My hands-on impressions of the Sony Reader
on
The eBook, Mark 2
·
· Score: 1
The Good: -The screen is nice. Very readable even in sunlight, fairly high res for it's 6" size at 600x800. -The battery life(although I didn't play with one nearly enough to drain it's charge.
The Bad: -64MB of flash. What is this the 90s? Even plain old text could fill that up pretty damn fast, and it's damn near useless for graphics or audio. -2-bit greyscale is great for text, but is on the lower edge of acceptable for manga (and the resolution could stand to be a bit higher for manga as well). I realize 4 or even 8 bit grayscale would be a luxury feature on an early-model device like this, and I wouldn't even mention it, except that Sony advertises and sells manga for their Reader. -Windows-only software, and no word on weather 3rd parties will be able to make their own loaders for linux and macs.
The Ugly: -The case has a huge lip all around the screen, especially on the bottom. I think this device could be a good deal smaller and more portable without shrinking the screen size. -The interface is even clunkier than the screen's slow refresh rate requires it to be. -There are too many ports and slots and buttons and widgets. Sony really ought to take a page from the iPod's book on minimalism. -Zooming in seems to only work on text, not graphics (manga) -The $350 price tag. Unless the screen itself costs over $200 (who knows, maybe it does), I just can't justify that price, especially when you need to spend another ~$50 to give it a usable amount of memory.
I'd seriously like to see Apple's take on an eBook reader. My complaints are almost all about cross-paltform support, configuration and case design, and interface design; which are all areas Apple does pretty well in the iPod. So I think they could build a better eBook reader in short order if they chose to (really, it's mostly just grafting an ePaper screen onto a iPod nano's innards and putting it in a slick little case, with a well designed interface).
It's too bad that I suspect they see readers as a nice market next to music listeners and video watchers, and won't bother with that market until they've safely conquered the others.
Yeah, because you know that when you're ready to upgrade to HD, they'll give you a free new set of disks if you already bought the non-HD DVD!
There are some perfectly good reasons to prefer CDs and DVDs the currently available download methods, so why do people insist on instead putting forth rationalizations for their preference based on topics where downloads and physical media have identical limits (i.e. you have to pay if you want another, possibly higher quality, copy)?
In any case, this up-sampling of old videos is a pretty lame move by Apple. But at least it looks like it may be limited to a few old music videos for which they simply didn't have access to high-res sources, while TV shows were all cleanly re-encoded from higher-res raws.
At this point it's probably in Apple's best interest to do whatever it takes to acquire appropriate high-res sources and offer free upgrades to whoever downloaded the up-sampled vids, to restore consumer good will and confidence for their next eventual upgrade to HD.
Walmart can't just choose to distribute movies over the net and then cut the studios a check. And they couldn't compete with Apple if they had to buy a boxed edition for every one they sell online (and even then courts might not like them unilaterally changing the format - even if it results in NO lost DVD sales).
If you think the studios charge more for wholesale DVDs than for wholesale download-rights, I think you've got things very much reversed.
Wholesale DVDs can be had for a couple of bucks a disc for many older movies. Whereas, if Apple's cut of their movie sales is anything like their cut of music sales, they're sending somewhere around $7 to Disney for each of the older $9.99 movies they sell.
Laptop chipsets with Intel's integrated graphics cost $3 or $4 more than otherwise equivalent chipsets without graphics as of July according to their price list.
Good luck getting cheaper than that with your knock-off.
You can get an account with an indie "label" like tunecore.com and get $.70 for each of your songs sold on iTunes. That's only a $.29 cut for Apple, not $.35, and I *seriously* doubt Apple is giving this no-name indie label that much better a deal than the big 4.
Actually, at geosync orbit altitudes, the earth's escape velocity is ~4.3km/s. And you gain a good deal of orbital velocity (~3km/s) when going up a space elevator, which can be converted into escape velocity. So you only really need a delta-v of ~1.3km/s to escape earth's gravity once you're at the top of a space elevator (compared to ~11km/s from earth's surface).
The earth's ~30km/s velocity in orbit around the sun has no real impact on this scenario. Once you hit earth's escape velocity, you're effectively free of earth's gravity and into the domain of the sun's gravity. You'll get to the sun eventually as long as you don't hit something else first, or accelerate far more to beyond the sun's ~43km/s escape velocity, and I don't suppose it really matters how long it takes waste to reach the sun once it's on trajectory.
