Apple chief executive Steve Jobs stayed home last night to catch up on some much needed rest while his attorney made another go at convincing a local review board that he should be free to demolish a historic but abandoned mansion — seen in these rare photos — that has fallen into a state of disrepair.

Jobs has been petitioning for the right to raze the 14-room, 17,250-square-foot structure in California’s Woodside woods for eight years so that he can erect a smaller, contemporary style home for his family.

The Jackling House, so it’s called, was built back in 1925 for copper mining mogul Daniel Jackling. Preservationists have opposed Jobs’ efforts, arguing that it represents one of the few remaining examples of a Spanish Colonial Revival style home and is therefore too historic to destroy. They also allege that Jobs, who reportedly lived in the house sometime between the 80′s and 90′s, intentionally let the house fall apart so that it would be easier to justify a case for tearing it down.

“I don’t think he would be strong enough if we were here until 1 a.m., and I think there’s a strong possibility of that,” Jobs’ attorney Howard Ellman told the Woodside Town Council on Tuesday, referring to the health issues that have forced the Apple co-founder into a temporary leave from his leadership role at the company through June.

Indeed, reports the Palo Alto Daily News, the review board was still hearing arguments at 10:30 in the evening from both preservationists like the Uphold Our Heritage organization, that has once overturned Jobs’ permit to demolish the structure, as well as locals who side with his property rights.

As part of his latest effort to persuade the council on Jobs’ behalf, Ellman presented a detailed cost analysis showing that it would take $13.3 million to restore the mansion, or more than $5 million more than it would cost Jobs to simply get rid of it and build a new one. An appeals board had previously suggested such a sum would be sufficient grounds for Jobs to move forward.

Still, preservationists and former residents maintained Tuesday that all resources to preserve the house haven’t been exhausted. They’re now proposing that Woodside commission an independent firm to draw up the costs of carefully dismantling the dilapidated structure so it can be relocated and then resurrected. A decision on the matter is expected at a later meeting.

A couple of years ago, photographer Jonathan Haeber stumbled upon the Jackling house to find its property gate ajar and the doors and broken windows to the house wide open. Below are a series of rare, and at times spooky, photos of the moldering mansion, which has now been abandoned for over a decade.

Owners of Apple’s Mac Pro workstations will have a second, high-end home video card option within weeks, as NVIDIA is planning to release a version of its GeForce GTX 285 chipset specifically for Macs.

The GPU maker told AppleInsider on Wednesday that the new card, simply labeled the GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition, would ship in June.

Little information about the card was directly mentioned, though certain details are evident through an image accompanying the teaser: the GTX 285 will be made by third-party firm EVGA, a company already well-established in making NVIDIA-based cards for Windows PCs. Like the Quadro FX 4800, though, it will forgo Apple’s preferred Mini DisplayPort in favor of two dual-link DVI video ports. Both 2008 and 2009 Mac Pros will be supported.

The company does say that, unlike some cards converted for the Mac, the GTX 285 will have the same performance as its Windows counterpart. In its existing form, it’s NVIDIA’s fastest single-processor graphics chipset and has a whopping 240 visual effects cores that let it process more tasks at once. By comparison, the GeForce GT 120 that comes standard with the Mac Pro has just 32 cores, and even the $1,800 Quadro FX 4800 has just 192. It also has 1GB of video memory and supports all of NVIDIA’s general-purpose processing features, including CUDA and (eventually) OpenCL.

Why the company is releasing the card at this stage isn’t completely evident: the ATI Radeon HD 4870 already fills the role of the high-end yet mainstream video choice for the Mac Pro and would have the GTX 285 Mac Edition fight for a subset of an already small market. Various tests of the Windows version on the web show the newer card outperforming the 4870 by a significant margin in most tests, however, hinting that NVIDIA may simply be trying to snatch the Mac graphics performance crown from its rival.

And whatever the reasoning, the addition will have its own impact on the Mac graphics market. While the Quadro itself is noteworthy for being one of the first NVIDIA cards of any kind to bear a third party’s brand, EVGA’s involvement for the GTX 285 signals the first GeForce card to share the same distinction. It also gives owners of Apple’s Xeon-based workstation their second new graphics option in as many weeks as well as an elevated level of graphics technology — an important factor with the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard expected to reward GPUs with fast OpenCL performance

The report published Thursday recaps the Cupertino-based company’s acquisition of the 150-person P.A. Semi chip design firm and the subsequent hires of two key (1, 2) chip architects from ATI/AMD, including former chief technology officer of AMD’s graphics products group Raja Koduri, who the financial paper says started work at the iPhone maker this week.

