There hasn't been a decent album made since 1996, when the Ramones broke up. I don't listen to hardly anything recorded after 1984. But there is hope. Through the magic of digital restoration, there are many of us who are restoring our old rare recordings and pushing them out on the net. There's more good OLD music out there than there is good NEW music. And we know damn well that the record companies are never going to rerelease our favorite obscure old punk records on cd. So we'll do it ourselves.
You are mistaking the medium for the message. Weather forecasts and agricultural techniques can be transmitted just as easily by AM Radio or print media. The Internet is not an essential part of this equation, it adds massive complication to a simple problem. The problems of Laos are not essentially technological, so the problems cannot be solved by the application of high-technology.
Here are some simpler ways to achieve your internet-based ideas:
- price discrepancies are big in Laos. With
an Internet connection farmers can look up
the prices on the market without travelling
two days to see that they are down.
AM radios are cheap and can convey information from market to farmer. They can run on solar power.
- there is no normal chance to communicate
for farmers to share information about
planting methods, fertilisers or whatever.
Books are cheap, presuming the people can read.
- maybe in villages there are very basic
schools, but teachers have also no chance to
lookup information or communicate.
I've dealt with Laotian charities, they report the teachers ask for BOOKS and mimeograph machines. They want to teach people how to build water pumps and sewers, not nuclear weapons or computer chips.
- due to the general lack of information
infrastructure it's also simply impossible
for people to see whats going on or just get
a weather report for the next week
AM transistor radios and cel phones are very cheap, and require little infrastructure.
I've donated to charities for Laos, they asked for textbooks, transistor radios, and batteries so that's what I gave them. Now all of a sudden they need the Internet? Who put THAT stupid idea in their heads? Sometimes the hype and BS of the Internet just appalls me.
I've spoken out before that this is just a bad idea. Laos is a land with almost universal illiteracy, poor health care and few utilities like electricity and sewers, and now Felsenstein wants to set up internet for the elite ruling classes. I doubt that your average Laotian rice farmer will see much benefit from the internet, he's too busy farming when he has time to spare from caring for his malaria-riddled children. He'd probably prefer something more useful like some mosquito nets or a refrigerator. Most of these people are living in Stone Age conditions and people expect computers will improve their lives? They'd be happy to just move up into the Bronze Age, let alone the Computer Age.
Send your money where it will do the most good. Laos needs many things before it needs the Internet. Here are some charities that spend their money directly on real-world projects like improving literacy through education, better sanitation and health care, care for orphans, landmine removal, etc.
Darunee Fund for Education in Asia (Laos) http://www.daruneefund.org/asiamerica.htm
Of course, these are URLS from just a few minutes of googling, after weeding out the religious nutcase missionaries. Give your money where it will do the most good, where it can save a life. Forget computers and the Internet. They'll come to Laos when the Laotians are ready.
Get into developing and printing your own photos. You know, the old analog kind. Even better, study some old antique photo processes like Cyanotype or Platinography. I make my own photo papers using these antique methods, and it is satisfying enough to keep me interested, and I was an Honors Chem major until I switched to art, majoring in photography). Making your own printing papers and photochems is a ton of fun, and yields tangible results (unlike most things you could do with a chemistry set).
There are other valid tests than a single-proc app on single proc mac and pcs. I just wanted to suggest a platform where AfterEffects isn't handicapped on either platform. Of course, testing a nice dual-proc app on a dual proc machine would be a level playing field, and a more valid test since all Macs are now dual processor. Another msg in this thread reported a dualie 1.25ghz mac 50% faster at Cleaner than a dual 1.8Athlon (IIRC), and that's fairly representative of my experiences. But anyway, I'm happy with these highly optimized Mac apps. Nobody cares about AE anymore, we've moved on to apps like Combustion, Shake, etc, which started as IRIX programs on SGI but are now well suited to the Mac platform. And you should see what Apple's doing now. The economic rules are a little different when you start looking at licenses. If you buy Shake (now at half price. $5k), you get a $2k rebate on Maya 4.5, and $1k license for PC renderer. Maya costs $2k, so buy Shake and you get Maya for free plus a second $1k PC license for offline rendering. And guess what, Linux licenses for Shake renderer are even cheaper, IIRC they're about $400. If you follow the money, you'd get a dualie 1.25Ghz Mac and a big RAID (especially an XRaid in a month or so) for a workstation, and line up 5 commodity PC linux hot boxes for a render farm. That would give you the performance of a huge render system that can kill its rivals like Fire or Flame workstations. You'd have to be an idiot to invest heavily in pipsqueak toys like AfterEffects when you have major league tools like Shake, Combustion, etc. and they just run faster on the Mac.
