Review: EFI-X Boot Module

Today's edition of MacInTouch reviews a new product, the EFI-X Boot Module. This is a $260 (currently discounted to $200) USB dongle that sets up an EFI boot environment on a generic PC.

For those who don't know, EFI is a new boot environment for PCs that is intended to replace the old BIOS environment that PCs have used in various forms since the first IBM PC shipped in 1981. EFI is much more advanced than BIOS, but only the most recent operating systems can boot on EFI-equipped PCs.

So why is this interesting? Apple Intel-based Macintosh computers (which is everything sold since mid-2006) use EFI and Mac OS X requires EFI in order to boot. (There have been some hacking efforts to make Mac OS X run on BIOS-based PCs, but they are of questionable reliability.) With the EFI-X Boot Module, you can get that same EFI software on a generic PC. It would appear that this alone is sufficient to allow Mac OS X to install on non-Apple hardware. (Assuming you have hardware for which Apple provides drivers, of course.)

Of course, installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of Apple's software license terms, so actually doing this might be illegal, depending on where you live and what the courts decide. And it is likely that Apple will update Mac OS X in some way to make it incompatible with an EFI-X-equipped PC. Nevertheless, it is a very interesting piece of news and an even more interesting product for PC hackers to play with. (And there's absolutely nothing illegal about using EFI-X to run Linux or the 64-bit version of Windows Vista - both of which have EFI support.)

The Ornery American: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

Orson Scott Card deals out a much-needed blow against the media, who are lying through their teeth about the causes of today's financial crisis in order to get Obama elected.

Read the essay for the whole story.

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis

Back in July (sorry, I just read the article today), Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal that much of the science behind today's global warming panic has been discredited (he presents several specific examples) and that the arguments being tossed about today are based on religious and political ideologies, not scientific fact.

Read the article for the full story.

The entire universe

Today's XKCD depicts the entire unvierse, plotted on a logarithmic scale of distance from the Earth's surface.

Pretty nifty, eh?

Behind The Music: The Muppaphones

Ever wonder what happened to those stars of TV, the Muppaphones?

Talking to the Police by Professor James Duane

Professor James Duane gives a 47-minute lecture on why talking to the police without a grant of immunity is always a bad idea, even if (especially if) you are innocent. The first half of the lecture is the professor's lecture, the second half being commentary by a police officer who confirms everything and then describes many (all perfectly legal) techniques for getting people to confess.

Male dogs and other unusual words

This week, I started wondering if there is a term for a male dog. We all know the term for a female dog, but the males are usually just called "dogs".

Well, thanks to the internet, I now know that answer.

There are three terms used for a male dog:

• Stud - usually only used for breeding purposes
• Sire - but only if it has fathered pups
• Cur - although this usually implies one that is angry or ill or abused

And while on the subject, I was able to find out what male and female cats are called. Until now, I only knew the first of the following:

• tom - a male cat
• gib - a male cat that's been neutered
• queen - a female cat (usually only if she hasn't been spayed)
• clowder - a group of cats

And now you know too.

A terabyte in the palm of your hand

This weekend, I assembled a 1TB hard drive for my Mac. I purchased a Seagate Baracuda ST310005 1TB internal SATA drive at Micro Center for $210. I installed this drive into a Vantec NexStar-3 360UFS external drive case, which cost $70. This is an all-metal case that provides USB, FireWire and eSATA ports. It is currently attached to my Mac via FireWire, that being the fastest interface I currently have. (I may install an eSATA card for better performance, but not now.)

Overall, installation was very simple. The drive just snaps onto the circuit board in the case. The circuit board is also attached to a metal frame that contains the case's external connectors. Thanks to the standardized (and simplified) ports used by SATA drives, there is no need for actual cables. Just a simple connector that mates with both of the drive's connectors. The drive then attaches to the board's frame with four screws. It was important to use the screws that came with the case, and not the ones that came with the drive. The former are pan-head, while the latter are round-headed. The round-headed screws scrape the bottom of the case when the drive is inserted. After attaching the drive to the circuit board, the assembly slides into the case. A single wire attaches the case's in-use LED to the circuit board.

After assembling the drive, I attached it to my Mac. Although simple from a technical point of view, this was tricky trying to find a place for it on my desk. My other external drives (two hard drives and a tape drive) reside on top of my Mac. When I tried to put the new drive there, however, the power cord proved to be too short to reach the power strip on the floor. I found another location, on my desk, behind the monitor, only to find that the bundled FireWire cable was too short to reach from there to my FW hub. Fortunately, I have other FireWire cables and was able to swap it for a longer one.

After physically attaching the drive, the rest was smooth sailing. As soon as I turned it on, Mac OS informed me about the new drive and asked me if I would want to format it. I said yes and the system's Disk Utility launched. The drive was partitioned and formatted in a few minutes. Afterwards, I chose to explicitly zero-out the partition - this is unnecessary, but I do it with new drives, to check for any damaged sectors. That operation took nine hours. (This is a trillion bytes we're talking about!)

After formatting, the drive appeared on my desktop and Mac OS asked me if I wanted to use it to store Time Machine backups. Since this was my purpose for buying the drive, I said "yes" and it was automatically set up.

Time Machine took about four hours to make the initial backup of my data (about 90GB). Subsequent snapshots (taken every hour) take only a few minutes, because they only back up files that have changed.

I don't yet know what the overall reliability of this system will be, since it's a new drive and a new case, but so far I am suitably impressed. The drive case has no fans, so it gets a bit warm but the aluminum case seems to dissipate the heat well. It does not get hot to the touch, and I don't have any other devices stacked on it. Mac OS X seems to have absolutely no problem supporting a single disk volume of 1TB.

Update 6/13/2008:
See also my review on Epinions

The self-peeling potato

The Japanese seem to have a miracle solution for everything, including a clean and easy way to peel a potato:

Breaking matza in half - the Japanese way

I posted this last year to my LJ, but what the heck..