Kidz Rage !

or or BOTH ?

Microsoft’s Vista hits store shelves on Tuesday and although it’s got mixed reviews, there’s one group that actually seems quite excited about it — Mac users.

At Macworld, the most crowded booths belonged to Parallels Inc. and VMWare, two software companies that help run Windows a Mac. It was quite remarkable: both were mobbed.

Funnily enough, Macs are great machines for running Vista. They’re new, they’re fast and they exceed Vista’s demanding specs. They can even run OS X and Windows at the same time.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been running Vista on a quad-Xeon Mac Pro. Click the link to see how it’s working out.

The Mac Pro is a very fast and capable OS X machine, but it’s an even faster Windows Vista machine.

Vista really flies on this beast, and feels like it’s faster than OS X – it boots faster, folders burst open and apps launch instantly.

(The Mac Pro has two dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon chips; 3GBs of RAM; and a medium-range NVidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card)

I’m especially delighted with Vista’s “glass” Aero interface, which works in all its glory on this machine.

The OS is dark and handsome. It’s really quite exciting. Like the Zune’s interface, it’s artfully done. The beautifully-rendered shadow effects and transparency give Vista a greater “depth” than OS X, which looks a little flat and well… old fashioned in comparison. I know this is because Vista’s new and novel, but it makes OS X look dated.

There’s a bunch of interface features I wish Apple would copy. Vista’s widgets, called “Gadgets,” are always on top – a vast improvement over having to hit a hotkey to see them.

Vista’s icons are big and colorful, and frankly, a lot more logical and easy to read than some of OS X’s, like the intelligible iWeb icon.

I like the way Windows Explorer file browser has a “back” button, web browser style.

Of course, in many ways it’s the same old Windows. There are pop-up dialogs galore thanks to the new security features, and the Start menu, though slimmed down, is still a confusing mess. Maybe it’s just me.

Thanks to Apple’s Boot Camp software, installation was a breeze.

I used Boot Camp to format an internal drive for Windows and create a CD of XP software drivers for the Mac-specific hardware. (Although they’re XP drivers, most worked, but I had to install them individually instead of as a package. Tips here).

There are some nice touches. Vista automatically detected and installed drivers for my printer. When I went to print I expected a wizard, but it was already set to go.

The only big problem – and it’s been driving me crazy – is getting the sound to work. Neither the rear digital optical out port nor the two analog sound jacks will work, despite all kinds of driver jiggery-pokery. The internal speaker did work initially, but I’ve somehow messed that up.

I tried to get Vista working with Parallels, but it doesn’t yet support Vista installed on a separate hard drive. Parallels says this will be addressed shortly.

I hoped to sync my iTunes library to my Zune player, but although copying the music via an external hard drive worked fine, the Zune synced only the first fifth of my iTunes library – artists A through E – before it said the player was full. I haven’t had time to work it out yet.

Thing is, after I got Vista set up, I’m like, what now? I noodled about a bit, but I’ve no real use for it. My entire computing life is already in OS X. The eye candy is nice, but I’m already committed. I guess that’s what a lot of Windows users think when they look at the Mac.

Hopefully Vista is spurring Apple to reinvigorate the interface of OS X in Leopard. According to reports, Leopard is already resolution independent. Let’s hope the rumored interface overhaul, Illuminous, does for Vista what Vista’s done for OS X: make it look dated.

For 18 tense months, a computer-savvy grifter named David Thomas runs a thriving online crime hub for bank heists, identity theft and counterfeiting, with the FBI paying the bills.

Check out the full story here.
via (wired.com)

In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.

Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.

Professional social network LinkedIn will announce a previously rumored $12.8 million round of financing on Monday, led by Bessemer and the European Founders Fund. The company, which has been profitable since March 2006, has raised $13.4 million in two previous rounds of financing, bringing the total to more than $26 million.

The company had something north of $10 million in revenue in 2006, and says they’ll do substantially more than that in 2007. LinkedIn Answers, which launched earlier this month, has been a huge success, they say. LinkedIn has 70 employees, up from 45 a year ago. They claim 9 million worldwide users, and are adding 100,000 or so new users per week.

The valuation of the financing round is not being disclosed by the company, but it is rumored to be around $250 million. LinkedIn’s European competitor, Xing, is currently generating about €2.8 million in revenue per fiscal quarter, or $3.6 million. The company was valued at about $200 million when it went public in December 2006.

via (techcrunch)

AllFreeCalls, a new service which lets people make free phone calls by first calling a phone number in Iowa and then calling to any of dozens of other countries, just added eight new countries to the permitted lists (plus Antarctica). In an email the founder also said that they handled 80,000 call minutes yesterday.

