April 21, 2006 by Santaduck.

Tactical Ops:Crossfire Interview: I just interviewed my long time friend Petterf regarding the upcoming Tactical Ops: Crossfire release. TO:C is the free mod for UT2004, an updated of the original mod for UT99 which was the most popular mod for Unreal. Of course, the prerelease begins today (see April 2 news below), with the server version being released, as well as a client encrypted with a password– the password will be released in one week (Apr 28), so that servers will be up, running, and populated from minute one. Petterf is the official Mac member of the TO:C team, but I also know him from his earlier roles as TO:AoT [rm] server admin, and an official Mac betatester for UT2004, the original TO and TO:AoT, as well as for TOST. Petter also gave us some exclusive screenshots, and Province looks very nice indeed. Check it out here.

XIII Review: Our reviews editor just finished up his review of Feral Interactive’s XIII. Now I saw this game before on a Feral preview disk, and it was beautiful– it’s a FPS based on the Unreal engine, but omg, it’s beautiful with severe tweaking of the engine which results in beautifully cel-shaded (think comic) graphics. They did a great job on this, much better than that old Robin Hood cartoon mod. You’ll see comic panel headshots, and POW! hit damage, and the like. The thing is, now I want to buy this game, after reading his review. The storyline is apparently Robert Ludlum-esque, with the conspiracy theories ratcheting up a notch at every step, and of course, you wake up with a loss of memory and the world after you. Check out the review here.

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April 21, 2006 by Santaduck.

Robert Cringley, host of PBS’s Electric Money and former columnist for Infoworld, wrote today in his blog regarding the relationship between OS X and Windows.

One of the most attention-grabbing topics was the possibility of running Windows applications on Apple Macintoshes, without installing Windows XP, and without Windows virtualization:

“I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5…

‘m told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab — Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.

Think of the implications. A souped-up OS X kernel with native Windows API support and the prospect of mixing and matching Windows and Mac applications would be, for many users, the best of both worlds. There would be no copy of Windows XP to buy…”

Cringley begins by thinking through Apple’s strategy regarding Windows, given its latest moves. He comes to his speculation based upon Steve Jobs’ 1997 $150M deal with Microsoft, where Apple may have obtained some legal rights to the Windows API, which could enable Windows apps directly in OS X.

Granted, Cringley simply makes several speculations and offers these all up as possibilities to think about, but the legal issues and the impact on users as well as the future of Apple are far-reaching.

Read more here: Robert Cringley PBS blogarticle

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