posts

Ars Technica’s Peter Bright, in his 15 page review of Windows 7:

So while Windows 7 may not right all of Vista’s wrongs, it is absolutely superior to its predecessor. It has three years of improvements, so it can’t help but be better. But if you hated Vista’s UI, you’re going to hate Windows 7’s. Worse, in fact, because 7 forces you to use the new Start menu and taskbar, with no possibility of reverting to the old behaviour. If your applications didn’t work in Vista, they almost certainly won’t work in 7. Sure, 7 has some virtualization tools to help, but this was always possible in Vista too. If you felt Vista was too big and too slow, well, 7 isn’t going to provide much joy there, either. Marginal improvements, perhaps, but nothing more. Everything “bad” about Vista—and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, because the things that garnered most complaints have negligible legitimacy—is still “bad” in 7.

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Apple:

Today, changes in technology, changes in the way we perform work, and where and how we work are occurring at a rapid pace. Nowhere is the change more evident than in the use of computers.

This new technology has brought on new demands for information as well as new and more sophisticated computing systems. Today, almost every one of us interacts with computers on a daily basis to create new things and ideas, to produce documents, to correspond with friends and associates, and to retrieve information. Along with the expanding use of this technology have come reports about adverse health changes for computer users.

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It’s a fascinating read:

Jobs says, simply, “I convinced them [Adobe] to drop plans to be a hardware company and be a software company instead.”

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Reuters’ Mark Sullivan:

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is the top recipient of campaign contributions from large Internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast over the past two years, according to a new report from the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics. McCain has taken in a total of $894,379 (much of that money going to support his failed 2008 bid for the presidency), more than twice the amount taken by the next-largest beneficiary, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. ($341,089).

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Boy Genius Report:

The Motorola CLIQ was a pretty big disappointment for me personally, but oh man does the Droid make up for it. Sure, there’s a little hype sprinkled in because this is the first Android 2.0 device I’ve had the pleasure of using, but once you move past the initial “wow” factor, the Droid really delivers. Whether it’s Verizon’s ad campaign or Motorola’s that pits the Droid against the iPhone it doesn’t matter. The Droid isn’t an iPhone competitor because nothing at this point in time is an iPhone competitor besides the new iPhone. And things don’t have to be right now. Everyone can eat. So will the Motorola Droid be successful? Absolutely, we think. It will eat in to BlackBerry sales, Windows Mobile sales, and positively murder any lingering Palm Pre sales. It’s that good.

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Apple PR, back in 2001:

Apple has applied its legendary expertise in human interface engineering to make iPod the easiest to use digital device ever. Simply rotate iPod’s unique scroll-wheel with your thumb or finger to quickly access your entire music collection by playlists, artists or songs. The scroll-wheel makes it possible to hold and operate iPod with just one hand and features automatic acceleration when scrolling through long lists so you can find your music in seconds. iPod also features customizable settings such as shuffle, repeat, startup volume, sleep timer and menus in multiple languages including English, French, German and Japanese. iPod can display song data in any of these languages, enabling users to mix and match songs from all over the world.

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Scott McNulty:

The first iPod had 10 hours of battery life, a FireWire port (which I still miss), and 5GB of storage for $399. Oh, and it was Mac-compatible only. When I first heard about it I thought, “Who the heck even has one gig of music? Dumb move, Apple.” Good thing Apple doesn’t call me up for business pointers because I couldn’t have been more wrong about the iPod if I had tried.

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Ars Technica:

If digging through build trees for a Mac build of Chromium (the open source project behind Chrome) was more trouble than you wanted to go through, here’s some good news for you: Google today announced availability of an official Google Chrome for Mac developer preview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

The developer preview is based on the upcoming version 4 of Google’s upstart browser, and it’s important to note that although it’s publicly accessible, it’s still not quite a beta. Several versions have already been released for Windows, but none have been released for Linux or Mac OS X. This is the first time an official release—build 4.0.223.8—has been available for Mac OS X outside of nightly development builds.

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PC World:

McCain’s bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom'.

According to the text of the McCain bill, the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.” Isn’t that what the FCC does? Isn’t that sort of like introducing a bill to prohibit the Treasury from printing money, or a bill to prohibit the IRS from collecting taxes?

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Apple:

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

Mac Rumors:

ZFS is an advanced file system developed by Sun that had been ported to Mac OS X and released as an open source project on Apple’s Mac OS Forge collaboration site in 2007. ZFS had been rumored to become the default file system for Mac OS X Leopard, but ultimately appeared with only limited read-only capabilities.

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Gizmodo:

Happy 8th Birthday, iPod-you don’t look a day over… Aww, who am I kidding? You look old.

[…]

Because the problems weren’t fixed by the release of the perfect iPod, but a whole new species: the iPhone and its non-phone-y sidekick, the misnamed iPod Touch. (There’s a good reason why many people prefer to call it an iTouch.) Apple themselves expects the iPod’s trajectory to chill out as iPhone sales eat into the big picture. And it’s not because of these small fixes as much as the fact that while the iPhone and iPod Touch apps collections get bigger and more useful, there’s been a quick shift from the regular iPod as a consolation prize in a time where if you don’t have a network connected pocket computer, you’ve got a toy. A toy that is an island. Or something.

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Nilay Patel:

The MacBook is an extremely competent, utterly boring laptop that doesn’t have enough ports.

At only $200 more, I don’t understand why anyone — other than maybe schools — wouldn’t upgrade to the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

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