The company operates under a legislative loophole that gives rural telco’s a kickback on every received call. That kickback is greater than the cost the company bears for making outbound international calls. So someone’s paying for these calls (other telecos? taxpayers?), just not the person using the service. I love bureaucracy.

via (techcrunch)

Saturday night, after a nice dinner function for my roomates daughter (burns night at her school)…i ended up almost getting a “thick ear” from the cook, when i advised him that the beef was “quite good” instead of “absoutely, mouth watering, the best ever, etc etc”. Well, i guess you learn something new every day….in the real English language (not the jumbled US version of English, i mean American…which I speak).

At about 11 they came a picked me up, heading towards Oxford.

Once in Oxford we met up with the rest of thier crew and headed for some club where it was some guy in the groups 20th birthday! A very nice group, who seemed like all nice people…and the birds were especially fit!

Boy do i feel old, but i must say that all my new friends made me feel hella welcome!

Respect Mr Odell for the lift home and putting up with my stinky chicken kebab & smokes On the way home, the legend Mr Denny called us at about 4 am, saying that he was stranded & didnt know hwere he was…why was i not suprised ?

All in all this was a great night & ill be looking forward to taking the crew to Fabric next month for a smasher!

Quality: 128kbps
Size: 39.2 MB

Download!

Tracklisting:

That Girl - Rhythm Beater vs Benny Page - Cutterz Choice
[Murdah RMX]
Skat Rat - Rhythm Beater - Nemesis
Authentic - Break - Quarantine
Stampede - Brockie, Kane & Ed Solo - Sonic Art
The Rocker - Bladerunner - Dread
Jahovas Witness - Rhythm Beater - Cutterz Choice dub
Nebula - Benny Page - Cutterz Choice dub
Raging Bull - J Majik & Wickaman - Infrared
Lost Bass (Kane VIP) - Brockie & Ed Solo - Undiluted
The Beginning - Moving Fusion - Ram
Dub Room RMX - Benny Page vs Rhythm Beater - Cutterz Choice
Beaters Island - Rhythm Beater - Cutterz Choice dub
Crying Out - Dirty Dubs Round 1
Amongst The Madness - Rhythm Beater - Cutterz Choice dub
What Is This? - Tomi Kain & Interface - dub
Redline - Fierce & Break - Quarantine
Things Ain’t The Same - DJ Craze & Infiltrata - Cartel
Love for Granted - Cutterz Choice
Move VIP - Ryme Tyme - 1210

MP3 Hosted by BeatKingz

Many people are locked into cell phone contracts with unsatisfactory service and no way out.According to the US Public Interest Research Group, nearly half of all US cellular phone customers would switch, or consider switching, their current service carrier if they did not have to pay an early termination penalty of up to $240.

Features

• Cellswapper.com has developed a social network for the exchange of cell phone plans and phones.
• CellSwapper.com transfers the remainder of a contract to another interested party. It is a win-win situation, as unsatisfied customer gets out of their unwanted contact and the assuming party gets a free, short-term contract - as low as 1 month - without having to pay the hefty activation fee usually incurred with a new service plan.
• Most short term contracts come bundled with a free phone or cash incentive that is offered as an incentive by the seller.
• Free posting of plans/contracts.
• CellSwapper has developed Transfer Tracking™ technology to keep all parties up to date with the contract transfer.
• Consumers become free to change their cell phone plans as often as they wish!

The Apple iPhone

• Since the Apple iPhone is a Cingular exclusive, anybody who wants to buy one will need to first become cell phone contract-free. In that sense, for many consumers CellSwapper will serve as perhaps the only means of getting an iPhone.

Dion Hinchcliffe, in a blog post over at ZDNet, talks about the increasing business value of ‘Mashup’ projects. Some of these, he believes, may soon or already be ready for use in an enterprise environment. He demonstrates one of these upcoming projects, showing off IBM’s QEDWiki in a Flash demonstration. The software allows users to create their own mashups from canned widgets, turning data into simple applications with fairly straightforward functionality.

From the article: “The motivations for mashups are quite different inside of organizations, where application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant. If this state of affairs is true, far from having too much software, most enterprises don’t have enough to satisfy demand, despite the prevalence of mountains of existing enterprise systems, many of which are underutilized. The arguments for letting users self-service themselves with end-user application tools and getting IT out of the critical path for the backlog of simpler applications are extensive.”

How important do you think ’self-made’ software will be in the future?

01. N Phect :: Shift Funk

02. Cerebral Productions :: Exposure

Grab your copy here

http://www.chemical-records.co.uk/sc/servlet/Info?Track=FF008

via (neurocode)