Ok, ok. We’re talking rain clouds, not cloud storage.
It’s not too often we post about local events, but we really wanted to share some of the photos OWC Jamie took of our local skies this late morning.
After drought conditions for the past four weeks here in Woodstock, IL, it looks like we may see a little relief rain. The gallery shows some of the impressive cloud shots of the thunderstorm rolling in towards the OWC headquarters.
Other World Computing announced today the OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express/Mercury Aura Envoy as the industry’s first high-performance Solid State Drive upgrade and bus-powered enclosure bundle for 2010-2011 MacBook Air computers. Representing a ‘Dream Team’ of performance and convenience, the Mercury Aura Bundle includes a Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD that offers nearly 8x the factory maximum storage capacity along with extreme data rate speeds up to or exceeding 500MB/s — representing up to 68 percent faster real-world speed than the factory Flash SSD. After installing the Aura Pro Express in the MacBook Air, the factory SSD is easily converted into an external storage solution inside the Mercury Aura Envoy to complete the two-in-one storage upgrade. Article Continues…
Imagine if the continents never separated, yet all the various cultures that developed throughout the world still retained their identities, all the while intermingling with each other. What would their music sound like? African percussion mixed with Japanese flutes and Spanish guitar? European techno beats over Brazilian vocals?
It’s kind of a strange concept to try and wrap your mind around, but that’s the whole concept behind Pangaea Projekt. They take instruments from cultures across the globe and fuse them together with vocals and modern synthesizer technology to form their own unique-sounding compositions, with a unique “electronic/world music” sound.
Well, while we won’t take any claim to the music itself, OWC memory and drives were instrumental in its production. Their latest album “Gaia’s Dream” was recorded and mixed on a MacBook Pro full of OWC RAM and it was recorded to several OWC hard drives, and when they played live at the Reebok World Conference in Phoenix, they used the same rig for flawless playback.
It just goes to show you, no matter what kind of music, video, or art you produce, OWC delivers professional-grade hardware for the discerning user.
In case you missed it a couple of weeks ago, an intrepid tinkerer, coder, and apparent Apple enthusiast has succeeded in shoehorning System 7 onto the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch e-Book reader. This feat had been attempted a few years ago by others, but it took the work of 68k Macintosh Liberation Army Forum member FlyingToaster to bring the project to fruition. In this gallery of screenshots, you can see sights like System 7 loading in all the Nook’s greyscale glory, along with the infamous After Dark “Flying Toasters” screensaver and some classic games, too.
This impressive feat was accomplished with the aid of the open-source Mini vMac, an open source Macintosh Plus emulator. For those who don’t know, an emulator is a computer program that copies (aka “emulates”) the functions of another electronic system entirely through software. In this case, Mini vMac created a “virtual system” that acts just like a real Macintosh Plus. So what we have is an e-Reader with an 800Mhz ARM processor and 256MB of RAM running an emulator on top of Google’s Android operating system all in the name of being able to run classic Mac programs from 1986-1994.
The actual usefulness of System 7 on the Nook e-Reader hardware is definitely questionable at best. However, the ability to imitate the entirety of an OS from the early 90′s running on a computer that weighed 17-20 pounds and could cost upwards of $2600 (depending on model) on a device from 2011 that weighs less than 8 ounces and under $100 is, to me, just incredible.
One of the great new features of the new Apple portables is the addition of USB 3.0 capabilities. Now we can get data transfer speeds faster than FireWire 800 out of the same port we use for our printers and wired keyboards. More importantly, we can finally get some decent, bus-powered external drive performance on the MacBook Air, that is also able to be used on earlier systems.
Of course, the trick to getting that speed is making sure both sides of the USB chain are USB 3.o capable. Hooking a USB 2.0 drive up to a USB 3.0 port is going to – you guessed it – only run at USB 2.0 speeds. Fortunately we’ve been bringing our line of Storage Solutions over to USB 3.0 for a while now. These solutions currently have at least one USB 3.0 configuration:
All these models are ready to go, whatever your SuperSpeed storage needs may be. Of course, if your favorite enclosure line isn’t currently configured for USB 3.0, don’t worry; odds are that it will be soon. Stay tuned to the OWC Blog for future release details as they become available.
