I was driving to Paramus to proctor an SAT Practice Test, so before I left, I wanted to find a McDonald’s on the way so I can drive-thru and bring it to the classroom. After a quick search of “mcdonalds,” Google Maps gave me its usually reliable scatter of McDonald’s locations around my destination. I quickly found one that seemed on my route. It was on Rt-4 – perfect. Google Maps told me it was 247 Rt. 4, and I noted it was right before the Garden State Plaza.

When I drove by the area, there was nothing on either side of Route 4. I was quite confused. I drove all the way past the Garden State Plaza, made a U-Turn, and came back. Still nothing. I ended up going back and going to this McDonald’s, which was right past my exit. I had wasted about 10 minutes roaming around Route 4 trying to find this mystery Mickey. Instead of eating leisurely before the students came, I had to munch on french fries while they wrote their essay.

When I rolled past the McDonald’s driveway, I noticed that the address placard said “247 Rt. 4 W.” It seemed strangely familiar. When I got home, I checked the two McDonald’s locations on Google Maps. They had the same address. Then I noticed that the first one, the one I couldn’t find, was labelled an “Unverified Listing” in pale grey text. Well, I guess now it’s verified. There’s nothing there.

Now my question is: who posted this unverified listing, and why was it 1.8 miles away from the actual location?

The intangibles are all there. Boot times, even on my MacBook, are nearly as fast as Leopard. Within the OS, everything is quite snappy. There really isn’t any of the sluggishness I experienced in Vista. When I open Chrome, it opens. It’s refreshing, especially when compared to Vista. Also, I look at the system resources, and Windows 7 is buzzing along at a mere 25% of RAM used, with a browser and IM client open. That’s really impressive. Altogether, it’s really a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft, and I really hope they can carry this success through to release. 90% of the world uses Windows, and it’s about time that Microsoft gave them something that works more often than not.

That said, I haven’t tried going through some of Windows’ usual pains. Networking, on the surface at least, has improved, with the wireless icon in the taskbar now no longer completely useless. Compatibility with hardware I also have not tried, but Vista SP1 seemed to have fixed many of the issues, and I expect that Windows 7 has kept that up.

For those of you who haven’t really looked at Windows 7 yet, here’s a run-down of some of the new features.

New Taskbar

This is where the biggest change in Windows 7 happened. The new taskbar is very similar to Mac OS X’s dock, as you can pin elements to it to keep them there, and the programs show up as icons rather than strips.

click for larger version

Programs pinned to the start menu but not open, like Mail in the screenshot above, still appear, just like in OS X. Open programs are given the glass frame, and the active program is given a semi-opaque shine. If there are more than one window open for any given program, like Windows Explorer above, the glass frame reflects that. When you mouseover a tile, or click on a program that has multiple tiles, it shows you a preview of the open windows. Mouseover one of the previews and it hides everything on-screen temporarily except for that window. Click it, and it becomes active. It’s smooth and, albeit not immediately useful, it doesn’t get in the way. It’s very much eye-candy, but, again, it’s not distracting, and it won’t annoy you.

They also fixed up the right side of the taskbar. The best change here is the option to hide not only the icon, but also notifications. Finally, all the annoying notifications from Windows about your computer not being protected and other pop-ups that may show up can be hidden with an easily accessible option. In the week or so I’ve used Windows 7, I haven’t seen one annoying, needless notification – but only after I turned hid the Windows notifications. Of course, the default still has them popping up sporadically, but the ability to hide them creates an almost OS X-like atmosphere.

Mouse gestures

In preparation for touch-screen displays going mainstream, Microsoft has seen fit to include several mouse gestures that, ostensibly, are meant to be touch gestures. When you drag a window to the top of the screen, it maximizes instantly. Drag it back down and it returns to the same size it was before. Drag a window to either side, and it instantly fills up half of that side of the screen. The normal left click functions on the taskbar can all be activated with a click-hold-drag upwards. One can argue that these functions are nearly useless, as they replicate easily accessible functions, but they’re very fast, so there’s nothing really wrong with having them.

Windows Explorer

Not much has changed since Vista, which is a bad thing. Mac OS X’s Finder is still several steps above Windows Explorer in terms of utility and aesthetics. Windows Explorer feels like a raw fossil in the midst of a modern OS. Many of the dialog windows around the system are also the same as before. There really is no comparison between a Windows Properties dialog and a Mac OS X Get Info dialog.

Closing

I haven’t really gone in-depth into Windows 7, only really touching on some of the more visible, tangible new features. I only hope that Microsoft continues to make Windows 7 slicker, quicker, and more usable; they’re already halfway there. Windows is now beginning to reach a parity with the ease-of-use and simplicity of Mac OS X, seven years after OS X’s introduction.

I still won’t use Windows over Mac on a regular basis, but Microsoft has definitely got something good with Windows 7.

