sullust.org

I’ve noticed that the place I work is highly tolerant of the great number of ideas that will float around a place as multicultural as the technology industry. Today I noticed a new, subtle example of this in the bathroom.

By the toilet there are two toilet paper rolls. One is arranged in the blatantly superior “over handed” fashion while the other is quaintly arranged in the wholly awful “under handed” style. Even when the ideals embraced are obviously inferior, we take the extra step to ensure that all feel included. I think it’s kind of sweet to humor them…

In other news, Thunderbird seemed to go a bit wacky today. I typed Ctrl-h Ctrl-h and, for no apparent reason, it sent my message. I’ve tested it since and haven’t been able to reproduce it. Why would I type Ctrl-h Ctrl-h? Because I’m a Unix Nerd

I’ve been listening to the Wheel of Time series on the iPod for quite some time now. I’m not exactly sure when I started (a few weeks before Thanksgiving ‘04) but I’ve been listening to it pretty much constantly since then and I’m now on book eight. It had occurred to me a few times that I’m obsessed there’s enough content there to make for a number of rich video games, but that it would be exceedingly difficult to execute. If you were to try to retell the story in video game form this would indeed be true and, I think, that’s ultimately not the way to go.

What I realized in the car today was that the best form to translate the stories into (and I don’t mean tell the stories) is actually a (real time|turn based) strategy game. The thought goes something like this: for a modern RTS to be reasonably good it has to have at least three unique groups (typically referred to as races) who have different strengths and weaknesses and who would employ different strategies. You also need around four kinds units (broadly drawn): infantry, calvary, non-combat support, and some variation on spell casters. Within each type of unit there are various individual units who are strong or weak in that role. Races, also, will be strong in some categories and weak in others, or may have gaps entirely. For example race A may have a unit that is a very strong (and thus very expensive) spell caster but no medium/weak spell casters. There’s a ton of other dynamics that go into it (early, middle, and late game units) that I won’t bother going into now.

The reason Wheel of Time (WoT) would make an excellent RTS is that it falls so neatly onto this template. You have at least three races in the form of Rand and Co., The Seanchan, and The Dark (this also falls into another general RTS rule of having sides that are good, evil, and generally neutral). Furthermore one is not massively outclassed in any given area if you’re willing to accept some tweaking. Obviously if you just take the books at face value Rand and Co. will have, well… Rand there and that won’t do because he’s just too damn powerful. Maybe maybe you let him be a final uber character that takes enormous resources to draw… but probably not. It’s my opinion that RTS games based on stories like this are best served when the major characters aren’t in the game (or only appear in the single player campaigns).

I don’t want to get into all the match ups so we’ll use spell casters (the most interesting to me) for example. Each group has spell casters, but they’re not all the same. Even this subgroup fits onto the RTS template. Rand and Co. have a large number of relatively strong spell casters in the Asha’man and the Seanchan have a large number of relatively weak spell casters in the form of Damane. That’s all well and good but the Dark is where things can get interesting. Turning an RTS into a very complex form of rock, paper, scissors gets old fast so the Dark is where you get to play around a bit. The Dark have a number (though not many) black sisters which are likely weaker than your average Asha’man, indeed possibly no stronger than a Damane, but what they also have is excellent antispell casters in the form of gholam’s. The Dark may not be particularly strong in offense using the power but are excellent in defense. Throw in a few angreal and ter’angreal along with a one off (or extremely rare) ability to use the True Power (essentially making anyone wielding it more powerful than Asha’man or Damane) and you’ve got a pretty decent balance.

I’m sure a thousand people before me have not only thought of this, but had long night debates over it. Graph paper was likely broken out and maybe even a hex map. I’m sure on a number of occasions, things came to fisticuffs and many a nerd scream was heard. In short, I doubt I’m saying anything new, but that knowledge can’t keep me from thinking about it now that the thought has come into my head. The most frustrating thing though is knowing (KNOWING) that I’ll never do anything with what I’ve been thinking about.

Tell me again how this isn’t supposed to be another Osborne?

