibility of buyying an iMac or MacBook just to run Windows, without OS X. There's precedent for this: a fair number of Linux users run it on Apple hardware.

A bigger market for Apple hardware

The upshot of these new possibilities, in my opinion, is that Apple has a potentially larger customer base for its hardware. The Mac loyalists should remain in the Apple fold, especially if Apple is successful in keeping OS X from running on non-Apple hardware, and there seems to be a "switcher" trend underway, perhaps from the "iPod halo effect". The new potential customers are those who are tied to Windows, but for whom the possibility of having enough access to Windows will be sufficient to get them to consider Apple hardware.

This could be huge for Apple. Let's stipulate that the sales rate for the desktop/laptop market is 95% Windows and 3% Mac. If only 1% of those Windows users buy Apple hardware, that's roughly a 30% increase in the sales rate for Apple hardware. Apple is already healthily profitable at current sales levels; any additional growth is financial gravy.

I'm sure Apple would prefer that people run OS X, but it can't hurt to get some revenue from the Windows base, and a Mac hardware/Windows software user is one (big) step closer to becoming an OS X user.

Apple and Microsoft

Lost in the noise here is the announcement of a five-year "agreement" between Apple and Microsoft wherein Microsoft has committed to continue developing Office for the Mac platform for five more years. This puts to rest the notion that Apple's move into the Intel space would alienate Microsoft and threaten Office support. This little bit of uncertainty about the Mac platform is put to rest for a while.

The unanswered (and so far unasked, as far as I can tell) is: what did Apple agree to in exchange for Microsoft's commitment? There are all sorts of possibilities, like a side deal over music and/or DRM, but I'll keep my guesses closer to home. Maybe an agreement not to develop a competitor for Office (the rumored "Numbers" application for iWork)? Or maybe to stay away from actively supporting OpenOffice? I don't know, but there has to be something, and I'd love to know what Microsoft thought they needed (or wanted) from Apple...

2005-10-07T01:11:00.000-04:00

One More Thing...

The speculation about Apple's "special event" on October 12th is running wild, mostly around the so-called video iPod, notwithstanding Steve Jobs' repeated comments that such a product doesn't make sense.

Some outlets are are arguing against it, notably Think Secret. (Has anybody else noticed that Apple doesn't seem to mind Think Secret continuing to operate within the parameters it had used before the incident that got them sued? I didn't think so...

Anyway, I think way to little time is being given to the notion that Apple may be planning to pursue the home theatre, as opposed to the hand theatre, market.

My notion (and, not incidentally, the product I would run out to buy): not a video iPod, but a video Airport Express. Plug it into an outlet next to your (HD) TV, connect it to the TV, and play video content from your PC (maybe not just Mac) on your TV. Said content could be a DVD or content purchased and/or downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.

Unlike the audio Airport Express, a video version would have the means of presenting a UI (on the TV screen), so the playback could be controlled from the playback location (the TV) instead of the host computer.

The only thing about this I think is hard is whether even 802.11g is enough bandwidth to carry an HDTV signal. OTOH, maybe they could stick a hard drive in the device (since the iPod nano has reduced the demand on small drives) and do QuickTime-style buffering in the device.

We'll know soon enough...

2005-06-14T12:13:00.000-04:00

FUD: OS X on generic PC's

John Dvorak, in PC Magazine, and Jason Brooks, in eWeek (or at least on their respective sites), seem to think it's inevitable that OS X is going to run on generic PC's, sooner rather than later. Maybe, just maybe, it'll happen later, but I don't see it happening any time soon, in spite of their "reasoning".

Follow the Money

Jason at least anticipates that counter-argument that "Apple is a hardware company", but he dismisses it, on the basis that Apple's innovative strength lies in the OS X software. That's mostly true, as far as it goes, but the inescapable fact is that the big bucks are in the hardware, and the move to Intel, done correctly, could lead to huge benefits in hardware-generated revenue with no erosion of OS and application software revenue.

No matter how you slice it, if OS X were to run on generic PCs, Apple might sell more copies of OS X, but it would lose hardware sales to people looking for discounted hardware. As Jason does point out, Apple's advantage in industrial design would retain some customers (like myself), but some significant percentage of sales would shift; even I would give consideration to a generic machine as a kids' computer in the house, or a laptop headed off to college, for example. I can't imagine software sales making up for this.

On the other hand, if Apple ships boxes that can run OS X and Windows XP, but generic PCs are precluded from running OS X, Apple keeps (virtually) all of its existing hardware customer base, and adds to that Windows users who either a) are attracted to Apple's better hardware designs, or b) want the option of migrating to OS X later. All upside, no downside, excluding the Mac users that Apple loses to Windows, which I believe to be a very small number, and even some of them will hedge their bets with dual-purpose hardware.

"Try and stop me!"

