Compiled by Charles Moore
and edited by
Dan Knight
- 2006.04.28
PowerBook, iBook, iPod, and other portable computing is covered
in The 'Book Review. News about
Apple's transition to Intel CPUs and other Intel developments is
covered in The Macintel Report.
iPod news is covered in The iNews Review.
All prices are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.
News & Opinion
Tips
Products
News & Opinion
The World Has Gone Apple Crazy
iTWire's Stan Beer reports:
"As if its success with iPod wasn't enough, Apple looks to be on
a winner with its new Intel Macintosh platform, judging by the
reactions of the media and its readers.
"In a new poll of iTWire readers taken over the past 24 hours,
nearly two thirds of the 448 respondents (299) believe that being
able to dual boot Windows will increase Macintosh market share
compared with just one third (159) who believe it will not."
- Link: The Whole World
Has Gone Apple Crazy: Poll
One Voice Demonstrates Voice Recognition on Mac
mini
One Voice Technologies, Inc., developer of 4th Generation voice
solutions for the Telecom and Interactive Multimedia markets, today
announced that it has successfully demonstrated its Media Center
Communicator™ voice recognition for Microsoft Windows XP
Media Center 2005 running on an Apple Mac mini. The Apple Mac mini was
configured to dual-boot into either Apple Mac OS X Tiger or Windows
XP Media Center 2005 using Apple's newly released Boot Camp
software.
"Our Media Center Communicator software is amazingly fast
running on an Apple Mac mini Intel Core Duo machine," said Dean
Weber, president and CEO at One Voice Technologies. "The Mac mini
is a great platform for the Digital Home given its impressive
features, performance and cost - all packaged in a small elegant
form factor. It is equally impressive to see Windows XP Media
Center 2005 running on a Mac mini, which in the past has only run
Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Allowing consumers the
option to boot into either Mac OS X or Windows XP Media Center
2005 gives them the power and flexibility of both worlds. With our
Media Center Communicator, you can now walk into your home and tell
your Mac mini to play music, view photo slideshows, place
PC-to-Phone calls, read email or watch a movie - all by
simple-to-use voice commands."
One Voice's Media Center Communicator is a complete in-home
multimedia communications package for Microsoft Windows XP Media
Center Edition 2005 - enabling users to speak, using voice
recognition, to play and view all their digital content from MP3
music, digital photos, slideshows, videos, live TV and much more!
Media Center Communicator also comes with a suite of communications
features to send and read E-mail, SMS text messaging to mobile
phones, Instant Messaging (IM), full motion PC-to-PC audio and
video chat and PC-to-Phone calling to any phone within the U.S. and
Canada.
Imagine walking into your family room and using your voice to
tell your Media Center to play jazz music or play your favorite
artist or album, play a photo slideshow, watch and record live TV,
read and send E-mail, call to order a pizza or video chat or
Instant Message with a friend. Media Center Communicator delivers
on this vision today! For more information, please visit http://www.onev.com/mcc or for an
online demonstration, go to http://www.onev.com/videos/mccoverview.wmv
or http://www.onev.com/videos/mcc.wmv
- Link: One Voice
Seagate Ships 750 GB Drives
PCMag's Mark Hachman reports:
"Seagate Technology officially brought its
perpendicular-recording technology into the desktop drive market,
announcing shipments of its first 750-Gbyte Barracuda internal
drive Wednesday. A complementary external 750-Gbyte drive will be
released this coming Monday.
"According to Seagate spokesman Michael Hall, the suggested
retail price of the 750-Gbyte Barracuda 7200.10 drive will be $590,
while the 200-Gbyte model will sell for about $104. The drives
began shipping last week to distributors, Hall said.
"Somewhat surprisingly, the external 750-Gbyte Seagate External
Hard Drive drive due next Monday will be priced at about $559;
external drives are generally priced somewhat higher than their
internal counterparts."
- Link: Seagate Ships
750-GB Drives
Why the Mac Version of America's Army Has Been
Dropped
America's Army programmer Ryan Gordon explains why the Mac
version of the game's development has been terminated:
"The Army used to pay me for the Linux and Mac OS X server and
clients. I was brought on originally to do just the Linux server,
because at the time one of the ArmyGame project's new game hosting
facilities insisted on having a Linux server and recommended
me....
"Within a few months, the Army (and SCI, in one case) added some
more bullet points to my resume: soon, a Linux client was shipping
to the public, a 64-bit Linux version was demo'd at the Athlon64
launch event, and a Mac OS X client was running on some shiny Apple
Cinema Displays in the Army's floorspace at E3.
