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One of the most distasteful aspects of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been, in my view, the blaming for their own plight, and outright demonisation of the victims of the hurricane
From the assumption by many that the residents left behind were just too stupid to get out of the way (an implication being made about poor, black neighbourhoods which conveniently ignores the fact that many rich, white Americans stayed behind as well). To the blanket description of people trying to find clothes to put on their backs and food to fill their empty stomachs as looters. Unless you come from an upscale suburb like Placquemines Parish where breaking into a supermarket is seen as an act of survival, not an act of looting. The labelling of survivors as refugees instead of evacuees, as if to say, oh so subtlety, that some Americans citizens aren't created equal after all. The countless unsubstantiated reports of murders and worse, etc, on the basis that a few shots are fired every night (in a country, never mind a city, where millions of people can legally own weapons!) Ignorning the fact communications had been destroyed by the hurricane and subsequent flooding so how did these reports reach the authorities and media? Reports that are now known to have been clearly wrong and false.
And I know that many, many people believe all the above to be the absolute truth. The heavily armed troops and out of state law enforcement certaintly do. The people buying up guns in nearby Baton Rouge (local residents and hurricane survivors alike) are firmly convinced.
I've never believed these reports, but I know that the governor of Louisanna did when she was talking about looters for the first first few days while tens of thousands of people sheltering at the superdrome and convention centre were dying of thirst, hunger and lack of meds in squalid conditions. Surrounded by armed police with orders to shoot looters, but none to help them. It's a pity that news coverage was and is so skewed in America that the story for the first few days was about looters, and not about a humanitarian disaster. Did that make it easy for the governor and the President to abrogate their responsbilities in the manner that they did?
It was just as appalling how the Metropolitan Police here in the UK were quick to blame the man they mistakenly shot as a terrorist for his own death (now since proved to be a lie - and still they maintain there was no cover-up). To see those charged with rescuing the survivors still stranded in New Orleans approaching buildings filled with women, children and the infirm armed to the teeth like every house must be a crack den like they say on the news…
Which aid operation around the world, even those conducted by the US, featured them pulling people out of the water at gunpoint? Which aid operation sets up metal detectors to screen disaster victims before they give them any help?
There is an utter lack of humanity being shown by both the political establishment, the authorities (at whatever level, local or national) and the media, which despite reporting the plight of those left behind was also complicit in demonising the same people at the same time.
I know that another untold story is the countless scores of people who have donated, who have volunteered, who have 'adopted' survivors and brought them into their own homes, who have driven down to the affected areas off their own back to bring aid. These are wonderful stories. But all of those individual acts of compassion threatens to be eclipsed by the utter indiference, shocking contempt and the ignorance and hatred one section of American society shows towards another. To me, that's the greatest tragedy, and I know will be the one lesson that will not be learnt from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Today's factoid: every day three million journey's are made on the London Underground Tube network.
I was not making one of those journey's on Thursday - I had come down with flu, and am still quite ill - but I live down the line from one of the blasts (at Aldgate). At best (or worse) I can only say that I am at the very absolute peripheral of events, but even so I am pretty shaken by what happened.
Returning to that factoid, with numbers like that it might seem that for any one individual, such as myself, the likelihood of ever being involved - even if I had commuted that day (and, btw, my route wouldn't have taken me into the area of all the attacks anyway) - was and is pretty remote.
And yet, I am only two degree's separated from Thursday's events. A good friend of mine was actually at Kings Cross just after the blast, but thankfully didn't take a bus and is safe.
And via the Internet I have found my connection to the attacks extends even further. Emailing people I know, even those with .com TLDs to their email addresses, I also learned of the cousin of a good online friend who was blown off his feet at Russel Square. Even talking to my next door neighbours I have discovered that the mother of one of their daughter's friends was hit by glass and shrapnel from one of the Tube blasts.
I live just down the line from Aldgate, but I still didn't expect to know anyone, whether directly or indirectly, who would be affected by these events. Three million journey's is a heck of a lot of Tube rides, the statistics are surely in your favour. But I'm sure the bombers hoped and planned that the effect of their crime would be more far ranging than simply travel disruption or inconvenience.
My two and three degree's of separation from the attacks remind me that this is an attack on all of us. As was Madrid, Istanbul, New York, Bali, Paris, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and countless other attacks, such as those on tourists in Egypt and civilians in Algeria.
