How do they fly inverted if it isn't? How does that wind up toy plane with balsa planks for wings fly if it isn't fiction? How would any aircraft with a symmetrical airfoil like the F-16, or the Pitts Special fly? What about a hang glider?
All plays fly by deflecting air down. A curved surface deflects a flow of fluid the old blowing out a candle behind the light bulb trick is a great example. BTW gases and liquids are both fluids.
If the old simplification that the air over the top of a classic airfoil generates lift because it has to travel a longer distance than the air over the top where true then an airfoil where the top was a series of bumps and dips would make a lot of lift, It doesn't.
There is more pressure under the wing because the wing is pushing the air down. It is actually thrust.
How ever the simple version of how an airfoil works does work just fine until you try to make a very efficient aircraft. Sort of like how Newtonian physics works just fine until you get in the extremes.
The other thing that most people don't know is that scale means a lot. An airfoil that works great on a plane B-17 will not work on a well at all on a hand thrown glider. The size of the wing and the speed really effect the way airfoils work. For most people this is all a lot more than they need to know.
The shame is that you could see I Love Lucie in HD. The older TV shows I think where shot on film. Those could be remastered as HD. Show that came later and where shot on Video tape are the ones that are stuck in SDTV.
What I really want is TMC in HD. I love old movies but those will not be coming to HD anytime soon.
You see I live in a place that has a lot of sunlight but it only gets down into the 80s at night and has high humidity. You could and probably do use large thermal masses to moderate the temperature in your home. Not an option for me. On the plus side the water table for me is only about 12 ft below the ground so it takes a lot less power to pump water out of a well plus we get a lot of rain so we could use a cistern for water storage. Of course windmills are ideal for pumping water since you can use a storage tank and pump as much water as you want when the wind blows. What I would love to see is every new home have a small PV panel on the roof. Even if it is only a 100 watt panel. That could help drive prices down as economy of scale kicks in and every little bit helps. As the cost goes down the requirement goes up. Hook them all on to the grid and you could have a few fewer coal plants being built. My big contribution to the environment are the simple ones. I bought a new car and picked a nice little Mazda 3 hatchback, I car pool with my wife to work, and I have gone to all CF lights.
I still hope to get a smallish pickup truck. I will still carpool with my wife but the truck would be handy for small weekend trips to Homedepo for mulch, compost, and garden stuff:)
All "lift" is generated by down wash. All that low pressure on top of the wind and high pressure on the bottom is just a convent fiction to make the math easy. As to how efficient this is. I don't know it may have a lot of advantages at low Reynolds number but totally fall apart at higher ones. In other words it may be the bee's knees for a small drone but fail totally for a replacement for a Blackhawk.
That is because no one cool uses Google for searching anymore! MSN search is the new Google just as the Zune is the new IPod. You are like so out if it. So sell off your Wii and Nintendo DS and get a cool PSP and PS3 like the rest of us.
But do you have Air Conditioning? That always seemed like the biggest energy since and the one that makes going totally solar not practical where I live. Now if we could just find someplace that was always sunny and cool:)
Great but... It costs about 30,000 to 60,000 dollars to install a roof full of solar cells that might on a sunny day produce enough power for an average home. I don't know where you live but it is unlikely that you could cover the labor of putting up a bunch of solar cells for for only $500 much less make the cells. Then even if you had all the homes covered with cells how are you going to store it at night? What about in the winter when much of the north will be very short of solar power? I just don't don't understand your post. It seems like you are saying if we could make solar cells for less then the cost of plywood then our energy worries would be over. Well yes they would and if we could build fusion reactors for less then we the cost of an IPod then we would solve the energy problem. Now tell me how to build a 2Kw Solar power system for $500 without using Moore's law which doesn't apply to solar power cells.
Wouldn't a Quadro or a FireGL make a lot more sense in one of these machines instead of one of the Crossfire line? Those are the cards I see most often in workstations.
No I am not. I programmed on the 68k. Man that was a nice chip compared to Intel systems of the time. I never got to use 32032 from National Semiconductors but I heard that it was also much nicer to program than Intel which wouldn't be hard. Then you had the ARM which was just getting started. So many better choices so few left today.
You must be young. The 386 was so much better than the mess that was the 8086 and the super mess that was the 80286. The 386 had an option for flat addressing. Until you have to tell your compiler if you want to small, large or huge mode you just haven't lived.
