Two Slashes

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.

Once upon a time, I wrote a short blog post about the way to get the best computer for you. I wrote that piece as the result of a few people asking me for my opinion on what would make a decent machine for what they do; I figured that the more people I could help, the better.

Now, I don’t get a lot of traffic. But sites like FastWeb do. I have an account primarily to help me look for scholarships, but it’s turned out to be a veritable goldmine of humor and other things one generally wouldn’t associate with a college site, at least in my experience. But when I found that FastWeb decided to post a computer recommendations article of their own, I just had to review what it recommended.

FastWeb primarily posts articles for members only, so I’ve gone ahead and made a PDF of the article for your quick reference (nothing fancy) so that you can read it in its entirety if you want, but I’ve got plenty of choice excerpts that might help you get the bigger picture.

Memory: Random Access Memory (RAM) is a temporary storage area for data currently in use. It allows multiple programs to run simultaneously without slowing down your system. The more RAM you have, the faster your computer will run. The amount of RAM is measured in gigabytes (GB) or megabytes (MB). It is a good idea to get a computer with at least 512 MB of RAM. Consider getting more RAM if you will be using your computer for multimedia purposes, like watching movies and downloading music. If you plan on having your computer for a long time, look for a computer with easy-to-access memory slots that will allow you to upgrade your memory.

Kudos for recognizing that more RAM is better, fail-points for saying that it makes the computer faster in such a way that it sounds like it’s the only thing that improves performance. Now, I’m sort-of happy with the recommendation made, but the point of the matter is that it all depends on what operating system, software, and activities you run and do with the PC. My Toshiba laptop came with 256 MB standard; it ran just fine under Linux. I added another 512 MB and saw a bit of an improvement with Windows, but I haven’t noticed any change with Linux because it worked well already.

And did anyone catch the subtle “piracy ‘hint’” buried in there? Look again. Since when is downloading music solely a “multimedia” activity?

Hard Drive: The hard drive provides permanent storage for your computer. Look for computers with at least 20 GB of hard drive space.

Alright, you just got through explaining that more RAM made multimedia work better, and you just suggested everyone go download their music. Now…if I’m going to do that, I’m going to need a lot more storage than that. My music library alone (let’s not even get into my video collection) already fills at least 105% of that drive. Hell, Vista would barely install on that, let alone with enough room for you to save any of your work or install anything else (in fact, would it, once you subtract the space for the FAT and partition table?). Try adding another 0 to the size, or multiplying that by at least 4, and we’ll see then.

Software: The software you need will vary by school and program. Whether you get a PC or Mac, expect to have Microsoft Office XP, which includes Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Many schools prefer students to have the Professional edition of Microsoft Office instead of the Home edition that is usually included with new computers. Make sure you make this distinction when purchasing your computer.

Oh, there’s plenty more than that. I need to question when this article was written though. Office XP? How quaint. I’m confused on the “Home” version of Office, though – since when has Office been offered as a “home” package? And what school requires more than the basic Word/Excel/PowerPoint trio? Surely Outlook Express or *cough cough* Thunderbird is sufficient to check e-mail, and one could get away with OpenOffice? The truth is, you’ll figure out once you get to the school what you can get away with, what you need, and what’s merely for entertainment…like Unreal.

Like I keep saying…figure out what you do with a PC, figure out what works for your situation and budget, and get only what you need. And if you can, get it cheaply/free (while remaining legal, of course).
Even as this is a poor excuse for an educated recommendation, thanks to the author, Ms. Kulla, for an amusing read.

Note: I realize this is somewhat qualified to file under “Geeky”, but I think it can safely stay out due to the fact that I’m not going to get overly technical with anything the average (l)user wouldn’t pick up.

Web browsing, e-mail, chatting…they’re all things we do on a daily basis (and in my case, so does checking my site hit statistics, among other things). And for as long as anybody’s known them, they’ve been strictly two-dimensional. You point, click, and read in an interface designed for you to get the most out of what you want to look at, rather than staring blindly at a 1000-pixel-tall toolbar or a progress bar bigger than the grin on your face when you order your favorite meal.

The point I’m trying to make is that the delivery systems are two-dimensional because the content they deliver is two-dimensional as well. The text on a web page, for instance, doesn’t all consist of WordArt and Flash, especially if the people involved in designing the site had any shred of common sense. In short, there’s absolutely no need to add in a z-coordinate when the information displays just fine using x and y. It’s overkill, and it overcomplicates things.

Not to nitpick anything in particular (especially on an app that’s still in development), but I’ve come armed with examples. Take a look at 3D-Mailbox, for instance. This e-mail client promises to revolutionize the way you look at your e-mail by (what else) giving you a 3D interface with which you can act upon your communications. The e-mails file in one-by-one looking like various beachgoers, and where they go in this “oasis” designates how important they are. The fat people wading too far out into the shark-infested waters are spam, while the scantily-clad women tanning nearby are the trusted e-mails.

Now, here’s my first gripe: Why should my e-mails get so separated that there are only a handful at any one location? I prefer being able to stare at the big picture, but if I have to navigate around so much to do make a mental picture for myself, you’ve ruined everything. Why do unread e-mails go here, read e-mails go here, things the program can’t tell are spam here, and this here and that there? (Yes, I realize the bottom half of the application is a standard e-mail list…but if you’re going to the trouble of making a 3D app to do away with a standard “old-fashioned” list, why should that even be necessary? Eh? Eh? I’m waiting.)

Not to barrage the developer even more, but remember what I said about site traffic statistics? Yup…the same people that brought you 3D Mailbox have also developed a way to see who’s on your site…in 3D. Explain to me why I need to see a Greyhound drop off a few people when someone finds Two Slashes via Google. How about I just open up my copy of FireStats and read about the person who just showed up.

It gets worse beyond these too. If it weren’t for the fact that Second Life has a game(-ish) concept behind it, I’d almost call it a chat client.

Does anyone remember the old Microsoft-developed IRC (Internet Relay Chat for you newbs), aptly called Microsoft Chat (not to be confused with the Microsoft Network or any other Microsoft (blank) application)? That crazy application that turned your “bland” IRC-based communications into a fun, yet colorless, comic strip. Yes, the very same one that bungled up IRC standards so badly, the people who actually know how to use a proper client (who are still horrified when they find MSChat users spamming configuration settings to control their character’s emotional state) shudder and go into fits of rage. (Though on the other hand, I have to commend MS for providing users with a very serviceable free IRC client for their operating system…provided it was used in a standard “line” mode rather than with the comic garbage.)

There are times and places to go right ahead and use the third dimension.  But when it overcomplicates even the simplest of day-to-day tasks, there’s obviously been a step way too far over the line.  People refurbish old computers and sell them (or give them away to relatives) for use as basic web browsing and e-mail rigs.  I don’t get why these should be just as powerful and expensive as the usual gaming rig to look at what would be represented by any other application as meaningful text.

The day I need a three-dimensional client for anything is the day my communications can no longer be expressed in text.  I mean, I thought concepts like the bubbly IncrediMail were horrible (and why the f**k is it still around!?)…but then again I should have realized that if there’s a market for emoticon-splashed messaging, it was only a matter of time.  What’s next – an e-mail client that projects a hologram of some long-since U.S. president to announce new messages in “Ye Olde Englisch”?