I’m using Windows 7 for about a month now and would like to give you an impression of how it feels to me.

Windows 7 is Microsoft’s new weapon of choice. They went back from implementing in C# (–> Vista) to pure old C, as the performance losses of this political descision were accepted with the thought that “hardware becomes faster anyways”. They didn’t think about smartphones and netbooks back then. And got hit by really bad sales. Well, I’m using this platform for about one month now, therefore I thought I should share my experiences with you.

Image by nick see via Flickr

Speed: Its not as fast as XP, but MUCH faster than Vista. The boot process is faster, though a bug slows it down for my machine at the moment. Glad you can hibernate. You should.

Its New!: It looks shinyer than Vista. Well, its REALLY shiny. It has all the drivers. If it hasn’t got the drivers you need, you usually get an URL where you’ll find it. But a system thats new also has some few bugs. But the approximately 50 updates I got so far made everything run very stable. Atm my boot process is very slow due to a bug, and sometimes I don’t have the “txt-file” in the “create new”-context-menu, but thats about it. And as its new, it also supports features that you won’t use now, but that you may want to use in the future, such as multitouch. Homegroups make easier network-sharing possible, even if it won’t help much till other devices use the feature.

It has a good search: As I didn’t use Vista, I’m not sure if Vistas search features were good, but 7’s search is really nice and was officially stolen adaped from OSX‘es spotlight. Just type and you’ll have what you were looking for really fast. If you need something from a not-indexed location, you can declare the location as indexed and will find everything there faster next time.

Taskbar: The taskbar is now merged with the quick launch-bar. This means, you can have quick-launch-links and “open-programs” in the same bar. Well this wouldn’t be a good thing, but if you have a quick launch-program open, you just have a rectangle drawn around it. This also prevents opening programs that are already open accidentally. While you hover over open program-rectangles, you get a small preview of the windows. Shiny. O, besides, the tray: You can define which tray-icon-programs may bug you with annoying messages, and which may not. That a nice feature.

Good feeling: I especially like the gesture-stuff you can do with open windows. Especially dragging a window to the upper border of the screen to maximize it and being able to un-maximize it by dragging the window away from there is a feature I use everyday without even thinking about maximization anymore. I don’t use the “shake-window-to-minimize-all-others” and only seldomly find a use for the drag of a window to the left or right border of the screen, which makes it maximize to that half of the screen. That might be a usable feature when you don’t have two monitors, but you can’t use it on the left side of the right monitor for example - which should be fixed.

Good overview: The system-properties are pretty cleaned up and you can find everything pretty fast. Smart guesses help you finding something you might have looked for that is related to the settings you’re just seeing. Hovering taskbar items gives previews of the respective window. If you have place at the right from the windows explorer, content of chosen files gets previewed (as long as its text, pictures or microsoft-stuff like wordfiles). All pictures and music get shown up in virtual folders called libraries. The desktop widgets now can be dragged around on the desktop, as I have found out just today, when I firstly used a yellow sticky note as ToDo-list. Or am I mistaken and this is an office 2007-feature? Well, perhaps my overview here is blurred.

All in all, Windows 7 doesn’t make me freak out. Its nice, futuristic, and has got a lot of nice new stuff. Thinking about what I don’t like I only can mention that I like to define myself, which are my “my pictures” folders and such, but I don’t have any really negative points to say. Well. Make it cheaper, but I guess that doesn’t count. That said, I would definitely advise EVERYONE running Vista to upgrade. XP users who like their interface don’t need to switch by all means, but eventually, XP will be outdated some time, so wrap you head around something new. Something shiny.

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We are living in exponential times. Science works much faster than ever. New technology that helps us managing our life in a more comfortable and quicker way gets developed every day. The world population cooperates over the internet. People are confronted with more and more information every day. Social bookmaring services and twitter gives us 1000 interesting links to watch every day. This might either mean information overload or adaption of the brain. Will we cope this stream of information and be hyperintelligent or will we just waste our time watching useless information making us inproductive?

Just in case you didn’t see this video before, take the 5 minutes of time and watch it. Its really impressive.

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

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Image via Wikipedia

Listening to technology-podcasts on the german Handelsblatt.com-website, I heard about Zemanta. It is a service that uses a firefox-plugin to read out your blogged text and parsing it for “words they know”. They present you links, tags and images to embed in your blog post, showing you links to wikipedia-articles and pictures fitting the content. Just after finishing this sentence, the sidebar that gets embedded in my webbackend of wordpress refreshes. Whoa! I got 5 links for the first sentence and I just included them all. I also included a pic you see floating right.

This is what many people think the semantic web or Web 3.0 to be. And in a way, it is. The use of Web 3.0 (the term in my understanding encapsulates user-generated-content as in Web 2.0 and the semantic web) in blogging seems logical to me as blogging the one of the most public displays of Web 2.0. This firefox-plugin makes it much easier to generate interesting articles and IF it doesn’t break my blog frontend, I’ll definitely use it in every post from here on. But back to the functions:

Image by pshab via Flickr

You can press an update-button and your content gets scanned again. New pictures appear and new links can be included. Just realized that most links are Wikipedia ones, but some (like the firefox-plugin-link or the Zemanta-link at the top) are also directed at other “well-known” resources. You can search for a term you put into a searchbar and get links, content and new pics. I tried “semantic web” for example. You can drag-and-drop pictures into the content-pane, and it gets easily included.

