Several hours not being able to use the computer much (because it gets slow and because you must try and not modify files while it’s running)… and they wonder why people don’t back their hard drives up more often.

If there’s a computer maker that should include RAID-1 by default in all it’s machine, it’s Apple.

Feed Icons [via]: Now that Microsoft’s decided to use the same icon as Firefox for RSS feeds (rather than keep the one they took from Safari) you’ll see this symbol pop up on every blog, so you might as well get ready now and be one of the early adopters.

Not a fan of orange? Download the package and customize the icon to your liking. We believe that as a symbol, the feed icon is recognizable enough that it doesn’t need to be restricted to one colour.

Nintendo has a patent on hardware optimization for displacement mapping (that’s, basically, describing mountains, for instance, not as polygons but as a a height bitmap — looks better and more natural). So maybe those “first Revolution screenshots” that were all over the web, always followed by a “those guys don’t even have a Nintendo dev kit yet” disclaimer, weren’t actually so off the mark. Cool. Reminds me of the old Comanche game (the first), the only flight simulator I ever found pretty: it used voxels for terrain mapping (which amounts pretty much to the same as a displacement map) and looked much better in 320x240 than the latest Flight Simulator on any hi-res screen. (But I’m nearsighted, so I may have a slightly peculiar vision of the world.)

P.S. Oh, yeah, it can do that, too (but I don’t think Nintendo plans to put in several gigs of video RAM). I’d much sooner buy a cheap, sturdy Revolution that outputs pretty, lifelike 3D, than a Sony- or Microsoft-produced HDTV-ready behemoth with sharp, pointy polygons and lens flares.

Actually, now that I put it that way, I’d be all the more tempted to buy a console for the first time in my life just to spite Microsoft and Sony.

The more icons on your desktop, the more OS X lags. I should deactivate the desktop, at least on my mini (my iMac runs Clutter, so I’m not going to count the windows), but I don’t know if I could live without it.

It’d really be time for Steve Jobs to remember that the Finder originally was one of the Mac’s biggest advantages. How can it ever reach the point where you mustn’t use the desktop at all anymore?

I mustn’t be reading the right blogs: it took an English-speaking blog’s post for me to find out that France is preparing its own DMCA, that a Vivendi – Sacem amendment wants to make filesharing software illegal, and that the whole thing will be discussed in emergency, hurry, and discretion at the end of the month, when three fourths of the Parliament are home preparing their Christmas parties. (Seriously, is that the “emergency” regarding French legislation right now?)

Once that’s done, I suppose that won’t prevent them from getting back to lobbying for a tax over DSL connections¹.

P.S. Ah, turns out it’s an emergency because it’s a European directive that has to be implemented before next year. We avoided software patents; can’t win every time. But when I think of all those DMCA horror stories we’d read, thinking “ha, ha, thank heavens it’s not happening here”…

¹ Or maybe not.

P.S. STOPDADVSI.NET.