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Shoelaces Untied To Start (7/12/98)
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Faithful viewer Matt Steinecker wrote in to clarify what went wrong during last Wednesday's network speed test, which pitted a Mac running Allegro (soon to ship as Mac OS 8.5) against a PC running Windows NT. If you weren't so lucky as to be at the keynote, you missed seeing NT trounce the Mac after the Mac's file copy got "stuck" shortly after starting. We attributed the problem to the fact that Allegro's still in beta, but Matt's got the real reason:
About the network speed thing: You may already know this, but it was caused by Energy Saver. The hard disk on the other machine had spun down, so the file was copied into RAM, and when that was full, the hard disk [on the server] took its time readying itself for the file... Or so said an Apple engineer at one of the User Conferences.
So the problem wasn't with the beta version of the operating system itself, but rather with the configuration of the server. (We can't imagine setting a spin-down time for the hard disks on a file server, for precisely this reason.) It also explains why the demo worked perfectly the second time they tried it; the server's disk was spun up and ready to serve, and demonstrated admirably that Allegro's networking implementation is faster than NT's. Darnit, we thought we'd seen an honest-to-goodness software error wreck an Apple demo, but it just turned out to be one of those silly things that you forget to check. Ah well, we had our fill of crashed demos back when Apple was trying to show off Copland. Man, was that ever a crash-happy disaster...
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SceneLink (849)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 7/12/98 episode: July 12, 1998: Further info on the Return of the Prodigal Expo yields both reason to celebrate and cause for concern. Meanwhile, Uncle Bill demonstrates just how well-trained one can keep one's customers, when one holds all the cards, and the real reason for last week's flubbed Allegro network demo shows that the guts underlying even Apple's failed demos are technically sound...
Other scenes from that episode: 847: Good News, Bad News (7/12/98) From our point of view, a Boston Globe article about MacWorld Expo's return to Boston next year includes good news and bad news. Of course, your opinions may differ, but regardless, the info is interesting to note. The good news is, when we heard that the '99 Expo was to be held only at the World Trade Center instead of both there and at the larger Bayside Expo Center, we hadn't heard that the show will actually be held at the World Trade Center and the brand-spankin'-new Seaport Hotel, right next door and with plenty of extra exhibit space and meeting rooms... 848: Pulling the Strings (7/12/98) With monopoly comes muscle, and lots of it. Remember how last week several PC manufacturers were strongly cautioning their customers about potential problems that could occur if they upgraded to Windows 98?...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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