The X86 ISA is a mess. It is a total pig. It is short on registers and it was just an unpleasant ISA to use from day one. The problem is that it is a bloody fast and cheap pig that runs a ton of software and has billions or trillions of dollars invested in keeping it useful. I am afraid we are stuck with it. At least the X86-64 is a little better.
"But that is a far cry from the claims that some make that it is a waste of money, or that the money is better spent on food as blanket statements." but you see that is the problem. You get blanket statements like the OPLC is a great idea and other that say that it is a total waste. It is really easy to just write a blanket statement and frankly this is slashdot so short messages without depth are to be expected. What I find so sad is that a statement like the OLPC is a waste seem to inspire people that think they are great to jump to the worst possible conclusions. As I said it is often just a difference in view points. If people would spend half the time thinking that they spend shooting off flames maybe we could actually make more progress. I agree with you about Tobacco.
I think RATFOR still predates your prior art:) But man I can feel your pain. Back when I was in college I took a microprocessor course. Back then they used a Heathkit trainer that ran a 6800! with 265 bytes of memory. To program the thing you used a hex keypad to enter in the opcodes. I wrote a cross assembler in FORTRAN that ran on the TRS-80 Model-IIs that they had in the programing lab. I could write my code in assembly and then dump the hex output to the printer. I then wrote a simulator for the 6800 so I could test run and debug my programs before punching the hex. Probably would have been faster to do it all by hand but not as much fun. I used Fortran because I had the compiler from the FORTRAN class I took earlier.
Actually there are many problems. Growth is one but frankly in a lot of third world countries you have a corrupt ore at the best overly bureaucratic governments stopping growth and development. The Congo is a prime example of a country with a lot of valuable natural resources and a lot of misery and poverty. I really wish I was better at writing because my reason for posting wasn't to say the OLPC is a bad idea everywhere or a good idea everywhere. What I was trying to say was that there are logical reasons why a person could feel that the OLPC wasn't the best use of resources and that opinion has nothing to do with racism or arrogance but on an honest difference of opinion on the best way to help people. I don't know all the answers to solving poverty and misery in poor countries. I freely admit that the poorest counties have visited is the Bahamas in the late 80s. So I actually know very little about the problems of the extremely poor nations, except what I read, and hear.
"But all the jobs created in text book printing distribution ect. are jobs that could better be spent doing other things (like educating for example)." Well I think creating the text book is educating. The people making the paper and running the press probably are not qualified to be teachers. It was more an example of how one could think that the OLPC isn't a clear cut "great idea". The real point is that people in the poorest counties need JOBS. They need opportunity. Microloans are a great idea and should be pushed hard but let's face it a very poor country can not jump into making CPUs overnight and as Mother Threasa said, "People need to eat in the short term." Sustainable forestry and paper production can provide some wealth for those countries so they can buy medicine and maybe more schools. Printing can help them distribute news papers, and other useful printed materials. When I am working in my garden I take pamphlets on bugs and fertilizers not my laptop. Paper is sometimes better than computers.
"You ask why not use the local people to write the books and print them? I ask why not use local people to write the lessons in HTML?" You could but then you are not creating jobs in country for the people doing the printing, makeing the paper, growing the trees or plants you make the paper from, harvest the plants or trees that you make the paper from, and distributing the text books. Most of the costs of a text book are profits for the publishers. Printing is cheap and every penny kept in country is less debt and better living conditions for the people in the country. Up to date for Elementary level educations? Basic grammar and spelling doesn't change, elementary level math doesn't change. Even most elementary level science doesn't change a lot. You know plants take in CO2 and produce oxygen. A mouse in a mammal, the Earth goes around the sun... I doubt that most science before say forth of fifth grade get to any science that changes a lot. The entire point was making wasn't that nobody thinks that the OLPC is a good idea but that you can question the value of it without insulting or demeaning the people for the countries that are interested in it.
But if you don't question you will not find the best answer. Frankly the idea of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money flowing into China to make the OLPC seems like a less than ideal situation. Why not pay a little more and build them in say Mexico, Brazil, or any number of countries that are not exactly at the bottom of the economic ladder but also not at the top. That way you would increase their technical level and economy as well?
Sorry but I can beat that prior art. How about RATFOR , pas2c, and the first version of C++? All where preprocessors that translated one high-level language into another.
