Have I been dreaming the last 10 years of this PPC revolution?
Yes, I’ve been punk’d. Remember all the Expos with the demos of Photoshop up against a Wintel? Recall how they rendered everything faster? How Mathematica crunched numbers like crazy and the CEO would come out and talk of the wonders of the Mac? Remember the Intel bunny being burned? Yes, they poo-poo’d that this week and laughed at ol’ times on stage. I wasn’t amused – it was a badge of honor. Recall all the talk about CISC and RISC and all that? Pipelines and bottlenecks and speed increases and how it took two Intel chips to do the work of one IBM PowerPC chip? That OS X was written to take advantage of the power of the PowerPC?
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I spend my days as an educator and even student on college campii. This year I am spending more time at a state school here rather than the private school. Two very different worlds they are too. What struck me immediately when I went on campus was that immediately after class everyone digs out a cell phone and starts talking. If you’re walking you’re talking. Pretty hard to carry on a conversation with them. The cell in the cell phone contains all their interests and rational plans, and only these. Anything outside it is just incidental. It’s a weird sort of techno-solipsism in a way I suppose.
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On November 4 CNN held its “Rock the Vote.” You know this from the (im)famous “Do you wear boxer or briefs Gov. Clinton?” question back in 1991. It is supposed to be for young people, college-aged and college-educated mostly (a built in bias from the start mind you) to get involved with politics. Recent poll by Pew, however, have found that modern college students are more politically active and interested than ever before. Yet, we all supposedly know that voter turn out is miserable in this nation. It is changing with the polarization brought about by the Clintons – being polarized brings strong feelings, so 50/50, right down the middle, equal armies, are at bay, and that’s where we are at, so, enraged, more people are voting. But people are voting more out of anger and against things, rather than voting out of a rational inquiry of the real issues and real people involved in any election. That’s what polarization does – it makes us dumb.
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I gingerly walk down the step, almost tripping. I feel as though I am losing my balance. I feel a rush a wind and I look up, what is it? A car drove by. I would have never seen it coming. Then suddenly my cat, on a leash with me on the porch, makes a sudden move, she peeks over the bushes, almost standing on her hind legs. I don’t know what she’s looking at. She chases flies and hears them upstairs while she is downstairs – I most definitely do not hear them when downstairs. She has some keener senses than me. So I look up. A dog! A boy is walking him, ignoring the local leash law. “Hey I have a cat here,” I said, probably so loud the whole block could hear me, I do not know. “You need to put that dog on a leash.” “OK” he said and went on his way putting that dog into the legally necessary leash. I fall back in my chair in on the porch. If it had not been for my cat I would have jumped out of my skin when that dog came around the corner.
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Augustine said that ‘lust’ was “inordinate desire.’ He was half-right. Lust is defined not by kind but by degree: It is reducible to desire, it is a desire. But what makes one desire lust and the other not? I think it is a question of degrees, not kind. It is merely a normal desire taken to an extreme degree. Instead of ‘inordinate’ I prefer to speak of ‘unbridled’ desire. That is lust. Lust is desire that runs loose like an ill-mannered child in public. Lust is certainly a symptom of that 20th century ‘mental illness’ psychologists call ‘borderline personality.’ Though some say it has nothing to do with borders or lines, one thing is sure – the borderline is extreme in all he does; there are no limits, no borders to what he can do; he is intense in everything. The neurotic will think about stealing your car; the psychotic will steal it and drive it home’ the borderline will steal it and drive it across country. He can’t just have half or a little, he must have all. He would not buy a single Mozart symphony but the complete symphonies. I know, that’s what I did the other day.
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As is evident by now, my editorial decision to publish
Charles Moore’s ‘political’ piece last Friday has caused
a stir here. I make the following remarks not to justify
myself: I believe I was justified and seek no further
justification. I will explain partly why I made the
decision, but even that not because I think it’s owed
anyone. I answer to myself for my actions because I
have to live with myself after acting in anyway. If
conscience keeps me awake at night, then it is only
because of my own actions, and not that of others which
stirs my slumbers.
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We all will never forget the terrible images of planes Continue reading »
flying into one side of the WTC Towers and exploding
in balls of flame on the other side; the images of desperate
people jumping to their deaths; the clouds of powderized
concrete exploding on the streets as the Towers crumbled
and fell; the people running; and the look of FDNY heroes
looking back knowing their brothers were in and under
that falling city.
©6-14-02
David Schultz
Caution:
This article contains sentences which, if one has
been weaned on the culture of fast images and the
aberrant sounds of weirdness, the quickness of disturbing
images, the loss of memory and time, the span of
even a minute, let alone a day, or even an afternoon,
like your morning, TV, which embeds and requires
short temporal parts and bounds, being told by someone
what is going, by the likes of ‘anchors’ and ‘VJs’,
modern culture’s new teachers, or probably sophists,
and their ilk, one might have trouble following.Continue reading »
“On suns and worlds I can shed little
light,
I see but humans, and their piteous plight.
