R3Ware, Inc. / Robert R. Randall

I’m an agnostic when it comes to operating systems.  I don’t possess the religious ferment present in a lot of us geeks as to the ‘best’ OS nor do I believe in the ‘free is always best’ mantra of the open source zealots.  But this is starting to feel political so I better move on…

I’ve been running Windows 7 RC on my desktop for a while now and I must confess that is has been a refreshing experience, especially when compared to Windows Vista.  Windows 7 has been reliable, fast, and even pleasant.  No strange networking behavior.  No driver uglies.  It just works and doesn’t get in the way.  I’m running 64bit Windows 7 RC on an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz with 6GB RAM and I’ve yet to push the box at all.  It always has plenty of spare resources.  Dare I write that Windows 7 is more efficient?  Oh gosh, I guess I did .

 Best of luck with your Windows 7 endeavors.  So far mine have been pleasant and pain free.  And for a Windows OS RC experience that is a new result, at least for me.

Yikes, so here we go…  We need to give the least transparent and least accountable entity with the most control over our economy more power without restrictions or transparency.  That sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?  NO!  IT DOES NOT.  The Federal Reserve does not need more power and giving it more power without forcing transparency on decision making will leave us with more closed door decisions that benefit Wall Street at the expense of the tax payer.  NO THANKS!!

 Oh yeah, and we need another regulator to oversee financial instruments marketed to consumers to make sure they are safe.  Hey, keep that lead paint out of my mortgage!  Another massive bureaucracy funded by our tax dollars with little or no accountability and no firewall between duty to the consumer and political pressures from the beltway.  Yes sir may I have another!  But it feels so good when it stops!

What we really need and many independent analysts agree is real reform.  The regulatory system in place today is a patchwork of incomprehensible junk built up over years and years of patching a system designed for the economy that existed six decades ago.  It ALL need to be rethought, simplified, and firewalled from politics.  But, of course, when those in charge benefit from the current system, this type of reform is dead on arrival.

Ah well, the very very very very slow pace of democracy when campaign cycles drive decision making.  It is just as bad as the myopic quarterly obsessions of publicly traded companies.  The Democrats have one year to get something meaningful accomplished.  After that, we’ll be back to gridlock over the midterm elections and then the next Presidential cycle. 

What a mess.

Well I’m drooling a bit over the new MacBook Pro models.  I happen to love the design, support and build quality of the notebooks as well as the stability of the platform.  The new models that can hold 8GB of DDR3 along with an SSD for storage should be really fast and very very lovely for running lots of virtual machines and avoiding the pain of waiting on disk i/o.  Come on, a 5400 RPM drive is way to slow for power users.  But an SSD, now we’re getting somewhere.

cnet’s Apple Byte has some info after you get past the iPhone hype.