Weekly update: God bless America, and the rest of the world too

This is the end of a long weekend, the "Martin Luther King" day was celebrated today in honor of this great leader that was assassinated for having a dream. Combine this with the upcoming inauguration of the first African-American president and you have a reason for celebrating human rights and equality in the USA. Is it so indeed? I still feel that there is a large gap between the poor and the rich, where the poor are usually members of the minorities and the rich are members of the white majority, and perhaps this gap is even increasing. In one of Cincinnati's more upscale shopping malls, the Kenwood Towne Centre Mall, we saw that almost all the shoppers were white, while the people cleaning the food-court area were black. This gap, in my view, with its widening and almost unbridgable distance, is one of the biggest challenges that the American society needs to overcome. You could claim that Israel is following the same example, with increasing gaps between poor and rich. To this I can say that: you're right, it does, as mentioned before. However, it is still not as bad as it is here. And, finally, except the bad example we have with Ethiopian-born Israelis, the difference is not based on racial discrimination or the tone of the skin. Again, this might change in Israel as well.

One of the customs of a long weekend is shopping. We have decided to follow the tradition and went shopping today. Part of it was the tradition, but more importantly it was Circuit City going out of business sale. The prices were not as low as one would expect from this kind of a sale, but still, I managed to buy a good Sony Vaio laptop for less than $700 (after taxes). D couldn't find the media player she wanted to buy, but we decided to get one online. There's nothing like tradition.

The previous week was full of work and studies, but not only that. D started working for a company that her professors have found. The people in this company are certain that D and her friend will continue working for them during the internship part of their studies, which starts in the summer. There is no guarantee of that, though, and D continues to look for internship options. I handed my first assignment in the degree. As I mentioned in one of the previous updates, the professor teaching this course is K. I don't get to go to the lectures themselves because I teach at the same time. However, it is easy for me to ask the professor questions regarding the homework, and occasionally help him correct problems with the solutions manual that accompany the textbook. Therefore, it seems to be beneficial to both sides of the bargain (or as some call it "the win-win spirit").

I also had time to play a bit with Windows 7 beta on my old (very old) laptop. You can read about my initial enthusiasm, and later admission that my archaic laptop is not cut for this. As a new user of Windows Vista (installed on the laptop I purchased today) I don't think it is horrible, but it does become a pain when it requires you to authorize every single thing you do. It seems that Microsoft has decided to eliminate some of the pain in 7, and perhaps improve the performance of the operating system. My conclusion is: if you have time to play with it on a spare computer, especially if it meets the requirements, you are welcome to give it a shot. It will probably be better than Vista. Perhaps it's Vista Service Pack 2. It is definitely similar to Vista in many aspects.

This week was as cold as your mother in law. The temperatures went down to -19 Celsius on Friday morning, when we left to the university. This is subzero even in Fahrenheit's scale, in which the zero measures the freezing of a water / salt mixture. This may mean that the roads will be frozen even with the use of salt to prevent it. I think it has been below zero Celsius for more than a week now, with the occasional improvement when it snows. There isn't much snow, though, only an inch or two when it really snows. That's disappointing for me. I want some accumulation on the ground to play with the snow, build a snowman perhaps, and make a snow angel. So far all we have is a thin white coating, which doesn't thaw since it's cold, but doesn't accumulate either.

One final note regarding Gaza: I'm glad that this cycle of violence is finally over, and I do hope that Hamas has learned its lesson. I don't feel we'll be that lucky though. Only time will tell who has emerged from this conflict with the upper hand, and what will be the Israeli response to every rocket, which will undoubtedly be launched. As I have been saying in recent years, Israel should react with full power to any attack on its citizens. I think that if we had done so 3 years ago we wouldn't have to cause so much damage now. I also think that the international community has yet again showed that it doesn't mind when Jews are being killed. Luckily, we live in a conservative state in the US, where the general public supports Israel actions, but we did have a Palestinian display at the students' center at UC. As I understand, the Jewish and Israeli organizations are working to set up a pro-Israeli display to counter that one.

