Solipsism Gradient

The hotel is quite large, there are over sixty “chalets”, small cottages with a single bedroom and shower. Most of these are actually split into two units. They’re distributed along two roads on the northern third of the hotel area. On the southern third there’s a dozen small buildings with 9 or 12 apartments in each. In the middle third are the public areas: reception, restaurants, swimming pools and so forth. A small creek forms a lake near the pool, and in the back there’s an exit onto the beach.

The beaches in this area are quite shallow, you can walk in for perhaps 200m until you lose footing. The water is amazingly warm, from 27 to 30 Celsius even in the evening. And you can walk for dozens of kilometers either north or south. Here’s a photo of our cottage:

And here’s one of the view from there:

In front is the lake, the water is very dark due to natural iron salts. To the right are the pools and the main restaurant. The sea is visible in the distance.

Here we are at the Arraial Canabrava Resort Hotel, which seems to be the official name. They’re just installing Internet access, in a month or two guests should have a separate room for getting on, but for now I’m sitting in a little back room next to the reception. It was down when we arrived, but was fixed today; so I’m downloading e-mail and whatnot while I type this.

The flight from Belo Horizonte to Ilhéus took about 90 minutes. Here’s a photo of Ilhéus during the final approach:

The landing strip is the dark (nearly horizontal) band near the wingtip, and the paintbrush-shaped peninsula with beaches at the lower end (where the paint would be) is a local landmark.

We’re packed to leave very early in the morning for the Cana Brava Resort, near Ilhéus (Bahia). It’s located at a beach where a small river flows into the sea, and it has a swimming pool – three types of water to choose from, but I’ll probably try to stay out of the sun as much as possible.

The hotel is supposed to have a modern convention center, so there’s a small chance that I may be able to get on the Internet. I’m taking my PowerBook anyway, and hope to get some serious work done, away from distractions. 😆

So, expect very light to zero blogging here until Dec. 28th… happy holidays for everybody!

Steve Jobs himself said that hell froze over; but even so, as he repeated in a Nov. 5 conference call, Apple won’t switch to Intel Microprocessors. “It’s perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor.. but we’re very happy with PowerPC”, he said. “The G5 is the fastest personal computer in the world… right now we don’t see a compelling need to switch processor families and the stuff that’s in the PowerPC roadmap… is really good.”

Nothe that he didn’t mention Intel explicitly, nor did he use the word platform. Why did our glorious leader feel the need to repeat the obvious? There has always been speculation about Apple migrating to Intel processors, especially while Motorola was responsible for the “megahertz gap” between top-of-the-line Macs and the competition. There actually is a version of Darwin, Apple’s open-source base for Mac OS X, for the Intel platform, and a rumored “Marklar Project” that supposedly keeps an up-to-date full Mac OS X running on top of that version.

I’m emphasizing the difference between “Intel processor” and Intel (or x86, or AMD) platform. Apparently, nearly all speculators thinks those terms are synonyms; they’re not. Beyond the processor itself, the Intel platform also includes support chips, BIOS, and standard peripheral controllers – a standard motherboard, for all practical purposes.

Every now and then, well-known analysts say that Apple’s only hope to survive would be to migrate to the Intel platform. Last March, John C. Dvorak predicted that “Apple Computer Corp. will switch to Intel processors within the next 12 to 18 months… announcing the new architecture in July at the next Macworld Expo would be ideal”. Soon after that, he again predicted that Apple would come out with a dual-architecture Itanium/G5 Mac in early 2004, then later offer Mac OS X for generic Dell/HP/IBM computers. Instead, in July, Apple announced the IBM PowerPC 970-based G5!

Former Apple CEO John Sculley said recently that Apple considered the Intel option in 1992 – when Apple was leaving the 68K architecture – but this was discarded in favor of the PowerPC architecture. Even though Sculley still considers that decision “one of the biggest strategic mistakes that Apple ever made”, it’s clear in hindsight that only the PowerPC had enough capacity to emulate the 68K in software without any performance loss; a decisive factor in easing the platform transition.

Whoever wants Apple to migrate to the Intel platform wants, in essence, to run Mac OS X on a cut-rate PC assembled in some anonymous Far-East factory, or by some hardware geek in his own living room, and of course, also wants to run Linux or Windows on the same machine. The chance of this happening is zero. What would be the consequences of the release of Mac OS X for any generic PC? Apple, of course, would have to close down their computer assembly lines. They’d never be able to compete with someone like Dell on price only; just look what happened to Gateway and dozens of others.

