Computing

A lot of people share their computers. At work, at home, it's not uncommon for several people to make use of one machine.

Well, for the last 3 years I've been sharing my computer with up to 8 people. At the same time.

You see, my 2006 Mac Pro was loaded with Mac OS X Server, a really superb server operating system that handles your 'usual' client-server stuff, such as having user accounts that can log into any client machine on the network. Every day it effortlessly ...

Yesterday's new iMac unveiling had something of a surprise with it. For the first time, starting this November, Apple will sell the iMac with a desktop CPU - namely Intel's Core i5 and Core i7.

Now, I don't know a lot about the Core i5, but the Core i7 is the next generation Intel architecture that includes an integrated memory controller and the ability to shutdown some cores and over-clock others, making it the master of both multithreaded and single-threaded performance.
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There's no doubt in my mind that smartphones have reached the stage in their development where they're taking over as the primary computing and Internet access vessel for some users. I know two people now who have 'survived' for several days (or more) using just their smartphone and I find that quite incredible. The iPhone is so good that even I could probably survive one quiet day without having to whip out the laptop.

This is a critical turning point for mobile, and a massive change ...

For a dedicated fibre connection from BT, symmetric, you're looking at £74.61 per megabit per month.

I don't think it's too hard to see that, with the massively growing demands for data that we're making, that's much too expensive.

But what can be done to make high quality, high speed data affordable?

Sharing data across many users (contention) and making connections asymmetric so that end users can download fast but not upload fast are surely stopgap ...

If you head over to the Macrumors forums at the moment you'll notice there's a whole lot of anti-Apple sentiment floating around. Hell, I've been using the forum for a few years now and, while I've never known it so busy, I've also never known it so hostile.

One (private) thread even discusses how members will feel if/when SJ dies... despite the fact that he's quite alive at the moment... with many of the respondents saying they'd be interested or even excited to see what happens... ...