...quoting John Siracusa in one of his many excellent Ars Technical columns. Dvorak believes that the hackers who would want to crack Apple's hardware protection won't be denied. Siracusa's coverage of this topic is, in my opinion, much more realistic.

Someday, however...

Apple does retain the ability to release OS X "into the wild" if and when that option becomes attractive. With a little help from third-party software, I have OS X 10.3.9 running on a nine year old PowerMac 7500. The machine has been upgraded with a G3 processor, but otherwise the machine did not match the specs of an OS X-capable Mac: ADB keyboard and mouse, SCSI disk drives, no FireWire or USB at all (when installed). It would not be a reach to run on generic Intel hardware, considering Darwin already does.

So Apple could throw the switch on opening OS X to non-Apple hardware, but I expect it will choose that moment very carefully, and delay it as long as possible while it milks the benefits of building and selling hardware with broader appeal than ever.

What's this BS about spyware and viruses?

Dvorak also seems to think it's inevitable that the new Macs and OS X will attract, and be unable to fend off, a new rush of malware. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think he gets it.

It's probably the case that malware authors will be more attracted to OS X if it is installed in vastly larger numbers. (On the whole, I suspect that's a problem Apple wouldn't mind having.) But wanting to attack and being able to carry it off are two different things. Just because the new machines run the same instruction set as Wintel PCs doesn't mean the virus code is now portable; most malware needs to use system APIs to do the damage, and OS X and Windows remain worlds apart as far as the APIs go. Between the need to write portable malware, and the fact that OS X is locked down tighter than Windows (or is less vulnerable, if you're a glass-is-half-empty type), I expect OS X to remain unappealing to malware authors.

Bottom line

I still see way more upside than down in this move for Apple, especially with the potential for increased hardware revenues and a lower threshold for Windows users to explore and ultimately adopt OS X without a precipitous move away from their investment in Wintel. The big question mark in my mind is to what extent, and I'm sure there is some, that people hold off on buying Mac hardware until the switch occurs.

2005-06-10T19:46:00.000-04:00

OK, so one of the new complaints about the attitude of the Mac community is the apparent change of heart about Intel and the Pentium versus PowerPC. As a long-standing hater of the Intel architecture, I can sum it up briefly: I still don't like it, but it really doesn't matter any more.

For the first 5 years of my career, I coded almost exclusively in assembly language, mostly for PDP-11's. I could fairly readily translate octal into assembler in my head, could tell you how many milliseconds(!) a sequence of code would take to execute, and knew all sorts of gnarly tricks for packing the most functionality into the least number of bytes or milliseconds. I also coded on other, more primitive processors (one of which lacked a subtract instruction, for example).

In 1979, I started coding for the Motorola 68000 (only pre-production evaluation chips were available to us at the time), and developed a love-hate relationship with the 68K: richer instruction set, more registers, but "lop-sided": special purpose registers, addressing modes available only in certain contexts, etc. In 1983, I started working for a PC software company, and was introduced to the original 68K Mac. I immediately liked the idea of a 68K-based personal computer, but had my suspicions about the mouse as an input device. (See; we can learn to adapt...)

In 1985 I was assigned to work on a DOS-based TSR ("Terminate and Stay Resident) product, and was thus thrown into the deep end of the Intel processor world. TSR applications worked by hooking many of the interrupts used by MS-DOS (BIOS calls, keyboard interrupts, etc.) and inserting their own functionality to "enhance" MS-DOS; necessarily, this included the necessity to work with the 808x instruction set. After working on the 68K, I hated the 808x: limited registers, primitive instructions, weird addressing modes and modalities (like the "direction bit"), and don't get me started on the addressing model! What a frigging waste that most bytes in the address space could be addressed by 16 different pairs of segment/offset values, which made simple things like address comparison unnecessarily tedious.

The 80286 was itself a marvelous example of why I believe Intel couldn't design decent processors. The 80286 introduced "extended mode", which allowed for 32-bit addressing and larger address spaces than the one meg address space of the 8086 (shortened to the infamous 640K by the needs of the PC architecture). The 80286 needed to offer continued support for "real (8086) mode" for legacy software, but Intel left something out: the chip booted into real mode, and could be switched into extended mode by software, but could not be switched back! This led to a laughable hack by IBM for the 80286-based PC "AT" model, and severely limited the extent to which extended mode could be used.

Later in the 80's I started working with C, which at least papered over the instruction set somewhat. Still, given the state of the tools at the time, it was helpful during debugging to know assembler and watch how your code was executing, regardless of the processor. But the 808x was still tedious to work with because it required unnatural acts with the compiler to handle the various data models (near/far code, near/far data, aarrggh!).

[During this time I got a look at the NeXT machine and interviewed for a position on a team developing a NeXT app; although the system was cool (and, yeah, because it was Steve's), I wasn't too sure about NeXTSTEP and Objective-C... Damn; missed another call!]

