Val Kilmer to be... blah, blah, blah

I don't care so much about this article itself; I focused more on the accompanying photograph. Is that seriously the guy who played The Saint? I know that was 12 years ago, but he seems to have aged nearly twice that.

Kilmer to be king of Bacchus in New Orleans parade - Yahoo! News

Today's xkcd

With a reference to Calvin & Hobbes... fantastic!

Windows is officially irrelevant

In a NYT piece this morning, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that the upcoming "Windows 7" will be important. However, this paragraph from the article just made me laugh:

He added, however, that Windows 7 should not have the same sort of problems with compatibility with devices and programs that Vista did. While some of underlying architecture of Vista changed from earlier versions of Windows, Windows 7 is built on Vista’s underlying structure.

That means that users upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 won't experience any problems. However, anyone that didn't upgrade to Vista because of the compatibility problems will still face the exact same roadblocks if they try to use Windows 7.

He's assuming that all his customers are using the latest version and just might just have had some problems getting it to work. But in my lab, I still have all the workstations running Windows XP. I was hoping the next version of Windows would respond to criticism from the cautious and provide a cleaner upgrade path from XP, but based on this report of Ballmer's CES keynote I'm no longer optimistic.

Thankfully, our use of XP is just a fallback measure for a few pieces of software that aren't cross-platform; Linux is our main operating system and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Ballmer: Windows Is Still Relevant - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com