Last night my fever broke, and I'm sure by Monday I'll be fit enough to add my Tube journey to those three million again.
octetstream
MacDailyNews.com has declared that a developers copy of Tiger for x86 has been leaked. Only problem is: it hasn't been.
Someone over there didn't read this blog very carefully, because there has been no leak and Tiger for x86 isn't in the wild (yet).
Basically, the above blogger argues that the pre-retail version of Tiger is bound to be leaked at some point (fair enough). But he also says Apple will be happy about this. Why? Cos peeps will get to try Tiger on their PCs before they buy it. Then, when the first PCs (sorry, I meant) x86 Macs come along they'll go snap them up. Per'aps, one may think, that is why the Mac mini is slated first for the x86 treatment?
The fiendish bit is that Tiger for x86 (which hasn't been leaked yet, I'd like to remind you), but if it was leaked, being pre-release won't run on future Mac 'puters since those will have open firmware, etc. So, having tried Mac OS X, so the logic goes, peeps having been hooked on its stability and simplicity will then go off and buy themselves a new PC (sorry, I meant) x86 Mac. Cos those will be the only 'puter (you can't really call them a platform anymore, can you?) that will run it. iow, it's co-opting Microsoft's earlier heroin marketing of Windows through piracy that so helped to build it to its current overwhelming market and thought share.
Neat theory, except: it sucks. PC users are dumb and lazy. Apologies to the clever ones out there, but it took the other 99 per cent a decade to wake up to Windows security flaws, and even now only a few tens of millions out of hundreds of millions have even put in the effort involved to install an alternative Web browser. And someone expects them to now go to all the effort of partitioning hard drives and installing an entire alternative operating system?
Therefore, this doesn't seem to me so great a marketing wheeze (I mean, it may very well be a marketing wheeze - it just isn't a very good one is what I'm saying). Anyways, ho-hum, either way it generates press for The Switch, so I guess that's alright then…
octetstream
I kinda wonder Why President Bush green-lit a plan for NASA to return to the Moon and from there Mars. Why, you might, ask, do I wonder why, and why am I bringing it up now?
I just kinda wonder if President Bush is hoping if astronauts return to the Moon and scrabble around a bit more they might find evidence to prove it's made of cheese or something. I mean, if it really is billions of years old, is that like, way out compared to what's written in the Bible?
Science is in a sorry state of affairs right now, what with the controversies over Intelligent Design vs Evolution and the systematic doctoring of scientific evidence supporting climate change by the Bush Adminstration. Of course, politics and money have always played their part in this (someone has to fund research, and often those someone's are vested interests). And of course, there's always been those who, when confronted with evidence they don't like the sound of, just ignore it and create policy accordingly.
What worries me is that, this time, the crackpots are the ones in the ascendency. Science has never been easy to get your head around, and many of its promises haven't amounted to anything. Scientists some time ago acknowledged the former and have ever since been trying to communicate better. While the latter was the fault of policy makers. Y'know, the ones who control all the money and nothing can happen without their say so. And they tend not to have science majors, do they?
Science's opponents are people who will take things as an article of faith if it is presented to them in the right way, and the best presentation tends to be the one that is the simplest to understand, is most comforting to its audience and chimes best with their personal prejudices.
That's how Creationism got rebranded talkshow-friendly Intelligent Design, cos if you're God-fearing how can it not make sense? And that's how the Bush Adminstration can dismiss climate change evidence as the product of an out-of-touch scientific elite, because, after all, isn't that what the scientists are? Some elite who think better than us common folk armed only with our common sense? And so will be created a world where many will put more value in what they believe, than what they know and understand.
octetstream
David Weinberger writes about his keynote for the reboot conference.
It's always entertaining, if a bit humbling, to read smart people thinking out loud.
But it is interesting to note that whenever anybody talks about knowledge, knowledge creation and that whole complicated field, they reveal fairly strong cultural biases to one perspective on the other.
In David's case it's probably all right because, even if he has a strong western male slant in his perspective, he does realise that our ideas about knowledge are just tools—ways to grapple with knowledge.
Although it is not quite clear whether he is aware of his own slant or not.
Oh, well. Glass half-full and all that. He probably is.
baldur.
I figure that this is as good a place as any to answer Erik J. Barzeski's question of the day, namely:
"Question: How many minutes, on average, do you rack up on your cell phone in an average month?"
He racks up between 1000 and 1500.
