Apple has had "palm detection" in their touchpads for a while now, even before the MacBooks. The touchpads on Macs are just different than anything I've ever used on a PC. The feel different, they behave differently. They are more accurate, less "grippy", and they don't do weird annoying things. Also, they now have multi-touch support, which effectively removes the need for more mouse buttons. The best description of the touchpad on a Mac is probably that they are hard to use by accident, and very easy to use on purpose. Before switching to the MacBook I had several PC laptops (Thinkpad T23 and T40, a Sony Vaio, and a GamePC desktop replacement (worst computer purchasing mistake I ever made btw)). I have also used an obnoxious number of other laptops (whether borrowing them, helping someone with them, etc). There is a wide range of touchpads out there, but the only one I've ever actually enjoyed using enough to leave the trackball home is the one on my MacBook Pro.
I couldn't stand the Trackpoint. I hate touching it. I hate when my fingers accidentally brush it. After a while I just bought a trackball and started dragging it everywhere with me. (Yes...I use trackballs instead of mice, so this is sort of "Pot to Kettle..."). As for the "accidentally brushing the Touchpad," it's a non-issue on the MacBook Pro.
Haha, well, if you actually like the nipple I guess you're stuck. I can't understand why people like them, is it like a cult or something? I had a T-23 for 2 years and a T-40 for 2 years, both had their hard drives replaced multiple times, the T-40 had it's entirety replaced separately. Both died completely after their respective warranties expired. To be fair I used them pretty much every waking moment of every day and brought them everywhere with me. But to be even more fair, so did my brother, and he still has that iBook.
When I went to college I got a Thinkpad, my brother got an iBook. My Thinkpad barely made it through 2 years, my brother still uses his iBook (this is now ~6 years later). A year ago I relented and bought myself a MacBook Pro, today's Lenovo Thinkpads don't even compare. A couple people at my office have the new Thinkpads, but far more now have MacBooks or MacBook Pros. It has nothing to do with PC vs. Mac, Apple simply makes excellent machines. For the record, my office is a Windows XP only shop, so all those Mac owners are running XP on their macs (at least at work).
I wish I had this when I was in high school. I knew what I wanted to do with my life well before I was in high school, but I had to wait until college for that to matter. I hated high school mostly because it wasn't focused on what I was interested in.
I hope they don't listen to all the people bashing the MacBook Pro keyboard. I *love* mine, and don't want it to change. It's significantly better than any of the last 3 laptops I've had, and better than any other laptop keyboard I've ever used (at least if you only count reasonably sized laptops and not those DTR monstrosities). That goes for the trackpad too. The trackpad on the MBP is spectacular, and the one button issue becomes a non-issue very quickly. I'm not a fan of trackpads or single-button input devices in general, but I have grown to love the MBP trackpad over the last year.
As a point of reference, at home and at work I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard and a trackball (logitech marble mouse at work, Kensington Expert mouse at home).
I have a very similar setup. I have an Expert Mouse at home, a Trackman Marble for my laptop, and another Trackman Marble at my office. I've also got an old translucent green MacAlly mechanical trackball kicking around somewhere. I hate mice, I love trackballs.
Fair enough. My experience was just the opposite, though seemingly with similar results. My wife and I had sex very soon after we first met (as teenagers) and did not get married until 5 years later. We seem to have avoided all of the same issues in any case. (Yay anecdotal evidence!)
I'd definitely believe mine was defective if I wasn't surrounded by other people who have similar problems with similar and identical phones. I keep my screen brightness down to the lowest visible setting, and extraneous features like Blue Tooth off. I'm lucky to make it through the day with any charge left. I'm also often on the go without time or a place to charge it for more than 24 hours. I've used it in every major metropolitan area in the US and had the same problems universally, the signal strength can't be bad everywhere. I'll pull the battery during all my flights and still not make it through a weekend. I've also had fun experiences where I can't make or receive calls, but I can still go online and check my email (which of course is hell because the phone is so slow that even with EvDO it takes forever and crashes often during the middle of sending or receiving mail). I'll drop a call, and I can't call back, but I can get on AIM and respond. Of course the AIM client tends to crash the phone, so it's not a great solution.
