Today in Technology Analogy Week... In 1987, three years after the world's perception of the possibilities of the PC had been changed by the Apple Mac and two years after the Mac's cheap knockoff Microsoft Windows had been released, the world's leading PC manufacturer released a new operating system. OS/2 was the perfected pinnacle of… Continue reading Windows 8: A bit like OS/2
Category: Computers
iPads in schools
Fraser Spiers remarks, in a review of the Google Nexus 7 tablet: My experience with two years of iPad in school is that the iPad can cover 99% of everything we want to do with a computer in school... the iPad can replace the computer suite I think the radical nature of his observation has… Continue reading iPads in schools
Repairable laptops
The new MacBook Pro has prompted some argument about how repairable a laptop should be. Its screen can't be detached from the protective glass, the RAM is soldered in, and the solid-state drive uses some sort of obscure (proprietary?) connector. The mainstream article prompting this is here from Kyle Wiens, the founder of iFixit. I… Continue reading Repairable laptops
2880×1800
The Verge: Apple announces next-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display (nice URL, by the way). Obligatory grump: Pity it's not a 4:3 aspect ratio... More rational grump: How come nobody else has been able to do this? I'm not the only person to have been waiting for a machine with a screen like this—and… Continue reading 2880×1800
At last, a PC with a decent screen resolution
Pity it's so small! I've been longing to see a resolution as good as 2048x1536 on a flat-panel 14" laptop or 19" desktop screen. Clearly it was possible, but it never arrived. Perhaps that's because the one company that seems to take an interest in these things nowadays (Apple) has a desktop operating system that… Continue reading At last, a PC with a decent screen resolution
Sad Lion
Mountain Lion may drop support for older Macs (The Verge) It appears that OS/X 10.8 won't work on many Macs more than about three years old. Apparently this is a consequence of cleaning up its 64-bitness, and so losing support for 32-bit EFI bootloaders. (The 10.7 release already dropped support for 32-bit CPUs, such as… Continue reading Sad Lion