The Mac Pro is a great Mac candidate for drive striping, being that it has four internal drive bays. What is drive striping? Imagine if you had two pencils and were capable of writing with both hands at the same time. Can you imagine how much faster you could write things down? This is effectively what drive striping does for your Mac: You can give it two hard drives, and it will treat them like one big drive; anytime it has to write something, it will write to both drives at the same time, which means it can get the job done theoretically twice as fast. Striping drives can significantly decrease the time it takes to complete hard drive intensive tasks, like video processing, especially when it is done on machines with faster processors like the Mac Pro. Think about it: With all that processing speed, one of your biggest bottlenecks can become the hard drive.

Apple has simple instructions on how to set up driving striping on a Mac. No additional hardware or software is needed, except the extra drives, of course, to accomplish this.

In a perfect scenario, you should stripe two identical drives. You can stripe two differently-sized drives, but the striping will use “the lowest common denominator”. In other words, If you had a 160GB and a 250GB, when you stripe them, the 250GB only uses the first 160GB, and the resulting volume would be 160GB+160GB=320GB.

One approach you could take is to keep the factory-installed hard drive, purchase two new and identical drives, and stripe them. The factory-installed drive remains as a separate startup volume, and the two additional drives are striped together as your big, fast volume (e.g. 500GB if you have two 250GB drives, 1TB if you have two 500GB drives).

Since the Mac Pro has 4 hard drive bays, you would still have one drive bay for later expansion. At that later date when you decide to expand, a couple actions you could take are: (1) Get rid of the factory-installed drive and buy two more drives and have those two striped together, or (2) Buy a big drive that will be assigned as a Time Machine backup drive to use with Leopard when it comes out.

There are benefits to having the startup volume be a striped volume, but the biggest benefits are in storing large data on those drives, like video, photos, and audio, for manipulation in iMovie, iDVD, and so on.

It is important to note, however, that having a striped volume increases your risk of lost data by a factor of how many drives you have striped together. When your data is on one drive, you risk losing that data if that drive ever fails. When you now have a striped volume with two drives, if either drive ever fails, your data is lost. You can stripe 3 or 4 drives together for even FASTER data writing, but then obviously there’s an even greater chance of data loss. The more drives you have, the higher statistical probability that one of those drives will eventually die, and everything on the volume that the dead drive was a part of will be lost, because data on a striped volume is spread across all the drives.

As long as you are protecting yourself with a good, regular backup plan (especially with Time Machine when Leopard arrives), the added speed is certainly worth it.

All my Windows geek friends have nifty taskbar software that indicates the temperature of the CPU and other useless but interesting geek information about their systems.

iStat Pro is cooler than any of the tools they have. Developed as a dashboard widget, iStat Pro displays CPU temperature and fan speed, but also duplicates all the information in Activity Monitor, displaying typical geek Unix system info, like active processes, memory usage, and so on.

All in a dashboard widget, and all for free (donationware)!

During the same week that Microsoft announces that they would be removing support for UEFI from Windows Vista, some hackers finally establish a method to install Windows XP on Intel Macs (legally, I might add!).

That is exciting, and the timing is of course very comforting.

I was naturally livid when I read about Microsoft pulling UEFI support from Windows Vista on March 14. For many users who highly prefer Mac OS X but want the flexibility to use Windows when necessary, the Intel transition was an excitement followed by frustration when we realized that Windows XP was not cognizant of UEFI. For us, Windows Vista seemed the best, cleanest solution. eWeek’s David Morgenstern holds that Microsoft’s EFI pullback is Apple’s gain, which is a positive attitude but I don’t feel there is much realistic validity to his opinion; Vista’s EFI-lessness gives Mac users one more bullet on their bragging rights list. That helps us dual-boot Windows on our Macs how? And it makes Windows users wish they were running OS X for what major benefits?

Furthermore, Microsoft is not expressing any interest in expediting the development of a Universal, Intel native version of Virtual PC.

Although there have been understandable and reasonable explanations for both of these scenarios that are unrelated to Microsoft’s interest in the success of the new Macs, the zeal in us loyalists moves us to irritation and suspicion that Microsoft may be making a passive/aggressive move to frustrate the Intel transition.

Alas, another day, another innovation in this incredibly busy year in the Apple universe. Some hackers have finally been able to answer the challenge on OnMac.net to successfully get Windows XP installed on an Intel Mac! He has posted photos and even a video as proof of accomplishment, in addition to the required patched files and instructions. At this point, it has been tested and verified by numerous sources and testers.

My need to purchase a new PC just vanished.. Sorry, Dell!

Article: Web Site Reports Intel Mac Dual-Boot Breakthrough.

Having a “robot companion” in my office, as bizarre as it sounds, actually could be really useful, or at least, entertaining. But when I read about how SCOTY works, I wonder why my Mac can’t already do the things he can do.

I read about SCOTY in the PC Magazine article, “WowWee Unveils First Robot Media Hub“. He can greet you, speak to you, play your music for you, and even read your email to you. Hey, some of those things would be kind of nifty! How nice would it be to just step into the office, and after being recognized and greeted, say “Play my ‘Soft Music’ mix” or “Read my new email” and have it happen? Beam me up, SCOTY!

Then I realized that the actual physical element of SCOTY is actually unimpressive. It is just a mess of microphones, speakers, and cameras, tied together with a plastic metal frame with lights and a couple motors to keep the camera pointed at you.

Take out a couple of those luxuries (namely, the lights and the motor for the camera), and what’s SCOTY got that my Mac with an iSight doesn’t have? It has a camera, microphone, and speakers. The rest of SCOTY’s impressive behavior is managed by software, even the facial and speech recognition, and the interface for communication.

Furthermore, I already know the groundwork is there in Mac OS technology for handling speech recognition and synthesis.

So why can’t I have a SoftSCOTY on my Mac? Read my mail. Run my iTunes. All the functionality is there. I just need an app that ties them together and throws in a speech communication interface.

Mac software uberdevelopers, make it happen!