For some strange reason I do most of my communications over e-mail and instant messaging and prefer to use the land-line whenever I'm forced to use that voice phone thingy.
Nevertheless, I rack up somewhere between 15-25 minutes a month these days. I've never managed to use up all of the free minutes I get from my provider per month.
Go figure.
baldur.
I don't pretend to be a hardware engineer, so I don't know if the MacIntel project (Intelitosh? MacTel?) is the best move Apple could have made, or if perhaps there are secret reasons behind it (i.e., the speculation that Apple wants to use the Pentium D, which apparently has DRM built into it; or maybe it doesn't; depends on who you ask). I just hope it works out for the best for Apple, and I think for the most part the average user won't give a damn, as long as their computer works.
See, that's the key: Computers just need to work. And Windows computers often don't. Nobody would put up with their TV giving them the blue screen of death in the middle of their favorite show, or just shrug it off if they had to reboot their car while doing 65MPH on the freeway. But yet most people seem to just accept it if they struggle with their Windows computers.
Like my neighbor across the street, who told me this past weekend that he had finally bought an application that would allow him to turn his photos into a slideshow, with music, and burn it to a DVD. I was like, "I've been able to do that for a while now on my Mac." And this is a tech savvy guy who swaps out the hard drives in his TiVo and hacked his Xbox right after he bought it. But he just seemed to accept the reality that using a computer is hard, so you better get used to it.
So I hope Apple's Mactellica project finally brings them increased marketshare from people finally getting fed up with Windows and making the switch. Yeah, I fully admit my bias here: I'm a contractor with Apple, and I write for The Mac Observer and MacCentral, so of course I want more opportunities to expand my workload and earn a few more bucks. Who doesn't? But I really do appreciate that the 3 Macs in my house just work. Meanwhile, my several-year-old Windows 98 machine seems to be so riddled with malware that it's better off in the closet in the garage.
There will likely be growing pains, of course, and it sounds like Mac gaming is due for an interesting ride. One prominent Mac programmer, for example, said that Rosetta won't do jack for gaming, so the owners of shiny new Macintelitosh computers won't be able to run games released for PowerPC Macs, unless the publishers release some kind of fix. But new games will hopefully run on both types of machines, thanks to this universal binaries thing, and hopefully the new architecture means that Macs will finally be on par with PCs, performance-wise. I guess I'll keep my Dual 1GHz G4 around just to play older stuff. But I should probably upgrade when the time comes, since I write about Mac games for Apple's web site.
Personally, I think there's also a lot of hysteria going around right now. I've heard comments to the effect that people will be able to install Windows on these new Macs (Apple said it will be possible, although they won't support it, of course), so bye-bye Mac games and other apps, since people will just run the Windows versions and developers will drop Mac support. I was thinking: "What are you smoking? Why would someone buy a Mac and then install Windows and stay in that OS? Helloooooo!"
Hardcore gamers will install Windows so they can play Half Life 2, etc., but I seriously doubt your average user is going to want to reboot their computer every time they want to play a game and then reboot again to go back to work. I doubt I'm alone among Mac users when I say that I pause in my work, load a game (okay, sometimes playing the game is my work), and then quit it and go back to work. I don't want to have to perform two reboots every time. And if the whole reason to use the Mac OS is because it's better, why would anyone buy a Mac and then run Windows all the time on it? Duh.
There's talk that something like WINE could enable people to play Windows games on their Macs without installing Windows or doing double reboots. Assuming that happens and it actually provides good performance (and people bother to do it, since I doubt Apple will tout it), then, yeah, that could seriously hurt Mac gaming. But there's no point in worrying about that now, since we're still a year away from Apple starting a process that they say will take until well into 2007 to complete.
I initially thought that the prognosticators were wrong when they said Mac hardware sales will take a dump over the next year, but now I'm not so sure. I've read that Rosetta only performs at about 70 or 80 percent of the app's speed on the original architecture, and anything that uses the G4/G5's Velocity Engine will need serious code rewriting because that's not supported. (Notice that Steve Jobs just showed off stuff like MS Office, which obviously doesn't need the kind of processor power that, say, Final Cut Pro requires.) So it sounds like enough people may get scared off from buying Macs now, just to see what shakes out in the meantime.
