Two Slashes

A day or so ago, Gizmodo ran an article explaining some of their beliefs of why Windows Vista isn’t bad.  It’s their site, and their beliefs, but I’m not crazy over the arguments they picked, and decided it was worth at least a mild post about.

1. It’s more secure than Windows XP.

Excuse me a moment while I laugh, then point out that Windows XP has more security bulletins (at least, as far as I’m aware) than any other platform, be it OS X, Linux, Solaris, or anything else.  Then let me point out that XP also has the largest market share.  Make sense yet?  Notice the correlation?  I thought so.

I’ll give Gizmodo credit for actually acknowledging that little tidbit in their article, but there’s no reasonable way to compare the security across all of these platforms.  So what if there are fewer bulletins?  For example, if I code a CMS for a site, and that site is the only one with that CMS, is it necessarily any more secure than a common platform like Drupal or Joomla?  It could have all the holes in the world, intentional holes even…but the fact that it’s one site in the shadows means that there’s probably only a handful of people in all the world who would even attempt such a pointless endeavor.  Those holes would remain, my CMS would have no security reports - so by all means, I’m coding the most secure platform, right?

There are some things that can be compared…but the “amount of security” is not one of them.

2. It’s the best-looking Windows yet.

This is a matter of opinion.  While I’m not a fan of the Fisher-Price stock blue Windows XP theme, I’m not a fan of Aero either.  The transparency is a little much for my taste, and I prefer a full Start button to something that makes me feel like I’m trying to predict the future with it.  And most of the other stuff, like the 3D task switching, is just overkill.

Instead, I prefer Windows XP (*cough*) with this theme (though I use the alternate version with the actual start button instead).  It’s a lot cleaner looking, and it looks professional and sleek enough to me to at least not look like I’m messing with some virtual preschool toy.

3. Games work just about as well as under XP.

This one’s a tough one, because it really depends on the game and the system configuration.  Some games experience drags on one or the other, others need to be hacked to work on one or the other platform; all in all, it’s a real mess.  But in my case, I’m fine with Hover! and a 486.  (Nobody ever said “gaming rig” meant top-of-the-line specs.  And if they did…well, they should be forced to play Hover! for a while.)

4. Vista Media Center is a fantastic DVR.

Not everybody’s even hopped on the DVR bandwagon yet.  First, you need to teach people how to make their clocks quit blinking 12:00am.  Then, you need to explain to these same people why using their computer over a subscription box or the cable converter gives them an advantage.  Good luck with that.

My dismay with the lack of intelligence among people today aside, there’s also the issue of lock-in here.  There are plenty of great and reliable alternatives that AREN’T Media Center, and have a lot more expandability (namely MythTV for the experienced, and MediaPortal for the faint-of-heart).  One also has the benefit of working under…Vista.

If I had to recommend a DVR, I’d actually probably end up recommending a Tivo over a PC solution for the people who can’t read manuals.  I did just suggest MediaPortal, but Tivo at least has the benefit of being dumbed down and friendly enough that anyone with a moderate English vocabulary or the ability to recognize a thumbs-up or -down could pick up the remote and start using it.  And people can understand and recognize a Tivo box much faster than they will a PC sitting in the entertainment center.

5. The sleep mode works.

Funny…I’ve only ever had one problem with a computer sleeping while using Windows XP.  And you know what the funny part is?  It’s a hardware problem, an issue on my motherboard designer’s part that causes the Ethernet jack to disable itself (and an issue easily circumvented with a separate LAN card, I just haven’t bothered to put one in).  My laptop’s actually sitting here, also in a state of slumber, awaiting me getting back to updates.

If you need further proof still, I’ve been kicking the power button to my Gateway Mini-PC for the past hour now.  And I can still see it lighting up in my management console.

6. Built-in search is better and more useful.

Perhaps if Microsoft had thought to default indexing to ‘on’ in XP, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.  Not that it matters; a properly-organized work environment means you’ll still be able to find things faster than that search box.

7. User Account Control is useful for some people.

Wait…what did they say?  Let’s look again:

7. User Account Control is useful for some people.

That’s what I thought.  And the problem is that they’ve just shoved their foot in their mouth.  Yes, UAC may be useful to some people…but most often people get too annoyed.

Microsoft tarnished their “plug-and-chug” image as far as usability was concerned when they implemented UAC.  What I mean is that rather than people have their all-authoritative power that they’re used to, with nobody and nothing asking them what to do, suddenly the computer is the boss.  “Are you sure you want to do this?”  “Are you sure you want to delete that?”  “This wallpaper looks nice, so you’ll need administrative privledges to change it to something else.”

Understandably, there’s going to be the phase where everyone hates it, then slowly warms up to it and the idea that it “helps”.  Right now, this is the hate phase, and everyone’s turning it off.  OS X does something similar, requiring the user to enter their password as additional confirmation…but the users are over it because there’s no setting to turn it off.  (If there is, please correct me.  But my voyages through the cat-flavored fruit haven’t turned up any.)  Microsoft, perhaps the checkbox should have waited?  Or been included only for enterprises?)

If you want all that in a nutshell, I’m actually commending Microsoft for this move.  But the implementation…it’s missing something.

