apple juice

Apple announced today what once seemed impossible. They are transitioning the Macintosh to Intel processors.

For all the news and hype this will generate, for the people who matter, the users, it is basically a non-issue. Apple has the engineering prowess to pull this off, as they have in the past with similar changes. The users will never notice. Well, they will notice in the sense that their laptop batteries will last much longer, and we should see much more regular processor updates. But comparing mhz with Dells is no longer the issue.

It all comes down to interface, user experience, and Apps. iMovie, iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, all of Apple’s pro apps. OS X is already regarded as the best system on the planet. The situation will only improve.

The obvious downside is that the developers have work to do, more work in compiling on two processors. In the end of it all, they need to sell new versions, and targeting two platforms will, in theory, create better, more stable apps. (Having to debug on multiple processor types, while a major pain, tends to bring out problems in your code.)

I’m excited for this change, I think it will allow some great new products. I didn’t think it was going to happen, but here we are! One thing though, no G5 laptops, sorry Joey.

Bagel Biter
Originally uploaded by ajc3.

I found this funny for some reason…

Just decided to give Netflix a two week trial. Are you on Netflix?

After that post about movielens, it occured to me that Netflix must do the same thing… and it does. Multiple profiles on your account, seperate ratings, recommendations for your friends. I can tell I’m going to be hooked. I know people (jgd3) have been telling me forever to get on this, and in fact we bought a gift subscription for the parents a couple years ago, but we’re finally giving it a shot.

Send me an email or an invite if you use Netflix so I can get some people on my friends list.

Oh, and Eric, I’m finally going to see Donnie Darko. It’s in queue.

It looks like I’m not the only one that gets Lost in Eden Prairie

Even the Eden Prairie mayor admits it took her years to confidently find her way around town. “You’d almost think,” sighed Williams, “they didn’t know that people were coming.”

Seriously, it’s like the Bermuda Triangle over there. Once you go in, you may never find your way out again.

The city has hired experts in the new discipline of “wayfinding” to help folks make their way through a network of roads that consultants say is neither “linear nor logical.”

Back in the heyday of the internets (the late 90’s) there were all sorts of free services that offered you interesting information for free… with little or no advertising! Moviecritic was one such site. It capitalized on the power of collaborative filltering to recommend movies to you.

Basically you would browse through the movie database, and if a movie was listed that you had seen, you would rate it, 1-5 stars.

After rating a certain number of movies, it would begin to predict movies for you based on your ratings and the ratings of all the other users.

Then the really sweet thing was when you fed another username (the Juice-ette, say) to the site, and it would return movies that both of you will like, based on all these ratings.

Well, somewhere around late 2001 – early 2002 (not sure exactly) the site was shut down. Very sad. A few dark years of movie watching ensued. Somewhere in there we saw ‘Connie and Carla‘. A bad time indeed.

Something sparked my interest in movies this afternoon, so I thought I would see if any sites had cropped up in the wake of Moviecritic.

With that, I give you: movielens

The site is very similar to Moviecritic, and lo and behold, it’s appears to be a research project at the University of Minnesota. So with any luck, after I’ve rated 1000 movies, the site won’t disappear.

So, I strongly urge you, the 3 or 4 readers of my site, to sign up and do some rating. Send me an email to let me know you’ve signed up and we’ll see some movies!