Well, I guess there are a few reasons. For starters Apple is obviously in far better financial shape than Osborne was when they announced early. But how well can apple manage with what will no doubt be 12 months of sharply reduced low end computer sales, and likely 18 months of reduced high end computer sales? And what about software vendors? No matter how well that shiny new copy of Photoshop is supposed to run on an x86 box (through emulation) not very many people in the know are going to drop the change on it just so it can run slower in 12-18 months on their brand new computer.

Now iPods will also help, they’ll help a lot, but they account for 31% of revenue for Apple. Thats obviously not insubstantial, but neither is it the sort of thing that could keep a company from financial ruin.

Article le tiers: You can pretty much rule out any new hardware (that isn’t an iPod) in the next 12 months. No new laptops, desktops, or tablets. Apple would be pretty foolish to invest any R&D in a faster G5 that practically no one is going to buy. If it’s as simple as strapping in a new CPU and updating the Apple Store then they’ll probably go ahead and do it, but don’t expect much fanfare. I suppose the Apple Tablets just got a little more plausible, but only because they can now run on the Pentium M.

I’ve commented before about what I think Apple’s strength is. As far as I’m concerned the only value add they’ve got in their PC division is their operating system, but I believe the real money maker for them is how much they make you pay for a machine that actually runs that operating system. Obviously no one knows yet how Apple intends to ensure that you can only run OSX on Apple x86 platform, or if they’re going to try to do that at all. If Apple chooses to put some DRM in the BIOS to ensure you buy an Apple branded x86 box, and continue to charge literally twice as much for the same performance as Dell I believe that will really start to shake the foundations of the Apple loyal. It’s all well and good to pay $3,000 for a desktop when you can kid yourself into believing it’s faster, it’s much harder to do so when Dell sells the exact same hardware for $1,500. Which essentially means OS X would be a $1,500 operating system… that only ran on one kind of hardware… sketchy.

If on the other hand Apple chooses to go mass market with OSX, if you can buy a Dell with OSX already on it, that would a completely different matter. It would make Apple a boutique PC maker, a designer line of pretty hardware that only the most wealthy or zealous can afford. Which… is kind of what they are anyway. So theres that…

Personally (and selfishly) I’d like them to release OSX at whatever price for commodity x86 hardware and slap in a nice dual booting utility. Maybe something that would auto-parition your drives without letting you loose any data. And I think theres a real chance of that happening. Microsoft has proven that you can (oh god I can’t believe I’m about to talk this way) leverage the mind share of your operating system to gain traction in the consumer electronics market. Perhaps Apple can pull off the reverse.

Update: So it looks like Apple has chosen to go the route of preventing OS X from running on non-Apple hardware. That’s fine, it will ensure that the gloss of the OS is reflected by the gloss on the box. But there better be some significant price drops in Apple land. It’s always been sort of hard to compare (a’hem) apples to apples when Mac’s ran on Motorolla or IBM chips. But now you can put up a Dell and a Mac side by side and say the only thing you’re paying $1,500 for is the operating system and a pretty case. The Mac community has been fond of saying for the longest time that “Mac hardware is teh bettar and teh fastar and it is higher qalitee!” But you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that a higher quality case fan or cd-rom drive is worth hundreds of dollars. We’ll see though. If Apple releases a Power Mac with top of the line everything (not counting the video card, just make that above average) for $3,000 I’ll not complain. I also won’t buy one. The real question is going to be in their workman lines. The iMac and whatever form the Mac mini ultimately takes. If they still try to charge $1,300 for a machine that dell charges $600 I think a lot of consumers are going to balk simply because they feel insulted at the price differential. We’re not talking about iPod’s costing $50 than the equivalent Rio product. We’re talking twice as expensive for literally the same thing (except OS and pretty case).

I’m tired of rambling, but I’ll say this: I want to run OSX, I want to run it a lot. I want to give Apple my money and if I have to I’ll buy an Apple branded Intel box. But I will not pay $500 for the operating system. I could buy a whole computer (and one that’s a lot faster than a Mac mini) for that.