There were four papers presented on points at the conference, each of which dealt with handling large numbers of points or re-sampling polygonal data for representation with points. Considering the use of large scanned data sets, this area of study is very important to current practice in film. Combining Edges …

An article in the The Register is reporting that after talking to Apple executive Greg Joswiak, they can confirm that OSX 10.3 (Panther) will be a 32-bit release with accommodations for 64-bit addressing (much as 10.2.7 is intended to be). The approach will allow Apple to continue …

Day one of SIGGRAPH is on a Sunday this year, allowing for the travel benefits of staying over a Saturday night without having to find something to do that isn't related to the conference on Sunday. However, none of the papers start until Monday, so you will only miss the …

It's pricey, but it's huge! Trans International has announced that they are now shipping a 1GB DDR333 RAM module compatible with Apple's 17" PowerBook. For only $1400, you can have 2GB of RAM in your laptop.

In May of 2002, I sold my 15" PowerBook to a lady named Jenny Hedley (a transplanted Californian living in New Zealand at the time). She had purchased it to work on a surf film "by women and for women." I emailed back and forth with her over a couple …

Gefen has announced a new USB extension product that will allow you to communicate with USB devices that are 1,650 feet away using fiber optic cable. Thanks to a pointer from MacCentral, we were turned on to the latest product in Gefen's extension empire. The company has long been …

Thanks to a pointer from SlashDot, I found this article by NASA Langley Research Center researcher Craig Hunter. The study compares the G5 against a P4 (and a pair of G4s) in a single processor configuration (done by turning off the second CPU using Apple's CHUD tools) on scalar operations …

Following up on a discussion earlier this week, I wanted to lay out some additional performance comparisons between the IBM PowerPC 970 and the AMD Opteron. Thanks to Dmitry for the pointer to this AnandTech article about the Opteron architecture. Opteron memory philosophyThe design of the Opteron memory and …

According to an article from CNet, Toshiba has released the P25, a portable computer with 17" of screen and 9.1 pounds of weight. Although using basically the same screen as the Apple 17" PowerBook, the computer weighs in at 50% more weight. Basic stats are: 2.8GHz Pentium 4 …

Charlie White (author of the infamous, and now missing Adobe "PC Preferred" article), has written an editorial piece for Digital Video Editing. Not surprisingly, it takes Apple to task on their PR this week. Although not likely to curry favor with the Macintosh crowd, it is not a bad article …

Apple announced on Monday the G5 series of desktop computers. The computers are serious speed daemons, with the ability to access 8GB of RAM, a fast 1GHz processor bus, SATA storage and up to two 2GHz CPU's processing data in 64-bit chunks. Of course, they won't be available until August …

With Monday's (hopefully) impending announcements from Apple, here are some thoughts on the individual technologies mentioned in the "leak" last week. G5 (aka IBM PowerPC 970) The 970 (which it looks like Apple will be calling the G5), is the first workstation-class chip released from IBM's Power4 architecture of CPUs …

I have been refraining from the various blow-by-blow rumors for the upcoming Apple WWDC, but this one is just too juicy to let pass. I will note that the following may well be a hack from outside of Apple or it may just be a huge mistake from inside, but …

A good set of pointers this morning in an article from CNET about the IEEE-sponsored VLSI symposium taking place this week in Kyoto, Japan. They talk about Intel's Tri-Gate Transistor work, "finfet" transistors being worked on by IBM and AMD, and a variety of papers in the wireless area …

As rumors intensify heading into Apple's WWDC, the IBM 9701 and the next version of Apple's OS X are the chief concerns. This article from eWeek cites the likelihood that the 970 will initially be supported by a version of Jaguar (OS X 10.2) code-named Smeagol. The version …

An article from CNET reports that Sun and Intel announced they are teaming up to make sure that Java runs well on Intel's XScale processor, used often in PDAs and some phones. The press release from Sun's site specifically refers to some modifications to Sun's Hotspot VM and some changes …

According to an article on Wired, a model rocketry group from Portland State University is putting together a model rocket that is running on Linux. The group is building a sophisticated rocket designed to climb to about 50,000 feet and to carry processors to control flight and send back …

An article on LinuxJournal includes a copy of the NDA required by SCO of anyone who wants to look into their claims about trade secret/patent/copyright infringement vis-a-vis Linux. It's not surprising to me that this NDA is as rock solid as it appears to be. In particular, they …

With the ability to take standard composite or S-Video and turn them into DV signals (4:1:1, 720x480 at 30fps), the latest offerings from ForMac provide Mac users (and to a lesser extent Windows users) with the ability to read and write composite/S-Video while still concentrating on DV …

I was following a link about keeping MacOS X keychains on external USB devices (flash drives, mostly) and found a pointer to the BioSlimDisk, a fingerprint-based encrypted USB storage device. It's not cheap ($150 at DevDepot), but it is an interesting approach, since the fingerprint is used to encrypt/decrypt …