Office Sluggish on Mac OS X 10.6
From Troy after reading Speeding
Up Office 2004 on 10.6:
I am finding Office 2008 slow as a dog on both my Late 2009 Intel iMac on 10.6.3 and on
my MacBook Pro running the
same version.
I have not really seen any improvement between 2004 and 2008
versions of Office. That is really unfortunate, as I need it and hate
sitting there and waiting for Excel or Word to load. We won't even talk
about Entourage.
I know they are both running in Rosetta. But you would think by now
Microsoft would be able to "speed up" Office 2008.
Unfortunately, Numbers cannot come close to
what Excel does, so that is not an option. Same goes for Pages.
Troy
Hi Troy,
I don't use Microsoft
Office - any version - but I'm finding that anything running under
Rosetta in Snow Leopard is
exceedingly sluggish - startup in particular - and the Carbon programs
I use tend to be small and inherently lively - or at least they were
under OS X 10.5 Leopard
Rosetta and previous versions.
A Carbon behemoth like
Office, no speedster at the best of times, must be really lazy in Snow
Leopard.
I expect it will take Microsoft getting around to
developing Cocoa-based Office apps to speed things up.
Charles
Editor's note: Office 2004 was the
second version of Office for OS X and compiled for PowerPC Macs
(Intel-based Macs didn't come to market until 2006). Office 2008 was
the first universal binary version of Office, and Office 2011 is
expected by the end of 2010. dk
Apple and Microsoft Drop the Ball on Old OS
Versions
From Mark following up on Unreasonable Expectations:
Charles:
It appears that Microsoft is allowing some sales of XP, but you have
to get it bundled with a new computer, which is not what Jim wanted,
since he just wanted to buy the upgrade to OS X to be able to run
certain software programs or be compatible with a HP printer. And your
investigation indicates that you cannot buy it directly from Microsoft,
which is also what Jim was so disappointed in . . . not being
able to go into an Apple Store and get Tiger or Leopard. So I think it
is a pretty close tie in the two OS super powers being a tad unfriendly
toward purchasing older versions of their operating systems directly,
without investing in a complete new computer.
I am glad to see you can presumably get to a legit copy of Leopard,
though Apple has made that 'fact' difficult to find for the casual Mac
user. Maybe Jim will consider getting a legit copy of Leopard, but he
does have to be willing to make a phone call and use a credit card over
the phone.
Netscape has been very nice to continue keep so many versions
available for download, for the old OS such as 8 and 9, etc. Amazing.
Even GraphicConverter
[venerable Mr. Lemke] still has an OS 9 version the last time I
checked his website.
Small aside: Leopard is still my main boot, with Snow Leopard as an
experimental hard drive on my Mac Pro. The lack of a true QuickTime Pro
version in Snow Leopard keeps me from using that as my primary boot,
similar to some of your issues about WindowShade. I have Snow Leopard
ready, as I know there will be increasing numbers of 10.6 only
software, and I do want the option of at least trying them.
Take care,
Mark
Hi Mark,
I've been using Snow Leopard for production for 2-1/2
weeks now, but I'm not by any means a happy camper, as I laid out in my column on
Tuesday. The instability and bugginess is hair-tearingly
frustrating. If not for the interest of research, I would switch back
to Leopard in an eyeblink and miss nothing other than access to running
programs that require Snow Leopard.
A footnote: Jim with the old iMac (see iMac G5 System Support Dilemma) informs
me that he's now got Mac OS X
10.4.11 installed, thanks to a Mac-user friend who gave him a Tiger
install disk, which has enabled him to connect and use his new HP
PhotoSmart printer, the issue that ignited his discontent when he was
stuck in OS X 10.3.9,
and he says he thinks he'll also go ahead and try to purchase the 10.5
upgrade from Apple.
Charles
Creator Codes in OS X
From John:
Hi Charles,
In fact, Creator Codes were deprecated in the APIs for at least the
entire life of Leopard if not much, much longer (possibly since 10.3
Panther, if memory serves correctly).
In Snow Leopard they were finally cut off.
The focus was a move to UTIs (Uniform
Type Identifiers), which look something like a backward URL or
URI.
Property List files found in the Preferences folder are named as
UTIs in fact. This is one of the many places in the Mac OS where you
will see UTIs.
Developers have been encouraged for a long time (in a software
development time sense) to use UTIs instead. Some were slow to do
so.
Sometimes upgrading is painful when you find out your favorite app
hasn't been updated as well. That said, you can usually "Get Info" on a
file of a given type and in the info window set which app opens it.
Just below that, you can also tell the system to always use that app
for that file type. This is set on a per-user basis.
The user does have control over this!
Hi John,
Yes, that's what I finally recalled and what I've been
doing. Thanks for the information.