The pace of modern life has accelerated with time. As a society, we spend less time sitting down and more time moving from place to place. When we do sit down, it’s most likely in front of a computer. This is especially true for us students — the younger generation — who are now entering mainstream adult life. So where, then, does television fit into this equation?

We grew up watching TV. For me, at least, Saturday morning cartoons became a tradition. After-school shows, too, were hard to skip. Missing “The Magic School Bus” was almost as bad as missing the actual school bus. Yet today, few of us find the time to sit down and watch TV regularly. What was once a daily event has now dwindled to sporadic viewings, governed not by TV Guide but by our own schedules. I may say that I can’t possibly miss the next episode of “The Office,” but when Thursday night rolls around, I often find myself too busy to sit down.

I’m not alone in this sentiment; other Yalies interviewed expressed similar views.

“I don’t watch TV very often,” Santiago Correa ’12 said. “I don’t have time to adhere to its strict schedule.”

But perhaps that sense of busyness is a product of our circumstances. High school and college are certainly a great deal busier than the earlier years of our lives. TV is still filled with a lineup of popular shows, which would not exist if there weren’t a steady viewership.

That said, there’s no denying that television is losing its place at the center of domestic life. The computer, along with the Internet, is taking over. Families that used to huddle around the television set are now split across the house.

Now, just as television replaced the radio decades ago, the computer is replacing TV.

It’s only natural, then, that the next revolution — and, perhaps, the last — in television is at the hands of the Internet. Hulu.com, a joint venture by NBC and Fox, is a prime example of this web-based revolution. It offers nearly every show on NBC and Fox, along with some other channels, for free. Episodes are often released a day after they air on TV. There is no strict schedule to follow, no time to block off for a specific show. There are also shorter commercial breaks — fifteen to thirty seconds rather than the three-minute breaks on TV. Because it’s possible to determine exact viewership online, Hulu can sell concrete blocks of ads, which generates just as much, if not more, revenue as the traditional television commercial.

There’s a fast-approaching future in which TV shows become Internet shows, and we no longer have to get our weekly hour of satisfaction at a specific day and time. There are already “made-for-Internet” shows, such as the made-for-MySpace show “QuarterLife” and Joss Whedon’s serial Web musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”

With the steady increase in Web speeds, the video quality of online content is also quickly eclipsing that of cable. In that future, televisions could stream their content not from cable or satellite providers, but from the Internet — straight from the source. When NBC streamed the Beijing Olympics live from their Web site, the first bell of death tolled for traditional television. As more made-for-Internet shows emerge, the ringing will continue.

The last bell, the death knell of TV, will ring when we are watching live events, newscasts, and even “Good Morning America” on our laptops or cell phones — whenever, wherever we want.

I download music illegally. I tried to be legal, to buy my CDs and use the online music stores legally. I want to support the bands whose music I enjoy. But the very thing the music companies use to protect themselves from piracy – Digital Rights Management (DRM) – pushed me into the murky waters of the black market.

Here’s the scenario: I went onto the iTunes Music Store and clicked “buy” next to a song. The word itself suggests that I’m buying that song. A legal, market transaction. A full transfer of ownership from the big boys at Warner Bros. to me. I want to put the song where I want it, play it when I want to, have full freedom and full ownership over my 99-cent property. But that’s not what actually happens. Thanks to DRM, what I’ve got is essentially a rental. I can only burn it seven times, have it on five computers, and I can only play it with an iPod or through iTunes.

To the casual observer, this seems only annoying, and certainly not deal-breaking. Most Yalies I talked to expressed indifference, saying it has no immediate effect on their online purchases. But I argue that DRM isn’t just annoying; it’s absurd and dangerous, even. Time is the greatest factor here. How long do you expect your purchase to last? I assume it’s forever, as is the case with every other good on the market. But that’s just not the case. For example, what if I stop using an iPod? Gadgets and trends change rapidly, and in ten years, I could be running around New York with another mp3 player in my pocket. It’s also not unimaginable that I’d be on my sixth computer in fifteen years. The moment any of those happen, I lose the song I purchased. At 99 cents a pop, that’s not spare change.

Worse, still, is the fact that the DRM-driven music is so tied to the seller. If a store shuts down its servers, like Wal-Mart did a few days ago, all of its customers are suddenly left with locked music that cannot be unlocked. Basically, DRM has made it so the music I buy isn’t really mine, but rather some convoluted entitlement to use the music where and when the music company wants me to. It’s not my property.

The music industry defends the use of DRM as an anti-piracy measure, a way to prevent people from uploading the files back onto the Internet and sharing it with others for free.  Yet the measure isn’t a complete, blanket protection. CDs are all-too-easy to rip into shareable files. Even the DRM itself isn’t
perfect.