But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
Oops, I lost a chunk of that post somehow, the 2nd paragraph was supposed to go something like this:
And much of that 1% isn't even on decently priced analog cable anymore. Comcast has cut even basics like the SciFi channel form analog cable in my area, and hasn't offered any premium channels outside of digital for a while now. So paying $10 a month for each of the few shows I want is a much better deal for me than paying $70 a month to ransom the channels that offer those shows back via digital cable.
And you are so blinded by the crap on TV that you don't realize that less than 1% of it is worth my time to watch.
And much of that $70 a month to get the channels that offer those shows back via digital cable.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that I can see them whenever I want instead of having to remember to watch or record them on the TV's schedule.
If Apple were to extend this deal (~16 shows for $10, paid in advance) to some of their other shows, like Battlestar Galactica, I could actually see myself making my first iTMS purchase.
But of course, they probably won't offer that low a rate on longer and more collectible shows like BSG. And I really can't see paying much more than that for a movie that just isn't all that comparable to a DVD (320x240 vs 720x480, watchable on ubiquitous $40 players vs needs a computer or an iPod, comes on a nicely packaged DVD vs can't even be burned as a DVD, etc).
Really, it seems to me the iTMS got a lot of things right with music, and then turned around and got those same things irritatingly wrong on video.
They made the music decent quality, as good or better than most of the stuff being traded on the net at the time (using similar bitrates and a superior codec). But they made the video disappointingly low res, equivalent to stuff that was traded online in the late '90s, not the mid '00s (the h264 codec is great, and the ~768k bit rate they use is, if anything, overkill for their resolution, but the 320x240 resolution is just not competitive with what you can find on bittorrent these days [and as Jobs has said before in relation to music, the pirates are their real competition]).
And they made the music burnable to a standard redbook CD so it could be easily backed up and used with your old equipment, but they made the video unable to be burned to a DVD... (I wonder if the studios demanded the burned DVDs be DRMed and were bitten in the ass by their earlier mandating that consumer DVD burners cannot burn CSS encrypted DVDs?)
I wonder what balance of the causes of this was? Were the studios setting apple up to fail, or at least not succeed to fast for the competition to copy, after being frightened by apple's rapid success in selling music online? Or, was it largely a technical issue? Would letting the iPod decode 640x480 h264 have required more time/money/power than Apple felt they could spend to release the iPod/w video?
Carbon emissions are *rising*, with something like a 60% increase in the last 30 years.
Even a small impact in terms of *reducing* emissions over 30 years is a *huge* change form the level they would have *risen* to by '35 at the current rate.
Seriously, FM radio isn't exactly pristine quality to begin with.
I'd think even common 64kbit MP3 streams from a clean source at the radio station would probably sound better than a high bitrate stream generated locally from the noisy distorted signal you could receive over the air and digitize.
Do these remind anyone else of the camera balls that the Tinkers used for their security systems in The Peace War?
The ones in the book used some fancy optics to capture a 360 degree picture, and then post-processed it to let the user virtually pan-and-scan without the need for moving parts, instead of mechanically rotating the ball like these. And, of course, they were a lot smaller, were tacky instead of bouncy, had better power arrangements, and were deployed ubiquitously.
But, still, this could be seen as a sort of primitive ancestor to the Tinkers' surveillance systems...
Monitors, and to a certain extent video cards when they're not doing anything but display an image, don't *need* to support more than 8bbp to take advantage of HDR editing and display.
The human eye isn't really capable of perceiving significantly more than 8 bits per pixel. Those extra bits aren't for us, they're for the computer to use in calculating the 8bbp it wants to display for us after a picture is edited.
Say you want to adjust the brightness of a picture, if you change the brightness of an 8bbp image, you end up throwing away some of those 8bbp by shifting them into white, and you stretch the remaining bits out to cover the entire spectrum, giving you a resulting image with less than a full 8 bits worth of levels for each color, leading to banding and whiteout and other nasty artifacts. Now if you do the same with a 16bbp int image, you'll have more bit depth to begin with, and thus can afford to spend more of it in editing without leaving your final image with less than 2^8 levels. And if you use 32bit floats for each color channel, as in a true modern HDR image, you can do even better, as well as accurately accounting for very bright or dim areas which wouldn't show up well in integer valued pixels.
I'm sure there were many "innovations" made 300 years ago that made it seem like the same effect was at play
That's probably because the same effect *was* in play. Remember, the guesses Kurzwiel is making are based on an exponential progression of technological innovation. But if you'll remember your statistics, exponential distributions are memoryless, they look the same no matter where you cut them off; there's always the same increasing increase in proportion to whatever the current value happens to be at your chosen point.
