The verdict: Leopard spanks Vista
This story caps off a truly comprehensive wave of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard coverage from Computerworld. Our readers have asked for more operating system coverage, and we're delivering.
This story caps off a truly comprehensive wave of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard coverage from Computerworld. Our readers have asked for more operating system coverage, and we're delivering.
Intel's move to provide new integration with NAC (network access control) tools in its latest vPro desktop processors could provide interesting opportunities for use with the device authentication systems while further strengthening the technology standards it supports, according to industry watchers.
An old business saying advises: "Find a need and fill it." That's the impulse behind a new group of mobile devices that, while having varying capabilities, have this in common: They are sized and priced between smart phones and traditional laptops.
Video editing applications are starting to accept high-definition footage. But you may need to crank your PC up a notch: The shipping versions of Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus and Pinnacle Systems' Studio 11 Ultimate require serious computing horsepower for editing in high def.
Twenty yeas from now a new generation of computer users will look back on the operating systems of today with the same bemused smile we look back at the cars of the <a href="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=1959+cadillac&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2" target="_blank">late 1950s and early 60s</a>. They had huge fins, were the size of a small yacht and burned up just about as much gas.
Last week, Microsoft sent certified letters to its OEM partners regarding Vista's anti-piracy technology -- or, more accurately, what happens if they dare ship a system with a "non-genuine" copy of Vista.
At the AMD CTO Summit held last week in Monterey, California, AMD put a few members of the press under nondisclosure and gave us an unusually detailed look at unpublished products and plans. Much of it is to be kept under wraps, but we were given leave to carry a few facts home to our constituents, including some related to the state of AMD's manufacturing process engineering.
Lately, it seems like it's all about disk space. They're no longer file servers but document repositories with multiple versions of single documents saved ad infinitum -- just in case of a finger-pointing fest. Not so much the trouble with Word files, but your average PowerPoint file is now over 20MB, easy. Five or six versions of each of those multiplied by dozens of sales people and hundreds of target customers, and suddenly, you're talking real space. To say nothing of photo albums, corporate podcast libraries, online training videos, and gigabytes and gigabytes of e-mail. Hell, my home-movie collection just topped 150GB.
Your hard drive may not be as reliable as manufacturers would like you to think. Recent studies by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Google suggest that vendor Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) ratings for hard drives are a bit misleading.
It's way too early to be writing off the desktop.
A couple of columns ago, I introduced you to a friend and lifelong professional Windows user who agreed to let me observe and document her trial run at switching to the Mac. I set her up with a can't-lose bargain: She would swap her desktop Windows PC for a Core 2 Duo MacBook running OS X Tiger but retain her PC as a Parallels Desktop virtual machine. To switch or not to switch is entirely her decision to make; I'm just watching.
AMD says Intel loves the delete key a little too much. Several hundred emails from top Intel insiders have gone missing due to "inadvertent mistakes", which, the company assures us, have nothing to do with AMD's antitrust suit against it. Sounds like Intel is stealing - I mean, inadvertently borrowing - a page from Microsoft, which mislaid 35 weeks' worth of emails after being sued by Burst.com in 2002.
Your desktop computer is fast. It's faster than you can type, faster than you can browse, and unlike you, it can do many things at once. Sure, you multitask. You can be on a conference call with your boss while you're buffing your nails, but when you're asked a hard question, what happens? You stop buffing your nails until you come up with the answer. Humans are not wired for parallel execution.
The leading quote from this week's news comes from Intel CEO Paul Otellini: "We're doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we invented and then stopped doing after Pentium 4, shame on us," Otellini said. "We fell off it -- mea culpa, we screwed up -- and now we're back on that pace."
No theory is ever as good as lots of real-world data. So here, based on lots of real-world data, is what you should do to minimize problems with hard disk drives: a) burn them in rigorously; b) replace them as soon as they start throwing errors, especially scan errors; and c) retire them before they turn three years old. Oh, and d) remember that none of those measures is a substitute for regular backups.
AMD's Barcelona CPU is loaded with "invented here" innovation. It is also inspired by IBM's Power architecture. IBM's newest Power CPU, Power6, is due mid-year, along with quad-core processors from Intel and AMD. And while x86 will get more headlines in IT publications, Power6 is arguably more deserving.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are taking different paths to the quad-core market, but some believe it's only a matter of time before their roads converge.
AMD's next-generation processor line, code-named Torrenza, has gone from a block diagram to living, breathing silicon. The first incarnation of AMD's redesigned x86 CPU is Barcelona, that which your non-co-readers will call quad-core Opteron. Barcelona is genius, a genuinely new CPU that frees itself entirely of the millstone of the Pentium legacy. It'll do the same for you.
I wrote a column in 2005 called "How will Dell Offset the Loss of Intel's Generosity?". In it, I asserted that Dell needed to overhaul its strategy and focus to make up for the coming loss of Intel's ... oh, call it what you like: price supports, subsidies, loyalty bonuses, or what the business calls MDF (market development funds).
If nothing else, Intel's reversal of AMD's exclusive contract to supply CPUs to Sun Microsystems shows just how far some CEOs are willing to go on the first date.