| Welcome to my blog! | My software | ||||||||
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This is the blog of Gabriele Biffi, the smiling guy in the top left
corner! Oh yeah, I still have to put a picture there, just imagine it,
there is some work in progress. This blog is at the moment all about my software, and some of my pictures. More stuff will come, soon or later. |
My software for Haiku, BeOS™, and
ZETA™:
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| 2011-10-25 John McCarthy, 1927-2011 |
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Thank you, John. What a month for computing. Add a comment |
| 2011-10-13 Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011 |
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Thank you, Dennis.
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| 2011-10-06 Steve Jobs, 1955-2011 |
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Thank you, Steve. Even if I don't own neither an iPhone nor an iPad. Add a comment |
| 2011-01-01 Happy new year! |
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Happy new year!
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| 2010-12-25 Merry Christmas |
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Merry Christmas!
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| 2010-10-27 One Apple a day keeps the doctor away |
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The last months have been very busy for me, and I wasn't able to keep the blog updated. I didn't even make it to BeGeistert 23. In the meantime, I just wanted to sum up my thoughts on the recent Apple announcements. The new MacBooks Air. I can't resist to say how much I like the smallest of the two, the 11.6" model. Whith all the BTO options maxed out, it has almost exactly what I want in a small notebook: thin, lightweight, a good CPU, a good graphics card, a nice video connector, good SSD storage, enough RAM to do everything, a full size keyboard with a large touchpad, decent screen resolution, a wonderful OS, and it's a Mac (ok, ok, I know they're not perfect, but they compare very favorably to everything else). The bad: somewhat disappointing battery life which forces you to carry the power supply, USB is only 2.0, RAM not expandable after purchase - SSD replacements will be happily provided by OEM suppliers -, no Ethernet port (the USB adapter is tiny enough to be ininfluent in your bag, but it leaves you with only one USB port and reaches only 100 Mbps), and the price isn't exactly popular. I guess you can't expect a popular machine from Apple, anyway. The 13.3" model isn't as much as interesting; if you can carry a 13.3" machine you should look at the regular MacBook or the same sized Pro which aren't much heavier but come with a faster CPU, more battery life and several other useful features. The Air has an interesting higher resolution display, but I bet the future model of the Pro will also gain it. Could Apple have done it differently? I don't think so. A lot of people seems upset because Apple didn't use a newer processor like the Core i3; but that CPU, while being a bit faster than the Core 2, comes with a crappy integrated GPU, and it doesn't sound like a good deal, since Mac (and not only) apps are starting to use the GPU to speed up graphics and video rendering, and that gain is impressive compared to the CPU alone. Soon the web browsers will take advantage of it as well, so the excuse that the GPU is ininfluent in everyday usage will no longer be true. Using a discrete graphics chip probably wasn't an option for such small machines. Others are suggesting the Atom, but probably they just don't realize how crappy the Atom is. It's fine just for those €300 tiny netbooks (and read my sentence above about Apple's pricing policy). Then, there are the ARM fanboys. This option is so laughable I won't even discuss it. Obviously Apple has more sense of reality than certain morons. Someone noticed how not long ago some executive at Apple said that they wouldn't be making a netbook because they didn't know how to do a nice machine with it. I guess he was referring to the 10" Atom machines, and I agree with him - those machines are terrible (I'm sure of this because I own one). Definitevely, I would happily buy one, but my Aluminium MacBook is only 16 months old and it seems a bit premature to replace it :-) The Mac App Store. However, the most important Wednesday announcement was the new Mac App Store. While very welcome, and undoubtly will pump the Mac development scene, I can't understand why they gave it those whacky acceptance policies which will leave a lot of good stuff out. Probably, they realize they can't really control the Mac as they do with the iPhone, so they just decided to keep a "family" profile for it. I'm not worried about things like the App Store becoming the only authorized source of Mac software. Neither I am worried by the recent announcements about Flash and Java being no longer supplied by Apple; the first will be supported by Adobe itself, the second will be replaced by OpenJDK. Apple is confident that them both will do a better job, and it's probably true. Only, it will be funny to see what new switchers will think when they will be presented the usual "Additional plugins are required to see this page" warnings on their new $1500 computer which was supposed to be ready for everything! The 7" iPad. So, it looks steve Steve doesn't like 7 inches tablets, but the real surprise isn't that. I think there is something strange happening here: why haven't we been flooded by tablets of all sizes yet? Chinese manufacturers are making tablets in every possible declination, but they're all being imported by "parallel" marketers - I bet their low prices are because they forget to pay for royalties, patents, and taxes - but what about the big brands? The only reasons I could think about is that they want to make out as much profit as they can by setting up some Apple-like environment. After they manage to set it up - which of course will have only 1/10th of the success of Apple's, but that's another story - they will flood us with a plethora of tablets, the market will finally blow, and Apple will be forced to make a 7" iPad, as well as a 5" iPod. And the overall prices will drop (not Apple's, of course, they will just add more features to keep them high). Well, that's my vision. If you don't agree... you're wrong :-P Add a comment |
| 2010-04-08 Blog engine rewrite |
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It's been long months the last time I published something here. I have a couple of interesting articles coming: the first about how I restored my father's old Thinkpad, and the second about my MacBook getting a 7200 rpm hard drive. They're quite finished, but I've been busy with rewriting my blog's engine - the usual situation that starts with "some fixes, a couple of new features, and some tweaks to the look" and ends up with a nearly complete rewrite - and with my job. The biggest difference with the current engine is that the whole content will be placed in the database, and the pages will be built on the fly. Currently, except for the news, everything is mostly a bunch of HTML pages that calls some PHP functions for common functionality, like the sidebar. I'm quite happy of how it is growing up - being object oriented et al - but as I always tend to do, I reinvented the wheel. Multiple times, actually, as I could have used several libraries that are already available and save some time to write content. But I'm a programmer, not a scribbler. My software is my content. And I hate PHP. Seriously, guys, how can someone pretend it is any better than Java? If only there were more Java hosting services around... 5 comments |
| 2010-01-01 Happy New Year! |
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Happy 2010 to everybody!
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| 2009-12-26 My desk |
 OSNews every year asks its readers to publish a picture of their desktop. I never did because my desktop are always stock, or very close. This year they asked to show your workspace. Well, this is mine :)I change it often, but it is always more or less similar to this. Below the desk, my self built quad-core Q9650 is playing World of Warcraft, which you can see on the 23" monitor, on Windows 7 Professional x64. On the desk, my MSI Wind U100+ is running Haiku; sometimes it runs Ubuntu as server for my web development. But my real "personal" computer is the one on the right: a MacBook running Snow Leopard. Add a comment |
| 2009-12-25 Merry Christmas! |
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Merry Christmas to everybody!
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