The Girl with the PowerPC

[Hack5190]

I've watched both versions of the movie “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (including the other 2 movies in this series) and decided before reading "The Girl in the Spiders Web" I should read all 3 books. Below are 3 excerpts from Chapter 11 of Stieg Larsson's book “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” that I think members of this forum will enjoy:

“The rucksack contained her white Apple iBook 600 with a 25-gig hard drive and 420 megs of RAM, manufactured in January 2002 and equipped with a 14-inch screen. At the time she bought it, it was Apple’s state-of-the-art laptop.”

“When she opened the rucksack, she could see that the lid of her computer was cracked. She plugged in the power adapter and tried to boot up the computer; not even a death rattle.”

“Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners. Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market.”

 

[MultiFinder17]

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson, co-authored by Phil Schiller.

 

[Erdbeertorte]

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson, co-authored by Phil Schiller.

Reminds me of a song and video I like very much:

 

[Hack5190]

From The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, Chapter 1:

"The extra batteries she had ordered for her Apple Powerbook (G4 titanium with a seventeen-inch screen) had finally arrived".

I'm beginning to think Stieg Larsson was an fan.

 

[bunnspecial]

Where's this mythical 17" G4 Titanium?

 

[Hack5190]

Where's this mythical 17" G4 Titanium?

[WISE GUY MODE] Page 47 of the book. [/WISE GUY MODE]

Is this it -> https://support.apple.com/kb/sp84?locale=en_US

 

[bunnspecial]

[WISE GUY MODE] Page 47 of the book. [/WISE GUY MODE]

Is this it -> https://support.apple.com/kb/sp84?locale=en_US

I'm really just being pedantic. All Titanium Powerbooks were 15". The later Aluminum models(which I think came out in 2002) came in 12", 15", and 17."

 

[tevion5]

As an apple and PPC fan I really appreciate this geekiness. But I gotta say this is sort of sacrificing good writing for a chance to nerd off. I mean, if I wrote a short story with an extract like this in it back in school I'd get a big angry underline from my English teacher

 

[Hrududu]

Not sure why he went into so much detail and managed to fabricate RAM totals that really don't make any sense. Where are these mythical 292MB and 420MB sticks of memory? lol

 

[\-V-/]

If I read that in a book it would be incredibly irritating. Reminds me of basically ANY episode of NCIS. I don't know how anyone can watch that show without gouging out their eyes.

 

[Hack5190]

Sadly Stieg Larsson died before any of his books were published. Similar to the # of licks needed to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop Drop, the world may never know.

 

[happyfrappy]

The later Aluminum models(which I think came out in 2002) came in 12", 15", and 17."

The 15" TiPowerBook G4 remained in the lineup until Fall 2003, the first 12"/17" Alu PowerBook G4 models used the shortest supported GeForce4 420/440 which lacked Core Image support and clamshell/2nd display mode was slow in comparison of the TiBook's Radeon 9000 at certain higher resolutions.

Not sure why he went into so much detail and managed to fabricate RAM totals that really don't make any sense. Where are these mythical 292MB and 420MB sticks of memory? lol

Maybe the writer was a Windows user counting/subtracting the GPU VRAM as many low-end portable PCs of that era typically had shared memory Intel IGPs.
On my old Thinkpad T61 if you turned it on when it was still in stock form(1GB of RAM), it only had 960MB usable after the Intel IGP X3100/GMA965 ate 64MB of memory... use a 2nd monitor and it would balloon to 256MB of shared VRAM

 

[tevion5]

If I read that in a book it would be incredibly irritating. Reminds me of basically ANY episode of NCIS. I don't know how anyone can watch that show without gouging out their eyes.

*glaces at desktop*

"Oh look a twelve core."

"Yeah I have the high score in basically every MMO"

 

[bunnspecial]

If I read that in a book it would be incredibly irritating. Reminds me of basically ANY episode of NCIS. I don't know how anyone can watch that show without gouging out their eyes.

I was reviewing my thesis earlier(we're trying to-finally-publish one of the chapters) and it's painful how many technicalities I went into when writing that. Of course, it's par for the course in scientific writing(i.e. .5µL of the the sample were injected into an Agilent 7890 Gas Chromatograph attached to an Agilent 7963 Mass Selective Detector. A splitless injection was used etc etc etc) but still can make for painfully boring reading.

