The Setup: William Gibson
william.gibson.usesthis.com
william.gibson.usesthis.com
Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.
Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.
It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.
You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it.
Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.
Software does a lot more stuff these days, with richer media, more layers of abstraction and more reuse of code. We mock Iris as a poor knockoff of Siri, but the thing has text-to-speech and speech-to-text linked in to it, and was put together in 8 hours! Try doing that on your 486/33, with the tools of the era. You'd be lucky to have a sound card (MPC was a standard to encourage OEMs of the time to include them, along with a CD drive, if you recall) and a color console I/O library, much less a network connection good enough for cloud speech recognition.
My point? People today are forever bitching about how little we've progressed, how software development is still the same, but I can't agree. I remember what software development used to be like. It was great in that everything was small enough to be fully understandable, but that's all that was great about it - otherwise it sucked, deeply.
It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.
Amazing imagination and forward thinking -- but it's hard to blame him for wanting technology to mostly stay out of his way.
It kind of blew my mind to learn he wrote _Neuromancer_ on a typewriter.
(I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust. Their SO has a hell of a job keeping them supplied with either 20 year old Compaq 386 lunchboxen or Linux boxes tailored to run DOSBox full-screen on the console without pestering them to do annoying GUI things every few days. This novelist is younger than I am.)
Gibson has repeatedly displayed a fascination with style and fashion and design language, rather than with random agglomerative collections of features bolted together into a Frankensteinian morass by a bored marketing committee. Given how Apple is oriented around design and the humanities, I find it very unsurprising that he'd be working on a Macbook Pro ...
Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's at least 24 months old (next summer).
Pretty dull, huh?
(There are also hordes of eccentric items around here, such as the Viliv N5 palmtop -- currently running Win7 as I don't have the energy to battle a GMA500 chipset into cooperating with Linux right now -- but let's not get into lesser-used territory.)
Core software:
- Firefox 7.blah (with noscript, adblock pro, ghostery, beef taco, instaright, https-everywhere, and tab mix plus)
- Thunderbird (mostly using gmail as an IMAP/SMTP/SSL server)
- BBedit (what can I say -- it's prettier to stare at than MacVim, and seems to support MultiMarkDown better)
- Apple Pages (I loath MS Office 2010's ribbon with a cold and fiery passion because it eats vertical screen real estate; Pages is "good enough" for layout and final markup)
- Scrivener (because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)
- NeoOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice (because sometimes I need something that can handle MS Office documents better than Pages)
- Calibre (ebook management software)
- NetNewsWire (this may change soon)
- SplashID (because we all need unique passwords for each website, right?)
- MacPorts
- iTerm (and Go2Shell)
...
I think that about covers it. I really don't game much, if at all (it interferes with work to have attractive nuisances on my computers).
Dream rig:
(This is going to strike you as deeply sad)
Start with a build-to-order Macbook Air 11", 4Gb RAM/128Gb SSD. Add the 1.8GHz i7 CPU bump. Don't bother with the 256Gb SSD from Apple because we are going to replace the stock SSD with a 3G OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express sized in 480Gb. Finally add a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display for when it's sitting on my desk.
Underpowered? Sure. But it's tremendously portable, and I'm on the road for 8-12 weeks of the year. Two wires to connect, and I have a decent desktop system. Unconnect, and I have a nice 1Kg notebook.
The reason I don't have this dream rig right now is that I have the last generation, and I'm not quite enough of a sucker to upgrade every time Apple crack the whip, thanks. Maybe next year.
This line really caught my eye: "(because when I write myself into a corner and need to refactor the deep structure of a book, Scrivener makes life a lot easier)" I've heard of Scrivener being used by writers for this purpose, but do you think it would work well for programmers? I'm struggling right now like I've written myself into a corner and notes/diagrams aren't really helping as much as I'd like.
Have you considered Microsoft Office 2011 for office documents? I agree about the ribbon, but it is better than the free alternatives.
Why not upgrade to the 27" or a dell u3011 now, and mba11 later?
Also, backups?
