Windows 7 Keeps the Good, Tries to Fix Flaws

By DAVID POGUE


Windows 7 comes out Thursday. And if the programmers at Microsoft have any strength left at all, they are high-fiving.

Their three-year Windows Vista nightmare is over. That operating system’s wretched reputation may have been overblown; at the outset, it was slow, intrusive and incompatible with a lot of gadgets, but it’s been quietly improved over the years. Nonetheless, the corporate software buyers who order copies of Windows by the gross weren’t impressed. As recently as this summer, at least two-thirds of corporate computers were still running the positively ancient Windows XP.

Windows 7 is a different story. It keeps what’s good about Windows Vista, like security, stability and generous eye candy, and addresses much of what people disliked.

Item 1: Sluggishness. As Microsoft’s triple redundancy puts it, Windows 7 offers “faster, more responsive performance.”

Item 2: Hardware requirements. They’re no steeper than Vista’s three years ago (the standard edition requires 1 gigabyte of memory and 1 gigahertz processor; more is better).

Item 3: Nagging Windows 7 is far less alarmist than Vista, which freaked out about every potential security threat. In fact, 10 categories of warnings now pile up quietly in a single, unified Action Center and don’t interrupt you at all.

Best of all, Windows 7 represents a departure from Microsoft’s usual “success is measured by the length of the feature list” philosophy. This time around, it was, “Polish, optimize and streamline what we’ve already got.” That seems to be the industry mantra for 2009 — see also Apple’s Snow Leopard release in August — and it’s fantastic news. There are three ugly aspects of Windows 7, so let’s get them out of the way up front. Upgrading from Vista is easy, but upgrading from Windows XP involves a “clean install”— moving all your programs and files off the hard drive, installing Windows 7, then copying everything back on again. It’s an all-day hassle that’s nobody’s idea of fun.

Microsoft doesn’t think XP holdouts will bother; it hopes that they’ll just get Windows 7 preinstalled on a new PC. (It’s no accident that new operating systems come out right before holiday shopping.) The second bit of nastiness is the insane matrix of versions. Again, there are five versions of Windows 7 — Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate — each with its own set of features, each in 32-bit or 64-bit flavors (except Starter), at prices from $120 to $320. Good luck figuring out why some cool Windows 7 feature, like the much-improved, TiVo-like Windows Media Center, isn’t on your PC.

(No wonder a raft of books about Windows 7 is on the way. A disclosure: I’m writing one of them.)

Finally, out of fear of antitrust headaches, Microsoft has stripped Windows 7 of some important accessory programs. Believe it or not, software for managing photos, editing videos, reading PDF documents, maintaining a calendar, managing addresses, chatting online or writing e-mail doesn’t come with Windows 7.

What kind of operating system doesn’t come with an e-mail program?

Instead, you’re supposed to download these free apps yourself from a Microsoft Web site. It’s not a huge deal; some companies, including Dell, plan to preinstall them on new computers. But a lot of people will be in for some serious confusion — especially when they discover that the Windows 7 installer has deleted their existing Vista copies of Windows Mail, Movie Maker, Calendar, Contacts and Photo Gallery. (Mercifully, it preserves your data.)

Otherwise, though, Windows 7 is mostly great news. The happiest developments help Windows live up to its name: there are some slick, efficient new features for managing windows.

You can drag a window’s edge against the top or side of your screen to make it fill the whole screen or half of it. You can give a window a little shake with the mouse — kind of fun, actually — to minimize all other windows (or to bring them back again) when you need a quick look at your desktop.

The taskbar now resembles the Dock in Apple’s Mac OS X. That is, it displays the icons for both open programs and those you’ve dragged there for quick access. (Weirdly, though, you can’t turn individual folders and documents into buttons on the taskbar, as in Mac OS X, only programs.)

Better yet, if you point to a program’s icon without clicking, you see Triscuit-size miniatures of all the windows open in that program. And if you point to one of these thumbnails, its corresponding full-size window flashes to the fore. All of this means easier navigation in a screen awash with window clutter.

Windows 7 also introduces libraries: virtual folders that display the contents of up to 50 other folders, which may be scattered all over your system. Libraries make it easy to keep project files together, back them up en masse or share them with other PC’s on the network.

Speaking of which, networking is also more refined in Windows 7. Handling of Internet hot spots is much better than before, and the new HomeGroups feature lets you unify all Windows 7 computers and printers on your home network without having to mess with accounts or permissions. You just enter the same long, one-time password on each machine. (Only at Microsoft do “user-friendly” and “write down this password: E6fQ9UX3uR” appear in the same sentence.) Once that’s done, each computer can see the photos, music and documents on all the other ones. It’s a little buggy, but it’ll get there.

Compatibility is excellent. I connected a couple dozen cameras, phones, iPods, printers and scanners, and Windows 7 recognized them all. Recent, brand-name apps fare well, too, but there are no guarantees. I found a couple of smaller, older programs that wouldn’t work in Windows 7.

