Parity Violation

Last summer, I bought an inexpensive “plumax” firewire enclosure to house my old 10 GB hard drive. I had upgraded my desktop’s internal IDE drive to an 80GB I think, I can’t even remember so I had a spare 10 GB and thought I’d pop it in a firewire case for use with my laptop.

Sometime later, I saw a great deal on a 120GB drive and with a newer, larger, hard drive in my new iBook G4 I thought this would be a good time to get the bigger drive for the firewire case, for backup purposes.

However, I noticed how slow the new 7200 RPM drive seemed to be doing in in the firewire case. It was performing worse than a 7200 RPM 3.5 Seagate Barracuda should do. It was slower than my ibook’s internal drive. It was slower than my iPod.

So I blamed the case, but I couldn’t prove it. Until today, my new Other World Computing Mercury Elite firewire case came in today ($59 on clearance, but a 1 year warranty)… it’s literally 10 times faster than the old case, with the same drive inside, according to a few quick Xbench tests. Unreal.

So, don’t skimp on your firewire enclosures. That one you see on dealmac.com may be cheap, but there may be a reason for that.

The Supreme court threw out the conviction of a Texas death row inmate, saying that the prosecutors showed racial bias in removing blacks from the jury. The decision was 6-3 with the usual trio of Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas dissenting. The ruling is certainly a victory to opponents of the death penalty. Justice Breyer wrote in a concurring opinion that the whole notion of preemptory jury strikes should be tossed. A preemptory jury challenge are those done without explanation.

While I’m blogging about capital punishment, I’d like to know why no lawyer has thought to challenge the notion that capital juries are chosen specifically for people who don’t oppose the death penalty. That is to say, should I ever be on jury duty, they’d toss me because I don’t believe in capital punishment. That’s the law.

You’d think some lawyer somewhere would suggest that very notion is unconstitutional – that a jury of peers may include some people that don’t believe in the death penalty. Of course, in practice, this would end capital punishment since juries have to be unanimous. I suppose that dealth-penalty-happy legislatures would just change the unanimity requirement if this sort of legal challenge worked, and more than likely someone has tried that and no one bought it. Oh well.

Going back to the court, the other week I heard several people say they had ruled against medical marijuana. This isn’t strictly true. The court’s decision was really about federalism, and the supremacy of federal law over state law. They ruled that the federal government makes the rules on drug laws, and that state’s can’t override such laws.

The thing is, the anti-federalist bloc – those who argue federal supremacy on most matters is the liberal bloc and it’s Souter, Ginsburg, Stevens, and Breyer. In recent years, they had been squashed on matters such as Violence against Women Act, Gun Free Schools Act, and the American with Disabilities act, by states’ rights proponents..

In this case, they held together for federal supremacy, and since pot-smokers aren’t a popular conservative constituency, certain justices such as Scalia sortof changed their tune on federalism. Anyway, Salon does a much better job explaining this than I am doing.

I’ve long scoffed at the notion Apple would ever switch from PowerPC chips to Intel chips, but apparently they see something in Intel that they like. Clearly, IBM didn’t get the 3 GHz G5 chip out on time… there are issues with the G5 in a laptop, etc, etc.

I just hope the transition isn’t too painful, and this isn’t the beginning of the end of Apple as a hardware company. I don’t want to run OS X on some ugly Dell box.