A dual processor Mac should do no worse than a single processor Mac.
Except when you are comparing price and performance. The Macs look bad when you are paying for dual processor performance and use apps that don't use the second processor.
I wrote a polite note to the author, and pointed out some flaws in his "benchmarks." He chose to benchmark using Adobe AfterEffects, but that app does not use both processors on the Mac, and is not Altivec optimized, but AE is optimized for Intel. He further stacked the deck by running the benches on dual processors, where a fair test would have benched a single-proc app on single-proc macs and PCs. He used codecs that are also optimized poorly on the Mac, and compared the different Mac and PC codecs and declared them equal in speed. This completely biased the benchmarks toward PCs. I suggested he do the benches with a program that is equally optimized for both platforms, like Cleaner 6 or Shake.
In response to my polite letter, I got a obscenity-laced reply. I decided he was a lunatic, with an axe to grind. I always admonish people not to believe benchmarks from people of companies with such obvious biases. Slashdot readers wouldn't believe Microsoft benchmarks done by companies with a bias towards MS, so why would anyone believe this idiot? It all comes down to the eternal problem in the PC world, consultants like PCs because it guarantees them an income for life, from all the support calls. And this guy's a PeeCee consultant.
I saw the Tarkovsky film a few years ago, I'm afraid to see the remake because I don't want to obliterate my feelings about this great film with an overblown James ("Terminator" "Titanic") Cameron production. And Solaris is one of my favorite Lem novels, I even used to run a BBS with the name Solaris, long before Sun or anyone else latched on to that name. I'll never forget going to see Solaris. I took my girlfriend and I had previously lectured her that this was a really long film, and that was part of the "Aesthetics of Boredom" that was part of both the book and the movie. So we went to the movie, and I'll never forget what happened. In the row in front of me, at about the 1 hour point, some guy started hassling his friends that the film was boring. Well of COURSE it was boring, they were just getting that established as a plot element. He griped and griped and then he finally got up and left. What a relief. We watched the whole film in peace, and my girlfriend and I went to a nearby diner to grab a bite to eat. And who the hell should sit down at the table next to us, that damn whiny guy and his friends. I got to hear him gripe about how boring the film was for ANOTHER half hour. My girlfriend and I cracked up with laughter.
Perhaps he rewrote the liner notes, I have a first edition on vinyl, and I definitely recall the 16/33 thing, in fact, I remember playing around with the album at different speeds on account of his description. I couldn't just make something like this up.
Interesting comparison to Eno and Discrete Music. If you read the liner notes to the original Discrete Music album, Eno talks about how he was laid up in the hospital, immobilized in a cast, when a friend came in and brought a record player with some classical music, he put it on to play and then left. The player was set to 16rpm instead of 33, so he was stuck listening to a slowed down album of Pachelbel's Canons. He said the album seemed to take hours, through his fog of pain and painkillers. He says it gave him the idea for ambient music.
Why actually, I do. I was a Hollywood script doctor, 5 of the scripts I worked on were nominated for Best Picture, 1 of them won. Of course, I got no credit, that's all part of the deal, you get paid the big bucks to disappear after fixing things.
