So, you’re building a golf cart-sized robot car to travel millions of miles through space, enter the atmosphere of another planet, drop down on the surface inside a bunch of balloons, and then drive around sightseeing. What computer processor do you choose? You guessed it! The control computer on the Mars Exploration Rover, “Spirit”, which this week started motoring around the Martian surface, runs on a cousin of the chip that runs your Mac. It uses a 32-bit Rad 6000 processor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip. It operates at a speed of 20 million instructions per second, and has 128MB of RAM. Hmmm. With 128MB of RAM, you can go to Mars, but you can’t run Windows XP. Go figure.

In a move that no doubt even caused the ground to shake in Gusev Crater (the basin the size of Connecticut that “Spirit” is roving around in), HP and Apple have announced a strategic alliance to deliver an HP-branded version of Apple’s wildly successful iPod to HP customers. HP won’t call them iPods – they’ll carry the really catchy name “HP Digital Music Player”. Instead of being white (or multicolored, like the new iPod mini), they’ll come in that blue/gray/corpse color that HP computers come in. Yummy. As part of the alliance, HP’s consumer PCs and notebooks will come installed with Apple’s iTunes software and a desktop icon to point to the iTunes Music Store. What this also means, is that Apple’s media layer, QuickTime, will be installed on HP computers as well. The announcement came the day after Bill Gates’ manifesto of Microsoft digital media world domination at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Needless to say, Microsoft’s response was swift (and predictable). They labeled the move uncompetitive. All right, stop laughing. They went on to say “Windows is about choice”. Come on, get up off the floor. Sure, Microsoft is all about choice, as long as all the choices are Microsoft.

But isn’t HP giving customers a choice? They’ll have iTunes, which plays AAC (Advanced Audio Codec, the audio portion of the MPEG-4 “industry standard”) as well as MP3 files. And, because they’re Windows PCs, they’ll also have the WMA (Windows Media Audio) that permeates the Windows experience. Perhaps what really scares the folks from Redmond is that people will be able to see (and hear) the difference.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski