Google, asked how on earth this slow-motion, oddly-planned scenario would play out, gives mixed responses. The official PR line, when asked about the merger:

[W]e're reaching a perfect storm of converging trends where computers are behaving more like mobile devices, and phones are behaving more like small computers. Having two open source operating systems from Google provides both users and device manufacturers with more choice and helps contribute a wealth of new code to the open source community.

There, perfect: acknowledge that your boss's sentiment is true, but deny any specific plans. But what about when CNET asks Schmidt directly? Observe:

The future will unfold as it does.

There it is! When these guys are talking about Chrome and Android merging, they're not talking about any kind of roadmap, they're just speaking in obvious, unusually long-term truisms, like they've been doing an awful lot lately: Two Linux-based operating systems from one company are bound to develop similarities; eventually, our computing usage will be totally centered around the web; in a decade, our notebooks and cellphones will probably be one device; the future is awesome; etcetera.

This Zen futurism is charming and all, but Chrome OS and Android aren't uncontrollable entities—they don't need to be crudely estimated, or attributed some kind of autonomy, especially by the people that make them. Specifically, they need to be planned. [CNET via Download Squad via Engadget]

Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s). The advertisement can be visual or audible. The presentation of the advertisement(s) can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at reduced cost.

The advertisement could appear as:
- a pane on top of any other pane in a user interface of the device
- in a designated area of a background of the user interface
- in a window for an application program
- inserted in content from an application program
- through an audio output of the device; and combinations thereof.

Microsoft Office Starter 2010 aside, ad-supported software has pretty much gone out of fashion. However, it does show that Apple, too, has at least contemplated the idea. [USPTO via MacRumors]

Looks like LinkedIn might be working well for Hand Huang's because his profile certainly caught some attention for this little blurb (emphasis mine):

3. Joining Caesar product development, lead a team to do telephony feature and other applications development. Migrated relative applications from Windows Mobile 6 to Windows Mobile 7

Language: C++
Tools: VS2008, AKU, Platform Builder
Runtime Environment: Windows Mobile 7.0 (Beta)

According to Ars Technica, Huang might not just be fluffing up his resume. The timeframe seems about right for WinMo 7 to hit beta testing since it's been in development for years and there'd been a search for internal testers in the recent months. The timeline Ars lays out based on this information is that testers would truly be seeing the OS in November of this year, while we would see it out in the wild in April of 2010. The dates are loose and based on rumors, but when isn't that the case?

The way I see it is that WinMo 7 is pretty much Microsoft's last hope for a decent mobile OS, so I certainly hope this is true, shortening the time we'll have to endure Windows Mobile 6.5. [Ars Technica]

Robin Harris, who has worked in the data storage field for as long as I've been alive, is discussing the mysterious absence of ZFS in Mac OS 10.6 over at his blog StorageMojo. He reconsiders his original stance, that there were migration or integration timeline issues, in favor of it being a battle between licensing preferences.

Harris speculates that Sun Microsystems, the folks behind ZFS, may have pushed for a Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and patent indemnification which turned Apple off the deal. Harris emphasizes that the incompatibility between CDDL and GPL was one of the issues for Apple, but certainly not the only one. (How could it be when there are CDDL elements such as DTrace in Snow Leopard already?)

Patent indemnification could play a larger role as the manner in which Sun might waive patent claims against Apple for the use of ZFS wouldn't actually truly protect Apple from third-party claims, but that too is speculation.

What we do know is that Apple promised us ZFS a year ago and didn't put out this month. Be it a lovers' spat with Sun, licensing issues, or a larger legal picture, we're still optimistic that we'll see ZFS down the road, particularly with the changes going on as part of Sun being taken over by Oracle.

Check out Harris' thoughts and tell us yours. Why did Apple go back on something they were so proud to announce? And when will this broken promise be made up to us? [Storage mojo]

Applications that won't open in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Aperture ver. 2.1.1 and earlier
• Keynote ver. 2.0.2 and earlier
• AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow ver. 4.2.5
• Parallels Desktop ver. 3.0
• VirusBarrier X4 ver. 10.4.4 and earlier
• SPSS 17 ver. 17.1
• Director MX 2004 ver. 10.2
• EyeTV ver. 3.0.0 to 3.1.0
• Ratatouille ver. 1.1

Applications moved to an "Incompatible Software" folder during the installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier
• Unsanity
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net ver, 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0

[Apple via Apple Insider]

Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, "This is a new operating system?!" Those people are missing the point.

