As of last week, I'm officially an Apple junkie. I completed the Apple triple play by adding an iPhone 4S to my MacBook Pro and iPad 2, making the world's perfect combination of electronic devices. (Well, technically, I also still have the iPod I bought somewhere around 2005 or 2006, but that barely works anymore - it had a good run, but nothing lives forever.)
Before this past October, I hadn't used a Mac at all since college, and then only once or twice in the computer labs. The last time I'd used a Mac extensively was in junior high school around 1995, so of course I didn't know what to expect, about 17 years later (holy crap, it's really been 17 years - I'm getting old). Since then, I was the stereotypical Apple hater, always making fun of people overpaying for children's toys or for being trendy hippies, since real technology people use PCs. Of course, that hasn't been true in a long time, and I found myself losing that battle when I realized that there were more Macs than PCs at every tech conference I went to.
When I got my MacBook Pro in October, after the initial setup, I found myself immediately loving it. There were a few things I needed to learn, but fortunately they were easy to learn. For example, the keyboard configuration is a little different than I was used to, and having an external PC keyboard attached makes things a little bit more confusing. And the mouse scroll wheel or trackpad is actually reversed from a PC (to make scrolling more like it is on mobile devices, where you are moving the page instead of moving the scrollbar). But it only took a short time before I could switch back and forth without any problem.
I also added on a Magic Mouse - this was pretty expensive for a mouse, but it is totally worth it. It combines the best features from the new Mac trackpad with a normal mouse. I can scroll and click faster than ever now. (Yes that was partially sarcastic, but it really is a nice mouse)
I use the Mac OS as my primary OS for day-to-day stuff, and I'm also learning Ruby on Rails and Objective-C. I've got Windows 7 loaded on the MacBook as well, dual-booted with Boot Camp. I only use the Windows partition now for .NET development, which is still my primary development environment for my own applications (my personal website, blog, link shortener, LLC site, web deployment tool, and more to come soon, including CSS 4 test, a lottery pool tracker, task reminder service, and more).
The iPad was more an experiment. I'd heard nothing but good things about it, and knew several people who had one and loved it. I never really saw the benefit - I thought if you wanted a real computer, just carry your laptop, and if you want mobile, just carry your mobile phone. But it turns out the iPad is a great compromise. You can't keep it in your pocket, but it's much easier to carry than a laptop, making it perfect for situations when you want to get things done but don't want to take up a lot of space. The battery life is ridiculous, much longer than a mobile phone or a laptop. It's great for games, reading, listening to music, working on the web, or almost anything you can do on a full-size computer. I was a little concerned about the virtual keyboard at first, but it turns out it does a great job, especially when the screen is horizontal and you get a little more room. The auto-correct is incredible, and fixes just about all of my mistakes correctly, even when I've typed a valid word as my typo.
My "new every two" from Verizon was up in late February, so I finally switched from my original Droid to an iPhone last week. This is just a miniature iPad (or I suppose the iPad is just a large iPhone), so I already knew how to do everything except use it as a phone, which of course was a no-brainer. The keyboard is a little small, but no different than any other phone. And the iPhone 4S comes with great voice recognition, not only with Siri, but anywhere that has text input.
So now that I've got all this Apple stuff, I find myself going to coffee shops now a few times per week, trying organic food, and I'm thinking about growing my hair long and wearing tye-dye T-shirts.
I've got a new page on my website, Free Software, listing my favorite free applications for software development, data security, and other utilities. Some are open source, some are freeware, and some are free software, but no shareware or trialware.
Now that Windows 7 is out there, you may be asking yourself whether it's a good idea to go out and buy it. Microsoft's been advertising it like crazy, and every tech blog and publication is telling you how great it is. Very few people have anything bad to say about it. Even Apple's only argument so far is "Vista sucked, so Windows 7 must suck too". With Windows 7 costing $119 for just the home upgrade from Vista, or $319 for the good full version, it's important to know whether it's worth it to buy it directly, or just buy a machine that comes pre-loaded. Fortunately, I attended the kickoff event here in Phoenix, and received my version for free, so I don't have to make this decision.