It adds, however, that the company’s efforts to amass its own team of chip designers may be even more extensive than once thought. In particular, the report points out that there are more than 100 people listing current Apple job titles on their LinkedIn professional networking profiles with past expertise in chips, including veterans of Intel, Samsung and Qualcomm,

The Journal even rifled through Apple job postings on a variety of employment websites and turned up dozens of interesting calls for chip engineers, including two listings for people versed in handwriting recognition technology, others for designers with expertise in chips for managing displays, and one for a position that involves “testing the functional correctness of Apple developed silicon.”

Citing people familiar with the matter, the paper went on to note that Apple even participated in a job fair this month “for soon-to-be-unemployed engineers at memory chip company Spansion,” which filed for bankruptcy last month. Similar efforts were reportedly in motion even before the company’s acquisition of P.A. Semi in April of 2008, which has largely been seen as its most significant move towards internally developed silicon to date.

As has been noted repeatedly by AppleInsider, and confirmed by comments from Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, this emerging family of chip designers spearheaded by the P.A. Semi crew is being tasked with crafting a future generation of chips for Apple’s multi-touch devices that will deliver advanced gaming graphics and specialized features while simultaneously improving battery consumption and allowing the company to maintain more secrecy around its intellectual property.

“People familiar with the situation say Mr. Jobs told P.A. Semi engineers last April that he wanted to develop chips internally and didn’t want knowledge about the technology to leave Apple,” the Journal said. It adds that company executives have long shared their concerns that information shared with outside vendors regarding current iPhone chip designs — which include tweaked versions of broadly available Samsung processors — may have have found their way into chips sold to rivals.

Still, Apple’s is said to be facing its share challenges in developing its first batch of custom chip designs, with “people familiar with Apple’s plans” suggesting the specialized processors may not turn up in shipping products “until next year at the earliest.” If true, this would raise new questions about the components making their way into the third-generation iPhone due this summer, which is expected to sport a noticeably different architecture from the first two generations of the touch-screen handset.

A composite laminate having an improved cosmetic surface is presented herein. The composite laminate includes a plurality of sheets of preimpregnated material, or prepreg, stacked one over another and a scrim layer provided on an exterior surface of the sheets of prepreg. The scrim layer and the sheets of prepreg form a composite laminate whereby the scrim layer constitutes an outer, exposed surface of the composite laminate. Each sheet of prepreg is made from fibers preimpregnated with resin, and the fibers of the prepreg may be substantially parallel or woven carbon fibers. The scrim layer may be a glass fiber or carbon fiber scrim, or veil, that has absorbed resin from the sheets of prepreg during a molding process. In another embodiment, the composite laminate includes a plurality of sheets of prepreg stacked one over another and first and second scrim layers provided on opposing exterior surfaces of the sheets of prepreg, whereby the sheets of prepreg are sandwiched between the first and second scrim layers. The first and second scrim layers constitute exposed surfaces of the composite laminate.

Since scrim absorbs resin of the composite, scrim takes on the cosmetic properties and color of resin. Also [...] scrim is very thin, and it is translucent, and the underlying fibers of composite are partially visible therethrough [...] The combination of resin and scrim forming scrim layer imparts a depth to surface of composite laminate, thereby providing an improved cosmetic surface of a molded article formed therefrom that is not only consistent in appearance, but is also aesthetically pleasing.

And other yadda yadda yadda and blah blah blah. Summary: They have discovered a new way to shave pounds of your future notebook that won’t look like crap. Sounds good to me. [Apple Insider]

It’s been pretty good. Here’s a quick rundown of some of my experiences.

• Expose and Spaces are great for someone who usually has over a dozen windows and programs open at once. Having Photoshop isolated to its own space to reduce clutter is great, and being able to swipe down and see everything at once is also really nice. One issue I’ve run into, however, is that spaces makes dragging and dropping across programs harder. Sure, you can drag down to the icon, but if I want to drag album artwork from Firefox into the proper section of iTunes rather than importing the image, I can’t do it across spaces. Not a huge deal, however.

