Good Deals. Good Ideas. Good Designs. Good Health.

The long wait is finally over. The cage is opened, the cat is out and the reviews are all in… I meant Leopard, Mac OSX latest revision. Since Friday you will find all kinds of review all over the Internet but none came close to this article by Ars Technica that I really loved! It’s not just the aesthetic that most talked about… it is not the cover flow here and there, or the time machine this and that… but the underlying architecture changes made to the latest revision. That’s for me, an very interesting read and one that will impact the application / platform on OSX in the long haul. The same article that intrigued me when someone dived deeper into Microsoft Vista a year ago… and till today, I still hold the ground that Vista is a good solid operating system, in many ways, just like what Apple did with the underlying changes to the operating system…

Looks and feel are subjective, the platform is the king. Who will draw the most attention will be determined by which platform enables developer to great beautiful and functional application… that is the future. (not forgetting which developer tools are better to code on…)

At the end of my Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger review, I wrote this.

Overall, Tiger is impressive. If this is what Apple can do with 18 months of development time instead of 12, I tremble to think what they could do with a full two years.

That was exactly two and a half years ago, to the day. It seems that I’ve gotten my wish and then some. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they’ve only grown as the months and years have passed. Apple’s tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good.

Maybe the average Mac user just expects another incrementally improved version of Mac OS X. Eighteen months, two and a half years, who’s counting? Maybe we enthusiasts are just getting greedy. After all, as Apple’s been so fond of touting, there have been five releases of Mac OS X in the time it’s taken Microsoft to deliver Windows Vista.

But far be it from me to use Microsoft to calibrate my expectations. Leopard has to be something special. And as I see it, operating system beauty is more than skin deep. While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard’s worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple’s web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what’s really changed.

These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they’re based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user.

This review will cover all of those angles, in varying degrees of depth. Like all other Mac OS X releases before it, Leopard is too big for one review to cover everything. (After all, Tiger’s internals alone can fill over 1,600 printed pages.) As in past reviews, I’ve chosen to delve deeply into the aspects of Leopard that are the most interesting to me while also trying to provide a reasonable overview for the non-geeks who’ve decided to take the plunge into an Ars Technica review. (Hi, Mom.)

Okay Leopard, let’s see what you’ve got.

Check out the link for the rest of the review.

But just because the operating system doesn’t look and work the way you want doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with it as is. Windows is extremely tweakable; if you dig a little, you’ll find that you can customize it in almost any way you want.

To help you out, we’ve put together this guide to tweaking Windows. It covers both XP and Vista and lets you do all kinds of things you might have thought were impossible — replacing your boot screen, hacking the Control Panel, speeding up Windows Flip 3D and more. Look for the XP and Vista icons to see which tips work in which OS.

The hacks vary in the expertise you’ll need. In some cases you’ll get down and dirty with the Registry, so if you’re not certain you know how to make a DWORD value, for example, read our story “The tweaker’s guide to the Windows Registry” first. (Be sure to read the instructions for backing up the Registry before you attempt any Registry edits whatsoever.)

In other cases, you’ll just have to dig into hidden corners of menus and folders. But in all cases, you’ll tell Windows exactly how you want it to behave … and it will bow down to you, the master.

For full read, check out the article.

According to this ExtremeTech article on the worst thing about Macs…

Recently, a reader named David e-mailed me, saying he found the article from my guide on how to replace the hard drive in a Macbook Pro. He asked, simply, “A year later, what do you think?” Fundamentally, I stand by my initial impressions: There are plenty of things OS X does very well, and better than any version of Windows. There are also some really boneheaded things. But honestly, the thing I hate most about using a Mac are the Apple fans. The old song and dance about the Steve Jobs worshipping, sycophantic, “thank you sir may I have another”, na-ture of the Cult of Apple is true. And while it certainly does not represent all Mac users, there are enough bad apples (pardon the pun) to spoil the bunch.

Check it out.

Personal thoughts:

I agreed with the perception that some mac user out there felt they are far superior in knowledge and choices as compared to the rest of the world.

