The first laptop that got me hooked on the idea that 4 lbs was the maximum weight I'd accept in a portable was the Thinkpad 560e, back in 1998. It was perfect in terms of keyboard size, form factor, and acceptable in weight to carry all the time.

I now use a Macbook Air as my main laptop (I did have a Thinkpad X300 for a while, but had to drop it, but that's another story) and basically we have advanced by shaving off about 1 lb of weight and adding maybe an hour of battery life or so. In 10 years!

Yes, the machines are now faster: faster processors, faster memory, faster hard drives, more resolution. But it's a wash. And I know it's a wash because recently I found my old 560e, from 1998, and booted it. There it went! Windows 98 Second Edition took perhaps 20 seconds or so to boot. Double clicking on Netscape, IE, or Word would bring up the application within a few seconds, no slower than my Macbook Air and definitely faster than the X300 and even some desktops these days.

Web pages may be less interactive in that machine, or not load at all, but you can basically do what you would need to do in most cases (unless you work with high-end graphics, or code, or do numerical analysis...). Btw, the irony of loading up an old machine and being able to open documents like RTF and such, but not navigate the supposedly standards-based Web is rich.

And this isn't confined to Windows -- Linux and even the Mac's System 7 was similar in speed (ok, ok, System 7 was more sluggish). The point is that we've just taken two steps forward and one back.

Don't get me wrong, I like what we have now, and any trifle of advances that we get. But it's 2008. In ten years, we have not, objectively, gotten that far. We have added lots of abstraction layers on top of basically the same functions (as far as PCs are concerned -- the web is a whole other story),

Maybe we'll have to wait for the singularity to show up and give us better, faster, more energy efficient portables and desktops. :)

cracks knuckles.

That's better.

It's been over two months since I posted anything. I really don't know where the hell time goes, but I hope it's warm there.

I just got back (only last week) from a couple of weeks of much-needed vacation.

There's of course the global financial meltdown going on (not to mention the US Presidential election) and so it's fitting that I could spend some time reading When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, both excellent and highly recommended. Up next in my list is The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, which pretty much called what is happening right now.

I also had a chance to re-read Brave New World and confirmed that it continues to be one of my favorite books of all time. It often happens that re-reading a book after a long time can be perilous: what you thought was great before isn't anymore, and you rediscover not just the book but yourself as you are now, or as you were before ("Wow, I thought this was good? I really was an idiot back then.").

It's good to be back. Now to see if I can keep up blogging in any way, shape or form. :)

In Alan Moore's 1988 masterpiece The Killing Joke we got the clearest vision yet of the Joker as Batman's "dark side," and a Joker that was as vicious and demented as anything we had ever seen.

Until The Dark Knight, that is.

The movie borrows narrative strands from some of the best Batman graphic novels: Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Loeb's The Long Halloween, and The Killing Joke. One of the core plot elements of the movie in fact (The Joker wanting to prove that everyone can essentially become like him given the right circumstances) is at the center of The Killing Joke, and many story elements and characters in The Long Halloween reappear in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, most notably perhaps the plotline involving DA Harvey Dent and his transformation.

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is nothing short of astonishing. In a sense Batman can be defined by contrast with his enemies, and Bale's Batman is better because Ledger's Joker has so much ferocity. Without it, one of the few shortcomings of the movie (that Batman's own latent insanity and his finely tuned detective skills are for the most part conspicuously absent) would be much more glaring.

A review I read somewhere said that The Dark Knight is a "modern bullet train of a movie" and it's true. The last half hour in particular is something to behold. It's one of those movies that really require a giant screen to be experienced in full.

Supposedly this is the second part of a trilogy, and if commercial success leads to sequels then this one is almost guaranteed (it broke the opening day box office record), and hopefully it will be as good as the first two.

In the meantime, we have The Dark Knight to take us once more to Gotham, in all of its bleak, chaotic intensity.

• Disable push. Yep, this could be a deal-braker for some people, but I switched push to checking every 15 minutes and battery life improved remarkably.
• Disable "Ask to Join Networks". For Wifi, the default settings of the iPhone have it scanning for networks to join, even if areas where you wouldn't use WiFi. Disabling this also helped significantly.