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• December 24th, 2008

  How do you play the classic game Heretic natively on an Intel Mac?

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• December 29th, 2008

  Is there really any reason to use Leopard?

  Hobbes, when I first replied, I was focused on the feasability of going back to Tiger on a Leopard-capable Mac. Thinking a little more about it, and seeing the other replies, I would like to change my reply a little (and concur with the others): my mom’s first-gen 2GHz MacBook works great with Leopard and it wouldn’t be more usable with Tiger. Actually, that MacBook was good, but not great, when it had 1GiB of memory. I recently upgraded it to 1.5GiB and this is when it became a pleasure to use. Purists will tell you that it’s better to have a pair of identical SODIMMs installed on your MacBook. This is true, but this effect (up to 5% faster on some specific computational tasks) is much less than the effect of having 512MiB more working space for the system. If you have 1GiB or less of memory, upgrade! On the MacBook, it is easy: 3 screws and a lever (you can find a step-by-step guide online, even directly from Apple in this case http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1651). The 1GiB SODIMM I bought was 10 EUR in a Mac shop that was able to guarantee that it would work in the MacBook (you may have to pay 12 for yours, I was lucky). If you want to do it at minimal expense, replace one SODIMM with a 1GiB one. If you want to be done with it (and the satisfaction of knowing everything is as fast as it could), replace both. You can check the amount of memory currently installed in your MacBook in “Apple menu -> About this Mac”.
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• December 28th, 2008

  Is there really any reason to use Leopard?

  Applications that you never use do not make your Mac slower, with the following caveats: 1/ some applications like to have a helper program that starts at login. This does slow down every login, and sometimes makes your Mac slower also the rest of the time. You can see if you have these in System Preferences -> Accounts. By the way, you will see iTunesHelper there, I think you can remove it. It must be useful for starting iTunes automatically when you plug an iPod or to get your podcasts for you in the background or something. iTunes works without it. 2/ Having had an almost full hard drive for a long time can create fragmentation and make your Mac appear slower than it should. A fresh install will solve this. I find spotlight to be more snappy on Leopard, and already some applications are out that no longer work on Tiger, but it’s perfectly doable to use Tiger for everything in 2009.
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• December 27th, 2008

  Is there open source software available that analyses a string and guesses the gender of the author?

  Not OSS, but this is something: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php
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• December 27th, 2008

  Is hdmi higher quality than dvi?

  > Having said that some moitors with a DVI input can’t display HDCP but that is a > limitation of the monitor not the cable. And (all?) current DVI video cards are unable to carry HDCP to the monitor through a DVI port, but you can see that as a limitation of the video cards :) Seriously, DVI is a non-encrypted standard. Although it is digital, it actually contains “red”, “blue” and “green” wires. The fact that people later chose to define HDMI as an extension of DVI and optionally re-use the wires in the DVI connector for carrying something else does not change the fact that a device (monitor or video card) with the DVI label does not need to know anything about HDCP. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface (the rest of the page is also very interesting): Some new DVD players, TV sets (including HDTV sets) and video projectors have DVI/HDCP connectors; these are physically the same as DVI connectors but transmit an encrypted signal using the HDCP protocol for copy protection. Computers with DVI video connectors can use many DVI-equipped HDTV sets as a display; however, due to Digital Rights Management, it is not clear whether such systems will eventually be able to play protected content, as the link is not encrypted. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Multimedia_Interface
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• December 27th, 2008

  Is hdmi higher quality than dvi?

  HDMI is not better quality than DVI (DVI is already a digital signal, for up to 1920×1200 for single-link DVI, more for dual-link DVI. From a technical standpoint, there is nothing to improve in DVI at this time). However, DVI does not carry the encrypted signal that is the only thing allowed to come out from blu-ray drives. As a consequence, you will not get HD at all if you watch a blu-ray disk on a graphic card with only a DVI port, only purposefully downgraded DVD-like quality. Buying a DVI -> HDMI adapter won’t help. The whole chain has to be able to carry the encrypted signal in order to get HD on the screen. You need a new video card with HDMI or DisplayPort, and a new screen with the same. Welcome to the wonderful world of HDCP, where you need to buy again (and pay more) for devices that limit what you can do with them. If you do not like it, vote with your wallet and postpone your transition to blu-ray.
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