I don't that the people questioning these laptops are trying to be offensive. The honest question that a lot of them have is simply is this the best use of resources? Just how valuable is a laptop going to be for a child in elementary or middle school. I question if a child in the US needs a laptop before they get to at least seventh grade. Your answer about the right information increasing your yield is correct. However you left out that it was done without computers. In the poorest countries it may make sense to have people going around teaching farmers how to increase their yield. I feel that it would be for the best to try to minimise the amount of chemicals used since those cost money and can increase the debt load of the country. As a replacement for text books wouldn't it be better for the countries involved too write their own and then print their own. If they make their own paper and ink they could keep more of their money in country and create jobs for their own people. To use your language. I assume that just about every country has a at least a few people that could write elementary level textbooks and run a printing press why not use them instead of buying text books from the UK or the US?
In every country including the US a cheap laptop for secondary education sounds very useful but I am not so sure about the OLPC.
Many projects to help poor nations have turned out to be total wastes of money because they where the wrong solution. It isn't offensive to question if the OLPC is the best use of resources the help nations with less resources then the US or the EU. I just worry about a bunch of broken, useless OLPCs sitting around and the money spent on them sitting in a Chinese government bank account. Everybody does know that it is a Chinese company that is going to make them right? I will give Intel some credit. Making their laptop in Brazil will help bring jobs to Brazil and some technical knowledge.
It is a step in the right direction but. Why does it cost more without DRM? Why does it cost more than buying the album? By going digital the record companies don't need to press CDs, Print covers, buy jewel cases, ship CDs to stores, take back unsold CDs.... Why does it cost more to buy a digital copy on-line than at the store? I might still buy some if they have anything I like and don't have on CD but it still seems like a ripe off.
The real point is. What makes OpenOffice better than Office? Forget about price because the cost of software compared to people is small. Forget about the file format because everyone uses Office. I use OpenOffice because it is free but I have an older version of MS Office on my computer at work. I hate to say it but OpenOffice really isn't any better. Office's help system is much better than OO.org's. Graphing in Office is much easier than in OO.org. I recommend OO.org to everyone that has a choice between OO.org and a "free" copy of Office from a friend. I keep hoping that OO.org will do something better then Office someday. In other words I can see your point.
"his definition of "easiest" is rather biased (maybe "easiest for those with a solid experience of Windows"?" Frankly Windows is a standard. Much like the QWERTY keyboard is the standard. There have been other keyboard layouts that are supposed to be easier to learn and faster the the QWERTY keyboard. But if you already know the QWERTY keyboard then that is the easiest to use and learn. I have set average long time Windows users down in front of a Mac OS/X system and they hated it and thought it was harder to use than Windows. These people had only used Windows machines so that is "easy" to use for them. Most people would rather deal with the Devil they know is better than the Angel they don't. It is sad but many Computer "Windows" experts feel that if they can not sit down and make a computer work the way that windows works then it is broken or it just sucks.
I am not saying this is a good thing. I really hate that Windows has become a standard. Heck I an mot thrilled that Linux has become entrenched as the ultimate FOSS OS. Unix is like 40 years old. I would love to see something really new. I would love to see a FOSS OS that was super innovative but I will take what I can get for now.
"750GB is a lot of data," It is but itunes should be dealing with a tiny fraction of this. An MP3 might be three or for megabytes is size. The tag information should be far less than one kilobyte and probably a quarter of that. So let's say that he has 100,000 songs. So at one kilobyte per song runs to a grand total of 100 megabytes of data and 100,000 records in the database. That isn't a big database at all. I have one that I run on an old 300 Mhz P2 using Postgres that has over 400,000 records in a single table. Look uptime for any record is under.1 second using an indexed search of course. SQLite would handle it with NO problem. Heck a good Xbase system could deal with it. The problem with Itunes sounds like XML addiction. I swear people think of XML as the perfect tool for every problem. An XML flat file sucks as a database. Itunes is probably reading it all into memory to parse the file which will most likely cause a thrash unless you have a lot of memory free. It is a fine solution for small datasets but as people here have found it really starts fall apart once the data set gets too big. I haven't gotten into yet but SQLite looks like a great solution for many programs that need some type of data storage but don't need the complexity of a full blown database.
Slashdot Mirror
How do they fly inverted if it isn't? How does that wind up toy plane with balsa planks for wings fly if it isn't fiction? How would any aircraft with a symmetrical airfoil like the F-16, or the Pitts Special fly? What about a hang glider?
