Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

It seems interesting to me that the JDK 1.6 is 64 bit only. Nothing else in the Leopard install on my Air is 64-bit. Indeed, the only other 64 bit app I have is MySQL. Seriously, WTF?

Found this via MacRumors. IBM appears to be looking into furthering themselves away from windows. Though I believe they do quite a bit of work with linux and unix, this appears to have a larger impact on there day to day use. They still would have quite a bit to flush out like creating a supported version of UDB and Websphere for OSX. A few other things are mentioned in the article. Not surprised that "19 of 22 (86%) Users Ask to Keep the Mac."

Check out the rest HERE.

So I had my first big failure with the Air this week. A couple of days ago, I tried to connect to the file server at the hizzy and got a kernel panic. Honestly, the issues I have had with network drives and Leopard *cough*crap*cough* this seemed like par for the course. I hard powered it and waited, login and PANIC!. Fuck. Next I hard powered it and right after POST, it just shut back down. This went into a complete loop and it was bricked for a few days.

Noticed this on Apple's Store. From $500 to $700 off the original price for what is still great machine. You have to get this through the educational site and Clearance items.

So, I took a chunk of my tax refund this year and threw down for a MacBook Air. Yes, the total-pimp version, Solid State Disk and all.

So, lets clear up some stuff. The battery life is OK. Not great, but OK. I don't know how much this is going to affect me over the long haul. I would say it is on a par with the first-gen MacBook I upgraded from. However, I had two batteries for that. I only ever actually used the two batteries when dealing with air-travel days. Is the irony that the Air sucks in the air? Har har.

Ars via Kevin:

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.[ed: Emphasis mine and OMGZ OMGZ OMGZ OMGZ YAH!]

These efforts are largely made possible by the inherent portability of Trolltech's Qt development toolkit, the underlying framework used by KDE software. Qt is designed for cross-platform portability and even uses native widgets on both Windows and Mac OS X. Trolltech uses a multi-licensing model that makes Qt available under the GPL for open-source software development and requires programmers to buy a commercial license for proprietary development. Previously, only Mac OS X and Linux/X11 versions were available under the GPL, but Trolltech decided to make the Windows version available under the GPL too with the introduction of Qt 4. This finally opened the door for porting open-source KDE applications to the Windows operating system.

I thought the sub was just hype and rumor, but nope, it's real:

10:25 am Pre-orders today, shipping in two weeks
10:24 am $1799
10:24 am 2 GB Memory standard
10:23 am 5 hours of Battery Life
10:23 am No optical drive, but a Superdrive accessory is available for $99. Also, software comes with the MacBook Air that allows you to "borrow" a Mac or PCs optical drive.
10:21 am 802.11n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR
10:20 am Other features: 45 Watt MagSafe, 1 USB 2.0 port, Micro-DVI, Audio Out