Let's look at this from various points of view - you probably fall into one of these categories:
Computer illiterate You know nothing about computers, except how to turn them on, fire up "The Internet" (a web browser, probably IE), send/receive emails, fiddle with a Word Processor, and play solitaire (or Minesweeper if you're slightly more advanced). If this describes you, you most likely should never buy or install an operating system at all. You probably buy a computer that has an OS on it out of the box, and you'll use that OS until the computer breaks down or becomes obsolete and is replaced by another. Whatever OS comes with the computer is just fine for you - if it's Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7, or if it's any Mac OS, it doesn't really matter. You can do everything you need to do.
You should not buy Windows 7.
Competent, but not a techie You know what you're doing - you know the difference between "The Internet" and a web browser. You know that "the big blue e" is not "The Internet", and maybe even have installed an alternative browser to use. You defrag your hard disk, and use a virus scanner that you set up yourself. You actually understand that Macs cost a lot more than PCs, and don't really do anything different, so aren't worth the extra money. You could install your own OS, but you're content just using the out-of-the-box OS. You're probably better off just using what you have - after all, your machine does everything you need of it.
You should not buy Windows 7.
Rich, but clueless You have more money than most small countries. You're filthy stinking rich, and you'll buy any damn thing you see on TV or in an electronics store, just so you've got the latest and greatest. You bought a video phone when they first came out, and are the only person you know who owns one. You paid $2000 for a Blu-Ray player when they were brand new, instead of waiting a few months and paying 1/10th of that. You have a color monitor in your refrigerator that tells you what's inside without having to open the door. You have a T1 line in your house. You own laptops, netbooks, smart phones, home servers, media centers, and standard desktops, all of them top of the line, and the most you do on any of them is play internet checkers. But by golly, it's really fast. You have no need to ever install an OS, and you buy machines so often that you'll have an out-of-the-box Windows 7 before you even realize it.
You should not buy Windows 7, but you probably will anyway.
Serious gamer You play computer games 18 hours a day. You're an expert at World of Warcraft, and spend your days boosting up your magic levels or super powers or whatever you guys do. Your diet consists mostly of Hot Pockets and Red Bull. You're afraid of natural light, so you have blackout curtains on your windows. Your water bill is very low, since you don't waste water on unnecessary things like showers. Windows 7 will probably work fine with your games, but that would mean you'd have to take an hour or two away from playing your games to install it. Plus, it means you'd have to dip into your Mountain Dew budget in order to buy it.
You should not buy Windows 7.
Large non-tech business You are responsible for maintaining the computers for a large non-technical company. Your core business is not software engineering or anything else that requires top of the line software. Your employees come to the office every day, do their job, and then go home. You have no need for super-special security measures, high level encryption, or seamless remote access. You're probably better off leaving things as-is for now, then adding new machines with a Windows 7 image as you regularly cycle out your employees' machines.
You should eventually buy Windows 7, but not all at once.
Large technical business You are responsible for maintaining the computers for a large technical company, or one that has significant technical needs. You want to take advantage of some of the new features, like more advanced software installation and deployment policies, advanced virtualization, on-the-go encryption, and built-in remote access. You may develop software that will be distributed to end users or other businesses, and you need to ensure that you have significant testing capabilities on all operating systems.
You should absolutely buy Windows 7. Learn everything about it, and deploy it as soon as possible.
Software developer You work for a software development team, building web or desktop applications that solve business needs. You're not cutting edge, but rather working with stable technologies that you've known well for years. If you want to stay marketable by keeping up with the latest trends, you should probably have some experience with development techniques on Windows 7, but you probably won't actually accomplish anything useful.
You should probably buy Windows 7, but only if you don't already have it at work, and don't have an MSDN subscription, and only if your job is secure enough that you feel comfortable spending a couple hundred dollars on something you really don't need.