8. Drivers support isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.

Wow.  Finally an argument I don’t have enough experience with to debate completely over.  Why couldn’t Gizmodo have brought this up sooner?

I actually think the driver support is backwards at this point.  I’ve purchased “Vista-only” devices before, and had to hack them into submission for use with XP (namely, a Pinnacle remote control).  I understand that Vista’s the newer, shinier consumer sibling in the Windows family, but too many people are complaining and stalling their move to Vista to warrant products with no compatibility on older platforms.

9. It’s not any buggier than XP.

Once again, this is a matter of opinion in relation to the level of mishap you’re willing to accept before something becomes buggy and unusable.  And it’s already known that the biggest issues come from driver bugs - the more people using those “bugs” the merrier.

10. Vista is not slow if you have enough RAM.

Alright, complaining about this one is probably a little overkill, especially given that Microsoft has finally realized that free RAM is wasted RAM, and decided to stuff it with the morsels you might need to use the most.  Some of the slowness can be alleviated by turning off things like Aero…wait, did I just suggest turning off bloat?  Alright, that’s it.  Vista needs to get on the StairMaster now and lose some weight.

I tend to agree more with the complaints they brought up, including the painfully slow file transfers from h*** and the requirement to categorize every wireless network you see as something like “Home” or “Work”, .  But those are common and heard just about everywhere anyway, so it really wouldn’t be missed if Gizmodo hadn’t bothered at all.

For a computer science major, software developer, and someone who generally is known to stick with everything needed to get stuff done…it’s nearly 1.5 years since Vista was released, and I’m still running on the previous generation.  And for once, I would rather wallow in the history than leap into the future.

I came across a video purportedly demonstrating some of the new features of Windows 7 that Microsoft’s been working on.  While this early in the development cycle, such videos should be met with questions and belief in deceptive and mockups of what people would WANT, I figured it was worth a few moments of my time to discuss it.

For your convenience, the video is embedded below:

Now that you’ve seen what we’re expected to be using in just a while, perhaps it’s time to point out that absolutely none of this is revolutionary or breathtaking, or even a big step up from what’s available now.  If anything, all they’ve done is take the hard work and brilliant ideas of others, and besmeerch them with an Arial Black Microsoft logo.

Windows Explorer
Browsing for files in a paned/tabbed system navigator is not even remotely new.  Konqueror, Dolphin, and countless other utilities have been doing this for ages.  And there are add-ins available for Windows XP.  Nothing new to see here.

FTP Locations
How many times around the track does it take for you to realize that this is a feature of Windows already?

Now, Microsoft:  Where would you like to go today?  Because I’d like to go somewhere where the featureset of your operating system isn’t yesterday’s news to everyone else.

…Wait, you seriously thought I was kidding?

Keyboard Shortcuts
This may be new to Windows users who don’t want to use remapping utilities, but other platforms have had this for a while.  The one I can think of off the top of my head is the K Desktop Environment, which is extremely lenient and flexible when it comes to setting things like this.  On the other hand, this is also one of those features that permits standardization to fly right out the window.  Just wait until Great Aunt Cecil remaps all the keys to Shutdown and wonders why the manual telling her Ctrl-P to Print instead powers off her machine.  Perhaps this should come with a safety warning.

Screen Animation & Capture
The video portion of this, if true, is at least a long time in coming.  But they’re only integrating the tools many people use and reuse daily (Camtasia, FRAPS, etc.), and I highly doubt they’re even going to consider it for use in anything more than a basic desktop capture (i.e. no games or really-hardware-accelerated functions).

Disk Usage Analyzer
Pardon me while I clear my throat here; to have the nerve of pushing this as new is pushing it.  It’s been done…a lot better and with a more helpful visualization than a pie chart.  (Anyone notice that smell?  Smells like burning pie to me…and I think it’s coming from the Redmond campus.)

Task Manager
The only thing new I see here is that someone’s finally harnessed the power of Netstat in a convenient graphical interface.  Though, they’re definitely a bit late in this respect.

Virtual Drive
Need I say more than, “Daemon Tools and Alcohol, noobified?”

Website, Blog, and Portal Designer
Excuse me, but why is there a copy of Expressions in my operating system?  Shouldn’t that be something extra?

Seriously now, I can’t wait until people actually start using that…you can tell who the inexperienced are by their use of one of a few dozen stock header images and designs that probably say “Microsoft” in more ways than there are calendar days in a year.

Coming Soon…

• Image Conversion - Image conversion.  We’re spending all our time and money on image conversion.  Because Grandma can’t use the software that came with her digital camera to do it.  Or because it’s a part of several other operating systems and work environments.  Take your pick, because either way it’s still lame to me.
• Document Conversion - I love how ‘document’ can be so vague as to encompass anything and everything all at once.  Does this mean Windows might actually be able to open OpenOffice files?  Doubt it, unless you want to install the third-party filter.
• PDF Conversion - Wait, doesn’t this one smell like a royalty fee?  Has Adobe approved this?
• Password Manager - This one I can understand, but it’s also nothing new.  KDE has Wallet (which IE had something similar to), OS X and GNOME have keychains, and other password managers have their “acceptable alternative metaphor” to a Post-it note in a wallet.

