Tech Tok

The price for Windows 4870 cards is substantially lower than Apple’s. The Canada Apple Store currently lists one for $420, whereas Canada Computers has one for $210. In this MacRumors forum thread people are discussing how to do this and what the pitfalls are.

Basically, download and flash the ROM from RapidShare. One person said:

I just tried it on my Sapphire HD4870 (the 1st gen one, based on ATI’s ref design).

I flashed using freedos and the following command line:
atiflash.exe -p -fs -fp 0 4870.rom
note: -fs and -fp are used to ignore SSID and P/N mismatches

And it works!

EFI driver is initialized correctly, (I don’t have the leaked MacOSX drivers for this card, so I can’t tell if this one works too), and bootcamp stil works (currently writing from GNU/Linux on my 2006 Mac Pro).

Only problem is : only one output is active, no dual-head, it seems (at least using ATI’s linux driver)

I should note that doing this seems to make the analog output (SVGA) not work. DVI is fine, though one person reported the “top” port as only going up to 1024×768.

Be careful out there. Read the thread for info on which cards work, and what possible side effects there are.

YMMV.

Reid

Bought a new hard drive today; a 1½ terabyte drive for $160. Thats only 10?¢ per gigabyte!

Scott showed me a site that says the first hard drive was $10,000 per megabyte! So over 50 years, the price of hard drive storage has dropped by a factor of a BILLION.

At this rate, by the year 2059, the lowest cost of storage should drop from the current cost of $100,000,000 per exabyte to 10¢.

I’d like to record a podcast with one or more other interested individuals, using some sort of software that allows both a multi-party voice chat, *and* records each person’s audio locally in a high-qality format suitable for remixing in post.

I think I remember such software being mentioned somewhere, but I’m not sure where.

Any volunteers? … Bueller?

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *

This removes the “This file was downloaded, are you sure…” warning when dealing with downloaded files.

There are attributes other than com.apple.quarantine, such as:

• com.apple.ResourceFork
• com.apple.FinderInfo
• com.apple.diskimages.recentcksum
• com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms
• com.macromates.caret

I like that last one. I guess it’s how TextMate remembers its position in a text file.

If you want to see what extended attributes your files have, you can either use “xattr -l filename” or just “ls -l@“.