Ramblings of a Technology Addict

Monday, June 23, 2003

Running MacSlash Keynote Commentary.

3:03 We Innovate. In Six months, they've done a ton. Safari. Keynote, FCP4, 12 and 17" TiBooks and now all this good stuff.
3:00 They appear to be FireWire and USB, as well as headphone jack
2:57 video from Apple here. Oh, and there are Front ports.
2:55 will be at 3 GHZ in 12 months.
2:54 roughly 2.1x the speed of a PC. Not bad at all.
2:51 Logic demonstrated. A BT piece for Matrix trailer. Windows is using QBase. It's peaking the CPU meter on the bottom. It halted. Choked. The G5 smoked it using less than half of its CPU.
2:48 Gerhard Lengeling of eMagic is there, talking about their music stuff. 1,000 voices on the G5. Um, Wow. Their stuff barely cracks the G5. 25% of the CPU. Not bad at all.
2:44 Mathematica guy is up. He's doing a demo of Mathematica 5. The PC is struggling. Theo says it's faster than the Unix workstations.
2:40 Luxology Guy talking animation power and such. 15 minutes to rebuild his environment. G5 smokes the Xeon machine. Again. It was embarassing.
2:38 Finding Nemo Photoshop Test. G5 smokes it. A lot.
2:35 Now it's time for the real world tests.
2:32 Spec tests. 2.0 Ghz, 3.0 GHz Pentium. 3.06 Ghz Xeon. 10% slower on integer, 21% faster on floating point. Now let's look at the duals. Single P4, Dual Xeon and Dual G5. Dual G5 edges out on Integer-rate. and smokes on the floating point.
2:30. $2000, $2400, or $3000. A bit pricy, but hey, that's fine. $3k vs $4k for the spec'd out Dell...Not too much gap. Ship in August.
2:30 Handles still. Welcome to the Power Mac G5.]
2:28 35 dBa despite 9 independent fans.
2:24 8GB of memory. Leaving things in memory becomes great. Big ol' cache. 4x SUperDrive. GeForce FX 5200 Ultra in low end. Radeon 9600 Pro in the high end. New Tower. Aluminum and grated on the front, lots of fans.
2:22 400 MHz 128 bit DDR Memory. 6.4 GBps of bandwidth from memory. Add graphics. AGP 8x Pro Graphics. Twice the bandwidth of current systems. Next, 133 MHz PCI-X slots. 8x the bandiwdth. Hyper Transport interconnect. 1 big slot, 2 small. Storage: Serial ATA. 1.5 GBps oif bandiwdth, Independent interface to each drive. Apple deisgn 1/0 chip. Hyper transport interconnect. FW 800/400 USB 2.0 GigE, AirEx, BT and Optical Digital Audio.
2:21 Talking system now. New Controller. Point to point architecutre. Dedicated bandwidth for main memory. Apple Designed.
2:18 Brings up John Kelly from IBM. We've come so far from the days when IBM was the enemy.
2:17 built by IBM in New York. made in the USA.
2:16 Big Graphic of the Chip. It Does Stuff.
2:13 it's all true. Here's the scoop. Apple and IBM have worked on this for years. It's the World's Fastest Personal Computer. The G5. 64 bit processor. World's first 64 bit desktop processor. Runs the existing 32 bit apps natively. 2 Ghz. Fastest 64 bit proc ever. 1 Ghz front side bus. Fastest FSB ever. Built for full symmetric multiprocessing. Dual Processors are in the queue.
2:13 It was Premature Specification.
2:12 One More Thing.
2:06 Chris Espinoza, Apple Employee #8. It's clean, like the iApps. Folders and files on the list, also a list view with searching. Filtering search, not type select. Code tools are good, but I'm afraid I'm not much of a programmer. Chris is Far Far over my head, I'm afraid.
2:02 Xcode. Getting faster, still not the fastest. Distributed builds now. 2 machines beats 1 machine with Code Warrior. 5 machines Trounces code warrior. Turnaround Loop. Stop, Debug, recompile, link, run. Now it's different. No LINK. It's gone. Stop Debug Compile Run. Predictive Compiling. Stop Debug Compile (half) and Run. You can make changes to apps while they're running. Xcode is Superfast.
1:57 iSight 640x480 res, 24 bit color, built in mic. Firewire does it all, audio, video and power. iSight is better than the iBot, better location. Mounts on the portables, and all other machines. $150. Available today.
1:55 Panther dev preview is available today. Will cost $130 available by the end of the year.
1:51 iChat demo complete, audience floored. Al Gore called in, said hi, cracked some jokes. Get the beta today. $29 for Jaguar.
1:47 Come here Steve! I need you! -- Phil Schiller. They test it, it works. Does full screen. "It takes a little while longer to negotiate with France" hehehe. Audio quality sounds pretty good. Speakerphone!