Techie You build your own PCs at home, buying parts one at a time from Fry's Electronics, or online at sites like Tiger Direct or Newegg. You set up your own secure home network, run automated backups and maintenance jobs, and are the resident tech support for your family and friends. Since you never buy machines out of the box (except maybe laptops), you do all of your own operating system installation and setup.
You should buy Windows 7, as part of the next machine you build.
FSF member You are a member of the Free Software Foundation. Richard Stallman is your personal hero. You sing along with the Free Software Song (below, or here). You run some flavor of GNU/Linux (making sure that you say "GNU" whenever you say Linux). You hate Microsoft and all it stands for. You despise the free enterprise market (which is ironic, because your entire foundation is built on "freedom".
Let me think...You probably won't be buying Windows 7.
Hacker You're an expert on all things technological. You might be a hacker in the traditional sense, doing illegal things, breaking into where you don't belong, pirating software, attacking networks, etc. In that case, you probably use Backtrack, Openwall, or another specialty Linux distribution. If you're the "good" type of hacker, where you just enjoy learning everything about hardware and software, then you probably use another more mainstream Linux distribution, like Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian, as your primary OS. In either case, as a technology prima donna, you must also be an expert in hacking Windows (either in a good way, or a highly illegal and destructive way).
You should buy Windows 7 (or steal the source code, compile it yourself, and break the activation code - not that I condone that kind of behavior).
Conclusion Windows 7 is expensive. 200-300 damn dollars for an operating system that probably doesn't do anything you need and can't already do. GNU/Linux or similar free operating systems (like FreeBSD or OpenSolaris) are out there. You probably already have Windows XP or Vista. More than likely, you have absolutely no need to pay that kind of money for Windows 7.
With that said, Windows 7 is clearly the best operating system Microsoft has come up with, and I absolutely believe that most people should have it - but unless you have a specific need for the new features, then my opinion is that it would be a waste of money to spend that much right now simply on an operating system. Just wait until your machine takes its last breath and gets replaced, or until you can find a smokin' deal, or until you suddenly have more money than brains.
With the release of Windows 7 to the public, you knew Apple was going to have some fun with it. There's a new "Mac vs. PC" commercial that was just released, poking fun at Microsoft's history of imperfect operating systems:
I've been using Windows 7 as my primary operating system at home for several weeks, after attending the kickoff event and receiving an early copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Prior to that, I beta-tested Windows, and participated in the Release Candidate program, so I've been using Windows 7 off and on since February, and I have to say that I'm incredibly impressed. Everything runs smoothly, applications are more powerful and useful, and tools are available for improving productivity even more in the coming years, as people start to take advantage of the features Windows now provides.
I'm not going to go into any details of what's new and improved with Windows 7 - you can find those anywhere. I just wanted to give my opinion that it looks like Microsoft finally got it right, out of the box - in other words, 7th time's a charm.
Apple's commercial may prove to be wrong, but still, it's pretty damn funny.
I've had a few weeks to look at Windows 7, and I just wanted to share a few newer opinions. In my first post, I listed a few postive comments, but had a generally negative overall opinion. Since it's been out for awhile now, I've had a chance to get used to a few things, and read some articles from some experts, clearing up some of the issues I had.
The best article I've read on the subject was found from a Microsoft director named Tim Sneath, who provided The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets. While I don't necessarily agree with all of his comments, I found much of the article very useful.
One of the coolest new features is the Problem Steps Recorder. This is a very easy-to-use application that allows a user to record the steps they took to perform an action, then save it to a file. That file can be given out as training material, given to technical support, or any of a number of uses. An example of the output, after only a few clicks, can be found here (It generates a MHT file, which can be viewed in IE easily - attached is a PDF printout of that MHT file).
Internet Explorer 8 has several new and exciting features, designed to compete with Firefox and other browsers, to maintain dominance in the browser market. There are add-ons like toolbars and extensions, accelerators, and InPrivate browsing. And IE8 provides a more Firefox-like search function, opening up a toolbar for searching instead of a popup window. Up to now, Firefox has managed to stay one step ahead of IE, and there's really no reason to think IE will beat it anytime soon - but IE is definitely improving on itself with each new version.
