The Bitstream

Hello happy reader,

Well, after that nondescript lunch thang, a turkey sammy, cardboard–tainted sweet and pasta salad, I headed over to meet w/the PCI folks. I sat down with Al Yanes, president and chair of the 918 member PCI-SIG, who met w/me to discuss v3 of PCIe, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express bus. Here’s what I came away with…

The spec is on track for delivery in the second half of 2009. PCIe 3 requires full backward compatibility with earlier versions, including the same or a better power budget than PCIe 2. Performance–wise, they’re looking at 8 GTransfers/second as I mentioned last time, with an ultimate increase to 10 GT/s. Lower latencies, Data Reuse Hints, Atomic Operations and other optimizations will be part of the performance and functionality improvements. Data Reuse Hints, or DRH, addresses the mismatch between I/O data rates and latencies relative to throughput and latencies observed inside a CPU core or memory subsystem. DRH provide “explicit cache management hints (to) significantly reduce I/O to memory bandwidth utilization, system interconnect bandwidth, and associated power consumption,” according to the folks at Intel. The device driver identifies patterns in the bus I/O, usually copies of data already transacted, and attempts to substitute shorter versions. My guess would be that entropy encoding is used…

Atomic operations refer to processor–to–processor operations, which improve memory utilization. Their patents say Atomic Operations “…arbitrate ownership between system devices/resources are included to allow efficient access/ownership of shared data.” I think the PCI folks borrowed that technique from InfiniBand, a bus used for short haul, low latency, high rate communication method in HPC or High Performance Computing applications.

To achieve the next level of data rates, PCIe 3 will use a new channel coding scheme. The existing 8b/10b encoding is being replaced with scrambling–only (no control characters) 128/130 encoding, a new one for me. This yields enough improvement in coding efficiency to kick it up to 10GT/s. BTW, scrambling is a technique whereby a known polynomial is applied to a data stream in a feedback topology. Because it’s deterministic, you can recover the original data by running the process in reverse.

Lastly, the PCI-SIG is working on an I/O Virtualization or IOV suite, a collection of specs that provide enable the direct sharing of PCI devices by a hypervisor, a supervisor application sandwiched between a host and any virtual OSs running on it…

OK, enough already with the PCI schtick! Next time, I’ll blab about SATA and the gear being shown at the confab. ’Till next time, continue to geek.

Posted on August 26th, 2008 by OMas
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Hello happy reader,

I’m currently at the Intel Developer Forum…Here’s my notes so far:

▼ Opening Forum Keynote — Intel Chairman Craig Barrett

• Intro’d with thoughts on making good things happen by leveraging tech.

• Stressed the lack of political will in the US to fund education

▼ The first segment  featured a Wii remote hacker, Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University, who demo’d a wonderful application of low cost, existing tech. A Wiimote + home brewed IR markers + computer = interactive white board for ≈ $50 in parts (+ a Wii).

▼ Second segment covered Kiva, a net–based microlender that I’ve found to be well run and easy to digest. Matt Flannery, CEO, discussed his company…Take a look at my blogroll for a Kiva link.

▼ Next up was a health care presentation for the Third World…A nice demo (Barrett lying on the stage, pretending to be injured) by a Columbian radiologist whereby a plastic card with a unique bar code allows any camera–equipped phone can “shoot’ the bar code, bringing up the pateint’s basic health record, and contact the patient’s primary care physician. Barrett’s demo physicians were from HRMI in India, who provide telemedicine services for the poor and rural population. They’re working on real–time diagnostics and treatment via WiMax.

▼ The last segment was a young high school fellow from Oregon, an STS finalist, who’s been working on polymer photovoltaics.

Next up, Intel® Larrabee: A Many-Core x86 Architecture for Visual Computing. Gotta wolf down this miso soup and I’m off…and, that session was a bust, as in busting at the seams. It was so popular, the hall filled up and I was turned away until Thursday, when it’ll be repeated. For now, I’m parked in a presentation about PCI Express 3.0 electricals, Key Electrical Developments in the Third Generation of PCI Express Technology…Version 3 supports 8 Gigatransfers/sec. without too much effort…ye hah! (Thank you, Jonah.) Trying to push the data rate to 10 GT/s ain’t gonna cut it with current channel coding. CTLE or Continuous Time Linear EQ keeps the eye pattern clean enough for jazz. Plus, fancier, two tap Tx de–emphasis, Rx EQ and CDR bandwidth shaping to minimize reference clock jitter will allows the implementer to hit a 8 GT/sec. target.

