Industrie Toulouse

	Tuesday, April 30, 2002

Mac OS X 10.1.4 must have come out 12 days ago. Why? Because -- 1:18AM up 12 days, 1:19, 1 user, load averages: 1.77, 1.57, 1.35.

I ordered my white iBook the day they were announced. All I was wanting was a sub-$2000 notebook from Apple that would give me 1024x768 resolution. Even if it looked like the old iBooks, I'd have been happy. Anyways - I don't think I've ever shut my system down. It's restarted a few times (two Mac OS X kernel panics in the early days, some Mac OS 9 audio usage), and was off during a RAM upgrade, but even when moving across the country in a Ryder van, it stayed asleep.

On the other hand, we met a salesman at the airport the other day to give him a CD-ROM for a show he was doing. He had a fairly recent laptop running Windows XP. We had to wait for him to power up to test out the CD. It was such a strange sight to me - people actually shut off their notebooks? Mac OS X has excellent wake-up technology (the IOKit spawns off a bunch of separate threads simultaneously to wake up the system so that it's usable by the time your hands hit the keyboard), but Windows XP and recent Windows notebooks should be in the same ballpark, shouldn't they? I'm guessing this guy is a long time notebook user and maybe just isn't aware that sleep mode can be safe. Or, maybe it isn't.

There was a time when I was considering a Windows CE device. The main reason? Instant-on. The small notebook sized devices were seriously looking tempting a couple of years ago. Fortunately, Mac OS X delivers almost-instant-on from sleep, and battery drain while sleeping is pretty minimal. So, I have my small instant-on wireless internet device that is not only as beautiful as the Helmut Lang Parfumerie, but is powerful enough to do real work and play off of. With decent battery life, almost one year later. When network computers were announced many a year ago, this is what I had pictured in my brain. And it's so much better than the NC dreams.

Anxiously awaiting Jaguar.
1:37:52 AM blips[]

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