Earth’s little god runs true to his old way
And is as weird as on the primal day.
(Goethe, “Faust” lines 279-282)Journal Entry: Friday,
February 8th, 2002… I’ve been waiting.
I am facing a surgery in four days. I have known
this for five weeks. I’ve been worrying a lot, frankly.
Many things could go wrong. It is natural, then,
that I make an assessment of my life, my relationships,
my accomplishments (if any), my work, my goals,
and my publication I’ve wondered if any of these,
my on-line publication included, have been a waste
of time. Have I wasted my one and only chance at
living in any way? Thoughts about mortality have
that effect on me. Limits. I hate limits.
Waiting
|
“A
sure means of irritating people and putting evil thoughts in their heads is to keep them waiting a long time.” (Nietzsche, “Human, All Too Human,” 6:310) |
Waiting. I just sit here. My mind is free to roam. Continue reading »
I fiddle my fingers. I lean back and sigh. I look
around impatiently. Then I sit up and begin to go
into deeper introspective thoughts and suddenly I
become self-conscious. I come to, shaking my head.
I look around to see if anyone else notices me other
than myself. Waiting. Just waiting. Suddenly I am
confronted with myself. All that I am, have been,
or will never be, all of my empty expectations and
fanciful dreams, are presented to me for inspection
and judgment. I don’t like waiting because frankly
sometimes I do not get along with myself.
iPhoto has turned our Macworld upside-down. Continue reading »
It is, in an interesting way, very different from from
iMovie and iTunes, though each is equally a spoke in
our digital hubs. I
have written about the human context which makes
iPhoto a slick reminder of our own, and of other’s,
mortality. But it is different in another way as well.
(c) 01-16-02
David Schultz
As my wife and I sat there on Pacifica Continue reading »
State beach, to catch my very first Pacific Ocean
sunset, I couldn’t help but think the experience seemed
to encapsulate the whole MWSF Expo for me. The truth
dawned on me as the sun slowly hid itself behind the
horizon, sinking into the Ocean: “The Sun had set
on many things this week,” I thought, “especially
in the Macintosh Community.”
“Once, when Caesar saw some wealthy visitors Continue reading »
to Rome carrying young dogs and monkeys around
on their laps and petting them, he apparently
asked whether the women in their country did not
produce children – a right royal rebuke of those
who waste our innate capacity for love and affection
on animals, when it is due to men.”
I am a Mac user. I am a die-hard Mac user. Continue reading »
It empowers me insofar as it transfers
the power of a Turing Machine into my hands much
more easily (a higher power-transfer-rate) than Windows
at least. I feel empowered with my Mac because it in
fact empowers me, and in this case I trust my ‘subjective’
feelings because they have objective grounding.
Last Continue reading »
time I talked about Jobs’ philosophical background
at Reed College and his trip to India in 1973. We mentioned
that after a semester of taking classes he “dropped
out” as it were and “he hung around campus
for a year, taking classes in philosophy.” (Quote
from here.)This
installment of Jobs’ philosophical background will focus
on his Mysticism and how we might see it in the products
Apple produces and the methods Steve uses to create
them.
I have been practicing for about two Continue reading »
years what has come to be called “Mac philosophy.”
Some see it as silly; others as a fascinating sideshow,
but not serious. But I think Steve Jobs gets it. Much
of the digs aimed at Jobs are based in this fact:
They fail to see he is a serious thinker, in fact,
a philosopher in his own right. There are solid historical
reasons for saying this, though it will take me a
while to get there.
What is happening to me? Am I the Continue reading »
same person anymore? Has Apple Computer, unknown
to me, performed some kind of clandestine brain
transplant on me? Am I in fact the same person
I was before March 24, 2001? I am not sure anymore.
I am so unsure of many things. I feel haunted,
haunted by a daemon.
One does
not only wish to be understood when one writes;
one wishes just as much surely not to be
understood … all … select their audience when
they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one
at the same time erects barriers against “the
others.” All the more subtle laws of any style
have their origin at this point: they at the same
time keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance,”
understanding, as said above — while they
open the ears of those whose ears are related
to ours.”
(Nietzsche — The Joyful Science.)
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Product: SmartDisk’s
VST USB Flash Media Reader
Here
ya go.
from the Apple — very tasty!
A Personal Story: Testing Under Intense
Expo Conditions
Okay, here is the story.
Continue reading »
[Note:
This is a revised, up-dated and very much expanded
version of a sweries entitled "Mac Communitarianism"
that first appeared on the now deceased "MacOS
daily" site back in Feb. of 2000.]
In the last Continue reading »
Infinite Loop I looked at communities generally
and applied what I found to the Mac Community
specifically. In this article I continue on the
same lines but look at the myths and origins of
the Mac Community. I want to examine the role
of myth in creating communities generally and
the Macintosh Community in particular.
[Note: This is a Continue reading »
revised, updated and very much expanded version
of an article entitled "Mac Communitarianism"
that first appeared on the now deceased "MacOS
daily" site back in Feb. of 2000.]
Comments. Be heard!
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