That said, there are two huge things I'd miss about the Treo if I switched to the iPhone. First and foremost, the ability to use my phone as a modem. That's the one great thing about the Treo, it makes a great modem. The second is an ssh client. Second only because if I can use my phone as a modem I can get away without an ssh client on the phone itself. Those are the only two things holding me back from throwing my treo off a bridge and buying an iPhone.
In any case that's it, that's the Treo's one redeeming quality, it makes a good modem. Unfortunately for me, that's also one of the most important features of a phone, so I remain chained to my Treo for now. I honestly can't believe it could be that much better running windows mobile, but I'll have to reserve my judgment because I've never actually seen someone with a Treo running windows mobile...which is odd because I've seen a lot of Treos.
Same reason you'd buy the Nano (ie the reason I own a Nano). You're way too paranoid to carry around something with a harddrive in it, so solid state is the only option. Sure you're limited in size, but that's the price you pay for not trusting tiny spinning discs.
Whenever I see the word Treo, I feel obliged to point out how terrible it is. The Treo is terrible at everything it does. It is very slow and crashes all the time. It's a terrible phone, it's a terrible pda, and god help anyone who thinks using it as a music player (pTunes...) is a good idea. I own a 700p. Even with the extended battery I can't get more than 24 hours of standby time. If I actually use the phone that goes to nothing really fast. Using the email client or the web browser will kill the battery in under an hour. As I've said numerous times in other places, a lot of people at my office have treo's ranging from the 650 to the 755 (all p's, don't know how much greener the grass is on the w side...) and they invariably hate them. Not saying the iPhone is the be-all-end-all, but I've yet to meet someone who really liked their smartphone. Addicted? Sure, that's why I still have this godforsaken thing, but there is no joy in using it. Smartphones today are like heroin. They become addictive almost immediately, and once you're hooked you need your fix just to stay alive, no matter how bad it is.
I've never had my interest in a topic wane over something as trivial as a spelling or grammar error. Sure, it could mean the writer is a moron, but it could also occur for plenty of other reasons (non-native language, simple mistake, self-proofreading, being raised in a certain way, etc). I personally don't even notice spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm reading for the idea, not the syntax of the writing. Unlike a compiler, I can figure out what you meant when you misplaced a word or punctuation mark or two. All you need to do is get your point across. If you can do that, it doesn't really matter how you did it.
I've honestly seen a lot of people in clubs with treo's clipped to their hip. Frankly, I've just seen a lot of people with Treo's this year. Considering that the Treo is one of the worst phones out there (I own a 700p, and as per previous posts, my office is filled with examples ranging from the 650 to the 755p, universally hated by their respective owners), I find this completely odd. If that many people are buying Treo's, I think the iPhone should have no problem selling. Most of the people I know who are buying iPhones (3, out of 4) are buying them to replace Treo's that they have owned for less than a year.
I really don't get people who are afraid of banks and credit cards. Do you think that cash is somehow guaranteed while the money in your bank account or on your credit card isn't? The value of cash is tied to your government. Sure, in the US it *seems* pretty secure, but that doesn't mean it is. Plenty of countries throughout history have seen the value of their cash drop to nothing (a wheelbarrow full of Deutsch Marks for a loaf of bread anyone?). Unless you've got gold and diamonds in a safe in your house, your money is never guaranteed to be valuable. So get over yourself and get a checking account and a credit card. You're honestly just putting yourself behind by not having them. If you can't handle the responsibility of keeping track of your finances and paying your credit card bills on time, then you're just as lost with cash as you'll be with anything else. Also, it's much better to have no cash and some credit than to have no cash and no credit. Always remember, "he who dies with the most debt wins."
