"Maybe this is a personal thing, but I think that the excellence and creativity that characterizes Apple's products inspires the people who use them to try to create something equally great in their own work," Gyatt told Apple. "I've always felt that when I use Macs." Amen, brother. Gyatt is one of the engineers programming the Helios unmanned plane project, which ran on Macs. Don't get me wrong, I like PCs, Unix boxen, and Macs all for their own unique reasons. But when I spend the morning trying to talk an old win98 pentium into accepting a 40gig drive (for a networked MP3 library doncha know) with limited luck and then, on a whim, plug it into an old G3 Mac and it comes up and is accepting MP3's within five minutes (what, no BIOS fiddling??) you can guess which machine is my favorite for the day.

Back to unmanned airplanes and such. There's other projects, mostly NASA funded, for using them to do all kinds of strange and unusual missions, including monitoring coffee fields for ripeness and wine fields for crop rot. I wonder if this is a really a military codeword? Like bat research is a front for improved radar (or anti-radar) technology. NASA has been doing some other extra-curricular activities, my favorite is building 3 centimeter location accuracy into John Deere tractors.

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