Live from Austin!

[Update: Looking for a more positive story about ubiquitous cameras?]

David Brin wrote about the coming social revolution at length in his book The Transparent Society. Momus provided some handy tips in his song The Age of Information. Now Dog-Shit-Girl has demonstrated the dangers of not picking up the courtesy cluephone.

We live in a world where increasing numbers of people have digital cameras. In fact, in a few years the majority of people will have a mobile phone with built-in camera and Internet connection. This means that if you are going to be an antisocial ass in public, there’s a good chance that you will be recorded, your antics will be publicized, and you will be mocked. The worse your behavior, the more widespread your infamy. If what you do is bad enough, you might get threats; you might find that people recognize you, point at you in the street and yell at you.

You can whine all you like about privacy and rights; it won’t do any good. The Internet and digital cameras are not going to go away. Legislation won’t stop it, the transparent society is coming. My advice is to learn to live in it. People will be able to publish facts about you to a massive audience, so it’s probably a good idea to make sure the facts on offer are favorable ones.

In a way, it’s a return to the past. When we lived in villages where everyone knew everyone else, the antisocial would become outcasts. Now we’re headed back that way; the only difference is the size of the village.

LAPD were caught on video tape firing 120 shots at an unarmed driver in the space of 18 seconds.

A police spokesman said “Yeah, but he had a 5-star wanted rating”.

Someone should start a company offering home maid services exclusively from self-confessed Republican voters.

That way, guilt-ridden liberals like me could hire them, make them go through degrading background checks, and pay them insultingly low wages to clean our toilets…without feeling guilty about it. After all, exploiting the underclass is OK if they keep voting to be exploited.

Quote of the week:

“People are pretty freaked out,” said porn webmaster Jim McAnally, who estimates that more than half of hard-core websites, including some of his, will have to dump significant numbers of photos and videos.

—WIRED News

Porn webmaster Jim McAnally. Please tell me that’s not a pseudonym…

Star Wars barf bags. Official ones. Frankly, they should have handed them out in theaters before Episode I.

“I would shut down Apple and give the shareholders their money back.”

—Michael Dell, October 1997.

“If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.”

—Michael Dell, June 2005.

Next year: holographic optical storage, 30GB on a flat card the size of a credit card.

Of course, the downside is that the drives are going to be $2000 each initially… but then, so were CD drives once, and now you practically get them free in boxes of cereal.

I’ve been watching reaction to the Apple announcement. On the one side, there are a lot of long-time Mac fans who have been expressing a kind of unfocused pessimism. Something about the move makes them really unhappy at a subconscious level, but they seem unable to express exactly what.

Then on the other hand, there are lots of people saying “Hey, it’s just a computer, it’ll still run OS X and be pretty and be a Mac even if it has a Pentium 4 inside.” I think that’s not quite true, in a fairly subtle way. To understand why, though, you need to understand the Mac religion.

Apple have been forced to make the move because the desktop CPU marketplace, while still competitive, is only competitive around a single instruction set–the one that has gradually evolved from the original 8086. The x86 instruction set dominates the desktop, in CPUs from VIA, Intel, Transmeta, AMD and others. It’s even somewhat strong in the embedded space. Compiler technology for x86 advances far faster than for any other instruction set.

So let’s be clear: x86 is completely dominant. And it blows. That’s what makes the move so hard for many Mac-heads to accept. The Mac has always been about doing what’s technically right, not what’s most popular.

For instance, I vastly prefer the clean simplicity of the 6502 to the ugliness of the Z80, having written code for both. The 680×0 was a joy to write for compared to the 8086 thru 80486.

Moving up out of the realm of processors, SCSI was clearly superior to IDE. USB was obviously the right thing, even if serial ports and ADB were far more popular and USB peripherals were initially almost impossible to find. Firewire is better in every way than USB 2.0 HiSpeed.

In the software layer, the way the Mac filesystem works is a pain in the ass to write for, but the way the system behaves to the end user as a result is clearly the right way. (Programs don’t break when you move them, files launch to the application you last edited them with, and so on.)

In short, the Mac has always been about picking the best technology and doing what’s right. But now suddenly there’s going to be an x86 CPU in the middle of it all–kludge after kludge piled on top of the original 8086 design. And recall, IBM chose that because it sucked, they didn’t want to choose something that might threaten their real computer systems. Worse, the Mac isn’t even going to be using leading-edge AMD 64 bit x86 CPU, it’s going to be a 32 bit Intel processor.