Anyway, the Academy is a large collection of people, sure there's a bunch of idiots at Disney who nominate their own films, but the vast majority are extremely conservative and vote for the same films for mostly political reasons. The point stands, SA will not be nominated for Best Picture. A foreign animated film of such limited interest will not even be a blip on the Academy members' screens.
You clearly don't know how the Academy works. No film will ever be nominated for Best Picture if it has no chance of actually winning the prize. No animated film has ever won Best Picture. And this "film" (and I use that term loosely) has exactly zero chance of ever winning best picture. Ergo, it has zero chance of ever being nominated for Best Picture.
Time goes off on a tangent about how Will Wright created the first Sim City due to his interest in map creation for a bomber game. But it's not true. Wright has already written about how he came upon the concept for the game, when reading the Stanislav Lem book "The Cyberiad," specifically the chapter "How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good." There's a short synopsis here: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~abbate/cyborg/cyber iad.htm l Every Sim player should read this story, it is a classic.
I have a Zaurus PI-6600, the Japanese model. I solely use it for the Japanese dictionary. I used to store phone numbers and addresses, but not anymore. I remember the last time I stored a phone number in it. I had been trying to meet a certain woman for 3 or 4 weeks, then when we met, she came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go out, and boy was I happy. Showing off, I put her phone number in my Zaurus right in front of her, and said I'd call her that evening. Unfortunately, my Zaurus died and wiped her number. I never ever saw her again. Since that time, I make sure to store all IMPORTANT data on nonvolatile storage: a little black book.
It's a devious trick. The grocery stores are making more money selling customer data than groceries. These computer devices can gather more data than ever, as long as you trick people into USING them by offering them bells and whistles, and the consumers won't suspect a thing. These stores want to track how long you spend in each section of the store, how long you stop to browse the shelves, and use that info to data mine your receipts.
I could sure use some smart shoes or white-noise socks, my sense of balance is destroyed. I had an acoustic neuroma, when they remove it they cut your vestibular nerve in one ear, otherwise you have permanent vertigo. The best way I can explain it, is that my sense of balance is now mono instead of stereo. My doctor said there are three components to balance, pressure feedback through the skin, position feedback from the body and skeleton, and visual feedback. The doc said my sense of balance is now "visually dependent" so I have to be able to see clearly or I can lose my balance. When it's dark or the footing is rough or loose gravel, I stumble around like I'm drunk. This is horribly embarrasing, but more than that, it's a health risk. I took one balance test and barely passed, and I asked what it measured, the physiotherapist said it is to determine if you should use a cane or a walker. Poor scores meant a dramatically higher likelihood of broken arms, legs, and hips from falls, and subsequently, greater mortality.
well, if your intention was to prevent comparisons to $4500 macs, then I don't understand your point because that's exactly what it inspired. I think performance is very good for the money you spend, and if you want a hot rod, you'd go for aftermarket disk systems and RAM anyway. Apple would like to own a bit more of the upgrade market by selling loaded CPUs, who wouldn't want some extra profits? My point is that my midrange dual 1Ghz cpu is a good performer even stacked against hot boxes, and you can build them up without spending $4500.
There aren't any $4500 Macs.