• I really like the multitouch trackpad…most of the time. It’s great for using expose and for right-clicking with two fingers, but it also often misfires, especially in programs like Photoshop. Photoshop thinks I want to rotate the image every damned time I put more than one finger on the trackpad. This gets very annoying.

• Some functions and options are just buried way too deep. For example, whenever I plug my iPhone in, iPhoto opens. I in no way want this to happen. In order to turn this off, I had to Google it and get instructions from a message board. It involved fiddling with the Image Capture app, which is not really that intuitive. How would a non-expert figure this out?

• One of my favorite programs is Connect 360, which serves media to my Xbox 360 from my MBP. It’s actually amazingly ironic that this works so much better on a Mac, seeing that Microsoft makes the Xbox 360. But I tried multiple times to do this on my PC, and it always involved downloading new versions of Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player, getting codes from my Xbox and putting them into my computer and multiple restarts. Even then, it never worked. For $20 I bought Connect 360 and it was working in 3 minutes. Microsoft, what the hell are you doing that this is the case?

• Growl is a nice little notification service that lets programs deliver pop-up messages in a way that’s unified across the system. It’s great for stuff like the Gmail notifier, but a lot of apps abuse this thing. No, Last.fm, I don’t want a pop-up notification every time a new song starts. Annoyingly enough, you can’t control these notifications inside the preferences of the apps that use it. Instead, you need to go to System Preferences and go to Growl’s pane. Not a huge annoyance, but I had to search around through all of Last.fm’s menus before trying a different approach. Not too intuitive.

• Every single Mac app costs money. Where’s the freeware on Macs? On the PC, I used Texter to create macros for things I type a lot, which is free. On the Mac, there’s TextExpander, and it’s $30. There are loads of free FTP clients for the PC. On Mac, you use Transmit, and it’s $30. Tweetie is a nice enough Twitter client, but it sure isn’t $15 worth of nice. TextMate is a great, robust text editor, but no text editor is worth $54.

Paying $30 for one app that provides a great value is fine, but paying $30 each for 10 basic apps that aren’t all that important on their own adds up pretty fast.

Overall, the learning curve on the switch was really gentle. I feel like I’ve figured out most of the important stuff, and I’ve been enjoying my experience for the most part. But the fact remains that this was a damned expensive computer. MacBook Pros start at a solid $2,000. Is it worth it in this recession?

I’d say that if you are happy with your PC and don’t have any serious issues, no. There’s no real reason to justify the switch and the difference in price. But if you’re sick of your PC, are curious or just feel likeswitching things up, I haven’t run across any dealbreakers that would make a former Windows user run for the hills. It’s a slick machine that’s very stable and has lots of nice perks, but switching isn’t going to change anybody’s life all that much.

It’s especially interesting when you take into consideration Apple’s other recent major hire, ATI’s former graphics CTO, the guy who designed the GameCube’s graphics card.

For the love of all that is holy and Jobsian, however, it doesn’t mean they’re going to make a MacBoxStationCube 1080—the iPhone (and maybe that tablet/pad thing) is Apple’s gaming platform. 15 of thetop 20 paid apps of all time are games. There are over 9,000 games in the App Store. And there are 37 million iPod touches and iPhone out there—still below the PSP’s 50 million and the DS’s 100 million, but consider these are consoles that have been out at least twice as long as the iPhone platform.

It’s not just the numbers, either. The argument that the production value of games doesn’t match those on on the PSP or DS, is slowly becoming more irrelevant—not simply because extremely short-form gaming, which the iPhone handily beats the PSP and DS at, is becoming more interesting, but because the iPhone is picking up fare like Metal Gear Solid Touch, even if hardcore gamers can’t replace their dedicated portable consolesyet. (Bad sign though: I’m a huge gamer, but haven’t touched my DS Lite in months. I do play an iPhone game at least a couple minutes every day I’m on the move.)

Apple’s got a very real gaming platform, they’ve got their own chips in place, and now they have a legit gaming strategist. If Nintendo and Sony weren’t concerned at all previously, I imagine at least a bead or two of sweat is dripping down their forehead now, even if direct, bloody conflict between their consoles and the iPhone is still a generation or two away. [MCV via 9to5Mac]

Maybe, maybe not. Although the old version didn’t have DVD either (the new version does), there was no Blu-ray functionality at all in iTunes before. And, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to have iTunes be the Blu-ray playback, so we’re not sure what’s going on. [9to5Mac]