Being PowerBook based, I was a bit disappointed. The towers sound fantastic, especially the G5 Quad, which is a mind-blowing amount of horsepower in a desktop machine. Aperture looks stellar, I know several professional photographers who will probably start using it right away and I might be graduating from iPhoto too.

Today’s hardware releases had to have been tailored for a few goals:

1. Make terrific machines which will sell
2. Don’t exceed the Intel machines
3. Don’t fall too far behind the Intel machines

Number one is obvious. Numbers two and three are more delicate. These machines can’t be so good that they take the piss out of the coming Intel boxes. Likewise, they can’t be so pathetic that Intel hardware makes these worthless. Apple has a great deal invested in brand loyalty, these machines were distinctly tailored for the transitional role they’ll be serving.

Based on that, i think it’s clear that the PowerBooks are maxed out. Yes they have better screens, better batteries, upgraded video chipsets, dual-layer DVD burners, digital audio ports and the option for larger hard drives. But there was no speed boost. These are the same CPUs as the previous generation — and that’s why I’m not going to buy one now.

New portables will most likely ship before new towers. Intel’s latest quarterly earnings pointed to the exceptional performance of their portable division. Before this upgrade, PowerBooks hadn’t been updated since January 2005, which means that Apple’s laptops for the holiday season will likely be running year-old CPUs. That’s just bad on its face. Intel’s Mobile Computing Platform and Centrino chips have been an area of great innovation at Intel, a good thing since AMD’s workstation and server chips are currently out-performing Intel’s equivalents. Apple’s Intel laptops are likely going to break my third point above. Battery life should be significantly improved and there will probably be something close to a half gigahertz speed increase (numbers based on the Intel® Products Laptop Processor Roadmap). This round of laptops won’t compare well unless Apple releases intentionally weakened Intel PowerBooks.

So I’m thinking 1Q 2006 for laptops, hopefully at MacWorld in January. They will absolutely be shipped at least a month or two before WWDC. There’s no way Jobs will get onstage this year without having shipped Intel laptops. A few months lead time would allow many developers to have Intel hardware on their laps for the keynote.

If one always argues as the Devil’s Advocate does one eventually come around to the Devil’s side?

It’s interesting to hold an opposite position from nearly everyone you know. Especially about something politically divisive. Everyone assumes you think like they do, lots of offensive stuff gets emailed and linked, people nudge you about things and expect something other than a blank stare. I’m good at the blank stare now. I’m also good at keeping my mouth shut and swallowing anger. People, even good smart people, just aren’t as accepting of differences as they think they are, and it’s just not worth the risk of finding out who can deal with it and who can’t. Yes, this is can be depressing at times.

Sort of related side note:

Last week a friend of a friend (of a friend…) was emailing around this short New Yorker column:

Day No. 1
And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”
“Im loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”
“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

What’s wrong with this picture? The Lord God and Allah are the same entity. How could the New Yorker let that slip? Are they honestly that ill-informed? Or was it perhaps a last minute “diversity-correction”, grepped in to appease the new gods of political correctness. Whatever it was, it completely undermined the whole piece. Successful humor is just not based on alternate universes. The punch-line to a joke can’t come from somewhere outside the setup. “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the sky was green and there was no gravity.” The Lord God can’t just talk with an accent and then become Allah. The Lord God is Allah, and vice versa.

I had written a few related paragraphs about my thoughts on religion, evolution, intelligent design and a few other topics. Then I deleted them. If you really want to know what I think about any of those, buy me a beer. Or three, I’m difficult to pigeonhole and chatty when I drink.

ps. I will not acknowledge any guesses as right or wrong so please don’t bother.

On each anniversary I walk by Engine 28 and Ladder 11’s stationhouse . In 2001 they were my local FDNY company who would serenade the East Village with “Lowrider” blaring from the hook-and-ladder’s PA. They used to buy groceries at my supermarket.

Today I took Lila with me. We talked a lot, explaining how today was a sad anniversary instead of a happy one. She knows a little, as she puts it, “a building fell down and lots of firemen got hurt.”

