the brook

It’s finally official, I guess Apple’s reality distortion field is wearing off for me. This was the first Macworld that I slept through since 2004, and no regrets.

The most interesting thing to me was that they got a pretty awesome movie rental service out. Includes all movies, at a pretty good price and reasonable rules for viewing. If there was an iTunes store in Singapore, I’d actually become a subscriber for this (I’m not sure if one can access the US store from here). Rentals are almost as cheap as stores, and you have the added advantage of not having to bother about going to a store to get and return media. The upgraded Apple TV makes a lot of sense, and actually it’ll be a pretty awesome device to have – given that you can access Youtube, Flickr photos, video podcasts as well as traditional iTunes content without needing a computer.

Minor updates to the iPhone. Steve Jobs is undoubtedly the greatest presenter in the world – he got applauded for allowing iPhone users to send SMSes to multiple people at once – a feature thats been around on phones for half a decade now. Enough said.

Which brings me to what was in the air at this Macworld – the Macbook Air. It’s certainly not what many people, including me were asking for (as long ago as last Macworld) – a Pro machine thats portable yet powerful – in essence a replacement of the 12″ Powerbook that I still use.

Thin is good, but Apple compromised way too much on thin. Let me put down my premise here – I understand Apple as a brand commands a premium, and with good reason. However, if I’m paying them US$1799 for a computer, I had better get a decent computer. One that I can, say, make my only computer if necessary and it should do whatever I’d need. Is that asking too much?

Lets start with the lousy disk options. Guess what, the consumer looking at the MacBook Air has a “choice”. Option A, choose the slowest drive in the world (80 GB, 4200 RPM). Firstly, 80 gigs? My three year old Powerbook 12″ has a 60 gig drive (5400 RPM), and I had an option to make it 100 gigs at the time. This is ridiculous, especially as Apple clearly has a 160 gig drive on their iPod Classic as well, which is NOT an option on the MacBook Air – I guess it was a slice too thick. But hey, if we go from 0.76″ to 0.8″ we’ll no longer get a thinner laptop than Sony, will we? Secondly, speed. This drive was advertised as “the drive on millions of iPods”, ergo, fast enough to play music – but you know, I might actually want to run like, real software on it. I dread the thought of anyone trying to load up a large Lightroom (or worse, Aperture) photo library onto this machine. Thank God we have a choice.

Option B is to choose the most expensive drive in the world – the 64 GB solid state drive. This is supposed to be really fast – but only costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars that could fetch you a whole new Apple Macbook at student price. Not to mention its even smaller than the actual magnetic storage, and lets not forget that OS X eats up close to 10 gigs of space for a full install. Yay for consumer choice.

Optical drive extra – but as Jobs said, we don’t need to watch movies on DVD (we have movie rentals!), we don’t need to burn CDs (we have iPods!) and we certainly don’t need space for backup (why wouldn’t anyone spend US$300 extra on a glorified router plus hard drive that is the Apple Time Capsule?). And we have the option of sharing a drive wirelessly from another computer to experience the joy of installing Microsoft Office 2008 over wifi, as if the process weren’t already slow enough. Fact is, there are people who live outside Cupertino-land. They’ll actually need a DVD drive, and be forced to pay US$99 (though I would hope other brand-drives which are cheaper would work as well).

No ethernet. Which will be missed when you want to configure your brand new router for the initial wifi config. But well, they do sell an adapter for US$29, and though we’re leaking change, we’ll bite the bullet except…

The MacBook Air has a single USB port. The ONE. Like Neo, in The Matrix (sorry, but I couldn’t resist). Why one? What is one supposed to do if forced to use the Ethernet adapter? Buy a hub, of course! So now we have to have an optical drive, a hub, an ethernet adapter – is it just me or is the Air getting a bit more viscous than it looked? Given that most people like to work with a mouse attached, that means the average person will have to move around with a hub all the time, if they so much as want to be able to work with a USB drive sometimes. Would it have been that bad if the Air was a tenth of an inch thicker but had three USB ports?

And no decent video card option, either. All of this ranting though, is only for someone who wants to buy this thing as a primary or only computer – clearly not Apple’s target market. Apple seems to be targeting this at people who already own a primary machine (maybe even two) and the Macbook Air is just for travel, or to be cool. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them.

I can pretty much bet that revisions to the Macbook Air line will be way better than what we have now. SSD will get cheaper and bigger, small hard disks will become faster, and who knows they might find a way to put in a real video card in there. And maybe when wireless USB comes along the whole Air thing will make more sense; as it stands currently, the Air is an experimental concept. All the more reason to wait this one out.

So this morning I was told by someone that they had a slice of bread and half a slice of cheese for breakfast. Half a slice of cheese. I don’t know about you, but this novel idea left me dumbstruck.

