Between all the Windows 7 hubbub, you'd almost forget that that other operating system maker is also hard at work on the next release of its operating system. Even though Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was supposed to be a release that did not focus on end user features, it seems that Apple will still include a number of those in Snow Leopard. The new cat will follow in Windows 7's footsteps by including a location awareness framework, while also allowing programmers to make use of the multitouch trackpads in Apple's laptops.

Three months after the previous release, the ReactOS Team has released version 0.3.8 of their Windows NT-compatible operating system. We have taken a short virtual look at this new release. In addition, the project will have a booth at the FOSDEM event in Brussels, Belgium on the 7th and 8th February. Several members of ReactOS Development Team along with the Project Coordinator will be attending. You can have a chance to test the live system, speak with developers, and get a closer look at their project.

So Windows 7 is supposed to be screaming fast, right? Anecdotal accounts report it booting quicker and feeling snappier than Vista, but the proof is in stats. TuxRadar has benchmarked Windows 7 against Vista and Ubuntu Linux, comparing install time, disk space usage, boot speeds and filesystem performance. The graphs also show how the sparkly ext4 filesystem compares against its older brother.

"Has the era of the 1GHz smartphone arrived? It has for Toshiba, which has tapped Qualcomm's new Snapdragon silicon. The Toshiba TG01 Windows Mobile phone was unveiled Tuesday, according to reports. Based on Windows Mobile 6.1, it is designed to take on the iPhone 3G. Only 9.9mm thick, it uses a 4.1-inch WVGA 800 x 480 384k pixel resistive touch screen and comes with support for 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and assisted-GPS. The TG01 is slated to be available in Europe this summer. The price, at this time, has not been disclosed (Acer and Asus are also expected to bring out Snapdragon-based products)."

The JNode project has released a new version of their Java-based operating system. Apart from a small nanokernel written in assembler, JNode is written entirely in Java. The reason for undertaking this effort is to provide those that like the idea of a Java operating system something to work with. Obviously, version 0.2.8 improves JNode in several areas.

"Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast."

Apple has always been about moving forward, about pressing customers to buy the latest and greatest. Product pacing has been high in Cupertino (except for the Mac Mini, obviously), and this is obviously a good thing if you're an Apple bean counter. Most Apple fans more or less accept this planned obsolescence without question, but the company may have just gone a little too far.

Yes, actually. The old-school, inefficient, heat-generating incandescent bulbs are all but history, CFL (compact florescent) bulbs taking the pedestal what with how relatively inexpensive and efficient they are when it comes to both electricity consumption and overhead cost. However, even these may have a short-lived supremacy as British scientists developed a new way of "growing" the material needed for LEDs on silicon instead of sapphire wafers, which was the original and somewhat expensive way of doing it. Because of this, household-grade lights of LED nature can be produced for under $5.00 and last up to sixty years. LEDs are three times more efficient than CFLs, last substantially longer, and contain no mercury, so they're even more environmentally friendly. These wonder-bulbs are supposed to be available to consumers within two years. It is estimated that if these new bulbs were to be installed in every home and office, it would cut electricity used on lighting by 75%. I'll take twenty of those, please.

One of the biggest problems with Windows Vista was its rather convoluted and complicated SKU scheme, where there were far too many different versions of Vista to figure out. To make matters worse, the Home Basic version left out several defining parts of the operating system leaving customers with a sense of being lured in by certain features that in the end turned out not to be there. With Windows 7, the company will still offer a myriad of different versions, but according to Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte, it will be a lot less problematic than with Vista.

"Next Monday, Amazon will likely unveil the next version of its Kindle e-book reader at a press conference in New York. But how did the gadget do last year before it sold out in November? Pretty well! Via a research note, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney now thinks Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles last year, more than his previous estimate of 380,000 (and if Amazon hadn't run out of Kindles in November, it could have potentially sold 750,000, Mahaney estimates). Mahaney now thinks Amazon's all-in Kindle revenue could reach $1.4 billion in 2010, or an impressive 4% of Amazon's revenue that year. This assumes that Amazon will sell 1 million Kindles in 2009 and 3.5 million in 2010; that Kindle owners buy one book per month, etc. It's an admittedly rough estimate, but not necessarily an unbelievable one."

Roger Grimes offers a comparative overview of browser security, including profiles of Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and Opera. Grimes subjected each browser to numerous tests, including dozens of pre-defined tests made in his lab, Internet-based test suites, and exposing the browsers to known-malicious Web sites. "None of the fully patched browsers allowed silent infections or exploitation beyond simple DoS attacks. All of the browsers stopped the latest malicious attacks available on the Internet. Occasional zero-day attacks could silently infect a particular browser during a particular period of time, but all of the browsers have this same risk, and all of the browser vendors in this review are fairly consistent in patching significant problems in a timely manner." The package also includes articles on each browser's XSS vulnerability profile and cipher support.

Python 3 is the latest version of Guido van Rossum's powerful general-purpose programming language. It breaks backwards compatibility with the 2.x line but has cleaned up some syntax issues. This second article builds on the previous article, which focused on changes that affect the language and backwards compatibility issues. In Part 2 of this two-part series, discover more new Python features and details on more advanced topics such as changes in abstract base classes, metaclasses, and decorators.

Creating a new operating system isn't an easy task. Even if you have dozens, hundreds of people, it may still take years. And even if you do get some code out there, chances are no one will really give a flying monkey butt, and your hard work will wither away in irrelevance. You really need something unique in order to stand out and be noticed, and Dmitry Zavalishin claims he has that something: his Phantom OS never dies.

There are many tools available that allow you to synchronize files across UNIX directories, but doing it effectively, and securely, takes a little bit more effort. This article looks at solutions for synchronizing files across UNIX filesystems and different computer systems securely, and at solutions that allow you to synchronize encrypted versions of your files for the purposes of backup.