I’ll Tell You What…

There is an extremely good, in depth review of Apple’s latest OS X release over at Ars Technica. It’s the best one I’ve read so far.

[Hat tip to MacSlash]

While some may be borderline “features”, you can find out more about Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)’s features on Apple’s website. There are some really cool things included with this release.

You can take the boy out of the South but you can’t take the South out of the boy.

That Yankee score isn’t too bad when you consider that I’ve lived in New England for 9 years!

[Note: I found this over at What in Tarnation?!?!?]

Sometimes you read the most insightful things on Slashdot. It’s rare, I admit, but it does happen every once in a while. Here’s a quote from this morning that I can relate to in such an intimate way that it makes my heart sink.

It’s your job as a corporate drone to rate management’s decisions on a scale from good to excellent. Anything less might label you as a bump in the road, a thorn in the side.

I have always been one to voice my opinion in tactful ways to the leadership at the companies for which I’ve worked. But I’m starting to get beat down and am becoming a little cynical about the whole system.

At my company we are just past review time and rapidly approaching raise time. After receiving a very dissappointing ranking slot, I’m not looking forward to the small raise that normally accompanies an average position.

*sigh* Battling cynicism is so difficult.


Results 200.91
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.3.8 (7U16)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model PowerMac7,3
Processor PowerPC G5×2 @ 2.00 GHz
L1 Cache 64K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 2.00 GHz
Bus Frequency 1 GHz
Video Card ATY,R360
Drive Type Maxtor 6Y160M0
CPU Test 180.02
GCD Loop 111.88 4.37 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 318.83 1.15 Gflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 123.83 3.60 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 199.44 3.10 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 382.97 15.33 Mops/sec
Thread Test 196.08
Computation 142.42 1.92 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 314.60 3.95 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 336.17
System 376.54
Allocate 720.90 470.24 Kalloc/sec
Fill 326.59 2599.63 MB/sec
Copy 284.25 1421.23 MB/sec
Stream 303.61
Copy 261.02 1908.07 MB/sec [G5]
Scale 266.39 1965.98 MB/sec [G5]
Add 347.49 2223.96 MB/sec [G5]
Triad 368.74 2253.01 MB/sec [G5]
Quartz Graphics Test 272.20
Line 263.44 6.71 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 250.00 17.59 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 257.93 5.95 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 231.96 2.52 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 419.30 6.83 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 187.11
Spinning Squares 187.11 130.94 frames/sec
User Interface Test 320.45
Elements 320.45 103.07 refresh/sec
Disk Test 110.21
Sequential 116.27
Uncached Write 130.12 54.24 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 88.40 36.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 159.50 25.25 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 109.47 44.23 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 104.75
Uncached Write 138.62 2.08 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 112.71 25.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.85 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 99.69 20.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]


My Geek Code.


—–BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK—–
Version: 3.1
GCS/IT/S d- s: a C++$ ULHS++++$ P++$ L++$ E— W+++
N++ o– K- w O++ M++ V PS– PE++ Y– PGP t+ 5 X++ R– tv
b++ DI++ D+++ G e++ h++ r+++ y++++
——END GEEK CODE BLOCK——


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hackerkey.com

Apple has announced the availability date for its next release of Mac OS X code-named Tiger: Friday, April 29. It’s going to have some really cool new features such as Spotlight, Dashboard, Safari RSS, iChat AV, Automator, Quicktime 7, .Mac Sync and Tiger Mail 2.

For those of you who cannot wait for new things to be tested by others, you can pre-order Tiger and it will arrive around the 29th.

They say that old habits are hard to break and anyone who has ever been around a smoker trying to quit knows it’s difficult on everyone. Well, I personally think that sugar would be a hard habit to break and when I read this article at the BBC my heart sank. Oh the humanity!

It’s not too bad, I suppose. Cookie Monster will now be teaching kids that cookies are “a sometimes food.” One interesting factoid from the article is that before Cookie Monster ate his first cookie “his name was Sid”. Go figure.

Well, the recording industries are at it again. This time they want ISPs to agree to a code of conduct that is anything but reasonable. I’m very much against copyright infringement but to stand behind organizations that use such tactics is something I just cannot do.

So what does President Bush listen to when he goes on his bike rides? The BBC has takes a peek inside the First iPod.