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.

Anyone who has ever dealt with Microsoft Outlook will know the .pst file format - it's the binary, undocumented file in which all data from Outlook is stored - emails, contacts, calendar, you name it, it's in there. Microsoft has announced that it will release detailed technical documentation on the Outlook .pst data format.

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.

Yes, we are continuing our new-found fascination with the Amiga platform, by reporting to you straight from the floors of AmiWest and Pianeta Amiga. Chris Handley consolidated all the information from these two Amiga shows into one handy post, and the future of the AmigaOS looks bright indeed! Update: More planned features have emerged. Read on for the update.

Apple has stated on its website that will add support for Windows 7 to Boot Camp later this year. "Apple will support Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) with Boot Camp in Mac OS X Snow Leopard before the end of the year. This support will require a software update to Boot Camp."

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).

As if selling non-Apple labelled computers with Mac OS X pre-installed and licensing the technology to do so to third parties wasn't enough, Psystar has now moved ahead and has started offering its Rebel EFI package for everyone to buy and use. It makes it possible for just about anyone to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple labelled computer.

NoStarchPress sent us in the newly released "Book of Inkscape", written by Dmitry Kirsanov, who is also one of the core developers of Inkscape.

"Digital civil liberties organization Open Rights Group, Knowledge Ecology International and software developer Richard Stallman tell the EC in a letter that they are concerned about Oracle's possible squashing of competition in the database market by abandoning MySQL."

The fourth update in the CentOS Linux 5 family is released. Highlights of the new release include a kernel-based virtual machine virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages, GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem etc. Grab a CD set from a mirror, and via BitTorrent 32bit, 64bit DVD. On a related note, if you are already running CentOS-5.3 or an older CentOS-5 distro, simply upgrade it over the Internet.

Funny Or Die has posted a video showing you how to have your very own party to celebrate today's Windows 7 release. It's strikingly similar, yet importantly different from the video that Microsoft put out a couple of weeks ago.

Remember when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and proclaimed, to much applause, that they patented the hell out of it? Well, apparently Apple likes to boast about its own patents, but when it comes to dealing with other's they're not so willing. That is, if you believe Nokia: the largest phone manufacturer in the world has sued Apple for patent infringement.

Since I encountered BeOS 5 Personal Edition, my experience with BeOS PE led me to purchase the BeOS 5 Professional Edition, which I used for some years. I am not ashamed to say that I love using this OS. After the demise of Be Corp., I still used BeOS as my "main OS" since it would do everything that I needed to do, except for gaming and academic works. I closely followed all the developments of the BeOS contenders after Be's fall... Until Zeta OS became the leading standard for a short time. I purchased every Zeta OS release that YellowTab produced. It is currently my favorite BeOS version today.

"With the imminent release of Windows 7, IBM and Canonical are clasping hands to sell an Ubuntu Linux- and Lotus-based desktop package to US businesses targeting low-end PCs and netbooks. The duo initially launched their Ubuntu-powered IBM Client for Smart Work desktop bundle to Africa back in September. But IBM said it decided to swing the offering State-side due to demand from its partners."