mahiwaga

Now, mind you, I don't have one of these myself, although I am currently saving up for it. A review of the Mac Mini entitled "The Emperor's New Computer" has been penned by Jorge Lopez, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, which rehashes a lot of strawmen arguments about Apple Computers in general that have been circulating since the early '90's by Windows/x86 die-hards. I couldn't help wonder if this wasn't a piece of satire, since the arguments are way off base.

Some of these arguments are truly ridiculous. Take the criticism that the Mini lacks PS/2 ports, parallel ports, and (I assume, DB-9) serial ports. Seriously, what modern peripheral does not plug into a USB port? Are you really going to want to attach your circa 1995 PS/2 mouse, keyboard and Centronics parallel printer to a computer built in 2005? A decent USB optical mouse and keyboard can be had for $20-$30 total. And who really still uses 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies? A 128 MB USB Flash drive can be had for the cost of 20 floppies these days.

The lack of expansibility is perhaps a more reasonable criticism, but then again, Apple is not marketing the Mini as a full-on computer. It is marketing it as an appliance, a media center. It has the same sort of satellite relationship a gaming console (such as, for example, the XBox) has to a full desktop and/or notebook computer. These machines are not meant to replace your personal computer. And if you really want to, although it is more expensive then merely popping in a 3.5" hard drive into an open drive bay, you can daisy chain 127 external drives via Firewire, or you can connect them by USB 2.0.

I can't believe he knocks the fact that it makes no noise while operating. Isn't this what everyone wants? What kind of moron doesn't know if they turned an appliance on? Early gaming consoles didn't have fans that made noise, and 8 year old children were competent enough to know that the damn thing was on. Come on!

His mischaracterization of MacOS X is really ridiculous, though. He is trying to argue that MacOS X is not as advanced as Windows, never bringing up the fact that MacOS X is in fact a UNIX variant (techinically, more so than Linux is, but we won't get into that right now.) Meaning that it is technology that has stood the test of time, the type of OS you can depend on in mission-critical scenarios. (OK, so you might not be screwing around with a GUI when you are in truly mission-critical scenarios, but, hey this is UNIX, you can boot into a command-line if you are truly hackerish.)

And since the early 1990s, just exactly what sort of application can you run on Windows that you can't run on MacOS? There are MacOS X versions of Microsoft Office, all industry standard desktop publishing and image processing programs are available for MacOS X, many advanced video editing and audio editing programs are only available for MacOS X, and if you really need to run Minesweeper or Solitaire in all it's crashable glory, you can run WinXP on top of Virtual PC (which, by the way, is now a Microsoft product.)

Yes, I know. The argument is games. But, really, this is a marketing and economic issue. There is no techinical reason you can't play games on a Mac. The typical performance bottleneck in a first-person shooter is the video card, but Macs use the same AGP video cards that x86-based systems use. Hell, one of the first person shooters ever created (Marathon, written by Bungee, the company responsible for the wildly popular Halo series) was written exclusively for the Mac, and this was in the early '90's Sure, it's a pain in the ass to port code written for DirectX APIs to anything else, but the limitation is economic, not technical. Just look at the popular games that have been ported to Mac OS and even to Linux: Civilizations, Warcraft III, even Halo. But honestly, if you're really a die-hard gamer, and you're into more than just first-person shooters like Half-Life, you really should be getting a game console and not screwing around with your computer that is likely to BSOD at a critical juncture in the game before you even saved.

The e-mail criticism is bizarre as well. Mail.app is a really excellent mailreader, especially when you consider it comes with the OS, unlike Outlook (the full version.) And if you really want to run Microsoft software, there's nothing stopping you from installing Microsoft Entourage, which I understand is actually superior to Microsoft Outlook.

What is really laughable is the criticism of the lack of antivirus software, defragmenter, and registry cleaner. While I recognize that Macs are not immune to viruses, UNIX systems are simply more robust. Consider that the Internet is run mostly by computers running a variant of UNIX. MacOS X makes the wise choice of not allowing the newbie user to run around as root, unlike Windows, which gives the first user account admin privileges, allowing one to trash one's computer willy-nilly. Without root access/admin privileges, it is pretty difficult to spread viruses and worms. Not to say that it's not impossible, just that it's less likely.

