Tomorrow, Bill Gates is ending his full-time job at Microsoft.

While I have left the PC and Windows behind for personal use, I have to say that most of what I’ve done in my professional life has been done in a PC, and the passion and love I feel for technology involves everything from PCs, Macs, UNIX systems, and everything in between.

He, who has been labeled as evil, is the one among the very few people who has made it possible for almost anyone with a fairly reasonable economic power to own and use a computer, to have an email address, to use a word processor, to do your taxes in an easier way…

Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done for the past three decades.

Your legacy will prevail… whether people like it or not.

Microsoft has publicly offered over $44 billion to acquire Yahoo!.

The offer arrives just in time, since Yahoo! has been struggling financially, this week they announced ‘hundreds’ of layoffs. In the end, they disclosed the number: 1000 jobs.

Because there has been a lot of buzz about Windows Vista and hardware performance, I recently installed Vista on my Mac Pro with the most current version (at the time of writing this article) of Apple’s BootCamp Beta.

It is now known that Vista requires quite some beefed-up specs to have the so-called Aero Interface active.

I first installed it using Parallels and ran it as a virtual app… which literally felt like a downgraded version of Windows XP. Then that’s when I decided to installed on it’s own partition to take full advantage of the hardware in my Mac Pro.

I was pleasantly surprised on how the Mac Pro performed through the installation process… and even before installing the BootCamp drivers once the Windows installation was complete, the Aero interface was already up and running.

One interesting thing that I found on the System Properties is a ‘Score’ that Windows gives to your hardware configuration. It takes into account the CPU, the RAM, the graphics card, the graphics memory, and the hard disk.

As noted on the image above, the Mac Pro scored a quite comfortable 4.4 on the Windows Experience Index. It is comfortable because…

“A computer with a base score of 4 or 5 is able to run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality, and it is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multiplayer and 3‑D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content. Computers with a base score of 5 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released.” -Windows Vista Help

One thing that I haven’t been able to find is the full scale… where does it end? is it a 6? a 10? Do you know?.

So, it is safe to say that if you purchase a Mac Pro, You will be able to easily run both Windows Vista and Mac OS X, especially if you are someone like me… I started switching to Mac a bit over 2 years ago, now I have 2 Macs at home (a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro), and I ocassionally run Windows XP on Parallels, which gives you the advantage of having both Operating Systems running at the same time without the need of restarting the computer… Not the case for Bootcamp, which requires me to restart every time I need to use either OS.

To the point: If you love Macs, but you are still tied to Windows… Get a Mac, and enjoy both worlds.

=)

Hilarious , Mr Craig Ferguson!

Well, You have to tell me what do you see on this screenshot of my desktop…

Parallels has released a new beta, with a ‘Coherence’ mode… what does it do? well… it looks the way the screenshot does… standalone “Windows’ windows” making a “windowed environment a thing from the past.

The announcement within Parallels’ forum is more complete, and some of the new features seem very complex. While I haven’t had the chance to try them, this ‘Coherence’ mode alone left me amazed.

Looks quite good, huh?