On deeper inspection, Snow Leopard's inconspicuous aspects—performance squeezed from underused CPU multicores/GPUs and basic UI tweaks—are found to be the kind of refinement generally reserved for virtuosity. These speed optimizations are deep, reminding me of when a master martial artist puts the entirety of his weight behind a strike (while a neophyte would flails his limbs like a henchman in a Bruce Lee movie). The little UI tweaks are no different than when a great sculptor's chisel works to remove everything non-essential during the final steps on a statue. Challenging 30 years of ever more bloated software tradition, the changes here are about becoming a more effective middleware between the media and the hardware, reducing friction while becoming more useful by, well, being lighter, less visible.

And if you think that's bullshit, well, I can't say you're completely out of your mind, but there's always the consolation that this OS upgrade costs about the same as a used Xbox game.

Performance

After some benching on a first-generation MacBook Air, an older MacBook Pro 15 and a pair of current-gen 13-inch MacBook Pros, it's clear that Snow Leopard is faster—sometimes drastically—but almost never in third-party applications. Some people like charts. If you feel like skipping them, here's a summary:

• In preview, where opening six 35MB 20,000-pixel-wide images of Tokyo's cityscape each took half the time in Snow.
• Safari's javascript processing, using Snow's specific tech, is about 40% faster—useful for all those Ajax-heavy websites we all use now.
• Time Machine backed up a 1GB dataset nearly 40% faster than on Leopard.
• There was no discernible improvement in non-optimized 32-bit programs: Photoshop testing and Handbrake DVD ripping times were identical. High-def playback on QuickTime 7 (not the new QuickTime 10 version) was identical in CPU usage, too.
• Synthetic benchmark results were interesting: The aging Xbench app, which tests everything from graphics to disks to memory, took a slight performance dip, implying older software may, too. Geekbench, a multicore optimized, newer benchmark available in both 32- and 64-bit saw a lift on Snow. But the test is only focused on theoretical CPU and memory performance, which may not translate into every day use.

Here's a video of those JPEGs cranking open in parallel, rather than serial, fashion:

Impressed yet?! You shouldn't be. Well, not by the act of opening images. But you definitely should once you realize what it really shows: Apple just pulled 2X performance out of my hardware, by software alone. Tada!

How is Snow Leopard Getting Faster?

There are three fundamental reasons for these performance increases: Better multicore processor support through what Apple calls GCD (Grand Central Dispatch—which we explain here); OpenCL APIs for utilizing the processing power in any graphics cards above the GeForce 8600 Series for video acceleration and general purpose computing; and they've rewritten almost all the applications that ship with Snow Leopard to run in 64-bit mode while taking advantage of GCD and CoreCL. So it's making processing for today's chips more efficient and easier for developers. And giving programs a way to utilize the power of the video card when it's not playing games. It also allows programs to run in 64-bit mode, the main theoretical advantage of which is to allow these programs to access more than 4GB of RAM on systems that have it. (More on all that at the bottom of the page.*)

Snow Leopard is efficient in other ways too. Install size is down to 10GB from 16GB, most of that weight shed by losing printer drivers and the PowerPC part of universal binaries. (Snow Leopard runs only on Intel hardware and downloads printer drivers it needs from the net, as you need them.) Installation is also quicker by about 30% on any given piece of hardware (consistent with the smaller install footprint). And in a move that can only be categorized as showing off, Snow Leopard can finish its installation if you accidentally power it down midway through.

But I'm digressing. The bottom line on performance is that the programs included with this operating system will do just about everything faster on modern machines that support those technologies—that is, most of the multicore Macs or those running Nvidia 8600 series video cards or higher. And not just a bit faster, but faster on the scale of 25 to 50% which means there's typically a good amount of latent processing juju in your video card and CPU. Great, but to be honest, it's a bit less impressive than it sounds in real life today, because all the basic system tasks happen fast anyhow. (When was the last time you sat around while a JPEG opened up?) Again, no other apps that use GCD or OpenCL are available from software makers outside of Apple. But if the theoretical gains are here to be had via easier programming methods, I'd bet those apps will come soon.

Interface Streamlining

There are 5 major changes in the UI:

Finder
Icons now scale, courtesy of a little slider on the bottom right of the pane, up to 512 pixels wide. It sounds wasteful, except that video files can be played directly from the finder window. Honestly, I don't prefer it more than the QuickLook (hitting spacebar to popup a quick preview window) in Leopard and carried over in Snow Leopard. I don't mind the option, but I have no use for this feature.

Dock
OS X's dock has been interactive for some time. You could drag a file to an icon there to somehow get the two to interact, but you could never use the dock to select which window instance of an app to use. Now clicking and holding (empty handed or with a file) triggers Expose, Apple's window management doohickey, for that particular application. Being able to quickly pop out an app's windows and then select the right one in a single step is terrific, but you still can't use Expose to quickly find the browser tab you want within a window. That's an increasingly big problem as the time spent in browsers goes up.

