Lone Mac in the Desert

I came across this article today at Wired, which talks about a Major doing intelligence planning in the desert... he claims he has the only one...

Excerpted text:

"It is the only one out here in the desert," said Weed. "The problem with computers in the Army is they are bought by the gross and not necessarily purchased to accomplish certain functions. The Army doles out laptops in the same way we dole out boots, tents or any other class of supply."

According to Weed, he was issued the rugged Panasonic Toughbook, but it didn't work fast enough. Weed declined to specify what he does exactly, but said he works with giant satellite and reconnaissance images, presumably for battlefield planning. When he opened these giant image files on the Toughbook, it would slow to an excruciating crawl, he said.

"Frankly, lives are in the balance here, so the quicker I can get stuff done accurately, the better," Weed said. "The Mac makes this work simple, quick and efficient. The other laptops either can't open the files or lock up halfway through, losing whatever I was working on at the time, and then (I have) to restart the computer and start over."

It really gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, mostly because in this instance a powerbook very well may be the best tool for the job, and the fact that he was able to get what he considered to be the best tool for the job is a good thing. If you are working with high-density images from satellites, you are going to need a lot of horsepower, and chances are this isn't exactly Photoshop being used but rather highly-specialized, custom software (possibly written/modified by the person noted in the article himself) and be highly tuned to use the SIMD component of Apple's G4 processor. For what he's doing, it probably wails on the Toughbook.

I can of course see why the military standardized on the Panasonic Toughbooks- they're ruggedized, tought-as-nails computers, but they aren't built for speed by any sense of the imagination just as digital cameras used by surveyors and contruction site managers aren't built for image quality but rather keeping the muck and dust out. I would worry as hell about the durability of the Powerbook- I only have experience with the titanium version but it didn't exactly live up to its claims of being super-durable.

Besides the fact that I just like stories where a person is able to use the tool he thinks can get the job done best, I also just enjoy the fact that Macs are used in the military, albiet sparingly. Besides Limbaugh, mac-users themselves often have a very liberal bent, so it just amuses me for some reason.

A little nugget I picked up through one of my Apple books tells the story of Steve Jobs and others getting wind that the Apple II was being used by the military to help with missle guidance/controls, and it completely freaked them out... they just had no idea and had never thought their computer would be used this way.

They apparently got so freaked out at the thought of these Apples being used to point these missles against our enemies that it was the major catalyst in the huge educational discounts applied to Apple II's that made them such a mainstay in schools: they wanted to make sure the mac was being used for public good to balance it's karma.

Of course the story probably isn't the whole truth, but it makes me chuckle anyways.