One other significant reason that I like Windows is that I haven’t been running Windows XP for a long time. I was one of the brave few who decided to give Vista a try and I have to tell you, XP is absolutely archaic in comparison. Even more so when you compare XP to Windows 7. Windows 7 is very, very good.

A simple example of what you get when you upgrade from Windows XP is the ability to mute annoying system sounds, like those “online/offline” dings that I can’t seem to turn off in Trillian. I know this feature may seem trivial, but all these little goodies add up to a great experience.

Don’t get me wrong, I also like Mac OS X and Linux. If only PC manufacturers would raise their standards, more people would like Windows as well. Fortunately, looking at the announcements coming out of CES last week, things are trending in the right direction.

D is not a scripting language, nor an interpreted language. It doesn’t come with a VM, a religion, or an overriding philosophy. It’s a practical language for practical programmers who need to get the job done quickly, reliably, and leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code.

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The latency to a fast website (say, google.com) is about 45ms, comparable to hard drive seek latency. In fact, while hard drives are 5 orders of magnitude removed from main memory, they’re in the same magnitude as the Internet. Residential bandwidth still lags behind that of sustained hard drive reads, but the ‘network is the computer’ in a pretty literal sense now. What happens when the Internet is faster than a hard drive?

In other words, we need to get past this bottleneck, or Moore’s Law is going to quickly become meaningless. Here is a short summary of hard disk drive replacements that actually have a chance at making it to your desktop in the near future:

Solid-State Drives (SSD) are fast (250 MB/s), expensive, very efficient (0.15 Watts), and you can buy one today. Linus says that Intel SSDs are the only ones to buy.

Hard Rectangular Drives (HRD) are crazy fast (500 MB/s) but expensive. Their first target is high-end database servers.

Metal Foil Drives (MFD) are fast (~250 MB/s), cheap, extremely reliable, and efficient. MFD’s are not yet available, but the technology is patented and Cringely is working on it.

Update: Intel recently announced cheaper, faster SSDs.

If you are an Apple fan, your software picks this month have to be the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards announced this week at WWDC.

Burn Music CDs the Easy Way on Windows

Let’s face it: sometime you still need to burn an old-school music CD. Digital music players aren’t for everyone, and making a custom CD as a gift is still nicer than handing someone a bunch of zipped MP3′s. If you are running Windows, the easiest way I know to burn a music CD is with Burrrn:

Burrrn is a little tool for creating audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files.
Supported formats are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets. You can also burn EAC’s noncompliant image + cue sheets! Burrrn can read all types of tags from all these formats (including ape tags in mp3).

I especially like the way it converts song information from your tags to CD-Text so that CD players can display song and artist info for each track. Very nice. Although Burrrn is free, please consider sending a small thank-you to the programmer by way of a donation.

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In fact, most people get lucky the first time and spend their entire lives trying to duplicate that first success, with no real understanding of the principles that made them successful in the first place. But Pixar has made a conscious effort, since the beginning, to identify and reinforce such principles. And that’s the real secret to being great.

Was it possible, even remotely, I wondered, that the Windows 7 RC had improved matters enough to make this OS usable on this old hardware, a machine that was slow and out of date the day I got it over two years ago? I didn’t think so, but I needed some UMPC shots for the book, so it didn’t really matter. I fired up Windows 7 Setup on the device and got to work.

To my surprise, it runs just fine. Not just acceptably, it runs well. It runs as well on this little piece of junk as it does on a 2009-era netbook. This UMPC has an 800 MHz Celeron processor and just 1 GB of RAM. It will not accept any USB memory keys for ReadyBoost purposes, so there’s no way to even improve the memory situation. But it doesn’t matter: Windows 7 just runs and runs and runs. It runs well enough to play a full resolution H.264 DVD rip in Windows Media Player (windowed or full-screen) without a hitch. In fact, I brought the thing to the gym Friday and watched 30 minutes of that movie while doing some cardio. Perfect.

Now, I don’t care if you think Steve Jobs is your own personal God and Microsoft is merely a footnote in history. You have to admit this is freakin’ amazing. I actually installed Windows 7 on my old Athlon XP 1800 box. And it runs like champ. But here is the most surprising thing of all: in some ways Windows 7 is even faster than Windows XP on the same hardware.

Prediction: Apple will spend millions on new commercials making fun of Windows 7. They will probably run some spots that try to paint Windows 7 as just Vista with a new set of clothes, a haircut, or some fancy makeup. This will be sadly hypocritical, because you can make the same argument against Mac OS X vs. BSD. But, at the end of the day, anyone who takes a genuine look at Windows 7 will have to admit Microsoft has done something, well, insanely great.

Tip: Be sure to rate your computer (search for Windows Experience Index in the start menu or control panel). Windows 7 will actually use the results to tune your system for better performance.

The Limelight metrics are especially awesome. CDNs used to be ridiculously expensive and difficult to use, usually requiring massive amounts of cash, lawyers, paper, and coffee. Now, all that power is in the hands of the people. I’m excited about the trend toward democratization in the broader market. I hope the trend continues with other areas of tech and communication services. What would you like to see?

Full disclosure: I work for Jungle Disk, a fully-owned subsidiary of Rackspace.