I’ve been using Windows, in its various forms, for about twenty years now.  Over this period, it’s been a big part of my professional and personal life.  I’m also a long-time Mac user.

After this much experience with Operating Systems, one would expect a certain sense of skepticism with each new release.  In my case, I can honestly say I still get incredibly excited when Apple or Microsoft come out with a new release of their OS, even though I’m almost always disappointed.

So when I downloaded and installed the beta of Windows 7 last weekend, I have to admit I was preparing myself for disappointed.  Boy, was I wrong.

So what’s so special about Windows 7?  Well, it’s not the usual chrome that comes with a new OS release actually.  Check out Tim Sneath’s “Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets” for a terrific list of those: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx.  It wasn’t the improved boot time, support for Netbooks, or impressive stability for an early beta release.

Nope, it’s something much more subtle than that.  It’s something that only someone who’s used Windows extensively would probably ever pick up on.  I’m not a UI expert, so I’m not sure if there’s a technical term for it, but I’ll just call it “fluidity.”  Mac OS has this to a certain extent, the iPhone has it as well.  It’s the sense that the UI is flowing with you as you  navigate through it.  It’s the subtle way that icons light up and thumbnails smoothly appear as you move your mouse across the screen.  It’s the way the OS responds to your actions and the CPU seems to prioritize what the USER is trying to do over what an App or Service might be thinking about at a particular moment.

What’s special about Windows 7 isn’t how it looks, but how it feels.  None of the reviewers that I’ve read have picked up on this quality, but to me, this is the single most important feature that Windows 7 brings to the table. 

As a Canadian, I’m not so sure I want my tax dollars being spent on bailing these companies out.  I sympathize with the folks who will ultimately lose their jobs, should the American auto makers go down.  I just don’t see how that’s Canada’s problem.  To us, these are foreign auto makers just like the Japanese and Europeans. 

The Japanese auto makers build cars in Canada, they employ workers and they sell us good quality cars that people want to buy.  As I see it, if Canadians purchase 1.6 million cars per year in 2006, they will likely purchase a similar number regardless of whether GM or Ford is around.  This demand necessarily means that the other manufacturers will increase production to satisfy it, hire more workers, build new plants, purchase and run existing plants.  Sure, there will be a lag period, but it’s quite likely many of the laid off workers will be hired back into auto industry jobs.

So why should Canada subsidize foreign automakers to build cars we don’t want to buy?

This week I decided I’d better start ramping up on Microsoft’s Hyper-V Hardware Virtualization technology.  I quickly realized that for a number of reasons (including compatibility) I’d better build a dedicated machine.

I wanted something that was powerful, relatively small (in case I needed to move it around), capable of loading 8 GB of RAM into and most importantly, inexpensive.  After a brief visit to my local electronics warehouse store I realized that, at the time of this post, few commodity systems would accept more than 4 GB of RAM.

So off I went to my favorite computer specialty store and picked up a Shuttle Prima (http://us.shuttle.com/barebone/Models/SX38P2_Pro.html) with the following spec:

Model: Shuttle Prima SX38P2 Pro
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad at 2.4 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Disk: 720 GB Samsung
Video: ATI HD 2600 Pro (overkill but what the heck)

The above system came in at around $1,000 which is a pretty good bargain for the whopping spec the above machine provides.  Not only is it lightning fast, but it runs cool and quiet, all in a package that’s a little larger than a lunch box.

After loading Windows 2008 with Hyper-V there’s plenty of headroom left for VM’s.  The best thing about it is I can remote into this machine where possible but I can always pack it and go if I have to.

So far performance of VM’s on Hyper-V has been amazing.  I really can’t tell that I’m running a VM at all.  I’m working on an interesting idea that (if it works) I’ll post on this blog later.

I was thoroughly impressed by Nicholas Carr’s article on Google’s strategy for competing with Microsoft: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/05/one_of_the_corn.php.  He raises the important question of what the impact of companies like IBM and Salesforce incorporating Google Apps into their own offerings might be.

It’s a very interesting battle to watch as Carr rightly points out the fact that Google is patiently applying Microsoft’s own strategies against it.

Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about privacy.  Computer companies like Microsoft and Google are bickering with governments over whether the companies should self-regulate or the bureaucracies should legislate privacy.

But is there such a thing as privacy anymore?  Is there any way we can keep our personal information personal anymore? 

The private sector is racing to collect, resell and capitalize on information about us while governments are struggling, under severely constrained resources, to keep up with the necessarily legislation.  Meanwhile, criminal elements trump all these groups in terms of innovation and understanding of the inherent vulnerabilities in this space.

While I’m not arguing that we should give up the fight for privacy, it sure seems like an exercise in futility to me.  As soon as we make our information available electronically, it is vulnerable to disclosure. 

We often hear that the medical industry is on the forefront of maintaining our privacy in an electronic world but my experience today is what prompted this post.

This morning I was seated at my doctor’s office for an introductory meeting.  Usually, a receptionist seats you in a private room and you sit there and wait while the doctor makes his rounds.

In this case, I was seated in a room and there happened to be a computer in it.  This is a modern office, so it’s likely there were computers in every room. 

So here I sat alone, waiting for the doctor. When I casually looked up at the computer, right there on the screen in front of me were the medical records of the patient who was there before me.  The screen wasn’t locked.  I was staring at every prescription my doctor made to the lady who visited the office before I did.

Now surely the doctor made an innocent mistake here, how could the doctor know that he should lock his computer screen before exiting the room or having another patient seated? 

And that, is the fundamental problem.  We are all human, we all make mistakes, and lots of them.  I can inform this doctor, but who will inform the millions of others?

I don’t have any answers in this post.  Just thought I’d share my experience and my questions.

This got me thinking about the whole glass of water analogy.  From the realist’s point of view, asking whether the glass is half full or half empty begs for more information.  A realist might ask how did the glass get here?  Did someone fill it half-way and then walk away in which case the glass could be considered half full, or did someone drink half the water, in which case the glass could be thought of as half empty.

My point here is that nobody is that black & white.  We are all shades of gray and our outlook on life, pessimistic, realistic or otherwise varies based on our moods and experience whether by the hour or by the year.  Perhaps I seemed a little pessimistic that day because someone came along and drank half my water.  That doesn’t necessarily make me a pessimist.