Why Apple’s switch to Intel is a good thing

With the announcement that Apple is switching to Intel, the computing world has been thrown a curve ball. Speculation will run rampant for the next year. We obviously won't know what's going to happen until it happens, but I see a bright future coming out of this. I see Apple with more headroom for the future to create better, faster designs. I see much more opportunity for the hacker community to work with this also.

Open letter to Apple about its marriage with Intel

Dear Apple, I am among the many switchers you successfully brought to your platform. And now I plan to switch back. Simply put, after reading this press release, I no more think the Mac has any future as an interesting hardware or software platform. I further believe that you have made such a bafflingly shortsighted decision that I worry about the sanity of your management staff, enough to dread more of these moves. I also disbelieve most of the claims that have been made today as purely hilarious.

Microsoft’s road map for Longhorn tools

Microsoft later this year will look to populate the market for Windows Longhorn applications with development tools and the company's own server applications, including long-awaited updates to the Visual Studio programming tool and SQL Server. Also, although Microsoft is still working on the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn and due to ship in 2007, the company already has a team working on Longhorn Release 2 and is looking at the potential feature set for Blackcomb, the version that follows Longhorn.

New Mac OS X 10.4.2 build, Intel Mac benchmarks

Apple seeded a new build of Mac OS X 10.4.2 to developers. Build 8C27 addresses a few bugs from build 8C26 and features an "improved widget download experience." Individuals have submitted Xbench benchmark results from Apple's Pentium 4-based Power Mac systems. The benchmarks do not reflect native performance of the 3.6GHz systems, however, but rather provide an indication of how PowerPC-compiled applications will run under Rosetta on Intel-based systems.

SciTech SNAP Graphics 3.0 Offers Video Acceleration

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that it has released SciTech SNAP Graphics 3.0 for Linux. It offers support for XFree86 and X.org. SciTech SNAP Graphics delivers advanced 2D acceleration for business users, Plug-N-Play support for hundreds of graphics cards and now provides advanced XVideo acceleration for ATI’s desktop and mobile graphics processor, making enterprise wide deployment and management easier and more powerful than ever.

OpenSolaris live next week

According to this CNET report next week is the launch date for OpenSolaris. "After having dipped a Solaris toe into the open-source waters last January, Sun Microsystems will take the full plunge next week. The company's OpenSolaris effort will go live early next week, a Sun representative said.

Guest PC 1.4 – Ready for Prime Time?

Guest PC, as described by Lismore Software Systems, Ltd., is "another computer inside your Mac". While in simplicity this is true, Guest PC offers Mac users far more. Guest PC has received a few bad reviews along the way, however, version 1.4 makes up for many of the previous versions shortcomings. This review will discuss the features and highlight some of the improvements found in Guest PC 1.4.