Monthly Archive:: August 2009

"Apple today released Hard Drive Firmware Update 2.0, addressing issues with certain hard drives on the latest MacBook Pros models. Apple had been reported last week to be working on the issue, which involves intermittent 'beeping' noises and occasional brief system freezes on machines using 500 GB, 7200 rpm hard drives."

The Intel Atom platform, on which most netbooks are based, lacks the graphical grunt for things like 3D games and HD video playback, because Intel insisted on paring the Atom processor with an outdated graphical chip by Intel. Several efforts are underway to resolve this issue, and one of them, NVIDIA's Ion, might already be in trouble before it has even arrived.

"The many thousands of free games available for Linux has made it difficult to select which ones deserve a special mention. For this article, our objective is not to necessarily select games which have flawless graphics and sound, but instead to identify games which are highly addictive and have great playability. It has taken us weeks of heated discussions to whittle down the games into just 42 titles. We have tried to cover a wide range of game genres. Hopefully there will be something in this article which will be of interest to any type of gamer."

Remember the very detailed proposal Microsoft submitted to the European Commission not too long ago about the browser ballot? This was quite the detailed proposal, covering just about every possible aspect of such a ballot screen. Responses were positive from within the EC, but now it seems that according to the Mozilla Foundation, the proposal is not good enough.

"We've been doing some investigating, friends - making phone calls, demanding answers. And it was worth it. We can confirm something very few people get to confirm: British shoppers aren't going to be totally shafted over software pricing for once. Full versions of Windows 7 Home Premium are going to cost us half as much as they cost Americans."

MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk to GoodGearGuide about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of the OS and future plans for it.

Last week we talked about what Linux (well, okay, X) could learn from Windows Vista and Windows 7, focusing on the graphics stack. A short article over at TechWorld lists seven things Windows 7 should learn from the Linux world. Some of them are spot-on, a few are nonsensical, and of course, and I'm sure you have a few to add too.

As everybody had been more or less anticipating for months now, Sony has released the Playstation 3 Slim, a much smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient variant of the regular Playstation 3. There's good news for people who held out on the PS3 because it was too expensive, and there's bad news for those of us who liked the idea of running Linux on the PS3.

The MIT Technology Review, one of the world's first technology magazines still around, has named Adam Dunkels, author of the Contiki embedded open source OS, as one of this year's top 35 young innovators.

Apple maintained a 12 percent lead over Dell, one of the largest gaps between first and second place for any industry. Dell's position remained the same, while Acer's Gateway brand rose 3 percent in consumer satisfaction. Hewlett-Packard inched up 1 percent and its Compaq division jumped 6 percent.

Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers - all other Macs default to 32bit. By holding down the '6' and '4' keys during boot, you can to boot into full 64bit mode - that is, if your Mac supports it. As it turns out, some Macs with 64bit processors cannot use the 64bit kernel because the EFI is 32bit. Note: I should have included in the article that 64bit applications will run just fine (including benefits) on a 32bit kernel in Mac OS X. Since this was already possible in Leopard, I assumed people were well aware of that. Turns out some were not, so my apologies for that.

The beta for Moonlight 2.0 is now available. It's considered feature complete and is ready to test against Silverlight 2.0-minded websites. Microsoft has already gone and released Silverlight 3.0, but the Moonlight team is pretty confident that users will generally be able to access most if not all web content while Silverlight 3.0 is still young. Moonlight will ask to update itself to the beta automatically in Firefox, but new users can also download the plugin.

The F-Script project has announced the availability of F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools for dynamic introspection and scripting of Cocoa objects on Mac OS X. The package provides Mac OS X developers and power users with graphical tools for exploration and interactive manipulation of objects. It also provides programmatic tools for scripting, in the form of a Smalltalk dialect directly hosted on top of the Objective-C runtime. This new version of F-Script introduces major new features including system-wide scripting, dynamic Cocoa class creation, 64-bit support and automatic garbage collection.

The legal bickering between Apple and Psystar is almost getting uglier and grittier by the day. In a filing made last week, the Cupertino giant accused Psystar of destroying evidence, but today the clone maker has vigorously denied ever having done such a thing.