Next up, Lenovo Reveals the Next Generation of Personal Computing: extreme lameness to start…finally got around the key concepts, which was storage virtualization and LCVP or Lenovo Client Virtualization Platform. LCVP is aimed at improving security and centralizing management. The lameness continued. Oh well, can’t win ’em all…Now for a box lunch.

Posted on August 19th, 2008 by OMas
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Hello happy reader,

Another week, another trade show. This time it was LinuxWorld and Next Gen Data Center: it’s two, two, two shows in one…Nothing earth shaking but, I did finally get to put my paws on Bug Labs’ BUG. For the electro-geek, it’s a really exceptional tinker toy. Can’t say, however, that it will fulfill their idea of a universal gadget. My demo dude compared it to a swiss army knife, and I pointed out that swiss army knives do many things…poorly. So, not a good role model. Anyway, as a tool for learning programming, microcontrollers and generally getting around the electronics world, I’ll give it a B+.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a different mix of enterprise computing companies exhibiting, from the Big Kids, IBM, Oracle, etc., to familiar names (to me, at least) like SugarCRM, Xiotech and Emerson’s Liebert division. Sugar had a new module for Sugar 5 that speeds up the process of building interfaces. A welcome addition, methinks.

Xiotech was showing their ISE or “ice” product and, from my brief talk w/the XioDude, it seems to be a well designed, self healing storage appliance with better than average management. They’ve come a long way since I last worked with them six years ago and I look forward to investigating ISE for my next asset management client.

Liebert had a box I’ve heard about for a while but have never seen. It was their kinetic energy transitional power system, the Liebert FS. This full height, 1U rack contains a battery–free DC generator to provide power in a data center while traditional diesel gennies are firing up. Distinctive feature is the FS uses a magnetically levitated flywheel to generate electricity. Once the flywheel’s spun up, the device consumes less than 300 Watts yet it can deliver 190 kW for 10 seconds when needed. Also, Liebert has a rack division, Knurr, that I was not aware of. Nicely made stuff, if you’re into racks.

Another vendor I found interesting was Zmanda, with their FOSS backup suite for MySQL and Oracle. They operate on the same model as Sugar, Red Hat and others; giving away the app while billing for services. If you run MySQL, check their stuff out.

There were a couple of embedded Linux vendors, one in particular was Tin Can Tools, with their wicked small Nail Kit, a complete ARM Linux system, based on an ARM920T processor, that’s designed to plug into your laptop. It’s portable, self-contained and weighs less than 3 ounces.

The last vendor I’ll mention is Violin, makers of an outboard DRAM–based “memory appliance” for servers. This 2U beast virtualizes a passel of DRAM SIMMs, providing improved scalability, reliablity and power savings.

To wrap up today’s rant, I’ll mention one NGDC session that was, for me, actually quite useful. Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corp, gave an interesting talk on re–thinking archiving, a subject near and dear to my heart. His presentation discussed the work of the SNIA 100 Year Archive Task Force, new technologies one can deploy today, and future tech that should ease our asset management pain.

Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for listening!

Posted on August 8th, 2008 by OMas
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More from Session 1: 

OS Optimization: This year the first Solid State Drives or SSDs appeared in end user applications. For many years, DRAM–based SSDs have been in use in enterprise computing where the insane cost and Soviet-era form factor was outweighed by their almost zero latency, incredible access times and sustained data rates. The new generation of NAND–based SSDs are non–volatile, use less power, are orders of magnitude faster, on average, than rotating media and, are much more mechanically and electrically reliable than HDDs as well. As an example, RAM giant Samsung has an SDD available in either PATA or SATA attach versions, with capacities from 32 to 128 GB. SanDisk, STEC and Avant (see below) are other vendors providing drop–in replacements for SATA disks.

