The Dorky and Skewed World of Me
From MacOSXHints.com…
“You can force OS X to use LCD font smoothing on all displays with this Terminal command:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
The number 2 here corresponds to Medium – Best for Flat Panel. You may also use 1 for light smoothing, and 3 for strong smoothing, as per the original OS X font smoothing options.”
Really?
They’ve even stated that they plan to open many of them near existing Apple Stores. You might ask yourself, what would a Microsoft Store sell? Apple actually makes computers AND the OS. What will we find inside a Microsoft Store? I think Penny Arcade hit the nail on the head…
Seriously though, my guess is that you’ll find a buttload of XBox games, XBox controllers, Microsoft peripherals, PC Games, and Microsoft software. Does that really warrant a store though? Especially since you can get all that at just about any electronics store?
The new 3GS has faster internal hardware, a 3MP camera with auto focus, a built in compass, voice control, and video recording.
Full Keynote summary, HERE
How in the world did I end up with Steve Perry?
I hopped on my road to geekdom in the 80’s when my family purchased a Commodore 64. In Elementary School I attended BASIC programming classes using Apple IIEs. In the 90’s I got my first PC, a 386SX running MSDOS 5 and Windows 3.1. For many years, I was a “Windows guy.” I bought more computers, built some of my own, and always upgraded to the newest Microsoft operating system. From Windows 3.1 I upgraded to Windows for Workgroups. From there I upgraded to Windows NT 4.0. Then came Windows 95, and Windows 98. My Windows journey finally stopped at Windows 2000. (I hopped on the LINUX train, but that’s a different story.)
Thinking back to all these Windows upgrades one thing stood out. Whenever a new Windows OS was released, I had to upgrade my hardware. Yes, hardware upgrades are necessary to take advantage of new OS features, but for the most part, the upgrades were needed because the OS itself became more bloated, and therefore needed more powerful hardware to run it. I never remember performing a Windows upgrade because the newer version used less RAM, or had been tweaked to run better on less powerful processors. It was always the opposite. The reason being is that Windows helps PC sales, and PC sales helps Windows.
Why do I bring this up? Because unlike Windows, Mac OS X actually gets tuned in each release in an attempt to shrink its footprint and allow Mac users with older hardware to utilize the newest OS version. The next version of Mac OS, code-named “Snow Leopard” :
dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos
AND
takes full advantage [of multi-core processing] by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors
Have you ever seen a Windows ad claiming that the newest version will take up less space and perform better on your current hardware? I haven’t. This is just one more reason why Mac OS X is > Windows.
Nintendo just released System Update 4.0 for the Wii, which adds a new channel called the “SD Card Channel.” With this update, you can now run games directly off your SD card instead of having to reinstall the game from the card, to the Wii. The update also adds support for SDHC cards, increasing the allowed SD storage size from 2GB to 32GB.
I’m really glad that Nintendo has done this. Filling up the Wii’s measly 512MB of internal storage doesn’t take long, and moving games on and off a SD card was time consuming and annoying. Smart move Nintendo!
