Microsoft has begun to let out details of Windows 7. It would appear to address issues prevalent in Vista such as driver incompatibility, build on the security laid in Vista and it should support apps available for XP/Vista. Although it is debatable how much will be in this release at such an early date, it would seem that it somewhat shortens the shelf life of Vista, then again that may be no harm. Microsoft say that machines bought today that are Vista capable (though some machines sold with Vista installed are ill-equipped for the task to begin with, so I have my doubts).

It will be interesting to see what this new system offers, it can’t be worse than Vista, right? Though it does build on the same kernel which has plagued MS systems to date, a rewrite would be nice to see. I’ll stick with XP for the moment and reserve judgement until I see final product. Many people refuse to upgrade to XP and I’m one of them, XP does what I need without too much clutter. Of course its early days yet, and MS want to give Vista a 3 year run before rolling out a new OS. Of course the day Photoshop and Dreamweaver are available on Linux I’d be switching to a nice Ubuntu desktop full time, but alas that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Is Windows XP too good for Microsoft’s own good? by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley — Did Microsoft make XP Service Pack (SP) 2 too good for its own good? Or is Vista just an off release that Microsoft should hurry up and replace — and definitely sooner than 2010, when it is slated to roll out Windows 7?

Personally, I would not quite say that XP is too good for MS own good, just that its a hell of a lot better than Vista, XP is chunky enough and I often revert to Windows 2000 on older machines. XP simply allows you to muddle through your day with relative stability, if an OS is not stable it is counter-productive. Vista has a lot of kinks to work out and lords knows how there are so many after a 6 year development cycle. I recently purchased a new laptop with Vista installed as standard, after an hour or so of playing around I found it too awkward and unresponsive for even the most basic tasks and installed XP, my sympathies go out to those who may not be so knowledgable of OS workings, especially those who have become comfortable with XP and fear change, as many do.

It is astonishing how slow the industry is to port 64 bit apps for XP x64, especially considering I have no intention of upgrading to Vista x64 in any of its flavours when it is available. Ok, fair enough I can live without most apps being ported, but when it comes to drivers like for for my mobile phone and TV tuner card I get annoyed.

I recently undertook the task of backing up my DVD collection to my home media server and chose divx to compress the files now that it can preserve 5.1 sound. First I found that DivX Converter was not only lacking 64 bit support but didn’t even make use of my dual processor system! Dr DivX did a slightly better job, making use of the SMP fully but still 32 bit…and these are exactly the kind of tasks that could use the massively better number crunching power of a native 64 bit application.

It would be nice to see 64 bit Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator too, but I guess I may as well keep dreaming there. Its not all bad I guess, when I want a taste of the power under the hood I can always boot into Fedora for the 64 bit experience and for the most part compile what I need natively. If the above mentioned apps were ported to Linux perhaps problems would be solved, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of that for the moment.

Bill Gates is undoubtedly a clever man, but his vision has not always been clear. His brute force business tactics and the corporate machinery of Microsoft that surround him. Of course, he is soon to bow out (2008) and leave the MS machinery chug along.

No one will need more than 637Kb of memory for a personal computer’ - Bill Gates

More Bill Gates quotes and blunders..

He was also slow in realising the potential of the Internet, even making comments that the internet wouldn’t have much impact on computing, and with Windows market share of the desktop they felt untouchable. At a time, circa ‘96 when it was thought that Netscape were the future of the internet, with visions of a browser-based desktop running the show on top of the host OS, even though at that time bandwidth constraints on the average internet user were quite limiting for such applications. But of course MS threw everything it had at developing new internet friendly software, primarily Internet Explorer, re-affirmed their monopoly further on the desktop market.

Linux is certainly a threat to Microsoft in the server market, but is still a long way behind in the desktop arena. The visions of the past have now become reality, or closer at least, with the growth of the internet and wide availability of broadband the browser desktop is taking shape. These new applications are what people are using, and this is the new cash cow MS would like to milk.

We use Linux here at Blue Star (Debian and Fedora primarily). It is reliable and stable, unlike MS products for servers. A better built system and for free. I’d reccommend anyone to get one of the live cd distributions such as knoppix and give it a try!