It’s finally here!

It’s here at last! Windows XP day has finally arrived! The world will now be a better place — our work will be easier and more profitable, leaving us free to enjoy our happier and more creative leisure time! At the press of a button, we’ll be able to fly, clutching video clips of our most cherished moments, over trees and towns and appear before our colleagues and loved ones, all to the sound of Ray of Light! Thank you Bill, thank you Steve, we don’t deserve your wonderful, life-changing OS! Just a shame about the privacy-infringing product activation and Passport features that mark the first stage of your attempt to take over the Internet…

To be fair, although I didn’t feel the need to queue up outside a shop to purchase a copy at the stroke of midnight (is anyone actually sad enough to do this?), I’ll probably end up getting a copy of XP. It’s clearly not as earth-shattering as MS would have us believe, but nevertheless it does seem like a significant improvement on their previous OSs. Not sure why MS is making such a big deal about XP’s video editing facilities though - it’s far more basic than the stuff you get to do on a top-of-the-range Mac (add special effects, create DVDs etc.).

And what about the hardware requirements? If MS say the minimum recommended RAM is 128MB, God only knows how much it’ll take to run in the real world. Still, that’s not just MS — it’s Apple, Adobe, Macromedia etc. too. I mean, back in the mid-90s I was designing magazines and posters for high-quality printing, using FreeHand and Quark. And what powerful bit of kit did this process require? An Apple Color Classic. With a 9″ screen. And 8MB of RAM. And a 40MB hard disk. And, I think, a 33MHz processor… As Charles Shaar Murray put it recently:

Maybe what we want in terms of new stuff is no more new stuff. At least not for a while. Not until the stuff we’ve got stops working, or until somebody invents something genuinely useful that we don’t already have… Most of us don’t have the loose dosh necessary to buy new stuff just so we can feel good about being on some notional cutting edge. And most of us aren’t remotely convinced that what’s currently on offer will improve the quality of either our working lives or our leisure time. To put it colloquially, we simply can’t be arsed.

Anyway, instead of playing with a new operating system, I spent most of the day laying mosaic tiles on the toilet floor. Green glass ones, in various shades. Looks very nice, but a bit of a killer on the back and knees.

The highlight of my day is about to begin — the film Viva Knievel! is on telly. Awesome.

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