May 2008

From AHN: Former Model Angie Everhart Arrested For DUI

Getting arrested for DUI is not terribly unusual for celebrities, but it turns out that there’s a little more to this story.  It turns out that Angie Everhart, the 38 year old former SI Swimsuit Model, was recently dumped by Joe Pesci.  Yeah, Joe Pesci.  It seems that he ended their nine month old engagement and has moved on to another girl.  The only good news for Angie is that this probably as low as you can possibly go.  It’s all up from here!

From NYTimes.com: Blu-ray: The Future Has Been Delayed

The end of the format wars clearly did little to boost Blu-ray’s prospects. Like others, Mr. Rubin said the much cheaper upconverting standard DVD players are winning consumers’ hearts and wallets.

Sony may have assumed with HD DVD dying that it had won the format war.  But, what Sony needs to realize is that the war isn’t over yet.  Now, it’s a battle against upconverted DVDs, Internet downloads, Cable and Satellite TV.  If they were smart, they’d aggressively push down the cost of the Blu-ray players to get as many customers to adopt this format as quickly and make money on movie sales later.  Right now, customers are just waiting and in the meanwhile trying the other alternatives.

I found out recently that the Xbox 360 upconverts DVD’s and while not HD quality, it’s still acceptable to watch. 

I noticed in the post The Truth About the Spinning Dancer, the animated GIF of the dancer spins significantly slower in Safari 3.1.1 vs. Firefox 2.0.14 running Mac OSX 10.5.2.  This is with a fresh launch of each program and only the page showing.  At first I thought it was the computer that I use at work, the original MacPro 2.0 Dual G5, but it’s the same on my home computer a MacPro Intel Quad Core.

CPU usage is actually about 30% more for Safari vs. Firefox while the animation seems to be about six times faster for Firefox.

Scrolling the image off of the screen reduced CPU usage by 50% in Firefox.  While in Safari, scrolling the image off screen reduced CPU usage to nearly zero.