The Way of the Johnny

I listen to Leo Laporte on the TWiT netcast network and lately he's been raving about Windows 7, so I decided to give it a test drive. I use VMWare Fusion my my Mac to run Windows XP, so it was a natural choice to try running the Windows 7 Release Candidate in a virtual machine. Fortunately, VMWare had a tutorial on their website on how to accomplish this, so I downloaded the 64-bit Windows 7 ISO, installed it in a virtual machine, an presto, I've got Windows 7 RC on my Mac. Following are my first impressions of the operating system. 1. Windows 7 feels snappier than XP. The fact that I'm using 64-bit Windows 7 compared to 32-bit Windows XP might be a factor in this. And I assume Windows 7 is better able to take advantage of the Mac's Core2Duo processor compared to XP. Whatever the factors are, it's really nice to see Microsoft improve the speed of Windows dramatically from Vista. 2. Windows 7 retains the same control panel structure as Vista. I don't u...

I listen to Leo Laporte ´s TWiT netcasts regularly and I recently heard something on TWiT #154 that got me thinking about our privacy in this day and age of fear of terrorism. For your reference, federal agents can now confiscate laptops or any other electronic device without any suspicion of wrongdoing. This is obviously unconstitutional and a violation of privacy. But, with security checks so tight now and with the public´s fear of terrorism, how far are people willing to let their privacy be compromised in the name of security? Sometime right after 9/11 happened, I remember hearing about a survey that was taken among Americans. The issue that was polled was whether people were willing to let their personal records be checked if there was any kind of suspicion of terrorism. Most people who took the survey said they were willing to let their personal records be checked. I´m sure you see where I´m going with this. What´s to stop federal security agents from searching not jus...