Brain Drippings

And there was much rejoicing!

Jared at 23x posted a great link to an analysis of the armageddon that struck Endor following Death Star II’s destruction. In summary:

No animal larger than a few kilograms and incapable of long sheltered hibernation could survive the Endorian calamity.

Bwahahahahaha. Too bad Jar-Jar wasn’t present at the time… or was he?

Macwork has a great tip for iPhoto users. Yeah, it’s old, so what?

Well, it looks like Mac OS X 10.5 might come with the option of using Sun Microsystem’s zettabyte files system (ZFS), which has some very interesting advantages over other file systems.

WorldOfApple.com has the details

For the record, a zettabyte is 1024⁷ bytes, or 1.18059162 × 10²¹

That is 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes. The maximum size of a zfs drive is actually less than a zettabyte, as it can reference “only” 16 exabytes (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes or about 1.15 x10¹⁸)

There’s a great blog posting about ZFS by Jeff Bonwick, who is the primary developer at Sun behind ZFS. The title of the posting is the rather amusing, “128-bit storage: are you high?”

As for why the filesystem is named ZFS when its maximal size is a mere 16 exabytes (well short of a zettabyte), Jeff explains in another posting that “Zettabyte File System” is a backronym and that he had to hunt around for something for the Z to stand for. He settled on zetta, the prefix for 10²¹.

Microsoft (MSFT) has finally shipped its next OS, named Vista né Longhorn, to its business customers. Vista lacks almost all the features that were promised for Longhorn Lo those many years ago, but it does sport a new OS X-alike look; some purdy graphics; and emphasis on security, sorta; anew version of IE, which is also available for XP; and some really serious problems.

Let’s look at security, which Microsoft swears up and down is now a primary concern. Microsoft dealt with this in typical Microsoft fashion, the system now pops up an authentication dialog ALL THE TIME. Change anything, and the system asks you to authenticate. The dialogs are so frequent that you will quickly be aggravated into turning off this ‘feature’; and since this is Microsoft, it’s all or nothing, so once you turn it off, you will get no protection or notification of nefarious programs trying to do things they shouldn’t. In a brief test with Vista I averaged 8 authentication dialogs an hour, or one ever 7 1/2 minutes.

Here’s an excerpt from David Pogue‘s article at the New York Times:

And then there’s that Sidebar, the floating layer of mini-programs. If you close one of the gadgets, you lose its contents forever: your notes in the Post-it Notes gadget, your stock portfolio in the Stocks gadget, and so on. You couldn’t save them if you wanted to. How could Microsoft have missed that one.

What a wonderful example of Microsoft’s foresight on behalf of their customers, don’t you think?

There’s many other Windows XP features that are missing from Vista, but one of the more glaring absences is that Word Pad will no long be able to view Word documents, so people will need to either pony up several hundred dollars to buy office, download OpenOffice, or upload the documents to docs.google.com.

Windows Vista comes in five different versions, ranging from the worthless and crippled “Home Basic” to the Media Center-ish “Ultimate”. Most people will likely end up with the Home Premium version, but this one has some rather serious shortcomings, and many people will find that to do what they want, they will have to go for the $400 “Ultimate”. For example, want to use Remote Desktop to manage your kid’s Widnows machine? Yeah, Premium don’t play that, pony up $400. Premium also doesn’t support encryption, so stolen laptops will still have millions of SSN numbers on them available to the thieves. For the record, Remote Desktop-like features (VNC) and encryption are a part of every OS X install.

That’s not to mention that you need a top-end video card and a very recent processor in order to take advantage of many of Vista’s flashier features. If you’ve bought your machine in the last 6 months, you are probably ok. If not, you likely need to at least spend $200 on a video card, and you quite possibly need a whole new machine.

So, while we’re at it, let’s talk about the new licensing for Vista, which will come as a rude shock to many users in 6 months to a year, as people will be quite surprised to find that when they upgrade their Vista machine’s processor and video card in a year, Microsoft will demand you purchase a whole new version of Vista. That’s right, you can’t transfer your Vista to a ‘new’ machine, and Microsoft is the sole arbiter of what is a ‘new’ machine.

Of course, none of this matters. Unless you hang on to your current Windows machine, you will have no choice about moving to Vista. All new machines will be sold with Vista next year, so unless you buy a Mac (really, buy a Mac, it will even run Windows XP or Vista if you really want), you will be forced into Vista soon enough.

After spending a little bit of time with and Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and seeing some demo videos of the PS3, I think I figured out what separates these products.

Microsoft wanted the Xbox 360 to be an extension of Windows; a Hardware product that was exclusively and irrevocably tied to the Windows OS. They have largely succeeded in that score. The Xbox will play video and music from your PC, but only if that PC is running Windows Media Center, and only if the stuff you want to stream is Microsfot DRM or no-DRM. What this really means is, no iTunes. Everything streamed to the 360 is encoded, or decoded, or recoded, or something, to end up with a Microsoft only format that only the 360 understands, and that is what is then translated to your screen/speakers.

On the other hand, Sony made a Blu-Ray player that also acts as a sort of home-PC. They are obviously hoping that for some people, A PS3 will be good enough for them to not even need a PC. So their product is really positioned as a PC/DVD player that plays games.

And then we come to Nintendo. On paper, everything about the Wii loses to both the big boys. It is cheaper, the graphics are not nearly as good, it’s half the size, and heck, it doesn’t even play DVDs; though this feature is promised for early 2007. So why is the Wii selling like a 1980 pet rock? The Wii is fun. That’s really it in a nutshell. You pick up that ‘wand’ controller and swing your arm and bowl a ball, and the ball on the screen, and the arm on the screen, match you motions so closely it is stunning. Standing up to bat and as you wiggle the wand the bat on screen amplifies those motions just as if you were holding a real bat. In Call of Duty III, you hold the Wii controllers as if you were holding a rifle, aiming by looking down the ‘barrel’ of your ‘gun’.

Call of Duty III is a great benchmark, because the same game is on all three platforms. It looks MUCH better on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 (and I couldn’t tell a difference between them, though others claim the PS3 is clearly better). So, fine, for the first few minutes the Wii looks pretty weak. And then you start playing. You find yourself jumping and crouching and whirling around and suddenly the graphics don’t matter much because playing the game is so much more involving on the Wii.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don’t we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don’t love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker ‘n’ too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, ‘lope with you!

Hunky Dory’s pop is lolly gaggin’ on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!
Chollie’s collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an’ polly voo!
Chilly Filly’s name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly’s jolly chilly view halloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!

Quote of the day:

Lithium is no longer available on credit.