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Macs in space?

updated 09:49 pm EST, Thu January 4, 2001


A Business Week article profiles Dennis Wingo, owner of SkyCorp, who plans to build a 544-satellite constellation to provide earthbound Web hosting and e-mail using customized 500 MHz Power Mac G4 Cubes. The constellation would be powered entirely by standard Macintosh computers floating in space. "Microsoft's Windows machines are too crash-prone, says Wingo. That's a bad thing in a satellite, no doubt." The company is looking for 50 beta testers in the U.S. to test the system between November 1 and November 30, 2001.


by MacNN Staff

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  1. 0

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    01/05, 01:56am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Why Cubes?

    Why would you bother with cubes? The I/O is too slow when taking a battering, plus the loss of a fan will also create heat issues. I can only think that they are using very customised Cubes, without IDE drives. Other than that it wuld be great for Apple's image if all this went to plan.

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    01/05, 02:49am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Think Security

    Under MacOS 9 with WebStar, these Macs will be much more secure than PC-like computers that decended from "timesharing" lineage. After all, we don't want computers floating around the planet under the control of script kiddies do we? (See also http://odbcrouter.com/webservices.shtml)

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    01/05, 10:52am | report spam | Reply | delete

    RE: Why cubes?

    In case you missed it, the cubes are going to be in space. There will be no heat issues except for being too cold if anything.

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    01/05, 02:11pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Thermodynamics guru

    Hey, nimrod, the cube's cooling works using air convection going through the case. Something that requires (a) gravity and (b) air.
    And when it comes to crashing often... Have you ever USED Webstar? It's a piece of *c****, and crashes all the time. I mean, windoze sucks, but Webstar is no alternative.
    This Dennis Wingo (hahaha... is that his real name?) is either on crack or a full-blown nutcase.

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    01/05, 03:35pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    cooling

    Contrary to popular belief, the biggest problem in space is not freezing, but overheating - there's no atmosphere to conduct heat away. As noted, this does away with the cube's cooling tricks. But I don't think the cube motherboards would actually be in cube shrouds any more anyway - what they probably want is just a low power, low heat dissipation, computationally effective realtime (singletasking) platform. There's a lot of merit to elements of this guy's plan, and the technical hurdles don't seem insurmountable. Good luck to him.

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    01/05, 08:05pm | report spam | Reply | delete

    Thermodynamics guru

    Hey, nimrod, the cube's cooling works using air convection going through the case. Something that requires (a) gravity and (b) air.
    And when it comes to crashing often... Have you ever USED Webstar? It's a piece of *c****, and crashes all the time. I mean, windoze sucks, but Webstar is no alternative.
    This Dennis Wingo (hahaha... is that his real name?) is either on crack or a full-blown nutcase.

  1. 0

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    05/09, 12:58am | report spam | Reply | delete

    in case you haven't.....

    ....noticed, in the article they said "running mac os x server" and the airport and power macs would be "modified"


    nuff said

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