Thoughts on Apple switching to Intel

1) Cost. Although more fully featured, Macs are more expensive than PCs. Running on Intel will keep costs down.

2) Heat. G4s and G5 are hot as hell. I can barely keep my iBook G4 800 on my lap without worrying about sperm count.

3) Compatibility. Some people hesitate to buy a Mac because they may need that one Windows app, use Windows at work, or want to play games. Perhaps you could install Windows on the new Intel Macs?

4) But then, why buy Intel Macs when you can buy a Dell and install OSX?

5) If Apple plays too hard, Microsoft may stop selling Office for Mac. You could always boot into Windows on your Intel Mac to run Office, but then you’re back on Windows.

6) Chips are getting fast, but Windows doesn’t take all that much to run. As chips get faster, emulation may eliminate the need to dual boot.

7) Even if Apple loses Mac hardware sales, it could more than gain the difference in OSX sales, iTunes sales, and software sales.

Counterforce

I'm an avid reader of the Becker-Posner Blog, and someone has just launched an Anti-Becker-Posner Blog. "Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise" - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 536.

MFoQL Project

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Annotation Project is a project I started to create a set of online annotations to Umberto Eco's latest novel. Two weeks and 150 edits later, it's progressing nicely: I'm 110 pages in with hundreds of annotation entries, mostly by me, but also some by two anonymous contributors, who by their IP addresses I can tell are from Australia and Brazil. Hopefully as the project picks up and more people read Eco's novel, the contributions will snowball.

Jurist icons

these are the current drafts of some icons I made for Jurist-- could still use some work...

What Happens on Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow

Zak Smith’s Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity’s Rainbow – The Modern Word hosts a staggering 755 illustrations by New York based artist, Zak Smith, depicting the events and imagery of Pynchon’s magnum opus. It was exhibited at the Whiteny Biennial last year, taking up an entire wall, and is now completely viewable online. I wrote an introduction to the work and co-created the website, personally coding over 400 pages of HTML and giving myself the worst neck pain of my life!

It was worth it, though - we got mentioned on Kottke.org, Metafilter, Screenhead, and Yahoo! Picks-- each one creating a spike of over 1,000 unique hits per day. Funny to think that once per minute, someone new is checking out a website featuring experimental illustrations of an absurdly difficult novel.