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The big “D” Michael Dell has spoken some words lately about absorbing Apple’s OSX into Dell’s mix of OS’s distributed with their systems. I wonder how Microsoft feels knowing that not only is Apple’s future plans to go X86, but the biggest computer distributor in the world [Dell] wants a piece of their competition [Apple]..

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“If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers,” Dell wrote in an email. It’s the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple’s software.
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If you’ve ever wanted to benchmark your hard drive against another or were just curious to how fast it truely was checkout this free application by Simpli Software called HDTach.

Apparently this highly regarded tool will allow you to store a 9gb dual-layer DVD to a 1 - 2gb compressed file. Also retaining all the extras, digital audio, etc at 1/8th the space it would normally consume. No fancy MPEG-4 functions needed and you have a real DVD for your “physical archive”

ratDVD takes a full featured DVD movie and puts it into a highly compressed .ratDVD container format file - while preserving all the features of the original DVD such as:

-Full anamorphic picture, seamless branching, multiple video angles, multiple audio channels, subpictures, etc.
-Keep movie versions (Directors Cut, Theatrical version, etc.), Alternate story endings, making of, video commentary , cut scenes, etc..
-Keep complete menus, navigation and features
-Reliable high quality, valid check-summed container.

You can also convert a .ratDVD file back to DVD format, burn it to a DVDR and watch the movie using a regular DVD player.

ratDVD supports metatags similar to ID3 tags in MP3 files. The metatags can contain information about the movie, such as title, actors, year of release, plot outline etc. It can even include a thumbnail of the DVD cover. The information for the tags is automatically retrieved from IMDB.

I came across a very cool tool today called ShareKMC. It is similar to Synergy except it adds the ability to copy/paste images between the two computers.

Here are a few reviews:

On a side note: I found yet another tool that is similar to Synergy called Kavoom

Just in time for the weekend too! While we were in Las Vegas last January for CES 2005 EA gave us a damnnn good demo of Battlefield 2. So good infact that we thought it may be fake or running on some super-duper high end gaming machine. According to the released minimum requirement specs all you need is a 1.7ghz processor and a low end video card… We’ll see about that

A few weeks ago Microsoft promised that the upcoming IE 7 would feature tabbed browsing. Well it looks as if they couldn’t wait. This past Wednesday Microsoft released a new MSN toolbar that added this new defunkt functionality..

Yet another sign Firefox is rapidly gaining on the legacy IE.

A few days ago I was praising Microsoft’s Photo Suite 10 and it’s great panoramic stiching abilities. Well today it appears that Microsoft has yet again released a new vector based pixel editing tool called Acrylic. Although, currently in Beta form it’s a mear 77mb to download and reportedly “not as buggy as regular microsoft gold code”

Worth a try I guess. Can’t beat the price.