With a modern filesystem like HFS+, what in hell do you need a defragmenter for? Sure, fragmentation happens, but it is not the performance sucking problem that it is with FAT16 or FAT32. Note that NTFS (another modern filesystem) needs far less attention to defragmentation than it's DOS-based cousins.

The lack of a registry cleaner could be a problem, although, again, access to the Netinfo Registry is limited to the admin (i.e., you need to explicity type your password if you or a program wants to make changes.) You can't just blindly mangle your registry like you can on Windows, and there are very few reasons why a newbie would want to go mucking around in Netinfo.

I do not foresee the Mini getting unstable and slow in a couple of months. I've known users who have uptimes of a couple of months—i.e., not rebooting— with very little performance loss.

I do wonder what sort of software this guy is running. If a particular package doesn't exist, I am certain there is an equivalent, hell maybe even a Free or Open Source equivalent. And if you're really missing all those performance-killing gewgaws and doodads swirling around in your web browser, go ahead an install Mozilla Firefox and it's plugins. With regards to keeping track your passwords, it's built into the OS. Keychain.app will track your web passwords, e-mail passwords, and certificates if you want it to.

This is where the article descends into what may well be a gotcha. The author makes such absurd claims that perhaps this is a subtly written piece of satire, and the last few paragraphs is the "Ha-ha, fooled you into taking me seriously." For example, take how he tries to install MS Office for Windows onto a Mac. Or the fact that he mindlessly refers to the hard drive as C:\, which means nothing to a system that is not based on MS-DOS. Who the hell wants to run IE 5.2 anyway, which is ancient, not standards compliant, and which might actually open up your Mac to serious security risks? Run Safari, run Firefox. You've got choices. IE is a piece of trash that's not going to be updated until Microsoft releases Longhorn.

And then the fact that most of the software he runs is simply stuff that keeps his computer from otherwise crashing. Sad.

Anyway, I figure anyone who is going to buy a Mini knows exactly what they're going to use it for. For a file server/media center (mp3 player, photo storage, DVD player, etc.) that can be effortlessly added to a LAN (Rendevous/Zeroconf, baby!) $499 is not a bad price at all, and you don't need to assemble it yourself or try to hunt down obscure drivers for your cut-rate no-name Taiwanese peripherals. If you really hate Mac OS, you can probably easily get Linux to run on it. What more could a real hacker ask for? Sure, the stylishness might be a minus in that regard, but hey, nothings perfect.

Like many aspiring authors often do, I had a "hey, I thought of that" moment. This occurred while reading Broken Angels by Richard Morgan, the second book about Takeshi Kovacs, a Japanese-Slavic mercenary from a colony world 100+ light years from Earth who used to be a U.N. Envoy, which, contrary to its diplomatic connotation, really describes someone who has been trained to be a preternatural super-killing machine.

But the idea that I had once upon a time which I have since failed to complete as a novel is akin to the cortical stack in Morgan's books.

What is the cortical stack? It is basically the human equivalent of an airplane's black box machine, except more sophisticated in that you can retrieve the person's consciousness and reimplant it into either a computer or another human body, thereby wondrously bypassing death. Sure, you can still melt the cortical stack to slag, causing Real Death™, but people can go on for centuries without running into that kind of problem.

I was actually going to use a similar device in a Fantasy story with SF trappings. Swords and sorcery mixed up with a little interstellar technology here and there. I was going to call the device (for lack of imagination) a soul catcher. My protagonist would find the soul catcher of a particularly nasty demi-god-like character who harbored a genocidal rage against the inhabitants of this world. It would have been guarded for centuries, with very few people even understanding what the thing is anymore. Set against the backdrop of a corrupt Republic that was on the verge of being twisted into an Empire (how original, I know), the chaos of war allows the thing to get lost, and strange forces become allied to try to retrieve what they think is a powerful artifact which is in fact the very consciousness of an evil persona who was thought to have been long-ago vanquished and who is now looked upon as more of a character out of mythology.

