Mac on Red Leopard

SOD: System Benchmarking Hardware

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:55:14 +0000

I’ve been working on and off on the next Seeds of Discontent article. This is a tidbit of an upcoming post but I wanted to push it out now since I need it published for a divergent sidebar article. It stands here bald and raw. That’s life.

This system uses most of the Rampage III resources. The two Radeon cards will completely consume the PCI Express lanes (2 x16). The 24GB DDR3 will fill the six DRAM slots.

Will it Blend?

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:52:02 +0000

In the previous article Seeds of Discontent, I jotted down a few benchmarks to compare OS X, Windows and Linux performance at a system level. In this article, I explore further a test built around graphics rendering engines. In particular, I was impressed by Sintel, an open source movie built with (among others) Blender.

I don’t know how long it takes to assemble the movie from source assets into a shipping product but I’ll venture it is quite a compute intensive process. I got the idea for this benchmark while reading on the sintel.org home page that the project is re-rendering the film for 4K and that it should be ready later this year (still a few months away). I didn’t know what 4K was so I looked it up. That lead me to compile a table of film formats and supported Frames per Second (FPS). I also appended three rows for HDTV of which only 720p and 1080p are real. 4320p is something bandied about as future but I couldn’t find material online that would lead me to believe it’s anything but a concept. I included it to define the upper envelope edge. (Note: different formats support different levels of FPS.)

Seeds of Discontent

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 03:10:48 +0000

I like reading Tom’s Hardware Guide. I liked it better in the site’s early days when it wasn’t so javacript and flash heavy and the articles were idomatically ‘German-English’. A lot happens in twelve or so years. Still, Tom’s is the best source of information on the web.

I read a CPU benchmark this morning which got me wondering if there were a possiblity to benchmark on any operating system but Windows. I concluded for the kind of benchmarks seen on Tom’s–not really.

Ten Apple Announcements That Would Not Disappoint

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:24:58 +0000

There are a lot of haters out there but I’m still rooting for Apple. I want Apple to succeed. I’m not going to WWDC 2010 (tapped out of conference budget).

I wish I were going.

Job’s “you won’t be disappointed” promise has my head spinning. I like surprises. I hope Apple doesn’t disappoint.

So, what would I like to see announced? Here’s my top ten list of wishful thinking.

Sepia MacWorld

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:06:49 +0000

I’m reading the news of Apple pulling out of MacWorld with a touch of sadness. MacWorld Boston is long dead. It was only a matter of time before MacWorld San Francisco ended, too. It makes sense to me.

Consider the history of COMDEX. In it’s heyday, COMDEX rocked. There was excitement, drama, confusion. I attended my first COMDEX in 1991, my last in 2003. Fall COMDEX reigned supreme but I also have fond memories of Spring COMDEX in Atlanta. (Never made the Chicago show).

iMac on Loan

Sun, 25 May 2008 17:14:54 +0000

Last summer, I retired my old Titanium PowerBook G4 (800MHz) as the Company bought my a shiny new MacBook Pro (2.4GHz). Sweet!

A year later, the latch on my laptop stopped latching. I sent it in for repair. In the interim, I Carbon Copy Cloned my hard drive and am using that hardrive to boot a 20″ iMac on loan from the office. I love it.

One thing I do miss: I really do use my laptop as a lap top. I can lean back with feet up on the ottoman and work with laptop on my lap. Sometimes, I need a book under the laptop. It gets hot.

Marketing Matters

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 04:32:48 +0000

This is a must read. Title is ‘The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story’

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

I tried to use CUPS from my Mac. Crikey! I don’t know HOW it happened but I can now print to my laser printer over ethernet. Of course, it has one of those [not supported on OS X] ethernet dongle thingies from NetGear.

But I can now print And it wasn’t CUPS either. I really don’t know if I’m printing through CUPS or over AppleTalk. Of course, I can’t print from ALL applications. Office-yes. PDF-yes(slow). Illustrator/Photoshop-no.

Favicon

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:12:42 +0000

I got a message from Dan last week asking about favicons. See, we both are on Mac OS X. It seems anything that comes from the Windows word requires an extra level of understanding when it’s in the Mac world.

After a bit of googling, I found the no non-sense answers I needed.

Not Gonna Upgrade

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 03:53:45 +0000

The cool thing about Open Source software is that folks world-wide are constantly working on it. That means continual updates. However, I’m not gonna update for a while. Here’s why.