7 is dead

The experiment with Windows 7 has failed.
It "freezes" too many times, probably because of driver issues or incompatibility to my old hardware. I still think that Microsoft has improved Vista and that this improvement (Service Pack 2 so to speak) is now Windows 7. Enjoy it if you have a compatible hardware.

The question now is: 7 is dead, who is the next OS on my laptop?

Windows 7 Beta - day 2

After my previous post on playing with Windows 7, I have experienced some "freezes". So far I haven't been able to locate exactly where the problem is, but I suspect it is related somehow to the fact that Windows Media Player is unable to deal with my old video adapter. This is only a preliminary suspicion, and perhaps there are more or different reasons for the "freezes". When the display freezes, I cannot do anything to know and have to shut down Windows 7.
Another annoying thing that I suspect is that the system shuts down whenever it tries to put the laptop to sleep. I have canceled the automatic sleep mode and it appears to have stopped the involuntary restarts of Windows.
Well, a few hiccups are to be expected from a Beta version, especially if it's running on hardware that is not supposed to control it.

Playing with Windows 7 Beta

Those of you who know me (which, as far as I know, are all my 3 readers :-)), should know by now that I am a geek who likes to play with the newest and shiniest operating systems. No, I didn't try to run Apple's OS X on my computer, though I had thought about it in the past. I decided to come back to Microsoft, who had just released the beta version of the newest 7, available for download here.
What can I say about it so far?
First of all I would like to mention that my veteran laptop, which has been the playground for so many versions of operating systems (Windows XP SP1, SP2, SP3, Kubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10, and the KDE version of OpenSuse 11). It is almost 5 years old, and as such it has 1.5 GHZ CPU, only 750 MB of RAM, and an old ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 video adapter. The latter two specifications are much less than the minimum required to run 7. Nonetheless, the setup procedure went quite smoothly. I am happy to say that, finally, this Windows is probably the fastest, and simplest, version of Windows to install. Everything take about 20 minutes and you're done. Unfortunately, unlike Linux, the distribution does not come with extra packages like an Office suite, antivirus, and other useful packages. Still, for Windows it's pretty nice, and it's free (after all you are a Beta tester) to use until September.

After the installation has ended (it took two reboots in the installation process, plus two other reboots for updates after the installation, which is stupid, because the entire system was ready for download only a day ago) the system loaded up. The GUI looks nice and slick. Very similar to the Vista one, only with the new taskbar showing only icons and not window's names. The Aero glass could not load on my machine, because my video adapter is not capable of doing it. Still, most of the features work, and it can run Gadgets. I tried the CPU/Memory gadget and it showed a surprisingly low CPU and memory usage. Surprising, because the 750MB on my machine are less than the required 1 GB and the memory used was in the range of 50%-75%.
The system was fast to respond on this archaic machine as well. I would say that it was almost as quick as a fresh installation of Windows XP if only I could remember how a new installation of Windows XP runs on that machine.

As far as drivers are concerned I had two problems. One was solved by the automatic driver update that Windows 7 ran on the computer. The other one was with my video adapter. This card has not been supported for Vista by the manufacturer, and Microsoft added a Vista driver capable of running Aero by themselves. This driver, once installed on my computer, has caused the display to flicker without end, and I had to roll-back to a default VGA driver, which lowers the display resolution. Finally, I have decided to try my old XP driver from the package that had come with my laptop when I had purchased it, and voila, it works. So it doesn't support Aero, but it still enables me 1280x800 resolution. I think that it caused the CPU usage to rise, but I haven't had time to check that out.

In conclusion, so far the system have shown a relative stability and agility that are impressive for a beta version running on hardware that is not intended to run it. I think that Microsoft has finally come up with a good version of Vista. As always, it's Service Pack 2 that does the work.
I am not sure if I will keep it or not, and anyway the Beta expires in the summer, so a new operating system will be required, or I will dump this old laptop. However, if you have the time and the proper machine to spare (Microsoft strongly advice against using 7 on the primary machine) I suggest you give it a try.