Most Yalies interviewed agreed that circumvention is terribly easy. “It’s easy to get around it,” Charlie Sharzer ’12 said. “You just burn a CD and load it back onto your computer.”

But the fact that DRM forces users to circumvent it seems to defeat its purpose. It’s clear that the industry is not handling anti-piracy correctly. Rather than building satisfaction with customers, they use DRM to shackle them, which signals a paranoia and a lack of trust and respect for the customers.

The bottom line is that DRM does not work. It has not prevented those who pirate music from pirating it, and it has only annoyed the legitimate costumers. That itself should signal to the music industry that enough is enough. DRM is dead.

It’s not that I’m a fan of Greek mythology or even that I’m more than superficially interested in them. They just have cool names, and it’s certainly less boring that “Macintosh HD; Storage; Flash Drive; Time Machine.” Plus, it’ll confuse everyone, which is always a plus.

1. Drop the old technology.
Microsoft’s products are mired in the past and old technology. Vista remains on the NT kernel – released in 1993 – and still uses NTFS – also released in 1993. Microsoft just can’t expect to compete with faster, more secure, and more modern alternatives in Apple’s Mac OS X, which runs on a modern HFS+ file system and is based on an open source UNIX core. Windows Mobile looks and feels like ancient technology next to recent offerings from Blackberry and the iPhone. Internet Explorer consistently falls behind the competition in modern speed ratings. Microsoft needs to re-evaluate its product refreshes and make them more significant and more innovative. Each step forward must be a real step, not a crawl. What Microsoft truly needs is to:

2. Take some risks.
Microsoft’s offerings are frequently too conservative. If the XBOX 360 hadn’t been released a year early, it’d be competing with Sony’s PS3 for last place. Ultimately, it suffers from being the middle child. It’s not as family-friendly or as affordable as Nintendo’s Wii, yet it’s not as technologically advanced as the PS3. It falls into the netherworld of being neither, and thus has been last in sales for most of 2008. As for Windows, there really is only one solution. Start over. Microsoft has plenty of money to either hire a new team of experienced engineers, or break off a small piece of its Windows 7 team to begin a new operating system based on new technologies. It’ll have to maintain a legacy system to run NT processes, but the core of the operating system must be new. Microsoft spends too much money and too much talent trying to wrangle a modern operating system out of fifteen-year-old technology. Take a risk. Start over. It’ll only make Windows better.

3. Tame the OEMs.
Microsoft relies on OEMs to deliver their overwhelming lead in the home desktop market. Yet it was OEMs that created most of Vista’s problems at release. The Vista Capable fiasco tore down customer confidence and set Vista back severely. Apple’s Mac OS X can promise the smooth and powerful experience it’s known for because it controls the specifications for the machines that run the operating system. Microsoft’s traditional issue has been a wide range of specifications. However, a quick glance at the websites of popular low-price OEMs such as Dell or Gateway shows that the minimum machines match the minimum machines released by Apple. Intel Core 2 Duo chips and 2 GB of RAM are commonplace even among $400-$500 products. Microsoft needs to work with the OEMs to establish a minimum. Place restrictions in the license in terms of technology. Microsoft has the power of the license, and it needs to use it in way that doesn’t trap the OEM, but makes it mutually beneficial. The success of the OEM is tied to Microsoft’s success, and Microsoft must make that clear.

4. End the over-extension and establish focus.
One of Microsoft’s major problems is over-extension. It has attempted to push itself into too many markets, many of which are now dominated by focused competitors. Mobile phone OS is dominated by Symbian, Mozilla Firefox is rapidly eating away at Internet Explorer in the browser market, Nintendo’s monthly sales far outstrip XBOX 360′s, Google is the clear winner in online search, and the list goes on and on. Microsoft is not the leader, nor is it even second, in almost every market outside of the desktop operating system. Microsoft needs to focus its efforts, and maybe trim down its offerings in failing markets. It doesn’t need to be in the media player market. Expand the Zune into a multimedia portable console and bring it in line with the XBOX 360. It may be difficult to dump one of Microsoft’s many tentacles, but Microsoft needs to slim its offerings and focus them.

5. Cater to the niche.
Mac OS X has done remarkably well among the technophiles, the bloggers, the ones who make their voices heard on the internet. For the average user, the price, availability, and familiarity of Windows make it the attractive choice. However, with the growing ubiquity of the internet, more and more average users are beginning to turn to the internet for information, and once there, they run across the posts and articles written by the blogosphere. Microsoft needs to create hype and buzz among that niche. It needs to release attractive products that are attractive to that population, because they are gaining more power and influence over average consumer.

Microsoft ultimately needs to get off its crumbling throne and revitalize their business. They are slowly falling behind technologically and are in danger of losing relevancy in the fast-paced world of technological innovation. Microsoft has the money and the power to reverse their direction. They just need to be unafraid of failure.