Lunch Hour Report: Windows 7, DOSbox and XBMC

First off, I'll start by apologizing for being late on the post. I got stuck in a meeting so I'm having to take my lunch hour later than normal. Now, on to the news.

Lets start off with Microsoft and Windows 7. If you're reading this post, you likely are away that Microsoft is planning to release Windows 7 sometime near the end of next year, but today I found some benchmarks for it, and they look promising. Supposedly the speed is "head and shoulders above Vista SP1." Even though I still hold that I'm a linux guy, this is kinda interesting because as much as I don't like some of the things Microsoft does, or some of it's policies, on the tier of things that I don't agree with the policies of, Microsoft falls below some other companies, namely Apple and their lock down on the iPhone apps.

Next, I want to show you something very cool that I found today on LinuxJournal.com. I found an article while browsing their collection on setting up DOSbox, a nifty little program that's similar to WINE, in the respect that it emulates a Microsoft environment for the purpose of running apps native to that other OS, but this one, unlike wine, is designed to run DOS programs. In the tutorial in the article, they show you how to install it and set it up to play the original Duke Nukem game. I have DOSbox installed on my laptop which is running Ubuntu 8.10, but I've never actually installed any useful applications on it. I saw it in the apt repositories one day and said, "Hey, that's neat, that might come in handy some day", so I installed it. Now I have an excuse, that game was one of my childhood favorites, within the ranks of Sonic 2 and Kirby's Dreamland in my book.

Finally, I'm going to take a look at Xbox Media Center (XBMC). This little program is something I stumbled upon back in the days when I was in the process of modding my Xbox, chipping it, new hard drive, Linux OS and XBMC. I loved the application on the Xbox and when I found out that they ported it to the x86 platform under Windows, Linux and Mac I was very happy. So, it's not really anything new really, but it's something worthy of mentioning if nothing else. I haven't yet installed it on my laptop, but it is running on my Desktop which right now runs Windows XP SP3 and it runs absolutely flawlessly. There are a few features that I can't use just because of my hardware setup on my desktop, but overall, the look and feel of application is great. Very professional looking and it makes a great alternate for anyone who wants a media center PC and has a Vista version such as Business that doesn't come with the media center built in or if you're running a flavor of linux and don't want to put up with some of the hassles of some of the other media center applications (even if some of them are a bit more feature rich when they run properly).