The Demands of Video -- Microsoft announced that it will shortly release to developers version 1.1e of its Video For Windows (VFW) software, just a day before a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order halting the distribution of VFW 1.1d. According to Microsoft, version 1.1e will not contain any of the code Apple alleges was originally developed for its QuickTime for Windows software and subsequently distributed by Intel and Microsoft. (See TidBITS-263.) Despite Microsoft's earlier claim that none of the performance improvements seen in recent versions of VFW were related to Apple code, word on the street is that version 1.1e can be significantly slower than 1.1d in certain situations. [GD]
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Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?
If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.
Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.
Written by
Glenn Fleishman
The Demands of Video
by Geoff Duncan 
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