Anyway, my soul catcher is basically just like the cortical stack, except for some details of storage and reimplantation. Ah well, maybe I'll use it anyway. If I ever make any progress on my story.

it is 9:30pm, and I have to be awake again in 6½ hours, and I basically pissed away an entire weekend off.

well maybe I’m being a little harsh on myself. I did sleep quite a bit. I also felt sick as fuck and like complete ass yesterday.

I most likely have a horrific case of gastroenteritis (yes, too much information, I know) and it feels like my intestines are trying to wriggle out of my belly, but now, since I took a 4 hour nap between 2pm and 6pm, I can’t seem to get to bed.

This sucks.

I am currently reading The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore, another of his books set in Cambria, AKA Pine Cove. I recently finished reading Practical Demonkeeping and will probably go on to read Sideways which is not by Moore, does not have supernatural goings-on, and is not set in Cambria, although it is set in the Santa Ynez Valley, which is, while farther south, still on the Central Coast. Yes, I’ve heard the accolades and the hype about the movie, but since I spied the novel at B&N (where I found Lust Lizard) I figured I’d have a look.

I’ve been thinking about the time I spent wandering the Central Coast. I worry that I spend way too much time by myself. A small part of me worries that this is completely unhealthy, and that it may very well be the first step on that long descent into clinical insanity.

Then I wonder which class of perenially single people I fall under: am I a quirkyalone, or am I a full-fledged loner outcast&the type of person that everyone worries is really a psychopathic killer.

Which is all a very roundabout way of saying: what am I doing with my life?

Despite my avowed disdain for making plans, I realize that for the 1st 20 or so years of my life, I was driven by one single goal: to become a physician. Whether or not this was a good idea or not is sort of moot at this point, but I am totally having one of those existential moments. I’ve brought this up before. If you’ve ever watched “The Princess Bride”, you might remember Iñigo Montoya’s existential quandry at the end of the movie. He had been so intent on revenge for so many years of his life that now that he had achieved it, he really didn’t know what to do with himself.

Yeah, I guess the lesson of that movie is that I could always become the Dread Pirate Roberts.

But seriously. What’s next?

Oh sure, I still have to finish my residency, which is going to be another rs and five months of ball-busting agony, but, while I am under the yoke and the whip, I figure I’ve got to have some sort of carrot leading me onward.

What is that carrot?

Oh sure, there are the traditional, normal things. Money, power, love. A good paying job, a nice house out in the suburbs, a family, 2.5 children. The good ol’ American Dream. But you and I know that I could never stand such inanity, at least not for long, and, sure, part of that is the finite probability that I will never meet someone that would be willing to procreate with me.

After all, this isn’t exactly the ideal world to raise children in. Especially not if this country regresses into a racist, homophobic utopia for fat white guys, which it seems to be in danger of doing.

But, then what?

Here is where I finally confront the heart of the matter and recognize what exactly lies inside my heart.

I guess this is the carrot, as mundane as it may be. I need to finish my residency, get a decent paying job, and pay off my loans before life passes me by completely.

And assuming that nothing manages to derail me on the way (which is basically another way of taunting God or the Fates to kick me in the crotch and give me a nice wedgie), I guess I can do this in 10-14 years. Maybe sooner if I can rein in my extravagant spending habits. And if I can keep my sex drive repressed by psychotropic medication.

Sick, sad, but effective.

Shit.

So that’s where I am. Making a decision to go down the path that I probably should’ve just gone down years ago, instead of having to face me fears of inadequacy, realize that I should actually probably pursue my dreams instead of simply fulfill other people’s expectation, and then now have to come up with an escape plan from a prison of misery of my own making.

OK, OK. So I don’t hate what I’m doing that much, but, months like these, I know that I’d much rather be writing than spending 36 hours locked up inside a hospital.

Ah well. It’s all perspective.