I had an encounter months ago while traveling in the MRT (mass rapid transit) in Singapore. I came into the train and sat down beside a young guy having a macbook on his lap. He was doing some programming stuff on it. I use an Acer and placed the laptop bag on my lap as I sat down. The mac guy saw that and started to press all kind of keys to flash the expose, dashboard, dock then back to expose… and eventually stopped (after 10 – 15 sec). What’s so funny to me what that the same screen / program that he was on while I sat down, after all the switching and flashing… was on the screen… where it was earlier.

Halo 3, the latest in the Halo series, took in $300 million in global sales through its first week. Microsoft said that this makes Halo “the fastest-selling video game ever and already one of the most successful entertainment properties in history.”

According to this article, Bungie and Microsoft are parting ways… sort of.

Article extracted from ComputerWorld on Flash Challenges:

The future of Flash

But behind the bold words, acknowledge Adobe executives, is real concern about the future of Flash. Though Flash is dominant on PCs — the Flash Player is installed on more than 90% of Web-connected computers, according to Adobe — it has failed to make much headway yet in the key cell phone market.

Moreover, Microsoft’s Silverlight poses a serious technical and marketing challenge to Flash.

“Is there any moment that I am not worried about Microsoft?” said John Loiacono, senior vice president for creative solutions at Adobe. “I always treat them as a formidable foe, if only because they have a huge checkbook and are a monopoly.”

Released officially in September, Silverlight trumps Flash in two key areas: video quality and the digital rights management (DRM) technology desired by advertisers and content providers.

Moreover, Microsoft is offering some of the necessary Silverlight server software cheaper than Adobe or, in the case of Expression Encoder, for free. Adobe’s equivalent, the Flash Media Server, costs over $4,000.

Rather than automatically distributing Silverlight to Windows users via Windows Updates, Microsoft has inked almost 10 deals with broadcast partners — enough, it believes, to get Silverlight onto 80% of Internet-connected PCs within a short time.

The adoption of Silverlight “has been great so far,” according to an e-mail from a Microsoft spokeswoman, with “downloads right in line with expectations to date.”

Check out this cool file system from Sun which is soon to be adopted by Apple Leopard OS… Reminds me of WinFS but in many ways different. It is certainly geeky and we will see how the actual implementation turns out. It does look promising.

Following article extracted from OpenSolaris:

What is ZFS?

ZFS is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We’ve blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that’s actually a pleasure to use.

ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all file systems at all times.

All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS file system, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.

ZFS introduces a new data replication model called RAID-Z. It is similar to RAID-5 but uses variable stripe width to eliminate the RAID-5 write hole (stripe corruption due to loss of power between data and parity updates). All RAID-Z writes are full-stripe writes. There’s no read-modify-write tax, no write hole, and — the best part — no need for NVRAM in hardware. ZFS loves cheap disks.

But cheap disks can fail, so ZFS provides disk scrubbing. Like ECC memory scrubbing, the idea is to read all data to detect latent errors while they’re still correctable. A scrub traverses the entire storage pool to read every copy of every block, validate it against its 256-bit checksum, and repair it if necessary. All this happens while the storage pool is live and in use.

ZFS has a pipelined I/O engine, similar in concept to CPU pipelines. The pipeline operates on I/O dependency graphs and provides scoreboarding, priority, deadline scheduling, out-of-order issue and I/O aggregation. I/O loads that bring other file systems to their knees are handled with ease by the ZFS I/O pipeline.

ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients.

ZFS backup and restore are powered by snapshots. Any snapshot can generate a full backup, and any pair of snapshots can generate an incremental backup. Incremental backups are so efficient that they can be used for remote replication — e.g. to transmit an incremental update every 10 seconds.

There are no arbitrary limits in ZFS. You can have as many files as you want; full 64-bit file offsets; unlimited links, directory entries, snapshots, and so on.

ZFS provides built-in compression. In addition to reducing space usage by 2-3x, compression also reduces the amount of I/O by 2-3x. For this reason, enabling compression actually makes some workloads go faster.