Expose
Expose itself has been improved, too. When viewing all the windows for one application in Expose's zoomed-out view, the items are now arranged in a grid instead of a single, impossible to read line, and each window has a text label. (That's helpful when you're trying to recognize a particular window amongst lots of similar looking—and rendered tiny by Expose—text documents or emails.) Minimized windows are also now shown at the bottom of the screen under a faint line dividing it from other maximized windows from the same application.

Stacks
When Stacks made its debut in Leopard, the dock mounted quick file viewer was too twitchy to use. You'd try to move a file andit would snap close, offended you'd try to do anything but open a file. And the space was always too limited in fan or grid mode to display more than a few icons. Stacks improves on this by allowing scrolling in the Grid view, but by also adding a smart list view capable of showing numerous files at once. It's an improvement.

QuickTime 10
Putting QuickTime in this list is questionable, but aside from its acceleration, there are some major changes here. That is, as you mouse away, the video screen loses all borders and buttons, appearing like the video equivalent of an infinity pool or one of those ultra thin LCDs. The program has a new capture system for encording video and audio clips and even voice annotated screen capture sessions. It also borrows the trimming thumbnail line from iMovie '09. I love it.

Let's face it, in the big picture, calling these changes "major" is generous. But there are literally dozens of even smaller examples, all welcome, all reducing friction points in the OS's usage, eliminating clicks needed and making the OS less obtuse. You can read about all of these additions in the gallery below, or here on one page, if you're curious to read about them all. If not, take my word for it: They all make things better.

While it's not UI- or performance-related, one additional Snow Leopard benefit is free Exchange support, so your mail, address books and calendars can all sync through it. I don't work at a corporation, so I don't care, but you may.

Bad Things

What kind of sick fanboy would I be if I didn't mention the imperfections?

And Safari 4's ability to segment unstable browser plugins made itself useful when many more flash powered pages crashed in Snow Leopard than Leopard.

Other reviewers have discovered that Snow Leopard has disabled or quirk-ified some of their apps.

I've also noticed that Expose doesn't work as smoothly with spaces now. You sometimes select a window on another virtual spaces desktop and it won't bring the window up top.

If you've got some third part mission critical app that you need to run every day, you should double check its compatibility and wait for a new version before upgrading your OS. Look before you leap here. The OS isn't so radically new that you have to have it right this moment.

Meow

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you're looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard's biggest feature is that it doesn't have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

Uses latent multicore and GPU power to speed up
the apps it comes with by relatively huge amounts

Costs $30 to upgrade

Still haven't seen any third party apps
rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard's speed yet

No major new functionality might turn off
some

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

*Performance Background: You May Skip This Section.
Today's chips have hovered in the 2-3.6GHz range for some time, with gains in theoretical processing power made by increasing the number of CPU cores on one chip and optimizing the silicon in those cores. Think about it as roof shingles: It's easier to protect your roof with lots of little shingles than one huge one. Unfortunately, the power afforded by the additional CPU cores has largely gone to waste, because it's difficult to write code that takes full advantage of multiple cores. The programmer has to write the application in a way that breaks down large problems into multiple smaller problems (called threads), each of which runs on a single CPU core. The application then becomes a traffic cop keeping threads in sync. If any part gets out of sync, the app crashes or hangs.

This problem is made more complex because many apps are written with a maximum number of threads in mind. While some workloads, such as video encoding or photo processing can take advantage of many cores innately, most need to have some work done to add support for more threads, so future-proofing has been difficult. I don't know if programming GCD is easier than straight-up multiple-core programming—we cover some of those details here—but the key here is that Apple's created a middleware that developers can write for, which automatically scales up to work with the number of CPU cores or other hardware in your system. The developer writes for GCD, while the system handles the gruntwork. Apple hopes more people will use this easier, more future-proofed way to tap into multiple-core power. Of course, no one has so far, except Apple programmers themselves. This explains why Finder, Preview and basically everything else that ships with Snow Leopard run faster. But in my tests, Photoshop, still a 32-bit program on the Mac and written without any support of GCD or OpenCL, showed less than 1% variation from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Still, as we can see from the system apps, there's potential here. And let's face it, the majority of us are not rendering Photoshop files all day, so this is performance you can put in your pocket today.

There's a story of efficiency here, too, however. Because GCD is better at managing resources, a program like, Mail, for example, shows less system impact (thread usage, cpu usage) while sitting idle in Snow Leopard, than on Leopard. When testing OpenCL's hardware acceleration, something Windows machines have had for awhile, by playing a 1080p trailer of James Cameron's awesome new Avatar movie, CPU usage dropped drastically when machines were using the 64-bit CoreCL and GCD supported version of QuickTime. Any modern machine can play 1080p video well, but here, we were talking about Snow Leopard causing the strain on the system to take total CPU usage from 30% to 16% on the 13-inch MacBook Pros. Other apps will eventually be able to use these GPU superpowers, but what Apple claims is the real potential for GPU processing is that OpenCL will let computers use video cards for not only 3D acceleration, video encoding, and heavy math, but more general computing tasks, too, because its written in a non-specific (C-based) programming language.