Current generation OSs are optimized for rotating media as their “tier zero” or primary, performance–oriented storage. This does not take into account the completely different power profile of a NAND SSD. Unlike DRAM SSDs, you don’t have to cache the contents when switching to “sleep” or low power mode. Also, rotating media requires a large power burst to initially spin up the drive and relatively large continuous application of power to keep the device operational. Quiescing the drive means that another burst of current will be required to spin up the drive. In contrast, SSDs or Solid State Drives have relatively miniscule power requirements to operate the device and essentially no power to quiesce or sleep the device.

Also, RAM is read or written with high granularity but is erased, in contrast to HDDs, with very low granularity. So, an OS should deal with task prioritization and workload management that is currently not handled.

on to Session 2: Steven Woo, Rambus

Graphic subsystems are still the most demanding subsystem for memory applications, closely followed by game consoles. This is especially true as the number of compute cores in GPU now exceeds 800. GPU memory bandwidth now exceeds 128 GB/s, which is quite a bit higher than the memory bandwidth that CPUs or CE (consumer electronics)appliances require. This makes it tough for memory vendors to design one product for different application markets.

Rambus Terabyte Tech Initiative: From XDR at 3.2+ GHz to 1 TB/s…How? Among other things, multi–threaded, fully differential architecture, including data and command/address links achieve 16 Gbps speeds. Also, EQ; Equalization provides greatly reduced ISI or Inter–Symbol Interference. Eye patterns without EQ are almost non–existant while, with EQ, the eye pattern can be textbook–perfect.

Session 3: Panel

Amongst other topics, they mentioned “ZRAM,” “MRAM” and Numonyx’s “PRAM”

Session 4: Don Barnetson, SanDisk

Currently, only top shelf laptops, like the Lenovo X300 and MacBook Air, employ an SSD as their primary storage. SanDisk predicts that SSDs will, by 2011, be part of the $900 to $1500 notebook market, while small capacity SSDs are already a part of the “netbook” or ultra–low cost, sub–notebook market. In Ye Olden Days, netbooks would have been considered “thin clients.”

He discussed the concept of LDE (Longterm Data Endurance), or XRZPD, a single number “gas gauge” measurement of SSD drive endurance that indicates the amount of data, say 20, 40 or 100 TB, that can be reliably written during a product’s lifetime.

Session 4: Amber Huffman, Intel

NAND is the only commodity memory type that has no standard interface. Huffman talked about the ONFi or Open NAND Flash Interface standard, which attempts to address this conundrum. They have put forth uniform electrical and protocol interfaces as well as a universal mechanism for device self–reporting so the host can “ask” what the device is capable of. They have also published a connector spec for standardized NAND in mobile products and DIMMs, in place of those flash DIMMs you have now. ONFi 2 is backwards compatible with trad DRAM and it’s also scalable, bringing the future a little closer while reducing time to market and development costs. ONFi is one example of how vendors improve the specs of their finished products while keeping the end user cost constant.

Session 5: Nathan Orb, Microsoft

He discussed NVMHCI, the Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface, a proposed host controller method where, unlike the current interfaces for removable media and ATA, the host and device controller are merged…

Session 6: Paul Goodwin, Avant Technology

Goodwin discussed SSD features and form factors, mentioning the low power (< 1W vs 2-9 W), high reliability, ruggedness, wider operating range for temperature and altitude (yup, atmospheric pressure is spec’d for HDDs) 10x performance over HDDs. He also mentioned that CE applications are a perfect application for SSDs since they are very quiet, an important factor in the living room.

Avant has a brand new SSD for servers and desktops that uses RAID inside the package to provide capacities up to 640 GB, all in a 2.5″ form factor. This provide the standard RAID modes for increased fault tolerance (mirroring), increased performance (striping) or both since the device includes up to 5 “drives” inside…Holy mackerel! They even have a hybrid mode that provides a combination of separate RAID 0 and RAID 1 within the total device capacity. One portion provides high reliability and the other portion provides blazing performance. Trouble is, the 640 GB product has got to cost mucho $$. [I couldn't get a price on Avant’s drive but, to provide some perspective, a top of the line, 146 GB “Zeus oips” SSD from STEC retails for US$21,505 while a SanDisk 80 GB UATA will cost you about US$6100. Did I mention SSDs ain’t cheap?]

