So far this has been a busy week at work and otherwise. Production support is ordinarily busy so really this is not surprising although Monday seemed to be exceptionally packed with fires to put out. The fires are mostly out, with the exception of a few hot spots here and there, and now I am concentrating on some product performance enhancements.
The main stream media is buzzing with H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) and what they are billing as “the coming pandemic”. CNN actually had a story talking about Twitter and how it has made public tensions of H1N1 worse while at the same time CNN had at least four separate stories relating to H1N1 on their homepage at the same time. It seems to me the main stream media, which has always sensationalized “bad news”, is far more to blame for public tensions. Online social sources such as blogs, twitter, and Wikipedia are generally understood to be written by the general public and common sense should be used when reading them. The news media is supposed to be a trusted source of reliable information for the public and their word is often taken as fact without a second thought. In reality each news media company has its own agenda (political and financial) which manipulates the facts and promotes only the stories which fit their needs (such as sensationalizing the current public health situation). I apologize for that rant and this ends my commentary on both N1H1 and the main stream news media.
Tech news seems to be abuzz with cloud computing, netbooks, and Windows 7. Cloud computing, while not entirely new, has gained momentum to the degree that it will likely be used not just by corporations seeking to minimize capital expenditures in technology but also by individual users that do not have the need for a powerful stand alone system. One group that would seem to benefit from cloud computing and the economical netbooks is college students who often do not have the spare money for a nice notebook.
Windows 7, the next Microsoft operating system, is chugging along and is being mentioned on an ever increasing basis. There were a couple of resources that came across twitter via @jldavid. First are some sample book chapters from Microsoft on Windows 7 and second is a blog style web page that discusses Windows 7. While my primary home computer is a Macbook I do have one laptop at home that runs Vista and I can say that I am not a fan of the Vista OS. I am hoping that Windows 7 will overcome the shortcomings and annoyances Vista brought to the table.