Some Windows 7 developments fall under the heading, “If you build it, they might come... eventually.” For example, the updated Windows Media Player program can now send music playback to another gadget on your network: an Xbox, digital picture frame, another Windows 7 machine and so on. The catch: the other gadget has to be D.L.N.A.-certified, which you’re supposed to know refers to an industry compatibility standard.

Or take the new Device Stage screen. When you connect a gadget to your PC, you’re supposed to see its actual photograph, model name and list of relevant features. But until all the gadget makers get on board, you sometimes see only generic icons here.

Even the multitouch feature of Windows 7 falls into that hit-or-miss category. On new laptops and even desktop PCs with multitouch screens, you can drag two fingers on the screen to rotate photos, scroll and zoom, exactly the way you do on an iPhone.

Alas, software programs have to be rewritten to understand these gestures; for example, they all work in Microsoft’s Photo Gallery, but only the zoom gesture works in Google’s Picasa. You’re in for many “Doh!” moments as you realize you’ve reached out awkwardly with your arm, dragged around on the touch screen, and produced nothing but gross grease streaks.

Now, Windows 7 is still Windows. It’s still copy-protected, it still requires antivirus software and its visuals still aren’t consistent from one corner to another.

On the other hand, it’s still Windows in a good way, too, meaning that it’s your ticket to a world of choice — a huge catalog of software and computer options. This Win is a win if you’re in the market for a new machine, or if you’re running Vista now and you’re not thrilled by it.

Above all, Windows 7 means that Microsoft employees can show up in public without avoiding eye contact. Looks like 7 is a lucky number after all.

In Memoriam: An Appreciation of Robert McNamara

from http://www.charlierose.com/

On Thursday July 9, 2009.

Spiralling Upward

Celebrating fifty years of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim.

from www.newyorker.com

May 25, 2009

In 1959, when the Guggenheim Museum opened, traffic on Fifth Avenue moved in both directions. As you drove northward, the bulbous form emerged from behind flat-fronted apartment buildings like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I first saw the museum that way, as a nine-year-old, and the idea that this beguiling object had been created to display art, or that it might not be up to the task, seemed beside the point.

Fifty years later, it still does, even though the charge that the building upstages the art has become part of its legend. Staff at the Guggenheim like to refer to the building as the most important object in the museum’s collection, which makes it odd that the Guggenheim hasn’t had a major exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work until now. Its fiftieth-anniversary show also marks the recent completion of an extensive restoration of the building and the fiftieth anniversary of the death of its maddening, egotistical, duplicitous creator. Wright died, at ninety-one, in April, 1959, six months before the museum was finished. He last saw the building in January of that year, when he was photographed looking out from the spiral ramp with the contractor, George Cohen.

Notably absent from that picture was the museum’s director, James Johnson Sweeney, who fought with Wright over almost every aspect of the building. Once the architect was gone, Sweeney painted the interior white, instead of the ivory that Wright had wanted; rather than hang the paintings directly on the backward-sloping walls, where Wright wanted them to appear as if they were on artists’ easels, he installed them upright, on metal rods projecting from the walls. Over the years, the building has been pushed and pulled in all kinds of directions, rarely to its benefit. Taliesin Associated Architects, the inheritors of Wright’s practice, put up a garish addition behind the museum; later, it was demolished to make way for a limestone slab by Gwathmey Siegel, and a bookstore was stuck in the open space beside the rotunda. It’s wonderful now to see the Guggenheim at least a bit closer to its 1959 condition, the reinforced-concrete surface of the exterior smooth and voluptuous rather than cracked and shabby. Planters, complete with live plants, and a fountain that Wright installed in the rotunda are back in use. They’re hardly his most sophisticated gesture, but it’s pleasing that the Guggenheim resisted editing them out.

Wright envisaged the Guggenheim as “a curving wave that never breaks.” When it opened, John Canaday, in the Times, called it “a war between architecture and painting in which both come out badly maimed.” But Wright’s conception has always functioned better than its critics have admitted, if never as well as he himself predicted. Works of artists like Alexander Calder and Ellsworth Kelly play off well against the curves, but the space overwhelms anything small, delicate, or highly detailed. This makes the Guggenheim the progenitor of every architecturally assertive museum since, and beside works like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao or Daniel Libeskind’s glass-and-metal shards in Denver and Toronto, it now looks almost demure. What strikes you when you walk into Wright’s rotunda today is how intimate and comfortable its magnificence is. Art is none the worse for half a century of being seen here.