Furthermore, there have been a number of good articles questioning the speed benefits of 64-bit computing. Apple only goes so far to claim that math-based tasks benefit from the larger bus, but generally the only concrete advantage of 64-bit computing is the ability apps gain to manipulate over 4GB of RAM, a 32-bit limitation. Apple's dev docs go on to say that some apps will incur a penalty if going 64-bit. So, rewriting apps in 64-bit versions is not a surefire recipe for speed improvement.

In many cases, with many of the built-in apps, Apple attributes the performance improvements to all three core technologies above. That stuff that means not so much today, but might mean a lot tomorrow as GPUs get faster and CPUs gain more cores and there's already an infrastructure in place to take advantage of all that.

[Back to our Complete Guide to Snow Leopard]

As one might expect, the packaging features a snow leopard, staring out at the user with the same white hot intensity of, say, Steve Jobs in his Apple lair as he examines the latest prototype build of an Apple Tablet that may or may not exist.

There's also the slogan, reading: "The world's most advanced operating system. Perfectly optimized."

You know what else would be perfect? If, in the inevitable "I'm a Mac" ad that comes out to market this OS, Hodgman wrestles a real snow leopard. That scene, sadly, is not represented on the Portuguese Mac OS X Snow Leopard packaging. There's still hope for the U.S. release. [MacRumors]

Before we dive in, it's worth talking about exactly what we're going for here. What "theory of Chrome" are we planning to adhere to? Or perhaps more to the point, what the hell is Chrome? From Google:

"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks" and "most of the user experience takes place on the web." That is, it's "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel" with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors (like your standard Core 2 Duo) and ARM processors (like inside every mobile smartphone). Underneath lies security architecture that's completely redesigned to be virus-resistant and easy to update.

From our own Matt Buchanan:

If I had to guess, I'd say Chrome OS is somewhere in between an entirely browser-based OS and a generic Linux distro, though leaning toward the former.

In other words, Chrome, as we understand it, and as Google describes it, is a Linux OS that lives on the web, depending almost entirely on Google's suite of services, which are served through a special, Google-designed interface. We have no way of knowing what this mysterious window manager, menu system or desktop environment will look like, so we can't replicate that. The web half of Chrome OS, though, is already in place, and ready for us to clumsily unify. So, we'll make our own stripped-down operating system. Here's how:

Get Yourself Some Linux
Before embarking on this goofy afternoon software project, we need a launchpad. Specifically: Linux. You could go with almost any distro and accomplish the same effect, but this guide will be focused on a distribution called Xubuntu. Why Xubuntu? Because it strike a perfect balance between being extremely compatible and easy to install—on both counts, it really is—and, since it's essentially just a version of the uber-popular Ubuntu Linux distro with a stripped-down, super-fast desktop environment called XFCE, it's quick, and lightweight. Anyway, head over the the Xubuntu website and start downloading. (Go with 9.04 the latest stable version.)

There are a few ways to handle this. If you're planning to install Xubuntu on a netbook—Chrome's first and most natural target—you're probably going to need to create a bootable flash drive. Ubuntu provides some fairly fantastic instructions for doing this on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. If you're trying to do this on a regular laptop or desktop, or you have an external optical drive, you're going to want to burn your downloaded ISO to a CD and install from there. Alternately, you can order a free install disc from Xubuntu. Lastly, if you're like me, and you just want to test this out in a free virtual machine like VirtualBox, all you need to do is boot a new system from your downloaded ISO. At any rate:

During the installation, you'll be prompted with a number of options. Make sure to check the "Log In Automatically" radio box—it'll make your boot-to-browser experience a little smoother later on.

Once you've finished the installation—this should take no more than a half-hour, really—you'll find yourself with a pretty, fresh new Xubuntu desktop. It's really nice! But now, it's time to start replacing it.

Choose Your Browser
So obviously, you'll need a browser. This is the center of the Chrome experience—the window through which you'll access Google's suite of services, and which you may never leave. It needs to have support for all the web's various technologies, be it Google Gears—a plugin that lets Google services store data offline, so they can load faster and function offline—or Flash, which makes the internet significantly less boring. Chrome OS will ship with Google's Chrome browser, obviously, but the Linux port is a little sickly right now. Gears, for example, doesn't really work right now, and Flash, though technically available, crashes constantly. But if you really want to stay as Googly as possible on this project, you can get Chrome for Linux (Chromium, it's called) by adding these lines to the "Sources" list in a program called Synaptic, which manages Linux applications through one, unified interface, and is accessible in your System menu.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

You can find out how to enable Flash here. Pro tip: don't bother with this.