"Literally years have passed since that heyday. I'm now paid for
just the Linux server. The Mac and Linux clients were cancelled
several versions ago.
"Let's say it happened when GameSpy jacked their prices, but the
port wasn't actually cancelled because of the GameSpy fiasco; while
it definitely didn't help, the two events just happened to
coincide. I asked that I be permitted to keep shipping the Mac and
Linux versions if I wanted to, and was allowed, so long as I
understood that it was going to be pro bono work....
"The problem, though, is that I'm a busy, busy guy. There are
paying clients that are waiting for me to give them my attention,
and my TODO list is continuing to grow....
"What you can do: nothing. Please don't email anyone about this,
don't offer to send money. It's just how this goes for now....
"Apple's Boot Camp had nothing to do with this, either, as some
forum people have apparently decided. That being said, lucky you if
you have an Intel Mac: you can boot to Windows to keep playing.
Linux users can try their luck with Wine, Cedega, or Windows
itself."
- Link: Why the
Mac Version of America's Army Has Been Dropped
Tips
Using DVD-RAM on the Mac
IT Enquirer Staff reports:
"Sony sent me their newest DRX-820UL. It's a Multi-drive, the
first ever that I try out. This drive writes and reads
non-cartridge DVD-RAM discs at 5x speed. Verbatim sent me a box of
those discs and so I could test the Sony and the Verbatims this
afternoon. This article is not intended as a review of the
Sony. It's more like a small test to see how DVD-RAM behaves under
Tiger, and how useful it is for desktop publishers and
designers.
"DVD-RAM discs are not recognized out-of-the box. In fact, Disk
Utility doesn't even recognize them as volumes. The first thing
that you will have to do, therefore, is initialize the disc. The
Verbatim 5x DVD-RAM in the Sony DRX-820UL, and Disk Utility
allowing to 'Erase' the Sony (the icon of the Sony is available;
the icon for a volume is not). I tried to initialize the disc as a
UDF disc first. Partitioning is not possible, and I read somewhere
that DVD-RAM must be formatted as Unix File System volumes on Mac
OS X...."
- Link: IT Enquirer
(unable to find link to article)
Products
$329 Four Drive Hot Swap FireWire 800 Enclosure
with Hardware RAID
PR: The EF83-Q is the latest in a series of FOUR DRIVE
3.5" drive FireWire 800 (1394b) enclosures. The EF83-Q comes with
FOUR HOT SWAPABLE IDE hard drive trays which can be programmed into
either a RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD configuration. The EF83-Q has a
built-in high-performance FireWire 800 (1394b) bridge board with a
1394b payload of 4096 (instead of the standard 2048), and supports
LBA 48-bit sector addressing drives(138GB+). With such
specifications there are no current drive size restriction
limitations.
Available and ready to ship, our EF83-Q provides an essential
solution and data rates to next-generation storage used in high-end
applications, such as audio/video (A/V) editing. Our EF83-Q offers
full FireWire 800 and ATA-7 speeds (800MB/s and 133MB/s
respectively), as well as software RAID 0, 1, support in Win2K, XP
or MAC OSx, which is critical for A/V applications.
Any FOUR 3.5" HDD (no size limitation) devices can be easily,
quickly and reliably converted to plug-and-play high speed FireWire
800/1394b, up to 800Mb/s. For RAID use, all drives installed must
be identical.
Our EF83-Q offers a unique opportunity to continue to take
advantage of the low cost IDE drives available while presenting
high performance (800mbps transfer rate), hot plug-able devices
into the expanding 1394b/FireWire market.