Each year after their memorial mass a large group of firemen and their families gather near the station. Lila was asking why they were “all dressed up” in their formal uniforms. Soon enough the questions are going to get more difficult to answer. I told her that today was a special day for thanking firemen. I also thank the police, military, and Con-Ed who were busy restoring power the next day, if not sooner. And especially that one MTA bus driver who was driving his M14 bus up Avenue A after the towers fell, with a foot of debris on the bus’s roof.

This year I finally shook hands with and thanked one of the firemen in person, something I’ve been wanting to do for four years but never found the courage.

My voice broke. We both stood there quietly for a few seconds, looking down. I felt very small.

Dear Anonymous Neighbor with the crappy cordless phone,

You probably noticed a constant clicking sound on your new phone. That would be the 5-7 wireless networks freaking out because your crappy phone is flooding the spectrum. I’m sure you got a great deal on it and never thought about it again, people get attached to their cellphones, not crappy cordless phones. But your phone sucks. And it’s suckingness is inconveniencing a half dozen of your neighbors.

“Ok,” you say, “maybe all those wireless networks are causing trouble? Maybe they’re overlapping and turning the air to mud?”

I thought about that. Thing is, this never happens when normal people are at work or sleeping. I don’t have a normal schedule. I’m home during the days, some days working, others taking care of kids. And I’ve always been a night person, usually going to bed around 2am even though I need to be functional again at 8. And all those times, the early afternoons during naps, late at night when everyonen else is sleeping. Those times are wonderful. Flawless wifi.

Then you get home from work, get on your crappy cordless phone and wreck everything for everybody.

Perturbed, you try to blame my computer, “maybe it’s your crappy laptop.”

That would be plausible, but it’s not just my laptop. It’s also my wife’s and my neighbors (they asked me for help when their wireless network was having trouble). It’s also my Linksys WRT-54Gs. Yes, I have two, sometimes, specifically the times mentioned above, they work flawlessly. I’m using hacked firmware, which includes a frequency scanner. When you’re on the phone, every network in range is obliterated. You could sell that thing as a frequency jammer for five times what you paid for it.

“Aha! Hacked firmware, what do you expect.”

Uh huh, I guess you weren’t listening when I mentioned the other networks. Those include Apple hardware, whatever RCN sends out, other Linksys routers and a few miscellaneous devices I wasn’t able to identify. The hacked firmware also allows me to adjust wifi properties like beacon frequency. The beacon is probably what you’re hearing when you’re phone clicks. Tonight I’m setting the beacon on my router to something much smaller. I’m also turning the broadcast power up to eleven.

Cordially,

joe

The total area of destruction is the size of Great Britain.

We should have dropped leaflets.

“President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.” There had never been a mandatory evacuation of the city before. This action saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I never once heard that mentioned by the cable news networks.

Immediately after the Superdome became a hellhole (something I feared before landfall) I wondered if the suffering was an indictment of public transportation. I ask this question as someone who doesn’t own a car and relies on public transportation. The failure to evacuate wasn’t the fault of public transportation, it was a systemic failure to utilize local resources which could have evacuated thousands of people before the storm hit. I’ve now seen several satellite photos and found evidence myself with Google Maps that appear to be flooded parking lots full of hundreds of buses:

A full lot of city buses and unused school buses. I can’t tell what these are, they might be more unused buses but maybe not.

New Orleans had a high crime rate, with murder nearly 8 times the national average. I doubt the criminal element packed their families up into the minivan and headed for Shreveport. The best of New Orleans got out, leaving behind a far higher concentration of criminals. When MSNBC found police officers looting shoes from a Wall Mart, it became more clear that local governance had failed and that’s when criminal lawyers from http://mattgould.ca/ have to do their work.

