Check your processor before upgrading to Windows 7!

THe more I read about Windows 7, the more I find out how about I am not ready for an upgrade for at least a couple of years.

I first thought that VirtualPC will be needed to run WinXP compatible programs -- which sounded ridiculous, I'l leave it at that, to spare sarcasm. Today, I read that this support for virtualization is far more native to the processor you are running on than earlier VirtualPC versions. This means, that the VirtualPC that ships with Windows 7 requires either an Intel processor with VT support OR an AMD processor with a V tag, where V stands for virtualiation in both cases. This gives user having such a processor the advantage of running Windows XP applications just like a normal Windows 7 application, without having to bring up VirtualPC or anything. This is a more interesting proposition than I earlier thought...BUT....the requirement for a specific Intel model puts the plans to rest for good.

My laptop processor, a Core 2 Duo one, does not support VT.

So, even if I would have been wooed to upgrade to Windows 7 going by rave previews and post-release reviews, this one disability would undo all of my wilful enthusiasm.

So, until something really nasty happens to my laptop, I am not looking at Windows 7 for some time to come...

Google Wave Preview

Google Wave Preview

I realize that I am way beyond the 2.9 millionth viewer mark on this preview of the Google Wave platform. I wonder why it took me so long to come across this!

I sat through the 80 minute demo with breaks in between....and I'm impressed...and confused.

I'm impressed with the stuff Google is putting out with Wave - really brilliant! Just have a look.

But my confusion is what is worth delving deeper into. There is all this new development that is happening in the internet... Android, Web 2.0, and the works...there's so much of it... and I... am still motivationally and inertially stranded on the desktop, which I love a lot, needless to say. I use the word stranded because I really am beginning to wonder if I do not get on and learn the bits and bytes that make up a web developer's toolkit, I should be cheating myself off an opportunity to get into this fun looking collaborative bandwagon.

Looking at the way the big blokes that shape up computer technology are going, they're really bringing the development platforms for desktop, the web and the mobile, down under one pinning in the form of a development platform that abstracts away the deployment platform. When you have a common development plaform, there will be languages commonly available for programming applications -- it is very likely that these languages are OO languages. While this gets me more relaxed about starting development on such a platform, I strongly feel that if and when something goes wrong on the deployment platform, it is not going to be debuggable or serviceable easily in the programming language you developed in -- rather, it will be in the "rendered" language, which is some web scripting language like javascript, because we are talking html as the final deployment technology here.

So, to sum it up, until now I was subconsciously preoccupied on a low prio thread on when or if I should start playing with web development. I can safely say Google Wave now makes it a conscious preoccupation with medium prio for me!