I know I should be taking everything in that video with a grain of salt, but I can’t stand unoriginality in something like this.  Vista was just catchup for OS X (and a failed attempt at that, too…heh)…now it looks like Windows 7 is slated just to move Microsoft’s operating systems division into something resembling the early 2000s…most likely after 2011.  Oh well, at least it’ll give me more time to enjoy my eXPerience.

It’s always been said that there was a purpose involved with studying history.  Movies constantly preach about how you must study the past to move forward, and there are millions of people who dwell on historic fact in hopes that we can learn more about where we came from, and perhaps piece together shards of the map to our destination…whatever that destination is.  And one piece of history nobody can neglect is their own childhood - the only history not taught in schools.

Unfortunately, the majority of people are becoming more and more disconnected from their past, the times before that molded their lives into what they are, and there’s seemingly nothing we can do to stop it.  It’s not helping that evolution seems to be playing its part, as people seem to be jumping right from childhood to adulthood, skipping the memories that could help shape their lives and interests.

Digg was nice enough to remind me of a small part of my past in a roundabout way with the link to this article about the decline and possible extinction of pinball.  It’s saddening enough to realize that people don’t want the real thing anymore; they’re too busy firing up the cheap Microsoft imitation included on their PC, or playing something more recent like Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4.  What’s amusing to me is that these people play their games without a single thought as to what came before, or how they’ve developed into what they’ve become.  Hardly anyone younger than 20 even knows what an NES or Atari is, and you can completely forget about trying to convince them that anything older existed.  Some people might occasionally experience this phenomenon even with people of the proper age, just as I did earlier today what with re-introducing several classmates to the wonderful world of Hover!.  (No, that’s not bad punctuation…the legitimate name is “Hover!”.)

The pinball decline is understandable; the people who used to feed the machines with quarters they earned selling bottles and cans are now the people earning tens of thousands of dollars answering phones and making business deals with each other, and their priorities have changed from high score tables to high-return stocks.  What these people forget, however, is how easily the tables turn at the execution of a simple movement (a la bumping the table or using a flipper, though I could be making a metaphor )…and it might do them well to recall it.  And the machines that were once shrines to hours of fun are now the relics and antiques of yesteryear.  (Side note:  My hand is in those pictures on the first page as I help out repairing an older table…)

The lesson isn’t just relevant to pinball or old games, though.  As I said before, everyone’s always on the fast track, only worrying about where they’re going with no concerns about where they’ve been.  Perhaps it would be worth it to stop, take a second’s pause, and note what you have/see/do.  Then compare it with notes you’ve made, and the notes you will make.  Everyone claims they can improve…but without the records of what you’ve done in the past, how can you improve without a benchmark?  An even better solution would be to “Stay Young“, but without the experiences of their past, how could anyone possibly expect to

This is one of those times where suggestions on how to help yourself might be appropriate, so I might as well fill the gap while I have the chance.  If you really want to review the past (and especially yours in particular), it needs to be documented.  Memories fade, and opinions change as the result of new experiences, therefore a record is the only feasible way of maintaining a non-tainted record of the past as it was.  What I mean by record is completely flexible here.  For the more adventurous, there are plenty of blogging areas, but even keeping a simple word-processing document with some thoughts once in a while would be enough.  If you’re a photographer, take pictures.  If your nickname is Steven Spielberg, go make yourself a short video once in a while.  Even if you keep them to yourself, you’ll notice that the self-reflection (and even just the enabled ability to) is really what people mean when they tell you to “look at where you’ve come from.”

I think I’m getting too intellectual for the late-night hours…that’s enough insomniac-posting for one night for me.

Since it’s a required part of my curriculum here at school, I’ve been taking a rhetoric class. Recently in this class, we were assigned a research paper on a category of problems in academia, something that we can observe and then propose solutions about. Considering the post topic and me in general, you can probably guess (at least partially) what problems I’m focusing on in my research. This assignment couldn’t come at a better time, as I’ve heard plenty of complaints in particular about password-related issues as of late. You see, the school I attend mandates yearly password cycling, and considering the timeframe at which they hand incoming freshmen their account information, it’s becoming the one-year mark for a lot of people. Mostly, every gripe I’ve heard centers around one of a few major issues:

• The passwords my university requires are much more complex compared to the passwords most people use in their daily lives.
• Most services don’t require password cycles every year, or…ever.
• Since most people keep the same password (or set of passwords) for everything, constantly forcing password changes forces people to forget their password more often since it’s not the same password as other things they use on a daily basis.

While these arguments are perfectly legitimate, the people attempting to use them as rationale against needing to change their passwords also are the same people you find in a typical setting, not groomed in any form of security beyond that of the idea that any password is a surefire protection. (Cue Morpheus’ voice…”Welcome…to the real world.”) Anyway, as part of my research paper, I decided to compare the three pages’ worth of requirements about our university passwords with the requirements used by what I thought to be popular web services. And, after a few hours’ worth of investigative work, I can sympathize with the people who think changing their password is a lot of work. In short, these services, which I thought probably had at least a slight pulse on the idea of security, are grooming their users to be lazy and very unprotective of their data and service access. I’ve put together a table that should at least give an overview of the services I selected (if you have suggestions for more, I can’t promise anything but would welcome the heads-up) and the security procedures they enforce:

The numbers in brackets above correspond to these quick side notes:

1. MySpace’s requirement is an in-between: at least one numeric and one alphabetic character must be included in the password; no requirement is made as to the case of this character, however.
2. Windows Live has two sets of requirements that depend on the services the user accesses. Typically, users only have a six-character requirement, but if necessary due to the requirements of an application they use, Windows Live will force all of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and a unique symbol, and mandatory password changes every 72 days. These 72-day password changes are provided as an option to non-qualified users.
3. eBay refused to accept the password ‘aaaaaa’ because it is very poor in security. However, ‘ababab’ works, which means that eBay offers at least a slight security check at registration.

