The 17″ MacBook Pro is out as of like 2 minutes ago: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
Looks like the main thing it sports over the 15″ is the larger screen, FireWire 800, 3 USB ports rather than 2, and an 8x DL superdrive. Not bad though :-)
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
Probably most people who don’t own a G5 will have no clue what I’m talking about, and among those that do, a decent number will sigh when they hear mention of it. I’ve never gotten a full explanation on what the whole problem is, but when the power features for the G5 are enabled on a PowerMac G5 (as they are enabled by default), one will occasionally be greeted with noises like those described in this Apple support document.
Well, up until now, this has just been a minor annoyance until I stumbled upon this lovely utility while looking around MacNN’s PowerBook/MBP forums. What does it do, you might ask? It can place variable loads on the processors found in your Mac. What’s so neat that the author of this app has discovered? Apparently, you can make your power supply play scales in the chirping noises. Here’s the explanation from the help docs included with SystemLoad:
the application tries to variate the load put on the processors in a certain pattern. This pattern is equivalent to the frequencies of a C-major scale between the notes C6 and C7. For processors consuming much power this causes the current (amperage) drawn by the processors to variate in the same pattern. For a dual CPU system with PPC 970 processors for example, the total current drawn by the processors will fluctuate between 22 and 120 amps in the millisecond range. Certain components in the power supply will start to ring with the same frequencies due to the high load changes. For some power supplies these changes become audible. Similar effects can be seen with the DC/DC boards of some PowerBook models.
Very random, but also very cool. Wonder if the author would put out an API for hooking this up as a MIDI output. You could play all kinds of interesting stuff :-)
P.S.: I’ll give a try at recording this tomorrow. I don’t have any microphone around the house…
No, I’m not joining the military or anything. The boot camp I’m talking about is Apple’s new tool and firmware for booting windows natively on a new Intel Mac. Boot Camp itself is a selection of appropriate drivers for Apple hardware coupled with partition resizing and setup help software. This provides for a friendly user interface for getting things set up. In addition to this is a firmware update that adds BIOS support, allowing windows to boot on an EFI Mac. In reality, it’s the firmware that’s giving one the ability to boot windows, but Boot Camp makes it easy.
Now, there’s been more than a flurry of commentary about this in the past couple of days. Actually, I think deluge would be the appropriate term. Many have been supportive (Ryan’s post is quite good, and I pretty much agree with his sentiments), with some speculative statements about what this means for the future of whatever, but there are a few people out there who, I really think, just don’t get it. One of which is the following, from CNET. The article pretty much chalks Boot Camp up to a solution for existing Mac users to run games. He also discounts that any people will be coming over that are Windows users because of dual boot functionality. While I personally wouldn’t expect huge numbers of users to be coming over to the platform, it’ll get a lot more people to consider getting a Mac, which is a large part of the battle. I think the vast majority of Windows users that buy into this though will be the relatively tech savvy folks that kinda like OS X, but have a large base of existing investment in Windows software. These users can continue making use of Windows applications, but start building up a comfortable set of software on the Mac side of things. Couple this with virtualization solutions that are already here, with more to come, and the picture looks even sweeter from both sides of the fence.
The bottom line is that Apple is taking a gamble with this venture, but at the same time it puts the ability to run OS X (legally, and in a supported fashion) in conjunction with Windows and Linux all in one box, with virtualization for concurrently running everything at the same time. Where’s the complaint? Apple’s hardware really isn’t more expensive than comparably equipped boxes from top-tier Wintel vendors (you can find cheaper and more expensive versions, but Apple is one company, and in the business of selling quality hardware).