Session 7: Panel

CFast was mentioned, a transitional standard for CompactFlash with SATA interface

Intel presented an interesting experiment whereby, attached to a Sun server, a pool of old school 7k RPM rotating disks are replaced with lower cost 4k RPM drives in conjunction with a SSD for frequent data requests and another SDD for high performance file system journaling cache. The price for both approaches are about equal while the hybrid approach offers a 2x improvement in capacity and 4x performance gains.

Vendor Booths:

In addition to memory vendors like Qimonda and Samsung, design tool vendors such as Cadence and test & measurement vendors like Agilent, the MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) had some poop on two emerging standards, e–MMC as I mentioned earlier, and miCARD. e–MMC or Embedded MMC, is an industry standard jointly developed by JEDEC <jedec.org> and the MMCA for embedded flash memory applications. e–MMC leverages the existing MMC standard for controllers and flash memory. It addresses the need to divorce individual vendor’s functional differences from the host, which simplifies design and results in shorter design cycles, briefer qualification times and quicker time–to–market. It operates at either of the current powering standard, 3.3 or 1.8 volts, and scales up to 52 MBps and will find a place in a broad range of CE market applications.

miCARD, the Multiple Interface Card, is another standard developed by the MMCA. It combines two common interfaces, USB 2 Type A like you’d find on your mouse or keyboard, and the MMC standard you’d find in CE products such as cell phones and PDAs. With the help of a very small “passive mechanical adapter,” the e–MMC card plus a sort of slipcase that fans out the contacts and provides the correct physical profile, the e–MMC can be plugged directly into a USB receptacle. miCARD supports up to 480 Mbps with full compatibility with USB 2.0 while also providing full MMC v4.1 compatibility. Trouble is, at 12 mm by 21 mm by 1.95 mm, I find the package size to be stupidly small for day to day use.

All in all, a very useful conference for me. the presentations were mostly well done, the food was decent and I learned quite a bit. Hope you gleaned something useful from this post…l8r!

Posted on July 26th, 2008 by OMas
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My notes from Denali Software’s MemCon08, 07-24-08

We all are familiar with dynamic RAM on computer motherboards but most of this conference was concerned with NAND–based flash memory products. NAND storage is widespread in the form of “flash drives,” those little products that have completely replaced small capacity, highly portable sneakernet stuff, along with CompactFlash and other standards for removable consumer storage. What follows are my take–aways for this show…

Session 1: Dean Klein, Micron

Installed capacity for NAND flash in personal computers has, in one year’s time, reached what it took DRAM to achieve in a 6 year time frame. Significantly, from 1990 to 2008, the core voltage has dropped significantly, and it’s unlikely that core voltage will drop below 1 volt. Despite the prediction that 48 nm was thought to be the limit of fab technology, current technology provides a 34 nm architecture and that is likely to shrink further to 16 nm by 2020. DDR3 will move to 1.35 volts, further reducing power requirements and easing the expectation of ever higher performance through faster signaling.

DPD: DPD or Deep Power Down provides selective refresh rather than refreshing the whole memory array.

e–MMC: As with other subsystems in computers, memory manufacturers are looking to abstract NAND memory in order to mitigate the shortcomings of the technology, primarily wear level management. Even though flash memory has, by definition, no moving parts, a major shortcoming of NAND technology is “wear.” If a memory cell is used repeatedly, it will “wear out,” exhibiting increasingly higher error rates. So, smarter designers employ some level of read/write distribution of individual cells to minimize the wear and improve global device reliability. Abstraction places dedicated intelligence in between the memory elements themselves and the external controller to provide sophisticated wear leveling algorithms, along with an idealized and standardized external interface.

More to follow in Part 2…

Posted on July 26th, 2008 by OMas
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My better half asked me what to do about a plethora of needed wall warts so, while I was on the subject, I thought I’d mention possible solutions to y’all as well…

First off, there’s the 1 foot extension cord approach: cheap, effective and ugly as sin. A quick search of Froogle for “power strip adapter ” yields a 5 pack for less than $10.

