Anyone who knows me knows I’m all about making dire predictions. I predicted our current economic crisis and even pinpointed the cause being the mortgage meltdown. I also predicted that it would be revealed (too late) that Dick Cheney is an alien robot mastermind bent on enslaving the human race. I’m still waiting on that one.

My next dire prediction is that Microsoft will destroy the web… again. In case you’ve been sleeping under a bucket the past couple of days, the big interwebs news is the release of Firefox 3.5. One of the most talked about features of this new release is support for the HTML 5 audio and video tags using the patent free and open Ogg Vorbis and Theora codecs. Originally the plan was to include the Ogg formats in the HTML 5 specification, but Apple and Nokia threw a major warbler about it and so the Ogg specs were removed from HTML 5 and replaced with some kinda ambiguous, wishy-washy crap that I haven’t bothered to read.

So here’s my prediction. Microsoft will indeed support the HTML 5 audio and video tags in Internet Explorer, but it will only work with their proprietary codecs and not the free ones. There may or may not be support for the Mac platform, but there will certainly be no support for Microsoft codecs on Linux or other platforms. Since they won’t be supporting the Ogg codecs, web developers will be forced to use the Microsoft codecs to encode their content since Internet Explorer has such a large market share. That market share will increase once people start to migrate towards Internet Explorer so that they can watch videos and listen to music.

This is the same crap they pulled with Internet Explorer 6. IE6 was released with only partial support for CSS, and even the stuff they did support was plagued by rendering bugs. They had a huge market share at the time and so they didn’t bother to fix any of the bugs. They let IE6 rot for 6 years while the web stagnated and webmasters catered to the IE6 bugfest. Microsoft only started working on IE again after Firefox ate into about 10% of their market share. The new innovation really helped the web take off again (remember Web 2.0?).

The only question now is how long with Microsoft hold us back this time?

The second thing I noticed about Windows 7 is that Microsoft is actually allowing people to download and use it free of charge (until June of next year when it will stop functioning until you pay for it). As far as I know this is a first for Microsoft and a good PR move. The only drawback is that they give you the Windows 7 Ultimate edition which is not the Home Premium edition most people will end up with. So there is probably some functionality you’ll miss once you actually pay for the darn thing.

To install Windows 7 you must download an ISO image and burn it to a DVD. This is not a functionality built into Windows XP, so you’ll have to download a third party program to do this. I used Active@ ISO Burner which was second on the list of two programs that Microsoft recommended (ironically, I could not figure out how to use the first program they recommended). Once you’ve made your installation DVD, you just need to open and run it to do the install.

Installation was amazingly easy. I simply ran the DVD, answered a few questions, let it do its thing, answered a few more questions, and it was all done. I don’t know how long it took exactly since I slept while it was copying files, but it certainly takes less that 4 hours which is how much sleep I got. There were some power features that were either missing from the installation or not readily apparent that I would have liked to seen. The first missing item was a partition manager. It gave me no options to create, delete, or reformat partitions. Boo! The second item that wasn’t readily apparent was the ability to create more than one user during installation. It’s not something that I need personally, but it would be nice for people with more than one user in their household.

A gratuitous look at Windows 7

Upon bootup, I noticed another amazing thing. Windows 7 will actually automagically detect some of your hardware. It detected my faxmodem (big whoop) and ethernet adapter which was a big help in getting the first updates installed. During the first set of updates, Windows 7 also detected my graphics card and wireless card and installed drivers for those as well. The only things that did not work were the sound card and multimedia buttons. I downloaded the Vista drivers for my sound card and it started working (without a restart!). I haven’t tried to get the multimedia buttons working yet. Another thing that is funky is my trackpad. It works using standard PS/2 mouse drivers, but you can’t configure it.

After all that it’s really just a standard Windows experience. I found the interface to be less intuitive than Windows XP. I think in trying to make thing easier to use, they only succeeded in making things slightly harder for the tech savvy. The eye candy is nice, but it’s still just eye candy. Microsoft also failed to include its IM client, mail client, movie maker, etc. in this release. You’ll have to download those in a free package called Windows Live Essentials. They had about 2GB left on the installation DVD so I’m not really sure why they are not including those with the OS. Another disappointment was Internet Explorer 8. While it is much, MUCH better than IE 6 or 7, it’s still bloated with a clunky interface. I downloaded Google Chrome halfway through this article just because I found IE so annoying.

I updated the theme again for this site (let me know if you see a bug). It’s a modified version of the plainscape theme which has to be the most versatile, simple, and well thought out theme for Wordpress. Basically I just changed the colors and got rid of the old sad sun face that everyone hated. It has been replaced with a non-committal cloud. In fact, I may make The Non-Committal Cloud™ my official mascot.

H/T to the Consumerist

Personally I can’t think of a better way to spend a day than sitting in my car, listening to ABBA while I make videos of myself unlocking and locking padlocks.

Oh yeah… That’s the stuff.

For more about this fish, check out this article at Pharyngula.