Flashes of Panic

One of the things that is bolshoi, bolshoi cool about Mac OS X is that I have, in the background, Photoshop running a batch job to chew through one set of files, and Imageready running another batch job on another set, and yet they’re running more or less independently, so I can have Ecto open here in the foreground and be writing this without any significant lag. (OK, the load average is higher than usual, but if your load average is less than 1 you’re wasting processor time anyway.) (That’s a bit of a joke. Really.) It’s all possible through the Unix core, which manages the running tasks and juggles them nicely in a way the old Mac OS never could. (Or Windows, maybe, but I have a hard time remembering past limitations of Windows since I so seldom use it.)

But here’s where it falls short of Unix: since Photoshop is working on that batch job, I can’t use Photoshop for anything else until it’s done. Maybe that’s a drawback of Photoshop, not the MacOS, but it would be nice to be able to fork off a new instance of Photoshop and get going on another task while I’m waiting for my batch to be finished. Then I’d never have to wait for the computer; instead, I could pile up a stack of work for it to do while I go home for the afternoon. Heh.

Now playing: Elevation from All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2