Between the end of November and the beginning of December 2006, 9 people at my office bought new laptops. Every single one of them bought a macbook pro. All completely independently, all who work at a 100% windows shop, and 8 of them had never used a mac before. Even the CEO, who spends every waking moment with her laptop, has been a dell fan for years, and openly hates Macs, ended up buying a macbook pro. How did this happen? It was pretty simple, each of them went to a bunch of sites (dell, hp, lenovo, sony, etc) and priced out the machine they would want, and then for kicks, each went to apple and priced a macbook with similar specs. In every single case the macbook came out ahead by a considerable amount. Enough to convince people who would never buy a mac to buy one, even if they were just going to install windows on it and use it as a PC. Since then, many more have bought macbooks and macbook pros. Every couple weeks someone else pops up with one. I'm guessing this is why Apple's laptop sales grew nearly 100% in the last year.
I'm confused. I'll give you the animal sacrifice, and I'll give you that anti-American religions can preach violence on our own soil, but how does your agreeing that the mormons should be able to "do their thing" make it so? My statement is not "totally false" by that alone, and that's not even counting the human sacrifice thing. (How about human sacrifice where the victim is a willing participant? How about ritual suicide? That's still freedom of self, and it is not legal).
As far as "they're not hurting anybody" goes, that depends greatly on your point of view. Sure, they refrain from directly physically causing harm to other humans (for the most part) and if that's the only hurt you're considering, then that's that. It could be argued that inciting others to violence or teaching people (especially children) falsehoods that cause them to make bad decisions in life (causing harm to themselves and others) counts as hurting people.
We live in a land of hypocrisy and majority rule. We have some semblance of freedom, vastly more than many other places out there, but your freedom ends when you stray too far from the mainstream. You're not free, you're just in a huge yard with an invisible fence and a few good hiding places.
"And while you're not exactly right that this could only happen in the US, it is one of the few places where people are allowed, unafraid, and unashamed to practice religion."
Not quite. If people were truly allowed to practice their religion unafraid and unashamed we wouldn't be hunting down fundamentalist mormons for practicing polygamy. Honestly, for one reason or another, there are religions we do not allow (what if they wanted to practice animal, or even human sacrifice?). We really only allow the "free" practice of religions that people are vaguely comfortable with. Honestly, there are a lot of people in the US who don't really believe that there are any Americans who aren't "Christian." You do have some choice of religions in America (mostly different denominations of Christianity), but you do not have freedom of religion.
I was hooked on 3ware cards until I tried an Areca board. 3ware makes good cards, Areca makes amazing ones. I've put together a lot of small RAID5 systems (between 4 and 12 drives) and they all work great, but the Areca cards are much faster, both in terms of throughput, and in terms of rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
I used the same case and put together a 3.5TB RAID5 array with 12 drives almost a year ago. I spent $2700 total, and almost $900 of that was on an Areca 12-port SATA-II PCIe RAID5 board. The machine is running gentoo linux and the array filesystem is XFS. It works beautifully. I played with Solaris 10 and ZFS a bit on my AMD64 desktop a couple months ago, but for now I'll stick with hardware RAID. I've also got a few Sun boxes around (a few Ultra2's and an E4500). None of them have much local storage, so I haven't played with ZFS on them. I mostly use them for experimenting with parallel programming stuff (the Ultra2's have 2x400Mhz UltraSPARC II's with 4MB of cache apiece and 2GB of ram, the E4500 has 8x400Mhz UltraSPARC II's with 8MB of cache apiece and 8GB of ram).
Back to the point, I like where ZFS is going, and I can see it working for personal storage and even small to medium business storage, especially if the rumors of it being supported by OS X leopard are true. For the moment, for most people, I'd still recommend a hardware RAID5 for smaller arrays (12 or fewer discs). Your odds of losing more than one disc at a time are pretty low, you can easily hot-swap a new drive in and keep going, and an array of that size isn't too bad to backup (or even replicate with an entire hot-spare array). If you're a small company, or a startup, or for any other reason have a very limited IT budget, this is a very feasible solution, than can in some cases appear as reliable as a much more expensive solution for a while.