Counterintuitively, the best way to get the Google experience on Linux is with Firefox. Xubuntu comes with Firefox, but you're going to need to spruce it up a little. Ok, a lot.

Make That Browser Work
First, you'll need Flash. Open Synaptic—mentioned above—from your Applications>System menu, and search for an item called "Flashplugin," (it's Flash Player 10) or navigate to the item as shown in the below screenshot.
Click "Apply" and let the installer run its course. Now, Firefox should support sites like YouTube, Pandora, et al.

Now, you'll need Google Gears. This is a simple Firefox extension, which you can download here. This'll help make living online feel a little less like, you know, living online—think offline archived email. Most of Google services can use Gears, so you'll want to go through each site's settings page to enable as many "Gears" or "Offline Access" options as possible. Docs and Mail are where you'll see the biggest differences, since Gears turns them from web services into full-fledged offline apps, transparently. Pretty amazing stuff, and one of the few features we know will be in Chrome OS.

Next, you'll need the Google Toolbar. This, in absence of whatever interface voodoo Google is sitting on, will serve as a sort of constant dashboard for Google services in the meantime. Along with providing shortcuts and notifiers for services like Gmail and Googel Caldner, it's got a few little tricks that'll make your browser feel more like a proper OS. For example: in the Google Toolbar preferences, you can check options that enable both automatic Gmail-ing or Mailto: links, and automatic opening of many document formats in Google Docs. You'll want to enable these, since we're trying to create the illusion that the rest of the OS doesn't exist, which an errant OpenOffice window or email client could shatter, God forbid.

Lastly, grab yourself a copy of an extension called Speed Dial, which will give you a Grid-based homepage of favorites which you can populate with all the core Google Services you're going to need—Gmail, Reader, Google Docs, Google News, etc—and which will be the first thing you see when you open your browser, and eventually, your OS. Set the initial configuration as I have on the left.

And if you're really into this idea for some reason, you can download a Firefox skin that looks like Google Chrome here.

Getting Rid of Everything Else
Now that you've got everything you need to live wholly within Google's ecosystem, a la Chrome OS, you need to remove everything else—that means excess browser clutter, system menus, and pretty much anything else that stands between you and your Google suite.

The first step will be to strip out your Firefox interface, which is probably looking a bit bloated by now. I've posted my small-screened solution below, which you can replicate by dragging and dropping icons however you please in Firefox's View>Toolbars>Customize menu. The above configuration lets you totally remove the Bookmarks and Navigation bars, which saves a good deal of space. Feel free to play with this for a while—you might find that you don't need one input box or the other, or that you can get away with much less of an interface than I have.

After grinding down Firefox's interface to an acceptable size, you'll need to go to work on your desktop. Before you can kill all the menu bars and shortcuts you don't need, you'll need to make sure Firefox automatically loads at startup, so you're basically booting into the browser. You can do this by navigating to Applications>Settings>Session and Startup, and adding a new startup item with the values seen below. (The last one if the only one you can't change—it's the one that launches Firefox).

Now, it's time to murder everything else. Right-click on either the top or bottom system panels—the Start Menu-like things on the top and bottom of your desktop—and click "Customize Panel." From here, you can remove the top panel, and set the bottom panel to "autohide." Once you're done, restart. Upon boot-up, this is about all you should see:
Welcome to Chrome! Kind of!

See What You Think
As I said before, what you've just slapped together here is not Chrome, and Google's final product will probably look nothing like this, superficially. But this little web-savvy Frankenstein OS does, I think, capture something of Google long-term vision, in which everything we store, use and experience on our computer is based online—preferably on their servers—and native applications are nothing more than a small, necessary evil. This experiment is less about guessing the specifics of Chrome OSes interface, under-the-hood workings or usage model (three things which I'm fairly sure this fails at) than it is about deciding whether or not the the idea of Chrome OS suits you, and how you use your computer. That, at least, you can get a taste of. So, how do you like it?

So that's about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your OS impersonation, and have a great weekend!

Some of the products on this list were or are vital to the computing industry as we know it, especially the dearly departed Palm OS and the sure-to-infuriate-fanboys inclusion of Linux. But then...who the hell ever heard of Inferno? [Silicon Alley Insider via Switched]

These prices aren't 100 percent confirmed, and no one knows certain when these products will ship. But the speculation is that upgrading from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Home Premium will cost $82, while upgrading from Home Premium to Professional or Ultimate will cost $91 or $138, respectively.

