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I am writing this blog post in the aptly named “Post Blog Entry” program I installed into the latest Ubuntu release. I installed this several nights ago, and think I finally have a decent grip to be able to give an honest review of the latest.

Let me be first to say that if you thought Windows 7 and Snow Leopard weren’t full releases, you’ll feel the same way here. It’s a little polish here, a little update there. That being said, there are a few things I really like.

Package Management has Grown Up

The Ubuntu Software Center has taken finding free software, and made it mature and usable. No more trying to figure out what works with what you have, which version of the window manager you are using, etc. It seems to do a great job identifying software you can run with solid descriptions and one-click installing. That’s hard to complain about and if you are fine with the quality of open source software, you should be very happy with how easy it is to install.

Cleaning House

Ubuntu seems to have gotten the point. Nobody needs the massive amount of software that used to come pre-installed. Now you get some system tools, a couple games, a couple graphics apps, a collection of communication tools, office suite and a couple of audio applications.

Keeping Up

The top right corner of the screen seems to have taken a leap in usefulness. I get network connectivity, audio control, Instant Messaging and Email, Date and Time and User Account control. That’s all useful, not too much, not too little. Very subtle, but very nice.

The Bad

Now with that, there are still some things about Ubuntu I really don’t get. Why is Ubuntu so obsessed with brown. Now they seem to have transitioned a bit to orange, but the OS is still very brownish. It has a very unpolished looking user interface. KDE and Gnome are both capable of fantastic graphic things, they just don’t put it in the box.

Sometimes I think that the hoards of geeks working on Linux distributions don’t pay attention to real users at all. As much as it seems like no big deal, people care about flash. People care about style and people care about looks. Ubuntu has made the least of it’s strides in the last half dozen releases in this department.

The brutal reality is that sitting beside a Windows or Mac computer, Ubuntu looks dated, amateur and cheap. Now before the Linux community lights their torches and starts burning my site down, this is not a slam, it’s some honest feedback. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t continue to install the latest versions of Fedora and Ubuntu to keep up with the changes. It’s not something I do because I want to find the bad, I am honestly curious.

Linux is usable. But it’s usable in the same way that a folding chair compares to a Lazy-Boy recliner. I can sit in that chair, but I wouldn’t want to sit there long.

Windows 7 is no secret. It’s been in the hands of technologists and geek enthusiasts for a long time now. On October 22nd it hits the streets. Should you be in line like it was a Windows XP flash back? The short answer is yes, the long answer is yes if you are buying a new machine. Let me clarify that first, I am NOT saying that it’s not worth upgrading, it definitely is…please read on.

Good Money after Bad?

That’s not the best analogy, but it’s pretty close. If you just dropped cash in the last year or two on a machine that cost more than $800 or so, skip this section. If you are part of the herd with a value PC, this is meant directly for you. As of right now, the Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade is about $120. Today at Best Buy, you can get into a Core2Duo laptop for $520 and a Core2Quad desktop for $450. If your machine is a few years old, and you didn’t buy premium then, that’s probably a significant upgrade over what you already have. Both of these machines include 4GB of Ram and a healthy size hard drive. More than enough for 90% of computer users. The question you have to ask yourself is do you put $120 in your current machine, or apply that towards a nice new one, I would suggest the latter.

Bring Sexy Back

When you got your current machine, odds are it was pre-installed with Windows Vista and she was a sexy beast. Today she is still pretty, but you have been waking up with her and watching her pee for a few years, so she isn’t as glamorous as when you first unboxed her. Windows 7 will give your lady the makeover that brings back the spark, and bring some goodies along with it.

Your machine will run as good, but likely better than it currently does. It will also be less naggy with it’s messaging, change the way you work with a snazzy new UI scheme and bring along with it the stability and security that you expect in an operating system.

To Be 64-bit or Not To Be 64-bit

Oddly enough I had this conversation with a friend and I will repeat my advice here. If your processor supports it, and you have no significant hardware investment that you are sure will not work, it’s time to take the step to 64-bit. Don’t expect magic with 64-bit. Do expect, more stability when rogue applications crash and access to more memory which is always a good thing. Windows Vista laptops and desktops have been shipping in 64-bit on droves for over a year, you aren’t breaking virgin territory, it’s safe.

Parting Shots

This last section is just to include some tips for you no matter which way you go. First and foremost, if you upgrade, do a clean install. It’s likely you have some programs in registry purgatory and a bunch of junk that is always good to clean out. Backup your files, and reinstall fresh. There is even a fancy assitant to help you do that.

Second, take advantage of the free software you get with your genuine Windows license. Windows Live Essentials, Windows Security Essentials and Windows Live Mesh are all fantastic. Download them as soon as you have finished installing Windows.

Lastly, take some time to get used to it. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen users crippled by the differences in upgrades. They call it a learning curve for a reason. You will likely lose a little productivity at first, but as you get used to how things work, you will pass where you were and reach new levels of efficiency. Windows 7’s new task bar, previews and Aero features are like second nature to me now and I love them.