All plays fly by deflecting air down. A curved surface deflects a flow of fluid the old blowing out a candle behind the light bulb trick is a great example. BTW gases and liquids are both fluids.
If the old simplification that the air over the top of a classic airfoil generates lift because it has to travel a longer distance than the air over the top where true then an airfoil where the top was a series of bumps and dips would make a lot of lift, It doesn't.
There is more pressure under the wing because the wing is pushing the air down. It is actually thrust.
How ever the simple version of how an airfoil works does work just fine until you try to make a very efficient aircraft. Sort of like how Newtonian physics works just fine until you get in the extremes.
The other thing that most people don't know is that scale means a lot. An airfoil that works great on a plane B-17 will not work on a well at all on a hand thrown glider. The size of the wing and the speed really effect the way airfoils work.
For most people this is all a lot more than they need to know.
The shame is that you could see I Love Lucie in HD. The older TV shows I think where shot on film. Those could be remastered as HD. Show that came later and where shot on Video tape are the ones that are stuck in SDTV.
What I really want is TMC in HD. I love old movies but those will not be coming to HD anytime soon.
You see I live in a place that has a lot of sunlight but it only gets down into the 80s at night and has high humidity. You could and probably do use large thermal masses to moderate the temperature in your home. Not an option for me. On the plus side the water table for me is only about 12 ft below the ground so it takes a lot less power to pump water out of a well plus we get a lot of rain so we could use a cistern for water storage. Of course windmills are ideal for pumping water since you can use a storage tank and pump as much water as you want when the wind blows.
:)
What I would love to see is every new home have a small PV panel on the roof. Even if it is only a 100 watt panel. That could help drive prices down as economy of scale kicks in and every little bit helps. As the cost goes down the requirement goes up. Hook them all on to the grid and you could have a few fewer coal plants being built. My big contribution to the environment are the simple ones. I bought a new car and picked a nice little Mazda 3 hatchback, I car pool with my wife to work, and I have gone to all CF lights.
I still hope to get a smallish pickup truck. I will still carpool with my wife but the truck would be handy for small weekend trips to Homedepo for mulch, compost, and garden stuff
All "lift" is generated by down wash. All that low pressure on top of the wind and high pressure on the bottom is just a convent fiction to make the math easy.
As to how efficient this is. I don't know it may have a lot of advantages at low Reynolds number but totally fall apart at higher ones.
In other words it may be the bee's knees for a small drone but fail totally for a replacement for a Blackhawk.
Naw the 360 is actually a good console from what I hear. I even has some good games.
That is because no one cool uses Google for searching anymore! MSN search is the new Google just as the Zune is the new IPod. You are like so out if it. So sell off your Wii and Nintendo DS and get a cool PSP and PS3 like the rest of us.
But do you have Air Conditioning? That always seemed like the biggest energy since and the one that makes going totally solar not practical where I live. Now if we could just find someplace that was always sunny and cool :)
Great but...
It costs about 30,000 to 60,000 dollars to install a roof full of solar cells that might on a sunny day produce enough power for an average home.
I don't know where you live but it is unlikely that you could cover the labor of putting up a bunch of solar cells for for only $500 much less make the cells.
Then even if you had all the homes covered with cells how are you going to store it at night? What about in the winter when much of the north will be very short of solar power?
I just don't don't understand your post. It seems like you are saying if we could make solar cells for less then the cost of plywood then our energy worries would be over. Well yes they would and if we could build fusion reactors for less then we the cost of an IPod then we would solve the energy problem.
Now tell me how to build a 2Kw Solar power system for $500 without using Moore's law which doesn't apply to solar power cells.
Wouldn't a Quadro or a FireGL make a lot more sense in one of these machines instead of one of the Crossfire line? Those are the cards I see most often in workstations.
No I am not. I programmed on the 68k. Man that was a nice chip compared to Intel systems of the time. I never got to use 32032 from National Semiconductors but I heard that it was also much nicer to program than Intel which wouldn't be hard. Then you had the ARM which was just getting started. So many better choices so few left today.
You must be young. The 386 was so much better than the mess that was the 8086 and the super mess that was the 80286. The 386 had an option for flat addressing. Until you have to tell your compiler if you want to small, large or huge mode you just haven't lived.
The X86 ISA is a mess. It is a total pig. It is short on registers and it was just an unpleasant ISA to use from day one.
