Hardware encrypted drives coming to laptops.

C|Net news.com is reporting that Seagate (the hard drive company) is going to be shipping hardware encrypted hard drives in some new laptops. If you want more details on this read the article that I linked to above, but I will give you the short and sweet version.

Synopsis:

Seagate begins shipping new hard drives in laptops that use a hardware based 128 AES encryption, this means to drag on your CPU, encryption is on the fly, and minimal performance hit (according to Seagate). The encryption is decrypted with a password that the user sets up on initial boot, if lost data “cannot” be recovered (by a standard user that is, hacker could do it, nothing is truly secure).

My Thoughts:

This is great, finally some security is coming to most consumer laptops, and this really affects us all even if you never buy one of these laptops. It affects us all because hopefully large companies that store our data (think credit cards companies and such) issue employee laptops and those get stolen and with it our data.

Mac Pro: How much of the 16gb should I get?

That is the very question I have been wondering and pondering. How much RAM should I get for my Mac Pro. Note that this is not how much I need, but more how much I should have. The difference is this, I want 16gbs of RAM, I need 2gb of RAM, so where is that happy medium of good value, snappy performance and sanity?

Luckily for my Macworld has an article up about this very question. And after reading I realized that my current set up of 3 gb of RAM is plenty and is the best bang for my buck. So for now it look s like I have more than what I need, not as much as I want, and just about what I should have. Hmmm.

Well time to move on to more upgrades, next up for me:

ATI X1900 card, the one with 512 mb of RAM.

A second 20″ Cinema Display ( the 23 and 30’s are nice but I already have a 20, and I want them to be the same size).

A 500gb HD SATA II

Another 4 gb of RAM (2gb x 2)

Yes, well that should do it, really will be fast then, well I probably won’t notice to much speed with more RAM, but psychologically speaking I will think it is faster. And that is what really counts.

New .Mac Webmail Interface

There is a lot of strong reactions and some mild mannered ones circling the blogs about the new .Mac webmail interface. So I thought that I would throw in my thoughts, since I have been critical of .Mac and loving of it for some time.

Seems people are looking at this upgrade as something that it is not. People are saying nope this is not enough for my to stay or to buy for that matter. But I really don’t think that this was Apple’s intention when they did the update. This was not to attract new customers or keep ones that were about to leave, it was to appease the current customers, people like myself.

Reason being that I do not like the Google web interface, and have never used Yahoo’s and not about to change my mind. There is one problem I forward all mail to my .Mac because it is IMAP and I don’t have to bother learning a new method (such as archiving vs deleting with Google).

Biggest Threat to Mac OS X Users!

Viruses! But not those that you would normally think of, instead they are viruses all made in part by Intego, and suffering anti-virus company that seeks to make viruses for the same systems that they seek to protect by viruses. Does anybody see a conflict of interest with this?

There are no true viruses for OS X, and yet Intego is making business off of selling anti-virus software. Their solution to the problem then (of there being no viruses) is to make them, of course they say they are just proofs of concept. Whatever. If I was John Gruber I would give these guys Jackass of the week awards, for life.

Intego keeps making viruses for OS X, often they are patched long before there is even a remote possibility of them making it out in the wild.

Smugness of Mac users.

With the latest batch of Get a Mac commercials, and with the over all cult like status of being a Mac user coming out into the mainstream media, I all but accepted it. I was fine with what ever they call us, and really no one exacerbated the situation, but it occurred to me last night while talking on the phone, just why everyone views us this way. See I thought that they were just jealous, or scared, but it is truly that Mac users in general are crazy talkers.

I know at least I must sound like that most of the time, at least when talking to Windows users. And it is for one simply reason, Macs just work, and we can not explain that to PC users. It truly is that simple. Often when I am asked why someone should switch I fall back on that reason, I say “because Macs just work, and they work better.” Now if you are on the other end of that, you must be thinking, “ok, but my PC works just fine, so what’s the difference” and it is here that we become cultists, and smug. We say “no your PC doesn’t just work, it just barely works.”

The truth of the matter is that we cannot explain what we mean when we say it “just works” or it is “just better.” I know I can’t.