Charles
SETI May Have Nothing to Listen To
From Alan in response to Why Do Aliens Ignore Us? Because
They May Not Exist:
I don't know whether there is extraterrestrial intelligence or not.
As a long-time sci-fi reader, I sort of hope so. At the same time,
SETI's quest may be a difficult one even if intelligent ETs exist. When
the search commenced, humans were radiating a large amount of radio and
TV signals into space; we assumed that any other intelligent life-form
with at least our level of technology would be doing the same - and
that these signals would reach the Earth.
But since then, we've moved from broadcast technologies,
increasingly using cables for transmission; these transmissions aren't
broadcast into space in the same way. Similarly, the move to the
Internet makes more and more of our shared content increasingly
inaccessible to distant listeners. Contrary to the assumptions of the
1950s, 60s, and 70s, it is very possible that advanced civilizations
would not be broadcasting anything that we could pick up.
- Alan
Hi Alan,
I agree that aliens of the sort (some of them anyway)
fantasized in Star Trek, Star Wars, ET, and countless works of
SF literature could be fun, but as I noted in the column, imagining
that they would be recognizably similar to Earthly life forms amounts
to anthropomorphic narcissism. Most science fiction portrays alien
races, whether they be malevolent or benevolent, as analogical in form
and intellect to human beings, sharing roughly our size and physiognomy
with e.g.: limbs, eyes, and mouths more or less where ours are, and
able to learn and speak at least pidgin English.
Should extraterrestrial life exist, the odds that it
would have developed under similar enough conditions to ours here on
earth for this planet to be of any use or interest to them are
infinitesimally small, especially when you consider how uninhabitable
by humans even the closest planets to Earth are. The aliens' home
planet could be twice as big or twice as hot, with gravity 10 times
stronger, could have two suns with never any nightfall, and so forth
ad infinitum.
You mention the improbability of compatible
technologies, and when you consider the delicate and fragile balance of
narrowly constrained conditions that make human and animal life
sustainable on Earth, the notion of life forms developed on other
planets in other solar systems finding Earth livable beggars
credibility, even if it weren't for the vast distances involved in
interstellar exploration.
Charles
ET and the If Factor
From Andrew:
Charles,
Great article, as always. As an atheist, I find myself in total
agreement with the authors you cite and applaud their wisdom
(especially Dr. Davies and Father Funes) in the use of the word
"if".
If is a magical word that allows us to rationally discuss
things in which we do not believe, as you do so well when discussing
the secular and Davies does in discussing the theological. I wish I
could have such an open mind.
Alas, I do not. I believe, as Bertra[nd] Russell wrote, that the
likelihood of a creator god is about the same as the likelihood that a
tiny teapot orbit the Earth, too small to detect. I can't disprove
either statement, but I don't believe that either warrants the effort
necessary to try.
Of course, what was wonderful about Funes' point was that there was
not absolute "god", but more of an implied "If god created us, why not
ET as well?"
What amuses me the most, however, is that like Hawking, I too
believe that contact with ET would likely be fatal, and not because of
phasers and death rays, but whatever uninvited microscopic guests they
were carrying along. Of course, our tiny stowaways would likely be just
as devastating to them, resulting in not one decimated population, but
two.
Sadly, the failure of SETI, again in my opinion, is not as you
suggest that nobody is out there, but simply that the distances are far
too great. If life existed on a planet 100 light-years away, we would
not be detecting optical signals until those signals were 100 years
old. Timing is everything. We've been listening for 50 years. What if
those signals went out a million years ago? They would have long since
past us by. What if they were sent yesterday? We would have a century
to wait. That also assumes they are of a nature and technology we are
capable of detecting, come from a direction we were looking, at a time
(counting travel time) that we were listening. That's a whole lot of
ifs.
I honestly believe that there is intelligent life out there. Of
course, I don't believe for a second that they look like us,
communicate like us, or are even detectable by us. If they are out
there, the chance of them existing close enough to reach us and
existing at roughly the same time as us are also highly unlikely. We've
been here a few hundred thousand years in something similar to our
present form. ET may have existed a billion years ago on a planet near
or far. With such vast amounts of time and even a short distance, we
would never know.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the kind comment. It's always great to be
reassured that Christians and atheists can have civil and mutually
respectful dialogue on subjects of controversy.
As a Christian, I don't categorically dismiss the
possibility that God could have created other life forms in other parts
of this vast universe, but I'm skeptical about "intelligent life" in
the sense that we perceive human intelligence, since I believe that the
primary factor distinguishing humans from other animals - and that
enables us to be clever, inventive, creative, and scientifically
inquisitive - is our unique quality of self-consciousness and
introspection - and the ability to anticipate our inevitable physical
death - which I believe is spiritual rather than material and not in
any way a product of the evolutionary process under which our mortal
element developed. I'm convinced that this was a distinct act of divine
creation, most likely unique to the human species on this particular
planet, and that God the Creator Himself was incarnated as a human
being in the person of Jesus Christ, which, while I place no limits on
what God can do, I'm extremely doubtful that He would do likewise
elsewhere.
