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Portal 2 Gets Release Date: “AndrewGOO9 writes ‘After what has seemed like an eternity since Valve initially announced a sequel to their lauded puzzle title Portal, a release date has finally been attached to the game. Originally slated to be released before the end of the year in time for the holidays, Valve instead opted to delay the game, citing reasons such as, ‘making games is hard’ as well as continuing their tradition of releasing games when they’re finished as opposed to rushing them out the door. Either way, mark your calendars for February 9th, 2011, and in the meantime, brush up on thinking with portals.’ There’s some new gameplay footage available, and Valve announced that Stephen Merchant will be lending his voice to the game.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

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It’s being reported in a number of places, including Engadget, that some code has been found in the most recent firmware allowing a development phone to bypass the activation routine in iTunes. Some are thinking this is in reference to the rumored CDMA (Verizon) iPhone. Evidence is also there to support that a new type or updated version of the iPad is also in the works, though that should hardly be surprising.

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AppleInsider is reporting that the latest build of Mac OS X 10.6.5 has been seeded to developers. One of the expected improvements is with 3D graphics support. As someone who as recently taken up the Steam habit this is welcome news for me.

According to this post on the AppleInsider forums it sounds promising:

From some I’ve the reports I’ve seen, Apple at the urging of Valve and others is really starting to get serious about their OpenGL implementation. With the drivers in development some willing to break the NDA have reported scores up to 3 times higher in OpenGL Viewer and significantly higher game performance on all cards.

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I just can’t get over some of the stuff on Microsoft’s PC vs Mac argument page. Some of it is true, like the lack of Blu-Ray support. This is something that really irritates me about the Mac platform. Some of the other stuff is just simply stretching it such as the following:

Working smoothly.

Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC. For example, the mouse works differently. And many of the shortcuts you’re familiar with don’t work the same way on a Mac.

This statement really makes me want to wipe OS X off my laptop and install Windows 7, it really does. Then again, it really is amazing how I managed to adapt to the mouse and keyboard shortcuts.

But in the end, the thing that really makes me scratch my head is why the page exists at all, or rather, why it’s just so thin on real reasons to use Windows 7. Yes, Apple has been running a negative ad campaign for years poking fun at Microsoft and most of the time I thought they really did hit some of the weak points in Windows. Despite all of that, Apple still openly advertises that you can run Windows on a Mac and they even go so far as to provide the tools to do so. Their tools resize the OS X partition, create a new one for Windows and provide all of the drivers needed to get Windows running. You can then dual boot your Mac system between OS X and Windows. Point is, they’re not afraid to admit that sometimes a person really might want or need to run Windows for whatever function and they provide the tools to do so. Microsoft should be playing on this and attempting to convince people that they need Windows for whatever reason and that a Mac’s can also be a great PC.

Instead we have Microsoft making some incredibly weak arguments on how Windows 7 is superior to the OS X. Some of them are valid and some of them are simply wrong. Either way, Microsoft is primarily a software company and they shouldn’t be pissing on a potential platform. Microsoft has had Office on OS X for years but lets face it, it lags behind the Windows version and has never felt like a proper Mac application. The current 2008 version is incredibly slow even on the latest Macs. While Office 2011 may be set to change that it’s just too early to tell.

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I’m a bit behind on my Mac tip of the week entries and these two tips won’t really make up for it but they’re interesting all the same.

First one is that you can manage applications from the application switcher. By pressing command tab you can then tab to different applications. Once an application is highlighted you can issue other command+? commands like command+q to quit or command+h to hide an application.

The second tip involves iCal. iCal in Snow Leopard now officially supports synchronizing with Google Calendar. Adding new accounts is simply done in iCal’s preferences area but adding addition calendars you have access to isn’t as obvious. To add additional calendars simply click on the delegates tab when editing your iCal accounts in preferences.

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via – http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/

“When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put “-2000″ on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.”