A shorter list would be “What a Macintosh cannot do?”.
Driving a SUV will be another one off that list.
The “Team Banzai” will be competing in this year’s “2005 DARPA Grand Challenge” (“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”) on October 8, 2005 among 39 other teams for the USD2 Million grand prize.
The team’s vehicle is a Volkswagen Touareg named “Dora” outfitted with 3 Mac Mini’s, which control the full functions of the vehicle, including navigations, decision control and motor control systems.
Note that the “brains of Dora” are just three 1.25GHz G4 Mac Mini, Apple’s most economical desktop computer. Compare that to the Stanford University entry with the same model vehicle that is controlled by seven Pentium M computers. Given that the two teams are using the same model vehicle in the same challenge, it further shows the power of Macintosh computers (with its Mac OS X) over Intel based computers.
I wish the best of luck to Team Banzai in October.