It would be a support nightmare; they’d have to test and consider all possible variations of motherboards, peripherals, displays, BIOS, in other words, all those things that already bedevil PC users today. And finally, they’d have to do battle with Microsoft and their ironclad contracts with hardware vendors. Who would pay US$129 (or even US$49?) for an operating system if, owing to contractual requirements, their PC already came with Windows installed? That’s one of the reasons that the BeOS went under.

Let’s bury the notion of migrating to the Intel platform, and consider the use of the Intel processor itself. Apple could, for the sake of argument, build Macs with motherboards based on a Pentium IV (or Itanium, or Opteron), but with its own architecture. So, it would have Open Firmware instead of a BIOS and no concerns whatsoever about Windows compatibility. It would be a Mac as we know it today, but with different processor and support chips. Mac OS X would be recompiled for this new platform and wouldn’t run on common PCs. This option (and not the first!) is what Steve Jobs discarded in the interview I cited earlier.

The chance of this happening isn’t zero, but very nearly so. What advantages could Apple gain from this option? They might have some price advantages in buying the processors and support chips, perhaps a shorter design time, since Apple wouldn’t have to design their own bus controller. The machines would have to have more complex cooling systems to hold noise down; even iMacs would need several fans, in a G5-like scheme. iBooks and PowerBooks would probably be a little larger.

But in terms of performance, I’d bet that there would be a sizable disadvantage. Why? There’s an obvious answer: AltiVec. (Steve Jobs mentioned this precise point last year, in fact.) Not for nothing Apple now has its whole product line based on G4 and G5 CPUs, all of which have AltiVec built in; part of the noticeable speed increase seen between Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.3 can be credited to the gradual optimization of basic OS routines with AltiVec. Many people mistakenly believe that this PowerPC section is restricted to multimedia applications; far from the truth. AltiVec also has specialized instructions for data pre-caching, as well as for high-bandwidth data conversion and movement. And of course, Quartz Extreme itself needs AltiVec’s pixel conversion and vector instructions to implement Mac OS X’s visual subtleties. Only Microsoft would benefit from an Intel processor, as their Virtual PC emulator would then run at native speeds.

Together with these arguments, consider the excellent roadmap of the PowerPC architecture, with IBM widely adopting the G5 (970) and its successors, and it’s easy to see that Steve Jobs is right – there’s no compelling reason to switch. So, why does Apple still maintain the x86 version of Darwin, as well as the fabled “Marklar Project”? That’s because this helps finding bugs which might otherwise be masked by the processor architecture, and to simplify future architectural changes. For instance, without these precautions, the recent release of the G5 machines, with their 64-bit memory addresses, would no doubt have been delayed for several months.

Despite Jobs’ repeated denials, we can be sure that the “Mac Intel Inside” rumors won’t die; they tickle the fancy of PC users and are the kind of “too good to be checked” items that certain journalists love so much.

(This is a somewhat edited and updated version of my “Ombudsmac” column for issue #114 of Macmania magazine.)

My list of subscriptions has been updated (it’s to the left if you’re reading this in a browser), somewhat belatedly. Most of my favorite comics now have RSS feeds, a very welcome development.

So much to read, so little time

This post’s title comes from the Beatles’ famous song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”. What? Yes, for some reason the printed lyrics actually say “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”, but some people hear it that other way.

This sort of thing seems to be called a “Mondegreen”, for reasons explained by Jon Carroll in his article “Mondegreens Ripped My Flesh”. Thanks go to Bernie DeKoven’s DeepFUN for the tip. Other examples abound, such as Bob Dylan’s “Dead ants are my friends, they’re blowin’ in the wind” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Like a bridge over trouble, Walter, I will lay me down”.

There are mondegreens in many languages. In Portuguese the canonical example is Claudio Zoli apparently singing “trocando de biquíni sem parar” (“endlessly switching bikinis”) instead of “tocando B.B.King sem parar” (“endlessly hearing B.B.King”); there’s an entire blog devoted to examples from Brazilian sources.

I remember my mother quoting some German mondegreens… I’ll post a few after I get a chance to talk to her.

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Of current affairs and perennial folly

After a tour of the blogosphere established that the weekend’s big story has triggered every imaginable kind of response, on top of a couple of e-mails asking what I make of it, it was a relief to find that many are still busy with something completely di

Here’s a new installment in my Interesting Times column.

It’s the first part of a two-part article about the QI-900 computer which I designed in the middle 1980’s. It had moveable windows, menus, and preemptive multithreading. Even so, it already was obsolete when it came out…