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on to iPhones
Friday, January 30 2009
The economy is terrible everywhere, and for me this means there is less web database subcontract work (indeed, I am increasingly available to work on your project remotely). During these lean times, the guys who I subcontract with out in Los Angeles have hatched plan to develop applications for the iPhone, which has its own proprietary marketplace where real money can be made. As with most such plans, the chances of failure outweigh the chances of reward, but the iPhone looks a lot like what I imagine the future of computing will be, and I want to get in on it. Unfortunately, the only way to develop on the iPhone is to use a modern Macintosh computer, and Apple makes it prohibitively difficult to hack such functionality into a generic PC. So last night I took delivery of a used Mac Mini (shipped directly to me by my Los Angeles contacts); the UPS guys just chucked the box in the snow, where it had lain during our night at the shopping mall. Today I set up the little computer with its own LCD monitor next to my existing four-LCD Athlon-based PC, making my laboratory look even more like the bridge of a post-apocalyptic space cruiser.
At its heart, the Mac Mini has a dual-core Intel processor, which seems to make it run about four times faster than my main computer. I say this after watching the performance of some complicated (and entirely-client-side) javascripts on the two platforms. I'd been of the belief that computers haven't been getting any faster for the last three years, but it seems I was wrong. Furthermore, the Mac Mini seems to get a lot of computing power for the amount of power consumed; its power supply is only eighty watts.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090130 feedback
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