We're here at the MacTech conference, and as everyone checked in and got breakfast there was a demonstration of some clever Mac-based rover robots designed and built by a team at the University of Arizona. The brainchildren of Professor Wolfgang Fink, these robots are designed to be autonomous and use a Mac mini inside to provide a modicum of intelligence. For demonstration purposes, however, the robots were being controlled by iPod touches.
I spoke briefly with Professor Fink's colleague Mark Tarbell about the robots. He told me the Mac minis in these models still use platter-based hard drives, although he expressed the intention to someday use SSDs for reliability. Currently the Macs are protected in a
