SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

Surprisingly, Apple have quietly released an update to the Mac Mini.   The new Aluminium uni-body device now comes with an HDMI port built in.

Using Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics – the new device can now take up to 8GB of RAM, which is now easily upgradeable via a removable panel underneath (see below).

Introducing The Mac Mini

Mac mini comes to the big screen.

It’s easy to connect Mac mini to the biggest screen in the house — your HDTV — courtesy of a built-in HDMI port. Plug in one HDMI cable and start enjoying content on your Mac mini in brilliant HD. Like movies and TV shows from iTunes, the Internet, and your photo library. There’s also a handy control that lets you easily adjust the output on Mac mini to fill even the biggest HDTV screen. And when you just want to listen to music, you can play your entire iTunes collection through your home entertainment center, or stream it to a set of speakers in any room via an AirPort Express Base Station.

Plenty of ports make it ready for anything.

Mac mini makes things happen. It can connect to any digital display right out of the box. In addition to HDMI, Mac mini comes with both Mini DisplayPort output and an HDMI-to-DVI adapter, so it’s ready to connect to the Apple LED Cinema Display or a third-party display you already have. You can even connect two displays to see more of your photos, movies, and files. And there’s a built-in SD card slot, which makes it easy to grab photos and videos from your digital still or video camera. Mac mini gives you ports galore: four USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire 800 port, so you can plug in your keyboard, mouse, iPod, iPhone, iPad, digital camera, DV camcorder, external hard drive, printer, and just about any other device you use.

Souped-up graphics.

Mac mini refuses to act its size. It gives you next-generation NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics — the fastest integrated graphics processor on the market today — and speedy DDR3 memory. With 48 processing cores and 256MB of shared video memory, this graphics processor delivers up to twice the performance of the previous generation. It brings more pixel-pushing power to the latest 3D games and graphics-intensive applications. And you’ll notice a big difference when you

work with high-resolution photos and high-definition video. The most surprising part? You don’t have to sacrifice efficiency for speed. The NVIDIA GeForce 320M is more energy efficient than its predecessor. All of which proves you really can do more with less.

Posted in IT Hints and Tips | No Comments »
Tags: Apple, Mac Mini

If’ you ever need to modify your Hosts file on either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you’ll probably hit a warning that you need to be an Administrator to modify it?

Now this may seem odd as you’ve also probably already got Administrative rights on the PC?

This is a new safety measure originally introduced in Vista to stop rogue (spyware) applications from modifying hosts and redirecting traffic to other sites.

However, you can still modify the file:

Right Click on “Command Prompt” icon, and select “Run as Administrator”

cd \windows\system32\drivers\etc

notepad hosts

You should now be able to save the file without any problems.

Posted in IT Hints and Tips | No Comments »
Tags: Hosts, Vista, Windows 7

Google’s Matt Cutts is giving a keynote at SMX and is discussing the roll out of the Caffeine update.

Apparently in the last few days, Caffeine went live on all data centers.  

According to Matt, in the past Google used to roll out large updates using a “Google Dance” whereby datacenters updated gradually.   In 2003 Google introduced an incremental indexing system in which they crawled 10% of the web every night which was pushed out to all datacenters nightly.   This update system was known as Fritz.

The new crawl algorithm is now known as Caffeine.   With the new update, pages crawled are immediately added to the index and will instantly appear in the SERPs.

According to Matt – the results are 50% fresher and Caffeine enables Google to scale up their index in a massive way.

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tags: Caffeine, Google