All Posts by Paul

Keep Mail.app at a Glance With Mail.appetizer

Paul

Mac OS X Only: Freeware Mail.app add-on Mail.appetizer lets you read and delete email on the fly without having to open Mail’s main window every time a message arrives. What makes Mail.appetizer stand out from other notifiers is the customization—you tell it whether to show headers, icons, quoted reply text and determine its size. Mail.appetizer is freeware, available in a seemingly bug-free beta for OS X 10.4 Tiger and a stable version for 10.3 Panther. Thanks, dcharti!
Mail.appetizer [Bronson Beta]


This is Mac OS so I haven’t tried it.

eMachines announces new low-cost desktops for the holidays

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eMachines looks to be trying to make its already budget-priced desktops even more attractive to consumers this holiday season, with it today introducing a pair of models that it says strike just the right balance between performance and value. The most affordable of the pair is the company’s T3626 desktop (a slight variation on the T3616), which starts at just $350 after a $50 mail-in rebate. For that price you’ll get a 2.2GHz AMD Sempron 3800+ processor, along with NVIDIA GeForce 6100 graphics, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a DVD burner, among other standard specs. Taking things up a notch, the $435 (again, after a $50 rebate) T5234 model packs a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ processor, along with slightly beefer NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE graphics, 1GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and that same DVD burner. According to eMachines, both should be available at all the usual locations immediately.

This isn’t half bad for the holidays get a new system and at a pretty good speed and hard drive space!! I think I want one now!!

Alienware announces AlienExchange trade-in program

Paul

While they’re still far from eMachines-territory, those in the market for an Alienware system can now knock a few bucks off their desktop or laptop of choice — if they’re willing to fork over some of their old gear, that is. That can be done as part of the company’s just-launched AlienExchange program, which will let you trade in everything from cellphones and MP3 players to game consoles and digital cameras to computers and monitors in exchange for an AlienWare gift card or a plain old check. Those trading in their old Alienware system will also get an additional $200 on top of the regular trade-in value as a bonus. If that sounds like reason enough to clean out your closet, you can hit up the link below to get a quote on your gear, after which Alienware will send you a shipping label to send it all in.

I wonder if that includes laptops and Desktop machines?

Blog Offline with Google Gears at Blog.gears

Paul

Inspiration for great blog posts can be fleeting, but a lack of internet access can leave ideas in the dust. Webapp Blog.gears uses Google Gears to synchronize with a Blogger account to bridge that gap. Blog.gears allows Blogger authors to create new posts and edit older ones and synchronizes the data upon connection. The offline editor doesn’t offer any of the rich text features as the online site, but it could work great for ideas you don’t want to forget about later. Blog.gears requires a free Blogger account and Google Gears, and runs wherever Internet Explorer or Firefox do.

Blog.gears [via Google Operating System]

It’s not bad if you have need to write stuff for the blog but I do hope they come up with ways to upload pictures and links and all that fun stuff that blogging has become!!

Core of “Windows 7” taking shape: meet the “MinWin” kernel

Paul

Eric Traut, one of Microsoft’s chief operating system design engineers, gave a fascinating demo (WMV) recently at the University of Illinois, where he talked about where the Windows core is going and ended with a sneak peek at the kernel of the next version of Windows, known by the exciting codename of “Windows 7.” The demo showed what Windows would look like if it was literally stripped down to the core, showing the kind of work that is going on to optimize the aging NT kernel.

Traut runs a team of about 200 software engineers at Microsoft that is responsible for the core kernel scheduling, memory management, boot sequence, and virtualization technology such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server. The latter technologies are becoming more and more important as servers get more powerful and gain more and more CPU cores, and it was clear from the demonstration that Microsoft is placing significant effort into integrating virtual machine technology into everything that they do. The release of Virtual PC as a free download last year was just the beginning: Windows Server 2008 will ship with significant VM enhancements, and Windows 7 will only carry on from there.

Windows 7

Why “Windows 7”? The number is based on Microsoft’s internal operating system numbers: the first version of Windows NT, 3.1, was given the same number as the “Classic” Windows when it was released in 1992. Since then there has been NT 4, Windows 2000 (NT 5), Windows XP (NT 5.1), and Windows Vista (NT 6). You can check these numbers by typing “ver” at a command prompt on any of these operating systems.

Very nice article from Arstechnica story on Windows 7 which will be changed to something internal soon I wonder what the next name it will be!!