Charles Stross kind of touched on this in Accelerando, but he never quite made the point he kept hinting at by letting his characters debate when the singularity actually happened. The singularity is *allways* happening. It's not an instantaneous vertical asymptote on the function of technological progress, exponential functions don't have vertical asymptotes. It's the ever-present exponential increase that we all know and love, looked at from a distance.
Apple hasn't even announced a movie download service yet (albiet everybody and their brother has speculated they eventually will), and they're allready being cast as the company to beat. I love it.
IIRC launchd does everything you're asking for (and much much more), although I'm not sure if anyone's ported it to linux yet (knowing/., that's probably an unstated requirement).
First off, Opterons are pretty mediocre at double precision floating point benchmarks, it just isn't what they were designed for. Opterons effectively have only a single FPU (technically they have two, but one only does addition, while the other handles all multiplies), while most competing chips in the HPC arena have two full FPUs. They tend to get spanked by PPCs and Itanium2s, and even Xenons can do better.
Also, you should note that the modified PPC440s in BlueGene have a disproportionate amount of floating point resources. Making them about equivalent to the 970 in that area mhz for mhz, despite being massively outclassed in integer and vector ops. And the floating point units on those 440s are full 64-bit units (as fpus are on many other ostensibly 32 bit chips, as the bit width of a fpu has nothing to do with the integer units and mmus being 32-bit). Plus the PPC has a fused multiply-add instruction, allowing it to theoretically finish 2 FLOPS/unit/cycle, instead of just one.
And finally, you should know that individual nodes' ram sizes matter very little for Linpack.
When you take all that together, it's not too surprising that 700Mhz PPC440s with 2 64-bit FPUs each finishing up to 2 FLOPs/cycle (at least 2 of which must be adds) would perform on par with 2.xGhz Opterons finishing a total of 2FLOPs/cycle (at least one of which has to be an add).
Hmm...Actually, it looks like Camino and mac-Firefox will let you cmd-click items in menus to create new tabs, but both still won't let you middle-click on menu items to do the same thing. Oh well, there's allways room for improvement.
I was extremely annoyed by Camino's old tabbing system arbitrarily refusing to display more than 15 tabs. (a year or two ago, someone complained that tabs didn't look nice when they got really closely packed, and one of the developers decided to 'fix' things by pulling a number out of his hat, and simply ignoring any attempts to open more tabs than that)
Now that I can load up my morning webcomics with a single click again, I may actually switch back from safari to Camino.
Also, Safari & Firefox don't let you cmd-click items in menus to create new tabs, like you can in the windows version of firefox. And it seems Camino supports this too now, cool.
The graphics could use a bit of updating to match Panther's version of pinstripes, but otherwise this looks very cool.
It looks like Open Directory is open sourced as part of the Darwin. So you could just download the x86 version of Darwin and run that if you refuse to get off of x86 and don't mind doing without Apple's lickable GUI.
The numbers might not lie, but you do (probably unintentionally in this case).
The test case was intensive ray tracing with Pixar's RenderMan on two systems:
That statement is impossible because Pixar's renderman (prman) is not a ray tracer. It uses coordinate space transforms and shaders to render, much like a modern 3D video card would (albiet prman only does this after dicing the models to be rendered into millions of quarter-pixel-sized micropolygons, and allows arbitrarily complex shaders of many types).
This mode of rendering obviously has very different memory access requirements than ray-tracing (prman's memory access patterns would probably more like rendering a *really* complex scene via OpenGL or DirectX). Perhaps you can see how this is relavent in refrence to forkazoo's first statement?
If you were actually doing ray-tracing on those two systems, the results might be different...
Pixlet is not lossless. It's a high quality wavelet based lossy codec; sort of like JPEG2000, but with a bunch of optimisations for video.
What makes pixlet suitable for editing is that it has only I frames (i.e. each frame of the video is a complete entity in itself, not refrencing data in any other frame), thus it can be scrubbed quickly and accurately, and cut cleanly at any point (unlike the various MPEG1/2/4 and MPEG-4-derrived codecs, which decrease file size by refrencing information in other frames, thus sacrificing that editing functionality).
But you were right in that, if Apple were to launch a Video Store in the next few years, it would probably use MPEG-4-AVC (h.264) and AAC audio (perhaps even AAC-HC aka aacPlus, by then). Those codecs are much more suited to delivering media to consumers (i.e. they have much higher quality at lower bitrates, but less easy editing functionality).
