Everybody knows that I love (sarcasm..) Flash. The current Flash player version is 10, however there is a 10.1 Beta 3 release out at the time of this writing, so I decided to give it a go to see how it performs. The first thing to note is how it’s installed. This is on the download page:In Windows, this is a five step process.Close all web browsers...

The GUI which is the fastest of them all is the one which is an absolute no-frills environment. "No-frills" defined:No wallpaper No animations Solid-colored application window borders No color gradients in title bars No anti-aliased fonts (i.e. font smoothing) No application window shadows No transparency/translucence Squared-off corners of...

IRC is one of those things that either you get or you don’t. You probably know IRC as chat rooms. But if you said that to a diehard IRC user, he or she would give you a dirty look or two because "chat room" is a term originally popularized by AOL. And to be technically correct, IRC has no chat rooms. They’re called channels. Maybe...

An anonymous reader on Slashdot wrote that based on exhaustive benchmark testing, the upcoming v8.10 of Ubuntu Linux is noticeably slower in some areas compared to previous releases (namely v7.04). "Linux" and "Slower" never fall within the same sentence, but they do now. To calm the masses out there, no, Ubuntu 8.10 will not be a crawling...

I’ve mentioned on the PCMech Live show many times my disdain for the fact that if you’re one of the few running a 64-bit processor, your options for native 64-bit applications are few and far between on the consumer end. Chances are very high that the computer you’re using right now has a 32-bit CPU in it. Here’s the short-short...

For development and testing reasons, I wanted to set up a local server on my Mac Pro so that I could operate a local copy of PCMech.com. I thought I would document how I went about it for the benefit of others down the road. The easiest method to set up a quick LAMP server under OS X is to use MAMP. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Now, both Apache...

The last time I looked at gOS I was not impressed. It looked like it had a long way to go. The operation seemed oversimplified and too watered down. Even though I haven’t tried out the latest version of gOS, I might. Do you see the screen shot here? Does it remind you of an OS made by Apple? If not, it should, leaning app list and all. Am I saying gOS is...

Over the past several months, I’ve worked in an environment composed of both Macs and PCs. The Macs in question have mainly been employed for video work, so a degree of cross-platform usage goes on; video primarily on the Macs, and pretty much everything else on the PCs. There’s no avoiding the Macs since I work with both the IT and AV side of things. As a...

As of the time I write this article, I have been using the new Mac Pro for almost three weeks. I bought the Mac on October 26th, the day of OS X Leopard’s release. I bought it on a Friday, spent that weekend messing around with it, and have been using it in my day-to-day life ever since that following Monday. I am also happy to report that I have not had...

I have now officially gone two weeks using the Mac Pro. I bought the Mac Pro on the day of Leopard’s release. They gave me the Leopard upgrade DVD with the system. The first thing I did when I cranked it up was install Leopard. So how is the experience? Buggy So far, I am not exactly thrilled with Leopard. Unfortunately, too, this is my first experience...

Mac OS X is a different paradigm than Windows. Yes, many things act very similar, but there is a lot that is different as well. As a Windows user trying to learn OS X, some of it will be confusing. As I write this, I have not been using OS X very long. I am a long-time Windows user, so I understand the viewpoint of somebody who is confused by OS X. Below, I will...