Rob Gonda's Blog - Operating Systems

Will Microsoft ever learn? (Windows 7 buzz)

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:29:00 -0400

Microsoft is already working on Windows 7, formerly known as Blackcomb or Vienna, and is scheduled to release early 2010.

I run Windows Vista and OSX, and personally, haven't had any problems with Vista... Given, it might be a little more annoying for the savvy user, but I disabled/removed all those features. I previously blogged about how slow copying files could be (and a workaround).

PCWorld published a silly article about hardware requirements for an OS to be released 2-3 years from now; well, obviously, your current PC is not ready, simple answer. When XP came out, it required a decent PC, so did Vista, and in fact, so did Tiger, Leopard, Ubuntu, or anything else. Companies design OSs to fully utilize potentials of processing power and memory, it would be silly if they didn't.

In summary, if I worked for Microsoft's PR department I would try to keep any articles of a new operating system down in the low. There's a lot of clean-up work to do prior to anyone accepting new releases from M$.

On a positive note, one feature I did find interesting is the realization of tendencies towards virtualization. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V already showed Microsoft's understanding of market trends, and now with Windows 7 support for VHD (Virtual Hard Drives) they extend the power to the user.

Apple Office: iWork 2008 got the numbers

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:46:00 -0400

I forgot to mention yesterday that iWork 2008 also comes with a spreadsheet application.
Apple has ramped up its competitive stance against Microsoft’s Office software by adding an Excel alternative to its range of $99 iWork 2008 applications. Its Numbers spreadsheet application now joins Apple’s Pages and Keynote software in taking on Microsoft’s flagship Word, Excel and Powerpoint packages.

Apple Unveils New iMacs, iWork, iLife

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:42:00 -0400

Apple just release a new iMac with 2.0 or 2.4 Core 2 Duo processors, 800Mhz bus, 1Gb or RAM, and huge screen ... it's soooo thin. Along with it, they just release the 2008 versions of iWork and iLife... Will try out that new keynote, it's probably amazing.

Vista File Copy Blows - Seek Alternative

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:51:00 -0400

How many Vista users out there? I know many people don't like it, but I haven't had many problems with it ... I'm running Vista Ultimate on one laptop, and Mac OSX on another.

Anyways, one of my main complaints about Vista is that it tries to estimate the time to copy files prior to even starting the process... we all know that Microsoft cannot estimate that time by any means, so waiting five or ten minutes prior to even starting the process is not a great idea...

What can you do about it? Disable it ... lol, try at least.... The best solution I found that to install this program call Teracopy, a free-ware software that replaces your XP/Vista built-in copying engine to deliver faster results... and it does! In addition it has a couple of additional perks such as pause, resume, and error recovery. This is my new must-have program for Vista users.

FileReference onComplete is not fired on Mac OS

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:21:00 -0400

We are launching tomorrow a project that requires Flash to upload a file to a server, which is usually done through the FireReference class... Strangely, it works everywhere except on a Mac OS. We tested on OSX with Firefox and Safari, getting identical results: the file would upload, but the onComplete call would never get triggered.

The server environment for this particular project was php4 and amfphp for all remoting calls. After reading a couple of blogs, it seems like there's a Flash-side solution by using uploadCompleteData, which only works with ActionScript 3. Our project was developed with ActionScript 2, so I kept looking. Then I found that if php (or any server-side language) returns a space it should work ... nothing yet .... then I found that someone got it to work returning a "1", and indeed, echo "1"; fixed it for all environments... finally working on Windows, IE, FF, Mac, FF, Safari ...

So now you know, if you use the Flash FileReference class, make sure to always return a string so Mac OS knows the file finished uploading.

Apple Updates MacBook Pro Lineup

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:29:00 -0400

Apple is making more drastic updates to its MacBook Pro lineup. The company announced that its new MacBook Pros are now built on the Santa Rosa platform and features the latest GeForce 8 series mobile GPUs from NVIDIA and LED backlighting on 15.4” models.

The $1,999 entry-level MacBook Pro features a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR2-667 memory, 120GB 5400RPM HDD, NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600M GT (128MB) and a 15.4" 1400x900 LED-backlit display.

If you fork over $2,499, you'll be greeted with a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 160GB HDD and a 256MB version of the NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600M GT -- all other specifications remain the same.

They finally allow to upgrade to a 7200RPM HD, 4Gb of RAM ... That's it, I'm getting one.

Ubuntu Update

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:00:00 -0400

I just fixed my resolution problem and got my 1440x900 wide screen working. The trick was to execute

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver.xorg

and go thru the entire process. After done, press ctrl-alt-backspace to reset terminal.
I also installed Flash 9 Beta and it's working perfectly! I'm really happy with this OS.

Vista RC2

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:45:00 -0400

I just finished installing Windows Vista RC2 on my VMWare. However, it's 1AM so I'll play with it tomorrow. During the install it blue-screened once, something about a USB port... anyways, it auto-rebooted and finished the installation. I played just for a few minutes with Office 2007 Beta 2 this afternoon, and the new UI looks pretty darn good.

Update 1: I got the same blue-screen again when shutting down. It may be related to VMWare, I can't tell. Also, Windows did not recognize my network card or sound cart. Windows XP and Ubuntu recognized everything w/o any problems.

Update 2: got the network card going after installing the vmware tools and switching to NAT mode instead of bridge. I doubt that this second part had anything to do with it, nevertheless I did both. After connecting to the internet I was able to run an update which fixed by sound card too. I got a couple more blue-screens in the process.