Slashdot Mirror
The Good:
-The screen is nice. Very readable even in sunlight, fairly high res for it's 6" size at 600x800.
-The battery life(although I didn't play with one nearly enough to drain it's charge.
The Bad:
-64MB of flash. What is this the 90s? Even plain old text could fill that up pretty damn fast, and it's damn near useless for graphics or audio.
-2-bit greyscale is great for text, but is on the lower edge of acceptable for manga (and the resolution could stand to be a bit higher for manga as well). I realize 4 or even 8 bit grayscale would be a luxury feature on an early-model device like this, and I wouldn't even mention it, except that Sony advertises and sells manga for their Reader.
-Windows-only software, and no word on weather 3rd parties will be able to make their own loaders for linux and macs.
The Ugly:
-The case has a huge lip all around the screen, especially on the bottom. I think this device could be a good deal smaller and more portable without shrinking the screen size.
-The interface is even clunkier than the screen's slow refresh rate requires it to be.
-There are too many ports and slots and buttons and widgets. Sony really ought to take a page from the iPod's book on minimalism.
-Zooming in seems to only work on text, not graphics (manga)
-The $350 price tag. Unless the screen itself costs over $200 (who knows, maybe it does), I just can't justify that price, especially when you need to spend another ~$50 to give it a usable amount of memory.
I'd seriously like to see Apple's take on an eBook reader. My complaints are almost all about cross-paltform support, configuration and case design, and interface design; which are all areas Apple does pretty well in the iPod. So I think they could build a better eBook reader in short order if they chose to (really, it's mostly just grafting an ePaper screen onto a iPod nano's innards and putting it in a slick little case, with a well designed interface).
It's too bad that I suspect they see readers as a nice market next to music listeners and video watchers, and won't bother with that market until they've safely conquered the others.
Yeah, because you know that when you're ready to upgrade to HD, they'll give you a free new set of disks if you already bought the non-HD DVD!
There are some perfectly good reasons to prefer CDs and DVDs the currently available download methods, so why do people insist on instead putting forth rationalizations for their preference based on topics where downloads and physical media have identical limits (i.e. you have to pay if you want another, possibly higher quality, copy)?
In any case, this up-sampling of old videos is a pretty lame move by Apple. But at least it looks like it may be limited to a few old music videos for which they simply didn't have access to high-res sources, while TV shows were all cleanly re-encoded from higher-res raws.
At this point it's probably in Apple's best interest to do whatever it takes to acquire appropriate high-res sources and offer free upgrades to whoever downloaded the up-sampled vids, to restore consumer good will and confidence for their next eventual upgrade to HD.
If you think the studios charge more for wholesale DVDs than for wholesale download-rights, I think you've got things very much reversed.
Wholesale DVDs can be had for a couple of bucks a disc for many older movies. Whereas, if Apple's cut of their movie sales is anything like their cut of music sales, they're sending somewhere around $7 to Disney for each of the older $9.99 movies they sell.
Laptop chipsets with Intel's integrated graphics cost $3 or $4 more than otherwise equivalent chipsets without graphics as of July according to their price list.
Good luck getting cheaper than that with your knock-off.
Those numbers don't smell right to me.
You can get an account with an indie "label" like tunecore.com and get $.70 for each of your songs sold on iTunes.
That's only a $.29 cut for Apple, not $.35, and I *seriously* doubt Apple is giving this no-name indie label that much better a deal than the big 4.
Actually, at geosync orbit altitudes, the earth's escape velocity is ~4.3km/s. And you gain a good deal of orbital velocity (~3km/s) when going up a space elevator, which can be converted into escape velocity. So you only really need a delta-v of ~1.3km/s to escape earth's gravity once you're at the top of a space elevator (compared to ~11km/s from earth's surface).
The earth's ~30km/s velocity in orbit around the sun has no real impact on this scenario. Once you hit earth's escape velocity, you're effectively free of earth's gravity and into the domain of the sun's gravity. You'll get to the sun eventually as long as you don't hit something else first, or accelerate far more to beyond the sun's ~43km/s escape velocity, and I don't suppose it really matters how long it takes waste to reach the sun once it's on trajectory.
But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.
No, the volume limit is user controlled.
You're still free to use your iPod at deafening levels if you like, it's just easier to avoid doing so without thinking now.
Oops, I lost a chunk of that post somehow, the 2nd paragraph was supposed to go something like this:
And much of that 1% isn't even on decently priced analog cable anymore. Comcast has cut even basics like the SciFi channel form analog cable in my area, and hasn't offered any premium channels outside of digital for a while now. So paying $10 a month for each of the few shows I want is a much better deal for me than paying $70 a month to ransom the channels that offer those shows back via digital cable.
