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Mac OS X 10.5.2 released, Mac users everywhere rejoice

By Nick, February 11, 2008

You read that right. The mythical 10.5.2 update is now available via Software Update. The update weighs in at a hefty 180 MB, though some in MacRumors Forumsnote that it came in at a morbidly obese 341 MB for their particular Mac.

Updates about left and right, from the option to turn off menubar transparency to the option to turn off stacks. Mac OS X 10.5.2’s lot in life seems to be to squash massive amounts of bugs and fix Leopard “enhancements” that have been widely panned.

What’s that? You want full release notes? Here they are!

Download. Install. Visit DT and tell all.

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Becoming Obsolete

By Jay, February 9, 2008

Obsolete. A word that has one meaning in the technology world: useless. Lately this is how I have been feeling about my life and my computer, video camera, digital camera, iPod, cell phone, and basically everything else I own that has a circuit board in it. My gaming rig that I built last year never actually began to serve its constucted purpose. It bever took me to any Counter-Strike tournaments. It was never used to host a game of CS either, nor was it used to even connect to the internet. No, my aspirations for that computer completely fell apart within hours of building it. My tyrannous parents informed me that it would never see any kind of internet connection, meaning no games. My life carried on, but much more low-spirited. The fact that my dreams for that computer were now dashed meant that the non-returnable parts had cost me about $800 USD--more than enough to buy a Mac mini. As I said, I trudged on, despite having missed my first chance to buy a Mac.

The frustration of becoming obsolete continued when an incident with a hardware review caused an uproar, a personal attack on me. I won’t go…
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BusinesssWeek to Ballmer: Learn a trick from Jobs

By Nick, February 8, 2008

Today BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl published a lengthy open letter to Steve Ballmer, urging him to borrow a trick from Steve Jobs’ playbook and guide Microsoft down a more focused path (i.e. software and software only).

Quoth Hesseldahl:

So who has focus? That other Steve. You know, the turtle-necked guy in California who keeps annoying you by selling iPods and computers that typically don’t run on Windows. You could learn a lot from him. Focus saved his company from oblivion.

Hesseldahl also highlights a litany of tech mega-mergers (Lucent-Ascend, AOL-Time Warner, Compaq-Digital, etc...) to highlight how such large undertakings often lead to failure.

It’s a very good read, and I agree completely. Microsoft is a jack of all trades, and outside of their software business (and some success with gaming), they haven’t shown mastery in any of the markets they’ve jumped into. Web services? They’re a distant third. Digital media players? They’re a distant second. Microsoft has become a reactive company, trying to jump onto the latest tech trend or product segment without much success. I agree that Microsoft needs to re-focus on their strengths, and when they expand into new markets, they need to be proactive, not merely reactive. They need to innovate instead of merely developing a product to simply respond to Apple or Google or whoever their competition may be. The Yahoo merger would do nothing to improve Microsoft in this regard.

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PC World: Vista SP 1 performance ‘mixed’

By Nick, February 7, 2008

PC World posted a short advance review of Windows Vista Service Pack 1’s performance on their web site today. Their verdict? Service Pack 1 improves Vista’s performance in some areas such as copying files, but is slightly slower in others. In her tests, article author Melissa Perenson notes a 9% performance improvement in her file copy test (copying 1.9 GB from a flash drive to the PC’s hard drive). Startup and shut down times are mostly unchanged in SP 1, but had very slight improvements (hin her tests, Perenson noted a slight 3-second improvement in startup times and a 1-second improvement in shut down time). Meanwhile, archiving five 500 MB files in a ZIP archive took slightly longer under SP 1.

Perenson notes that “based on my informal tests conducted in the first hours of having Vista Service Pack 1 in hand, it’s hard to draw any hard and fast conclusions.” Needless to say, more tests are on the way.

Windows Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing on Monday, and will be available for download in March. Okay, let’s stop right there for just a second. Why is it, that despite Vista’s relatively poor reputation, Microsoft decided in their infinite…
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I’ll Take The Fast One, Not the Fastest One

By Mac Fan, February 6, 2008

It costs $1,600 to go from the Fast Mac Pro to the Fastest one, for a 10% speed increase.

I’ve been a Mac user since around 1987. The first Mac I purchased was a Mac SE/30 followed by a IIci.

I create graphics and animation for corporate clients, which involves a lot of rendering of video/3D and encoding. This all takes a lot of time. So for many years now, I have been upgrading my own personal workstation about every three years and I would normally just get the fastest Mac workstation available at the time. I think this year, I will pick the slower one.

For years, Apple would offer three main configurations of their professional Mac for people to purchase. They would typically be Fast, Faster, Fastest based on the speed of the CPU included in each configuration. They have also been known to offer a single processor version at various times, creating a forth and slowest version.

Recently, Apple has announced updates to their Mac Pro line. These include:

Slower	Fast	Faster	Fastest
One 2.8 Ghz quad core Intel processor	Two 2.8 Ghz quad core Intel processors	Two 3 Ghz quad core Intel processors	Two 3.2 Ghz quad core Intel processors
$2,299	$2,799	$3,599	$4,399

So if I were to repeat my purchasing behavior from the last ten or so years, I would just go and order…
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