TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Leopard, the name for the next version of Mac OS X, is due out spring of this year. It contains some new innovative features, once again taking it beyond the latest version of Microsoft Windows. What are these features, and why should you upgrade?

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From Boing Boing:

Arnezami, a hacker on the Doom9 forum, has published a crack for extracting the “processing key” from a high-def DVD player. This key can be used to gain access to every single Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disc.

Previously, another Doom9 user called Muslix64 had broken both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD by extracting the “volume keys” for each disc, a cumbersome process. This break builds on Muslix64’s work but extends it — now you can break all AACS-locked discs.

AACS took years to develop, and it has been broken in weeks. The developers spent billions, the hackers spent pennies.

Just goes to show… if you build it… they will crack it! DRM doesn’t work. Period. Anything can be broken. Think of all the money that could’ve been spent making better movies that instead went to making sure pirated copies wouldn’t appear online. And pirated copies will still appear online. In full HD quality as well. How about providing this content in an easier to acquire manner and for cheaper than currently can be purchased at the store if you want less people to pirate your content? Oh wait… that’s far too obvious and simple. A technical solution will not solve a social problem. Will they ever learn?

Ok, so… say your university’s online classes *cough* UMD *cough* doesn’t support OS X and you’re left wondering how exactly you should use that expensive MacBook Pro to take your online classes. Well, fear not, here’s a complete walk through on how to get Vista installed in OS X using Parallels. Of course, if you’re using Windows XP still, you can do the same thing using this site. And if you want to use the (currently free) VMware Fusion beta, as my review of Vista shows, it works well there. I really hate dual-booting, but using Apple’s Boot Camp, you can install Windows in a dual-boot configuration on your Intel-based Apple computer. Also, for the love of god, can people please stop coding to a single platform?

Pictures of ATI’s R600, a beefy card have surfaced. At 12.4 inches it’s a big one. The specs on it look quite impressive. Check out Engadget’s synopsis for some English.

After the post from a couple days ago about reasons for and against upgrading to Vista, I found this article from TG Daily that does some tests to find out if the Ready Boost feature of Vista (using a USB 2.0 memory stick in place of RAM) had any impact on application startup time in Vista.

The main feature behind Ready Boost, Super Fetch, pre-loads the most used applications in RAM to reduce startup times. The idea is that since most users have 512MB RAM, and many USB 2.0 memory sticks are faster than hard disks, the memory stick can be used as Super Fetch cache. What TG Daily found is that although Ready Boost does make an impact (in their tests they experienced up to 50% decrease in load times) adding just 512MB RAM more made far more of an impact in performance. It allows Super Fetch enough storage to cache several applications and prevents excessive swap usage. So while I still don’t feel it is a reason to upgrade to Vista, Super Fetch certainly seems like a cool and useful technology that will improve application load times for many people. Maybe they could try putting the swap on a USB memory stick and seeing how that affects performance.

HotHardare reviews the ASUS GeForce EN8800GTX video card. It looks like it is definitely the fastest card out on the market today. It is using Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GPU which is the first (and currently only) DirectX 10 card on the market. It supports HDCP so you can play protected high-definition content. It would make a great card for use with HDTV’s and high-end gaming rigs. The price is steep, but expect it to drop quickly as more competition in the DirectX 10 card market comes out. I am looking forward to seeing what game makers can do with the next generation of video cards.

This is a pretty good list of reasons for and against upgrading to Vista. I agree that there are definite improvements in Vista (check out my review) but overall some of his reasons for upgrading to Vista aren’t very good, in my opinion.

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If you’re in need of some Mac OS X applications to liven up your system, check out this list. This person went through and researched popular applications on OS X, so these are ones that a lot of people are finding useful. While everyone has their opinion on what is an “essential” application (in fact, of the ones on this list, I only use a small handful) if you’re looking for a particular application, this might be a good place to look. There are even links to other such lists. I plan on checking out a few myself soon. If I do, I’ll be sure to add a review of it.

TweakTown has reviewed Corsair XMS2 Dominator PC2-10000 memory modules and gives them a high rating. Only the extreme computer builders will probably ever try these, as they are quite expensive. However if you must have the world’s fastest RAM, this might be the RAM for you.

Amarok is my favorite music player on Linux (and other OS’s running KDE) and version 1.4.5 has been released. If you haven’t tried this application for playing and organizing your music collection, you should definitely check it out.