Preview: Verizon’s Android 2.0 Phone

Verizon's highly awaited Droid phone lands November 6th, but Geek.com was able to get their hands on one and post early impressions. This will be the first phone shipping with Google's Android 2.0 operating system, giving it a big advantage over some of the competing Android handsets on the market. Not content to win people over on software alone, Motorola included a 5MP camera, 16GB of storage, and an 854x480 WVGA display.

GeoCities Decommissioning Unleashes Torrent of Nostalgia

The Blogosphere has been abuzz over the past few days, with remembrances of the halcyon days of the internet viewed through the lens of atrociously-designed GeoCities sites. If you missed the xkcd GeoCities tribute, you'll have to be content with a screenshot, as it was a limited-time engagement. (Update: a mirror) The Archive Team is working on saving as much of GeoCities as possible for future generations. The internet is ephemeral, and, like ancient civilizations, it seems we're constantly building our new cities on the ashes of our old cities, but, this being the internet, in a much faster cycle. Like anthropologists who get excited about pot shards or shriveled woven sandals found in a cliff dwelling, a lot of internet old-timers like me get pretty nostalgic about how the internet used to be, and think it's worth preserving, or at least commemorating.

X.org 7.5 Released

X.org 7.5 has been released. This version includes DRI2, Multi-Pointer X, Input device properties, X Input Extension 2, RANDR 1.3 (adds support for panning and for Projective Transforms, which can be used to scale the screen up/down as well as perform projector keystone correct or other effects) and video and input driver enhancements. Here are the release notes.

We Hate the Wall Wart

The "wall wart" is one of humanity's worst inventions (not counting all of the inventions that are actually intended to kill and maim each other, I'll admit). AC-plug power supplies are a cheap workaround to various engineering, economic, and regulatory problems that manufacturers face, and they solve those problems by pushing them off onto end users. So what can we do about it? OSNews takes a look at an ingenious workaround to the Wall Wart problem, and some hopeful trends that might make them a thing of the past.

Windows 7, Macs, Apple

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.

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).