But I still think that if you need a new computer now, you might as well buy it. Apple will support it for the next several years, and odds are you can run your current apps just fine for the next couple years. But if you're a video editor or something like that, then you may be forced to not only buy a new MacIntel but also all-new hardware, if Rosetta can't handle your current stuff.
The developers still have plenty of time to figure this all out, though, so let's give this a couple months before making proclamations of doom for the Mac. Or thinking that the transition will be picture perfect. My bet is that it will have hiccups, and Apple may even suffer some revenue loss for a little while, but eventually we'll get over it. (And I'm sure Apple will figure out how to lock down the hardware so you can't install OS X on a garden variety PC.) It looks like we have a very nice roadmap ahead of us with Intel, whereas IBM clearly had other priorities.
- Brad
For those not aware, on the 6th June, 2005, Steve Jobs announced at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference that Apple would migrate the entire Macintosh product line to Intel chips by the end of 2007.
I'm not going to debate the ins and outs of this right now. Mainly, cos I stopped giving a shit about specs a few years back. Wow. 5% faster you say? How exciting. 'puters tend to improve by increments, and I'm just not enough of a nerd anymore to care about watching each one tick by. It's boring.
otoh, I freely admit my feelings about Intel aren't exactly positive. I'm perplexed why, if Mac must go x86, it didn't do so on AMD64. And I'm even more perplexed why we didn't get the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell, a scallable multi-core, symmetrically multiprocessing architecture with the promise of basically whooping everyone's ass?
Some, though, suspect dark forces at work in the form of copyright owners and the creep of digital rights management into every aspect of our digital lives. Others just think Steve Jobs got pissed off with IBM for not giving him a fast and cool G5 (he promised a 3GHz G5 at one time, and IBM didn't or couldn't deliver either it, or a chip suitable for portables). And Jobs has form on this. He ended his relationship with Motorola for much the same reason: failure to deliver fast G4s. When I can work up the enthusiasm maybe I'll explore all these theories in more depth…
Anyways, enough about that, let's get down to brass tacks. What will the new Macs actually be called?
I've been taking to calling these Intel Inside Mac, but many journo's have already taken to describing them as Mac on Intel. Of course the Power Macintosh G5 had a G5 chip in it, so I guess come next year (Steve Jobs promises the first examples exactly next year) we'll be seeing the first Power Macintosh P4? Though, technically, for PR reasons you'd prefer your series numbers to go up rather than down. But, hey, that's where choosing Intel gets ya…
Anyways, I hope the actual Intel chips they put in the Macs are different from other PCs. Give us at least some differentiation from the rest of the mob, Steve Jobs!
btw, who's betting the new machines are unveiled on the 6th of June, 2006 (think about it.)
octetstream
Chalk me up for a thoroughly unenthusiastic 'meh' in response to the Apple on Intel announcement.
I find it hard to care either way.
One point, though, about the question as to "why didn't they want to use the absolutely fantabulistic Sony/Cell/Xenon/Xbox new fast processor widget thingy from IBM?"
It'll suck for normal applications, that's why.
The Cell core (which according to most reports is the same or very similar to the cores used in the three-core Xenon used in the Xbox 360) is a fast, simple, in-order processor core.
Which basically means that it relies on the simultaneous execution of threads to keep everything nice and busy.
And other things. Those that want to suffer the details should check out the Arstechnica articles on the Xbox and the Cell.
What it comes down to is this:
Any processor based on that technology would have been great for games and media applications but awful for anything else. Normal applications would very probably have had to be massively redesigned from the ground up to simply maintain the same performance.
It's very much a technology designed for toys (toys, games, all the same thing. Yes I know I'm a bastard).
Some pundits thought that since Apple has a very strong presence in the media market they'd simply emphasise the media and streaming media qualities of this hypothetical processor and ignore the performance hit that the vast majority of people's applications would take.
Colour me as someone who simply thought that Apple would simply cough up the money to IBM to pay for the development of an otherwise dead end CPU (the 970, AKA the G5) that would only be used by Apple.
The idea that they'd simply bite the bullet and go for the only remaining desktop cpu architecture that still has an R&D budget at more than one company simply didn't cross my mind.
Seems a little bit silly in hindsight.
But as I said at the start, I find it hard to really care. I use my Mac Mini mainly to browse and to write (Tinderbox rules) and my Slackware GNU/Linux machine for all the heavy lifting.
So I'm not in a position where the exact processor the Mac uses matters in any way.
Interesting Times as the old saying goes.
baldur.
