Some posts ago, I mentioned a white paper on FW800; now James Wiebe has written an update:

f you are making storage decisions based on rollouts of FireWire 800 technology, your purchasing priorities are sadly out of order. Apple was the only champion of FireWire 800; a task it seemed to take reluctantly. Now, Apple is making marketplace moves that are absolving itself of FireWire 800.

Worth a read.

In other news, there’s no news on progress to make the new Intel iMacs boot anything else. There’s even a reward posted; I’ll be very surprised if someone collects it anytime soon (or even, at all). As the Apple/Intel FAQ notes, some people have suceeded in rendering their iMac unbootable by trying to change the EFI parameters. As that page also notes, it appears – despite some reports to the contrary – that the Core Duos Apple is using do report the VMX flag, which stands for Intel’s virtualization technology.

There’s a somewhat alarmist article out, regarding the Core Duo’s current 34 erratas, only one of which is slated to be fixed in subsequent production runs. Of course the number of such erratas is proportional to a chip’s complexity; both PowerPCs and older Intel chips have comparable numbers. I’ve looked over the list and couldn’t find anything immediately alarming, as nearly all of them have a software workaround and/or are not revelant to user code. Also, some of these seem to be inherited (and never fixed) issues from older Intel designs, meaning they’re considered harmless. All in all, you shouldn’t worry about this.