Lion ponderings

Stills from Mars: Inside SpaceX.  This was a separate show released concurrently with the awful soap opera that the general public saw, but not publicized.  There were no goog search results for it, only a buried link on nationalgeographic.com.  Still no hi res shots of that falcon heavy plaque which reveal the names.

The Phenom II X4 955 has 1 week to live & had the longest lifespan of any CPU. It has more sentimental value because it ran for 8 years. There weren't any major improvements until the last year. The best Macs in 2016 were just as slow. Before that was a dual 2.4Ghz Opteron which lasted 5 years & had 8GB of RAM. The brief 8GB configuration was actually more than the last 8 years.  Before that was briefly a dual 1.4Ghz Athlon which came after a longer stint with a dual 933Mhz Pentium III. The Pentium III was actually faster than the Athlon but the lion was ignorant & endured years of pain with the Athlon.  The RAM before Opteron was probably 1-2GB. Before that was the dual 550Mhz Celeron & the one that started it all, the Cyrix PR200, with 64MB & 32MB. The  Phenom II grew to thrash & thrash when running any modern programs.   Hard to believe the lion kingdom went as long as it did on 4GB of RAM.  Today, it's unthinkable. ...

The 8 year old computer takes 5 minutes to seek & 1 second to render each frame, but most striking in the latest PR video is the laptops giving way to phones & hot pixels. For someone who lived in a time when 8k meant a 70 lb camera, it's disappointing the relative ease of making 8k movies now has only resulted in IMAX theaters abandoning the 8k 4:3 format entirely, showing tiny 2k movies in letterboxed format.