Frankly, I’m very concerned with all of that red, and especially concerned with sites like Amazon, which allow you to store important credit card information in your account for easy checkout, and then allow me to log in with a capital ‘A’. Microsoft even surprises me (though in a good way), if you consider their forced-security dependency to be a good idea. (For once, Microsoft, I like.) Not that these sites and services even compare to the requirements for our university credentials, but it gives you an idea of just how absurd it is. Especially when I throw in the fact that a lot of these places have posted “suggestions” for creating a good and secure password, and then brush them all away in favor of some six-character string. So I apologize if I’m re-iterating what you already know or have seen, but after all of that, I think it’s important that people actually understand what good security is.

• The best passwords are not found in any published or publicly available work, be it a dictionary, your favorite action novel, or some random screenshot you found on Flickr. Don’t use anything important either, like a social security number. And anything personally identifiable or that has a direct reference to your life is out too; that means quit using your aunt’s birthday as a PIN.As one demonstration of coming up with unique but memorable passphrases, try to think of memorable snippets from your favorite written work (you’re probably double-taking right now, but continue reading). Now, develop your own personal algorithm for going through the phrase to select characters (hey, don’t be afraid of punctuation or numbers, because they help too and add uniqueness). For example, try taking the Fibonacci sequence’s digits and pulling those letters out. It sounds tedious now, but if you use the password regularly, your muscle memory will take over and you won’t even realize you’re entering the password anymore. At least, if you use it that regularly.
• NEVER use the same password in more than one place. There IS a reason for this, aside from “the man” trying to confuse you and prevent you from checking your mail; it’s compartmentalized security. If an attacker can compromise one account, and holds a password you use everywhere, you haven’t just handed him one site or a credit card, you’ve handed him your entire life. If that password doesn’t work somewhere else, the attacker’s got to go back to work and start all over again on the new site (if they’re indeed targeting you). If you can’t keep all of your passwords straight, get a trusted and notable password manager, and store your passwords with it. Some suites also provide you the added benefit of randomly-generated passwords like ‘Bs4&nd*D’ - but at the expense that you probably won’t remember them unless you use the application.

Considering these password recommendations are nearly timeless, it only makes me wonder when people are actually going to pay more attention BEFORE something bad happens to them. So quit complaining that you’ve got to change your password. Make it memorable, make it unique, and consider it worthy of a national secret. And for christ sake, ignore the fact that Google isn’t going to check for varied-case characters; force yourself to check for them. And a note to the few, the proud, the WordPress users: WP2.5 RC1 is nice, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. It’s got a few bugs, and I miss my old blue administration panel. I actually think it made more sense doing “Blogroll > Add Link” than “Write > Link” to add things to my blogroll.

Before I begin, I just wanted to thank everyone involved in my sudden spike in traffic over the past few days as the result of that “pci32b.exe” article; it’s still up for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s responsible for tripling my 24-hour unique visit numbers.  Go figure.

Thanks to (as usual) my habitual Digg surfing, I came across a rant describing why Asus, the PC manufacturer (also known as ASUSTEK) is the most hated company in all of the PC industry.

Before I even get started with what I really want to say, I just want to play devil’s advocate for a second and point out that the EEE PC did probably just make an impact in the way future devices are going to be developed?  And hey, I’m game for a laptop with no moving parts.

Anyway, I find it interesting that someone could call such an out-of-the-way company the “most hated” corporation in the entire computing industry.  For sure, there are plenty of more worthy candidates (did I hear “Microsoft”?), and at the least more popular and well-known ones.  How can you claim the public hates a company that has very little brand recognition; if I walk up to any typical consumer and ask them to name me all the brands of PC they can think of, I guarantee that among them small brands like Asus and Falcon Northwest are not going to be on that list.  The list they give me might list Apple, HP/Compaq, Dell, and perhaps Gateway or Alienware (you’d be surprised how many know about Alienware but not FN or other “gaming-specialty” companies, but I digress).  In short, you can’t claim a company is hated simply because it changes the way things are developed.

Okay, so Asus got to market with something before several other manufacturers did.  But let’s time travel back to when the iPod was introduced.  The audio player was a new market back then too, no?  And Apple came out, showed off a device with a scroll wheel and the “Apple-intuitive” interface (*cough*Creative*cough*) , and after that every media player to follow had to be based on a menu system.  It’s just another drop in the bucket, and there’s plenty of time to change things.

Sure, iPod may still be around and going strong, but it also has the name recognition behind it to carry it in the first place; Asus, on the other hand, has a strong but belittled following of people, and without the proper advertisement and word-of-mouth, they’re going to stay that way - paving the road for bigger behemoths like Dell and Apple to do as they want with the market.  I’d like to slightly sidestep here for a moment to point out that when the EEE first started shipping from sites like Newegg, it wasn’t CNN broadcasting news about the people who got too many in their shipment; it was aggregated along the usual “geek” channels like Digg and Slashdot from originators like Engadget and Gizmodo - never once did I see a mention of it on “mainstream” news.

