Breaking News: Windows 7 beta!

Well, maybe not so Breaking News, other than to report that it's no more no less than old wine in some new bottle. As I'm not following Windows too close nowadays, I happened to pick up the 'rumor' that their free Win 7 beta would stop shipping today; so for kicks I rushed before the break of Feb the 10th to download the 2.44Gigs of "Vista-reinvented". I heard the news on Cranky Geeks (their latest episode, with that moron Adam Curry attending as a guest, who better go back to his DJ stuff than pretend he understands ICT, at all, and keeps throwing pompous geeky terms he picked-up somewhere in the nerdy tents he attends nowadays). Someone else in the Cranky party mentioned he'd installed the beta on a virtual space via Parallels on his Mini Mac and it seemed to work surprisingly well. So, I'm like, what the heck, if that moron can do it I can do that too.

First extremely surprising news: it took me less than 15 min to get the basic install done and another quarter of an hour to get it configured with Parallels Tools installed and up and running! Well done MSFT! Of course with the usual Windows like UI stuff we are so used from XP and later Vista, but, maybe a bit less irritating (other than their security confirm pop-ups...gosh, I hate'em!) ... definitely not worse. Anyways, their standard desktop wallpaper is very representative of Microsoft's perception of users of its products... We are all goldfish in a ball, exhaling bubbles (see pic above). You know, kinda like fish, with no short term memory, so the Redmond freaks can fool around with us pretending a 'refresh' version of their old crack is a brand new hot gig! Anyways, my 'honeymoon' was soon over: within the first fifteen minutes, as I was testing a few of their trivia free applets delivered with the base, I experienced my first mega crash. All I was trying to do was to open up a jpg into their Explorer standard viewer. A bleedin' JPG it was, not the full library of the blueprint CAD plans of the Space Shuttle, mind you! All dead! I had to 'force quit' Parallels and start all over again. Jee, can U believe that? Of course it's a freakin' beta they dare say and you gotta do your backups before you plunge into it, they dare say again... but open up a JPG and crash? R U shittin' me? Gimme a break, brother!

Anyways... now that I know what it's like, I am not too impressed whatsover other than its fluent install (I'd be impressed though if I moved to Win 7 from Ubuntu... not Mac OSX for cryin' out loud!), but now, I can twit along with them other nerds on the net when they get high in talking about Win 7. Poor sods! I only feel sad about some very good friends of mine and ex-colleagues who joined Microsoft long ago, for life, I think... and now have to work for the biblical monster Steve (monkey boy) Ballmer managed to create in the few years he took over from Bill the philanthropist!