Friday

Friday

Well, this is it, the day that Leopard finally arrives. This promises to take MacOS even further in front of the much troubled Vista. An issue that cropped up in conversation recently is how Apple is able to charge only £85 for its newest OS, which has one version, where as Microsoft charges huge sums for the full versions and has a confusing number of SKUs available. It was agreed that this was in part because while Steve Jobs might like to paint Leopard as a whole new OS, it is in fact no more than an update and that most of the code is still the original MacOS X. In fact, Microsoft could be praised for making its service packs available for free. Only we know it isn't quite like that, as while each new MacOS X version adds loads of features, the service packs are mainly just fixing bugs and security issues.

I also discovered a new plug-in for Firefox - 'DownloadThemAll'. In the age of broadband I never thought I would need a download manager, but I have been using an older, slower 3G data card that tips out at 384Kbps, and also keeps dropping downloads. 'DownloadThemAll' solved the problem but using it felt decidedly retro.

But now it's only 4pm on a Friday and I can hear the 'donks' emanating from my MSN Messenger, as everyone signs off and leaves for the weekend.

As for next week, I can looking forward to getting down and dirty with Penryn, based on 45nm technology which Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel has described it as the, "greatest semiconductor breakthrough in 40 years". I'll explain more in the review next week, which I fully expect to be just as interesting as this last one.