HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

Windows 7 screenshot

Ok, first off I don’t usually write about Windows OS specifically and do not use it, nor have I even tested Windows 7 myself. That being said I decided that since this is a big issue for some I should make one of my exceptions.

If you are using Windows 7 beta then you know (at least you should) that it expires tomorrow (July 1, 2009) and after that it will annoyingly shut down your computer every two hours. Other than that it will function untill August 1, 2009 when the beta will expire completely.

Next step is to either return to your old Windows version or install upgrade to RC. Unfortunately Microsoft does not officially support upgrading from beta to RC (they recommend clean install) - however browsing the web I bumped into this guide at tomshardware.com that tells you how to do the upgrade (and if nothing goes wrong save you from the trouble of re-installing everything): Windows 7 Beta Begins to Expire July 1, 2009.
If you don’t want to read what tomshardware has to say about this, to just skip right into upgrade procedure guide go straight to Microsofts own document, “Delivering a quality upgrade experience” on their Engineering Windows 7 blog.

I just thought that it might be polite to post this here, just in case that some reader is in this particular situation, pondering how to upgrade his expiring Windows 7 beta (even if it’s just running on top of Linux+VirtualBox ;) ), so there.

P.S. Don’t expect that I will take a habit of writing about Windows, because I rarely will. Sometimes but rarely, as I see it this is mostly *nix (and specifically Linux) use and programming related blog :)

One great milestone for Mozilla FireFox 3 browser and in the battle against the more pathetic dinosaur of the browser world, Internet Explorer, was achieved early this year when FireFox 3 beated Internet Explorer 6 on most used web browsers statistics (at least according to StatCounters statistics).

Currently the lead is however still kept by Internet Explorer with it’s 7th release which is used by approximately 40% of users while FireFox 3 has around 24% of users. Internet Explorer 6 was left behind FireFox 3 with userbase of around 22%.

So despite this milestone Internet Explorer still has strong grasp of users worldwide. However as an example in Finland FireFox 3 is doing even better, having taken a 47% share of all computers in our country and leaving Internet Explorer 7 with only 29% of users we here in Finland are clearly leading the change away from Microsoft controlled browser monopoly (for more detailed statistics of browser use in Finland click here).

No, I’m not using Windows on my own computer but at work I’m facing this issue right now:

Drive letter C: was very low on space and I noticed that there was a huge swap set in there while on D: there was plenty of more room. So I decided to disable swap on C: and enable swap on D: and let the system decide the swap size. It was not that big of a surprise that Windows was not capable to enable these changes without rebooting - after all, it’s still lousy system on updating it’s settings on fly.

What bugs the damn out of me that it did not give me the regular “reboot now?” window that I could just dismiss but a one with a moving bar - and it would have automatically rebooted after the bar had gone full if I had not pressed “reboot later” button.
Now I dont know what kind of stupid idiot monkey came up with the idea of serving the user with automagical reboot so that he don’t have to bother himself about it but rather be glad after coming from cup of coffee and having suddenly lost all the open programs and unsaved work there was still at the moment!!

It does not end here! The stupid monkey decided that it would be nice to repeat the popup after a while… Supposedly in case that the user would have gone to have a cup of coffee and the system could sneak itself to reboot without the user having a chance to tell it not to! It’s not that there is any critical reason to hurry the reboot - the system keeps working with the old setting until I (or windows) decides to reboot but apparently someone thought that this would really be a great feature giving a fullfilling user-experience (oh, it certainly would if it rebooted while I was having coffee).

…and people say that windows does not suck? Come now, a real system does not need a reboot to change swap settings around as much as you might want, let alone go clowning around this way. Microsoft, WTF!?

Thank god we dont have software patents here in Finland and hopefully we will never have. Hopefully…
Here’s a quote that I read on one blog:

Patent: Application-Specific Windows Colourisation
posted by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 23:23 UTC
IconThe US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.

I wonder how is it possible that this feature in fact already DOES EXIST on at least one but propably in several window managers and desktop environments under *nix systems. In America you can get these silly patents called “software patents” that have very different purpose from the original idea of patents (which I then again do support) - but not only that: you can also get a patent for something that SOMEONE ELSE developed, released and has been around for years.

I don’t care - if any b-shit company ever comes to tell me that I break their patent to “creating shell scripts running under unix or unix-resembling systems” or something equally silly (and the fact is, many s-patents are way more ridiculous) I will tell them to stick their patents where the sun don’t shine - so that I wont have to.

Me is angry!