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I get tired of people stacking the deck against Macs by claiming Macs cost too much, then inventing some insane price out of thin air, like $4500. You'd have to build a pretty high end config, like a dualie 1.25Ghz with an Ultra160 RAID. Sure, you can build a wintel dualie hotbox and get up in the same price range. But I'm blazing along on a midrange dual 1Ghz machine, and oh man is it fast, and only $2500. So what is the point of attacking a Mac on price and claiming you can't get a machine except by paying $4500?!? Even an XServe doesn't cost that much. Anyway, I've had amazingly good performance in MacOS X, but there were a few rough edges at first. Finder was kinda slow on my old G3/400 and G3/500 machines, like sorting by kind in list view. They're getting some of the metadata stuff sorted out, the new Jag finder is all fixed up and speedy. The only laggy app seems to be the Terminal, which could use a replacement. But the core Unix apps have excellent speed. I put my old G3 into use with Apache & Quicktime Streaming Server, I'm amazed at how well it performs. Anyway, someone commented that MacOS X is hard on the apps but cushy on the user, or something like that. Right on. That was one of the Mac's big innovations, the GUI focused on the user. When I am running something like Final Cut Pro, I want every GUI screen gadget running full max. I want every single iota of computing power focused on ME and helping me get through the complex task. This is both the Mac's greatest feature and biggest CPU bottleneck. It's like the olden days of OS 9 before preemptive multitasking, when you held down the mouse, the whole CPU would hang until you let go of the menu. Whenever you were issuing commands, the CPU gave up control to the user. It was a CPU bottleneck, and we LIKED it, it gave the MacOS the immediacy of operation, a feeling of being in control that other OSes lacked. And I think they've translated that well into MacOS X. The system GUI still remains responsive, even when you're running CPU-intensive apps. Apps like Cleaner mpeg2 compression are as CPU-intense as it gets, it can compress 1 minute of DV video in 50 seconds on my midrange CPU. Cleaner is dual processor and Altivec aware, it maxes out both my CPUs, it's as hard a CPU workout as I have found. And it still leaves the system responsive, not locked up and CPU-bound.
is JapanTV, a 24/7 NHK feed. I'd have to upgrade my DirecTV decoder and get a new oval dish with dual receivers. Then I can get JTV a la carte for only $30/month. But I'd have to invest about $300 before I can even start spending the $30/mo. At least it would all work with my TiVo, they even have program listings. They have a bunch of ultrapremium channels in this price range or higher. Ouch, those prices are too damn high!
Looks like we are in line with the dust trails from the famous 1767 and 1866 showers, when "meteors fell like rain." So there's a tiny chance it could be a shower of historic proportions. And of course the computer model for this prediction is experimental, the shower can (and probably will) turn out to be a dud. But ooh that one chance in a million that it could be a shower they're still talking about 200 years from now..
Slashdot Mirror
That can't be too hard.
There hasn't been a decent album made since 1996, when the Ramones broke up. I don't listen to hardly anything recorded after 1984. But there is hope. Through the magic of digital restoration, there are many of us who are restoring our old rare recordings and pushing them out on the net. There's more good OLD music out there than there is good NEW music. And we know damn well that the record companies are never going to rerelease our favorite obscure old punk records on cd. So we'll do it ourselves.
You are mistaking the medium for the message. Weather forecasts and agricultural techniques can be transmitted just as easily by AM Radio or print media. The Internet is not an essential part of this equation, it adds massive complication to a simple problem. The problems of Laos are not essentially technological, so the problems cannot be solved by the application of high-technology.
AM radios are cheap and can convey information from market to farmer. They can run on solar power. Books are cheap, presuming the people can read. I've dealt with Laotian charities, they report the teachers ask for BOOKS and mimeograph machines. They want to teach people how to build water pumps and sewers, not nuclear weapons or computer chips. AM transistor radios and cel phones are very cheap, and require little infrastructure.
I've donated to charities for Laos, they asked for textbooks, transistor radios, and batteries so that's what I gave them. Now all of a sudden they need the Internet? Who put THAT stupid idea in their heads? Sometimes the hype and BS of the Internet just appalls me.
I've spoken out before that this is just a bad idea. Laos is a land with almost universal illiteracy, poor health care and few utilities like electricity and sewers, and now Felsenstein wants to set up internet for the elite ruling classes. I doubt that your average Laotian rice farmer will see much benefit from the internet, he's too busy farming when he has time to spare from caring for his malaria-riddled children. He'd probably prefer something more useful like some mosquito nets or a refrigerator. Most of these people are living in Stone Age conditions and people expect computers will improve their lives? They'd be happy to just move up into the Bronze Age, let alone the Computer Age.
r asia/l ao.htm
Send your money where it will do the most good. Laos needs many things before it needs the Internet. Here are some charities that spend their money directly on real-world projects like improving literacy through education, better sanitation and health care, care for orphans, landmine removal, etc.
