In January 2006, Apple moved from PowerPC processors to Intel processors. This brought with it a number of changes to the way that a Macintosh works. These changes involved the move from the IBM ...

Even in the Linux world, where cluster and grid computing are well established, there is often confusion about how to distinguish a grid from a cluster. Let's look at characteristics of each. Grid ...

Volume Number: 24 (2008) Issue Number: 02 Column Tag: MacTech Labs Virtualization Benchmarking How do Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and VMware Fusion stack up? by Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief ...

Ironically, the main performance bottleneck for game programmers today - as ten years ago - is getting pixels up on the screen. With the advent of 100 MHz bus speeds, built-in hardware support for ...

For the past couple of columns, we have discussed various ways to store and access data using AppleScript. One column provided an introduction to Database Events, a background application in Mac OS X ...

Software is abstract and non-tactile by its very nature. It can be difficult to see what it is doing and why it may be misbehaving. To get a better view of software, we often use tools like gdb, leaks ...

This article explains how to program a Microchip PIC microcontroller on a Macintosh running OSX. The programmer hardware that is used is a Wisp628 by Van Ooijen Technische Informatica. The software ...

The API for contextual menu plugins is different in OS X than in OS 8/9. It's COM-compatible--it's based on Microsoft's Component Object Model. That should be enough to scare you off, but don't let it ...

The Apple “Hierarchical File System” is a major advance in Macintosh technology. From the programmer's standpoint, HFS is an an extension to the current file manager. Many calls are the same, some ...

Warning: These programs use the alternate screen buffer, an area of memory that is also used by the Mac Plus RAM cache. As a result, when the program exits, Finder information previously in the cache ...