So, there’s a new startup out there, that’s operating under the idea that it’s useful to have locally cached versions of the web. The startup’s name is Webaroo, and there’s an article here about them. Now, I’m not sure whether it’s just because I’m not their target demographic, or what, but this seems like a rather short-sighted business. Basically, they’re operating under the assumption that you’d like to hold a subset of the web on one’s computer or laptop to carry around, view, and search while away from an internet connection. This sort of thing seems all well and good for things like Wikipedia, but what about things that are updated daily or hourly with new content. Personally, this content tends to have greater value to me. And, at the same time, I’m mostly able to access this whenever I want because I almost always have access to a net connection. Even if I were digging through more stable, established content, what if I happen to want to wander into an area that isn’t archived? What about the vast quantities of content that are just sitting on my drive not being used, ever?
Additionally, what about copyright? Is this company planning to cover all the copyright issues for distributing all the content that would be included in the local web archives? The main advantage I could see for this is that one could buy a pre-loaded hard drive with much of this content on it, but this seems frought with content ownership problems.
Additionally, in the long term, this business idea seems to be one that might only be useful for another few years as internet connections become more and more available. Even airlines are evaluating providing WiFi during flights, and most hotels, even those in the middle of nowhere, seem to provide net access. Their response to this problem is rather hand-wavy, stating that they’d perhaps have to do better in searching content. How, though could a locally stored copy on a hard drive do better than distributed databases housed by companies like Google? Unless disk bandwidth gets much better, I don’t see this as being faster. It’s like the dot com bubble all over again :-)
Ah, well, perhaps I’ll be wrong and Webaroo will take over the universe, but I’d be willing to bet money that they won’t last that long, or only will be met with limited success.
Interesting news bit about strange jets that emerge when pouring viscous fluids. Check out the video links in the article: here
The researchers have also noted that the “bouncing” fluids seem capable of carying light somewhat similar to transmission through fiber optics.
I’d never heard of this before… cool :-)
So, if you’ve been following either Slashdot or Digg or you go to Caltech or MIT, you may have become aware that some of the students at MIT managed to swipe a Spanish-American War era canon from Caltech’s campus and place it somewhere on the MIT campus along with a plaque.
Quite an amazing hack to have managed for them, and definitely keeping in the spirit of MIT/Caltech rivalry, but what I thought was even more amusing was that this isn’t the first time this Cannon has been removed. Harvey Mudd did something similar back in 1986, and thus the following was emailed to one of the internal lists at that university:
Subject: Caltech cannon
Date: 28 March 06 19:56:34 PST
To: [HMC internal mailing list]
Howdy,
Did anyone steal the Caltech cannon Monday night/Tuesday
morning? They called and said it was stolen and were hoping it was here.
Chris Sundberg
Associate Dean of Students
Harvey Mudd College
Hard to say why, but there’s something really amusing about the Dean or someone at Caltech giving the Dean at HMC a ring and being like, “Hey, so, in other news our cannon seems to have wandered off again, and we remember that you guys had something to do with that last time. You aren’t like doing a 20 year anniversary or something are you?”
Slashdot link: here
Another very cool news item for the day, missing link between water and land-inhabiting organisms at Nature: here.
The article is somewhat sparse on the details, but it does have a few neat videos of a new type of walking robot. The unique and cleaver thing about this one? It uses only a modicum of sensors which detect when the legs are touching the ground and when a leg has moved to a particular position, which mimics in many ways the more simplistic approach used in humans to maintain gait, where there isn’t a huge amount of complicated processing going on to maintain motion.
Wow, snazzy. So apple has released an official solution to boot Windows XP on a Mac: here.
I’m sure some out there will use this as further support of Dvorak’s comments about Apple going Windows, however, I’d like to point out a few things here.
1. Why would Apple at first make their hardware incompatible with booting XP from the start, including using ATI boards that have no windows drivers (up until now)? I don’t buy an consipiracy theories here.
2. The usual argument regarding Apple, people’s investments in the Mac OS and related technologies. Would Adobe, along with other companies seriously be working on developing a new Intel Mac release of their software with the expectation of that software becoming defunct within a year or so. All of that development is a HUGE effort. It makes no sense to screw over all your software partners after just getting them to do the largest hardware/software conversion in the past decade.
Found an amusing subject line courtesy of Nature this morning. Of course, it is with reference to a new publication, but funny nonetheless :-)