Despite many exploiting this disaster to advance existing prejudices against the president, as the facts come in, Louisana’s local and state officials look worse and worse. There seems to be some assinine political bickering on the part of Lousiana’s governor, even accusations that early federal requests to take over relief efforts were simply a ploy to pass blame. How many people died while that idiotic idea was discussed? The “24 hours to make a decision” story is appalling (video). According to Mayor Nagin, Bush asked the governor to make a decision about transferring relief to federal agencies and she said she needed 24 hours to make a decision. As if she was buying a car or something. Since everyone’s throwing around questions and accusations, I think a fair question to ask is whether Governor Blanco’s politics and dislike of President Bush affected her decision making.

Ultimately it comes down to this: The situation in New Orleans vastly improved the instant federal and military aid arrived.

After the flood of 1900, the city of Galveston was elevated. New Orleans will be rebuilt, I hope out technology is brought to bear and the city’s vulnerabilities are corrected. Really, they have to be, it would be stupid and immoral to rebuild any ruined part of the city below sea level.

I was on a family vacation for the past several days, was offline and stuck with only cable news for information. This was the first time I’d watched any cable news since the 2004 election. My general strategy is to change channels whenever any of them run a commercial, so I got a substantial sampling of all three networks.

MSNBC seemed to be doing a better job than their competitors. The primary exception being Keith Olberman. MSNBC’s discovery of the forgotten NO Convention Center and resulting suffering doubtlessly saved a number of lives.

FOX was dependable for trying to find any positive story in the disaster, focusing on what was being done without ignoring what wasn’t. Their producers seemed out-to-lunch at times, showing the same clips over and over while failing to bring up the shots their on-air people were talking about. Geraldo Rivera is a nerd and often hard to stomach, but he is sincere.

CNN was just horrible. They were hellbent on ginning up a racial angle to the tragedy, going so far on Saturday that they had only black anchors for most of the day. I could be wrong since I haven’t watched CNN in a long time, but it seem that somewhere in CNN, someone made a decision to call in any anchor with dark skin. I would love to hear that decision explained while trying not to sound like the blazingly racist thinking it was.

Several of the networks, perhaps all of them, were guilty of running days-old footage of suffering even after evacuations had been completed.

All of the networks had Touching Montages With Sad Music. I can’t begin to explain how much I hate those, how exploited they make me feel and how trite they make the victims’ suffering seem. The photos should be shown, but silence would be so much more effective and respectful.

There was little coverage of the damage in Mississippi and Alabama, where whole towns were reduced to little more than foundations. Areas outside of New Orleans have also been largely ignored.

I was able to refresh my newsreader (NetNewsWire) a few times over the weekend. 15 minutes of online reading gave me more information than 5 hours of TV news.

Texans are good people. I imagine there will be something of a ring of refugees and relocations around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, many of those places won’t be rebuilt for generations, if ever. I have faith in Southerners, they’ll do everything they can to help out. I wish I could do more, or anything. I’m waiting to donate money to relief efforts until it the destruction is better accessed and we can better see where the money is needed and who’s best able to distribute aid. Why does it seem like I’m giving to the Red Cross twice a year these days? Times like this I really wish I was able to go there and help, or was trained or a member of the National Guard or something. I hate these feelings of uselessness. I can give money, what I really want to give are sweat and labor.

All the mentions of this storm being the result of global warming are ill-informed and crassly political. Hurricanes have a 20-30 year intensity cycle. If anything, the last 150 years of records show hurricane numbers trending downwards. The New York Times noted that even advocates of global warming aren’t claiming this was related.

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught “is very much natural,” said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.

The disruption of Lousiana oil production seems like good reason to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. A far better reason than the discomfort of expensive gasoline. A disaster like this, which is one of the reasons for having the SPR, also reflects on the level of irresponsiblity in recent calls to tap it.

What I’m afraid to say out loud is that this seems normal from a natural perspective. It’s the bayou refreshing itself. This makes me wonder about long-term natural history of swamplands. It also makes me concerned that swamps want to be swamps, noting that Washington D.C. and my neighborhood (the East Village) were both swamps.

Also thinking about Mississippi’s massive Indian Mounds. If the area is historically prone to flooding, anyone who made a habit of creating higher ground had the right idea.