The 27" ... well, I upgraded my wife's side of the office to one earlier this year (pre-Thunderbolt) and there's a limit to the depth of my pockets. Besides which, my desk is already dwarfed by the 23" panel (and said desk is an obscure 1970's Swedish designer item, not something I'm likely to replace in a hurry).
Backups: Time Capsule for on-site, 1Tb pocket hard disk for on the road, and Dropbox as a sync solution and if-all-else-burns-to-the-ground fallback.
My solution to big monitors and small desks is a VESA arm mount and either a wall/floor stand or a desk stand; give in to the monitor being bigger than the desk!
The RAM is soldered on board. The SSD is a SIMM-like module, which can be upgraded by the user.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express
I'm still not sure if I'd do it for 256GB vs. 240GB or 480GB, but maybe, and the cost savings vs. Apple might make it worthwhile. Speed could be a plus too.
Somebody, please correct me if I am wrong, because that is one of the primary things keeping me from an Air instead of a MacBook Pro.
It's the RAM on the mobo that's non-upgradable.
The real issue is battery life/screen size (on the move) v. weight.
The top end 13" and 11" Airbooks both upgrade via BTO to a dual core i7 clocked at 1.8GHz, with 4Gb of RAM/256Gb SSD. The difference is in screen size and battery life (the 13" model has more of both) and weight (the 11" wins here, by 300 grams).
If you're out of the office and working on the laptop a lot, or don't use an external monitor, I'd go for the 13" model (unless weight and the ability to work in very cramped spaces are an overriding priority).
If you're in the office a lot with laptop plugged into a desktop monitor, or if you don't do much work outside the office (just need the laptop to check email/web/social networks), then the 11" model wins.
But they seem to be a tie on performance, which makes life a little easier than when they first launched (the 11" was, even maxed out, slower than the 13").
I wonder how much impact SSDs have on swapping. I rarely need 8gb of active memory. I just can't stand waiting minutes for things to swap around right now.
Time for more research...
Please, dear lord, someone fork this and fix the god awful user interface.
Not everyone can write a (trivial) bash script to do a batch conversion.
Aha! -> loathe! (I think?) Correcting you on the off chance I am actually correct and can then check off "corrected the grammar of a professional author" on my bucket list...
In my defense, I recently bought The Hidden Family and The Clan Corporate during Border's clearance sale, so I feel I'm entitled to this rude behavior as a paying customer.
zing!
You can minimize it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
"obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust."
And how on earth does the revered author get the words out to publishers? OCR and an Olivetti might be easier...
WordPerfect was more commonly seen, but WordStar fits the description of "Runs on CP/M and is not supported" better.
Edit: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment
http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1220865-talking-a...
This is not so exotic; how many of us still adhere to vi in an xterm when we are in "time to stop fooling around and work" mode. ;)
This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows more about computers than you. Hint: Rather than look at technical details, he has always thought about computers from the most critical perspective: at the points where they interact with people.
You probably missed all the "soft science fiction" movement after the sixties... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction ).
What you describe was 30-50s style "hard science fiction" --think Asimov, Clark, etc
Gizmos bore me. People doing the weird unexpected things they do with gizmos fascinates me.
https://mobile.twitter.com/#!/greatdismal/status/12615524172...
I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.
A palpable hit. Gibson was talking about the tablet, but I suspect there may be quite a few (Wi-Fi enabled) phones out there without data plans.
I think it's fairly fascinating to discover that the author of one of the most notable cyberpunk novels doesn't really care about technology. (In fact, that's kind of the feeling you get from Neuromancer. There's loads of amazing technology but nobody's really fawning over it. It's just there, and it's just used.)
This is the same reason my mother had a hard time when she bought a new laptop with windows 7 on it, though surprisingly she really likes google chrome and tells everyone on a computer using internet explorer they should use chrome instead.
I guess the gist of what I am saying is that sometimes change can be to much for those who aren't the power user. I loved windows 7 on the RC and all the little improvements, the same with word and office 2007. I get excited about new OS releases and new programs and updates because I find them useful and it doesn't take me hours or weeks or months to become more productive because I live tech but others just don't have the time or desire to understand it.