RIP michael jackson.
Aged 50 - well, what can you say to news like that?
His bizzare, often higly suspect personal life aside - I don’t think many people make it through life without enjoying at least a handfull of his tunes, from the Jackson 5′ & Rockin Robin to Thriller and Smoth Criminal the man could clealy make some music. So, break out the dusty LP’s, cassets and 8-Trac’s and have listen so you might remember the man from the days before it all went very wierd.
Earlier I was wathcing TV and bashing the stumbleuppon button in firefox like a guinnea pig at a feeder bar . The show was countryfile, the televisual equivelant of 20mg of Valium;
Anyway, they were jabbering on about churches and how they were “being made ready for the 21st century”. Dullsvile, This sent me off on my usual “what’s it all about” tangents:
I’m generally agnostic in my outlook. I think if you look far enough back, most religions begin with some very simple values people chose to live by in order that everyone get along, nothing more complex than “be good to each other” or “Be Excellent to each other”
I Think of it as a thousands of years old game of Chinese whispers where the start phrase was “Be Good to each other”. Somehow the game split into sub-games over the centuries, lots of ghost stories were added, people started adding more and more stories and dogma to suit there own situation, times or prejudices and eventually, over time, a religion is born.
Now people kill each other over the varying results of these Chinese whisper games; despite the seemingly Universal ideal of “BE GOOD TO EACH OTHER” they all started with.
Anyway, while Country file was playing and I was pondering the meaning (or lack thereof) of this stuff I hit the Stumbleuppon feeder bar without realising.
I spent a few hours playing with the new Windows 7 beta and I have to admit that I was quietly impressed with this latest offering:
First, a very quick word on Vista:
Remember with Windows of old you got the feeling that the OS was written in chunks, by separate little teams that did not speak to each other?
One team wrote windows explorer, another tacked memory management while another team worked in the firewall etc? The chunks were then assembled by yet another team with no idea what the end product was intended to look like and none of these guys were talking to each other!
The result, inevitably, was always a bloated OS with a dozen ways to achieve any given task, multiple management interfaces, ways of installing drivers etc, not the best process but it seemed to work for the most part.
The same old process seems to have been used for Vista, only with Vista the system reached critical mass and the result, Vista, was so bloated, so slow and overly complex that even mom’n'pop users with no clue about computers were unhappy and scores of geeks worldwide voted with their feet, either moving to Linux or sticking with Windows XP for much longer than they ever expected to.
The geeks of the world refused to move to Vista until it was fit for purpose and it seems like we are still waiting for that version/service pack for Vista
Preface over with , on to Windows 7:
Compared to Vista, Windows 7 feels more coherent, like it was developed by fewer people all with a clearer idea of what they were working towards, this is a very good start.
The new “free to all” beta programme is a good idea, the more Beta testers they get the more feedback they get, resulting in a better OS (Theoretically!)
The 2.3Gb download happens pretty quickly thanks to Microsoft’s own Bit torrent client, that alone made me grin. The install was painless on an IBM laptop with no driver issues at all, I installed on a Spare HDD to keep things simple.
From clicking “download” on the website to running Windows 7 took me less than 2 hours, not bad.
Windows 7 has some trick up its sleeve when it comes to driver distribution, assuming all users have broadband that is, It seems to pack the distro DVD with every imaginable network driver and little else. Once the OS is installed it downloads the rest from the web.
This approach has been present since XP but now actually seems to work in windows 7.
Windows 7 runs quicker on my PC than Vista does, feels like it’s been thought about a little bit more and has had most of the bells, whistles and general bloat removed. There are a couple of teething issues that were not unexpected from a 3 day old beta:
1. The glassy border on all applications is too thick and cannot be changed, this wastes a lot of desktop space!
1. You’ll struggle to find an Antivirus app for it at the moment - Symantec and Mcafee do not install, AVG etc do install but I’m convinced they don’t really know what OS they are on so I don’t trust that they really work once installed.