"What consumer-level apps out there really need more processing power than a single core of a modern CPU can provide?"
Are you serious? Until EVERYTHING happens instantly, computers aren't fast enough. For some people, that won't even be fast enough. My dear mother is a prime example. She was a sys admin in the early 80's when I was growing up, and I would always hear her complaining "this thing is so fucking slow." Later on she had a 486, a Pentium, a Pentium MMX, an Athlon, an Athlon XP, an Athlon64, and she now has a dual core Athlon64 X2 5600 with 4GB of ram. What hasn't changed in all that time? "This thing is so fucking slow." (Note, the computer does most things near-instantly). I don't think computers will ever have "enough" processing power. People will just continue to demand more forever and ever. Faster disk IO would help too.
As for the topic at hand, parallel programming isn't that hard, stop wasting time complaining and just do it.
It's a tad bit more expensive than Torque, and the development environment is Mac based, but Unity is awesome. It can make executables for OS X and Windows, as well as making use of a web-browser plugin for 3D in a web browser. It's filled with features and gaining more all the time, it's easy to install, easy to learn, easy to use, easy to update, and all around easy to get going with. It supports programming and scripting in many different languages, it supports all kinds of plugins. It gives you extensive control of shaders. It has an intuitive interface that allows you to string different parts together (models, textures, scripts, shaders, physics packages, etc) to make more complex things. It supports realtime updates of files from external applications like Maya and Photoshop (edit you model, edit your texture, it's there in engine as soon as you save, no need to reload anything or restart anything). Also, no need to export to any specific format, Unity can load the native file formats of most external programs that people use to make assets. Even if you don't use it, Unity is worth checking out, just so you're aware of what's possible.
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Apple has had "palm detection" in their touchpads for a while now, even before the MacBooks. The touchpads on Macs are just different than anything I've ever used on a PC. The feel different, they behave differently. They are more accurate, less "grippy", and they don't do weird annoying things. Also, they now have multi-touch support, which effectively removes the need for more mouse buttons. The best description of the touchpad on a Mac is probably that they are hard to use by accident, and very easy to use on purpose. Before switching to the MacBook I had several PC laptops (Thinkpad T23 and T40, a Sony Vaio, and a GamePC desktop replacement (worst computer purchasing mistake I ever made btw)). I have also used an obnoxious number of other laptops (whether borrowing them, helping someone with them, etc). There is a wide range of touchpads out there, but the only one I've ever actually enjoyed using enough to leave the trackball home is the one on my MacBook Pro.
I couldn't stand the Trackpoint. I hate touching it. I hate when my fingers accidentally brush it. After a while I just bought a trackball and started dragging it everywhere with me. (Yes...I use trackballs instead of mice, so this is sort of "Pot to Kettle..."). As for the "accidentally brushing the Touchpad," it's a non-issue on the MacBook Pro.
Haha, well, if you actually like the nipple I guess you're stuck. I can't understand why people like them, is it like a cult or something? I had a T-23 for 2 years and a T-40 for 2 years, both had their hard drives replaced multiple times, the T-40 had it's entirety replaced separately. Both died completely after their respective warranties expired. To be fair I used them pretty much every waking moment of every day and brought them everywhere with me. But to be even more fair, so did my brother, and he still has that iBook.
When I went to college I got a Thinkpad, my brother got an iBook. My Thinkpad barely made it through 2 years, my brother still uses his iBook (this is now ~6 years later). A year ago I relented and bought myself a MacBook Pro, today's Lenovo Thinkpads don't even compare. A couple people at my office have the new Thinkpads, but far more now have MacBooks or MacBook Pros. It has nothing to do with PC vs. Mac, Apple simply makes excellent machines. For the record, my office is a Windows XP only shop, so all those Mac owners are running XP on their macs (at least at work).