Is your head spinning yet? Good. Because you should also know that Microsoft plans to run a pre-release promotion to lower both the Home Premium and Ultimate upgrade prices to $49 and $99, respectively. OK, done. Phew. [ZDNet via Electronista]

As an employee of a parts supplier for Acer, one of Google partners for Chrome OS (true!), he was privy to a brief demonstration of a Private Developer Beta. They showed a full installation, which took about 10 minutes. After installation was done, desktop to desktop reboot took about 25 seconds.

As for the desktop, it is minimalist: at the bottom of the screen is the Chrome Bar, which is the system's dock, start menu, or whatever you'd like to call it. The glowing blue icon, which looks like the center of the Chrome logo (also true!), opens the main menu, and hides when not in use. It can be activated with the Windows key, a la the Start Menu, though Chrome-loaded netbooks could well have a dedicated Google key, or Chrome key. Update: The creator of these screenshots has admitted that they're fake.

Now, some reasons to be suspicious: these shots come a little soon for my comfort, just one day after the announcement; the shots could easily be mocked up in an existing Linux desktop environment (this one looks a bit like XFCE, actually); the shots don't necessarily look like they were taken in an Acer conference room (floral table tiles? really?); and, most damningly, the colors in the word "Google" are ordered incorrectly. Lastly, the demo was carried out on a Acer Extensa 4620Z—not a netbook, which would accord with Google's stated first target for the OS. So.

But you can see the same evidence I can, and the description in the leak is quite long, so just have a look for yourself—I'm just not overly hopeful. And anyway, even if this is real, we're just getting a tiny aesthetic preview of an early build of Google's Linux desktop environment, not any meaningful insight into how the OS works, performs or is in any way distinguishable from other existing products. [ChromeOSLeak—Thanks, MC Gamer!]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
There's this Wi-Fi strength indicator, long overdue, in the dock.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
And when a battery is close to end of life, the OS will report that, too. (To clarify, not only a dead battery, but one that will fail to hold its charge well.)

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
Automatic spelling correction in textedit.

Among other speed enhancements, boot and shut down twice as fast as in OS X Leopard.

Of course, these are really trivial next to things like multicore and GPU processing. But refined details are something I appreciate in an operating system.

[Macrumors, AppleInsider and Mac Life]

Snow Leopard, otherwise known as OS X 10.6, was first announced at last year's WWDC, and we got a pretty comprehensive rundown of what to expect: serious 64-bit support; the ability to really use multi-core processors with Grand Central; GPGPU processing (that's graphics card processing, in English) with OpenCL; and more under-the-hood upgrades. There've been plenty of rumors since then, but here's the official word:

WHAT'S NEW:

FASTER PERFORMANCE

• Much of the codebase has been rewritten, for speed increases system-wide.

• Installation is 45% faster, which is considerate, I guess.

• General optimizations abound: opening JPEGs, for example, is now twice as fast in Preview. PDFs are 1.5x faster. Some of this could be down to the new 64-bit, multi-threaded underpinnings; mostly, though, it's just plain old software tweaking.

• Same goes for Mail: it's about twice as fast to launch, search and move messages.

• Installing Snow Leopard actually saves space: you'll get back 6GB of hard drive space over Leopard 10.5. Successive versions of OS X are usually faster, yeah, but much smaller? That's new.

SAFARI 4

• Javascript performance, which is basically the core issue in the browser wars nowadays, is up by 50%. Browsing as a whole is faster, and Safari 4 passes the Acid3 CSS test at 100%. It gets Coverflow (for history browsing), just like virtually every other part of OS X. "Fastest in the World", they say. In addition, Safari 4 now has "crash resistance", meaning Chrome-like threaded processes, so a single crashed tab doesn't take down the entire browser. More here.

MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SUPPORT

• According to our own Mark Wilson, "it looks like it should look." That means seamless integration with Mail, Contacts and iCal. The implementation looks fairly complete, and most importantly, it's standard in Snow Leopard—not part of a separate app suite.

QUICKTIME 10

• QT gets a new interface, looks like the iTunes video player. Hardware acceleration for video playback, too. You can do some quick video editing as well, like in older versions of Quicktime Pro, except with an iMovie-style visual timeline. It's very pretty, and a welcome improvement of the ultra-limited editing powers of previous QTs. This, of course, is now standard. Oh right, and there' a new, vaguely menacing icon.

NEW DOCK, EXPOSE

• It's a lot like regular Exposé, except it can be controlled from the dock, and offers more in the way of interactivity, i.e., dragging content between previewed windows. App grouping is now managed by from the dock icons. Nothing revolutionary, but it's nice to see tighter Exposé integration. I see little hints of Windows 7's awesome new taskbar, maybe?