In truth, Apple isn’t all that concerned because they’ll do what they do, and the masses will respond. But poor Dell. That company’s flash-based mini-laptop will probably cost five times as much as the ASUS. It will be 10% better and 500% more expensive than the ASUS Eee PC. Good luck with that, Dell!

This excerpt in particular irks me, because it’s inaccurate.  As of late, I’ve thought Dell to be a very affordable solution, at least for the lower-to-mid-range systems.  As long as they can continue in this path, the Dell offering would be very affordable indeed, not to mention the support offerings would far outstrip those of the foreign “invader”(’invader’ is too strong a word here, but it’s close to what I mean).  Sure, you can go to Walmart and pick up one of those extremely cheap offbrand PCs they have, but they’re from a brand that (again) has no consumer recognition and that is going to be picked up by someone with a bit of know-how that realizes parts are parts are parts.

Not to mention, there’s the reverse side of the coin here too:  Yes, Asus was first-to-market.  Yes, Asus is also currently the only person offering such a slim laptop on the market.  Yes, they have a device that has geeks who know about it twitching and itching to get their hands on one.  No, the average consumer doesn’t know about it.  And that’s good, in a way.  Not only can Apple, or Dell, or any of those other companies put something out, but they can spin their advertisements to point out some random flaw in the Asus design…it wouldn’t matter what it was; it could be something as trivial as the location of a USB port.  But by pointing out the mistake, they make themselves look like the better machine…and what do people do in that scenario?  Look at the two, and pick the one that works better, not only in this case because the (potentially) “invisible” problem is missing in the name-brand version, but because it’s name-brand.

So all I’ve done to this point is rebuke the “most hated” part of the article in question.  Asus is indeed not the most hated in the industry.  Some clarification would qualify the headline (i.e. “Most Hated by Computer Industry Corporations”), but it doesn’t work as it’s written.

And this is going to sound like a flipover from everything else I just said, but I do believe that Asus is underestimated.  Their machines (at least, what experience I’ve had with them) are functional, and by slipping into a new market niche ahead of everyone else, they’ve lined themselves up to be the brainchild behind the R&D in this new category of devices.  It doesn’t take a million PCs sold to make a statement about what features people want; in a way, Asus is better-suited to handle this because of their smaller size - they make the development jump adding new features, and the bigger corporations tack it into their later models in a monkey-see, monkey-do approach.  It’s win-win, and it’s competitive marketing.

And by the way, I’ll just admit it…I was rather waiting to get my hands on a Foleo.

You know, there’s something to be said about the feeling when you know you’re going to be handed a pretty big job.  Sure, there’s a lot of work involved, but you also have that big payout at the end to expect too.

Such is the case with an organization that had an idea of where they were going and what they wanted when they contacted me to do some work for them.  After a face-to-face with one of the higher-ups who would be making decisions, I agreed and took on the job.  I put in the work, and even took time out of my day to go to their meetings to present what I had done as progress.  I got feedback and regular communication, and overall things went along more smoothly than I could ever have hoped for; I still don’t think I’ve taken on a job that went together as easily as this one since. (continue reading…)

So it’s been a while since I last posted.  Things happen.  People have other things to do.  And I’m in the middle of my finals right now, so I’m in even more of a time crunch than usual.

A friend in my dorm had a problem had a problem playing his copy of Command & Conquer 3 earlier, and asked me to help.

The system he was attempting to run it on was a Compaq laptop, preloaded with Microsoft Windows Vista, and overall it was a decent machine, with specs that should have been more than enough to play the game, albeit with a trip to the settings to turn down the graphics settings (as the machine had Intel graphics).  Indeed, this was something that he had already realized, and had proceeded to turn them down when he first installed the game.

He claimed to have tried numerous solutions, including trying several versions of his graphics drivers and game patches and setting all his graphics options to “Low”, to fix the problem, which was (in summary) that every time he tried to build one of a few particular types of building, the building would be animated as it was spawned…but the moment it finished, the game would be closed by Vista, which would proudly proclaim that the game had had a problem and needed to be closed.  However, the game would play fine and run great until those buildings were created, which made for some rather challenging gameplay when you realize that they were somewhat necessary for gameplay.

My first instinct (which still seems plausible) was that one or more files (and probably those responsible for containing the afflicted building animations) had been copied incorrectly or corrupted during installation, so my initial suggestions were to try to reinstall the game (again), and see if anything changed between installations.

Naturally, this did absolutely nothing but waste time.  At a loss, I decided to run a few searches on Google to look for anything that might be an indication of the problem.  Of course, I had plenty of posts of people with various problems between the game and Vista, even with the same error message, but nothing that quite seemed to match the problems I had been observing with the laptop in terms of recreating them.

After a bit of query manipulation, I came across a post on some far-off forums (I wish I could give credit and a link, but alas my history trail is so long that it would probably take me a month to find it.) that mentioned something somewhat similar, in that the same message occured when they tried to play the game (i.e. it would load, but immediately issue the message when it was ready for the user to play).  Curious, I read on, and found that his solution was to (and this is the awkward part) change the shader settings from their lowest settings up to Medium.