 

[Hack5190]

I was reviewing my thesis earlier(we're trying to-finally-publish one of the chapters) and it's painful how many technicalities I went into when writing that. Of course, it's par for the course in scientific writing(i.e. .5µL of the the sample were injected into an Agilent 7890 Gas Chromatograph attached to an Agilent 7963 Mass Selective Detector. A splitless injection was used etc etc etc) but still can make for painfully boring reading.

Have you read "The Martian"? A lot of technical details that they just happened to remove in the movie.

 

[\-V-/]

*glaces at desktop*

"Oh look a twelve core."

"Yeah I have the high score in basically every MMO"

*twitch, twitch*

 

[LordeOurMother]

If I read that in a book it would be incredibly irritating. Reminds me of basically ANY episode of NCIS. I don't know how anyone can watch that show without gouging out their eyes.

Let's be honest. ALL tv shows and movies basically get computers 100% wrong.

 

[\-V-/]

Let's be honest. ALL tv shows and movies basically get computers 100% wrong.

NCIS takes the cake though. My favorite was when they were both using the computer keyboard at the same time for DOUBLE THE HACKING POWERRRRR.

 

[LordeOurMother]

NCIS takes the cake though. My favorite was when they were both using the computer keyboard at the same time for DOUBLE THE HACKING POWERRRRR.

LOL. You're joking?
My grandparents love NCIS. My grandmother is only decentish at computers and even she says those law shows misrepresent computers completely. She just suspends disbelief.

My grandfather on the other hand, who has never touched a computer in his life, is completely fooled by these shows and thinks you can get access to anything you want on the computer. "Pull up the lottery numbers," for example.
He's also scared of us googling anything or buying on amazon because apparently hackers are out to target us specifically every moment of the day.

It's quite amusing really. He's an awesome guy though.

 

[jbarley]

Let's be honest. ALL tv shows and movies basically get computers 100% wrong.

Come on guys it's called entertainment, no different then all the "lead" bullets they shoot that somehow manage to create "sparks" when they hit something.

 

[\-V-/]

LOL. You're joking?

No, I am not joking. :/

 

[LordeOurMother]

Come on guys it's called entertainment, no different then all the "lead" bullets they shoot that somehow manage to create "sparks" when they hit something.

I know I know I know. BUT IT'S FUNNY TO MAKE FUN OF.

No, I am not joking. :/

Oh my gosh it's so bad it's good. lol.

 

[\-V-/]

Oh my gosh it's so bad it's good. lol.

At least Mr. Robot is fairly accurate. I can actually watch that show without wanting to gouge out my eyes.

 

[Possumgal]

That computer mess extends to all those crime shows that show detectives viewing surveillance cam videos. Just fire up Photoshop CSI and you can get a license plate a mile away to show up crystal clear.

 

[Cory5412]

Don't forget that it's a license plate a mile away from the reflection of somebody's sunglasses.

I'm normally fine with excessive tech details in my fiction. Early drafts of things I write tend to be that way as well, primarily because I find it interesting. If I ever brought anything closer to a publication-ready state, I'd probably pull most of the specific tech details out. Most people don't care what specific laptop a person has, and there's relatively little way or reason to make that an important plot point, other than perhaps about a quarter the way through book 2, an accident happened and the character needed to get a new one.

I remember getting a kick from the technology references in the Millennium Trilogy. I have yet to read the new one, but I hope that it's similarly thick with exactly which commands Lisbeth is running to tether the Ericsson phone in the air vent to her Palm or Mac.

I admittedly didn't notice or remember the weird RAM numbers. Interestingly, at the time these were written and set, the Windows notebook market hadn't really started using IGPs yet. I think the first ThinkPad to use an integrated graphics chip was the G40 in June 2003. An X or T series (Lisbeth wouldn't have been caught dead with a G series) would have used a discrete GPU. The X24 and X30 both had 8/16 meg Radeon 7000s. So, the GPUs weren't good, but they were discrete GPUs, even in the 12-inch UltraPortable system.