Darunee Fund for Education in Asia (Laos)
http://www.daruneefund.org/asiamerica.htm
Project Happy Child Laos
http://www.happychild.org.uk/nvs/appeals/eu
CARE
http://www.care.org
UNICEF
http://www.unicef.org/
Of course, these are URLS from just a few minutes of googling, after weeding out the religious nutcase missionaries. Give your money where it will do the most good, where it can save a life. Forget computers and the Internet. They'll come to Laos when the Laotians are ready.
Get into developing and printing your own photos. You know, the old analog kind. Even better, study some old antique photo processes like Cyanotype or Platinography. I make my own photo papers using these antique methods, and it is satisfying enough to keep me interested, and I was an Honors Chem major until I switched to art, majoring in photography).
Making your own printing papers and photochems is a ton of fun, and yields tangible results (unlike most things you could do with a chemistry set).
There are other valid tests than a single-proc app on single proc mac and pcs. I just wanted to suggest a platform where AfterEffects isn't handicapped on either platform. Of course, testing a nice dual-proc app on a dual proc machine would be a level playing field, and a more valid test since all Macs are now dual processor. Another msg in this thread reported a dualie 1.25ghz mac 50% faster at Cleaner than a dual 1.8Athlon (IIRC), and that's fairly representative of my experiences.
But anyway, I'm happy with these highly optimized Mac apps. Nobody cares about AE anymore, we've moved on to apps like Combustion, Shake, etc, which started as IRIX programs on SGI but are now well suited to the Mac platform. And you should see what Apple's doing now. The economic rules are a little different when you start looking at licenses. If you buy Shake (now at half price. $5k), you get a $2k rebate on Maya 4.5, and $1k license for PC renderer. Maya costs $2k, so buy Shake and you get Maya for free plus a second $1k PC license for offline rendering. And guess what, Linux licenses for Shake renderer are even cheaper, IIRC they're about $400. If you follow the money, you'd get a dualie 1.25Ghz Mac and a big RAID (especially an XRaid in a month or so) for a workstation, and line up 5 commodity PC linux hot boxes for a render farm. That would give you the performance of a huge render system that can kill its rivals like Fire or Flame workstations. You'd have to be an idiot to invest heavily in pipsqueak toys like AfterEffects when you have major league tools like Shake, Combustion, etc. and they just run faster on the Mac.
Except when you are comparing price and performance. The Macs look bad when you are paying for dual processor performance and use apps that don't use the second processor.
I wrote a polite note to the author, and pointed out some flaws in his "benchmarks." He chose to benchmark using Adobe AfterEffects, but that app does not use both processors on the Mac, and is not Altivec optimized, but AE is optimized for Intel. He further stacked the deck by running the benches on dual processors, where a fair test would have benched a single-proc app on single-proc macs and PCs. He used codecs that are also optimized poorly on the Mac, and compared the different Mac and PC codecs and declared them equal in speed. This completely biased the benchmarks toward PCs. I suggested he do the benches with a program that is equally optimized for both platforms, like Cleaner 6 or Shake.
In response to my polite letter, I got a obscenity-laced reply. I decided he was a lunatic, with an axe to grind. I always admonish people not to believe benchmarks from people of companies with such obvious biases. Slashdot readers wouldn't believe Microsoft benchmarks done by companies with a bias towards MS, so why would anyone believe this idiot? It all comes down to the eternal problem in the PC world, consultants like PCs because it guarantees them an income for life, from all the support calls. And this guy's a PeeCee consultant.
I saw the Tarkovsky film a few years ago, I'm afraid to see the remake because I don't want to obliterate my feelings about this great film with an overblown James ("Terminator" "Titanic") Cameron production. And Solaris is one of my favorite Lem novels, I even used to run a BBS with the name Solaris, long before Sun or anyone else latched on to that name.
