Blake Patterson

As most OS X users are probably aware "virtual memory" (or paging, in OS X's case) is always "on," as is the case with any modern operating system. It is an integral part of the kernel's functionality. As a result, every time OS X is booted, a swapfile is written to the partition where OS X resides. When many apps are open and free physical RAM becomes scarce, more swapfiles (80MB each) are...

A quick heads up to users planning to use Microtek scanners with the new Quicksilver G4's. I have a Microtek ScanMaker X6 (USB), purchased over a year ago, which generates execllent quality scans and was rather economical. After upgrading to a Quicksilver G4 (dual 800), I went to install the ScanWizard driver suite that came on the bundled CD (the same version that's currently on...

Tom's Hardware has an article explaining AMD's new plan in its battle against the megahertz myth. It seems that the new Athlons (based on the Palomino core) will be specified by model rather than MHz. Model A1600, for instance, is a 1.4GHz Athlon, which AMD views it as equivalent in speed to a P4 1.6GHz, at least. They demand that no motherboard/BIOS maker ever reveal the actual clockspeed of...

InsideMacGames.com, as part of their recent weekly series, has an interesting article about "Mac Gaming God" Graeme Devine, of id softwre, and his loyalty to the Mac cause. His early passion for the NeXT Cube combined with his love of the Mac's ease of use and general elegance makes him a rather good champion of the cause, so to speak. Check it out, a good...

As reported by xlr8yourmac.com, a download link appeared on VersionTracker for MacOS 9.2.1 (82MB in size). Go get it! Here's a link directly to Apple for...

Adam wrote in to tell us: I look at a couple of rumor sites every once and a while, and most of you guys tell me that thier is going to be new hardware at Paris 2001, but Steve says something else. Maybe just putting his hand over our eyes, or is he telling the truth? I think he's telling the truth. Given the signifciant new hardware at MWNY (and throughout this year, really) we've not been ...

I phoned the Apple Store to see if I could hear some hopeful news regarding the shipping status of my dual-800 G4 Quicksilver, ordered the day of the keynote (7/18). Past calls had yeilded nothing more than "5-7 weeks from your order date," but today I was told some pleasant news indeed. It appears that the dual-800's are shipping this week! Another user with a dual-800 on order was given a...

MacSpeedZone has just posted some rather surprising benchmark results, showing the relative speed of the new 733MHz G4 Quicksilver vs. the older single-CPU 533MHz G4. In almost all of the tests, the 533 outpaced the new 733. This speed can clearly be attributed to the inclusion of an L3 cache on the 533 as well as the shorter pipeline (which translates to greater performance/cycle) in the CPU...

We all know the G4 Cube and lament its passing, but some may be unaware that it was not the only cube design that Jobs broguht into the world. Before it (in 1988) came the NeXT Cube, a flat black cube, one foot on a side, wrought entirely of magnesium. In what interestingly parallels the demise of the NeXT hardware, Simson Garfinkel (then NeXTWorld Magazine Senior Editor) let his lifelong ...

Macworld UK reports that the firm Peacock Maps, famous for their large map-of-the-internet poster, has created a line of psychedelic music posters made up of shots of Apple's iTunes visualizations. Pretty slick...

xlr8yourmac.com posted the results of some in-depth memory bandwidth tests of the new G4 7450 rev 2.1 versus the older rev 2.0 units. Does this new chip revision offer notable bandwidth improvements over the rev 2.0? Andrew's 2.1 rev 7450 showed more than 100MB/sec higher GaugePro memory test rates than a 2.0 rev CPU, but still not that impressive when compared to results from 7400/7410 G4s -...

There was a post to xlr8yourmac.com late last week by a user who had recently received a Quicksilver G4 and had three 256MB PC133 CL2 (2-2-2) DIMMs, each containing 16 memory chips, to install. He encountered a memory error on boot (3 beeps) and found that if he took any one of the DIMMs out of the machine, even replacing it with the bundled Apple 128MB DIMM (comprised of 8 memory chips), all...

PC World has posted an interesting article detailing the graphics card throw-down between nVIDIA and ATI. It seems ATI's Radeon II (expected in September) could dethrone nVIDIA's GeForce 3 as the king of cards. But to what degree will graphics API's take advantage of each card's features? One might expect this to be a primarily PC-oriented issue, but with the innovation we're seeing coming ...

xlr8yourmac.com has posted an article explaining that the upcoming Mac port (OS X only) of the popular PC game, Giants: Citizen Kabuto will utilize specific features of the GeForce 3 video board, if present in your system: Nvidia's main web site has a button that links to screenshots and comments on Giants...

The Register reports that Halcyon Software demonstrated its Java Dot Net project at MWNY last week. This is a system by which, ultimately, a full implementation of .Microsoft's NET XML-heavy application architecture can be run on OS X (at present, a full MS Active Server Pages implementation has been completed). Interesting stuff. The .NET system is compelling, and the ability to serve it with ...

Macrumors man-in-the-field, Michael Wallace, was able to attend the 9am viewing of the Macworld NY keynote at the Tysons Corner Apple Store (McLean, VA), and has provided a brief report with a few shots of the action: I arrived at Tysons Corner early, at about 7:10am, in hopes of getting a spot in the Apple Store (capacity: 80) to watch the keynote via satellite on their 10' screen. Walking up...

MacCentral has posted some Macworld Expo setup pictures, taken at the Jacob Javits convention center in NYC. Have a look. UPDATE: Other setup pics... MyMac.com's galleries MacNN's galleries ...

User 'benmac' made a posting to our forums just now with a link to a pretty interesting page he's put together. I put on my webpage all the renderings of new PowerMacs, iMacs, PowerBooks, iBooks and PDAs I could find on the web. Have a look, it's great fun looking at the different views on how the next generation of Apple products will look like! Here's the link: http://homepage.mac.com/benvp/...

Living close to an Apple Store, I gave them a call to see if the keynote is going to be shown in the theatre area in the back of the store. Apparently they will be showing it live (9am EDT), presumably via satellite feed. I then figured I may as well give it a shot and asked if there would be any new hardware on that day. The guy I was talking to said, "If it's gonna be there, it'll be...

Ran across a funny thing in MacNN's forums this morning. User "theiliad" (the same Mac fan who attempted to infiltrate Apple's plant in Ireland in search of clues for the approaching MWNY's offerings) pointed out a bit of wit on Apple's Mac OS X page. Take a look towards the bottom-right of the page, at the text snippet under the "EightBall" download link... Clever little...