Category: General Tech

As Windows 7 moves closer to release, Microsoft seems ready for people to forget about Vista - and rightfully so. In an effort to swing the spotlight to Windows 7, Microsoft employees have been spending some time with the press. Here’s a bit from John Curran, Microsoft UK’s director, Windows Client Group, talking to the BBC:

We were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music. It’s indicative of really the level and detail and scrutiny on Windows 7.

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The Wall Street Journal:

The Silicon Valley trend-setter has been hiring people from many different segments of the semiconductor industry, including engineers to create multifunction chips that are used in cellphones to run software and carry out other chores.

Apple could use the internally developed chips to sharply reduce the power consumption of its hit iPhone and iPod touch devices, and possibly add graphics circuitry to help its hardware play realistic game software and high-definition videos, people familiar with its plans say.

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PC World has taken a look back over the last 20 years of AOL:

As the 1990s progressed, the company lived up to the promise of its new moniker, doing more than any other to introduce the country to the online world. As the Internet took off, it served as the most important on-ramp to what was often called the Information Highway. And although today’s AOL is no longer the country’s dominant ISP, its services and sites add up to the fourth most popular property on the Web, from instant-messaging kingpin AIM to muckraker TMZ.com to video engine Truveo.

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The Closet Entrepreneur:

Whether you’re embracing your decluttering OCD, or simply looking for a way to prevent electrical shock hazards under your desk, the setups shown in this post provide several useful examples for tackling the mess that lies under your desk.

Hit the link for some crazy photos. The one with the Mac Pro and Mac minis strapped under the desk is a stunning work of engineering.

[via @zacattac.]

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Urban Dictionary:

1. A joke used to refer to persons claiming to be experts in the field of social media. The punch-line being that those with enough expertise in the field know it’s an impossible field to be an expert of.

2. A self proclaimed title by carpetbaggers and snakeoil salesman to mesmerize unsuspecting people with their recipes of easy “1,2,3” success in Social Media.

And some examples:

1. That guy with hardly any social media experience will call himself an expert.

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Wired’s Brian Chen:

Given all these issues, I became pretty jaded about my netbook — hence my lack of mentioning it here at Wired.com in recent months. I ended up selling my MacBook Pro and buying the latest unibody model refurbished, and now I rarely use my netbook. So unfortunately, I have to agree with Dave “MacSparky” Sparks and The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Steven Sande, who both grew frustrated with their Dell Mini 9 Hackintoshes. It’s a fun hacking project, but it’s like the fixed-gear bicycle you built but left sitting in the garage, because over time you realized it was too impractical.

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As someone who has put OS X on two netbooks - a HP Mini 1000 and a Dell Mini 9, I feel pretty comfortable with the ramifications (and frustrations) of taking Apple’s software (and EULA) into my own hands.

As I discussed in the posts those links point to, the HP Mini 1000 is just about the perfect netbook, but Dell Mini 9 is just about the perfect netbook for OS X. That said, both units (and the other dozens and dozens of netbooks on the market) all suffer the same issues: cramped keyboards, little screens, and oddball hardware. Of course, those issues define machines as netbooks, so I’ll keep from calling these characteristics problems.

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Since the introduction of the Apple TV, users have wondered if the extra price of a Mac mini would be justified when used as a media server. Macworld:

Easy-to-use as the Apple TV may be, it’s designed almost entirely as an adjunct to iTunes and the iTunes Store—bringing the contents of each to your television.

And that’s fine, but it’s also limiting. Unless you hack your Apple TV to allow Boxee and XBMC to run on it, you get only the content Apple wants you to have—no Netflix, no Hulu, no Comedy Central, no PBS, no Pandora, no Radio Time… you get the idea. In a time when people are increasingly interested in streaming Web-based media, the Apple TV is deaf to this desire. And, in a way, that reflects Apple’s approach to the iTunes Store: “People want to own their media.”

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I recently re-setup my iPhone, but my Gmail account was acting wonky. It wasn’t syncing Drafts, Sent, and Trashed messages correctly with my Macs. This article set me straight.

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Apple has reported their second quarter results:

The Company posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion, or $1.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion, or $1.16 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.4 percent, up from 32.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

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Relevant Magazine:

In the 1970’s, every self-respecting music fan had a basement or bedroom that contained big, big speakers and crates of vinyl.  In the 1980’s, the CD player became popular, and the shiny plastic discs were still mostly played through larger home stereo units.  In 2009, a large amount of music listening is done through little white earbuds, or a single laptop speaker.

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Riva Richmond, in the New York Times’ “Gadgetwise Blog:”

But just how relaxed (or smug) should Mac users be? It’s true that very few viruses have been written for Macs — and none are spreading actively right now. Similarly, hacker programs distributed by malicious Web sites typically run only on PCs.

Yet Macs’ relative safety is primarily due to their still-slim market share. They’re simply a waste of time for today’s attackers, who are trying to accomplish crime on a large scale by infiltrating millions of computers. And there’s nothing inherently more secure about a Mac. Researchers found 26 vulnerabilities in OS X in 2008, about the same as in Windows Vista (27), according to the security software maker Symantec. If its market share rises enough, the Mac will become a target and attacks will succeed.

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