One of my biggest complaints was the loss of the Quick Launch toolbar. While it's not there by default, there are ways to get it back. But even without it, you can still be as productive as before, just a little differently. I was concerned that once you opened an instance of an app, you couldn't open a second one from the taskbar. I found out that you can open another instance by middle-clicking the icon (or right-clicking and selecting an item in the context menu, but that's one too many clicks for me when I'm in a hurry). Combine this with setting small taskbar icons, and you really don't lose any productivity.
So I'm warming up a little bit to Windows 7. When the final version is released in a year or two, I'd expect it to be very successful, unlike Vista. I don't think it will steal anyone away from the Apple or Linux communities, but I do believe it will finally get people to upgrade from XP.
Yesterday Microsoft released the first public beta of Windows 7, Microsoft's newest operating system. Being a technology fan, I jumped on the bandwagon and downloaded the beta this morning. Apparently the release was so popular that the servers were down most of the afternoon on Friday - they were back up this morning.
Windows 7 does seem to be faster than Vista, which is the one thing above all else that drove me away from Vista. Of course, if you have good up-to-date hardware, Vista runs just fine - but my Pentium D 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM (which runs XP and various Linux distros perfectly) performed miserably. I installed Windows 7 on a virtual machine using VirtualBox, and it seemed to be faster than Vista ran when it was installed full-time on this machine.
My first impressions include:
No Quick Launch Toolbar: In my opinion, this is the absolute worst thing they could have done. I click icons in the Quick Launch bar hundreds of times per day. In my XP desktop at work, I have about 21 icons (in 3 rows), ranging from drive shortcuts, to development applications, to utilities, to shortcuts to folders I need to go to a lot. Apparently there are workarounds to put it back, but nothing in the standard set of options.
Taskbar Pinning: In place of the Quick Launch bar, Windows 7 has the ability to "pin" shortcuts to the taskbar. This pinned icon serves double-duty - it starts out as a shortcut that starts the application. Once the app is started, the icon turns into the representation of the running program on the taskbar. Kind of an interesting concept in theory, but then you realize that the shortcut is gone - meaning you can't run a second instance of the app. In real life, I frequently open multiple instances of my most frequently used applications - things like Visual Studio, calculator, Excel, Notepad, and various Explorer shortcuts. This was an idea that might have been better off on the cutting room floor.
Action Center: The new Action Center feature seems to be a decent improvement. It's a combination of the Security Center with features like troubleshooting and maintenance. It includes pretty good messages to the user when actions are required.
Ridiculous Window Management: They added some totally unnecessary window management features that don't seem to serve any real purpose. For example, if you drag your window to the top of the screen, it will decide that you wanted to maximize the window. As opposed to normal people, who can simply double-click the title bar to maximize windows (or click the old-fashioned maximize button). Also, if you move your window to the left or right side of the screen, it will fill up that side of the screen. I'm sure these behaviors are configurable, so I'll absolutely be disabling them. Sometimes you just want to move windows out of the way, and I believe this new behavior will frustrate more people than it will help.
Tray Customization: The taskbar tray is more customizable that in previous versions of Windows. You can decide how each individual icon behaves, so you have more control over your display. You don't have to choose between showing everything (which can get pretty big and have a lot of unnecessary stuff) and hiding what Windows thinks is important.
Various Quirky Bugs: This is a beta, specifically an early beta, which means they've still got some bugs to work out. So I can forgive some buggy behavior, like Windows Defender refusing to run, and the "Run" command freezing up. I'm sure things like this will be fixed with no problem.
Overall, I'd say that Windows 7 is probably an improvement over Vista, but I'm not expecting it to be Microsoft's savior, the way people have hoped. It contains many changes that are implemented just for the sake of change, something that drives me crazy. In my opinion, Microsoft needs to focus more on performance and security instead of flashiness. New features are fine, but not when they destroy features that people have known and used religiously for years. I'll likely continue to use Windows XP at work, and as my Microsoft development environment at home, and Ubuntu Linux as my personal operating system.