However, I think there are plenty of non-metaphysical
reasons to be skeptical about the potential and wisdom of making
contact with intelligent ET, if for argument's sake, it does exist
somewhere out there.
You make an excellent point about the potential
microbial threat (which even within the human context ravaged the
aboriginal peoples of the New World when the European explorers
arrived) associated with alien visitation. As Steve Jobs remarked in a
different context last week, "life is fragile."
Also, the factor of distance really defies adequate
conceptualization for most of us. The rules of physics still apply.
Charles
The Odds Are Against SETI
From Mike:
Charles
I can't help but point out that the "silence" is not so deafening
when you consider how negligibly small a fraction of the universe
humans have probed. And the number of assumptions that SETI makes about
the nature of alien radio also severely limits our capacity to detect
signals not intended to be discovered. (Stephen Hawking has
recently commented publicly that it may be a very bad idea for an
emerging civilization to broadcast its presence to the cosmos, citing
how horribly we treat other less intelligent life on this planet. Or
how "developed" humans treated the hunter-gatherer societies they
discovered. [Think Captain Cook meets the
Hawaiians.])
There are something like 1024 stars in the observable
universe. Recent advances in astronomy have made it possible to detect
planets in other solar systems and it appears that planets are quite
common: hundreds have been found. Also, consider that we have only been
dabbling in radio for about a century. That means that our signals have
only reached a distance of 100 light years from us. Just one galaxy
spans tens of thousands of light years in diameter, and we can see
something like 1012 galaxies, the nearest of which is 2
million light years away. Even if life is common, a little bubble
of 100 light-years is a negligible fraction of a cosmos of 10+ billion
light-years. It's not even a big fraction of our own galaxy. (I don't
think it is at all likely that we will continue to transmit for any
length of time of cosmic significance; most likely we will revert to a
pre-renaissance civilization once all the easy energy sources [sc.
things you can burn] are used up or we bomb ourselves into dark ages
over disagreements about who has the right magic jujus. Or a
sufficiently large rock strikes the Earth while we are still horsing
around in low Earth orbit instead of colonizing the solar system.)
The distance- and time-scales of the cosmos are inhumanly vast.
Consider that nothing much happened on Earth, intelligence-wise, in 4
billion years (4 gigayears). The observable universe is at least 10
billion years old. Almost half the lifetime of the cosmos for Earth
life to develop radio! And SETI has only been looking in earnest these
last 10 years! And only for pulses, Gaussians, and triplets
. . . what if other civilizations think spread spectrum (a
cell phone kludge) is the most obvious way to communicate? Considering
the variety of human cultures, I wouldn't be surprised if aliens were
this weird.
So let's say that we are typical: it takes most life 4 billion years
to invent radio and the lifetime of a radio-capable civilization is in
the ballpark of 100 years before they destroy themselves with atomic
weapons or revert to pre-industrial societies, having burnt everything
you can burn. The probability of finding Earth transmitting is 100/ (4
x 109) = 2.5 x 10-8. Suppose only one in a
thousand stars have life. Seems pretty small....
Worlds whose life invented radio: (2.5 x 10-8)
(10-3) (1024) = 2.5 x 1013
Twenty-five million million worlds might have radio now. Now, I know
this computation is crude and grossly oversimplified. It's nuts to
assume that all those worlds were born at the same time ours was. But
the only number that matters is the 1024. All I mean to say
is that it is really too soon to draw any conclusions in a cosmos of
1024 stars which is at least 10 billion years old.
Also, why does life need a planet at all? Even Earth's most hostile
- to humans that is - environments host all kinds of life. Perhaps
strange beings who live in the cold, dark interstellar void are at this
moment speculating about whether or not it is possible for bizarre
animals to live in the hot, steep gravity wells surrounding stars.
PS: Since most computers spend most of their processor time doing
absolutely nothing, seti@home seems a harmless enough
pursuit. (I mean, compared to just heating the room slightly.) And
seti@home lead to BOINC, which
allows idle computers to work on more applied problems such as protein
folding and epidemiological simulations of malaria.
Hi Mike,
I pretty much agree with your analysis, including the
relative harmlessness of the Quixotic SETI project and prognostication
that we will likely eventually blunder ourselves back to pre-industrial
conditions. A major humanitarian problem with that, of course, is the
impossibility of supporting a population of nearly seven billion
without technological crutches, let alone the fact that traditional
knowledge and expertise in that sort of system has been forgotten and
we won't have the luxury of time to relearn it.
