Tech stuff for today:
Mac OS X
10.4.5 is out - get it via Software Update for lots of lovely improvements (apparently). You'll also now get
iTunes 6.0.3 as well as iLife updates to iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie HD, and iWeb, which presumably do something good for us, but who knows?
Sun are looking to
Open Source their SPARC processor hardware, to help increase community participation in processor architecture development and application design.
Why do we care? - well, this is a smart move, as the next generation
UltraSparc T1 is a kick-ass CPU, and if both
Solaris and
Linux fly on it from day one then we can expect to see some fairly compelling server offerings that the wintel boys will struggle to keep up with. (Bear in mind that Solaris has been a 64-bit O/S for years, as has Linux. Windows is still not there). The T1 is a 64-bit, 72W, 1.2 GHz chip that is almost 3 times (in SpecWeb2005) as fast as four Xeon cores at 2.8 GHz, which consume up to 300W. That's a lot of processing per watt. Maybe Apple should have looked at SPARC as well as Intel.......
Camino 1.0 is out - this is probably going to replace
Firefox as my second browser on the Mac (and yes, I do sometimes still need to use something other than
Safari). There's an interview with Camino Project lead Mike Pinkerton
here that also gives an overview of the relative merits of Firefox and Camino on the Mac. Basically, Firefox has extensions, Camino is fast and integrates with the Mac better. Personally, I also think Camino looks
nice.
