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Pictures of my new 1,100 dual 2.0 Ghz G5 Mac cluster.
Oh no wait, those are shots of the cluster at Virginia Tech.
Got a chance to play with Alex's new 17 inch Powerbook yesterday. That is one sweet machine. Compared to my 15 inch (last generation titanium,) the 17 inch aluminum is much nicer. The screen is sharper, with (it seemed to me at least) better color. The hinge mechanism for the screen is greatly improved and now glides open fluidly. A real pleasure. And the backlit keyboard is hard not to fall in love with.
This was also my first chance to play with two wireless powerbooks. We had Alex's machine connected to the office router with an ethernet cable. And my machine was wirelessly connected to Alex's through airport. This is very easy, but still not perfectly easy. I could share his internet connection. And my iTunes library automagically showed up in his version of iTunes (and vice versa.) That one is especially impressive.
I can't wait for the first time my iTunes program loads up some unknown iTunes users library when I'm out in public somewhere. Imagine being on a plane flight and having the music library of everyone with a powerbook on the plane suddenly display on your computer. "I wonder which of these people is the big Joy Division fan?" That's going to be fun. Ad hoc local wireless networks. Wi-fi and zeroconf (airport and rendez-vous in apple speak) are going to make the gadget world very interesting.
Still, when I tried to copy over my 17 gigs of, uh, uncopyrighted, uh, historical data (yeah, that's it, Alex and I are *way* into historical data,) we could see the limits of 802.11b 10 mb/sec connections. The highly unreliable time remaining indicator told us we would be waiting 9 days for it to finish. Plugging the machines directly into each other with an ethernet cable (both machines have gigabit/sec ethernet) resulted in the transfer time being knocked down to under 1 hour.