1:44 more iChat. it just grabs the infrastructure from the network. No Matter Where You Go, There You Are. Works with any FW camera or Microphone, works with Camcorders. 56k for Audio Chats. Broadband for VTC.
1:42 iChat AV. Bringing Audio and Video to the chats. Video conferencing for the rest of us. Very slick. Grab it straight from the buddy list. Text, audio, video. No config. It just Works.
1:41 Font Book. Professional Switching for Fonts. Finding within the panel. Looks like Address Book. I am a bit moist. This might make Font Reserve passé.
1:39 Fast User Switching. Menu up in the Top Right. Name is in the top right. You can switch quickly, it rotates on a cube face. Password protection, no problem. Gorgeous switching.
1:35 Preview for Panther. Much faster PDF reader than anything else. 71 seconds on a windows machine, 28 seconds on a mac. 18 on windows, 4 seconds on preview. Um Wow. Very very quick.
1:30 Pixlet. Studio quality from your dekstop. 48 bits per pixel source data. No visual artifacts. No interframe compression. Easy editing, back and forth scrubbing. HD/2 960 x 540 full screen 24fps. You can decode it on a Ghz G4. Built in to Panther
1:29 Fax button. It tells you all about it, fax completion from address book, etc.
1:26 New Mail client. Does a lot of stuff. Faster, addresses as objects, flagging for certain domains. Demo of Mail. Threading is implemented and opened like a folder. Nothing totally awesome, but some good upgrades.
1:25 FileVault: secures the entire home folder. Encrypts and Decrypt on the fly.
1:21 Exposé. We all use a ton of windows. Using app upon app upon app. Tons of windows. Ugly. Uncomfortable. Um. Fuck me. Expose is the shit. Keyboard trigger or second button on the mouse, or a monitor corner. Wait, did he say second button on the mouse? So very slick. Uses Quartz Extreme to handle the details. Sees all windows, just one app or the whole deal, or clear the whole damn thing. Activate it almost immediately.
1:18 new iDisk features - Automatic File Syncs with your iDisk, in the background. It's a syncing local folder. Works as a tether for networked laptops, etc. VERY cool.
1:17 Fast Search that Works in Real Time Steve likes it a lot.
1:13 Brand New Finder. It used to be Computer Centric. This is now User Centric. All the storage on the left, any folder you want, on the lefthand side. Takes Home folder to the top level. Labels are implemented. Network Browsing as well from Founder. New Open and Save Panels.
1:11: Panther. 10.3 Fourth Major revision. Over 100 new features. Most popular Unix in the world. X11 is in. NSF file locking FreeBSD 5, IPv6
1:10 7 million Jag users, and 6,000 apps for Jaguar. We're over the crest.
1:09 Safari 1.0 is declared. Oh, and Safari SDK. Bout Bloody Time. (You're welcome Brent)
1:07 iPod - One Millionth iPod will ship today. iTunes 4 - iTMS has sold 5million songs. Steve loved the Jay Leno parody and showed it.
1:04 Airport Extreme updates. 802.11g first to ship, Since started 300,000 802.11g products. Retail Stores: 25 months in. 58 of them. 17 Million Visitors. 3 Big Stores: Tokyo, San Fran, Chicago. Chicago This Weekend. San Fran on Stockton at Market, Tokyo in the Ginza.
1:03 - 300,000 Mac Developers. 1% in the audience.
1:02p - Steve onstage.
12:56p - Copyright notice.
Please keep reloading this, it will have my commentary for Keynote as it progresses. It'll be reverse chrono order...
12:54:02 PM comment []

Go Home, Dick.

"When I'm president, we'll have executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day," said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri.
-- ABC News
Dick, we have this thing here in the US of A called Checks and Balances. It's part of that whole Constitution thing. Yeah, I know you'd said you'd get around to reading it, but I'd really recommend picking up a copy of the document you've sworn to defend against enemies foreign and domestic. See, there's this bit where it outlines the powers of the three branches of government, Executive, Legistlative and Judicial. And that the Supreme Court is the Law of the Land, and that Executive Orders can be overturned by the Court. Not the other way 'round. Now, I'm sure your campaign people have explained this to you now, but I think we should all take this as an example.
Dick, Go home. Really.
11:30:33 AM comment []