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I Feel Anachronistic

Dan Wood has a good post up about storing per-machine preferences. But what struck me wasn’t the use of MAC addresses, it was his example of what sort of per-host preference they need to store:

For instance, we have a preference to remember if Core Image is accelerated on the particular machine. (The test for this is a bit of a lenghty process, so it’s best to perform it once when needed and store the result in user defaults for subsequent launches.)

What this means to me is that, while gestaltVIA2Addr lives on, there is no gestaltCoreImagePresent or gestaltCoreImageAccelerated. I’ve been living in server-land so long that my knowledge of the Mac APIs has slipped into Stone-Age status. This weekend may need to be spent digging out my copy of THINK Pascal, firing up Basilisk II, queuing the Footloose soundtrack on my iPod, and proving that a stone knife can still cut.

Posted on 28 December 2006 in Uncategorized

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A small note for Core Duo MacBook Owners

Don’t worry too much about the shiny new Core 2 Duo machines. Going from a 2GHz Core Duo MacBook to a 2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook will net you no perceptible performance increase.

Remember when you replaced your PowerBook (or iBook) with the MacBook? The day and night difference, the way apps seemed to launch half a second before you clicked the icon? There is none of that here. You might shave a few seconds off of lengthy compiles (in my case 20 seconds saved on a seven minute build time), but you aren’t going to notice any difference in real-life usage.

Now, that doesn’t mean Leopard and its 64-bit GUI libraries won’t change the playing field. But right now there’s no real difference. Besides, by the time Leopard ships you will probably be able to buy a 2.1+ GHz MacBook anyways.

Posted on 13 December 2006 in Uncategorized

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