And you are so blinded by the crap on TV that you don't realize that less than 1% of it is worth my time to watch.
/w video?
And much of that $70 a month to get the channels that offer those shows back via digital cable.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that I can see them whenever I want instead of having to remember to watch or record them on the TV's schedule.
If Apple were to extend this deal (~16 shows for $10, paid in advance) to some of their other shows, like Battlestar Galactica, I could actually see myself making my first iTMS purchase.
But of course, they probably won't offer that low a rate on longer and more collectible shows like BSG. And I really can't see paying much more than that for a movie that just isn't all that comparable to a DVD (320x240 vs 720x480, watchable on ubiquitous $40 players vs needs a computer or an iPod, comes on a nicely packaged DVD vs can't even be burned as a DVD, etc).
Really, it seems to me the iTMS got a lot of things right with music, and then turned around and got those same things irritatingly wrong on video.
They made the music decent quality, as good or better than most of the stuff being traded on the net at the time (using similar bitrates and a superior codec). But they made the video disappointingly low res, equivalent to stuff that was traded online in the late '90s, not the mid '00s (the h264 codec is great, and the ~768k bit rate they use is, if anything, overkill for their resolution, but the 320x240 resolution is just not competitive with what you can find on bittorrent these days [and as Jobs has said before in relation to music, the pirates are their real competition]).
And they made the music burnable to a standard redbook CD so it could be easily backed up and used with your old equipment, but they made the video unable to be burned to a DVD... (I wonder if the studios demanded the burned DVDs be DRMed and were bitten in the ass by their earlier mandating that consumer DVD burners cannot burn CSS encrypted DVDs?)
I wonder what balance of the causes of this was? Were the studios setting apple up to fail, or at least not succeed to fast for the competition to copy, after being frightened by apple's rapid success in selling music online? Or, was it largely a technical issue? Would letting the iPod decode 640x480 h264 have required more time/money/power than Apple felt they could spend to release the iPod
Carbon emissions are *rising*, with something like a 60% increase in the last 30 years.
Even a small impact in terms of *reducing* emissions over 30 years is a *huge* change form the level they would have *risen* to by '35 at the current rate.
Seriously, FM radio isn't exactly pristine quality to begin with.
I'd think even common 64kbit MP3 streams from a clean source at the radio station would probably sound better than a high bitrate stream generated locally from the noisy distorted signal you could receive over the air and digitize.
Do these remind anyone else of the camera balls that the Tinkers used for their security systems in The Peace War?
The ones in the book used some fancy optics to capture a 360 degree picture, and then post-processed it to let the user virtually pan-and-scan without the need for moving parts, instead of mechanically rotating the ball like these. And, of course, they were a lot smaller, were tacky instead of bouncy, had better power arrangements, and were deployed ubiquitously.
But, still, this could be seen as a sort of primitive ancestor to the Tinkers' surveillance systems...
Monitors, and to a certain extent video cards when they're not doing anything but display an image, don't *need* to support more than 8bbp to take advantage of HDR editing and display.
The human eye isn't really capable of perceiving significantly more than 8 bits per pixel. Those extra bits aren't for us, they're for the computer to use in calculating the 8bbp it wants to display for us after a picture is edited.
Say you want to adjust the brightness of a picture, if you change the brightness of an 8bbp image, you end up throwing away some of those 8bbp by shifting them into white, and you stretch the remaining bits out to cover the entire spectrum, giving you a resulting image with less than a full 8 bits worth of levels for each color, leading to banding and whiteout and other nasty artifacts. Now if you do the same with a 16bbp int image, you'll have more bit depth to begin with, and thus can afford to spend more of it in editing without leaving your final image with less than 2^8 levels. And if you use 32bit floats for each color channel, as in a true modern HDR image, you can do even better, as well as accurately accounting for very bright or dim areas which wouldn't show up well in integer valued pixels.
That's probably because the same effect *was* in play. Remember, the guesses Kurzwiel is making are based on an exponential progression of technological innovation. But if you'll remember your statistics, exponential distributions are memoryless, they look the same no matter where you cut them off; there's always the same increasing increase in proportion to whatever the current value happens to be at your chosen point.
Charles Stross kind of touched on this in Accelerando, but he never quite made the point he kept hinting at by letting his characters debate when the singularity actually happened. The singularity is *allways* happening. It's not an instantaneous vertical asymptote on the function of technological progress, exponential functions don't have vertical asymptotes. It's the ever-present exponential increase that we all know and love, looked at from a distance.
