MacEdition Pro News : September 18, 2002, Fast Spreading Prize Mail
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Fast and easy
The folks at WiebeTech are tickled pink to have found a way to create a FireWire RAID package that cranks out data at over 60MB/s in the ultimate plug-and-play package for those running Mac OS X.
WeibeTech’s new external dual drive enclosure comes packaged with a PCI FireWire card and requires no special drivers for an OS X user to hook up and go. As company president James Wiebe explains:
“FireWire RAID is designed to take advantage of OS X’s ability to easily create RAIDs using FireWire drives,” he said. “As a result, we are offering a storage device with up to 240GB (unformatted) storage capacity, all achieved without drivers and with performance in excess of 60MB/sec, as measured with InTech’s benchmarking software.”
In order to support the highest performance of FireWire RAID, a PCI FireWire host card is included with the system. This allows FireWire RAID to connect each independent FireWire bridge through an independent FireWire channel. (One bridge attaches to the FireWire port on your Mac’s motherboard, the other bridge attaches to a FireWire port on the PCI host card.)
The enclosure — which is priced from US$500 to US$700 (depending on the size of the array) — is available on line at Dr. Bott or from your well-connected Mac dealer in North America. The product rolls out October 18.
WiebeTech is also rolling out a new bus-powered FireWire/USB 2.0 combo drive which can be mount on both Mac and Windows machines, since WiebeTech will be bundling Mediafour’s MacDrive 5 with its products. MacDrive provides Windows systems with a file format that supports Apple’s HFS+ format.
“Customers are constantly moving FireWire and USB storage devices between Macs and PCs,” said Wiebe. “Until now, this has been done by formatting the disk for the PC format (also known as ‘FAT-32’). This has caused problems, especially for customers with large files that potentially break the 4GB file limitation of PC format.”
Man, it must really suck to do video on THAT platform.
Spreading out
MacSpeech Inc. and Mariner Software have put their wares together in a deal which sees the dictation software company handling distribution for Mariner Write and Mariner Calc.
As Mariner’s founder, Bill Parr, puts it in his press release, the new deal is part of Mariner’s ongoing program of teaming up with various partners to make the company's wares more widely available to the buying public.
“Since re-launching our company almost two months ago, we have strategically aligned ourselves with the leading edge, proactive Macintosh developers,” said Paar. “MacSpeech has set the standard in speech recognition on the Macintosh platform. Both of our customer bases will benefit with this partnership.”
While some of the finer details of the arrangement are still being hammered out, MacSpeech is already taking orders for the Mariner line at its store at www.macspeech.com.
Call it a consolation prize
Hey! If you weren’t one of the three lucky winners of our O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference passes, you can still crash the party without picking up the full tab.
OSXFAQ has become a sponsor of the Santa Clara, California, tech-fest slated to kickoff on September 30, and that means the geeks (and wannabe geeks) can slice off 35 percent when you hook up at O’Reilly’s site and use a special discount code: macosx02faq.
But wait! There’s even more goodness flowing from the site of milk and aqua:
In addition, we will be raffling off a conference pass (tutorials incur an additional charge). Don’t miss out on this opportunity. Also, tell all your friends to go to this link and sign up for our raffle.
A user will be chosen from the online respondents and announced by email. If you win and you have already registered for the conference, O’Reilly & Associates will refund your conference fee.
Automatic mail
Shareware vendor 24U is going to be releasing its OSAX scripting addition next week, giving users the ability to send massive amounts of email from within AppleScript without interfacing with an email application.
The script will run in conjunction with pretty much any database app and can be attached to folders and drop boxes to automate replies. A further explanation gleaned from 24U’s site elaborates further:
This OSAX is useful especially for scripters and Mac server administrators who:
- welcome the ability to send emails directly from AppleScript
- don’t want to use any additional application, like an email client
- appreciate the ability to send emails directly from databases
- prefer tools that are easy to understand and easy to use
- want to try the software before paying for it
After installing 24U Email OSAX, your computer will understand one new AppleScript statement — “send email”. This statement allows you to send emails via your favorite SMTP host, and lets you use standard email headers (To, Cc, Bcc, From, Reply-To).
Looking for old ProNews segments? Check out our index at http://old.macedition.com/news/. Do you have news releases or tidbits of interest to the Macintosh professional? Send them to pronewsnotes@macedition.com.