Report: Apple leaks 17-inch iMac for US$899?

It's kind of funny when an Italian-language site breaks a wee bit of English-language-based Apple news, but that's what happened when SetteB.IT spotted a small mention of an US$899 17-inch iMac for the education market on Apple's own Web site.

Currently, Apple is offering iMacs only in 20- and 24-inch screen sizes. The 20-inch model starts at S$1,948 (US$1,383.92), and the 24-incher starts at S$2,448 (US$1,739.13).

No word on when the "new" 17-incher will arrive (or if it's really new), but we'll await official confirmation from Apple.

Anybody interested? In this economy, I think the sub-US$1,000 market is a good spot for Apple to play in--especially when it comes to cash-strapped parents of students.

Update: Wired's Gadget Lab is reporting that the "new" 17-inch iMac isn't really new and is just a reference to the old white plastic iMac 17-incher. Of course, Apple could very well do a 17-inch aluminum iMac at some point, so we'll see how this all plays out.
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New Mac Pro with Radeon HD 4870 card not quite a 3D gaming powerhouse

We promised some more benchmark scores for Apple's new eight-core Mac Pro, and once the Fed Ex delivery guy showed up, we got to work. Apple sent us an ATI Radeon HD 4870 3D card to see how the major graphics card upgrade for the Mac Pro would improve its 3D gaming performance.

We tested with three different time demos in the Mac version of Call of Duty 4. We set the resolution to a modest 1,680 x 1,050 with 4x anti-aliasing. The results, as you can see, are definitely better with the S$321 (US$228.05) ATI upgrade, but it really only pushed the Mac Pro from "mediocre" to "acceptable" as a gaming system.
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Apple flexes design muscle in speedy new Mac Pro

So it's clear, we tested the default, S$5,288 (US$3,756.75) eight-core spec with a pair of 2.26GHz Intel Xeon quad-core CPUs, 6GB of RAM, and a 512MB GeForce GT 120 3D card. With the help of our digital-imaging and video production teams, we also put together a few extra tests.

We took Photoshop 4 and timed a batch RAW file treatment, and we also have two Final Cut Studio 2 tests that take an HD video file and prepare it for uploading to the Web. For comparison, we had a baseline 2.8GHz eight-core Mac Pro from the previous generation, but we tested it with both 4GB and 8GB of RAM.
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Sniffing keystrokes via laser and keyboard power

Presenters at the CanSecWest security conference detailed how they can sniff data by analyzing keystroke vibrations using a laser trained on a shiny laptop or through electrical signals coming from a PC connected to a PS/2 keyboard and plugged into a socket.

Using equipment costing about US$80, researchers from Inverse Path were able to point a laser on the reflective surface of a laptop between 50 feet and 100 feet away and determine what letters were typed.

Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used a handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that's typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals.
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When 5 percent equals 20 percent

A lot of companies have torn down the PC Berlin Wall and now allow employees to use Macintosh computers as well as PCs. Apparently, this creates some interesting dynamics for PC support people.

From what I've heard, most organizations settle in at approximately 95 percent PCs, and 5 percent Macs. Seems like a small and manageable percentage, but here's the rub. According to some services vendors and PC administrators I've talked to, a large portion of the Mac users are executives--CEOs, COOs, chief legal counsel, etc. These folks get top priority and can be very demanding, so network and endpoint administrators have to be on their toes and establish strong Macintosh "chops" quickly. As a result, some IT professionals claim that 5 percent of Macs may as well be 20 percent of the total PC population. Thus 5 percent equals 20 percent.
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