Another approach, if you need more bells & whistles, is the ‘power squid,” which has wall mounting slots, a circuit breaker and lighted master switch. This is a ’pod–inspired approach with 5 graded length cords being fed from a central hub, or body if you’re into the squidly thing.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to plug in at all to recharge? Just a dream but, back in May, MacRumors reported that ”A recently published patent application…reveals that Apple is investigating the use of solar power in versions of their mobile devices — both handheld devices and portable computers. Integrating solar power into a mobile device holds the enormous potential of extending battery life significantly.” The entire face of an iPhone or iPod Touch could become a PV generator so, they could significantly increase run time between charges…My work here is done, TTFN

Posted on July 21st, 2008 by OMas
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Hello happy reader,

On July 10th, Seagate “unveiled the industry’s first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives to meet explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments.” Don’t need no explosive disk drive but, in the case of storage, more is better. The 11th generation Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB mechanism, “marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives – a half–terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB, thanks to the capacity–boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.”

PMR is a novel magnetic coating composition…Imagine a box of brand new pencils. Pencils are usually hexagonal so, if you were to empty the box onto a table and then gather the entire pile into one hand, the pencils would all line up in parallel, tightly packing together into a relatively small space. PMR takes advantage of this tight packing by using magnetic material that resembles those pencils in micro–miniature. The “pencils” are attached, coated actually, such that they are “standing up,” perpendicular to the platter surface. The flying read/write head, they really do fly, “sees” only the very tightly packed ends of the magnetic material. Thus, the areal density is very high relative to the old school approach whereby the magnetic needles are lying flat, parallel to the platter. This mechanism is the 5th generation to use PMR.

Ye hah, this announcement means I’ll be able to deliver very high capacity storage configurations in really compact spaces once the drives are qualified. As Martha would say, “That’s a good thing.”

In the same press release, Seagate announced two new 2.5″ 500 GB PMR drives, the Momentus 5400.6, and the Momentus 7200.4, 5400 and 7200 rpm respectively. These mechanisms “deliver the best combination of capacity, mobility and durability for mainstream and high-performance notebook computers, external storage solutions, PCs and industrial applications requiring small form factor.” The 2.5″ form factor is what is commonly found in laptop computers so, this means that your future portable will not suffer from a lack of storage capacity.

“Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped.” The built–in accelerometer detects changes in acceleration and parks the heads in a free fall of as little as 8 inches.

That’s all for today…TTFN. 

Posted on July 14th, 2008 by OMas
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What ho, happy readers,

Some time this week, a lemming–like migration of metallic behemoths will assemble in Europe for a little ride over the wine–dark sea. According to an article in the April 08 edition of Television Broadcast magazine, HD OB vans are congregating on the Italian coast, where they will be aggregated for overseas transport.

The destination is China, where they have been rented for use by Beijing Olympic Broadcasting for The Games. Thirty six HD trucks and twenty support trucks will be loaded onto an oceangoing vehicle transport for approximately three weeks of sloshing about. Two additional trucks will be transported directly to Hong Kong, how I don’t know, for coverage of equestrian events. All told, more than 60 HD–capable trucks will be in service for the Games…that’s a quarter of the world’s entire complement of HD location equipment! Let’s hope da boat don’t sink…TTFN

Posted on July 8th, 2008 by OMas
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Hello happy reader,

Today we’re talking about engines. Not the “hemi four four two” sort but other, more modern flavors…Before I get to my main rant today, that of so called “laser TVs,” I wanted to mention tweaking another engine, Amazon’s recommendation engine…I just finished shopping for some textbooks and ended up back on the home page. Their engine threw a couple of additional textbooks at me, not of interest, as well as a copy of the Criterion Collection version of Harakiri. Now that was a spot–on recommendation, as I watched it just last week. I hadn’t seen it in a long while and had checked it out from my library. A very interesting film in all its rich aspects, though not for the meek and mild…

Anyway, I clicked on the Improve Your Recommendations link that appears once you’re logged in, and informed the engine that, yes, I had purchased Santogold’s single,  L.E.S. Artistes, as well as several examples of (semi–obscure) Japanese cinema for myself but I wasn’t interested in all those textbooks I’ve been buying, they were a gift for someone else. So, now you know you can fine tune the engine, it’s really quite useful.

On to the main topic, laser TVs. I know, you’re thinking, “Oy, not another bogus gadget to snag my hard earned dollar!” Well, this one’s a winner and it’s all because of those doggone lasers.

