HP netbook with the following specs
Simply beautiful. A nice addition would be a 20″ screen, so I can work comfortably at a desk at home. Unfortunately, because I am currently broke, and Santa Claus doesn’t exist, I will have to wait a bit before I can get this.
Brian Dunnington has picked up my code for WinampSnarl and ported it to Growl for Windows. I’m glad that my decision to release the source code has benefited an entire other community, but I can’t help but feel jealous because he is getting lots of feedback and excitement over at the GfW Google group whereas I have received none whatsoever. My plugin has been downloaded 81 times and no one decided to drop me a line. This doesn’t really motivate me to continue developing the plugin. I wanted to add a configure dialog which would allow you to customize the notifications’ contents. If I am the only one who cares about the project, however, it is much simpler for me to open my VS project and change the source code in order to change the contents of the notification rather than have that decision be made at runtime.
In short, if you like the plugin and would like to see it grow, please, say something! =)
I am a long time user of Microsoft’s operating systems – from DOS, through Windows 3.1 and 3.11, then Windows 95 and 98, and finally XP. I say finally because I use XP to this day and see no reason to move to another OS.
I love XP. I remember its release as if it were yesterday. In the years leading up to its release in October 2001, I was using Windows 98. It was an inescapable ritual to format my system and reinstall Windows every month or two as it would get completely unusable. It would crash (hard!) with no recovery. Blue screens of death were the norm. Even when I was using a clean install and was in the process of installing drivers it would sometimes blue screen and then refuse to boot, causing me to reinstall again. I remember there was a special order in which the drivers had to be installed for it to work. Voodoo magic at its best. Along came XP.
At the time I had a Celeron 333 MHz processor with 256 MB RAM clocked at 100 MHz. Today, a friend of mine runs XP on a Core 2 Duo 2 GHz with 2 GB RAM. I only mention this to stress the enormous gamut of computers that this jewel of an operating system has been used on in the last 8 years. When I first installed it, I remember I was bursting with excitement because most of my hardware worked without extra effort. I only needed to install a driver for the graphics card – a Radeon 7500. My, my… nostalgia is kicking in. Anyways, the OS was set up and ready to go. I didn’t reinstall until a year later when I upgraded my processor and motherboard to an Athlon XP. That same system still works to this day and runs XP in my old room at home. My mom uses it to call me on Skype.
Today a majority of computers use XP – an estimated 62% if we are to trust Wikipedia, which I personally do. It’s mind-boggling how much work has been done by countless people worldwide on computers running XP. I find this rather impressive from a software engineering point of view as well. Consider that Mac OS X and most distros of GNU/Linux move at a much faster pace. That allows them to shed old technology and offer customers new technology. They do not worry about compatibility.
As an aside, GNU/Linux is a many-faced, amorphous beast and I don’t want to get into its ABI or API stability. I have come to understand that no single statement regarding GNU/Linux can be accurate. Only by limiting yourself to a particular version of a distro can you make any sort of qualitative statement. For example, saying something like “GNU/Linux has very poor support for my graphics card.” can never be true. What you might mean to say is that the latest driver released from NVidia has buggy/spotty support for its latest lineup of cards, but there is no guarantee that it is possible to install that driver on any particular distro. Actually, it is perfectly possible that NVidia has covered its bases very well, but Ubuntu 7.04 has not adopted the driver and in order to use it you have to recompile your kernel. All this is strictly hypothetical of course. After all, it’s just a pointless aside.
OS X I can talk about in more concrete terms. Consider that a lot of programs you download for your Mac cannot be installed on OS X 10.3. Firefox 3.5 doesn’t run on OS X 10.3 which was released in October 2003, two years after XP. On the Windows front, Firefox 3.5 runs on Windows 2000 which was released in 1999. I speak of this because it is actually not difficult to support old versions of Windows whereas it is difficult to support old versions of OS X. Windows was engineered by Microsoft to last. Software written for old versions of Windows needs to work today and software written today needs to run on old systems. Anyone who has ever spent some time programming should know exactly what this entails and how much it complicates your work. I am not arguing that this is a good approach to writing software but merely that Microsoft did a splendid job of it.
So it has been 8 years. What advances have occurred in operating systems exactly? The latest versions of all software released by Microsoft, most importantly Office 2007, Internet Explorer 8, .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, all work. I hear Office 2010 might run on XP as well which is simply amazing. The first major piece of software to stop working will be Internet Explorer 9 (but who cares?!). Microsoft recently announced that IE will switch to Direct2D for its rendering backend. Direct2D is a fantastic piece of work, allowing most graphics related processes to be offloaded to a graphics card, which yields a significant performance boost. That is also the first bit of interesting technology that will not work on XP, hence the lack of support for IE 9. Actually, it is the only thing that makes me yearn for a newer version of Windows just because it’s so cool.
Still, I have all the software, stability, security (I have no virus problems because I install security updates unlike most people) I need, so I don’t plan to move away from XP – a dinosaur by software standards. Eventually I’ll get a new computer and will be forced to get a new version of Windows, but that won’t be anytime soon. My laptop is 4 years old and shows no sign of wear, tear or fatigue. It’s fast enough for everything I need, even though my use of computers is far more involved than that of most people. Long live XP! (I hear it will live until 2014)
