2010 — 19 November: Friday
Not so much a placeholder,1 as a status report as midnight rolls gently past. What have I learned? Well, Windows 7 has managed to do everything that Vista was supposed to. It's ahead of OSX in ease of use, and (I fear) more polished than Ubuntu 10.10 in appearance. It's not perfect, but so far I've managed to get every program I need to operate in the 64-bit environment without yet having to resort to XP compatibility mode. And (with the odd exception of an "unknown" device that Device Manager claims isn't properly installed) all my hardware has behaved itself, too.
So I have my set of high-quality fonts, DTP, vector and bitmap artwork programs (Xara and the GIMP), file editors, web server access, scanning, printing, networking, network drive mapping, virus scanning, firewall, and web browsing. I'm leaving email on my old workhorse. And I'll deal with my databases next, I guess. Yet to tackle CD ripping, too.
Time for some more sleep. G'night.
That all-important...
... first cuppa vanished faster than the thin morning mist has, so far. It's 08:27 and I've been grappling with the (to me) alien world of IE bookmarks (or "favorites" [sic]) whose import from Firefox on the workhorse is — shall we say? — just a little clumsy. Mind you, my festering heap of random destinations could use a little tidying up.
Is it leopards that don't change their spots, or just senior advisers in the Tory party?
Downing Street was last night reversing that rule of thumb, grinding its collective teeth that someone so experienced could have said something so crassly insensitive at such a difficult time for many voters... Young was partly brought back to the centre of government to bring his experience, and brusque style to bear on key decisions, but it may be that sometimes experience can become a euphemism for someone out of touch with voters.
You think?
A study in Totnes
Young Zeno has installed a remotely controllable camera to which he gave me (temporary) access. I caught him just before he went for some breakfast, which strikes me, too, as a good idea.
He was there a moment ago! [Pause] As I zap my next Bramley in the microwave, prior to adding some of it to the cereal, I ponder yet again what on earth we did before these handy ovens came along.
PC philosophistries
I've been exchanging thoughts with my chum Brian, who is no fan of the Microsoft Empire, and an inveterate hacker / tinkerer.2
Me:
Thanks for the tips. For what purpose do we live, if not to give sport to our neighbours? (Jane Austen.) I am, in fact, very impressed by the extent to which Win 7 (whose internal name, by the
way, is version 6.1) has got to where Vista so significantly failed to. It now comfortably heads the ease-of-use space that OSX likes to claim and that Ubuntu aspires to. But that's at a cost of
a working set at 1.2GB of RAM and over 14,000 handles, 650 or so threads and 40 or so processes before any applications get a look in. Vastly different from my 4KB of self-modifying assembler on
an ICL 1500 Series mini!
Brian:
I, too, was impressed with my initial exposure to Win 7 — I had it on trial for a couple of months. However it is the whole Windows philosophy that keeps me on Linux... I find Windows (at
all versions) a pain when on boot-up several processes all race for the CPU to check for and independently inform me that Windows, Java, Flash, Acrobat, Office, AntiVirus, Uncle Tom Cobbley all
need updates. Start-up time in Win 7 is impressive but leave the machine off for a couple of weeks and then see how long it takes from start-up until the machine is actually usable.
Me:
All I actually ask of a PC, most of the time, is the ability to use it to do what I want via the applications I use without obtruding on me more than it has to. I'm deliberately not loading the
system with anything until I'm convinced I need it. And I tend to leave hardware alone for months, or years, at a time. I reserve my tinkering for A/V rather than PC. And I still intend to keep
A/V and PC at (h)arm's length. We shall see.
Heavens to Murgatroyd, we're into the afternoon already. Lemonses, Mrs Landingham, I need my lemonses! And it's rather brighter out there. Even some hints of blue sky.
Rule of thumb(nail)
Impossible — no, shocking! — though this is going to be to believe, there are some aspects of Win 7 that are slightly less than 100% intuitive. On my primitive XP systems, for example, when I display a folder containing Xara artwork files, I can see (if I so choose) thumbnails of each "picture"...
... whereas, on Win 7, all I get is one pretty icon that I can resize. Not very useful, in my opinion...
Is it time for a cuppa yet? I could pop the kettle on while I do the lunchtime dishes. It's 14:16, after all.
Thanks, Mr Postie
I see Lord Young (see above) has now fallen on his sword. That was jolly quick! Meanwhile, a pair of new CDs by a pair of not-so-new musicians:
The Orb is somewhat easier on the ears than the Eno — they are both going to need more than one listen, however. [Pause] 17:00 and nearly dark out there. Yuk. [Pause] Now it's 22:00 and I've finished sucking database data out of the HP MPC as simple flat ASCII files. In between following David Copperfield's appalling childhood schooling :-)
Yawn. Time (23:13) for sleep. G'night.