‘Paving the way‘ made another appearance this week in this article I saw on cnet.com yesterday. I don’t really use windows unless I have to but this article and the comments underneath it made me want to at least try Windows 7 to see what it’s like. Maybe I’ll give it a go over the weekend.
There were loads of interesting expressions in this article, along with a lot of ‘geek speak‘ (computer jargon). The first word that caught my attention was in the second paragraph where the reviews of Windows Vista were described as ‘lukewarm‘. ‘Lukewarm’ is a slightly negative word we can use to describe a liquid which is a little bit warm. For example, if order a hot drink and it when it arrives it is only slightly warm, you can say it is ‘lukewarm’. If a review or response to something is ‘lukewarm’, it is not particularly excited or enthusiastic.
In the next paragraph, the author mentions a ‘deadline’, meaning the specific time a piece of work or a project has to be finished by:
In contrast to Vista, Windows 7 has been marked by the company consistently hitting its deadlines and receiving largely positive feedback along the way.
There is a great expression in the paragraph after that where Mike Angiulo is quoted as saying:
“That is our final engineering milestone in what has been a three-year journey,”
In this context, a ‘milestone’ is an important event in the three-year project he mentions. We can also have milestones in our lives or careers. The original meaning of the phrase is a kind of old-fashioned road sign that marked the distance to other important places. I guess if you think of life as a journey, milestones are markers along the way.
There’s a nice bit of geek-speak later on in the article where it is mentioned that the operating system would work well on ‘netbooks‘. A ‘netbook’ is a very small laptop where portability and minimal cost are usually more important than having a fast processor. I would like to buy one in the future, I think, because it would be ideal for blogging with.
The last expression I’d like to look at in this article is ‘end game’:
“When you are going through the end game, sometimes it is really bumpy; sometimes it is not,” (Mike Angiulo)
The ‘end game’ (sometimes spelled without a space) is the final or closing stages of a process. It’s also the last part of a chess game when the players don’t have many pieces left on the board.
Have you tried Windows 7 yet? If so, it is any good? If not, which operating system do you use and why?
Today’s image is by Peter Nielsen