Technology and Innovation

While the world dribbled over the new ¡Mac’s fíat screen, Apple had another surprise up its sleeve: this new Cinema HD Display. All right, so it’s really aimed at creative types using it for their work, but ¡s still sexy enough to tempt the rest of us. It’s less than two ¡nches thick and has a wide-format display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. It has support for 16.7 million colours and a 160-degree viewing angle, and runs its digital video signal, USB data and power through a single cable. Far less clutter, and a lot more style. Why should designers have all the fun? Surely your desk is crying out forone ofthese.

Intel Macs (and a few high-end workstations and servers) use EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), a newer type of firmware. Mac OS X can’t deal with BIOS, and 32-bit versions of Windows don’t know how to work with EFI, though 64-bit versions do. (This is one of the functions of Boot Camp—providing a bridge for booting into Windows.)

Doesn’t Work That Way So. you ask. since I could boot my Mac into Windows, why can’t I boot my Windows box into Mac OS? Two problems: first off. an Intel-based Mac uses a different type of firmware. Practically all PCs in the wild use BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), a type of firmware which has existed since the original (circa 1981) IBM PC.

The question of “Mac vs. PC” has started holy wars on computer forums. It also led to the notion of platform bigotry, the condition where people are so gung-ho about their platform of choice that they actively disparage anyone who doesn’t use it. (This also causes certain users to blindly accuse publications of being biased against a certain platform, even though four out of five current Vldeomaker editors happen to be invested in both platforms.)