Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, January 7, 2004

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Macworld: Apple posts CGI-enhanced "1984" ad: "Attendees of CEO Steve Jobs' Macworld Conference & Expo keynote got a big kick out of seeing Apple's well-known "1984" ad, which was shown only once on broadcast television, during the January, 1984 Super Bowl, to herald the coming of the first Macintosh. Jobs decided to show the Ridley Scott-directed commercial again to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking computer, and now Apple has it available for download on their Web site, albeit in a slightly modified form." [MacCentral]

Controversy about PowerPoint -- Comment()
It seems that my net column on PowerPoint interested a lot of readers (written in Finnish, Kuinka PowerPoint tuhosi avaruussukkulan). I have already received quite a few comments, mainly positive. However, I must once again point out that the column was inspired by the excellent booklet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward R. Tufte.

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Richard Gayle writes about a wonderful exchange between Tufte and an audience member: "Tufte said that all the greatest designs had the hallmarks of a single overall view, that one mind controlled the process. It was obvious to him that the Macintosh was the result of one or a few minds who had a single vision of what needed to be created and made that vision happen. Microsoft Windows looked as if it had been designed by a committee, with each members suggestions simply tacked on, resulting in a design that had no real coherency. [...] Now the good part. An audience member asked, Well what if you take a project, provide a single, coherant vision and it rurns out to be a failure? What then? To which Tufte replied that you should be fired!!"

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Apple Previews Xgrid Technology: "Xgrid helps scientists and others working in compute intensive environments to fully utilize all IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid enabled 'virtual' IT environment that takes advantage of unused computing capacity to run batch and workload processing." (MacMinute via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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Apple: 40% Of Users Using Mac OS X, Nearly 10M: "Apple announced that it estimates that there are now over 9 million active users of Mac OS X and the company expects to cross the 10 million user mark later this quarter. Additionally, Apple said there are now over 10,000 Mac OS X applications that run natively on the platform." (MacNN via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

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GarageBand: "I've been waiting 20 years for GarageBand." (Brent Simmons via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

Apple Xserve G5 and Xgrid software -- Comment()
Apple revealed yesterday a new Xserve G5 (plus Xserve RAID), which suits computational clusters. And the new Xgrid software offers nice features for cluster-builders. I think Apple is starting to take supercomputing and grids seriously. Perhaps the G5 dual cluster at Virginia Tech has inspired Apple to invest in computational science. At least Apple has set up a Advanced Computation Group (ACG) for supporting this area.