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The Apple/Intel rumor was easy to dismiss when first reported by CNet, but with a front page post on the WSJ and FWIW, independent confirmation by the Inquirer and Scoble, it seems like tomorrow will be a pretty huge day for Apple.

The first question that popped into my head was whether the mobile situation was really so dire. With all the PowerPC momentum (Freescale’s Dual Cores, continued POWER5 and POWER6 developments, all three next-gen consoles using PPC-based chips, cell-processing) it seemed like rather odd from a long-term perspective despite the short-term hiccups. My assumption with the switch is that there is a potential long-term strategic impasse that I just wasn’t seeing.

This kind of a platform-change would be an enormous risk though, both for developers and for consumer sales (Osborne immediately comes to mind), and especially with CNet’s reported 2006 to 2007 timeline.

I remain a bit skeptical until it’s officially announced, but this being the net of a million lies, I’ll throw my prediction in the ring for how this plays out:

• Apple announces a partnership with Intel and announces OS X on x86 in low-end tablet and HTPC form factors (new products, the latter possibly a mini-like extension) with out-of-the-box binary PowerPC compatibility via Quick Transit
• The Intel announcement is spun not as a switch, but as a platform expansion. To sell this, the Intel announcement will be cushioned by an announcement of new 970MP-based dual-core PowerMacs (additional confirmation)
• a competitive mobile platform would seem to be a major driver for the switch (especially with laptops now outselling desktops), but Yonah’s Q1 2006 release still seems far away. Whatever happened to the e600?
• It’s been noted that Apple carries a lot of PowerPC IP with them, and while I have no doubts that there will be cross-licensing involved, it seems much more likely to me that it’d be vector unit changes (permute?) or PPC-µop decoding in Intel chips rather than a wholesale jump into the PowerPC market (remember, the console margins are very low and Intel has never been in a foundry model, but hedging their bets wouldn’t hurt)
• Oh, this is totally without any basis, but Apple releases Cocoa on Windows and Linux. (all hell breaks loose)

This scenario is one that could sidestep the most severe dangers of the Osborne effect, while simultaneously solving Apple’s mobile problems and giving prime strategic positioning for the upcoming living-room battle (as well as leaving Apple in a position of strength vis-a-vis Longhorn in 2006), all while providing more leverage and reducing future risk.

Or, it could just be introducing a new XScale ARM gadget. We’ll see.

Some other points of view:

• Daring Fireball: I’ll See You Intel – Gruber’s points and predictions
• CNet: Intel/Apple coupling could woo Hollywood (see also: Cult of Mac: Apple Shifting To Intel, For Hollywood’s Sake
• eWeek: Apple-Intel Chip Deal Outcry Keeps Growing – quotes lots of forums talk (heh)
• NYTimes: Apple Plans to Switch From I.B.M. to Intel for Chips – The move is a chesslike gambit in a broader industry turf war that pits the traditional personal computer industry against an emerging world of consumer electronics focused on the digital home.

Kevin Drum did a great series on peak oil this week. (Interesting to read alongside Elizabeth Kolbert’s Climate of Man global warming series)

One interesting aspect not explicitly covered was an increasing link between China’s growth and commodities pricing (there’s also a link to some counterpoint in the comments).

I finally got around to seeing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith today (digitally projected at the Mann Village) yesterday. The second-half got me so caught up it made me wish there were three more movies that might explain what happened after that! Jokes, aside, watching the final act made me think about how good the prequels could have been. Also, it explains in a much better way why Anakin turns to the dark side (mostly because the Jedi are pompous, hypocritical assholes) while still illustrating why the Sith are no better. That’s actually more subtlety than I would’ve given Lucas credit for (especially as the hilarious ham-fistedness continues just everywhere else). However, my inner-geek is still niggled by the continuity errors like Old Ben not recognizing R2, being surprised by Leia later on (“no, there is another”)… Leia having memories of her mother (the whole time I was thinking how much more ironic it would have been if Padme didn’t die so that Anakin’s turning was pointless), if Anakin did have other family in Tatooine, what was his mother doing still in slavery for so long? oh, if Qui-Gon was the one who discovered immortality, how does Anakin learn it at the end?, also it took a long time to construct the original Death Star – union workers, huh?

Anyway, lots of movies out right now and in the next few months that I’d like to catch (most probably on Netflix… eventually)

• The Best of Youth
• Crash
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• Unleashed
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• It’s All Gone Pete Tong
• Rize
• Nobody Knows
• Saving Face
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
• Lords Of Dogtown
• Batman Begins
• A History of Violence

Australian student Nick Bertke has been doing some amazing things with compositing Half-Life 2 models in photographs (he’s involved in making an HL2 short film). I’ve given all his photos a full mirror in case it goes down.

Related links:

• Paul Debevec’s HDR Shop Tutorials (see also HDRI Tutorial v.2 on Splutterfish, HDRI The Cheap And Nasty Way )
• Rthdribl – realtime HDR rendering
• V-Ray, Brazil RS
• CGTalk

I’ve been following Blake Ross‘s coverage of the Stanford Daily‘s link-farming with some interest since it first popped up on my radar. While it started out with his discovery of the practice at the Stanford Daily, it expands to the discovery that lots of college papers do it and leads to some interesting conversations (for more, see my attempts to discuss ethics with SEOs in the Syndic8 bruhaha). There’s a somewhat happy ending as the Standard Daily has removed their linkfarm.