The problem is that it is a bloody fast and cheap pig that runs a ton of software and has billions or trillions of dollars invested in keeping it useful. I am afraid we are stuck with it. At least the X86-64 is a little better.
"But that is a far cry from the claims that some make that it is a waste of money, or that the money is better spent on food as blanket statements."
but you see that is the problem. You get blanket statements like the OPLC is a great idea and other that say that it is a total waste. It is really easy to just write a blanket statement and frankly this is slashdot so short messages without depth are to be expected. What I find so sad is that a statement like the OLPC is a waste seem to inspire people that think they are great to jump to the worst possible conclusions. As I said it is often just a difference in view points. If people would spend half the time thinking that they spend shooting off flames maybe we could actually make more progress.
I agree with you about Tobacco.
I think RATFOR still predates your prior art :) But man I can feel your pain. Back when I was in college I took a microprocessor course. Back then they used a Heathkit trainer that ran a 6800! with 265 bytes of memory. To program the thing you used a hex keypad to enter in the opcodes.
I wrote a cross assembler in FORTRAN that ran on the TRS-80 Model-IIs that they had in the programing lab. I could write my code in assembly and then dump the hex output to the printer. I then wrote a simulator for the 6800 so I could test run and debug my programs before punching the hex. Probably would have been faster to do it all by hand but not as much fun. I used Fortran because I had the compiler from the FORTRAN class I took earlier.
Actually there are many problems. Growth is one but frankly in a lot of third world countries you have a corrupt ore at the best overly bureaucratic governments stopping growth and development. The Congo is a prime example of a country with a lot of valuable natural resources and a lot of misery and poverty. I really wish I was better at writing because my reason for posting wasn't to say the OLPC is a bad idea everywhere or a good idea everywhere. What I was trying to say was that there are logical reasons why a person could feel that the OLPC wasn't the best use of resources and that opinion has nothing to do with racism or arrogance but on an honest difference of opinion on the best way to help people. I don't know all the answers to solving poverty and misery in poor countries. I freely admit that the poorest counties have visited is the Bahamas in the late 80s. So I actually know very little about the problems of the extremely poor nations, except what I read, and hear.
"But all the jobs created in text book printing distribution ect. are jobs that could better be spent doing other things (like educating for example)."
Well I think creating the text book is educating. The people making the paper and running the press probably are not qualified to be teachers. It was more an example of how one could think that the OLPC isn't a clear cut "great idea".
The real point is that people in the poorest counties need JOBS. They need opportunity. Microloans are a great idea and should be pushed hard but let's face it a very poor country can not jump into making CPUs overnight and as Mother Threasa said, "People need to eat in the short term." Sustainable forestry and paper production can provide some wealth for those countries so they can buy medicine and maybe more schools. Printing can help them distribute news papers, and other useful printed materials. When I am working in my garden I take pamphlets on bugs and fertilizers not my laptop.
Paper is sometimes better than computers.
"You ask why not use the local people to write the books and print them? I ask why not use local people to write the lessons in HTML?"
You could but then you are not creating jobs in country for the people doing the printing, makeing the paper, growing the trees or plants you make the paper from, harvest the plants or trees that you make the paper from, and distributing the text books. Most of the costs of a text book are profits for the publishers. Printing is cheap and every penny kept in country is less debt and better living conditions for the people in the country.
Up to date for Elementary level educations? Basic grammar and spelling doesn't change, elementary level math doesn't change. Even most elementary level science doesn't change a lot. You know plants take in CO2 and produce oxygen. A mouse in a mammal, the Earth goes around the sun... I doubt that most science before say forth of fifth grade get to any science that changes a lot.
The entire point was making wasn't that nobody thinks that the OLPC is a good idea but that you can question the value of it without insulting or demeaning the people for the countries that are interested in it.
But if you don't question you will not find the best answer. Frankly the idea of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money flowing into China to make the OLPC seems like a less than ideal situation. Why not pay a little more and build them in say Mexico, Brazil, or any number of countries that are not exactly at the bottom of the economic ladder but also not at the top. That way you would increase their technical level and economy as well?
Sorry but I can beat that prior art. How about RATFOR , pas2c, and the first version of C++?
All where preprocessors that translated one high-level language into another.
I don't that the people questioning these laptops are trying to be offensive. The honest question that a lot of them have is simply is this the best use of resources? Just how valuable is a laptop going to be for a child in elementary or middle school. I question if a child in the US needs a laptop before they get to at least seventh grade.
