Windows 7 RC works for over a year

The Windows 7 RC is supposedly going to work without problems for 13 months. What exactly is Microsoft doing? Well to put it simple. Microsoft is dumping a version of Windows 7 on the market to wet peoples appetites. Sure it works for a year and about 6 months in you realize hey I should buy this. If you don’t do this well eventually it will just stop working. Of course the real question is what kind of updates will Microsoft be supplying to the Windows 7 RC and will they stop after it becomes available through normal means. I am betting Microsoft will just drop support on release. So really this is just an extended trial. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Links:

• Tom’s Hardware

Linux hits 1% but will it stay?

I actually find this entertaining cause I was at Net Applications site the other day and told a friend “Hey Linux could hit 1% this month”. Wonderfully that has come true. But don’t get all excited about that just yet. If you have been paying attention to the news you would not Ubuntu 9.04 just released a week or so ago. Well you might ask what does this mean? Well something very important for web hit numbers. When a new version of Ubuntu comes out tons of people try it. It tends to get press and so everyone wants to see if this Ubuntu thing might be right for them. Of course not all these people will stick with the OS so the question becomes. Ubuntu is 1.02% now but will it be able to not lose more then .02% from those who remove Ubuntu? Personally I think we might be more like 1-2 months from the actual 1% mark but at the same time I actually think we have been past the 2% mark for awhile. Net Applications doesn’t get to measure important things like computers without Internet which is large part of the world still and some of these people do have old machines running Ubuntu. So what does this all mean? Nothing really except that from the main stream market that shows up on Net Applications charts Linux is growing a bit still at the expense of OSX and Windows. Nothing new here.

Links:

• OSNews

Another look at Windows being on ARM

OSNews brought up once again the idea of Microsoft making a version of Windows for the ARM architecture. In the past I have pointed out that if Microsoft doesn’t that they will eventually fall behind in the netbook market. This is caused by the fact that ARM netbooks are looking like they will not only be smaller then the atom netbooks but also may even allow for even more battery life while at the same time providing better video playback by having a graphics chip with some power to it (the 945 from intel is ancient now by todays standards). Of course OSNews points out one thing that so far many overlook. Unlike Linux which has been on ARM for awhile and so it has apps ported to ARM when you look at Windows they have NO ARM apps besides the stuff made for Windwos Mobile. Of course in theory using .net they could get a few apps but how many major apps that you use in your everyday life are .net based? I can bet its a small number. Of course I don’t think Microsoft really expects the users that buy netbooks to buy Office. I think that Microsoft is making the web based Office 14 exactly for netbooks as a way to prevent the huge amount of space office would take up and also the fact that most people still use a disc to install Office (no small feat when you have no DVD drive). In the end I think I agree with OSNews. Microsoft will probably not make an ARM version of Windows it’s just not in it or its partners interests to maintain two platforms. The real question here is will this kill ARM netbooks?

Links:

•  OSNews

Windows 7 release date accedentally announced

Today a Acer executive let slip that Windows 7 release date. By the way its October 23rd according to this executive. Of course this is a bit later then some of us were expecting. Also supposedly he said the upgrade deal would only be starting 30 days before release which is contrary to earlier statements that that would be started in July which would lead us to believe in a August release. In the end do we really know the release date? Who knows until Microsoft announces it technically it can change at any time.

Links:

• pcmag.com

btw: The date conflict makes me not trust this.

Linux is only getting faster

Many people are talking about the “huge” improvements in speed that Microsoft is seeing with Windows 7. Few though look at what Linux is doing to get going faster. OSNews posted an interesting article going over briefly what is going on. I find it impressive that many working on the GCC project are still finding even more ways to tweak the compiler to make it faster. At the same time we are seeing huge improvements in filesystems with updates to ext3 and 4 the one thing I was kinda disappointed with was no mention of btrfs. The one other area that it misses is the graphics gains we will likely see in a year or so from X when DRI2 is finished. When you look at it the Open Source movement isn’t sitting back at all and even though a lot of Open Source software already runs fast that doesn’t mean they wont stop looking at making it go faster.