Now curious, I checked the Daily Trojan (Technorati) and they came up clean. Woo, we’re not evil! Kudos DT!

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a good place to get online college degrees (not to mention licensed Canadian pharmaceuticals, and fish oil), be sure to check out UCLA’s Daily Bruin (Technorati). Yeah, Go Bruins! *snicker*

(College newspapers: yeah, you’re independent entities, but your actions will still reflect on your institutions. Also, stop lying to yourselves, you’re not serving anyone but yourselves in making the web less useful. I hope this sort of pissing in the pool never loses its stigma.)

These are just some personal notes for verbalizing the issue of information overflow. There’s been a couple interesting followups in the past few days, so worth summarizing…

• URLs map time to space (well, into a non-linear, accessible dimension) – permalinks, archives ensure means that it’s all available – thanks to Google and the nature of the normal activity of web browsing (voluntary), doesn’t tend to invoke the same sense of digital guilt (see also, paradox of choice
• Normally, television (channel-surfing) has functioned in the same way – you don’t worry that much if you missed a show, or if there are other good things on. However, Tivo changes this relationship for many people. There’s a “queue” to go through. Note that current generation RSS readers linearize blogs analogously. This is bad.
  

  “I feel like I make things un-bold for a living now.”
  — Lane Becker

• Winer former the alternative model the river of news analogy. Bradbury calls it surfer style, which within conventional metaphors. My own comparative metaphor is the hose and the stream: the former works fine for drops, but is uncontrollable at larger volumes/pressure, while when dipping into a stream, you’re free to get as wet or stay as dry as you want. You’re not trying to catch last drop.
• MacManus follows up by with the term Aggregator Ambience, as a way of describing Continous Partial Attention (see also). I like the ambience metaphor from a lighting perspective because it suggests the manner in which one might turn up and down the dial.
• The rise of blogs (originally as filters), then aggregators (ostensbility as filters for filters, but not doing a good job), social networking (more filtering, but not working as well as they could, TBD) and techniques and sites (GTD, 43folders) dedicated to dealing w/ infoglut

Some more reference links:

• Wikipedia: Flow (psychology)

  

• K5: Getting Back To Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit
• Structured Procrastination
• CNN: E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’ (Five fast email productivity tips)
• Principia Cybernetica: Change and Information Overload: negative effects
• Wikipedia: Information Processing (see also: The Basic Period of Individual Mental Speed (BIP), Underlying IQ
• Cognitive strategies and design heuristics for dealing with information overload on the web
• Coping With Information Overload & Keeping Up with Your Profession
• How Much Information? 2003 (Berkely SIMS study)

I’ve been using ACDSee forever to vaguely organize my files, but I’ve been looking at tools on the Mac to do the same. The nice things about both these tools I’m looking at is they allow saving of catalogues (in my case, I’m interested in being able to use a single catalog across multiple systems)

QPict ($35)

• cheap
• very fast intial importing (instant access, backgrounds processing)
• keyboard everything, some customizable
• – keywording is funky (doesn’t parse commas, can’t add multiple keywords at a time?
• – no paned/organization view?

iView Media Pro ($199)

• cross-platform
• free catalog reader for redistribution of your categories
• Folder watching automatically imports files, but not subfolders? (I still like how ACDSee does things)
• As of 2.6.4, supports Spotlight
• Nice organization and info panes
  • – only one or the other can be active at a time
• – can’t click in and add metadata by typing
• – crappy keyboard commands

iView is pretty close to what I need, marred primarily by interface issues. Here’s my ideal list of things that a photo management app could do:

• easy-click editable fields
• Fully reassignable keyboard command
• PathFinder like ‘Drop Stacks’, and a toolbar to manipulate (tag, organize, etc) stacks
• Easy dynamic filtering (say in a bar at top — even more powerful when combined w/ drop stacks)
• Smart sets (creation of dynamic sets based on combination of metadata)
• Better views (like MSR Media Browser)
• Web accessible/programmable backend

I finally got on the flat-screen bandwagon and picked up a Dell 2005FPW this week ($450 out the door after some well-stacked coupons). Wow, wish I had done this earlier, so nice. (Not the best monitor ever, but still damn skippy).

• The screen is ultra-sharp, with a native res of 1680×1050 (WSXGA+). It uses the same panel as the new Apple 20″ Cinema Display, an LG.Philips with 7ms Tr and 9ms Tf, and 12ms gray-to-gray average response times (it’s fast, no ghosting, no blur).
• The screen is also ultra-bright. In a dark room, that means blindingly, eye-stabbingly bright. Turning the brightness down to 0 still feels like 80, and I had to knock down the color bars to around 60 and then pop some gamma in the video drivers to get it comfortable. In a darkened-room, there’s also backlight bleed, but in the day or in normal light, it looks really great. I’ll have to Spyder the thing to figure out optimal settings for day and night.
• I have a Sapphire Radeon 9800XT that had some problems w/ DVI locking and screen-blanking when rotating. The former I solved by checking the DVI frequency and alternate operation mode options, and the latter was a driver bug that’s been fixed in the latest Catalyst drivers.
• As you can tell, the screen rotation will increase productivity tremendously:

  

Overall, I’m super-happy with this thing. I was considering picking up the 24″, but that has a 1900×1200 resolution, and if I’m going there, I’m looking for something that’ll support HD (at least 1920×1080). There’s apparently some exciting stuff coming in the next few months, screen-wise, so we’ll see. Also, I reserve the right to wait for nano-emissive displays. 🙂