I'll never forget going to see Solaris. I took my girlfriend and I had previously lectured her that this was a really long film, and that was part of the "Aesthetics of Boredom" that was part of both the book and the movie. So we went to the movie, and I'll never forget what happened. In the row in front of me, at about the 1 hour point, some guy started hassling his friends that the film was boring. Well of COURSE it was boring, they were just getting that established as a plot element. He griped and griped and then he finally got up and left. What a relief. We watched the whole film in peace, and my girlfriend and I went to a nearby diner to grab a bite to eat. And who the hell should sit down at the table next to us, that damn whiny guy and his friends. I got to hear him gripe about how boring the film was for ANOTHER half hour. My girlfriend and I cracked up with laughter.
I'd go pull mine and compare liner notes, but it's in storage. I bought mine in 1975, it's a brit import 1st edition.
Perhaps he rewrote the liner notes, I have a first edition on vinyl, and I definitely recall the 16/33 thing, in fact, I remember playing around with the album at different speeds on account of his description. I couldn't just make something like this up.
Interesting comparison to Eno and Discrete Music. If you read the liner notes to the original Discrete Music album, Eno talks about how he was laid up in the hospital, immobilized in a cast, when a friend came in and brought a record player with some classical music, he put it on to play and then left. The player was set to 16rpm instead of 33, so he was stuck listening to a slowed down album of Pachelbel's Canons. He said the album seemed to take hours, through his fog of pain and painkillers. He says it gave him the idea for ambient music.
Anyway, the Academy is a large collection of people, sure there's a bunch of idiots at Disney who nominate their own films, but the vast majority are extremely conservative and vote for the same films for mostly political reasons. The point stands, SA will not be nominated for Best Picture. A foreign animated film of such limited interest will not even be a blip on the Academy members' screens.
You clearly don't know how the Academy works. No film will ever be nominated for Best Picture if it has no chance of actually winning the prize. No animated film has ever won Best Picture. And this "film" (and I use that term loosely) has exactly zero chance of ever winning best picture. Ergo, it has zero chance of ever being nominated for Best Picture.
Time goes off on a tangent about how Will Wright created the first Sim City due to his interest in map creation for a bomber game. But it's not true. Wright has already written about how he came upon the concept for the game, when reading the Stanislav Lem book "The Cyberiad," specifically the chapter "How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good." There's a short synopsis here:r iad.htm l
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~abbate/cyborg/cybe
Every Sim player should read this story, it is a classic.
I have a Zaurus PI-6600, the Japanese model. I solely use it for the Japanese dictionary. I used to store phone numbers and addresses, but not anymore. I remember the last time I stored a phone number in it. I had been trying to meet a certain woman for 3 or 4 weeks, then when we met, she came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go out, and boy was I happy. Showing off, I put her phone number in my Zaurus right in front of her, and said I'd call her that evening. Unfortunately, my Zaurus died and wiped her number. I never ever saw her again. Since that time, I make sure to store all IMPORTANT data on nonvolatile storage: a little black book.
It's a devious trick. The grocery stores are making more money selling customer data than groceries. These computer devices can gather more data than ever, as long as you trick people into USING them by offering them bells and whistles, and the consumers won't suspect a thing. These stores want to track how long you spend in each section of the store, how long you stop to browse the shelves, and use that info to data mine your receipts.
I could sure use some smart shoes or white-noise socks, my sense of balance is destroyed. I had an acoustic neuroma, when they remove it they cut your vestibular nerve in one ear, otherwise you have permanent vertigo. The best way I can explain it, is that my sense of balance is now mono instead of stereo. My doctor said there are three components to balance, pressure feedback through the skin, position feedback from the body and skeleton, and visual feedback. The doc said my sense of balance is now "visually dependent" so I have to be able to see clearly or I can lose my balance. When it's dark or the footing is rough or loose gravel, I stumble around like I'm drunk. This is horribly embarrasing, but more than that, it's a health risk. I took one balance test and barely passed, and I asked what it measured, the physiotherapist said it is to determine if you should use a cane or a walker. Poor scores meant a dramatically higher likelihood of broken arms, legs, and hips from falls, and subsequently, greater mortality.