Optimists who are skeptical that we don't have the
capacity to destroy the delicate ecological knife-edge we're balanced
on would do well to contemplate what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico
right now. Kinda' puts speculating about extraterrestrial life and it's
potential to cause us harm into wake-up call perspective. We're quite
capable of messing things up spectacularly on our own.
As David Ehrenfeld observed in The
Arrogance of Humanism:
"[A] red herring that must be disposed of at the
outset is the 'cave and streambank' accusation. 'Surely,' say the
advocates of perpetual progress, 'you don't want us to go back to
making our soap out of lard and lye and to pounding our clothes on
stones at the streambank?' Must we give up our modern medicines, our
communications, our fast and safe transportation, and trudge wearily
back to the cave?'...
"Obviously few of us want to live in caves. But
what we want is often a separate thing from what actually
happens . . . So long as there are 'modern' washing
machines most of us will who can will no doubt continue to use them;
and if it comes to the point where there are only stones by the
streambank, then if we want clean clothes and there is a streambank
handy, we will use the stones . . . In the meantime, we must
live in our century and wait, enduring somehow the unavoidable
sadness."
Sorry for drifting into something of a digression and
the prolix citation. I'm certainly feeling sad about the catastrophic
tragedy unfolding in the Gulf, and your comments about a reversion to
pre-industrial society made be think of Ehrenfeld's gloomy but
realistic musings.
Charles
SETI and Fermi's Paradox
From John:
Hi Charles,
One of the best articles I've come across on the Wikipedia is on the
very subject you write about: Fermi's
Paradox.
I've no personal religious interest in the subject, but I do come
from a background in astronomy so have a few points to add:
- The universe is so vast that it's taxing for us to get our minds
around.*
- Life is so small, based on enormous numbers of microscopic cells,
that the Earth itself is a vast laboratory.
- Human experience of time is very limited. The universe and even
life on our own planet evolves in far longer scales than we are
comfortable considering.
The Atlantic ocean widens by a mere centimetre or so per year
(Iceland's many active volcanoes being among the consequences along the
seam), and yet the continents were together in the age of the
dinosaurs. That, in turn, was fairly recent in the history of life on
our planet. Every time we find older rock samples to look closer to the
Earth's formation, we find the hardy traces of earlier and earlier
microbial life. It seems as though the numbers game of giant laboratory
+ tiny participants + lots and lots of time does add up to good chances
so long as the materials and the energy are there. The chemical origin
of life, abiogenesis, is another
leviathan of a subject on Wikipedia, as I'm sure you'll find no
surprise.
With all that said, I am just as skeptical of SETI results as
yourself. How do I explain the paradox?
The Fermi Paradox article has a section that is broadly in line with
my understanding: Communication is impossible due to problems of scale.
This is because in addition to the three points I listed above,
Einstein gave us a fourth:
- Nothing may move faster than the speed of light.
Setting fictional conveniences like warp drives to one side, it's
the speed of light that keeps us so remote within the universe. Light
speed may seem fast on terrestrial scales - the Moon is a single second
away, and the Sun eight minutes - but beyond our relatively compact
little solar system, it takes over as a seriously limiting factor. The
closest neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri, is -
as any science fiction fan will know - 4 light-years away. The centre
of our galaxy is 25,000 years distant, while the next one, Andromeda, lies the
best part of 3 million light-years away. (And there are 100 billion
more galaxies, each containing many billions of stars, many quite like
our Sun.) Those distances translate directly into one-way communication
times. Multiply by two for a single phrase of dialogue, no matter what
progress we must first make in order to hear such tiny signals.
So, as far as I'm concerned, there's no advanced extraterrestrial
life anywhere we can reach, and vice versa. Which is not the same thing
as thinking we are unique and alone in the universe. Rather, it is
admitting that the cosmos exceeds us in scale. As does the ultimate
cause of its origin.
John
* Editor's note: I can't help but think of the way the fictional
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (that is, the electronic book
within the Hitchhiker's Guide universe, not the Hitchhiker's
Guide radio program, television miniseries, or book by Douglas
Adams) puts it: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly,
hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long
way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space."
dk
Hi John,
Thanks for bringing the Fermi Paradox to my attention.
The Wikipedia article is fascinating.
Your point about the speed of light being a daunting
limiting factor is especially well-taken.
My own conviction is that human intelligence is unique
because of my faith that what makes us human - intellect over instinct
and the capacity for introspection and reflection - is not a product of
evolution but rather a divine act of creation that united a spiritual
"image and likeness" of the Creator with a physical organism that had
developed through an evolutionary process, ultimately taking on the
mantle of flesh Himself, and while the Creator might conceivably have
done something similar elsewhere, it seems exceedingly unlikely.
If there is life out there somewhere in the cosmos,
it's probably very different from earthly life forms, and probably not
intelligent in the sense we understand intelligence.
Thanks for the thought-provoking observations.
Charles
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