Here"s a roundup of some interesting stories that are floating around the web:
· Western Digital has quietly released an upgraded version of their 74GB Raptor hard drive. Featuring 16MB of cache and NCQ, this drive has somehow floated under tech site radar with all the hype about the 150GB models. Prices for the "ADFD" variant of the 74GB drive are almost identical to the original model and the drive is rather hard to track down. Newegg for example doesn"t even have the drive listed yet. In other storage news, Seagate has accidently leaked information concerning their upcoming monster 750GB 7200.10 hard drive.
· The folks over at Linspire are planning to release a free version of their Debian/KDE based Linux distro. The initial release of "Freespire" is not yet available, but will definitely have a tough time going up against established distros like Ubuntu and Slackware. Users of Freespire can choose to purchase a "CNR" subscription or use promised "apt-get" functionality to install/maintain software packages.
· Ubuntu has put out a farily stable beta version of their upcoming 6.06 Dapper Drake milestone. New features for 6.06 can be found over here. Fans of Live CD"s might want to check out the Debian-based distro "Elive", which looks amazing because of their little known Enlightenment window manager.
· Mozilla has just released a new webpage detailing features that will make it into Firefox 2. The site lists all the different priority levels for features and when we can expect to see them in upcoming alpha/beta releases.
· Microsoft released build 5365 of Windows Vista last week to beta testers. Many users are reporting errors with "searchindexer.exe" when trying to access files. Disabling that service inside of services.msc seems to rectify the problem. Screenshots and reviews of the new build can be found over here. Paul Thurrott also just revealed in his review of 5365 that a beta version of Windows Media Player 11 will be released for Windows XP users inside of 2 weeks.
· Canadian readers will be interested to know that Sympatico and Rogers have joined forces to create a wireless pre-802.16 "WiMAX" broadband network, covering major metropolitan areas across the country. Each company offers different levels of service on the shared network with speeds reaching 3.0Mpbs with the high end Sympatico service. I had the opportunity to test the network the other day and the speeds are nothing short of astonishing for "anywhere" wireless access. (Especially driving around town with the modem hooked up in a friend"s car)