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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Also just in time for Christmas: Windows XP / SP3

By James Fallows

Dec 14 2007, 1:10 AM ET

As mentioned earlier, the good news for Windows Vista users is that Service Pack 1 is heaving into view. According to early word from Office Watch, it will be somewhat faster and more reliable.

The other news -- well, let's consider this good news too: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is also in its beta stage, for official release some time next year. According to this recent report on CNET news.com, via reader Chet Shannon, the long-in-the-tooth Windows XP with its new SP3 is twice as fast (on several benchmark tests involving Microsoft Office functions) as Vista, even with its new SP1:

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds. Vista's performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1--much lower than XP's SP3 improvement of 10 percent.



More details about the test at CNET's site. I'll think of this as Happy Holiday news for XP users -- putting the XP into Xmas, perhaps.

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