Apparently a japanese university is unveiling a Robot Suit that amplifies human movement that could be used in assiting workers with heavy lifting or allowing eldery people to move around easier. Are electronically enhanced super-humans around the corner?
My copy of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition finally arrived. I am impressed thus far. To date it is the fastest booting machine I have seen. I have only rebooted once thus far after installing an update (Yes there is an update already!!) and was amazed by how fast it was actually in the Windows interface. Honestly it must have been less than 2 seconds on the screen where you have the little blue car circling and then boom - the login screen. It seems to take at least 15x longer for my BIOS and GigE to post and start up. The install took roughly 45 minutes and ALL my main drivers (sound, lan, video) were found and installed from the Windows CD. Firefox and Thunderbird had no problems installing and I am writing this post from Firefox 1.0.4. The responsiveness of the OS is pretty astounding I must say. I can’t wait for binaries of my favorite program to show up in 64 bit versions!
It’s official. Steve Jobs showed the world a version of OS X on a Intel powered Mac today at the developers conference. He said that they have been secretly been tuning there software towards an intel switch for years. Intel powered machines should show up in 2006 and by the end of 2007 all Apple products should be completely Intel powered.
Rumors have been increasing that Apple is about to phase out its current PowerPC platform and move to an x86 platform. I’m sure tons of Mac power users are horrified but Apple seems to think it is the next step in its evolution. Most of Apple’s recent changes have been leaning towards the Wintel world for quite some time. Adopting PATA, SATA, PCI, AGP, USB instead of SCSI, ADB and NuBus to cut costs. Also the latest Intel and AMD mobile CPUs have left Apple notebooks in the dust and support newer standards since Apple has been unable to port the G5 generation of machines to a notebook form due to its greater power consumption than the G4. With OS-X Apple should have a pretty portable platform so migrating to another architecture should not be that bad aside from vendors needing to recompile there apps. Another questions arises though. Will I be able to turn my home PC into a Apple station if I so desire? Also what microprocessor vendor will Apple choose for mass production of desktops and laptops? My bet is AMD for the desktops but for laptops I think it is more of an unknown. The Pentium-M is a pretty good mobile chip though AMD’s Mobile 64 is a good bet too. I think it would be a good idea for Apple to start the ball rolling using everything designed around the AMD64 architecture due to its price, performance and scalability.
It seems that Intel’s Pentium 4 has been getting hotter and hotter as of late. A recent review in THG showed the new Dual Core P4 sucking up a jaw dropping 315 watts! Also interesting is if you notice the dual core X2 4800+ uses less power than the previous 4000+ model which is only a single core and both of those use less power maxed out than a single core P4 does at idle. So what do you need to cool a juggernaut like the P4? How about one of these bad boys from Zalman. This unit pumps out 25 cubic meters per second of air! Down right amazing!