Some Questions & Comments About Firefox 3.5

I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.

Playing With Its Wii: Nintendo's 8G Console

Now that the dust has settled in the Seventh Generation console wars, with the Nintendo Wii emerging the clear winner and the Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 duking it out in the dust behind, game manufacturers are already tapping out prototypes of their next-generation consoles in the race for the eighth-generation console war.

At stake is billions in licensing and sales revenue, and each company is straining to optimize its next-generation offering to slaughter its competition. And as before, Nintendo is playing it cool and designing a low-footprint system that will zip between its peers' enormous specs and straight to players' hearts.

Having been conservative in its last two console releases and realizing success from multi-segment appeal and diverse game interaction, Nintendo sees no reason to break this formula. So going by it, you can expect a direct follow-up to the Wii, codenamed "Wii2."

Apple Will Never Replace Darwin With Linux

Every few months, the Mac web is bombarded with open pleas to Apple, asking—nay, demanding—that Apple swap out the Mach-based kernel that Mac OS X runs on, XNU/Darwin, with Linux. This, of course, ends in with Apple stoically continuing development of XNU/Darwin while fanboys dry their eyes and limp home after their flamewars. The cycle then repeats itself again a few months later like clockwork. The truth of the matter, however, is that Apple will never replace XNU/Darwin with Linux.

AmigaOS: Dragging Ass into the 21st Century

Fourteen years before Apple released iMovie, Amiga offered video editing for the masses. But no matter how vociferously studios and hobbyists swore by their favored platform, Amiga failed, hard, almost overnight.

Today, the Amiga community is a church of zealots praying desperately to its dead saints of outdated hardware and a primitive operating system using two-dozen year old technology. So what went wrong? What caused Amiga to go from the top of the computing heap to the bargain basement practically overnight?

The answer to that is long, complicated, and slow, just like the course of the Amiga's operating system, which is exactly at the heart of the issue.

QNX 6.4 > 6.3

I had been running QNX 6.3 on my trusty old 1.4 GHz Pentium III system with two gigs of memory for the last couple years and it was alright. Never quite fast enough despite decent hardware (P3 chips were 2x as fast as P4s clock per clock, don't whine otherwise) and limited hardware support, I was looking forward to the upgrade because, finally, after four years I might get a better-optimized system.

FreeBSD Owes Apple Big

The other day, while booting my eight-core 3.2 GHz Mac Pro with 32 GiB RAM, I watched my system startup messages (nvram boot-args="-v") and thought of Darwin's origins at NeXT as a pastiche of academic research and hacker hobby. Darwin has come so far and exhibits the best of long-term software engineering. But while thinking of how far Darwin has come, I also thought of all it has given back to FreeBSD. By the time my Mac had loaded my desktop, I was at work researching just how much FreeBSD owes Apple.