Need for speed
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on September 14, 2007 at 4:11 pm
All we need now is the Aston Martin. Then we’ll have nearly half of the top ten in YouGov’s survey of the coolest 500 brands, here. Apple brands appear throughout the list with three in the top 20. The rest are things we’ve used for years such as Google, Amazon and eBay. We’ve even appeared in Tate Modern (in at number 15) when we created Simon Patterson’s JP233 in CSO Blue, now in the Tate Collection.
Blimey! we never realised we were so cool. Excepting Green and Blacks (number 18) because who wants chocolate when IT Pro sends us bottles of champagne (cheers).
Is there anybody there?
Something else we’ve been doing for years is connecting Macs together. It has always been easy since they included the AppleTalk printer network in the original 1980s computers, here, even though it was never intended to transfer large files which in those days was done via floppy disk. Applications such as FileMaker databases could be linked, network games appeared, speed-up and compression routines made the network run faster. Then along came 10baseT, followed by 10/100 ethernet, both of which transformed our work practices.
In the days before CD writers, instead of leaving Macs running overnight to transfer a few measly hundred megabytes over the serial network, ethernet accomplished the same in an hour or so – which became minutes as ethernet speeds rose. Since around the time they abandoned floppy disks, Apple has shipped Macs capable of gigabit ethernet. The problem being that the price of gigabit routers stayed near a thousand pounds when 10/100 routers sank to fifty. There are still no SOHO gigabit/DSL combinations (AFAIK) – until now.
Extremely fast
The latest update to Apple’s £119 AirPort Extreme base station gave it gigabit ethernet as well as IEEE 802.11n (draft). Tests, here, show wired LAN to run at a steady 800-900Mbps with Wi-Fi at 50-90Mbps. The latter is likely to improve as the 802.11n standard is finally settled.
On the other hand
An alternative high-speed wired network has been built into all Macs since the turn of the century and made available via Mac OS X. Running at four times the speed of 10/100 ethernet, the Firewire ports can be used to create a peer-to-peer, 400Mbps network. Adding a hub for £40 or so makes a star network for a small workgroup or to share Firewire devices. We use our thin iPod Firewire leads to go Mac to Mac if we ever need to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data. Just plug them into each Mac, daisy chaining from one to another and the Macs automatically do the rest of the configuration. The throughput speeds are the same as writing to a hard disk connected to the Mac. But to be honest, most of the time 10/100 ethernet is all we need.
Update to last week
A Director of Carphone Warehouse read my blog (hello, sir) and arranged for a new phone to be shipped to me with staff discount. Thank you, much appreciated.
Today, I read the iPhone is coming to the UK next week. Darn!
Not yet rated
Loading ...Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
Most commented posts
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- The difference between a Parapedal and a Pedalflanger (100%)
- CrushFTP 4 (100%)
- CD Ripping Rip Off (100%)
- Another Ripping Rip off (100%)
- That'll fool 'em (100%)
- A bad Tool always blames the browser (100%)
- Reasonably priced car hit by star (100%)
- 10.5.3 and Time Machine (100%)
- Carbon Dating (100%)
- Rough Wiis do shake the darlings (100%)