Something Unexpected

Posted March 23, 2010, 6:00 a.m.

Here’s something you might not have expected to find in my home: a retail copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium.

No, I’m not abandoning Mac OS X (or Ubuntu Linux, for that matter). While Windows has not been my primary operating system for a long time, I have pretty much always had a copy of Windows around either on a secondary computer or in virtualization environments. I need it to do cross-platform web site testing, run some mobile emulators that only work in Windows (primarily BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile), and a handful of other ‘occasional’ tasks.

I’ve been running Windows 5.1 (XP) for ages as my pet Windows and, like most of you, I skipped version 6 (Vista) entirely. Now that Microsoft has a stable, functioning version of Windows on the market, XP support is finally starting to fade away. Microsoft has already announced that the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will not run in XP, and the development kit and emulator for Windows Phone 7 will require Vista or higher too. If I intend to support these platforms (and I do), I need to upgrade.

Plus, I’m getting more and more tech support requests from friends on Vista and 7, so it’s about time that I got more familiar with the newer platform.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

The ancient world did in fact experience the birth of Christianity as a liberation from the fear of demons that, in spite of skepticism and enlightenment, was all-pervasive at the time.

Benedict XVI

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Martin Rees

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Universal Dec. of Human Rights

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival.

Winston Churchill

I think, therefore I am.

René Descartes

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Michael Crichton

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if the drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of the missing drop.

Teresa of Calcutta

What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,

Donald Trump

People who talk incessantly about ‘change’ are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.

Thomas Sowell

The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate.

Fulton Sheen

It is the idea that rejecting God . . . will somehow lead to freedom, to complete human fulfillment. As a result [he] is replaced by fleeting human idols which offer the intoxication of a flash of freedom, but in the end bring new forms of slavery and death.

Rino Fisichella

Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humor. . . . This association is a lie.

C. S. Lewis

Duck diplomacy . . . means that you float along placidly on the surface, but underneath you are paddling like the dickens with your feet.

Unknown

I hold it to be sufficiently demonstrated that universal suffrage is by no means a guarantee of the wisdom of the popular choice, and that, whatever its advantages may be, this is not one of them.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic.

H. L. Mencken

The passions are not evil but they are stupid. They need a teacher.

Peter Kreeft

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

We are not angels; that is why we should not be ‘spiritualists.’ We are also not animals; that is why we should not be materialists.

Peter Kreeft

It is good to tame the mind, which is difficult to hold in and flighty, rushing wherever it listeth; a tamed mind brings happiness.

Siddhartha Gautama