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So Apple admits the unthinkable, they really have been compiling and running MacOS X on Intel all these years, just in case. With the talk about reduced power consumption, I’d think they must be looking at the Pentium M chips as the Pentium 4 & Pentium D don’t exactly sip the power. Two dual-core Pentium M chips in a PowerMac could be quite the screamer and I’d bet still lower power consumption than a current single-core G5. One has to wonder if they aren’t looking at AMD also, as I recall, the Athlons use quite a bit less power than the P4s, though I don’t recall how they compare to the Pentium Ms.

Rosetta. Running PowerPC-compiled apps on the Intel. I can admit to having tried the impressive PearPC, but slow didn’t even begin to describe the initial experience. Admittedly I tried it again a few months later with a newer build and it was significantly faster but still barely usable in my book.

One potentially huge benefit would be VirtualPC. If the switch enables VirtualPC to run WinXP on OS X as fast as VirtualPC currently works on a Windows-based PC, that’d be pretty cool. What I’d really like to see is another Apple branded technology announced for 10.5 basically building in VirtualPC technology. Running Windows apps directly without actually loading a VirtualPC-type Windows XP system? Despite the potential security issues, that would be impressive and really eliminate a major reason for the average consumer to shy away from the Mac platform. Alas, no announcement on any such thing today, hopefully they’re just keeping that one a secret until 10.5 is closer.

So, a completely new lineup of dual-core Intel-based PowerMacs coupled with another release of MacOS X (10.5 Leopard) in time for Longhorn. Could Apple actually be giving Microsoft a serious run for their money?

Interesting tidbit from MacRumors.com… Developer transition kit – 3.6Ghz P4, for select and premier developers only $999. Tack on $500 for the Select Developer membership, not bad at all. Cheaper than even the bottom-rung PowerMac Single 1.8ghz G5 in the developer program at $1199 (+$500), I can’t wait to see the full specs and how it compares in speed.

Update: Bummer, you have to return the development P4 unit “by 2006″ when I’d imagine the true Intel-based units will be available.

Wow, it’s true.

Engadget

Since hink asked, here are my thoughts on the whole Google Sitemaps idea.

Overall, I love it. The ability to tell the search engines “hey, check this page out often and don’t bother with these over here but once a month” could prove quite useful. That said, part of me wonders if it isn’t just adding extra work for web developers that already have too much to do, though for a proper dynamic site a little work upfront to let the site generate the sitemap itself should mostly negate that. Even so, Google seems to do a pretty good job on their own without our input.

Then of course we all know that (the majority of?) sites will use the sitemaps completely improperly. Does anyone want to bet how many “webmasters” will setup a Google Sitemap telling them to check every single page, every day, with all pages at a priority of 1.0 because everything on my site is important! The concept of ‘relative to other pages on the same site’ will escape them and while they’re only hurting themselves with that, I feel for anyone having to explain to a client why a particular page on their site was only assigned a 0.3 priority let alone 0.1.

In the end I expect it will stick around, Google will ignore a good portion of them due to improper setup, and those with well designed sitemaps will benefit. Which I like to think is a good thing.

Google recently released their new Google Sitemaps as a beta (what do you expect from google?), here a few links I’ve been reading on the subject.

Google Sitemaps Homepage

Google Sitemap Protocol

Google Sitemaps Overview from Search Engine Watch

Breaking Down Google Sitemaps XML from Social Patterns

Google Sitemap for WordPress Blogs also from Social Patterns

Introducing “official support” for IE6. Hopefully I didn’t break anything in the process!

After much frustration, I’m pleased to announce that Editor Search now works in Internet Explorer 6.0. IE appears to automatically scroll the textarea to the proper position when I move the cursor, so that should be perfectly accurate, however the slight deviation from the proper position still occurs in Firefox, hoping to minimize/eliminate that in 1.3 or 1.4. One minor difference in IE is that word searching doesn’t currently wrap when you reach the end, I should be fixing that in 1.3.

Download Editor Search 1.2 Plugin for WordPress 1.5

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