Key Features
- 2x Master/2x Slave - FOUR drives FireWire 800/IEEE-1394b
- TI's TSB81BA3 IEEE 1394b 800Mbps PHY
- 800Mb/s FireWire 800/1394b channels
- Hot swap Four IDE/ATA hard drive trays
- Firmware Programable Stripping, Mirror or JBoD
- Supports LBA 48-bit addressing for large hard drives
(>128GB)
Package contents:
- One (1) EF83-Q enclosure
- Four Remove-able IDE/ATA drive trays
- One 2.0 meter FireWire 800 cable
- One (1) AC power cable
- Set of mobile rack keys
- Mounting screws set
- User manual
Specification:
- Part Number: EF83-Q, Quad hot swap 3.5" Bay FireWire 800/1394b
Enclosure
- Physical Mount Space Up to four physical IDE 3.5" drives
- Operating System: Win98SE, ME, 2K, XP, FreeBSD, Linux, MAC 8.6
or higher
- IDE Interface: Quad ATA-133 - No size limitation (48bit
address)
- IEEE 1394 Interface: IEEE 1394-1995, IEEE 1394a compliant
- Support data transfer rate up to 100, 200, 400 MBps
- SBP-2 Target
- Revision 4 compliant
- Cooling: Push Pull fan ; ruggerdize metal case
- Operating Temperature: 0o C to 50o CC
- Operating Humidity: 5% to 95% non-condensing
- Dimensions: (WxHXD) 7.08in x 6.93in x 15.35in
- Connectors: 9-pin IEEE 1394b connector x 2
- Power connector x 1
- On/Off switch x 1
- Power Supply: 90-265VAC 50/60Hz; 80W Output Power
- Link: EF83-Q
Four Hot swap HDD in FireWire 800 Enclosure Featuring RAID 1, 0 or
JBOD
FirmTek 2-Port Serial ATA PCI Express Cards for
Dual-Core G5s
PR: FirmTek, LLC, a pioneer and leader in Serial ATA
(SATA) storage solutions for the Macintosh platform, unveiled their
new SeriTek/2SE2-E today upon the opening of NAB 2006 (Booth SL
1238). The SeriTek/2SE2-E is a Serial ATA host adapter fully
compatible with the new PCI Express bus architecture found in
Apple's latest Dual-Core G5 Macintosh. Offering two external SATA
II ports at up to 3 gigabits per second, the card enables
individual drives or RAID arrays to be fully utilized as
high-performance storage on Dual-Core systems. With FirmTek's
established hot-swap compatibility, users can easily move these
drives or volumes from one system to another, providing maximum
flexibility and security.
Support for the Bus Standard of the Future
Apple's use of PCI Express in the new Dual-Core G5 has opened a
new era of performance for peripheral devices and expansion cards.
Unlike previous standards, PCI Express gives each device dedicated
bandwidth and access to the system controller. Under this design
standard, cards and slots are defined by the number of data lanes
included; usually one, four, eight or sixteen, each supporting up
to 250 Mbps. The new G5s include a 16 lane slot intended for a
graphics, as well as two with four lanes and one with eight. Cards
must be specially designed to work with this new standard. "We are
pleased to be among the first developers to offer a PCI Express
card supporting Serial ATA," said Chi Kim Stanford, Vice President
of Business Development for FirmTek. "Our design team has worked
relentlessly to ensure full compatibility with this new standard,
and the SeriTek/2SE2-E will provide Dual-Core G5 users the
performance and reliability they expect from this fantastic new
system."
Security and Flexibility
FirmTek has pioneered products supporting ATA standards on the
Macintosh for many years, and offers a variety of enclosures and
interface solutions for demanding users. Since the introduction of
Serial ATA, the ability to hot-swap drives between enclosures has
been a key feature across Firmtek's products. All FirmTek
enclosures are designed to allow quick and easy removal and
installation of drives, usually in about a minute, without shutting
down or restarting the computer. This flexibility allows users to
share important data quickly, transfer or duplicate files at the
speed of SATA (instead of over sluggish networks, slow
USB/Firewire, or Internet connections), and to keep more sensitive
files locked up and secure with minimal effort.
Hot-swappable external enclosures also provide effectively
unlimited storage capacity, as users are not limited to the two
internal drive bays provided with the basic G5 system. As volumes
are filled to capacity, they are easily removed and replaced with
new drives, ready to accept additional data files.
To assist customers in maximizing their productivity and
obtaining maximum benefit from their FirmTek solutions, FirmTek
offers additional drive trays for $22.99 each, without any
additional purchases required. This enables customers to keep an
unlimited number of drives on hand and ready for action.
Designed Specifically for the Dual-Core G5
As a PCI Express card, the SeriTek/2SE2-E is solely intended for
use with the new Dual-Core G5 systems. This new card design is not
compatible with older PCI-X or PCI slots. FirmTek offers a variety
of outstanding solutions for other Macintosh platforms.
FirmTek's SeriTek/2SE2-E adapter for the Dual-Core G5 will be
available early Q3 this year, with estimated retail pricing of
USD$99.95. For more information about the SeriTek/2SE2-E, visit
FirmTek's website.
- Link: FirmTek Announces
Two-Port Serial ATA PCI Express Adapter for Dual-Core Macintosh G5
Systems
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