In addition to file systems, ZFS storage pools can provide volumes for applications that need raw-device semantics. ZFS volumes can be used as swap devices, for example. And if you enable compression on a swap volume, you now have compressed virtual memory.

ZFS administration is both simple and powerful. Please see the zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) man pages for more information — and be sure to check out the Getting Started section for a whirlwind tour.

ZFS is already quite snappy on most workloads — and we’re just getting started.

The bridge connecting designer and programmer is the central focus for software companies like Microsoft and Adobe. Especially since both are venturing into each others’ turf with Microsoft providing Expression Studio coupled with XAML and the .NET framework while Adobe with Flex Builder and the web programming language environment. Microsoft is extending from its desktop stronghold to the web while Adobe is bringing its web tools and Flash dominance onto the desktop (see my recommendation on Adobe AIR)

And now, Adobe is bringing in another big gun, Thermo.

Adobe Systems Inc. next year will release a visual tool for designers to help them more quickly and easily build RIAs (rich Internet applications) and work better with developers writing code on the back end.

The tool, code-named Thermo, allows designers to draw a picture of what an application will look like and then, without having to write code, generate applications from those pictures that have the full ability to interact with users, said Mark Anders, vice president of engineering for Adobe. He and Adobe Product Manager Steven Heintz demonstrated the tool on stage during Tuesday’s keynote at the Adobe MAX 2007 user conference in Chicago.

Adobe, like Microsoft Corp. and other companies providing tools to develop RIAs, are trying to solve the problem of how designers and developers work together, since their processes are very different. It has been traditionally difficult for designers’ vision for the visual presentation of the application to come to fruition once developers code the logic of the application. Moreover, designers that are visually oriented are not typically good coders, and it has been difficult for them to create an application that truly meets their vision for it with the tools available today.

According to Anders, Thermo should help solve these problems by allowing designers to turn their visual representation of an application into a working program before it gets to developers. “We’re really trying to make it so that designers don’t have to change the way they work, and what they give to a developer makes more sense,” he said.

Read here for the full article.

My favorite all time software company Stardock, has released the latest version of its skinning application, WindowBlinds 6.0.

As part of the yearly subscribers to Object Desktop, I had the chance to really try out WindowBlinds 6.0 while it was in beta form and I must say I loved it completely! Together with the rest of the cool stuff like ObjectDock and LogonStudio… you skinning experience will not be the same again.

Check it out here.

Microsoft Corp. has bought comparative shopping Web site Jellyfish.com, which gives its customers a cut of advertising revenue from retailers, offering a rebate on purchases made through the site.

Microsoft sees Jellyfish.com as a way to augment its e-commerce and search offerings, although no details were immediately available on how the company may transform the site or wrap it into other offerings. Microsoft revealed the acquisition in a blog posting Tuesday, but did not say how much it paid for the site.

“We think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search,” Microsoft’s search engine blog announced.

Advertisers choose the level of commission they will pay to Jellyfish.com for sales made, at least half of which Jellyfish.com says it will give back to purchasers as a rebate. Jellyfish.com ranks products according to the price including that rebate.

While the discount the consumer will receive appears in the search results, Jellyfish.com doesn’t immediately apply the discount to the product. Instead, the money is kept in an account for 30 to 60 days to account for product returns, refunds and to guard against fraud. After the waiting period, a check can be mailed when the accumulated rebates exceed $10.

Jellyfish.com is not the only company to sell adverts based on “pay per action,” rather than pay per click.

In June, Google Inc. expanded its beta trial of a pay-per-action program, opening it to worldwide users of its AdWords service. The pay-per-action ads can appear in Google’s regular contextual ads results that Web site publishers put on their page, or publishers can choose which pay-per-action ads go on their page based on content.

Jellyfish.com tells merchants that its cost-per-sale advertising model is risk-free and not subject to e-commerce problems such as click fraud, where advertisers overpay for fraudulent clicks on their ads. So far, Jellyfish.com says it lists at least five million products.

Jellyfish.com, started in mid-2005, is based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Information taken from IT World.

The Yahoo new search features is all over the front page news this week. Microsoft Live Search added some functionality to compete just last week and no doubt both are trying very hard to compete with search leader Google.

