My gods J.C.Staff, you cer­tainly never run out of ways to enter­tain us. As if Rail­gun episode 10 wasn’t explo­sive enough, you have to raise this flag to pull my atten­tion in with this amaz­ing amalgamation:

Uni­ver­sal OS Macin­dows EXP with a sig­na­ture Outel Out­side marker! In a world when Macs were com­pat­i­ble with every­thing and not over­loaded with pre-programmed set­tings, and when Win­dows actu­ally have good processor/RAM uti­liza­tion.  On that note, I won­der what Macin­dows BST is a ref­er­ence of?

Sorry Ubunchu, but the pen­guin had been hand­ily given the boot. Read the rest of this entry »

Released as a mas­cot and spe­cial bonus fea­ture to the Japan­ese Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate edi­tion, Nanami Madobe quickly gains fame in the otaku com­mu­nity as the lat­est and most adorable of the OS-tans. Wide­spread pop­u­lar­ity was then estab­lished when the cel­e­brated seiyuu (voice actress) and singer Nana Mizuki was hired to serve as the voice of Nanami-tan. As one might guess, the name Nanami is a word­play on the seiyuu’s name and the Japan­ese proun­ci­a­tion of seven (“nana”).

Only in Japan…

What­ever else one might say about Microsoft as a com­pany, you got to admit that their Japan­ese branch sure has awe­some mar­ket­ing ideas. I can’t pro­vide fac­tual sources here, but I’m sure will­ing to bet that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the Japanese’s younger techie com­mu­nity — those most picky about their oper­at­ing sys­tem choices — are at least mod­er­ated involved in the Japan­ese visual cul­ture, bet­ter known as their anime/manga otaku cul­ture. Mak­ing Win­dows 100% more moé is cer­tainly one sure­fire way of mak­ing sure at least one of their machines, likely the most often used one, is run­ning it.

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So I finally got tired of hav­ing both my backup server and net­work share server down and decided to do some­thing about it. Unfor­tu­nately, rebuild­ing both of them is not cost-effective at the time since com­pletely rebuild­ing the Solaris Raid-Z server I used for back­ups and the Cen­tOS 5 server I used for net­work shares would involve siz­able expen­di­ture of both money and time (which as we all know equals money). So I ended up look­ing around for some­thing a lit­tle more bud­getable and ended up find­ing the Acer Aspire Easy­s­tore H340, which Newegg.com sells for $379.00. The H340 runs Win­dows Home Server, which I used sev­eral times set­ting up home media net­works for clients while I was in col­lege. It’s essen­tially a stripped down ver­sion of Win­dows Server 2003, with­out all the fun that is con­fig­ur­ing a Server 2003 instal­la­tion from scratch (which I’ve done more times than I want to think about). Microsoft released it a few years back in the hope they could get peo­ple to start using cen­tral loca­tions in their homes for back­ing up and stor­ing media to play on their var­i­ous com­put­ers and Xbox 360s. Of course, Linux did this ages ago and I’d been using Linux and Solaris servers to do back­ups and share media until their hard dri­ves crapped out on me over the past year.

Win­dows Home Server Console

(Run­down and more details after the break)

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So, for the past week and few days I have been using some­thing that I hon­estly expected to be yet another Micro$oft abom­i­na­tion — Win­dows 7 — or as I call it, Win­dows Se7en, in honor of the Kevin Spacey movie, Se7en (AKA Seven).  As much as I hate to admit it, how­ever, it has not yet proven to be an abom­i­na­tion, or as evil as Kevin Spacey’s char­ac­ter in said movie.  In fact, its been quite coop­er­a­tive except for a few minor things.

Ini­tial Win­dows 7 Desk­top (2 monitors)

One Week…

Over this week and a few days of using Win­dows 7, I actu­ally have not had any crashes or major hassles/problems with the oper­at­ing sys­tem, aside from the stu­pid User Account Con­trol secu­rity pop­ups I get when try­ing to install soft­ware.  XFire’s auto­matic update doesn’t work any­more since it needs Admin­is­tra­tor rights to install that, but man­u­ally run­ning the updates solves that prob­lem.  Win­dows does keep telling me it needs to back itself up, but it wants a drive that has 196GB free — the amount I am cur­rently using on the sys­tem drive — to make a com­plete sys­tem image.  While this is a more effec­tive backup method, and pre­serves installed appli­ca­tions and set­tings, how many peo­ple have a drive with equal capac­ity to their sys­tem drive lying around, aside from us nerds.  I haven’t run the backup yet so can’t com­ment on the process, I’m wait­ing to final­ize my deci­sion on my new net­work stor­age server (can’t decide between one gigan­tic server or one mod­er­ate one for stor­age and one small one for backup — the more likely option).

A few things have come up though dur­ing the week.  Itunes can’t save its library with­out giv­ing an error due to the way that it uses tem­po­rary files to save its library.  This is a stu­pid minor thing that hope­fully will be fixed by Apple because Microsoft sure ain’t gonna fix it and I’m too lazy to run through the 6+ steps to fix it myself that involve exces­sive reboots.  By default, the oper­at­ing sys­tem will auto­mat­i­cally index your drive.  While this is good if you ever want to quickly search for a file, it does hurt sys­tem per­for­mance, so I dis­abled it for my sys­tem drive.  Also, Win­dows 7 is a stan­dard Microsoft Oper­at­ing Sys­tem.  By that, I mean it is INCREDIBLY bloated.  It takes up at least 15GB for just the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself, let alone soft­ware, so don’t expect to see a full blown ver­sion of this on SSD net­books any­time soon.  The new fea­ture that lets you auto­mat­i­cally have a win­dow take up half of your mon­i­tor doesn’t work prop­erly if you have two or more mon­i­tors.  Win­dows Fire­wall blocks every­thing by default, but its been that way since XP so its not sur­pris­ing at all.  A lot of the bells and whis­tles are nice, but are shame­lessly stolen from Mac OS and Linux.  Come on Microsoft, lets see some inno­va­tion for a change.

But there have been some good things as well.  The power but­ton in the start menu defaults to shut­down now instead of hiber­nate (like it did in Vista), mean­ing my com­puter actu­ally would shut­down if I ever decided to click that but­ton.  The fact that I went with the 64bit ver­sion means my com­puter will finally use all its resources, since XP 32 bit decided to ignore one of my sticks of ram all the time due to the fact it had to deal with graph­ics mem­ory as well.

(Run­down and Instal­la­tion process rant/review after the break) Read the rest of this entry »