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Well, since I got this job, even though I have a big new responsability (my 7 month old daughter, Serena), I've found that I'm making enough money to be able to afford nice stuff: luxury foods at upscale grocery stores, new pants and shirts that don't come from the sale rack, all the books, CDs and DVDs I can eat from Amazon, and a brand-spanking-new MacBook laptop from the Apple store. I'm not trying to brag, however: I'm actually quite interested in why I thought, for so many years, that it was a wise investment to buy used laptops and nurse them along at great effort on my part. This is an investigation of personal economics.

The straw that broke the camel's back was all the time I spent this past fall trying to get Linux working on my old Toshiba Portege (bought used for about $300). After plugging away for six months I, finally, just gave up. Hibernation never worked reliably. Wireless networking never worked at all. Running windows in an emulator was entirely unsatisfactory (and WINE was a horrible disappointment). Battery life was barelly acceptable. I decided that, for my birthday, I would get a Mac and be done with it.

The Mac has been an absolute joy. Hibernation and Wireless networking just worked, right out of the box. Running Windows was a simple matter of installing Parallels and sitting through the Windows installation. The machine runs on battery long enough that I can get in a full work session (three or four hours) or watch a DVD from the dinner table, living room or bed room. How did I convince myself that I COULDN'T afford this for so long?

Obviously, there have been times where I simply did not have the money on hand for a new computer. In those cases it was a no-brainer to get a used machine, but that has not been the case for several years, at least. Instead, I think that I enjoyed the hunt for interesting old machines. There is also the 'sunk cost' factor: while economics tells us that we should ignore sunk costs (initial purchase price) and worry about recurring rents (time cost of maintenance), human nature does the exact oposite (worries about sunk costs and ignores rents). I'm sure that I was suffering a bit of human nature as well.

Here is what I think the real calculation should look like: when a tool costs as much in maintenance and down time as it would to replace, you should buy a new one. How does this apply to a new laptop? Well, let's assume that you make an equivalent hourly rate of $25/hour (which is a little above the median wage for the nation, but probably below the wage for tech workers). If you loose only 1 hour a day to some annoying problem on your rickity old laptop, it takes only 40 hours (about 2 months) before you've wasted enough time to have a new, low-end laptop (the low-end Apple MacBook costs about $1000 with an Amazon discount). I put up with my crappy laptop for 6 months, which should have rated me a 15" MacBook Pro, at least!

Now I've just got to see how much time I waste because I have an old PowerMac G4 on my desk: maybe I can justify a shiny new Mac Pro with a giant LCD!

I have only this to say: I could not be happier in a year not divisible by four.

I've been feeling pretty bummed since Steve Jobs announced, earlier this week, that Apple would be moving from PowerPC to Intel x86 CPUs. I'm not sure why I'm so upset, or even if I should be upset. Part of me is sad because I genuinely believe (even in the face of little or no empiricle evidence) in the superiority of RISC architectures, or, possibly, in the obvious (again, without empiricle evidence) inferiority of Intel architectures. The rest of me, however, knows that, so long as the box feels like a Mac, I really won't care if it runs on a PowerPC, M68K, Pentium XVIII, or a hamster in a wheel: the user (my) experience is all that really counts.

Now people are speculating wildly about how Apple will keep people from running OS X on non-Apple hardware. They're talking about motherboard dongles and DRM features in the CPU. Behind all this speculation is the barely concealed assumption of RIAA-like lawsuits. I think that all of this speculation is off the mark.

While Apple has been known to bring lawsuits against vendors seeking to clone Apple hardware, these suits were brought at a time when Apple's only real source of income came from hardware sales and Mac OS (then called simply "System") was given away for free. Times have changed: Apple began charging for system software back in the early nineties with System 7.1 and they now have several distinct income streams including software (including Mac OS X), online music sales, computer hardware and consumer electronics.

When Apple released Mac OS X, in fact, they only guaranteed that it would function with a small set of current and recent systems, reneging on earlier promises to support all G3-based systems. Despite this hardware support policy, however, Apple took little or no notice of efforts to allow use of OS X on older, unsupported, hardware. I don't see any reason to think that they would reverse this behavior with OS X on Intel.

The people who wanted to run OS X on the beige PowerMac G3s, or on pre-G3 PowerMacs, were mainly interested in saving money: they were not likely customers for new Apple products under any circumstance. Given the choice of enforcing the OS X licensing policy and slightly expanding the OS userbase, Apple chose to expand the userbase. Since Apple now charges for each copy of OS X, they were probably not actually losing money to the Old-worlders, so long as most of the ilicit OS X installs were actually paid for.

The people who will want to run OS X Intel on non-Apple hardware are also the most price-sensitive segment of the market. Given the choice of ignoring technical license breaches and passively evangelizing to potential future customers, I think Apple will choose to invest in the future and let people run OS X Intel on anything they want (of course, Apple won't guarantee that OS X will operate with anything other than Genuine Apple (R) hardware, and they certainly won't provide any kind of support).