Wright’s career spanned more than seven decades; he was born two years after the Civil War and died at the dawn of the space age. The exhibition is therefore a journey from architecture that, on the swirling ramp of the Guggenheim, can seem almost old-fashioned to work that closely resembles the museum. The strong horizontals, open interior spaces, and overhanging roofs of Wright’s early Prairie House style combine nineteenth-century sumptuousness with potent modern thrust. In his great house Fallingwater, of 1936, powerful cantilevers lent some of the crispness of European modernism. And then there are the hexagons, hemicycles, triangles, and spirals that pervade his late work. It’s appropriate that the exhibition’s section about the Guggenheim itself, unquestionably the culmination of Wright’s achievement, comes at the top of the spiral. Then again the Guggenheim spiral, ascending toward the sky, can be an overbearing metaphor for a chronological exhibition. (Wright would probably have loved it.) Not every oeuvre fits such a narrative, and in Wright’s case the curators decided that some work was better treated thematically than chronologically. Residential designs and major urban projects are in separate galleries—mini-exhibitions that remind you of the limitations of Wright’s ramp.

Among other things, the exhibition confirms the emergence of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which co-organized it, from the shadow of Wright’s widow, Olgivanna. For a quarter century after his death, she maintained his studio, more like a cult than like an architectural firm. She died in 1985, but it wasn’t until recently that Taliesin Associated Architects, which for years purveyed lacklustre imitations of Wright’s work, closed down. The foundation’s architecture school has broadened its reach to the point of admitting that there are other architects worth learning about. And the drawing archive, surely one of the great architectural collections, is now free of paranoia and eager to share its treasures.

Wright was vastly prolific, and the curators wisely decided to concentrate on key projects rather than show everything. They are smart in defining what is key: not just famous buildings like Unity Temple and the headquarters of the Johnson Wax Company but also the Larkin Building, in Buffalo, senselessly demolished for a parking lot in 1950, and, from 1924, the wonderfully named Gordon Strong Automobile Objective, an unbuilt design for a mountaintop planetarium reached by a spiral road. There are some models big enough to look into and get a sense of Wright’s great interior spaces, but the most moving model, of Wright’s property surrounding Taliesin, has minuscule buildings, the better to show you the reach of the rolling hills around them. Suddenly you understand the depth of Wright’s love for the expanse of American landscape and what he meant when he said that buildings should not be on hilltops but, rather, on hillsides, so as not to destroy the contour of the land. The exhibition also includes computer-generated animations that give you the illusion of walking through a building. This is no substitute for the real thing, but in the case of nine unbuilt or demolished projects virtual reality is as close as you are going to get.

The exhibition’s most important elements are the most traditional: more than two hundred drawings, including soft pencil renderings and lavish watercolors, from throughout Wright’s career. They have been installed in glass cases, most of which are set at angles along the spiral ramp. Not much has been placed on Wright’s slanted walls—a tacit admission of the Guggenheim’s issues as a museum—but the idiosyncratically positioned cases feel almost like pieces of sculpture floating free in Wright’s space. You’re not sure whether the curators are jousting with Wright or protecting him, but there isn’t a moment when you are not aware of, and reacting to, his space. This is exactly how he wanted it. ♦

PHOTOGRAPH: DENNIS STOCK/MAGNUM

Jermaine Jaclson on his brother's death

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Transcript:

This is hard…Ah, my brother, the legendary King of pop Michael Jackson, passed away on Thursday June 25th, 2009 at 2:26pm. It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home. However, the cause of his death is unknown until results of the autopsy are known. His personal physician who was with him at the time attempted to resuscitate my brother. And ah, as did the paramedics who transported him to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Upon arriving, at the hospital at approximately 1:14pm a team of doctors including emergency physicians and cardiologists attempted to resuscitate him for a period of more than one hour. They were unsuccessful. Our family requests that the media please respect our privacy during these tough times. And ah, we’ll all be with you Michael always…Love you. Thank you very much.

Smart Flight Attendant!

from www.livinginperu.com

A mother and her young son were flying Southwest Airlines from Kansas City to Chicago.

The little boy (who had been looking out the window turned to his mother and asked, "If big dogs have baby dogs and big cats have baby cats, why don't big planes have baby planes?"

The mother (who couldn't think of an answer) told her son to ask the flight attendant.

So the boy went down the aisle and asked the flight attendant, "If big dogs have baby dogs and big cats have baby cats, why don't big plane have baby planes?"

The busy flight attendant smiled and said, "Did your mother tell you to ask me?" The boy said, "Yes, she did."

"Well, then, you go and tell your mother that there are no baby planes because Southwest always pulls out on time. Have your mother explain that to you."

Human Resources: Reviewing Candidates

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Under the weather

To say that someone is "under the weather" is to say that they are not feeling very well.
Example: "What's wrong?" Answer: "I'm a bit under the weather." They probably have a simple cold or flu which will go away quickly. Example: "It's nothing serious; I'm just a bit under the weather." Being "under the weather" reminds us that a quick change in the weather can affect our health and the way we feel.