Steam User? You Shouldn’t Upgrade to 10.6.4

It seems like Steam for Mac doesn’t play well with Mac OS X 10.6.4. Valve itself has issued a warning to users who logged in during the weekend on Steam:

“The recent 10.6.4 update from Apple has noticeable performance issues for NVidia graphic chip owners running high performance games. If you wish to avoid this, you should consider waiting to install the 10.6.4 update until Apple has had the opportunity to address this issue. Full details of what is contained in the 10.6.4 update can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4150. If you have already installed this update and believe your graphic performance is affected, please contact Apple support (http://www.apple.com/support/) for details on what to do.”

If you’re a Steam user and care about your game performances, perhaps you should wait for Apple to fix these problems. Should happen soon.

New York Times Interviews Foxconn Employee

What’s it like to work at Foxconn’s hellish factories? The New York Times interviewed  24 Yuan Yandong, whom describes his technical ten hour nightshift as an assembler of hard drives.

“His task is to help complete 1,600 hard drives — his workshop’s daily quota — and to make sure every one is perfect. Seated in the middle of the assembly line in his black Foxconn sports shirt, cotton slacks and company-mandated white plastic slippers, he waits for the conveyor belt to deliver a partly assembled rectangular hard drive to his station. He places two plastic chips inside the drive’s casing, inserts a device that redirects light in the drive and then fastens four screws with an electric screwdriver before sending the drive down the line. He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep task.”

Read more

Geohot Already Working on iPhone 4 Exploit

George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot) confirmed during the “nuit du hack” meeting in Paris that he’s already working on an exploit for the iPhone 4. He said that he posted pictures of his jailbroken iPad way before Spirit released its tool, and now he’s working hard to release its exploit once the new iPhone is released.

How he believes the exploit is gonna work we don’t know, but in the meantime check out the (blurry) video of the meeting after the break.

Read more

Google Updates Gmail for iPad, Adds Fullscreen Compose Window

Google has rolled out some nice improvements for Gmail on the iPad, introducing a fullscreen compose window and several scrolling bug fixes.

“Today we’re happy to announce an improved experience for writing emails on Gmail web interface for iPad. When you write an email you’ll now get a big full screen compose window instead of splitting the screen between your inbox and the compose view. More text is visible at once and there are no more distractions with messages on the side. We’ve also fixed problems that prevented scrolling on long messages. Thanks to everyone who reported the issue via the ‘Send feedback’ feature at the bottom of the screen.”

Read more