I wish I had this when I was in high school. I knew what I wanted to do with my life well before I was in high school, but I had to wait until college for that to matter. I hated high school mostly because it wasn't focused on what I was interested in.
I hope they don't listen to all the people bashing the MacBook Pro keyboard. I *love* mine, and don't want it to change. It's significantly better than any of the last 3 laptops I've had, and better than any other laptop keyboard I've ever used (at least if you only count reasonably sized laptops and not those DTR monstrosities). That goes for the trackpad too. The trackpad on the MBP is spectacular, and the one button issue becomes a non-issue very quickly. I'm not a fan of trackpads or single-button input devices in general, but I have grown to love the MBP trackpad over the last year.
As a point of reference, at home and at work I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard and a trackball (logitech marble mouse at work, Kensington Expert mouse at home).
I have a very similar setup. I have an Expert Mouse at home, a Trackman Marble for my laptop, and another Trackman Marble at my office. I've also got an old translucent green MacAlly mechanical trackball kicking around somewhere. I hate mice, I love trackballs.
Fair enough. My experience was just the opposite, though seemingly with similar results. My wife and I had sex very soon after we first met (as teenagers) and did not get married until 5 years later. We seem to have avoided all of the same issues in any case. (Yay anecdotal evidence!)
"It was one of the best decisions we ever made"
Not to pry, but... how do you know?
I'd definitely believe mine was defective if I wasn't surrounded by other people who have similar problems with similar and identical phones. I keep my screen brightness down to the lowest visible setting, and extraneous features like Blue Tooth off. I'm lucky to make it through the day with any charge left. I'm also often on the go without time or a place to charge it for more than 24 hours. I've used it in every major metropolitan area in the US and had the same problems universally, the signal strength can't be bad everywhere. I'll pull the battery during all my flights and still not make it through a weekend. I've also had fun experiences where I can't make or receive calls, but I can still go online and check my email (which of course is hell because the phone is so slow that even with EvDO it takes forever and crashes often during the middle of sending or receiving mail). I'll drop a call, and I can't call back, but I can get on AIM and respond. Of course the AIM client tends to crash the phone, so it's not a great solution.
That said, there are two huge things I'd miss about the Treo if I switched to the iPhone. First and foremost, the ability to use my phone as a modem. That's the one great thing about the Treo, it makes a great modem. The second is an ssh client. Second only because if I can use my phone as a modem I can get away without an ssh client on the phone itself. Those are the only two things holding me back from throwing my treo off a bridge and buying an iPhone.
In any case that's it, that's the Treo's one redeeming quality, it makes a good modem. Unfortunately for me, that's also one of the most important features of a phone, so I remain chained to my Treo for now. I honestly can't believe it could be that much better running windows mobile, but I'll have to reserve my judgment because I've never actually seen someone with a Treo running windows mobile...which is odd because I've seen a lot of Treos.
Same reason you'd buy the Nano (ie the reason I own a Nano). You're way too paranoid to carry around something with a harddrive in it, so solid state is the only option. Sure you're limited in size, but that's the price you pay for not trusting tiny spinning discs.
Whenever I see the word Treo, I feel obliged to point out how terrible it is. The Treo is terrible at everything it does. It is very slow and crashes all the time. It's a terrible phone, it's a terrible pda, and god help anyone who thinks using it as a music player (pTunes...) is a good idea. I own a 700p. Even with the extended battery I can't get more than 24 hours of standby time. If I actually use the phone that goes to nothing really fast. Using the email client or the web browser will kill the battery in under an hour. As I've said numerous times in other places, a lot of people at my office have treo's ranging from the 650 to the 755 (all p's, don't know how much greener the grass is on the w side...) and they invariably hate them. Not saying the iPhone is the be-all-end-all, but I've yet to meet someone who really liked their smartphone. Addicted? Sure, that's why I still have this godforsaken thing, but there is no joy in using it. Smartphones today are like heroin. They become addictive almost immediately, and once you're hooked you need your fix just to stay alive, no matter how bad it is.