Links:

• OSNews

HP making major mistake

Last year there was a major issue with Nvidias laptop GPUs. Basically some very bad solder was used and so the laptops were prone to many problems. The only way to really solve the problem was to replace the motherboard. Of course like the rest of the laptop industry HP responded by extending warranties and fixing the problem. But did they really do this for everyone having the problem? According to some there are laptops by HP which are having the problem that HP has not extended the warranty on. What does this mean? Well for one HP is being cheap and trying to get out of extending warranties. This is will most likely mean that HP is going to see at least a bit of a customer loyalty decrease. I personally have never cared for HP but never told anyone to not buy one. An issue like this though makes me wonder if my recent advice to friends that HP was a fine company to get your laptop from might have been mistaken. It is not a problem if a company ships a bad laptop so long as they fix it but when a company knowingly ignores a product that needs to be fixed that is just bad support. I am very disappointed with HP in this case.

Links:

• Tom’s Hardware

Interesting OLPC story

So today I was doing my normal reading around the different Linux planets. For those who don’t know a planet is a aggregator for blogs that many Linux distros use to aggregate all their developers blogs into one stream. I tend to go around randomly and read the planets for gentoo, debian, ubuntu and fedora just to keep up on what is going on with the distros. Now onto the real reason I am writing this. On Planet Gentoo I found a really interesting 3 part series by Daniel Drake about distributing OLPC OX’s in Caacupé, Paraguay. I found it to be a very interesting story and a view of something many of us never see. It also shows a bit as to how much these laptops mean to these children. I hope you find these links worthwhile.

Links:

• OLPC deployments in Caacupé, Paraguay: Part 1
• OLPC deployments in Caacupé, Paraguay: Part 2
• OLPC deployments in Caacupé, Paraguay: Part 3

India buying OLPCs

India which earlier this year made a fancy AC adapter for $30 that they called a computer has now ordered 250,000 OLPC laptops. This could be the break that OLPC has been looking for since they saw a bit less enthusiasm then they originally expected. The real question though is what version of the XO did India purchase? I personally would not be surprised if India went with the Linux models of the XO as it has in the past been moving more and more towards using Linux in its schools. Also with a country as large as India the amount of savings is huge. I mean it costs $3 more for XP on it which increases the purchase by $750,000. That is not a number to sneeze at.

Links:

• Gizmodo

Microsoft Releases Office 2007 SP2

Today Microsoft finally released their second service pack for Office 2007. This actually adds some very interesting features that many normal users will probably overlook. The first major feature is Microsoft has now added .xps and .pdf support by default in Office 2007. This is great thing to finally have this feature by default. Hopefully with this some people will realize that they don’t need Adobe Acrobat in order to make a pdf document from a Word doc. The second major feature is Open Document Format(ODF) support. This is an amazing step in the right direction for Microsoft. This is a sign that Microsoft is willing to accept Open Standards when companies want them to. I have not yet got to try using the ODF support so I don’t know how well it works but hopefully it works really well (I would hope so since Microsoft has had a lot of time to work on it). The final feature that I think people will probably miss is they made it so you can extend the file formats further. This means that you can create a plug-in now that will add a file format that can be used like any other file format. Hopefully this means that Office will eventually support all the needed file formats. This looks like like a great update for Office 2007 and I hope it works as well as it sounds like it should.

Links:

• Microsoft Download
• Microsoft KnowledgeBase Article

ThinkPad netbooks?

Lenovo has stated that it is looking into making a ThinkPad netbook. This of course is more then just a normal rebranding of a preexisting netbook though. Lenovo has been trying to keep the ThinkPad brand as pure as it can recently and has gone so far as to fix problems with the keyboards in the T400 series ThinkPads that had flexy keyboards. So for a netbook to hold the ThinkPad name it definitely would need to be a good netbook. I think the biggest hurdle for Lenovo when it comes to this is the casing. ThinkPads have a rather standard look and lots of safety features. This would probably increase the cost of making the netbook. In my opinion I don’t think Lenovo should really work on a netbook. They would be better just refining their X200 line.

Links:

• pcmag.com