ChetOS.net

Is Windows Vista going to be a Windows ME?  Remember Windows ME?  Windows 2000 was released in 1999 and swept the business market.  Windows 98 was still used by home users.  Home users who were more advanced (like me) just put Windows 2000 on their home computers.  Everything was great... except that Microsoft had spent 4+ years creating a NT operating system for home users, and it still wasn't finished.

Well, Microsoft released Windows ME in late 2000 with great fanfare, it was supposed to be the next great home operating system.  It turns out though, that it was just Windows 98 with a better interface.  It was still a 16-bit DOS based operating system running with a 32-bit GUI.

Microsoft released Windows XP just over a year later.  People who had upgraded their computers to use ME were very upset.  They didn't know that they had bought an intermediate product, which was probably released simply to keep Microsoft on everyone's minds (and to make a few extra bucks on upgrade paths).  XP was the real "next big thing", Microsoft had just released an temporary product to keep the line going.

Is Vista just another round of ME-like behavior?  Windows XP is a solid product, Microsoft doesn't want people just sitting on a old version because they don't make money on upgrades, so they create a new version, under much fanfare, that underdelivers... and then turns around a year later with the real "next big thing".

It looks like Windows 7 is what Microsoft has really been working on behind the scenes.  It uses some technology from Vista and XP, but it is really the big step that Vista was supposed to be.  One reason I think this is because the codename is "Blackcomb", which was a codename that has been floating around since "Longhorn" (Vista).  They were both rumors at the same time, and we assumed that "Blackcomb" was simply the server version of "Longhorn".

Since Windows 7 is a consumer OS, and it's codename was rumored at the same time as Vista, I have to assume that development was going on.  Which means the Microsoft knew that it was building two consumer OSes at the same time -- exactly as happened with ME and XP.

Another possibility is that "Blackcomb" was the real product and "Longhorn" was just an snapshot of it that was polished and shipped.  Either way, millions of people got stuck buying the intermediate product.

I installed Windows7 on a virtual machine.  It is pretty nice, looks like a new version of Vista.  The start button has been replaced with a fancy circle, and the taskbar buttons no longer contain the name of the program, until you hover over it.

It was a bit too slow to really try it out in the VM, also hardware acceleration was disabled, so I couldn't check out any fancy graphics.

If you have a spare machine, I definately recommend trying it out.  Clean install is painless.

Every once in a while my computer stops letting me drag icons around.  It is very frustrating.  Sometimes I go so far as to reboot my computer.

Well, it happened again today, and I started searching for a fix.  And it turns out that my ESC button is stuck.  It didn't look stuck, but I saw on a web page that it might be.  So I pressed it, and viola, I can drag again.

Just putting this tip on the web for others to find.

Well, the CTP of VS 2010 is out, along with .NET Framework v4.0.  I downloaded the 24GB Virtual PC image, finally had time to run it... and... it says that it has expired and offers to let me upgrade to VS 2008.  Wow, what a let down.

I am downloading Windows 7 Beta right now, we'll see how that goes.  It isn't designed to run in Virtual PC, but hopefully it will work anyway because I don't have a machine to wipe out.

Does the style of music convey meaning?  Is there meaning in music beyond the words themselves?

This is something I have wondered for a long time.  There just seems to be something dark about heavy metal, forget the words.  Is it simply a style, that can be yolked with "Christian" lyrics at will?  Is music art?  I believe it is.

Art conveys a philosophy, a worldview.  This fact is not really disputed, and is how someone can look at art and try to discern what the artist was communicating.  If it is not possible to discern the meaning in a work of art, then "art appreciation" is meaningless.  Art is considered intellectually enriching.  We get the cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words..." because the work of art is full of information.

What the artist thinks is real (ontology), what the artist thinks is important and, traditionally, beautiful, impact the nature of his work.

Now, does art simply convey meaning in the subject of the work (i.e., is it only the drawn/sculpted object that is important), or does the decision to express it in a particular genre (like still life, pastoral, fantastic, etc), or movement/style (like cubism, expressionism, realism) matter as well?

The styles reflect a set of ideas.  You can determine what those ideas are (to a point), by following the history of a style, and the reasons it evolved (read the Wikipedia article on Futurism for a case study).  I am not an aesthetist, so I don't know exactly how culture influences art, but I know that it does.  Art movements are a product of their culture, for example, with the rise of Postmodernism, we see that art picks up some traits of that philosophy such as chance (randomness), anarchy (no standards), process (uncomplete art), "antiform" (using circles when lines would normally be used).  I am not good at actually critiquing art, but I understand the basic concepts.

A art critic will take the subject matter, the physical material, the genre, and the style, and attempt to figure out what the artist means (I am not considering the deconstructionist critic's methods, because they don't believe the artist's meaning is relevant (which is itself another expression of anarchy in Postmodernism)).

So, if music is art, and the style and genre of art conveys meaning, that means that a musical work's style and genre convey meaning as well.

If music is art, then we have a problem.  If style and genre convey meaning in music, we need to carefully consider what we are conveying when we hook Christian lyrics (the subject of the work) to a particular style and genre.

Can there be "Christian rock", or "Christian death-metal", I don't know; I haven't decided.  What about psychedelic music?  That style of music was specifically designed to disengage the mind, doesn't that matter?

All I am saying is that I no longer buy the argument that only the words matter.