Another week has passed us by, so it’s time for another Week in Review. This week was obviously dominated by the release of Windows 7, but Apple was also in the news often, reporting yet another stellar quarter, and of course updating its entire line of consumer Macs.
A Look at Adobe Premiere Elements 8 – Adobe announced recently the November release of its Premiere Elements 8 package, their consumer video editor. Here’s what’s new.
Touchscreen Tech, Windows 7, Tablet PCs – OSNews takes a look at the technology powering the latest generation of touchscreen personal computers. Have the stars finally aligned to give the touch interface the combination of price, precision, sensitivity, and software support to make it attractive to the mainstream PC buyer? And if so, what does that mean for the elusive Tablet PC? We take a look at a Dell Studio One, which is powered by NextWindow’s optical touch screen technology.
Apple Reports Yet Another Stellar Quarter – It’s getting a little bit predictable, but Apple has reported yet another stellar set of quarterly financial results. The company has sold more Macs and iPhones than the same quarter last year, but sales of the iPod were down compared to the same quarter last year. Profits and gross-margins were also up.
Apple Updates Entire Consumer Mac Line – As expected, Apple has refreshed its entire consumer line of Macintosh computers. The Mac mini, the MacBook, and the iMac lines of computers have all been overhauled, with the MacBook even getting a complete redesign. Prices in Europe have been dropped slightly, and there’s a new mouse, too.
My 7 Days Using Haiku Alpha Release 1 – Since I encountered BeOS 5 Personal Edition, my experience with BeOS PE led me to purchase the BeOS 5 Professional Edition, which I used for some years. I am not ashamed to say that I love using this OS. After the demise of Be Corp., I still used BeOS as my “main OS” since it would do everything that I needed to do, except for gaming and academic works. I closely followed all the developments of the BeOS contenders after Be’s fall… Until Zeta OS became the leading standard for a short time. I purchased every Zeta OS release that YellowTab produced. It is currently my favorite BeOS version today.
Windows 7 Hits the Shelves – It’s October 22 today. A completely random date in the grand scheme of things (we Dutch lost a big naval battle to the Ming dynasty on October 22 1633), but it also happens to be the release date of the newest version of Windows – Windows 7. Since Windows is still the most popular desktop operating system out there, this is pretty big news.
Nokia Sues Apple for Patent Infringment – Remember when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and proclaimed, to much applause, that they patented the hell out of it? Well, apparently Apple likes to boast about its own patents, but when it comes to dealing with other’s they’re not so willing. That is, if you believe Nokia: the largest phone manufacturer in the world has sued Apple for patent infringement.
Psystar Defies Apple Once More, Releases Rebel EFI – As if selling non-Apple labelled computers with Mac OS X pre-installed and licensing the technology to do so to third parties wasn’t enough, Psystar has now moved ahead and has started offering its Rebel EFI package for everyone to buy and use. It makes it possible for just about anyone to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple labelled computer.
Apple Shuts Down Mac OS X ZFS Project – John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X – he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS’ BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn’t really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity – and a little more – with the BeOS (at the FS level).
The Future of AmigaOS4: a Roadmap – Yes, we are continuing our new-found fascination with the Amiga platform, by reporting to you straight from the floors of AmiWest and Pianeta Amiga. Chris Handley consolidated all the information from these two Amiga shows into one handy post, and the future of the AmigaOS looks bright indeed! Update: More planned features have emerged. Read on for the update.
Was more notable for the Amiga news, Hyperion vs. Amiga inc. release of MorphOS for Mac Mini, updates of both their web-browsers. But then I’m a AmiFag so a little biased.
Windows 7 will be the next microsoft successor. It is better, and it is lightweight! That is what people say. Ok, let`s count how many people and organisations will repartition their hard drives to extend their 8 or 10 GB C:\ partitions with their working XP to 20GB required for W7..;]
Edited 2009-10-25 14:29 UTC
It is lightweight, well compaired to Vista anyway. It would be unsual for an OS released in 2009 to be lighter on resources compired to the 2001 version.
How can a modern OS with all things included weight 20GB? It’s insane. It’s only the OS with almost no applications, not much documentation, not a lot of drivers. What’s in there to weight 20GB?
My entire Linux installation with KDE desktop, documentation and translations is smaller. And that includes compilers, runtimes, python, perl, ruby, ghc and a myriad of binaries and libraries.
Cache cache cache. When you can’t be fast for real, just use cache. The size of a Windows install is bloated by the page file, the hyberfile, the prefetch, the driver cache, the assembly cache (WinSxS), superfetch, and who knows how many other caches.
Don’t forget all the temporary files and web histories that never get deleted, and the ridiculous amount of legacy compatibility still there, and the fact that most programs leave things all over, and the ridiculous size of a lot of Windows drivers and frameworks, and… well you get the idea.
I’ll be fair though, a fresh install of 32-bit windows 7 seems to weigh in at around 7 gb or so, not 20. Vista on the other hand easily could take up 25 gb. I’m not sure which is smaller, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard, but I’d bet it’s a close race. I still think 7 gb is too big for an os, not that it really matters in this day of large hard drives and even SSDs are becoming reasonable at larger sizes. Still I can’t help but compare that to a full Ubuntu install with all the apps I need weighing in at about 2.5 gb, and obviously using an os like Arch you can really have a small environment that is just as functional.
And what has been the average size of drives over the past few years? Seems to me that people worrying about this piddly amount have other concerns than the OS in question, as the computer is probably old as hell as well.
My copy of Windows 7 arrived. I was bad and trusted (should have paid attention to comments on the web) “Windows Easy Transfer” to move all of my data.
On OS X the transfer utility covers all the data files from all the apps you use/used. Windows, as I learned, does not. It tells you that it does not transfer “Applications” but… I sort of expected my “AppData” folder to move with me.
Ah well. It is sort of nice to start with a clean slate… and I do have some backups should I need them, but I did lose a few days of email.
I wish I had a “computer room” where I could have racks of computers and run every OS out there.
I’d never get an work done tho’.
Edited 2009-10-26 15:44 UTC
I still have to say Boo Hiss to Apple for dropping their ZFS port altogether. I’m pretty sure it was for brain-dead, non-technical reasons.
But whatever, I’ve got lots of sane and open options for my future upgrades. I’m quite sure that FreeBSD 8.1 and higher will be very nice