Read On…

DotMac Status Report

It has been a while since I have said anything on this subject, but given that my DotMac posts are some of the most popular I thought I would give an update on my current thinking with it. When I saw the preview for the interface redesign with .Mac mail I was excited, not because I use that (I really don’t), but I thought that might lead to more changes… It hasn’t yet, but that does not mean that the situation has become worse.

As I use the service more and more I find how to work around the quirks, yes it would be nice if it “just worked” but it just doesn’t oh well. Right? I mean you are never going to have a perfect set up with your computer, so if this is the only problem I have I should be happy. Right? Maybe in a PC – Windows world, but I am a Mac user, and this is not acceptable.

With that being said I still will renew it. Just the other day I made a calendar and sent it to my sister in iPhoto, it was that simple. I use iDisk to store important iCal backups, and I really do use those more that I would hope. (I think 3 Macs and Missing Sync get iCal confused at times).

More…click on.

Mac Pro RAM Installation

Just to follow up on my last post about the HD installation. RAM installation is just as simple. Not really much to report here other than if you do it yourself, it is a firm fit for the new DIMMs.

Good luck, oh and 3gb on a Mac Pro is very nice, thinking I want more though. I don’t need more, but man do I want more…

Mac Pro HD installation

So as you may have read I have a new Mac Pro. I only ordered it with the one 250gb HD, I wanted to buy my own to add. I bought a Seagate 250gb Drive 7200rpm w/ 16mb from OWC (macsales.com) I arrived today and I shut down the Mac Pro, and while I waited for it to cool off (i read somewhere that Apple recommends this for this computer prior to installing) I examined the new drive.

I quickly found that the packaged documents from OWC were for an ATA drive not a SATA drive. So they were useless. Luckily the jumper settings were on the drive. And man am I glad I looked at those because you have to remove the jumper on this drive to get the full 3gb/s speed otherwise you are stuck with 1.5 gb/s (I had to check on Apple’s site to make sure that is what they should run at).

After it cooled off and my patience ran out, I popped open the case, slid out drive bay two. Popped off the screws, which were glued down for safe keeping, and screwed the drive on the mount. Slid it in, and fired up the machine.

Upon start up OS X warns of an non recognized drive, a click of the initialize button launches Disk Utility. 30 seconds later it was formatted and ready to go. I am now consolidating data. That was a piece of cake. So easy that I would have no reservations letting my girlfriend do it (though not on my machine, maybe if she had a Mac Pro she could do it on hers).

So if you are thinking about this, do it. Way to simple not to do it.

Mac Pro: User Review

Now you know why I bought the Mac Pro. You can go to lots of websites and read about the benchmarks and measured speeds, you can read about user experiences too, what I want to do with this review is tell you how the computer feels to me. Not what the numbers say.

I have had a lot of computers in my life, each progressively faster. This Mac Pro is not fast in comparison to those past ones, it is lightening fast. It is the difference between driving a Hummer, and then jumping into a BMW M5. A Hummer feels fast because it is impressive to see anything that big move, but an M5 is fast, so fast that the M5 snaps you back in the seat giving you whiplash as you shift from 5th to 6th on the freeway (yes 5th to 6th not 1st to 2nd, that would break your neck).

The startup and restart speeds are awesome, almost makes me wish I had more of a reason to restart my Mac, cause it is that fast. As I mentioned before the speed in which it handles photos in iPhoto is awesome, jaw dropping even.

New Mac. Mac Pro. Why?

I had a interesting situation about 3 weeks ago, I had to make a decision. I was involved in starting yet another company, and because of this I was no longer going to be working from my home for the majority of the day. This meant that the 12″ powerbook that I had been relying on for the past 3 years was not really going to cut it for my 9 – 5 machine, especially not with all the spreadsheets and such that I would be using. So I decided that I would take my Mac mini to my office, leave my Cinema display at home and get another 20″ widescreen for the office (Princeton from Costco). But I knew that I would need to replace the home computer with another, I simply used the home one far to often not to have one.

So I looked at the three desktop models that Apple offers, the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. I know the headline spoils it, but I want to tell you why I chose what I chose, I will post a review of that system next.