Basically, the Mac community is being served a shit sandwich. It may still be the finest ciabatta bread, the freshest pickles and lettuce–but there’s going to be a huge turd in the middle, and some of us are having a hard time preparing to swallow it, even though we know it may be necessary–because as the saying goes, “Eat shit! Fifty billion flies can’t be wrong!”

• Red Sox win World Series. Twice.
• Debian project releases ‘Sarge’.
• Apple switches to x86. (Get your badge now!)
• Microsoft switches to PowerPC for Xbox, picks Macs as development systems.
• Deep Throat confesses.
• Labour wins third UK General Election in a row.
• Mathew learns to drive car, moves to Texas.

Coming soon:

• Showers of frogs.
• Duke Nukem Forever ships.
• Pope dies, replaced by Dalai Lama.
• Passport replaced by RFID embedded in hand.
• George W. Bush admits mistake, apologizes.

It wasn’t much fun following Apple during the 90s. The transition from mono to color was painful, as it involved whole new chunks of OS and a different processor. The transition from Motorola 680×0 to PowerPC was also ugly and painful, and a lot of software simply stopped working and was never fixed. Those of us who had 680×0-based Macs quickly found them made forcibly obsolete long before they would normally have become unusable. Then came OS X, and a bunch more machines were forcibly obsoleted, more software broke, and more developers gave up.

Things have been looking pretty good in the Apple world recently, though. The technically adept have been flocking to switch to the Mac, the OS keeps getting faster and better rather than bigger and flakier, and open source and Java software now runs better on OS X than on Windows.

And now, here we go again. Except that this time, it’s going to be much worse. Whereas PowerPC processors were able to emulate 680×0 at acceptable speed, it’s going to be a lot tougher to try and emulate a 3GHz PowerPC G5 on any kind of Intel chip, even the kind shipping next year. Everyone who uses Metrowerks CodeWarrior for their Mac development (i.e. all those big old legacy Carbon applications from the 68K days) is going to be out of luck, as they’ll first have to drag their entire codebase over to Xcode, and then spend weeks (according to Jobs) fixing up the code. So one thing’s for sure–we’ll be waiting years for another release of Quark XPress this time, too.

The core problem is that the x86 is a lot less like the PowerPC than the PowerPC is like the 680×0. For starters, the x86 stores all its numbers half backwards and half forwards–the least significant bytes are stored first, but within a byte the most significant bits are stored first. (That kind of ugliness is fairly typical of Intel designs, which are legendarily unpleasant to program for at low level.) Any program that does bit or byte manipulation is likely to break. The PowerPC also has a lot more registers than the x86, which means that emulation is tough.

Ultimately, though, the fact that the x86 is a hideously ugly design doesn’t matter too much, because hardly anyone touches machine code these days.

Still, will Apple be able to pull off this kind of screwing around with their developer and user communities again? I don’t know. The more interesting question is why they are willing to risk it. With Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all using PowerPC cores in their next-generation console systems, it really seems like a strange time to switch to Intel CPUs. Plus, if you want an x86 with PC-crushing performance and price, why not choose AMD rather than Intel?

One possible reason is that Apple is strongest in laptops, and IBM has singularly failed to deliver a G5 that can be stuck inside a laptop. AMD isn’t all that in laptops either, which would explain why Intel. But then again, there’s no reason why laptops can’t continue to use the G4, save for the perception that the G4 is “obsolete”, a perception which Apple itself has to take the blame for. Jobs says that there are no plans for improvements to PowerPC for the next few years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not; we’ll see.

Then there’s the intriguing possibility that Apple would like users to be able to run WINE. On the one hand, people could then switch to a Mac and still run their Windows software on it, for free. On the other hand, who would bother to develop Mac software if everyone could run Windows software? One possible answer might be to bring back Yellow Box for x86, which allowed Cocoa (NeXTStep) software to run on Windows. Still, even without WINE, software developers might just say “Hey, you want to run our software on your Mac? Just dual-boot into Windows!” (Jobs has already said that they’re not going to do anything to stop people running Windows on the Mac.)

So WINE on the Mac and Intel CPUs in the Mac could either be a colossal disaster that will kill the platform, or the best thing to ever happen to the Mac. I’m not going to pretend I know which is the case. I do know one thing, though: I’m sure as hell not going to buy a new Mac now, and I had been hoping to upgrade some time during the next year. No, I’m going to sit quiet and see what happens. I’ll want to see all my core applications available in native x86 versions, and an x86 based Mac that blows the doors off the G5, before I spend more money on Apple hardware. And as with the last round of turmoil (the switch to OS X), if it all goes disastrously wrong I’ll just switch to Linux everywhere.