[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 07:12:34AM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> I thought that FF3 was clearly faster than FF2 on a slightly higher  
> clock rate PPC machine (quad 450s versus dual 533s).  FF3 still wouldn't 
> be considered blazing on the G4 though.  Sadly FF speed is one of the 
> major pains driving my desire to upgrade.  That and an inability to play 
> flash video anymore (it used to work just fine, but more and more flash 
> videos stutter through getting 1 or fewer frames per second out, I find 
> this sad since similar size MOVs play just fine on the machine).

I think this has more to do with different encoding than with the speed
of FireFox. I recently puchased (for next to nothing) a 667mHz 15" Powerbook
and it also plays MP4 avi files fine using VLC or QT. 

It does not play flash videos with any useable speed, and switching to safari 
4 with its much faster Java engine did not help.

It's not network speed, if you start the playback and pause it, then wait
for the cache to fill, it still won't work. 

It's a shame as with a 15" screen it makes a nice tabletop video player,
and 99% of my TV watching these days is streaming flash videos.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM