Polishing: A glance at Chrome OS
The release of Chrome OS is getting closer, but there are still a huge number of enhancements and changes that are being rolled in that should spruce up the user experience, and TechCrunch was nice enough to cover a few for us. In our opinion, the biggest change is the ability to browse the internet without signing in, but if you want to update your bookmarks or save any form data you'll still need a Google account. There's a new side bar that appears to give access to other apps, replacing tabs on top, and it also adds in battery and WiFi strength indicators. There's also somewhat of a debate going on regarding whether Chrome OS should have support for compressed archives, such as ZIP, RAR, TAR, and GZ. Right now the OS has no support for those files, which, as one contributor points out, is rather unfortunate given that Gmail itself generates zip files when you click "download all attachments." Let's hope someone at the Googs finds time to add that in so that future users aren't locked out of the joys of extraction.
128GB BDXL Blu-Ray Disc Specification gets official
The Blu-ray Disc Association has published the final specs for the behemoth BDXL disc, opening the way for manufacturers to start introducing the technology in their optical drives. Not too much here that we don't already know: aimed at institutions and folks who need to archive lots and lots of... stuff, BDXL discs are available in either triple layer 100GB (re-writable or write-once) or 128GB quad layer write-once varieties. Of course, with all these layers, the laser in the Blu-ray drive you already own won't be able to do the trick, so start saving your change for a hardware upgrade once these things become commercially available.
Press release after the break.