I've never had my interest in a topic wane over something as trivial as a spelling or grammar error. Sure, it could mean the writer is a moron, but it could also occur for plenty of other reasons (non-native language, simple mistake, self-proofreading, being raised in a certain way, etc). I personally don't even notice spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm reading for the idea, not the syntax of the writing. Unlike a compiler, I can figure out what you meant when you misplaced a word or punctuation mark or two. All you need to do is get your point across. If you can do that, it doesn't really matter how you did it.
I've honestly seen a lot of people in clubs with treo's clipped to their hip. Frankly, I've just seen a lot of people with Treo's this year. Considering that the Treo is one of the worst phones out there (I own a 700p, and as per previous posts, my office is filled with examples ranging from the 650 to the 755p, universally hated by their respective owners), I find this completely odd. If that many people are buying Treo's, I think the iPhone should have no problem selling. Most of the people I know who are buying iPhones (3, out of 4) are buying them to replace Treo's that they have owned for less than a year.
I really don't get people who are afraid of banks and credit cards. Do you think that cash is somehow guaranteed while the money in your bank account or on your credit card isn't? The value of cash is tied to your government. Sure, in the US it *seems* pretty secure, but that doesn't mean it is. Plenty of countries throughout history have seen the value of their cash drop to nothing (a wheelbarrow full of Deutsch Marks for a loaf of bread anyone?). Unless you've got gold and diamonds in a safe in your house, your money is never guaranteed to be valuable. So get over yourself and get a checking account and a credit card. You're honestly just putting yourself behind by not having them. If you can't handle the responsibility of keeping track of your finances and paying your credit card bills on time, then you're just as lost with cash as you'll be with anything else. Also, it's much better to have no cash and some credit than to have no cash and no credit. Always remember, "he who dies with the most debt wins."
Between the end of November and the beginning of December 2006, 9 people at my office bought new laptops. Every single one of them bought a macbook pro. All completely independently, all who work at a 100% windows shop, and 8 of them had never used a mac before. Even the CEO, who spends every waking moment with her laptop, has been a dell fan for years, and openly hates Macs, ended up buying a macbook pro. How did this happen? It was pretty simple, each of them went to a bunch of sites (dell, hp, lenovo, sony, etc) and priced out the machine they would want, and then for kicks, each went to apple and priced a macbook with similar specs. In every single case the macbook came out ahead by a considerable amount. Enough to convince people who would never buy a mac to buy one, even if they were just going to install windows on it and use it as a PC. Since then, many more have bought macbooks and macbook pros. Every couple weeks someone else pops up with one. I'm guessing this is why Apple's laptop sales grew nearly 100% in the last year.
I'm confused. I'll give you the animal sacrifice, and I'll give you that anti-American religions can preach violence on our own soil, but how does your agreeing that the mormons should be able to "do their thing" make it so? My statement is not "totally false" by that alone, and that's not even counting the human sacrifice thing. (How about human sacrifice where the victim is a willing participant? How about ritual suicide? That's still freedom of self, and it is not legal).
As far as "they're not hurting anybody" goes, that depends greatly on your point of view. Sure, they refrain from directly physically causing harm to other humans (for the most part) and if that's the only hurt you're considering, then that's that. It could be argued that inciting others to violence or teaching people (especially children) falsehoods that cause them to make bad decisions in life (causing harm to themselves and others) counts as hurting people.
We live in a land of hypocrisy and majority rule. We have some semblance of freedom, vastly more than many other places out there, but your freedom ends when you stray too far from the mainstream. You're not free, you're just in a huge yard with an invisible fence and a few good hiding places.
"And while you're not exactly right that this could only happen in the US, it is one of the few places where people are allowed, unafraid, and unashamed to practice religion."