Curious, but doubting that this could be a possible answer, I had him try it, and it worked.  Now, I’m posting this not only to provide another source for people to find answers to the issue, but because I’m curious as to what would make someone think that this is the solution, and why it would work.  The only solution I can come up with after a few hours is that there’s an as-of-yet-unfixed bug in the shader code that causes it to have issues (at least with Vista), but only in the “low” quality settings.  Considering the numerous versions of patches released (and the fact that there were at least four in the first week of the game’s release), it leads me to believe that either EA doesn’t particularly care about their Vista userbase, or that they have yet to realize there’s a problem, even though I found several mentions of the same problem in different areas of the game.

Nevertheless, it still seems like a bit of a hacked solution.  It doesn’t really matter which of either C&C3 or Vista is to blame; for the most part, something like that probably would have been picked up if someone had done a little Q&A on a similar hardware setup.  (After all, the world doesn’t revolve around JUST ATi and nVidia cards.)

It’s a shame people just don’t make things like they used to.

Just be glad this isn’t my pre-planned iPhone rant…that’s for another day.

As a geek of many interests, I find it useful to keep track of all matter of electronic devices, at least to some extent. Being a student, especially one inclined to seeing things for more than what they are, I take quite a bit of interest in TI’s graphing calculators. I’ve developed a little for them, and I’ve been using them for several years now.

For the most part, I’ve been happy, or at least satisfied with what TI’s put out. They get the job done, they’re expandable, I can develop for them (quickly, I might add), and they aren’t really much of a nuisance.

However, when I heard about TI’s new Nspire series of calculators recently, I had to question some of TI’s decisions about what went into the calculator.  I know the device isn’t new…but it’s new enough to me that it still warranted further investigation.  So here goes:

• First and foremost, why start with two models of the unit? I understand that you want to be accepted as a calculator of choice for tests like the ACT (actually, it’s not so much of a want as a requirement, because who’s going to purchase a banned calculator), but there’s nowhere near the need to confuse consumers…it’s like Microsoft and their fun with seven versions of Vista.  What’s next?  Nspire More?  Nspire Much More?
• Why would you allow one version the privilege of having a “replaceable” keypad (shown below), but not the other? If the one non-CAS model can instantly go into “84 mode”, I think it would be trivial to support this keypad on the CAS version…just disable the advanced features the CAS provides because they wouldn’t be accessible on the 84. With plenty of storage for an operating system, it seems obnoxious to me that this wouldn’t even be a consideration.
• While we’re on the subject of keypads, what idiot decided that rather than use TI’s norm of the Alpha-button, they should steer away from it and instead make minuscule keys for the alphabet, some logic operators, and some of the more important buttons…and make a weird almost-diamond-shaped key for all the other functions (again, shown here). Not only does that not make any usability sense, but it’s laid out in a really awkward configuration. I have small fingers, so I wouldn’t have much of a problem typing on that personally, if it made any form of sense. I can get a pretty decent WPM on an 83+…and that’s WITH having to press Alpha for every keypress (no Alpha-lock). And to put the icing on top, it looks like the whole thing was designed for Fisher-Price. Let’s not even get started about what’s supposedly the “84 Keypad”.
• The non-CAS version of the calculator also includes a “testing” light. What is a “testing” light, you ask? Simple…when certain parts of the calculator are disabled by an instructor for use during a test, there’s a little light that blinks to let the teacher know the functions still ARE disabled. Now, I get distracted easily, as do thousands of other students, so a little blinking light is the last thing I need drawing my focus away from my test and back onto my calculator. (Now, admittedly, I haven’t actually played with one of these things, and I can’t say for certain that it’s even that much of a bother…but just because the calculator you’re using isn’t blinking where you can see it doesn’t mean another student’s isn’t going to bother you.) And there’s another problem: who’s to say some knowledgeable student doesn’t just wire up a timer and switch to pulse an LED? After all, I’ve seen people add in backlights, 3.5mm headphone jacks (for game audio), fans, and all sorts of miscellany to a TI-83. If people are that willing to carve up a lesser calculator to “improve it”, imagine the possibilities for this thing.  Can I just ask whether teachers actually requested there be a blinking nuisance for tests?
• There’s no real application support. Wait a second, let me repeat that. THERE’S NO REAL APPLICATION SUPPORT. Now, I’m getting a little ahead of myself…but the only way either model supports applications or programs is through its emulated TI-84 mode, with the 84 keypad installed. Now, explain to me why TI would be so kind as to NOT include this? When I was in high school, my teachers didn’t really frown on the program support the 83’s and 84’s have. Some of them wouldn’t be too happy if you took advantage of them and typed up notes into the calculator, but others would actually embrace the idea to the point of ensuring the students had their (*poorly-written*) programs. In chemistry for example, one teacher was well-known for writing programs for the students to use in class, on homework, and on tests. Now tell me, if a forsaken teacher is embracing the functionality you add to a product, doesn’t it mean that means more than just games or cheating on a test?
• What’s with the design? I swear, one of the designers must have either come from GM, or been working on his car a lot in the time leading up to the implementation of this design, because the thing looks like a kiddie-ized version of the Tech 2.  Where do I connect to the OBD port in my car?
• Let alone design…let’s talk about specs. Talk about waste when you realize that there’s 32 MB of Flash ROM and 32 MB of RAM…explain to me what part of that is necessary when you can’t even develop apps to put on it? Oh…hold on just a second, I think I’m getting an idea…it’s called it’s necessary because the dingbats did away with the backup battery, instead prompting the device to reload its own OS every time you wear the suckers down.  And by the way…why are they wasting 16-shade grayscale LCDs on this?  Why not swap them into another offspring of the 83 that can actually make use of them?
• Finally, what’s with the name?  People know you as the company that labels their calculators with numbers in such a way that you can tell which ones are better just by if x is greater than y.  So why dump that in favor of something that attempts to sound cool and lame and makes me want to gouge my ears out every time I hear it?  Frankly, I’m surprised that for all TI’s attempts at not sounding clichéd, they didn’t just keep the ‘I’ and call it the ‘iNspired’.  At least then we’d have the confidence that the jolly folks developing calculators took English alongside math.