2. Firefox will only load in safe mode??
3. Windows defender detected my IBM video drivers as “potentially unsafe”
4. Of course, IE8 is a whole load of bullshit
So,, Verdict? as a Beta, it really is the best effort I’ve seen form microsoft to date.
I cannot vouch for security etc but it generally feels more solid than Vista. Let’s hope that Microsoft resist the urge to fuck with it too much.
—
Addition (30th Jan 2009)
A few people have said to me recently that Win7 is just another crappy windows release and have then gone on to list a dozen specific complaints about compatability or changed layouts, “the usual suspects” for a new Microsoft OS.
I can’t help but feel that they have missed something more important than listing the specific annoyances you found in a beta.
So here is is:
The beta is being used legitimately by millions of tech savvy and vocal users(Geeks) for fee. This is in sharp contrast to the old windows beta model that put OS’s solely into the hands of TechNet subscribers who are mostly business users or Driver writers for Hardware producers.
This is something that I believe will improve the quality of Win7 by the time it gets to final releases;
With previous versions of Windows, the first release was never really ready, and was always bundled with new hardware at PC world. This in turn left the less technically savvy (nubes) to find the faults with the new OS while the geeks waited for SP1 or SP2 for the OS before making the move.
That’s is a big change, taking the monopoly on MS betas out of the hands of TechNet subscribers, sharing it freely, all of this should mean that the geeks will no longer have to wait for SP2 before adopting the final release and the not-so-tech-savvy users will no longer be unfairly used as guinea pigs.
It sounds like a leaf from the open-source book doesn’t it?
Then why are so many geeks shunning the beta a “another shit version of windows� and not ceasing on the opportunity to tell Microsoft where they are going wrong?
It’s everyone’s loss in the end.
I watched an advertisement for NatWest this evening which centred on there “all new” financial advisers. These guys will dissect your finances, electricity, gas and phone providers etc and tell you where they think you can save money.
Sounds pretty good right?
I don’t buy it, This is what that add is really saying:
“Hi, We are an institution who, like most other high-street banks, have been so irresponsible with our lending in the recent past that the world financial markets buckled under the pressure. We also avoided bankruptcy thanks to a taxpayer bailout that you will be paying for for a long long time.
At the point where collection, analysis and presentation of metrics and statistics takes priority over the actions or process those measures were put in place to monitor, it is time to get the hell out.
If you find yourself in this situation, I’m affraid you may have found yourself in a bureaucracy with little hope of ever achieving anything worthwhile. You now have limited time to escape the hell before permanent damage to your mental health is done.
I seem to remember not too long ago we were in the grips of a panic over fuel prices.
Remember that?
Well, now it seems that this global economic meltdown has started to have an effect at the pumps :
Cheapest petrol stations within 5 miles of “AB11″ for Unleaded :
———————————————
Station: Morrison’s Aberdeen
Address: West North Street, Aberdeen, AB24 5AR
Brand : Morrison’s
Distance: 1.34
Price : 94.9p
Updated: 26-10-2008
———————————————
I like to think of current economic problems as a long overdue correction instead of a meltdown.
Admit it. Fuel, Food and Housing have reached insane prices in recent years and months. Property prices in some areas doubled and even trebled in value over only a couple of years while earnings have certainly not followed suit.
The wider crisis is largely down to reckless lending and unregulated banking practices, but I think that the huge increase in amateur property development aka “The Beeney Brigade� has a great deal to do with the untenable state of the housing market in the UK.
With a huge increase in the number of amateur property developers gabbing up the affordable homes and re-selling at luxury home prices, less and less cheap property became available. This constant development of property and more people owning multiple homes has pushed prices higher and higher, great if you are already a homeowner but bad bad news if you were looking to get on the ladder as you found the bottom rung was moved way out of your reach.
So now fuel prices are looking sane again and property prices are certainly going to plateau or even decrease for a while. Maybe this will help to close the gap between the inflated prices and what people can actually afford, no bad thing in my book.
Sorry of you happen to have mortgaged yourself to hilt and back in order to buy a couple of flats, paint them beige and then cream tens of thousands of pounds in profits for your minor effort, I guess that bubble has just burst.
