Friday, October 26, 2012

A Busy Tech Week

I kept my eyes on the big happenings this week, and preferred to give an "end of week review' rather than taking each item as it.

**UPDATE**
I planned on just giving a summary here, but I saw that was going to be huge.    The acronym TLDR came to mind.   So, here I'll give a brief summary.   I will expand on several key releases this week in other entries.


Apple kicked off the week with some big news.   The Macbook is being revamped a bit, there is a new iPad 4 in the pipes, but the biggest clamoring was over the iPad Mini set to hit the streets on Nov 2.  With this, Apple is poised to enter into the mid-size tablet market, with a step between their iPhone/iPod and the full iPad, to compete with assorted Android based tablets that have dominated this market for a few years. 

Microsoft, not to be outdone, had their own press release regarding the launch of Windows 8 (today, 10/26/2012).  I've briefly tinkered with a Beta of Windows 8 in a virtual machine.   To say it's "different" is an understatement.   My first thought was "This feels like a tablet OS."  The shell-shock will take some getting used to.  Concurrently, Microsoft introduced the Windows Surface, which brings Microsoft not only into the tablet OS market, but into the PC market, as well.   A key "plus" to the Surface is that it ships with Microsoft Office pre-loaded - something that no other tablet does, or can run.  

Without the big press release came the scheduled deployment of Ubuntu 12.10: Quantal Quetzal. At present I am installing Quantal, but have yet to fully explore this release.  As a matter of personal preference, I have been using the Xfce desktop environment for some time.  I have found it to be better structurally than the Unity DE that Ubuntu ships with standard.  My review of Quantal will come about over the weekend.


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