Alright, maybe I’m just nitpicking because I have nothing better to do.  But despite TI’s pushing this as the “revolutionary way for educators to teach their students”, perhaps the only thing it’s revolutionizing is how disappointed I am.

For every useful piece of technology, we’re left with some crock of crap that somehow manages to become a reigning champion and hang around for a while with no improvement. No, as much as I’d love to, I’m not actually talking about Microsoft Office today. This little blurb is about something much more common than that.

It’s on the very hard drive you’re probably using now, and chances are it’s probably alerted you to some problem at one point or another. Now, if that problem ever really existed, nobody knows, but you probably took the warning’s advice and replaced the drive pretty quick. Still not catching on? I’m talking about S.M.A.R.T. - the “drive health monitoring system” that’s been standard in every drive manufactured in the past several years.

Standardization is good. It’s why we can swap things around and still expect them to work without a lot of jerry-rigging or modification. It’s also the cause of plenty of things ranging from why Windows is the dominant operating system of this point in time to why the power connector on most internal devices is interchangable.

Still - why S.M.A.R.T.? Well, that’s a simple answer. The very “technology” designed to monitor the health of your hard drive and alert you when it might be dying has a very poor track record with me, and it’s about to get worse. Every S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drive I’ve used that has died has done so without so much as a single S.M.A.R.T. alert. That’s right, nothing but the dreaded “click of death” to tell you your data’s on its way to the curb with your useless hunk of metal. And in my case, that’s not exactly something to be celebrating or claiming that the drives in question failed suddenly or were abused - not at numbers like mine. These are drives that have essentially been babied from the get-go. And interestingly enough…the ones I get warnings on? False alarms. Yup, they keep churning away, while the drives that don’t give so much as a warning die off every once in a while.

Now, it’s been a while since I’ve had a drive fail…maybe a few months. (Though the fact that I’m now away from 90% of my equipment and unable to mess with it helps that longetivity score just a bit.) But I brought a desktop and my laptop with me to school.

My usage habits might raise some doubt in why I’m posting this, but it’s interesting all the same. My laptop, for instance, usually rides around with me in an unprotected backpack alongside my schoolbooks, sometimes being squeezed, pressed, crushed, dropped, smacked, banged, hit…in short, it takes quite a beating just being carried with me. I know I could protect it more, but it’s a cheap machine, it’s long outlived the lifespan I had expected for it, and in general it just goes to show that treatment isn’t always the primary reason for failure. Not to mention that I’ve pulled the thing apart several times, flung it around onto beds, tables, desks, chairs, and any other matter of instant-computing surface…and it works. For three years now it’s gone through treatment like that, and here it is, still churning away and letting me write up my post. In fact, the only new hardware the thing has seen is a stick of RAM. That’s it.

My “school” desktop, on the other hand, is a different story. For the most part, the machine’s been coddled like one would coddle a newborn. At least, since I got some of the parts. (I got them from a friend; long story, but they still work and they saved me a bit of cash.) The hard drive in there’s been mine since day one though. And even after suffering a nasty PSU incident about a year into its life (it’s now about 4-5 years old), it’s served me well. After that aforementioned incident, the drive developed a small clicking problem. And despite the clicking, I continued to use it. I mean, what’s the point of status monitoring if it tells you the drive is in better condition post-trauma than it is beforehand? Anyway, it managed to make it into my school machine (at which point the clicking had subsided). It’s been between a month and a month and a half since that…and the clicking’s back, but it’s no *click* this time. It’s almost more of a screech. In the signs of hard drive health, it’s not a good sign when the thing is screeching.

Anyway, even I can tell by now that the thing is about to kick the bucket…yet where’s the “monitoring” that was supposed to have alerted me to the problem even before it occured? I wouldn’t expect it to warn me about my PSU blowing up, but it certainly should be able to predict the drive’s death based on the fact that it spends more time attempting to perform disk activity than actually doing it.

Now, the concept of drives monitoring their health is novel, and bloody useful, especially in a corporate world, and if it weren’t for the problem of flash-based internal media coming to the consumer world in the next few years, I’d be wondering more why there haven’t been any recent announcements concerning a technology that may very well be on its way to redundancy. But based upon its standardization and wide acceptance, and (lack of) monitoring prowess, I’m left to wonder why nobody ever bothered to try and improve it considering it fails in every way, shape, and form imaginable.

