the playstation cometh

For lo, the heathen executives at the place called Sony did send unto Engadget the thing called “test unit” (says so right on the box). And Ryan Block saw that it was good. And it was good. Thus the fanboys were sated for a time, their googly eyes glazed over at the sight of CELL vapor made flesh–at least until they drew out, for the zillionth time, their pre-order receipts from their collective pockets and cried the tears of unattainability.

Not long now, fellas.

–D. S. W.

the wiz is back…

…from its semi-unplanned hiatus. Apologies to all those who have been compulsively reloading the site, hoping for some tasty nugget of sweet nothingness on these pages in the last week. On the plus side, a more regular posting schedule should now resume.

–D. S. W.

the pre-professional push

It happens so soon: far too soon, I should think. The “it”, of course, is the inevitable shift in focus away from education for its own sake and towards, horror of horrors, the job. The job. The one in which you will distinguish yourself, find personal satisfaction, and (oh yes) bring home a nice paycheck each month. That thing that you, your parents, or perhaps someone else are spending many thousands of dollars for you to get, and the one that you will bring up in the course of countless dinner party conversations, assuming, of course, that it is something worth bringing up. Getting there is the trick. I wrote not long ago about the unfortunate power of grades over nearly every aspect of a college education. The corollary to those worries is the realization that grades are not an end in themselves but a means to something else, namely “the job.”

But for those who lack the questionable drive to move to New York and slave away for one of the financial services companies there, first comes intermediate step of graduate school. Or law school, business school, medical school, or any of the countless other “schools.” College thus becomes about the dreaded pastime of “resume building,” whether through overcommitment to dozens (hundreds?) of clubs and organizations or through time-sucking marathon study sessions in the library for each and every exam to produce, at the end of four years, a transcript littered with mind-bogglingly high marks. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?

Rhetorical questions aside, these aforementioned issues are of great concern to me in particular as I aspire, however gingerly and fearfully, towards a PhD program of some repute in some yet-to-be-determined subject area. Grades shouldn’t matter, I have been told and have decided, but the fact that they do behooves me to value them to some degree, however undeserving they are of such consideration, and even change things when they aren’t going (as) well. At the same time, the distressing rapidity of time’s passage–four years is far too short a time for all there is to do and be done–urges me to find ever-better uses for it. It will all work out in the end, I believe. The trick, as I said, is getting there.

–D. S. W.

think different. really.

Long have I considered myself a “power user.” While not skilled in the ways of coding until quite recently, I lorded over my PC with an iron fist, keeping tabs on the minute details of processes, services, and registry obscurities whose operation is essential to the stability of any Windows session. How humbled I was, then, when the MacBook Pro arrived, and with it OS X, an operating system whose power and elegance are only nominally under my control at this early juncture. What a rush.

Yes, the “welcome” video is hokey. Yes, the Aqua interface has its cutesy bits. No, OS X is not perfection incarnate. But it’s close, far closer in almost every way than Windows XP manages to be and even than Vista promises to be. Start with built-in search (called Spotlight). With it, any file, regardless of location, can be instantly located and opened from any window in the Finder (OS X’s file browser). Examine the beauty of the whiz-bang effects that accompany even the most minor of operations–the fade-in of Dashboard is particularly nice.

Then consider that I have yet to have OS X crash, seize up, or otherwise fail despite numerous deliberate attempts to do just that; simply put, OS X is steeled against all manner of would-be catastrophes by virtue of its UNIX underpinnings. That framework also allows its command line, Terminal, to behave just like a UNIX shell–you can ssh and chmod to your heart’s content with no additional software required. PDF support too, is native to the OS, and reading those files is far more responsive than is Adobe Acrobat on my PC. Much faster, indeed.
In fact, the sheer usefulness of each and every included feature, coupled with a few freely available 3rd party programs, is staggering, so much so that I wonder how I ever got along without them. The Finder is not without its oddities–no photo thumbnails, for one (a feature that Windows does have)—but I love the simplicity of having an “Applications” folder with one, and only one, file per program. Installing and uninstalling are a snap to perform, with no unnecessary detritus to clutter things up.

Windows never struck me as especially bad in any regard, but compared to OS X it seems faded and old. Much of this is due to the advanced graphics subsystem, but using both makes me recognize a difference in design philosophies: both are quite powerful, but Windows chooses (perhaps wrongly) to make its options and features plainly obvious in the form of myriad tabs, buttons, settings menus, and utilities.

OS X can seem a bit simplistic on first blush; the Terminal is where its power ultimately lies, and Apple designers have done a miraculous job of channeling that sophistication into a spare graphical interface that displays relatively few settings at any one time and for any one application or feature. Once glance at the Windows Registry or Device Manager is enough to send any Mac fan scurrying off in abject terror.

I jest, of course, but not as much you might think–or, perhaps, not as much as I should. Simply put, Redmond and Cupertino think differently about what an operating system can and should be about. Both have their merits, and both have their established audiences–Windows’ being much bigger of course. As a newbie, a technically-minded computer user, and unabashed fan of the Jobsian mystique, I find my initiation into the Cult of Mac positively delectable.

–D. S. W.