PBS | I, Cringely . April 20, 2006 – Native Speaker

PBS | I, Cringely . April 20, 2006 – Native Speaker

The money quote.

Now for the interesting part: I believe that Apple will offer Windows Vista as an option for those big customers who demand it, but I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5.

This would be great for consumers like me who want to run apps like Quicken for Windows or Windows XP games. Boot Camp and the various virtualization technologies have always seemed like kludges to me vs. a smooth OS X / Windows experience on one machine.

Vista won’t be shipping until 2007 so games will be written for XP for quite a while not only because of the delay in Vista but because of the huge installed base of Windows XP.

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Rolling Stone : The Worst President in History?

Rolling Stone : The Worst President in History?

A very well-written article. The President and his puppet masters/sycophants are such idiots.

Key sections like this make me worry about what type of future my children will have because of the short-sightedness of the village idiot. As time goes by, I’ll be proud to tell people that I didn’t vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004:

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush’s administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever — with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush — sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that “prosperity is just around the corner” — insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

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Runner’s World – Boston Marathon: Blog 4

Runner’s World – Boston Marathon: Blog 4

The Kenyans get 1 and 2 this year, but the U.S. get 3, 4, and 5, which isn’t bad at all.

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Wired News: The Glory of the Shooter

Wired News: The Glory of the Shooter

From Castle Wolfenstein 3d to F.E.A.R., I love the fun I derive from shooters.

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PBS | I, Cringely . April 6, 2006 – A Whole New Ball Game

PBS | I, Cringely . April 6, 2006 – A Whole New Ball Game

I predict that Apple will settle on 64-bit Intel processors ASAP (with FireWire 800 please), and at that time will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware, turning the Boot Camp relationship on its head and trying to sell $99 copies of OS X to 100 million or so Windows owners.

Will Apple really do this? Won’t it cannibalize their hardware sales? That would make a good plot twist though.

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Sea Otter 2006: Gooey gravity courses and a Gerolsteiner guy

Sea Otter 2006: Gooey gravity courses and a Gerolsteiner guy

Great! The year I decide to stay two nights in Monterey for the Sea Otter Classic, we have wet, rainy, mudball conditions. I hope it clears up a little over the weekend. I fondly remember the mess of a course the short track became in 1996. Juli Furtado was the only woman who could really handle the goop on a downhill section of the short track race.

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Boot Camp Public Beta

Run Windows XP natively on your Intel-based Mac with the Boot Camp Public Beta.

This will be big this upcoming Christmas since Microsoft Vista won’t be coming out until after the holiday season. Buyers looking a for a new computer will be able to purchase the best of both worlds (Windows for games and OS X for nearly everything else) with just one computer.

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MarvelDirectory.com

Kudos to Bill Fries for creating and maintaining the MarvelDirectory.com.

Now you can go online and read all about the history of all your Marvel characters. I remember family parties where all the guys would be reading my latest comics and asking me to fill in the backstory of the characters and plots. It was like soap opera for boys.

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Send Educational Software!

“The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, donated tax-deductible money to the Katrina Relief after the flood. And now we find out that it was with specific instructions that the money be spent for educational software owned by her son Neil. Because who can forget those tragic images of the poor black people on rooftops in New Orleans holding up signs that said, ‘Send Educational Software’?”
—Bill Maher

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Weird Stuff Truck

Weird Stuff Truck
Weird Stuff buys and sells surplus computer equipment. A great name for a company that tries to recycle all the tech detritus of Silicon Valley.

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