A few things have been getting on my nerves lately, so I thought I’d rant about them here.
First of all, when writing out times for the United States (such as you would in an email or on a website), you have several options. You should probably just use ET for “Eastern Time” (or AT, CT, MT, PT or HT, for Atlantic Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, Pacific Time or Hawaiian Time). However, if you must be fancy and use EST or EDT (for “Eastern Standard Time” or “Eastern Daylight Time”), please get a clue and use them correctly! There is no such time as “9PM EST, July 13”, because July 13 occurs in daylight time. It’s just funny how some people go to the trouble to use “EST” instead of “ET” and then use it incorrectly.
Secondly, allow me to dispel one misconception I see popping up all the time on message boards these days: you don’t need 64-bit applications on x64 versions of Windows. For the most part, 32-bit applications work just fine. I use 32-bit versions of Firefox 3.6.6 and Office 2010 all day long on my x64 computer with vary a problem. The only thing that really needs to be x64 are antivirus apps and system utilities, and that’s more about the way they interact with the operating system than any native i386 vs. x64 issue. Those apps are also the very same ones you’d expect to update when going from Windows XP to Windows 7 anyway, so that shouldn’t surprise you. Also, 64-bit applications aren’t any “faster” on x64 operating systems, so if you think that “64-bit Firefox would be so much faster on my system than the 32-bit version” you’re sadly misinformed. While it’s true that 64-bit apps offer slightly more protection in Win7 than 32-bit ones (assuming the app’s authors take advantage of it), it’s the only benefit to running an x64 web browser. The main advantage to using x64 versions of apps is that they can address far more memory than 32-bit apps. So if you need to work with gigantic Excel spreadsheets, then x64 Excel is for you. Other than that, stick with 32-bit, OK?
