Monday 28 July 2008

Battery Statistics

Simon Wilson recently explained that you can get information on the original and current capacity of your battery using the following command:

ioreg -w0 -l | grep Capacity

This works great on my machine, but just thought I'd mention that for those afraid of the command line, as I've previously mentioned, there's a great little utility called CoconutBattery which provides a GUI interface to all this. Try it, you might like it.

Tuesday 8 July 2008

The start of a trend?

From MacWorld:

Huge newspaper makes Mac switch move - Mac - Macworld UK:

One of Europe's largest newspaper publishers, Axel Springer AG, has announced plans to migrate its 10,000 employees and 150 newspapers in 30 countries to the Mac

Speaking in a video message that's now available through YouTube, company CEO Mathias Döpfner notes the following four reasons for the shift:

  • 'Most of the company’s layout work was already being done on Macs
  • 'Macs are more user friendly than other computers
  • 'Apple creates the most elegant computers
  • 'Macs are cheaper to buy and easier to maintain than they were in the past.'

Could this be the start of a trend? I'm not expecting an avalanche of such announcements in the near future, but the world is changing. Microsoft seem to be suffering from horrendous PR problems at the moment, with people (regardless of the reality of the situation) starting to view them as dazed and confused. I saw a magazine cover the other day which posed (if I remember correctly) the question: "The end for Microsoft?".

The $64000 question for me is "are Apple really any better than Microsoft?" I think the jury is still out on that one...