It’s been three years since we opened Deep Thought.

Three years. It sure doesn’t seem that long.

It all started on november 23, 2004, when Pilky wrote the following:

Welcome to Deep Thought, we hope you enjoy your stay. In case you don’t know who we are then here is a brief description. We are a Mac Blog site. There are five writers all with a different views on the world and on Macs. So we hope that we all give you different views on the world of Apple. Anyway, enjoy!!

We started as a Mac site, of course, but expanded beyond that soon after.

When we started Deep Thought, I don’t think any of us expected to set the world on fire. We were a tiny little outpost on the fringe of the tech blogosphere. Three years later, we’re a somewhat larger outpost, but still a spec of dust compared with some sites out there.

Running a small site like ours hasn’t been easy. It’s hard motivating others to write, especially when you can’t pay them. It’s hard establishing any sort of regular readership.  There have been some days where I wonder why I continue to write for Deep Thought.

In the time that Deep Thought has been around, many smaller sites have come and gone. The once-fairly popular Apple-X? There hasn’t been a new post in two months.

The Mac Mind was once a bustling site geared towards teenage Mac users. It went offline sometime in mid 2005 with…
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It’s been almost a month since Leopard made its debut and I’m just now writing up the conclusion to my review. What gives, you ask? I wrote it as several parts over about three weeks. I actually planned a couple more sections, but stuff happens, time marches on, and things have to be prioritized. So it goes.

Mac users waited over two and a half years for Leopard to emerge. I wrote two articles based on the WWDC previews of Leopard (one, two), and in both, my initial response was “meh.” In 2006, Apple showed off a handful of new features, but it was pretty clear that Leopard was incomplete. Some of the new features were pretty cool, like the new iChat and Time Machine, but Apple didn’t really mention a whole lot in reality. Steve Jobs promised “top secret” features would be revealed closer to Leopard’s release.

Macworld Expo came and went back in December, and Apple said nothing about Leopard.

Spring rolled around, and in place of a release, we got a delay, with the promise of a near-final beta unveiled at WWDC 2007.

WWDC 2007 rolled around and rumors abounded. There were talks of ZFS replacing HFS+, a new user interface, built-in virtualization, among others. And then there was Jobs’ mention of “top secret” new features. The rumor mill was turned up to 11 heading into Jobs’ WWDC 2007 keynote.

What we got was a retooled desktop look and a new Finder. So much for mind-blowingly awesome new…
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Some years back, President George W. Bush was quoted as saying, “Are the highways of the internet becoming more few?” Despite his seemingly nonsensical quote, George W. may have been onto something, sort of. According to a new report, commuters on the Information Superhighway could be facing serious traffic jams by 2010.

The reason? Too much data traffic, not enough capacity, and not enough added capacity to keep pace with growth. Hmm, sounds like the freeways here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One example given is YouTube, which was generating 27 petabytes worth of traffic per month as of mid 2007. To put that in perspective, 1 petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, or over 1 million gigabytes. Most desktop computers sold today have hard drives in the range of 250-500 Gigabytes, and only higher-end desktops are pushing into the terabyte range. So yeah, that’s a lot of traffic generated by a single site. Just to think, three years ago nobody even heard of YouTube.

What does this mean for you? If these predictions come to pass, without a major increase in capacity, you can expect to spend more time waiting for your Myspace profile to load. That means, of course, there is a greater chance of your boss catching you on Myspace. Now get back to work!

So enjoy your nice speedy connection while you can before it feels as sluggish as dialup, and go download some absurdly huge file!

If you want to read the whole report, you can (caution:…
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Windows Live never really was considered the best idea Microsoft has ever had. Couple a deluge of similarly named services with the fact that MSN was making money while Windows Live wasn’t, and you’ve got a great recipe for people to say, “wtf lol?” or, alternatively, “f u M$.” As the months have passed, one thing has become clear: Windows Live is a serious effort to compete with Google. Most of the web services went final earlier this year, including Hotmail, Spaces, Search, Maps, and Home. Now, a second wave of products has left beta, this time targeting Microsoft’s biggest asset: desktop software.

It’s Called Windows Live, not Windows Live. Duh!

I’ve been at somewhat of a loss to figure out just what exactly what to call the thing. Apparently, it’s called Windows Live, as though it’s a separate entity from the other Windows Live (the big one, remember? The one that was here first.) The download button at www.windowslive.com even says “Get Windows Live.” So, I’ll be calling this Windows Live. Sometimes I may say Windows Live, and in those few cases, I mean the project as a whole. Clear as mud? Excellent.

Unified Installer

Microsoft wants you to use all of the Live suite apps. They want you to use them so much that they’ve created one installer for all of them. The “unified installer” as it’s been called, is actually a downloader that goes out and gets the actual applications once you’ve picked which ones you want to…
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All righty, it’s been a while since we’ve done a hardware comparison here.

Lately it seems that all-in-one desktop computers have seen their popularity rise. Since August, Apple has released a fairly large update to the iMac, Gateway unveiled their Gateway One PC (which is way sexier than the Profile 6), and the Dell XPS One.

In this article, I will compare one configuration of the Apple iMac, Dell XPS One, and Gateway One. And if you think you’ve seen this sort of article around here before, well, you’d be right.

First thing’s first

Before I start, I want to get a couple things out of the way. First of all, I am not framing this article to make one company look better or worse, so let’s not even go down that road. These prices are for models as configured on Sunday, November 18, 2007, and are what the manufacturers list on their US online stores (Dell/Gateway Home and Home Office and Apple’s standard pricing). All prices are in US Dollars.

Secondly, yes, I know you can buy a regular tower PC for less than you can buy an all-in-one. Yes, I know you can build a PC for less. Please don’t leave a comment telling me this. In general, all-in-ones are presented as mid-range to higher-end consumer desktops.

A method to this madness

For this little experiment, I set out with some basic specs in mind:

• At least a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 320 GB…
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