Interestingly though in Singapore, Yahoo portal occupies around 60% due to the vast information at a a glance style from those portal site. But when it comes to search, I am pretty sure Google is way ahead.

Here’s an excerpt on the new features added to Yahoo search:

Get ready for the “new” Yahoo Search, a revamped version of the old search that now offers blended results, improved analysis of search intent, and a new “Search Assist” tool. The improvements made to the world’s second largest search engine are designed to make the site more interactive and better able to offer rich results. The company claims that these are the most significant changes since switching back to its core search technology from Google in 2004.

Yahoo appears to be doing something right, which is good news for a company that many believe is destined to always play second fiddle to Google. Web analysis firm Compete recently published data on search queries between several of the top search engines and found that although Google still retains a substantial market share lead over the competition, Yahoo appears to trounce Google when it comes to search fulfillment. That is, more Yahoo queries result in a successful clickthrough to one of the results—75 percent of searches, in the month of August, compared to Google’s 65 percent and Live Search’s 59 percent. This data seems to indicate that Yahoo’s results do a better job at presenting information that is useful to the user. Building on this success, Yahoo’s new search enhancements look to improve further on the core search experience.

The most significant change, Search Assist, tries to help predict what the user is looking for and offers up variations or alternatives. It has been added as an AJAX layer on top of the page that pops up when it senses that the user is hesitating on a search query. Looking for something that starts with “ars?” Maybe you’re looking for Ars Technica, ares, ars national, or ars poetica.

The tool can also offer up related concepts—Yahoo! Search VP Vish Makhijani offers up a query for “energy savings” as an example, which causes Search Assist to present a plethora of search options and alternatives that don’t necessarily contain the term “energy,” but could be related. “In testing Search Assist, we found that users were 61% more successful in completing their task with this new search feature at their disposal,” Makhijani writes. For those who are simply slow or hesitant typists, Yahoo (thankfully) does offer an option to turn off Search Assist if you should so choose.

Other improvements include the integration of photos from Yahoo-owned Flickr that are tagged with words from the user’s query, inlined videos when they are available (such as movie trailers), and even streaming audio snippets from Yahoo Music when you search for certain bands. The blended search catches Yahoo up to the rest of the leading search engines, although Yahoo’s formatting more closely resembles Google’s blended results than do its competitors.

For more information, check out this article from Ars Technica.

Anandtech has a wonderful review of the HP Blackbird, a super exotic design with performance in mind pc after HP acquired VoodooPC last year.

Below is some excerpts:

One of the most impressive aspects about the Blackbird is undoubtedly the case design. This isn’t just your typical rectangular computer case with a window, some lights, a design cut into the metal, and a fancy paint job. As we mentioned in the previous article, the fully assembled case is quite heavy, but it’s also extremely sturdy. The case is made from cast aluminum, and the main structure is extremely thick aluminum. The system we were shipped weighs about 70 pounds, and while the liquid cooling certainly accounts for some of the weight, the thick shell is the primary contributor.

One of the aspects of the case that we didn’t mention previously (in part because we weren’t aware of this fact at the time) is that the case door can actually be easily removed. Swing the door open and lift up on it and you can pull it off the pins and set it aside while you access the internals. Because of the heavy-duty design, this can all be accomplished without compromising structural integrity.
Other than looking cool and weighing a lot, the design of the case does serve other purposes. First, the raised chassis opens up a sixth side of cooling: air can now come in the bottom of the case. This may not be strictly necessary, but with the compartmental design that HP has created the bottom intake provides fresh air to the power supply.

The purpose of the compartmentalized design is to provide optimal cooling to all of the major components without creating a bunch of turbulence, so the internals are broken up into three main sections: at the bottom is the power supply, in the middle are the expansion cards, and at the top we find the CPU and water cooling system. The hard drives are located towards the front of the chassis and cooled by an internal 120mm fan that also provides airflow to the expansion cards. Having this fan located several inches inside the chassis allows it to provide airflow without generating much in the way of audible noise.

For more information, check out the link here.