We’re standing on the edge of Web 3.0. I don’t think that this here is all that Web 3.0 is about, but I think its a great application that can be called “Web 3.0″-ly. If you would like to use this ff-plugin too, just go to their website and install it. You’ll have to agree to their TOS, that basically says “don’t change anything our plugin includes” and “we need access to the text you write” and “you are in charge for your content and all content you get from us as we show you the license”. So now I hope this post doesn’t get destroyed by some bad constructed CSS on my side. Fire and forget - or do you have any comments, iThoughts or fears about this plugin? You may also comment in german.

Image via Wikipedia

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If you’re making citations in a scientific document and use LaTeX for building it, you might have trouble finding the correct BibTeX-citations. Google Scholar is the tool you need in this case. Here you can search all the literature you might use.

If you have logged in with your google-account, you’ll find a bibliography-manager in the Scholar-preferences. Here you can choose to add links to all found literature that lets you export BibTeX, EndNote or whatever format you need.

Have fun citing!

Hello, dear friends of “The Semantic Web”. I hope you don’t mind if I’m a bit sacrastic about this. I just got a tweet to this article, stating that the semantic web is soon developed and ready to be bought - or used, or something like this.

The article and several others that I found are saying all the same - they were busy explaining what the meaning of the word semantic is and how the human brain organizes information - and some other buzzwords also appear. They say they use neuronal nets to simulate the human brains way to connect words to semantics and that they are ready to sell it to us. They tell us that they found a way to make this n-net work with linear complexity (lowering the processing speed to “only” 20% [someone might see that this is not logical] ) and that every site in the semantic web just gets connected to every other when we use their technology - how this should look is shown in a small video where they take some text about a mac evangelist and show us how their remarkable someware does some pretty AJAX-effects. They tell us that it will find applications that fit the context of what we read and relevant text too - from anywhere on the net! They tell that it’s good for SEO (which I doubt - when every information is connected semantically, SEO is plain dead because only the content would be important) and they tell us its an innovative revolution.

Something that is not told is how we should buy this technology, sometimes its said that everyone will be able to use the new technology in their portal, but most of the time I got the feeling that you’ll need to but a licenced software to use it. They also don’t tell us what a server we’ll need, and how much bandwidth and hardware-capacity … this might be relevant if we’re simulating a human brain or if we’re trying to know where every written word on the internet is located, and in which context.

After all, I would be very happy to see that miraculous beta-version and test it. If it does, what you say, I’ll gratefully update this post and help you test that revolution. But till that happens, I’ll take Qimaya for the guys that sell the thing everyone’s talking about to the people who don’t understand its just selling freezers to eskimos.

(as you voted in the last post, this post is in english)

Finally, this is what many of us were waiting for: Copy and Paste as a working beta version for iPhone - only available for jailbreaked devices via cydia. The app is called clippy. It makes a clipboard available for all keyboard-based inputs. I tested around a bit, and it worked in every app I tried - except Twinkle. Its a beta after all.

In the following image-gallery, I put together some iPhone screenshots showing you how the copy and paste works.

[Show as slideshow]

How you do it:

• Type a text
• Press the ‘.?123′-key
• mark the text using the zoom function - put finger directly on the text until the zoom appears and then move it to mark some text
• press the new copy-key - the marked text will appear in the clipboard
• put your cursor anywhere and tap on ‘paste’
• this also works in maps or any other keyboard-based application

Touchscreens, Computer in Handys, Staubsaugende Roboter, Elektrische Autos, … vieles hätte man vor 10 Jahren noch für Science Fiction gehalten. Doch wir leben in einer Zeit, in der die Wissenschaft rasante Fortschritte macht und Technologien verfügbar werden, die ganz neue Möglichkeiten eröffnen. Was sagt uns das?

Immer wieder kommen Meldungen in den Nachichten, die definitiv in den Bereich der Science Fiction gehören gehörten. Einige davon seien hier aufgezeigt:

• Neuartige Bildschirme, transparent, unzerstörbar, biegsam und viel günstiger als heutige Bildschirme werden in Zukunft Straßenwerbungen wie in Science-Fiction-Filmen à la Blade Runner oder Minority Report ermöglichen… die passenden Konsumenten-Erkennungssysteme für personalisierte Werbung ist auch schon fast fertig. Auch Handys mit billigeren, ausziehbaren und somit größeren Bildschirmen wären so möglich, und die immer kleineren Prozessoren machen die Taschengeräte nach dem iPhone-Boom bald zu echten Taschencomputern.
• Auslesen von Drogenmißbrauch und anderen chemisch nachweisbaren Eigenschaften eines Menschen über seinen Fingerabdruck wird bald standardmäßig möglich sein - schlechte Zeiten für illegale Drogenuser - und für unperfekte Menschen, wenn man sich an den Film Gattaca erinnert.
• Ein weiteres Beispiel ist das Auslesen von Bildern und anderen Gedanken direkt aus dem Gehirn eines Menschen, die in diesem Artikel beschrieben. Auf der CES wurde beireits ein kommerzielles Spielzeug entwickelt, dass die Kraft der Gedanken nutzt - tja Luke, bin ich dein Vater? Konzentriere dich Luke!
• Roboter ersetzen Menschen auf Meetings…

Was zeigt uns das alles? Na dass die Science-Fiction Autoren nicht verrückt oder dämlich oder totale Träumer sind, sondern dass viele sich einfach den fortscheitenden Weg der Wissenschaft vorstellen konnten und uns zeigen, was werden könnte. Und gerade diese Visionen leiten Wissenschaftler heutzutage an. Ich bin auf jeden Fall beeindruckt, in einer Zeit wie dieser zu leben, … hoffe allerdings auch, dass wir bei all dem Schnickschnack und den SciFi-Problemlösungen es auch noch schaffen, die wahren Probleme der Welt (Klima, Krieg, Werteverfall, Gier, Talkshows, …) zu lösen!