steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

While its late - so late that I should have been asleep a few hours ago, I have been toying with so many things over the past few weeks that I had to finally do some fly-by note taking:
Q: this is the latest QEMU emulator available for OS X (at Q [kju:]) and it rocks. I bought a new MacBook Pro - I couldn't wait for rev2 because I was dying to see how Intel performed (notes below) and the performance of OpenBSD under Q on OS X is fantastic. The only thing I still can't figure out is networking and why I can't get packets past the emulator, but I'll have to do more digging on that one later. As far as performance of moving around the system, adding packages, etc. is concerned, it is very impressive. Considering my thoughts under the PowerBook (even the 1.67GHz model) was less than appealing, I am happy (and the fact the VirtualPC won't work on the new Intel machines - and I'm not sure given my recent bout of problems with that application that I will invest in it again).
MacBook Pro: I love it. Period. People are complaining about different items missing from the hardware like the S-Video connection and modem. I could care less (modem... well, I do a bit, but not too much). The machine is stellar. I like the built-in iSight (yes, I actually use it) and the speed. No, not the speed with regards to non-universal apps - especially Microsoft Office and Adobe products. Yuck. The performance is no better than my PowerBook. Where I notice the difference is on Intel native (i.e. universal) applications and especially on unix related stuff that I compile. I honestly think the performance on compiling ports (vis a vis darwinports.org) is better than on my dual 2.0 G5. I haven't actually timed anything - yet - but it has thoroughly amazed me. I'm happy all around and hope to do more writing on the topic later.
AFPoverTCP: i.e. Apple native file sharing on an 802.11g network. Quick quips: Stream DVD's? Not unless you really monkey with buffer settings in VLC (set file buffering to 10,000 ms). At least it is not consistent. I really don't know what Apple is going to do to make streaming video over 802.11g any good. Unless they tweak all of their media programs to do better buffering, people will be sorely disappointed if they think they are going to network a small army of Mac Minis together to create a hodge-podge video and content streaming network. The throughput is so inconsistent (even if I'm sitting 2 ft. from the AP) that DVD's often drop out and/or become choppy. I finally tweaked VLC enough to get it working to my satisfaction, but that is not for Joe-Mac-User. I really can't figure out how Apple has let afp performance slide so horribly. Even when looking at file transfer performance on a gigabit network, the best I see is 367mbps on file transfers (yes, single large files). That is some overhead... ridiculous. I'm going to look more into seeing if there are system related tweaks one can make to get better performance out of the built-in networking devices, but who knows. With the theoretical speeds of today's networks, a lot of what we want to do should be possible - i.e. stream high(er) definition video content from machine to machine. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on making things better, we're stuck with developers and companies trying to add some new, unneeded button to already good hardware. 17mbps of real throughput on [advertised as] 54mbps network gear is ridiculous. That equates to around 2mBps - just around what a DVD showing full color frames will stream at. I love living on the edge...