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This week I completed my Linux class at Mesa Community College (see my previous post for more details). The class was kind of a waste of time - it never got much past basic terminal commands and a brief introduction to things like networking, disk partitioning, and boot processes. But it did provide some useful insight into the open source industry and the different distributions of Linux.
The class used CentOS as the distribution of choice. CentOS is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is one of the more popular and powerful distributions used for business - CentOS is basically the zero-cost version, which provides the same OS as RHEL, with some minor differences and no support from RedHat. It is a very good distribution, and is well suited for classroom purposes.
Personally, I prefer Ubuntu, which is one of the more popular flavors of Linux among personal users. There's a lot of support out there for Ubuntu, which makes it perfect for novice users. I'm using it at home now, and it's worked out really well so far. Of course, since I'm a Microsoft developer by trade, I've also got Windows set up, which I use for my personal programming projects. But other than Visual Studio and SQL Server, there's not much on Windows that I can't get with Linux.
There are plenty of opinions out there about Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, and Solaris. Everyone knows that Windows is by far the most dominant OS for both business and personal use. It's what I use for business, and my own personal development. In my opinion, Windows XP is the best operating system out there.
Many Microsoft users are totally 100% pro-Windows, and scoff at the very mention of Macs or Unix/Linux. I used to feel this way, until I started learning more and more about the open-source world. Developers from around the world have built everything from simple file utilities to full operating systems - specifically Linux. Although there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of flavors of Linux, they all are based around the same concept - an open source alternative to Windows.
A significant number of people out there use computers for only a few basic tasks - web browsing, email, looking at pictures, listening to music, working on office documents. etc. All of these tasks are available and easy to do with Linux, for absolutely free. Linux costs nothing to the user, along with several browsers (specifically Firefox), office software (specifically OpenOffice), email (specifically Thunderbird), and a huge number of utilities, all of which are free. For these people, once the OS is installed and set up, they'd never know the difference.
I'll be the first to admit that Linux isn't the easiest operating system to use. I have tried and failed several times to make it work - it's just not as friendly a user experience as Windows. Something as simple as installing a program downloaded from the internet consists of several command-line commands. Once you learn how they work, it gets better, but as a beginner to Linux, it's not a lot of fun to have to type those commands. With Windows, just about everything is designed to be one-click, then a Next-Next-Next-Finish wizard. In addition, there are several websites out there that don't function properly outside of Internet Explorer - it's Microsoft's fault, not Firefox's, but it's just reality. So Linux is definitely not for everyone.
Solaris is a name you don't hear every day - it's a Unix-based operating system, from Sun Microsystems. I've installed it a couple times, and found it very similar to Linux, at least from a very superficial point of view. From what I've seen, Solaris is primarily a business/server operating system, and seems to be designed for specific hardware built by Sun. I've heard lots of good things about its stability in this role, as a database server or other business need, but I couldn't really find any advantanges of using it as a personal operating system. If you're going to go with a non-Windows, non-Mac, operating system, I'd pick a nice stable Linux like Fedora or Ubuntu, instead of Solaris.
I don't have a lot of experience with Macs - the last time I used one regularly was in college, when I spent a grand total of probably no more than 100 hours working on Macs in the various computer labs. Never anything exciting like graphics - just regular documents, browsing, and email. All I've seen lately is demos in retail stores - it looks very good, but I just can't get over the 1-button mouse. If you already are comfortable with Windows, I can't see any reason for switching to a Mac. But if you're brand new to the game, or if you're into some of the graphic design stuff that Macs are famous for, then I don't see any reason not to give Mac a try.
So I guess my whole point is to say that Linux and Mac have their audiences. I've actually signed up for a college course this fall to learn more about Linux. As a techie, I feel it's my responsibility to have at least some competence in as many technologies as I can. I doubt it will ever overtake Windows, or even Mac, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people get tired of paying $300 for a buggy operating system (a.k.a. Vista), and make the switch.
