“Espresso” to Caffeinate Nintendo's Wii U

Recent talk about the Wii U has been buzzing in the ramp-up to the new console's release on November 18. Technical details, however, have been few and far between—until now. Information about Espresso, the new IBM chip for Wii U, are finally spilling forth.

Espresso bridges the performance gap that Nintendo’s competitors, Microsoft and Sony, have held since the sixth-generation of consoles. With Espresso in the Wii U, Nintendo is clearly playing hardball to win back the demographic that other consoles have held for about a decade: hardcore gamers.

Game Review: The Legacy of Darkgold (1989)

I finally found disk images of The Legacy of Darkgold, a roleplaying game released in 1989 for Commodore 64. It’s another Questron-type game that is surprisingly complex for its day and takes a good 24-36 hours to beat.

Fortunately, this game is actually worth spending that much time playing.

Apple to Merge iOS, OS X

CUPERTINO—Just a day after Apple announced the merger of its iOS and OS X teams, talk of a merger of the two products is running rampant with some claiming that engineers have been well into the process for years.

Rumors began in October 2010, when Apple previewed OS X 10.7 Lion, showcasing many features from the company's mobile operating system that were making the jump to the company's desktop operating system. Lion's successor, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, continued this trend with its release in July 2012.

But, according to Ahmad Singh, a former Apple operating systems engineer, a string of public releases have indicated such a move for years. “[OS X 10.5 Leopard]'s release date was pushed back multiple times, debuting a year late. The excuse was software engineering for the iPhone,” he said. “It started with Intel support in Tiger and a desire for a mobile version of OS X.”

Fuck Firefox 14

It had been a few weeks since I last used Firefox because it sucks so fucking hard. Instead, I've been using Safari. With my recent upgrade to Mountain Lion I checked out Safari 6 and wondered what Firefox 14 was like in comparison. I decided to approach it with an open mind and did the old launch-check-install-relaunch routine that I've done over a dozen times in the last year or so.

Apple Releases Safari 6 Beta ahead of WWDC ’12

In anticipation of its World-Wide Developers Conference taking place tomorrow, Apple has released a public beta of Safari 6, the next big upgrade to the company's web browser.

Other confirmed product previews include iCloud, iOS 6, and OS X Mountain Lion, alongside rumors of new Ivy Bridge-based Macs and third-party apps for Apple TV. So far only Safari 6 has been generally released, however, with several new features.

Firefox Sucks! Unlucky Thirteen Is Useless

I just started up Firefox and, once again, there was another whole-number version update waiting to interrupt my use and enjoyment of the world-wide web.

Didn't Firefox 12 come out about a month ago?

Once I applied the update and got running again, nothing was changed. Not a thing. Okay, well, a new tab homepage. But seriously? Showing me a few sites that I visit frequently? I know how to use browser bookmarks and history, thank you. But in addition to useless new “features,” Firefox 13 also screws stuff up.

The damn thing won't load new pages to about:blank now, even though I've tried to configure it to do so. The Firefox team also fucked with page scrolling, so that now instead of moving in discrete increments, they have some half-assed “smooth” scrolling that tears across screen refreshes on OS X.

These are just a few in a laundry list of many complaints about Firefox that I have compiled since Firefox developers think that wasting my time is some kind of design goal. Here's what doesn't work as of Firefox 13.