Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Hey, and it’s my birthday! Let’s see what Uncle Steve will have for me…

Congrats, Rainer!!

Yesterday (Sunday) I registered, met some old and some new friends, and had an excellent dinner with one of them at the Persian Maykadeh Restaurant. I’d been there on my last visit to San Francisco, and it’s excellent. I even had Faludeh Shirazi again for dessert, one of the weirdest desserts I’ve ever tasted.

Now I’ll be off to leave my stuff at The Mosser, and get early into line for press registration, which will be very crowded. Soon we’ll know which (if any) of the rumors are true. I’ll try to be available on iChat while it’s going on.

Hey, and it’s my birthday! Let’s see what Uncle Steve will have for me…

I was about to post a longer note about the whole “Apple switching to Intel” brouhaha (and no, I won’t link to the original story), but John Gruber did it faster than I could, as usual.

I agree with him that the original story and its offshoots in other media paints only part of the picture. There are several more likely explanations than Apple ditching all of its AltiVec optimizations and switching to a plain x86 codebase. So, in my view, here’s what might be happening tomorrow (not necessarily in order of probability):

• WiMax; Intel has the standard chipset for that, and it’s the natural step beyond WiFi.
• Intel building a PowerPC variation; Apple should have enough rights, as a member of the original AIM consortium, to use outside companies for fabricating such chips. G6? Or perhaps they’d be moving off the G numbers entirely, as they’re getting a little long in the tooth. Hey, perhaps this means that Windows is moving to the PowerPC, following all the game platforms??
• Intel building a hybrid chip that runs both standard x86 and PowerPC/Altivec code either natively, or with some hardware assist, even if it’s just an endianness switch bit. Doing such a transition with purely software emulation is impossible. Endianness is so pervasive in non-trivial software that you can’t just recompile and hope it works. Also, emulating a PowerPC on x86 at any reasonable speed is unfeasible, because there aren’t enough hardware registers – this could be hacked by doing a special L1 cache implementation, but once you do this, putting in more hardware assistance is trivial.
• Apple will launch a completely new line of stuff that uses some Intel-owned tech. Like an ARM-powered tablet. Newton, anyone? Or should it be called Einstein now? Or perhaps a set-top box? At least that would mean I won’t have to build fat binaries for my applications.

About the only thing I’m sure won’t happen is Apple building, and running Mac OS X on, standard x86 motherboards. Tomorrow around this time we’ll know for sure; I’ll be at the keynote.

Yesterday I had a fun but tiring day wandering around the downtown area and doing some shopping. I ended up buying a RAM expansion for the iBook (600MHz, dual USB) I’m typing this on, and a Belkin F8T041-B bluetooth mouse. This mouse has 4 buttons, a scrolll wheel and it’s quite larger than the mice I’m used to, but very comfortable. The included adapter is the F8T003v but without the cap for the USB connector; instead it comes with a small dock with 3 ft. of cable attached.

No software was needed to get it working; just some fumbling around with the control panel, as I’d never used anything bluetoothy before. The manual says that the 2 AA batteries should last for about 25 days “average use”. Let’s see what that means in practice; I suppose that’d mean about a week for me, and I’ll be looking into buying a couple of NiMH batteries with a recharger. About the only downside I’m seeing so far is that there’s no power-off switch on the mouse itself; hopefully it’ll give up trying to pair when the computer’s asleep, and enter a standby mode. If not, I’ve still got my soldering iron from the old days at home.

In practice, both my hopefully soon to-be-sold PowerBook and my new iMac G5 have built-in bluetooth, so the adapter will travel around with the iBook. I’ve never really gotten as precise with a trackpad as with a mouse, so this will be a great help. The list price is $109.99, but I got it for $30 less.

As for the RAM, it worked great, despite being a lesser-known brand. It was twice as expensive as current RAM, but being for a discontinued model, that was to be expected. If anyone at WWDC reading this needs a working RAM module for an old white iBook (256MB, SODIMM, PC133-333) please tell me. I’m asking about $90. I’ll also be selling a brand-new, never-used, 512MB RAM module for the new iMac G5; I believe it’s PC3200-400 DDR SDRAM, Apple RAM, and should be worth around $110.

I’ll stay at the hotel until after lunch, then I’ll take the BART over to Moscone Center to sign in; I’ll hang around there between 5 and 7 PM, if anyone wants to meet up.

roger wrote:

It is Saturday around 3 in the afternoon. I sent you

an email at the address which consists of your

first name concatenated with a certain symbol

concatenated with your last name etc. I am

hoping you will read this during your visit

here. It contains a general question about

text editors.

Thanks Roger, I answered you by e-mail.

Posted by roger:
to Rainer:

It is Saturday around 3 in the afternoon. I sent you

an email at the address which consists of your

first name concatenated with a certain symbol

concatenated with your last name etc. I am

hoping you will read this during your visit

here. It contains a general question about

text editors.

I live here and I think it is a beautiful part

of the world. I hope you are having a good

time.

Roger Purves

I’m posting this from Apple’s San Francisco retail store, at the corner of Ellis and Market. Amazing; I’ve never been to an Apple Store before. The glass staircase alone is quite worth dropping in. Looks like 4-ply laminated glass on the stair itself.

Just chatted with a very nice Apple Genius called Diana; she’s French but I gathered her family lives in Buenos Aires. She exchanged 2 worn keys on my iBook and gave me 3 keys for the PowerBook 17″ I left at home. They don’t charge anything but on the other hand you need some luck; they have several busted keyboards in a huge drawer and it must be the exact model, as they swap suppliers quite frequently. Also, the keys I needed are the most requested ones: A, S, and E. Merci beaucoup, Diana!

So here I am at the South Airport Travelodge. Had lots of catching up to do, including on sleep, but from now on all should be well. The weather’s nice, sunny but with cold winds, around 18 Celsius. The free WiFi connection is excellent, I downloaded a large file yesterday at around 160 KB/s; 3 to 4 times what I get at home on my 512ADSL line. The hotel is just a walk away from BART and a huge supermarket/grocery, highly recommended!

The trip wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped but in the end, all is well. The first plane from Belo Horizonte to São Paulo was over 90 minutes late. In São Paulo I had to switch airports – from Congonhas (which is downtown) to Guarulhos (which is in a neighboring city) – and I mistakenly thought the airline’s van would do the transfer. After losing over half an hour in talking to several people I caught the regular bus, then spent an anxious time locked in downtown traffic. But later on it went better and I came in only 10 minutes after check-in had started.

The layover at Chicago was just over an hour. The queues at immigration were long but proceeded smoothly, no great hassles that I could see, and no extra procedures beyond fingerprinting. Amazingly, the United terminal still has very few electrical outlets – one or none per gate – and no WiFi at all. I saw several other people with laptops, so they should do something about that.

In San Francisco Airport they have a prominent charge-up station with Ethernet connections, but I didn’t stay to check the price. WiFi access starts at $6 an hour, quite expensive. The architectural changes since my last visit in 2000 are surprising and, in the case of the BART station, very useful.

Later in the morning I’ll go off into the city to do some shopping; I look forward to my first visit to a real Apple Store. More later…