I went to my local Mac store to buy a tote for my friend’s new Ibook. I got seduced a bit by the new Apple hardware

I think the word in industrial design is “appliance.” They had some new 20” floating flat-panel Imacs on display. They look like bathroom appliances with overtones of Japanese anime. That little dock on the bottom with the animated icons is really trick. Kudos to the new Panther OS.

I sat down at a large cinema display connected to a plywood box under the table. The movie software played a promo for the new G5. In a 20” inch window on this flat monitor I watched a 15 minute pitch for the amazing G5. What was amazing was the quality of the pitch. No stuttering stops. No pixelations. Video matched audio. All, crystal clear. Just like an episode of 60 minutes. Some of the testimonials were from Pixar and one of the companies that produced special effects for THE HULK.

On the way out I checked the price and asked about why they don’t have the G5 on display. The Apple guy said they got sick of taking it apart for everyone wanting to look inside. It looks like a stainless steel and aluminum Borg air filter.

I gotta get me one of those things...but maybe I should wait til they’re the size of a bento-box. Surely that won’t be long.

Technology marches on.

does that 20" flat monitor TV cable ready?
Can I use that as a television with a tivo?

a TIVO like thing now. Looks pretty handy. It uses Windows OS.

I don’t think the Mac Cinema displays can be adapted to show regular TV. I think they just do monitor functions. I think TV progamming is produced on Macs, but I don’t think you can watch regular TV on one. Maybe there’s a tuner card or something.

I am seeing a lot of the flat panel TV’s now. They tend to be expensive for TV. Not as bad as Plasma, but still expensive. Regular TV looks good on them.

I see your point. We have ComCast here with our cable tv. I don’t know if you can actually use your TV as a monitor...or if you need a modem of some sort. It’s supposed to be twice as fast as DSL for the same price. My ISP has three flavors of DSL...two of them are fast...but expensive.

http://don.cc.vt.edu/g5sinracks/slides/IMG_2354.JPG
G5s in racks at Virgina Tech

The Virgina Tech Terascale Cluster project employs 1100 G5 computers in a cluster to achieve supercomputer processing power. 1100 Power Mac G5 systems power the Virgina Tech “X” cluster, the world’s fastest university supercomputer, the third overall and only the third system ever to exceed the 10 TFflop/s mark, at 10.28 TFlop/s.

Skynet is built!

of HAL. Like a HAL 5000.