Not quite. If people were truly allowed to practice their religion unafraid and unashamed we wouldn't be hunting down fundamentalist mormons for practicing polygamy. Honestly, for one reason or another, there are religions we do not allow (what if they wanted to practice animal, or even human sacrifice?). We really only allow the "free" practice of religions that people are vaguely comfortable with. Honestly, there are a lot of people in the US who don't really believe that there are any Americans who aren't "Christian." You do have some choice of religions in America (mostly different denominations of Christianity), but you do not have freedom of religion.
That's a lot longer than my Treo 700p lasts, even with the extended battery. And the treo's interface sucks and it crashes all the time.
I was hooked on 3ware cards until I tried an Areca board. 3ware makes good cards, Areca makes amazing ones. I've put together a lot of small RAID5 systems (between 4 and 12 drives) and they all work great, but the Areca cards are much faster, both in terms of throughput, and in terms of rebuilding an array after a drive failure.
Maybe if you did a little reading of readily available information before posting you could have avoided posting altogether.
I used the same case and put together a 3.5TB RAID5 array with 12 drives almost a year ago. I spent $2700 total, and almost $900 of that was on an Areca 12-port SATA-II PCIe RAID5 board. The machine is running gentoo linux and the array filesystem is XFS. It works beautifully. I played with Solaris 10 and ZFS a bit on my AMD64 desktop a couple months ago, but for now I'll stick with hardware RAID. I've also got a few Sun boxes around (a few Ultra2's and an E4500). None of them have much local storage, so I haven't played with ZFS on them. I mostly use them for experimenting with parallel programming stuff (the Ultra2's have 2x400Mhz UltraSPARC II's with 4MB of cache apiece and 2GB of ram, the E4500 has 8x400Mhz UltraSPARC II's with 8MB of cache apiece and 8GB of ram).
Back to the point, I like where ZFS is going, and I can see it working for personal storage and even small to medium business storage, especially if the rumors of it being supported by OS X leopard are true. For the moment, for most people, I'd still recommend a hardware RAID5 for smaller arrays (12 or fewer discs). Your odds of losing more than one disc at a time are pretty low, you can easily hot-swap a new drive in and keep going, and an array of that size isn't too bad to backup (or even replicate with an entire hot-spare array). If you're a small company, or a startup, or for any other reason have a very limited IT budget, this is a very feasible solution, than can in some cases appear as reliable as a much more expensive solution for a while.
Then you don't know what ZFS is.
"What consumer-level apps out there really need more processing power than a single core of a modern CPU can provide?"
Are you serious? Until EVERYTHING happens instantly, computers aren't fast enough. For some people, that won't even be fast enough. My dear mother is a prime example. She was a sys admin in the early 80's when I was growing up, and I would always hear her complaining "this thing is so fucking slow." Later on she had a 486, a Pentium, a Pentium MMX, an Athlon, an Athlon XP, an Athlon64, and she now has a dual core Athlon64 X2 5600 with 4GB of ram. What hasn't changed in all that time? "This thing is so fucking slow." (Note, the computer does most things near-instantly). I don't think computers will ever have "enough" processing power. People will just continue to demand more forever and ever. Faster disk IO would help too.
As for the topic at hand, parallel programming isn't that hard, stop wasting time complaining and just do it.
It's a tad bit more expensive than Torque, and the development environment is Mac based, but Unity is awesome. It can make executables for OS X and Windows, as well as making use of a web-browser plugin for 3D in a web browser. It's filled with features and gaining more all the time, it's easy to install, easy to learn, easy to use, easy to update, and all around easy to get going with. It supports programming and scripting in many different languages, it supports all kinds of plugins. It gives you extensive control of shaders. It has an intuitive interface that allows you to string different parts together (models, textures, scripts, shaders, physics packages, etc) to make more complex things. It supports realtime updates of files from external applications like Maya and Photoshop (edit you model, edit your texture, it's there in engine as soon as you save, no need to reload anything or restart anything). Also, no need to export to any specific format, Unity can load the native file formats of most external programs that people use to make assets. Even if you don't use it, Unity is worth checking out, just so you're aware of what's possible.