Archive for June, 2005
June 8, 2005 at 3:06 pm · Filed under General
More news is coming out on the Apple OS release. Apparently, they are dropping Open Firmware for the x86 line. This is interesting news. I thought that porting Open Firmware was going to be a significant task that might cost Apple a bit of time before they could launch their new machines. (It would have been great to have… it’s always good to have a great monitor on a computer when things go wrong.).
Without this requirement, I can see no reason why Apple can’t get machines out in 6 months, unless they are wating for a particular chip or chipset from one of their suppliers (Intel).
In the meantime, this also makes it much easier for people to get the OS running on commodity hardware.
June 7, 2005 at 11:14 am · Filed under General
The news is still exciting so I’m going to make some predictions.
Apple’s pen technology and tablet will finally happen.
The resale value for Power PC based Mac’s will drop dramatically on the lower end. The decent higher end boxes will maintain their value until people finally accept that the x86 boxes will run their software fine. (There will always be those who ghost images and don’t want to risk their business on new technology just yet).
Fact. Apple will release their developer boxes next week. Within 2 days of them shipping a box, the following will occur.
Screenshots will show up on the web
Pictures and a detailed analysis of the dev hardware will show up on the web
Within 1-2 weeks of them shipping:
Bit-torrents of the x86 version of Tiger/Leopard will show up
Someone will announce patches to allow the OS to run on commodity hardware
I’ll say this. If I had 2 weeks to blow full-time, I could guarantee that I could have a patched version of OS X running on some commodity hardware.
People will still have to buy Mac hardware to run OS X legitimately. I think this will still occur. With better pricing and their solid hardware support (things just work), they will continue to have a healthy hardware market.
June 6, 2005 at 2:00 pm · Filed under General
I tried out the Yahoo Music service for the free trial the other week.
Overall, the experience wasn’t bad. If you are going to use it, I would recommend having one of the WMA compatible MP3 players to use with the service. I don’t have one, but when I do get one, I’ll check this out.
Overall, the selection wasn’t bad, the music sounded good, the search was Ok. The only question is whether Yahoo will give this endevour the proper long term commitment and energy that is required. They have a tendency of launching and not iterating on a product. Also, I found the bundling of Yahoo messenger and the attempt to change my search to Yahoo to be offensive. They need to ease up on that stuff.
Overall, recommended, but have a player and try it out monthly first.
June 6, 2005 at 1:41 pm · Filed under General
Well the unbelievable news about Apple and Intel is out.
Apple always manages to get my attention these days.
To a lot of people, they find all of this to be incredible. Actually, I ran Mac OS X on Intel about 11 years ago.
It was called Nextstep for Intel back then.
I wonder if they will repeat the next thing (again) and bring Openstep back and allow you to recompile an app for the Win32 environment 
I doubt that will happen since there is no need anymore for that kind of support. The web and other standards have leveled the playing field.
What a great day!
June 1, 2005 at 10:59 pm · Filed under General
A long time ago, I wrote an article that got posted to Slashdot about the benefits of high-speed Non Volatile RAM systems. There is definitely a spot for these devices in the memory hierarchy. Once these start showing up, I expect OS developers to wake up to this resource and start doing interesting things with it.
Today I saw this announcement from a prominent Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer. At $80, I expect to buy one of these at NewEgg in a few months! Cool!
June 1, 2005 at 3:23 pm · Filed under General
The new Intel and AMD dual-core procs are finally out. So far it looks like AMD has a good lead on Intel again. As a result, Intel is dropping the prices on their introductory dual-core processors to the $200 - $500 range. Even more interesting is the fact that they dropped the Hyperthreading on these low end versions. (Hyperthreading - aka SMT or Cray MTA). Intel does have one processor that is multi-core and Hyperthreaded (so it shows 4 cpus), and this is the Pentium D 840 Extreme.
This is interesting since everyone is getting a bit hyped up on dual-core and the details are significant. It doesn’t help that the benchmarks are all done with the ‘Extreme’ version of their 8xx line. Overall, this dual-core thing is just another trickle down of SMP to the masses. So, instead of having a higher quality motherboard and ’server class’ features, you can do SMP/SMT on your basic single CPU motherboard. Therefore, I think all of these benchmarks should be balanced against SMP. Maybe they should do a graph of total cost for a $ per mip.
I know this. My next big computer purchase will definitely be a multi-core processor with Hyperthreading/SMT from Dell.
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