The Setup: William Gibson • Hacker News Board

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#41

Post by cstross » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:16 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #15

cstross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery. Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's…

Wow. This is much more what I'd expect from a scifi writer, or really anyone who uses a computer all day professionally. Have you considered Microsoft Office 2011 for office documents? I agree about the ribbon, but it is better than the free alternatives. Why not upgrade to the 27" or a dell u3011 now, and mba11 later? Also, backups?

Office 11: Well, giving money to the Beast of Redmond goes against the grain a little, and in any event publishing tends to run on Office 97/2000/2003 .doc files, not .docx. Publishing is conservative for structural reasons. (I'd rather hand in markdown files or even LaTeX or similar, but unfortunately they've standardized on Office documents, dammit. Because "that's what everyone uses".)

The 27" ... well, I upgraded my wife's side of the office to one earlier this year (pre-Thunderbolt) and there's a limit to the depth of my pockets. Besides which, my desk is already dwarfed by the 23" panel (and said desk is an obscure 1970's Swedish designer item, not something I'm likely to replace in a hurry).

Backups: Time Capsule for on-site, 1Tb pocket hard disk for on the road, and Dropbox as a sync solution and if-all-else-burns-to-the-ground fallback.

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#42

Post by m0nastic » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:17 AM UTC

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #31

cstross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery. Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's…

I don't think you can upgrade the SSD on an Air. My understanding is they are pulled apart and soldered to the MB in order to give the Air its awesome form factor. Somebody, please correct me if I am wrong, because that is one of the primary things keeping me from an Air instead of a MacBook Pro.

Macsales sells SSD upgrades for the Air (they're not particularly hard to do either) here:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#43

Post by cstross » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:18 AM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #12

Technology is a means to an end. Once you can reach the end with the tech that you have there is no need to upgrade any further. Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do. Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.

Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1 upvote ...

It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#44

Post by cstross » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:21 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #36

cstross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery. Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's…

> Calibre (ebook management software) Please, dear lord, someone fork this and fix the god awful user interface.

What, you don't use the command line tools?

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#45

Post by cstross » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:22 AM UTC

StrawberryFrog wrote: post #30

keithpeter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust." Charlie, I'm racking my brains here. Ami Pro? Pipedream (no, that was Acorn Archimedes, and don't we wish Thatcher had supported that particular lame duck). And how on earth does the revered author get the words out to publishers? OCR and an Olivetti mig…

I'd guess WordStar. Or failing that, WordPerfect. WordPerfect was more commonly seen, but WordStar fits the description of "Runs on CP/M and is not supported" better. Edit: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment

Nope: Protext.

http://www.tigerteam.co.uk/protext/

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#46

Post by 2mur » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:26 AM UTC

StrawberryFrog wrote: post #30

keithpeter wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS, now supported as a hobby project by one of the former developers -- the company is long since bust." Charlie, I'm racking my brains here. Ami Pro? Pipedream (no, that was Acorn Archimedes, and don't we wish Thatcher had supported that particular lame duck). And how on earth does the revered author get the words out to publishers? OCR and an Olivetti mig…

I'd guess WordStar. Or failing that, WordPerfect. WordPerfect was more commonly seen, but WordStar fits the description of "Runs on CP/M and is not supported" better. Edit: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment

George R.R. Martin writes on WordStar.

http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1220865-talking-a...

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#47

Post by dextorious » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 12:39 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #20

lylejohnson wrote: post #2

"I haven’t bought an app for about a year. Neither hardware nor software excite me very much, after whatever brief (and usually painful) novelty has worn off." It's probably because I'm so immersed in tech stuff at work, but it's hard for me to understand how such an imaginative science fiction author can be so... indifferent about the technology he uses.

I'm of the belief that William Gibson pretty much hates computers which is why he wrote so much about them. He doesn't write SF, he writes anti-SF. An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. Gibson's novels about cyberspace and that relied extensively on handwaving, magical thinking, and "unseen, unknown threat" to develop their narratives. This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows…

> An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work.

You probably missed all the "soft science fiction" movement after the sixties... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction ).

What you describe was 30-50s style "hard science fiction" --think Asimov, Clark, etc

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#48

Post by losvedir » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 1:16 AM UTC

cstross wrote: post #10

dy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to have you do a usesthis as well - the more obscure stuff is especially fascinating as it usually carries a much better story than just "I'm using the newest Macbook Pro and I got 8GB of RAM."

Well, I am a gadgetoholic-in-recovery. Let's skip lightly past the colo server running Debian that I keep the blog on. I'm mostly a Mac shop. On my desk right now is an older 23" Apple Cinema display, being driven by an October 2010 13" Macbook Air (4Gb/250Gb SSD, OS: 10.7.2). Next to me is an iPad 2/64Gb and a 3 mifi, with a ZaggMate cover/keyboard. And there's an iPhone 4 that ain't going to be upgraded until it's…

> loath

Aha! -> loathe! (I think?) Correcting you on the off chance I am actually correct and can then check off "corrected the grammar of a professional author" on my bucket list...

In my defense, I recently bought The Hidden Family and The Clan Corporate during Border's clearance sale, so I feel I'm entitled to this rude behavior as a paying customer.

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#49

Post by jc4p » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 1:41 AM UTC

    I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.

I'd love to know what he would think of http://www.iawriter.com/

Re: The Setup: William Gibson

#50

Post by icandoitbetter » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 1:49 AM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #12

Technology is a means to an end. Once you can reach the end with the tech that you have there is no need to upgrade any further. Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do. Most of us could get through the day just fine on a 486/33 if we had to. In fact, we'd probably write better software if we did.

>Upgrading is an investment in both time and funds, both can be spent better if you are already able to do what you want to do.

You are operating under the assumption that the usual way of dealing with technology is that you have some goal, and then you search for the right tool to achieve that goal. I disagree with that assumption. Most of the times you don't know that you want a specific functionality until the technology comes that implements it. Then you realize that you wanted it 'all along.' You are shaped by your environment more than you shape it.

Your time is indeed better spent doing things other than upgrading, the reason being that the software business just hasn't been able to keep up with the advances in hardware. Even though we have so much computational power available to us, we still haven't learned how to handle complexity and make more interesting, flexible interfaces. There can be innovation in document publishing software, even though we haven't seen any for such a long time. And when that innovation comes, I'm sure you will start wanting features from your word processor that you couldn't even imagine were possible.