Here's the home page of the new Zaurus model (Japanese only)
m l
http://www.sharp.co.jp/products/slc700/index.ht
I surfed around, looks like this unit has cool GPS maps available, that's the most interesting app I found.
well, if your intention was to prevent comparisons to $4500 macs, then I don't understand your point because that's exactly what it inspired. I think performance is very good for the money you spend, and if you want a hot rod, you'd go for aftermarket disk systems and RAM anyway. Apple would like to own a bit more of the upgrade market by selling loaded CPUs, who wouldn't want some extra profits? My point is that my midrange dual 1Ghz cpu is a good performer even stacked against hot boxes, and you can build them up without spending $4500.
I get tired of people stacking the deck against Macs by claiming Macs cost too much, then inventing some insane price out of thin air, like $4500. You'd have to build a pretty high end config, like a dualie 1.25Ghz with an Ultra160 RAID. Sure, you can build a wintel dualie hotbox and get up in the same price range. But I'm blazing along on a midrange dual 1Ghz machine, and oh man is it fast, and only $2500. So what is the point of attacking a Mac on price and claiming you can't get a machine except by paying $4500?!? Even an XServe doesn't cost that much.
Anyway, I've had amazingly good performance in MacOS X, but there were a few rough edges at first. Finder was kinda slow on my old G3/400 and G3/500 machines, like sorting by kind in list view. They're getting some of the metadata stuff sorted out, the new Jag finder is all fixed up and speedy. The only laggy app seems to be the Terminal, which could use a replacement. But the core Unix apps have excellent speed. I put my old G3 into use with Apache & Quicktime Streaming Server, I'm amazed at how well it performs.
Anyway, someone commented that MacOS X is hard on the apps but cushy on the user, or something like that. Right on. That was one of the Mac's big innovations, the GUI focused on the user. When I am running something like Final Cut Pro, I want every GUI screen gadget running full max. I want every single iota of computing power focused on ME and helping me get through the complex task. This is both the Mac's greatest feature and biggest CPU bottleneck. It's like the olden days of OS 9 before preemptive multitasking, when you held down the mouse, the whole CPU would hang until you let go of the menu. Whenever you were issuing commands, the CPU gave up control to the user. It was a CPU bottleneck, and we LIKED it, it gave the MacOS the immediacy of operation, a feeling of being in control that other OSes lacked. And I think they've translated that well into MacOS X. The system GUI still remains responsive, even when you're running CPU-intensive apps. Apps like Cleaner mpeg2 compression are as CPU-intense as it gets, it can compress 1 minute of DV video in 50 seconds on my midrange CPU. Cleaner is dual processor and Altivec aware, it maxes out both my CPUs, it's as hard a CPU workout as I have found. And it still leaves the system responsive, not locked up and CPU-bound.
is JapanTV, a 24/7 NHK feed. I'd have to upgrade my DirecTV decoder and get a new oval dish with dual receivers. Then I can get JTV a la carte for only $30/month. But I'd have to invest about $300 before I can even start spending the $30/mo. At least it would all work with my TiVo, they even have program listings. They have a bunch of ultrapremium channels in this price range or higher. Ouch, those prices are too damn high!
Check these out:
http://www.arm.ac.uk/leonid/dust2002.html
Looks like we are in line with the dust trails from the famous 1767 and 1866 showers, when "meteors fell like rain." So there's a tiny chance it could be a shower of historic proportions. And of course the computer model for this prediction is experimental, the shower can (and probably will) turn out to be a dud. But ooh that one chance in a million that it could be a shower they're still talking about 200 years from now..
Yeah, I love the announcement. Order an early bird CPU now.. maybe we'll ship it by Christmas.. or whenever we get the OS finished.
Another classic Amiga vaporware moment.