Stardate 20020710.1754

(On Screen): The history of China after the fall of the Imperial system is an odd one. They have to have had one of the slowest, most strange civil wars in history. It started as a power struggle between the Communists and Nationalists, but then it was put on hold for about ten years after the Japanese invaded. It can't actually be said that they formed a temporary alliance or anything remotely like that. Each had strongholds which were defended against the Japanese, but both also spent as much time maneuvering for advantage after the Japanese were defeated as they did in fighting against the Japanese. (And in a few cases they still fought each other.) The Nationalists, in particular, did a very good job of milking the flow of supplies from the sympathetic Americans and stockpiling a lot of it for later use.

WWII in China was extremely brutal, and China lost more dead in the war than anyone except the USSR. (These are estimates; no-one really knows for sure. It's entirely possible that China actually lost more.) Most of the casualties were civilians, who died through Japanese brutality, or through famine, or disease, or other incidental side effects of the economic and political disruption caused by the war. But in the Chinese Imperial tradition, peasants really didn't matter. Death has always been cheap in China, and the leaders were really all that mattered, and it was routine for commoners to die like flies during any kind of political disruption.

Coming out of the war, you ended up with a final showdown in 1948 which the Communists won, and Chiang Kai-Shek ended up retreating with the remainder of his army to the island of Taiwan. Since the Communists didn't have anything remotely resembling a navy, the result was stalemate. The Nationalists were able to move into Taiwan because there were no significant defending forces, but once they were there, the Communists were not able to attack without being defeated on the beaches. Besides which, the US sided with the Nationalists. In any case, the Communists had plenty to do what with pacifying and organizing the vast majority of China that they newly controlled.

I remember as a kid the news reports about how every year on a certain anniversary Chiang Kai Shek would make a speech to his army telling them that this was going to be the year that they re-invaded the mainland and kicked the Communists out. It became something of a joke in the rest of the world, sort of the archetype of grandiose plans which would never come to fruition and which no-one in their right mind would ever believe.

Like, for instance, the way that the hardcore Mac faithful seem to believe just before each MacWorld that this is going to be the time that the Steve finally announces the killer product which is going to rock the PC heathen back on their heels and begins the great exodus from the dark side into the grace of Steve's love. I think that the majority of Mac users don't believe this any more than the rest of us, but there's always a core group, the ones for which the Mac is not just a computer but a culture and a lifestyle, who wait each time for the Second Coming, when their years of faith will finally be answered and they'll get to go to heaven. (And indeed some do actually portray the struggle in terms of a morality play. It's a bit disturbing, really. [As are their constant wails of "We had that first!"])

This upcoming MacWorld is no different. In the days coming up to it the rumors are swirling, just as always, ranging from the moderately realistic to the hallucinatory. But the fact is that the faithful are serving themselves and their brethren badly with this kind of dreaming, because when the truth is finally revealed it never lives up to the expectations. Thus what might otherwise have been greeted as a real advance, a significant improvement, ends up instead being greeted as a disappointment because it wasn't enough.

The hallucinators have too high a standard for acceptability. It's not just that they want better machines; they want to regain their crown as the "best computer out there." What they want is a machine so incredible, so overwhelming that it will be proclaimed as the best by nearly everyone, even non-Mac-users, with a loud Hosanna!

Unfortunately, though there may well be ways in which the Mac does excel, it's been a long time since there was any consensus that it actually was the best (if, indeed, such consensus actually ever existed anywhere except in the minds of Mac users) and as long as it badly trails in CPU power, there still isn't going to be any such consensus, let alone a stampede from the dark side to rejoin the Jedi on the bright side of the Force.

Yet hope springs eternal. Each time, there's just the faintest chance that this one will finally be the one which reveals the killer feature, the killer system, the killer advance which will turn the tables and allow a return of the Mac to the prominence and credibility that it really deserves because, well, it's just so damned cool and stuff. (Not to mention that this will be the one where we finally get that substantial speed bump so that we can stop making fools