Your answer about the right information increasing your yield is correct. However you left out that it was done without computers. In the poorest countries it may make sense to have people going around teaching farmers how to increase their yield. I feel that it would be for the best to try to minimise the amount of chemicals used since those cost money and can increase the debt load of the country. As a replacement for text books wouldn't it be better for the countries involved too write their own and then print their own. If they make their own paper and ink they could keep more of their money in country and create jobs for their own people. To use your language. I assume that just about every country has a at least a few people that could write elementary level textbooks and run a printing press why not use them instead of buying text books from the UK or the US?
In every country including the US a cheap laptop for secondary education sounds very useful but I am not so sure about the OLPC.
Many projects to help poor nations have turned out to be total wastes of money because they where the wrong solution. It isn't offensive to question if the OLPC is the best use of resources the help nations with less resources then the US or the EU. I just worry about a bunch of broken, useless OLPCs sitting around and the money spent on them sitting in a Chinese government bank account. Everybody does know that it is a Chinese company that is going to make them right? I will give Intel some credit. Making their laptop in Brazil will help bring jobs to Brazil and some technical knowledge.
It is a step in the right direction but.
Why does it cost more without DRM? Why does it cost more than buying the album?
By going digital the record companies don't need to press CDs, Print covers, buy jewel cases, ship CDs to stores, take back unsold CDs.... Why does it cost more to buy a digital copy on-line than at the store?
I might still buy some if they have anything I like and don't have on CD but it still seems like a ripe off.
The real point is.
What makes OpenOffice better than Office? Forget about price because the cost of software compared to people is small. Forget about the file format because everyone uses Office. I use OpenOffice because it is free but I have an older version of MS Office on my computer at work. I hate to say it but OpenOffice really isn't any better. Office's help system is much better than OO.org's. Graphing in Office is much easier than in OO.org.
I recommend OO.org to everyone that has a choice between OO.org and a "free" copy of Office from a friend. I keep hoping that OO.org will do something better then Office someday. In other words I can see your point.
The latest build that I got of Firefox 3 did pass ACID2. Another step forward for standards. Now if we can drag IE there.
Oh and first post.
Actually VMS has traditionally been a very secure system. I bet that anyplace running VMS probably has some very interesting stuff in their network.
"his definition of "easiest" is rather biased (maybe "easiest for those with a solid experience of Windows"?"
Frankly Windows is a standard. Much like the QWERTY keyboard is the standard. There have been other keyboard layouts that are supposed to be easier to learn and faster the the QWERTY keyboard. But if you already know the QWERTY keyboard then that is the easiest to use and learn.
I have set average long time Windows users down in front of a Mac OS/X system and they hated it and thought it was harder to use than Windows. These people had only used Windows machines so that is "easy" to use for them. Most people would rather deal with the Devil they know is better than the Angel they don't. It is sad but many Computer "Windows" experts feel that if they can not sit down and make a computer work the way that windows works then it is broken or it just sucks.
I am not saying this is a good thing. I really hate that Windows has become a standard. Heck I an mot thrilled that Linux has become entrenched as the ultimate FOSS OS. Unix is like 40 years old. I would love to see something really new. I would love to see a FOSS OS that was super innovative but I will take what I can get for now.
"750GB is a lot of data," .1 second using an indexed search of course.
It is but itunes should be dealing with a tiny fraction of this.
An MP3 might be three or for megabytes is size. The tag information should be far less than one kilobyte and probably a quarter of that. So let's say that he has 100,000 songs. So at one kilobyte per song runs to a grand total of 100 megabytes of data and 100,000 records in the database. That isn't a big database at all. I have one that I run on an old 300 Mhz P2 using Postgres that has over 400,000 records in a single table. Look uptime for any record is under
SQLite would handle it with NO problem. Heck a good Xbase system could deal with it.
The problem with Itunes sounds like XML addiction. I swear people think of XML as the perfect tool for every problem. An XML flat file sucks as a database. Itunes is probably reading it all into memory to parse the file which will most likely cause a thrash unless you have a lot of memory free.
It is a fine solution for small datasets but as people here have found it really starts fall apart once the data set gets too big.
I haven't gotten into yet but SQLite looks like a great solution for many programs that need some type of data storage but don't need the complexity of a full blown database.