Category: Web/Tech

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Web/Tech

Microsoft and IBM PowerPC

Fascinating to read this EE Times story about the new Microsoft Xbox 360 and its use of three custom IBM PowerPC processors — abandoning Intel.

Officially launched Thursday night (May 12) over broadcast TV, the Xbox 360 uses three custom 3.2-GHz PowerPC cores, each handling two threads. Each core includes a 128-bit vector graphics unit sporting a full 128 registers and a 1-Mbyte cache.

In addition, the console includes a graphics chip from ATI Technologies Inc. that processes up to 500 million triangles per second. The ATI chip contains 10-Mbytes of embedded DRAM and works with 512-Mbytes of external GDDR3 memory running at 700-MHz clock frequency.

PowerPC, of course, is the core platform for Apple’s Mac OS X.

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Apple Web/Tech

Spotlight on Mac OS X Server?

I was thinking this morning about coupling a Mac Mini together with a Google Mini for a killer office file server with superb search capability. Then I got to thinking that I’d really prefer to shed the $2,000+ Google Mini cost in exchange for just being able to run Tiger’s new Spotlight feature on Mac OS X supporting file sharing clients.

Anybody got a creative way to do this? Seems like Apple’s got a market opportunity to turn Mac OS X Server into something very close to a Google Mini by exploiting Spotlight technology on the server platform?

Categories
Apple Web/Tech

Mac Mini

David Hornik writes about Mac Mini — as the new new network computer. Kinda makes me want to pick-up a couple of them for the office!

His story reminds me of what I began noticing a couple of years back among the engineering teams of companies I was working with: they were all running around with Mac PowerBook’s and evangelistic about how great they were for development – especially in an environment where security matters.

Speaking of things Mac, Justin Williams has a great article about developing on a Mac over on MacZealots.com

As for me, I’m now over a week into Mac OS X Tiger and so far everything’s working great. In particular, I’m finding Spotlight to be very valuable for searching my overstuffed hard disk.

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San Francisco/California Web/Tech

Born Again

Charles Babcock writes about Silicon Valley and the rekindling of entrepreneurial spirits in the latest issue of Information Week.

The giddy days in the greater San Francisco Bay Area are gone. But Silicon Valley is back, and it just might be more relevant to business-technology managers than ever, as it hosts a new crop of startup vendors that are more focused, more globally connected, and more disciplined than their predecessors.

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Web/Tech

Search Schizophrenia

I loved this snippet from Lee Gomes’ column in this morning’s Wall St. Journal where he talks about how web search is often increasingly _less_ useful:

Thus, a kind of schizophrenia exists at search-engine companies. Half their engineering staff is busy trying to keep useless pages out of search results; the other half is busy coming up with tools that make it easier for people to create and profit from the useless pages in the first place.

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Apple Web/Tech

Tiger Balm

I installed Mac OS X Tiger yesterday on my Powerbook G4. So far, so good.

The performance of the system overall just feels “snappier”. Safari has an extra quick response now.

Dashboard is cool — we’ll have to see how useful it really is. I like the new Dictionary/Thesarus onboard. Spotlight is very nice — especially cool to have the new smart folders in Mail.

The UI of Mail is the only questionable aspect of Tiger for me. I liked the old interface – the bolding of mailbox names when there were new items, etc.

Had to clean up a mess in my iCal calendar – something I’ve been putting off. My calendar had entries back to 1998 which I’ve been carrying along since I migrated from Windows XP/Outlook 18 months ago. I used iCal’s export feature to save, year-by-year, from 1998 to 2004 — getting those entries permanently out of my iCal calendar. With those thousands of old entries gone, iCal’s working great.

John Saracusa’s written the definitive review of Mac OS X Tiger over on ArsTechnica.com. The Tiger Wiki is also a nice resource.

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Web/Tech

Mix vs. Remix

Some fascinating perspective about working with Microsoft from Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos in his weblog posting One Year Later.

Continue reading “Mix vs. Remix”

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Web/Tech

Blog Paul!

Debbie Weil has a great article about Intuit’s Paul Rosenfeld and his team’s Quickbooks Online blog.

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Web/Tech

Yahoo! Mail

It’s been fun to watch Google and Yahoo! battling it out re: the amount of email storage they offer. But I’m interested in Yahoo! stepping up to offering SSL-based access to POP and SMTP — something Google’s Gmail has supported for quite a while.

For those of us frequent travelers who often need to rely on wireless networks in public places, SSL-based POP/SMTP access has become a must — to avoid spraying our email logon passwords around.

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Web/Tech

Moved

Doug Kaye documents his recent move to the Mac. Another step to an ecology of mind!

I made the same move about 18 months ago – after following a similar path to Doug’s. I bought a 14-inch iBook to play with Mac OS X in early 2002 — while I continued to use my Absurdly Noisy Sony Vaio as my production machine. When Apple finally introduced the 15-inch Aluminum G4 Powerbooks in September 2003, I made the leap…and have lived very happily ever after.