The sad part is that I agree with him, the age restriction is silly and realistically the college basketball system should compensate it’s players since it monetizes them so heavily. That being said, the government has no business trying to get involved in the National Basketball League’s collective bargaining agreement.

Cohen, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, called the requirement "an unfair restriction on the rights of these young men to pursue their intended career."

I tell you, it’s getting scary. Any of my friends and family will tell you that I am not a government conspiracist. I used to believe that they functioned in a rational manner on things of public interest. These days, public interest is not what it used to be.

The NBA is the shepherd of a league with tremendous financial power. It employs young men who find themselves not only wealthy, but in a position to bear significant influence on our children. I don’t think that the NBA wanting a year or two more to mature these young men before they hand them millions of dollars and put them on TV in front of millions of people around the world is unreasonable.

That’s where the logic seems to break down. Cohen is looking at this like these kids are grocery store stock clerks or waiters. It’s becoming common for teams to draft kids on potential alone, in the lottery. That means that potentially you could take a kid who just barely left high school, that our government doesn’t even trust enough to drink, and give him almost four million dollars a year, a pulpit and a microphone. A phrase comes to mind, “idiot with means.”

Now I don’t want to come across like I think these are inner city kids who don’t have any intelligence or common sense, but I know that’s the case some of the times. For every Grant Hill there is a Ron Artest. For every Steve Nash there is a Chris “Birdman” Anderson. It’s just math.

I always thought that as a congressman, Steve Cohen’s responsibility was to his constituents. Sure Tennessee has an NBA team, the Memphis Grizzlies, but on a good day they might employ 200 people (including event staff) which in my math doesn’t even equal 1% of the population of Tennessee. If I was a resident, I would be pissed off that my representative is trying to push hearings and potentially legislation to allow 18 year old kids to become millionaires while Spring Hill is fighting for it’s life with GM in Washington DC right now trying to back out of a promise to invest billions in the plant in it’s community.

Congressman urges NBA to drop age restriction

Yet another article today. The EU is saying that it’s going to take another approach. Instead of fines, or forcing Microsoft to ship without Internet Explorer, they are going to try to force Microsoft to include other browsers in Windows. This means that most likely Firefox and Opera would ship inside Windows.

The EU is Picking Winners?

Forget for a second that I work for Microsoft and let us just look at this pragmatically. I have talked about this a lot, and I know it’s getting old, but we are very close to a complete reversal of roles and the EU using Microsoft’s supposed monopoly position to decide which browsers do and do not succeed. The concept of product tying, is what the EU is upset about. Windows the platform gives Internet Explorer an unfair advantage in the marketplace. I’ll get off my “who cares and who said business is fair” soap box for a minute and ask a logical question. If the EU chooses which browser would be included, are they not tying themselves?

Does The Customer Get Screwed?

Contrary to popular belief, there are other browsers than Opera and Firefox. Are they going to force Windows to ship with 25 browsers? Is your desktop going to look like circa 1999 Dell with 40 shortcuts on the desktop to different browsers? Is Microsoft going to be required to support these browsers? If so are they going to be compensated for having to support a competitor’s products? I can’t imagine calling Microsoft for a problem, only to be told that I had to call Mozilla for my issue.

Care to know what your support options are for Firefox? You can post something to a bulletin board, you can browse their knowledge base (probably not much help is your browser isn’t working properly) or you can download an IRC client and go into a big chat room and try and find help. I am afraid that to the average user, that isn’t support.

If you want more support than that from Opera, you are going to have to sign up for Premium Support and pay for it. See, that’s the problem with free software, it’s usually extremely poorly supported. Now you are asking Microsoft to take a product from an organization that wants nothing more than to see them fail, with little to no support, and ship it with their product. WHAT!?

Who Really Wins Here?

This whole situation is rife with conflict of interest, my biggest question is this: If they pull this off, is Microsoft allowed to change the default landing page and search engine for those browsers? If not… I mean…why not just force Microsoft to write Google a check. Let’s make it a tidy 20 billion or so.

Think about it for a second, it’s very obvious. The only way that Firefox makes money, is that Google pays them a referral fee for every search initiated through the search box or default home page of Firefox as it ships. That is other than the obvious huge payment they get for making Google’s search engine the default landing page.

Now, last time I checked, Google had a ridiculous advantage on all of the other search engines when it comes to Market Share. In 2007, and it’s increased since then, Google had 65% and the closest competitor was Yahoo with a shade over 20%. Microsoft was about 8.5%, Ask.com had around 3.5% and everyone else made up the rest. That means every other search engine on the internet combined for 3%.

It’s no secret that Yahoo is crumbling from within, and with an already declining market share, is likely to fall out of the running completely unless someone intervenes. The only problem is that they think to highly of their value and seem determined to fall apart than take an offer that isn’t well above actual value.