Apple hasn't even announced a movie download service yet (albiet everybody and their brother has speculated they eventually will), and they're allready being cast as the company to beat. I love it.
Did we not just have an article about this?
/., that's probably an unstated requirement).
IIRC launchd does everything you're asking for (and much much more), although I'm not sure if anyone's ported it to linux yet (knowing
It's 500mW max iirc, which is enough to keep most portable devices running, but would make charging really slow.
If they were to go to a standard connection Firewire might be nice at 12-60Wats.
But in the mean time, they'll generally use custom connectors for charging.
Well, it comes down to a few different things.
First off, Opterons are pretty mediocre at double precision floating point benchmarks, it just isn't what they were designed for. Opterons effectively have only a single FPU (technically they have two, but one only does addition, while the other handles all multiplies), while most competing chips in the HPC arena have two full FPUs. They tend to get spanked by PPCs and Itanium2s, and even Xenons can do better.
Also, you should note that the modified PPC440s in BlueGene have a disproportionate amount of floating point resources. Making them about equivalent to the 970 in that area mhz for mhz, despite being massively outclassed in integer and vector ops. And the floating point units on those 440s are full 64-bit units (as fpus are on many other ostensibly 32 bit chips, as the bit width of a fpu has nothing to do with the integer units and mmus being 32-bit). Plus the PPC has a fused multiply-add instruction, allowing it to theoretically finish 2 FLOPS/unit/cycle, instead of just one.
And finally, you should know that individual nodes' ram sizes matter very little for Linpack.
When you take all that together, it's not too surprising that 700Mhz PPC440s with 2 64-bit FPUs each finishing up to 2 FLOPs/cycle (at least 2 of which must be adds) would perform on par with 2.xGhz Opterons finishing a total of 2FLOPs/cycle (at least one of which has to be an add).
Hmm...Actually, it looks like Camino and mac-Firefox will let you cmd-click items in menus to create new tabs, but both still won't let you middle-click on menu items to do the same thing. Oh well, there's allways room for improvement.
I was extremely annoyed by Camino's old tabbing system arbitrarily refusing to display more than 15 tabs. (a year or two ago, someone complained that tabs didn't look nice when they got really closely packed, and one of the developers decided to 'fix' things by pulling a number out of his hat, and simply ignoring any attempts to open more tabs than that)
Now that I can load up my morning webcomics with a single click again, I may actually switch back from safari to Camino.
Also, Safari & Firefox don't let you cmd-click items in menus to create new tabs, like you can in the windows version of firefox. And it seems Camino supports this too now, cool.
The graphics could use a bit of updating to match Panther's version of pinstripes, but otherwise this looks very cool.
It looks like Open Directory is open sourced as part of the Darwin. So you could just download the x86 version of Darwin and run that if you refuse to get off of x86 and don't mind doing without Apple's lickable GUI.
Really? Well, I guess I'm behind the times...
Sorry.
That statement is impossible because Pixar's renderman (prman) is not a ray tracer.
It uses coordinate space transforms and shaders to render, much like a modern 3D video card would (albiet prman only does this after dicing the models to be rendered into millions of quarter-pixel-sized micropolygons, and allows arbitrarily complex shaders of many types).
This mode of rendering obviously has very different memory access requirements than ray-tracing (prman's memory access patterns would probably more like rendering a *really* complex scene via OpenGL or DirectX). Perhaps you can see how this is relavent in refrence to forkazoo's first statement?
If you were actually doing ray-tracing on those two systems, the results might be different...
Pixlet is not lossless. It's a high quality wavelet based lossy codec; sort of like JPEG2000, but with a bunch of optimisations for video.
What makes pixlet suitable for editing is that it has only I frames (i.e. each frame of the video is a complete entity in itself, not refrencing data in any other frame), thus it can be scrubbed quickly and accurately, and cut cleanly at any point (unlike the various MPEG1/2/4 and MPEG-4-derrived codecs, which decrease file size by refrencing information in other frames, thus sacrificing that editing functionality).
But you were right in that, if Apple were to launch a Video Store in the next few years, it would probably use MPEG-4-AVC (h.264) and AAC audio (perhaps even AAC-HC aka aacPlus, by then). Those codecs are much more suited to delivering media to consumers (i.e. they have much higher quality at lower bitrates, but less easy editing functionality).
meh, some people have no sense of humor (plenty of mod points though)