Let‘s digress…LASERs started life as an lower frequency offshoot of the higher frequency MASER, which outputs (M for) microwave radiation rather than (L for) light radiation. Anyway, laser went from costly and bulky lab curiosities to today’s dime–a–dozen status thanks, in part, to the inclusion of laser light sources in CD players. Early players, I remember the first Philips example, were equipped with a gas laser instead of the solid state laser diodes we find now if we dig deep enough.

A couple of months ago, my local SMPTE chapter had the monthly meeting down at Novalux, maker of semiconductor laser “engines” used for illumination. It was a particularly enjoyable gathering and literally an eye opener. Most current TVs use either cold cathode, incandescent or very recently, LED light sources. All of these suffer from one or more major shortcoming, including limited gamut, short operating life, or low output power/efficiency. Laser light engines, on the other hand, can be configured as very pure, RGB light sources with relatively good efficiency due to the extremely narrow output wavelength. Lasers, by their very nature, produce a single wavelength of light, whereas an incandescent light, as a broadband “black body” illuminant, has laughably poor efficiency and short life. Cold cathode stuff, like fluorescent bulbs and plasma displays, also produce narrow frequency output but the frequencies are not always ideal and efficiency is poor. High power blue LEDs, unlike red and green varieties, are relatively expensive and have relatively poor efficiency. The same goes for “white” LEDs, which actually are phosphor–based, sorta like cold cathode. OK, lasers are spendy but, they have everything else going for them.

So, what’s all this have to do with TVs? All modern TVs, with the exception of plasma, OLED and FED, need a light source to backlight or project the digitally generated raster. Think of the flashlight behind the shadow puppet…Most TVs also employ an absorptive “color wheel” to chop the light into RGB, further reducing how many photons actually hit your eye. Novalux is one of only a handful of companies making laser–based “flashlights.” By the way, they are an OEM so, you won’t see their brand floating around the CE universe.

An interesting ability of laser light engines is that each red, green and blue laser can be individually addressable, though that feature hasn’t been exploited as yet as far as I know. Given development time, this means the spectral output, the color, can be tuned in real time. Blacker blacks with bolder, more accurate color and gray scale images…very nice.

What got me on this high horse in the first place was Mitsubishi’s April announcement that they were bringing out a range of laser light engine–based TVs. At the SMPTE meeting I got to compare several conventional TVs with a laser equivalent. The result? Lasers win, hands down.

My rant is done, TTFN!

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by OMas
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Hello happy reader,

OK, I may be the last to hear about this but, I thought I’d add yet one more voice to the bellowing. Today’s topic is Psystar Corp. and their Open Computer. What they’ve done is an old concept, brought back from the grave for the current crop of x86 CPUs that ship in modern Macs.

By way of background, consider Power Computing Corp, a little company with big cahones, who sold the first line of Macintosh clones back in the Dark Days of Mike & Gil. They made decent hardware, we used one of their towers at dHouse, and had outstanding marketing. To this day, I cherish my “…you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands” Power Computing T–shirt.

Power Computing was the first of several vendors chosen by Apple to manufacture and sell Mac clones. Well, when Steve came back, Apple purchased Power Computing and discontinued all clone products…Fast forward to April of this year and Psystar’s announcement of a $399 white box PC that’s Leopard–compatible.

Their OpenMac is a standard tower product of theirs pre–loaded with Mac OS. The same hardware, as well as a fancier version, can be purchased pre–loaded with Windows or Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat, or CentOS flavors) as well. They seem to have cloned Apple’s firmware in such a way that both Mac OS and EFI are willing to believe the hardware is genuine and, Psystar has been very careful about the hardware to make sure it conforms to Apple’s expectations. They’ve also jiggered the OS’ automatic Software Update mechanism to insure that only those updates that have been vetted in advance by Psystar are allowed to be installed on their machines.

Apple watchers are in for a treat as the Clone Wars return, with a whimper for now but expect a cat fight to ensue before long. I’m gonna try and get hold of one of these for evaluation. If I do, I’ll let you know what I find. Until then, TTFN.

Posted on June 25th, 2008 by OMas
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