technology

I'm surprised I missed this before. But yes Windows 7, an operating system not even released has already surpassed the latest version of Mac OS. During September Windows 7 usage accounted for 1.52% of traffic measured by Net Applications, and as of this last weekend it broke 2%. During the same timeframe 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which was released the previous month, accounted for just 0.77% of traffic. I'm willing to bet with a few weeks of launch Windows 7 will eclipse the entire Macintosh user base....

So the BBC have been putting up a few articles on Windows 7, it is after all released on Thursday. But they've also made a few mistakes, usually when comparing it to Windows Vista. What I'll cover here is the Gadget platform. If you recall in Windows Vista you could open the Sidebar on either the left or right sides of the screen which could hold all the Gadgets, or if you wanted to you could drag them off the Sidebar and place them where you wanted, and even close the Sidebar....

It looks like the new version of Mac OS X has shipped with a rather major flaw. Users of the new Apple operating system Snow Leopard are experiencing massive data losses when logging into their machines under a guest account. The problem appears to affect those who had a guest account enabled before upgrading to Snow Leopard. Users have in some cases lost their entire main profile, including sites, pictures, videos and documents....

PC Pro (and no doubt others too) show how utterly gullible they are: Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant's Research department. Uh huh. A move to 128-bit support would be a bold move for Microsoft. Many, including PC Pro's own Jon Honeyball, were urging Microsoft to make Windows 7 64-bit only, but the company continues to offer a 32-bit version of the forthcoming OS...

As you may recall in my last post I was using a Touch Diamond to grab screenshots of the marketplace. Why wasn't I using my Touch Pro? Well the Diamond was running a stock ROM, on my phone however typically I flash a custom ROM after a while. With this ROM the Marketplace application would simply fail when checking for updates, stating it was unable to connect with an error something like this:...

Not officially launching until tomorrow the Windows Mobile Marketplace seems to be open. Here's some screenshots of it running on a Windows Mobile 6.1 device. in this case an HTC Touch Diamond, 6.1 devices aren't officially supported yet, and probably won't be until the end of the year.

Microsoft have opened up the Windows 7 Answers forum. Which I have to say semi-replaces the old newgroups, well not that there are any Windows 7 newsgroups yet. The old battle between web forums and NNTP looks like its heading the way of the web, I know in my opinion that's largely down to how bad the latest version of Windows Live Mail is at handling newgroups, no where near as good as Windows Mail or Outlook Express....

From the BBC: A study of the global state of broadband has put the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality and reach of its networks. The research for Cisco found that countries such as Latvia and Bulgaria were better prepared than the UK for next-generation net applications. The UK was listed among countries whose broadband is "meeting needs for today". 25th? Ouch, but not surprising....

So since Microsoft got into the anti-virus game a few years back, Symantec have been whining, their whining went into overdrive a few months back when the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials was released. And now since MSE has been released, they're back with more FUD/nonsense/complaining and general pathetic behaviour. From TechWorld: "Security Essentials won't change anything," said Jens Meggers, Symantec's vice president of engineering. "Microsoft has a really bad track record in security,"...

Microsoft are going to be releasing Security Essentials later today, for those that don't know this is their free anti-virus, anti-spyware, well anti-malware in general application. I've been running it for a few months now on all my systems, and the short review is this: it's the best anti-malware software ever, it doesn't slow your system down noticibly and it isn't constantly bugging you with pop-ups like other anti-malware software....