It should go without saying, of course, that any attempt to distribute pirated copies of Apple software will be met by an army of rabid intelectual property lawyers.

Every installed copy of OS X represents a potential customer for other Apple products and makes the platform more attractive to application vendors. Apple would like it if every person using Apple software were also purchasing new Apple hardware. Even today, however, when the only realistic way to run Apple software is to have Apple hardware, many users either buy second hand equipment or nurse aging equipment along with upgrades and patience. Apple doesn't seem to mind the active markets for upgrades and second hand hardware (though Steve did kill the clone markets shortly after regaining the helm of Apple Computer Corp.) so I see little reason to expect this laissez faire attitude to change. Until Apple actually supplants Microsoft as the operating system vendor on the planet, it will be in Apple's interest to get their products in front of every person they can, regardless of official policy.

We got back from our trip to Istanbul last night (Thursday, 26 May 2005) after an unexpected stay in Frankfurt Germany. We appear to have planned our vacation to conincide with two important soccer games also being held in istanbul, one derby match between Galatasaray and Fenerbache the day after we arrived (19 May), and the other championship match between Liverpool and Milan the day we left (25 May).

Both matches meant that we would have been royally screwed for accomodations if our hotel reservations had gone awry and caused some extra crowding on the streets of the old city. The second match, however, meant that an extra 200 planes were flying into Istanbul on the same day we were trying to fly out, which delayed our flight by almost an hour. As a consequence, we missed our connecting flight in Frankfurth.

Lufthansa was nice enough to put us up for the night and book us on the first flight out to Washington D.C. the next day, but we both had to take an extra day of vacation (which is a dear price for an American to pay, since we don't get very much vacation to begin with). Even with the extra day, however, I didn't manage to satisfy my craving for good German sausage. I guess we'll just have to take a trip to Germany (oh, the sacrifice).

We had a great time in Istanbul: we saw the museum of achaeology, Ciragan Palace, Topkapi Palace, Dolmabache Palace, San Sophia, The Blue Mosque, Dolmabache Mosque, the Yerebatan Cistern, the book Bazaar, the Egyptian Bazaar and the Grand Bazaar. We also wandered around Beskitas and Taksim quite a bit and took a ferry over to the Asian side of the city for one evening out.

My friend, Ozan, showed us around the city the entire week and had us over for dinner at his apartment one evening. His apartment is very small, but it has a great view of the Bosphorus. It was only a few blocks from our hotel, but most of the distance was straight up (Istanbul has a geography similar to San Francisco or Ithica New York).

Lina and I are finally going to visit my friend Ozan in Istanbus, Turkey. We've been planning to do this ever since Ozan went back to Turkey two years ago. Unfortunately, we'll only be there for six days (actually, only five days, since about one day will be eaten up in air travel) so we won't get to see much of the country: just Istanbul itself. While this is disappointing, I'm not too upset about it, since the main reason to go to Turkey, for any length of time is to see Ozan again.

Faced with the 12-15 hour flight from the east coast of the U.S. to Istanbul (we have two layovers along the way, in New York City and Munich) I have again been thinking about the hacker's handheld. Since there is no way in hell I'd get a home-brewed tablet computer past the security goons and the airport, I've put the last few days effort into getting a Toshiba Portege 3020ct working (in other words, wiping the Microsft filth off the hard drive and installing Linux).

Installing Linux on the Portege 3020ct is a bit of an adventure because the Portege doesn't have a CD-ROM drive (at least, mine doesn't have one) so I had to do an NFS install. The newest version of Slackware (10.1) did the job quite nicely, but with a few hickups.

The first installation went smoothly, until I had to install LILO: the non-expert options for MBR and superblock installation failed and screwed up the superblock on the root partition in an unrecoverable (by me) manner. All successive attempts to rerun the installer failed when it came time to actaully install the packages: once the package groups were selected, some text would flash by (too quick to read) and the isntaller would say everything was installed. In the end, I had to dismantle the install scripts and build my own scripts to untar the Slackware packages directly onto the destination partitions.

I probably could have just used the tag files, but I got fed up and decided to do it my own way. I was rather impressed that I could simply read the install scripts and duplicate the desired functionality in a few dozen lines. This is what I really like about Linux in general: all the inards are, with a bit of effort and patience, available for anyone to muck about with.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm complaining about Slackware, I'm not. Slackware was very good about recognizing the weird hardware setup on the Portege: I'd read web-pages a few years ago recounting the difficulty of installing and using Linux on the Toshiba Portege, but it just seemed to work (modulo the installer crapping out). Once installed, all I had to do was rebuild the kernel to get better support for VFAT and ACPI, download a few packages not found on Slackware, and fiddle a few configuration files.