• Sorta related, but not worthy of its own heading: you can magnify some icons in Finder, and preview video in thumbnails.

64-BIT, GPGPU, AND MULTI-CORE SUPPORT:

• 64 whole bits: All native OS X apps, like Mail, Quicktime, Finder, and Safari, are fully coded for 64-bit compatibility. This shouldn't have a massive effect on performance, but it's an inevitable progression, and a positive one. Previously.

• Multi-core support, i.e. Grand Central: We knew this was coming, but it bears repeating: the whole OS has been optimized to use all those fancy multi-core processors in your MacBooks and iMacs. This includes core apps. The API, which will allow developers to tap into Grand Central, which is essentially the software brain of the OS X multi-core engine, will expand support to third-party apps. Previously.

• GPGPU acceleration: Not much new here, but Snow Leopard will support GPU acceleration in non-graphics apps, when appropriate. Again, previously.

HOW MUCH, AND WHEN?

• Well, this is a hell of a surprise, but it fits with Apple's vision of Snow Leopard as a stopgap product: $29 to upgrade from Leopard, down from their regular $129 upgrade price. $49 for a family pack. It comes out in September, before Windows 7, and a developer preview is available from today. Anyone who buys a new Mac from June 8th can upgrade for a nominal $10 handling fee.

Apple Unveils Mac OS X Snow Leopard

SAN FRANCISCO, June 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today unveiled Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™, an even more powerful and refined version of the world's most advanced operating system and the foundation for future Mac® innovation. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies, out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange and new accessibility features. Snow Leopard will ship as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users in September 2009 for $29.

"We've built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before."

To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers focused on perfecting the world's most advanced operating system, refining 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects in Mac OS X. Users will notice a more responsive Finder™; Mail that loads messages 85 percent faster and conducts searches up to 90 percent faster;* Time Machine® with up to 50 percent faster initial backup;* a Dock with Expose integration; a 64-bit version of Safari® 4 that boosts the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent** and is resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins. Snow Leopard also includes an all new QuickTime® X, with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video to YouTube, MobileMe™ or iTunes®. Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 6GB of drive space once installed.

For the first time, system applications including Finder, Mail, iCal®, iChat® and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard's support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance, and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software to take advantage of multicore processors. GCD is integrated throughout Snow Leopard, from new system-wide APIs to high-level frameworks and programming language extensions, improving responsiveness across the system. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics.

Snow Leopard builds support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 right into Mac OS X Mail, Address Book and iCal so you can use these applications to send and receive email, create and respond to meeting invitations, and search and manage your contacts with global address lists. Exchange information works seamlessly within Snow Leopard so users can take advantage of OS X only features such as fast Spotlight™ searches and Quick Look previews. Snow Leopard is the only desktop operating system with out of the box support for Exchange 2007 and businesses of any size will find it easier to integrate Macs into their organization.

Every Mac includes innovative features and technologies for users with special needs, and Snow Leopard adds groundbreaking new features that make the Mac experience even more accessible to those with a vision impairment. Apple's Multi-Touch™ trackpad is now integrated with the VoiceOver screen reader so users can hear and navigate different parts of a window or the desktop by moving a single finger around the trackpad as if it were the screen. Snow Leopard also introduces built-in support for wireless bluetooth braille displays and the connection of multiple braille displays simultaneously to one Mac.

Pricing & Availability
Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard in September 2009 through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. The Snow Leopard single user license will be available for a suggested retail price of $29 (US) and the Snow Leopard Family Pack, a single household, five-user license, will be available for a suggested price of $49 (US). For Tiger® users with an Intel-based Mac, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife® '09 and iWork® '09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 (US) and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229 (US).

The Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller between June 8, 2009 and the end of the program on December 26, 2009, for a product plus shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US). Users must request their Up-To-Date upgrade within 90 days of purchase or by December 26, 2009, whichever comes first. For more information please visit www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate. Snow Leopard requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM and is designed to run on any Mac computer with an Intel processor. Full system requirements can be found at www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs.

*Testing conducted by Apple in May 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6 with shipping Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7 using shipping MacBook® 2.0 GHz systems with 2GB of RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256MB) and shipping generation iMac® 2.66 GHz systems with 2GB of RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256MB).

**Testing conducted by Apple in May 2009 comparing 64-bit Safari 4 to 32-bit Safari 4 on prerelease Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6. Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted on an iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

© 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Snow Leopard, Finder, Time Machine, Safari, QuickTime, MobileMe, iTunes, iCal, iChat, Spotlight, Multi-Touch, Apple Store, Tiger, iLife, iWork, MacBook and iMac are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

There are always emotional phases to this kinda stuff.