That leaves Microsoft, struggling to stay in a business that built Google into a multi-billion dollar behemoth seemingly over night. Microsoft is making some moves, most recently with bing.com appearing as the rebranding of live.com, but it’s no secret that being the bundled browser and search engine in Windows is the only thing keeping them at a still declining 8.5%.

So where is the monopoly here? If being in Windows is such a huge advantage, why is Google absolutely dominating this industry?

If the EU succeeds in this change, they will be further cementing one monopoly while trying to thwart another in an industry that they clearly are not the leader in.

The graph above is the one the EU will have you look at. 66% in favor of Internet Explorer for Browser market share. But the numbers that source the revenue don’t back it up. The obvious math would prove that the end users are either savvy enough to, or tricked into switching the default search engine for the operating system 80% of the time!

Google is not beyond striking deals that subtly switch your browser search provider when you install one of dozens of third party applications. Yahoo has pulled the same dirty move. These days any number of applications from little apps to ones as large as Adobe Acrobat.

The point is that shipping with the operating system doesn’t ensure a victory by any means.

The Dodge Ball Analogy

Imagine if you were a kid again, playing dodge ball in PE class. Before the game started, the coach came by and pulled the biggest kid aside and said “You see all of the smaller kids? You aren’t allowed to try to hit those guys.” Then, that same coach goes to all of the smaller kids, gives them two balls each and says, “You see that big kid over there? Everyone aim at him.” Then, to make things extra fair, announces to the class, “Every hit on the big kid counts as two, and every hit on a small kid counts as one half.”

I know, it’s extreme isn’t it? Or is it? And what kind of message does it send? We are already at a place where everyone gets a trophy. Kids are taught that you can get a black belt in a couple years at the age of 10, and that if you want something, all you have to do is keep complaining until you get your way.

The Mythical Monopoly Gauge

The sad truth is in the name of competition, competition is dying. Companies like Apple are benefiting from the restrictions being placed on their competitors by using the same (or worse in many cases) tactics that are the cause for many of these lawsuits. Don’t believe me? iTunes, the only media player that you can really use if you have an iPod or iPhone, default installs QuickTime with iTunes. OS X ships with Safari by default. iTunes tries it’s best to install Safari on your PC over and over, you have to diligently reject it every time there is an update.

These practices would be absolute cause of lawsuit for Microsoft, several of them already have been. These restrictions stifle and suffocate innovation at Microsoft.

So what is the lesson we learn here? It almost seems to me like the lesson is “Don’t get too big.” If you are small enough to avoid a target, then you can lie and cheat like everyone else and it’s ok.

Windows 7 screams on netbooks. My wife and I both run it on MSI Wind netbooks with 1.5GB Ram flawlessly. Installing it isn’t so easy though. Netbooks don’t have optical drives and Windows 7 RC ships as an ISO to burn your own disc. What to do….

What You Need

First, obviously, download the Windows 7 RC from http://www.microsoft.com/windows7 and don’t forget to write or print your product key, that’s a must. Also, for netbooks, make sure it’s the 32-bit version you download because your netbook might not play nice with the 64-bit version.

Windows 7 is a big bugger at 2.4GB, so you’ll probably need a 4GB or larger thumb drive to fit it.

Preparing the Flash Drive

This process will differ a little bit depending on which OS you are making the drive on, but don’t fret, you can do it on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X with no problem.

Step One is getting the files out of the ISO and expanded onto your disk

I used Mac OS X’s Disk Utility to mount the ISO and then just copied the files out of it. For Windows, use DaemonTools Lite and do the same thing, mount it and then copy the files out of it onto your hard disk.

Step Two is formatting the thumb drive and making it bootable

For this task, you need to do a little command line skullduggery, this is perhaps a little PC Jedi magic to the uninitiated, but it’s not that bad. I’ll assume you are using Vista for these tasks:

1. Connect your thumb drive to your PC
2. Right-click “Command Prompt” under Programs > Accessories and select “Run as administrator.”
3. Find the drive number for your flash drive using these commands
   diskpart
list disk
   The number of your thumb drive will be in the list.
4. Format the drive using the commands listed below (we’ll assume your drive number was 1 in this example)
   select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS
assign
exit
5. From the command prompt, browse to the folder you copied the contents of the Windows 7 ISO to and then to the boot folder. If you are using Vista it should look something like
   cd c:\Users\username\Desktop\Windows7\boot\
6. Now we will use bootsect to make the USB a bootable NTFS drive that is ready for the Windows 7 Install Files.
   bootsect /nt60 x: (assuming X is the drive letter of your thumb drive.)

That’s it, you can close the command prompt, the USB drive should now be bootable and ready to go.

Step Three is copying the Windows 7 Install Files

Simple enough, you copied them to your desktop in Step 1, now take everything that’s inside the folder you copied them too, and copy them to the root of your thumb drive.

Parting Thoughts

Not every machine is ready to go for USB booting, you might have to check the BIOS settings to enable this for your particular machine.