AT&T to drop all but Unlimited texting plans | iLounge News

AT&T is set to discontinue all but its most expensive, unlimited text messaging plans, leaving customers with a choice between expensive pay-as-you-go plans or paying for a full unlimited plan.

I wonder how much of this is a response to iMessage, Apple’s upcoming free messaging service that essentially replaces SMS for iPhone to iPhone communications in iOS 5.

AppleInsider | Apple seen merging iOS, Mac OS X with custom A6 chip in 2012

Peter Misek with Jefferies & Co. said in a note to investors on Wednesday that he sees such a transition possible with a new MacBook Air running Apple’s custom next-generation “A6″ processor. The theory, first reported on by Barron’s, would have a new iPad, iPhone and MacBook Air all running the A6 in 2012.

The headline is misleading here. It’s not really about merging Mac OS X and iOS, necessarily. It’s about moving iOS onto a broad range of devices, including the traditional ultraportable laptop. I’m sure part of the goal here is to turn iOS into a broad-based portable OS, with a focus on power management. One of the best aspects of the iPad is its incredible battery life. It would be great to have that in a laptop the size of the 11″ Air with an OS that’s optimized for the small screen.

I’ve been running Lion on my laptop since the GM came out in early June, and on my iMac since the official release. Some folks are still holding off on upgrading. Unless you’ve got some mission-critical piece of software that is incompatible, I see no reason to. It’s better in pretty much every way.

Lion is clearly optimized for the trackpad. Enough so that, if you use a mouse, I would suggest ditching it for the Magic Trackpad. I did this even before Lion, but Lion makes it all the more worthwhile. I don’t miss a mouse at all.

Aside from the under-the-hood advantages and various modernization upgrades, the biggest advantages of Lion for me are:

• Mission Control: I’ve been hugely surprised how much of a difference this makes. A three-finger upswipe now reveals all your spaces and windows, neatly organized. Unlike the random disarray of Expose, which I always found clunky, Mission Control makes it incredibly fast to find what you are looking for.
• Trackpad Gestures: iOS gave Apple a great deal of experience with developing a gesture-based UI. While the Lion experience is a bit less direct because of the lack of a touchscreen, with a bit of effort the touchpad adds another dimension of control over what was possible with the mouse. If you’re used to the old-style trackpad scrolling, Lion is disorienting at first as it reverses the direction of scrolling, but it really does make more sense with the trackpad, as you feel you’re directly manipulating the page as opposed to the scrollbars. Swiping between spaces, between pages in Safari, and adding pinching and zooming capabilities to web pages enhance the experience considerably.
• New Mail App: Better layout, better organization, better searching. Just better. The best addition: a browser like favorites bar. Navigate to folders by pressing command-1, command-2, etc. Move messages to the same folders with command-control-1, etc.
• Full disk encryption: I was a prior File Vault user in Snow Leopard, but this essentially made your entire home directory an encrypted disk image: one huge file that was mounted as a disk each time you logged in. This meant that anything outside of your home directory was unencrypted, but a bigger issue was that it rendered Time Machine (one of the best features of the Mac OS) useless, since any minor change would mean backing up a huge monolithic home directory file. Forget about tracking the history of a single file: it was impossible.

There are many other new features in Lion, some of which (e.g. versions) have a lot of promise that is yet to be realized because of application support.

For people like me who have been debating between the 11″ and 13″ MacBook Air, the decision was made harder by Apple with the most recent update of these laptops. Both can now be equipped with a 256 GB SSD, 4 GB RAM the 1.8 Ghz i7 processor. The pros of each machine come down to:

11-inch Air:

• Lighter (~20% or 0.6 lbs)
• Smaller (~20% by footprint)
• Slightly cheaper

13-inch Air:

• Larger screen (1366×768 vs. 1440×900; see image below)
• SD slot
• Better battery life

The cost difference isn’t that great. The 11-inch is slightly cheaper while some would argue you get more “bang for the buck” for the 13-inch.

While the SSD slot is nice, it’s not a killer feature. Unless you are planning to frequently load photos, one could easily toss a small USB-SD adapter in with the Air.

Everyone wants a smaller and lighter laptop; the question here is whether the tradeoff in screen real estate is worth it. Here’s what the difference looks like (the white rectangle represents the 11-inch Air resolution while the starscape represents the extra space the 13-inch supplies.

I’ve found the higher resolution (which I have in my current MacBook Pro) has been helpful, particularly for reading PDF documents. The vertical resolution of the 11-inch model is a particular challenge, but may not be a big deal for those using this largely as a travel computer for writing and email. For me, however, the extra resolution is worth the tradeoff in weight and size. Given that the extra battery life may allow for leaving the power adapter behind, the weight difference is further minimized.

What’s still unclear is how much performance boost the $100 upgrade to the i7 offers, and what battery life penalty it incurs.

I’ve stopped sending my tweets to this blog automatically. Too much clutter. Twitter will remain on the right column.

Counting Calories? Your Weight-Loss Plan May Be Outdated – NYTimes.com

The foods that contributed to the greatest weight gain were not surprising. French fries led the list: Increased consumption of this food alone was linked to an average weight gain of 3.4 pounds in each four-year period. Other important contributors were potato chips (1.7 pounds), sugar-sweetened drinks (1 pound), red meats and processed meats (0.95 and 0.93 pound, respectively), other forms of potatoes (0.57 pound), sweets and desserts (0.41 pound), refined grains (0.39 pound), other fried foods (0.32 pound), 100-percent fruit juice (0.31 pound) and butter (0.3 pound).

What’s left to eat?