So, this brings me back to my original point. Why include something that doesn’t work, and charge the consumer to implement it? Certainly there can be a middleground where the technology either is not implemented or actually functions well enough that the data on the drive can be backed up well before any audible clicking can be heard? It’s not smart, and it’s not fair to extort consumers for random “features” on that bulleted list that don’t work remotely near as advertised.  I realize that drive death prediction is really hard to do…but seriously…can it actually predict something?

It’s not uncommon for thieves to eye up anything they can swap around for a quick buck on eBay. Sunglasses, electronics…anything they can get a decent price for to make it worth their deal. And the worst part is that for the most part, these transactions are untraceable - unless the victim notes the serial number, and sees that serial number in a picture on eBay, chances are it’ll be across the country in a week.

One of the biggest “cash cows” for thieves is an iPod. In short, that Apple “luxury” you get when you overpay for the damn thing is only lining the thief’s pocket with even more green when they steal it and try to turn it around for cash. Exhibit A: 8072 listings (at time of posting) in the Apple iPod category on eBay. Now, I’m no expert, but usually when so many people are getting rid of something, most of them are either illegitimate or the product sucks and people can’t get a refund. (I wouldn’t be suprised if it was that second option, even though I know for a fact it isn’t; they’re decent devices, but there are better products for cheaper that can do so much more, and with a lot more expandability. However, now’s not the time for me to tangent into this. Maybe next post…)

That’s why when Apple proposed a way to disable the iPods from charging when they’re used on a computer they’re not supposed to be, I came to wonder what the f*** the Cupertino crew’s thinking. Sure, iPods are great targets for thieves, but implementing something like that is just asking for problems. I’ve got plenty of real-life scenarios, too.

1. At my (old) high school, most computer classes (and some others) allowed the use of MP3 players when the students were to be working on projects (which, in reality, was at least 75% of the time).

   Now, seeing as these are teenagers who don’t charge anything up unless it doesn’t even turn on, these people needed a way to power their players when they ran dry. And with a computer sitting right in front of you (99% of them being a Mac, no less), what better way than by plugging the thing in?I’m not questioning this practice; I actually see it as a sign that the students are “exploiting” their surroundings (in a good way), so to speak. But if the next generation iPods are going to check that the computer is theirs before even bothering to charge, you’re going to find that the students start to get mightily ticked off when that so-called “guardian circuit” is set off and their iPod becomes a very expensive “luxury” paperweight.
   

2. What happens when you buy a new computer, or have to do some serious renovation to your current one as the result of some damaged or failing hardware? Windows makes you reinstall, some of your applications might need another license purchased; in short, it’s a lot to deal with just getting the computer up and running. But now let’s add a new iPod into that, after the thing follows Windows in saying “This isn’t the same computer - buy a new license.”
3. Some people sync players between multiple computers; some they own, some they merely play the songs off the iPod while they work there (which is something the kids at school also did). While I assume that computers sharing the authorization on an account would share a code, what would become of the iPod when the fun-loving, music-seeking soul brings their player to the library?
4. I’d love to see a “security code” that matches the user’s computer manufactured into a wall charger a third-party accessory like a boombox. Those things aren’t ever going to be receiving authorization codes for iTunes, so plugging an iPod into one of those would be like forcing your player to commit suicide.

The worst part? If this actually gets implemented into anything, chances are other companies will follow with similar (though obviously not violating the patent) solutions. The same “monkey see, monkey do” approach Microsoft and Apple share when it comes to new OS features. Pretty soon it won’t be an MP3 market anymore so much as a “music brick”. And the fact that this is a hardware approach, buried so deep into the player as it is, certifies that while people won’t be circumventing this with any ease, any user with the know-how to repair it, well…can’t. It’s like putting Lo-Jack on a car and finding that the police arrest you for being in possession of the Lo-Jack-enabled car, “hot” or not.

Remember the famous saying? “Locks only keep honest people honest.” That wasn’t referring to any digital lock…that was referring to physical security locks like on a door. Digital locks like this novel theft deterrent, and even plainer and more simply, DRM, aren’t the ideal solution in this day and age.

A better idea, or one that would at least require far more know-how to deal with, would be to build the protection into the firmware in such a way that the user needs to enter a PIN (from the box, maybe, or displayed when they first authorize the iPod for the first time, or maybe user-set at initial setup) and needs to be used to charge and/or sync the device. This code would be embedded permanently into non-rewritable memory (preferrably encrypted, checksummed, and all that jazz to prevent tampering), would resist resetting with one of the Apple factory resets. Not only would that require an extreme amount of skill to remove by anyone other than an Apple techie, but it’d ensure the device could only be used by anyone who had the code.

Oh, and did I mention that it should be optional to set up, to avoid any outcry of people inconvenienced by their ATM code from avoiding the product. In this way, users can pick either the antitheft system, and a slight inconvenience, or ignore the security to avoid the hassle. Let the paranoid have their security, and let the lazy have their hurdle-less sync.

Enough rambling. Apple, if by some extremely odd chance you’re reading, I could use a bit of cash.