Maybe its because I’m a computer scientist and I tend to discretize everything; or maybe it’s because I’m a glutton – but I simply cannot fathom anyone halving sliced cheese. A slice of cheese to me is like a 1-cent coin. It can’t be broken, and it’s way too little to bother breaking anyway.

I know, to some of you out there this post will seem ridiculous. Hindsight is 20/20, once somebody tells you that a slice of cheese can be cut, it seems obvious. I like to think that my state of mind is akin to Rutherford’s after conducting his alpha-particle experiments and realizing that even an atom is made up of tinier parts. Sure, today every 12 year old knows what an atomic nucleus is. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big discovery. The guy got an element in the periodic table named after him.

I do not, of course, plan to use this information in any way. Just because you know that an atom can be broken, doesn’t mean you go ahead and try. Bad things have been known to happen. I’ll leave slicing the slice to the experts. But if somebody wants to name a fine cheese after me, I promise I won’t complain.

Yesterday evening, the nation of India watched yet another display of Just In Time Harakiri™ from their cricket team. The fans’ anger, however, was partly directed at the game’s referees, whose actions a viewer mailed in and charitably described as mentally retarded. Indian authorities and fans have complained bitterly not only to the ICC, but also Human Rights Watch, SightSavers International, Help for the Deaf and Dumb, and about twenty-two million gods and goddesses. It’s quite clear that umpire Steve Bucknor is not winning the Bharat Ratna anytime soon.

Every cloud has a silver lining however, and today ought to find Steve Bucknor smiling from ear to ear. A team of scientists have nominated him for the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the FIELDS (Fatally Idiotic Exhibition of Lousy Decision Schema) Medal. Apparently Stevie compares favourably with comsic gamma rays in at least one respect – generating random numbers.

Picky Ronting (name changed to protect identity), who nominated Steve Bucknor and is clearly in awe of the guy, explained. “True random number generation is one of the hardest challenges in mathematics. The best hope we’ve had so far have been purely physical phenomena – the amplitude generation of cosmic rays, for example. But even they have problems – the folks over at the SETI project keep finding patterns even in these signals and tell us about alien communications. We took a string of decisions given by Steve Bucknor and had the SETI folks run it using their distributed computing network of 50,000 computers, and it turns out his decision-making ability is unique for its pure, unadulterated and utter randomness.”

In a world where reasonable accuracy is so easy, we must applaud Mr. Bucknor for risking his outstanding position for the sake of service to science. Let not a few raised eyebrows stop the randomly raised fingers.

The Fake But Possible News Network asserts that any remote similarity of the events reported to reality is purely coincidental.

It was disheartening to read of two girls being molested in Bombay on new year’s day. Far more shocking was to hear that the Police Commissioner of Mumbai was dismissive in his reaction and asked the media “not to blow this out of proportion”, because such things “can happen anywhere.”

There are just so many things wrong with this.

It is downright cowardice to imply that if we somehow lack the resources or motivation to fight crime, we should instead accept it. Especially a crime as degrading, as humiliating as sexual harassment – humiliating not only to the criminals but to the society at large – not long ago, Mumbai used to pride itself on being a “safe” city, one in which a lady could walk alone at night unafraid. And now, even if a couple of girls are walking in the company of men they know, they still aren’t safe. As a democratic society, we have laws against such behavior, and if the police aren’t competent enough to fight it, they just need to be better.

Actually, this wasn’t blown out of proportion enough. The reason this became visible was that media men happened to be at the scene and recorded the proceedings. I wonder how many other cases of harassment or molestation, or worse, happened that night that went by unnoticed because the victims were too scared, too uninfluential, or just too ignorant to report what happened. It’s not like we do not know that this is a problem – we just like to cover it up.

It’s hypocritical to say that this happens everywhere, so lets just put up with it. The Mumbai police are so proud of their offensive against drug abuse that these days they put up neon signs on intersections congratulating themselves for jailing X number of drug users. How come they could find the resources to fight drugs but somehow can’t find resources or even the will to start a fight against harassment? Behind drugs are the most powerful resources that organized crime has at its disposal, because drugs earn them money. Comparatively, street harassment ought to be much easier to combat.

Finally, is it that hard to take a stand and say “No, we do not accept this”? If so, that means we’ve just given up, or worse, sided with the perpetrators. That does nothing but encourage these people to behave in this way. That such a despicable act occurred in Mumbai is partly due to the “look-the-other-way” silence of a society that somehow condones such crimes. Is it surprising that the villians feel increasingly free to encroach upon their victims until their ethics and morals start to define of our society? We don’t want to let this continue, and part of that process is awareness, part of that process is to face that this indeed is a social disease that we’ve failed to cure.

We either work towards awareness and a cure, or the crimes get worse; and history holds our entire society responsible.