The anger frustration comes from knowing you have to backup the important files from your hard drive and waste a night shuffling 0s and 1s back and forth, finding those obscure files you'll know you won't even think about for like 5 years. You hate your computer for making you do this. You might even kick it a few times. Although by the time you're erasing the drive, you have already accepted the fact that you'll have to set everything up again. And by the time you've started your install, you can see the ray of light at the end of the tunnel, although waiting for the install can test one's patience as you watch the "pot of water" boil.

But when it's all done, you're left with a pristine system, free of corruption (and 5pcs Cialis). You have a sense of new beginning: now that your computer is clean, you're free to take on the world. Everything that you haven't accomplished will be ten times easier now...at least, until next week, when your computer desktop looks as disheveled as ever.

Here's a soundtrack to get you through the ordeal.

Backing Up Your Data, Formatting
Save Me, Nina Simone


Or the Aretha Franklin cover, which I prefer.

Where Is My Mind? by the Pixies, via Michael Yap

Melt! by Flying Lotus

*The last minute of this youtube clip is Melt!

Ride of the Valkyries

Search and Destroy by Iggy Pop and the Stooges, via Kat Hannaford

Installing
Ghostwriter by RJD2

Computer Love by Kraftwerk.

Computer Camp Love (Villains Remix) by Datarock, via hiredg3Ek
*this is not the remix video

La Guitaristic House Organization by rinôçérôse, Installation Sonore.

Fingerstips, Stevie Wonder.

Bits and Pieces by Junior Boys

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

The Cuban government feels that Windows is not only a symbol of U.S. hegemonic rule, but they think the U.S. government has access to Windows' source code, and could use it against the Caribbean island. And it's difficult for Cubans to obtain and update their Windows software since there's like, you know, that whole trade embargo nonsense makes it really, really difficult to BUY it.

But it is impressive that 20% of the Cuba's computer users are already running some form of Linux on their computers. Bravo, I say. Bravo. [Reuters]

Moblin is based largely on Fedora, and it's still a work in progress, but its main goal is to optimize performance for Atom and Core 2 processors running on smaller machines. The alpha Intel just released alread has an innovative network connection manager and fast optimized boot times, and it's confirmed to work well with Dell's Mini 9, the Acer Aspire One, and the Eee PC 901 (although right now wi-fi on the Eee is iffy).

Performance is all well and good, but what I'm most interested personally is finding the perfect graphical UI for a netbooks' smaller screen. Right now Moblin is using the Xfce desktop, which is pretty bread and butter. Later in the development they'll switch to a more gussied up UI based on Clutter, which Intel owns.

Last week we saw Jolicloud, a fantastic looking netbook OS that has definitely focused on innovating a new UI for the small screen beyond the ol' desktop-and-icons paradigm. That's what we're waiting for. [Mobilin: Download via Ars Technica]

The new Backup and Restore looks pretty similar to the Vista version, where there's a welcome screen to choose backup or restore, and a prompt to choose a target drive before getting into the nitty gritty of data protection. But instead of a screen asking you what file types you want to back up, there's now a screen asking if you'd like windows to automatically choose the files to protect, or if you'd like to do it manually.

Letting Windows 7 back up your computer is a two click process. You click OK to launch the auto backup menu, and then you click OK to actually carry out the action. Manual backup, however, presents you with a tree menu that has check boxes next to each drive/directory/folder. From here, you can decide which folders are worthy of attention.

You can also create system images that automatically backup to an external drive with Windows 7, something you couldn't do with Vista. Previously, backups were limited only to data files that weren't system files, program files, or settings, but rather text docs, audio files, video files, and emails.

You still can't save individual program and system files with Windows 7, but you can have the computer create a whole image that can be used to restore you computer if your drive craps out.. This is done without asking in automatic backup if there's a proper amount of space, and is a checkbox option on the manual backup screen. It's also worth noting that Windows Backup still won't touch FAT formatted drives with a 39 and 1/2 foot pole.

It may not be as pretty or intuitive as Time Machine, but the levels of customization make it more functional than Apple's backup solution.

If you are in love with

You just need to head to devianART to grab the theme and follow Lifehacker's guide to install it. [devianART via Lifehacker]

According to Electronista, Cloud launches within a few seconds, provides access to the internet, runs client apps (like Skype), as well as a variety of web apps, including a dock full of them from Google. In addition, Cloud is compatible with flash video and mp3s, giving users options for multimedia use within the OS. But Cloud is not meant to be a standalone solution. Instead, it will be packaged in netbooks alongside Windows XP, complete with a dock icon that will switch you over to the more robust operating system when more power is required.

Cloud is expected to be available early next year, when it is shipped alongside Gigabyte's Tablet Notebooks. [Good OS via Electronista]