Still later in the 80's I got back to Mac development, finally. The app we were building stretched the Mac memory model (which divided code into segments for various reasons), which required some cleverness (i.e., trap patching) on our part to handle our large code requirements, but it still felt like I was spending more time getting my app written and less fighting the architecture. I was so glad to be away from the 8088 and 80286.

During my work on that application, I got to see a few nifty things: a demo of the now-infamous "Star Trek", where Apple and Novell got the Mac OS running on Wintel hardware. (More thoughts on that project in a later entry.) I also saw a demo of my own Mac software running under emulation on a Motorola 88000, a RISC chip that was Apple's early choice to succeed the 680x0. Later, I also participated in investigations of how to port that application to PowerPC, after Apple shifted its sights to that architecture. We did extensive work trying to employ a binary translation technology offered by an AT&T spinoff called Echo Logic (yet another future blog entry), but that approach turned out not to be viable for us.

In 1993 I went to work for a company developing a C++ IDE for the Apple PowerPC platform. (If anybody cares who "RetiredMidn" is, there's one of the best clues you're going to get.) I didn't work on the compiler, but it was important for all of us on the project to become familiar with the PowerPC; I got somewhat familiar with the instruction set for debugging, but with the availability of source-level debugging, it was less important than general knowledge of the runtime architecture and format of the application binaries.

[While working for that employer I had a chance to look at some of Apple's future OS efforts, specifically Copland. My impression at the time: they were trying too hard. Yet another future blog entry.]

After a brief and disastrous experience maintaining code build around Microsoft's COM/OLE, I started writing Java code for a living. At this point, my assembly language skills and instincts are mostly an anachronism and sometimes a hindrance. Although Java developers sincerely worry about efficiency, it's at a level that's a joke to your average assembly-level programmer; most Java developers have no clue how much work the processor has to do to execute a particular sequence of code, and anyone that tells you they do know is probably lying, when you take into consideration the optimizations that can occur in the runtime by JIT compilation, and in the processor by pipelining and multiple execution units. Processor performance and the nuances of architecture and instruction sets are now the domain of a small group of compiler developers and their counterparts writing runtime engines for intermediate representations like Java's and the C#/.Net runtime; those of us writing applications above that layer are thoroughly insulated from it.

And that's why Intel's processor architectures and instruction sets, while not appealing to me, are not offensive, either; give me a decent compiler and runtime, and the differences are lost on me. In fact, conventional wisdom among those who pay more attention to the matter than I do suggest that, while it would be nicer to hand-code assembler for the PowerPC architecture, the commonly available compilers (gcc and Intel's) do a better job optimizing high-level code for the Intel platform, so, all other things being equal, that's where my code will perform better. (Excepting Altivec, but I don't work in that niche.)

For the specific universe of OS X applications, I'm an informed bystander. I was not responsible for any applications that needed to be ported to OS X, but I've kept up to date with OS X development on my own, and I am intimately familiar with two highly complex classic Mac applications and can the challenge involved in porting them forward through Apple's major transitions. I won't go into the details here, but the conclusions are simple: applications that are more deeply rooted in past architectures and runtimes are going to have the hardest time moving forward; applications written to current standards will have the least. And guess what? More often than not, the older applications are probably nearing the end of their useful life anyway; the "tremor" caused by Apple's transition will possibly hasten their end, but the outcome was inevitable anyway. The Mac user community will emerge, again, into a world where the available apps meet their needs and less cluttered by obsolescence.

Looking even further forward, Apple is putting itself on a foundation where applications can be easily developed and deployed for an arbitrary number of processor architectures, not just two; an application installed on a server will be simultaneously launchable from a PowerPC Mac and an Intel Mac; and an AMD Mac; and a Cell-based Mac; and a hypothetical IBM mainframe Mac running OS XI Server, should that particular scenario make sense in the future.

It's always good to have options.

Entering the blogosphere

2005-06-10T12:44:00.000-04:00

In anticipation of a whole bunch of FUD to be stirred up around the Apple/Intel announcement this week, I've decided to establish a foothold in the blogosphere and add to the noise.

My initial take: It's a great move by Apple, nicely timed, and some of the most intriguing aspects of the story haven't even been broached yet. It's going to be a fun couple of years.

My background: I've been a software developer for just about 30 years, switching around among languages and platforms. I'm a Mac developer (and user) by choice, but I'm currently working with Java for web application development to pay the bills. I post to Slashdot and other sites under the name "RetiredMidn"; hence the blog title.

My nom de plume derives from the fact that I was a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy for a short time, before the Navy introduced me to computer programming and I realized what I really wanted to do with my career. While I was there, I was spared a serious ass-chewing by a prank attributed to the ghost of "Philo McGiffin", who is said to haunt the academy; there's an excellent writeup of the career of the real Philo McGiffin here.

More to come, as soon as I figure out how to hook up all those blogging tools I bought on spec a while ago...