Round Robin - Holiday Feast

MacBUS
The Macintosh Business Users Society of Greater Philadelphia
Tuesday, November 27th Meeting:
Try to attend and bring a friend.

MacBUS @ University of Arts

Round Robin - Holiday Feast

Our Nov/Dec meeting will feature a round-robin of introductions of members present. Every other year or so, we ask members to introduce themselves, and to explain what they do for a living. Be sure to bring extra business cards to hand out!

We'll also ask what's the one thing on your Mac you can not live without - that is, what is your most important application or most often-visited website?

If time allows, we'll do a round of favorite holiday gift ideas - so bring information about your favorite gadget, gizmo or software to share with the group.

This is also our holiday 'feast' meeting, and we'll have our usual Q&As, so bring your questions and bring a friend or coworker who you think could benefit from our meeting!!

We will have a drawing for a $100 Apple Store gift certificate for members only. Tickets are $1.00 each or 6 for $5.00. Get them at any of our meetings.

This Month's Meeting: Tuesday, November 27th, 7PM Hunt Room
(turn right when you come in through the front entrance instead of going straight), Dorrance Hamilton Hall, University of the Arts, 320 South Broad Street, Philadelphia.

WD Caviar GreenPower

New 500GB drive promises to save power

By Peter Cohen

Western Digital (WD) on Monday announced that it’s shipping in volume its WD Caviar GreenPower (or GP) 500GB hard disk drive mechanism. The drive costs $149.99.

The WD Caviar GP is a 3.5-inch hard disk drive bound for external enclosures or internal chassis inside computers that use Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The “GreenPower” moniker indicates that this unit is especially designed to be power-efficient. WD claims the drive is the industry’s coolest and quietest running eco-friendly 500GB drive.

The GP 500GB model uses the same technology as its 1GB counterpart. It yields and average drive power savings of four to five watts over other drives in its class; WD claims that results in an annual CO2 emission reduction of up to 13.8 kilograms per drive per year, or the equivalent of taking a car off the road for about three days per year.

The drive utilizes special technology that reduces power load during startup, and optimizes spin speed, transfer rate and caching algorithms. It will automatically unload its recording heads during idle periods, for example, which reduces aerodynamic drag. It also reduces less noise and lower vibration rates accordingly.

The drive sports a 16MB data buffer and an average read seek time of 8.9 milliseconds (ms). Transfer rate is 3 Gb/s for the buffer-to-host (SATA) speed, and 1,160 Mb/s for the buffer-to-disk transfer rate.

Read - Watch - Do sequence for learning

Adobe Photoshop CS One-on-One (CD-ROM included)
By McClelland, Deke
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978-0-596-52975-8 490 pages, $49.95 US, $64.99 CA,
Company/Producer’s name: Deke Press/O’Reilley
Phone #: 800-998-9938 Online address: www.oreilly.com

Deke created this book for both amateur and professional graphic artists, designers, and photographers. It is another in a series of books that provide step-by-step lessons accompanied by beautiful full colored lessons combined with video lessons and data files. The author’s approach is a “hands on –step-by-step process" that allows the reader to proceed at their own pace and establish their own sequence of lessons to personalize the instruction.
The book’s content is divided into 12 lessons that include several (up to 3-7) step-by-step exercises to explain the techniques. Explanations, data files, and video lessons support these real world project based exercises.
The book is highly visual, colorful, informative, easy on the eye providing nicely laid out pages on heavy clay based paper, and a comprehensive index to support the text.

Lastly, the wonders of the digital age have provided us with the possibilities of a virtual classroom in which anyone can invite an expert in the field to tutor them one-on-one. I would like to say that Deke McClelland has created a comprehensive training experience into which you can submerge yourself for hours at a time. In process of reading this book you'll get a good dose of graphics theory, best practices, and tips for avoiding Photoshop disasters. L. McNeil
Complete review @ www.macbus.org/reviews

Apple Updates MacBooks to Santa Rosa, GMA X3100; 2.6GHz MacBook Pro

posted by MacRumors.com
Thursday November 01, 2007 05:08 AM ESTAs rumored, Apple has quietly updated the MacBook tonight to the Santa Rosa architecture with mild speed bumps and the GMA X3100 integrated video
White 13.3"
$1099.00 2.0GHz/1GB RAM/80GB/Combo/GMA X3100
$1299.00 2.2GHz/1GB RAM/120GB/SD-DL/GMA X3100
Black 13.3"
$1499.00 2.2GHz/1GB RAM/160GB/SD-DL/GMA X3100

Despite comparable clock speeds (2.0 -> 2.0GHz, 2.16 -> 2.2GHz) to the old models, the new MacBooks use the Santa Rosa chipset which boasts a faster 800MHz front side bus over the previous MacBook models. The introduction of the GMA X3100 video card also provides significant benefits over the previous models. The new specs can be seen at the Apple Store: