Windows 8 Ejects Aero, Favors Solid Ground

One of Microsoft's litany of blogs has posted a bunch of info about the upcoming Windows 8, and boy howdy does it look good.

I was never a fan of Aero. I'm on a Windows 7 machine right now with the Windows "Classic" theme active. Doing that saves me over 100MB of memory. For most people, that 100MB is an almost academic subject, since most computer nowadays come with 2GB or more of memory, so why worry about one twentieth of RAM?

Really? I guess that there is no reason. But I'm a geek. I'm also a geek who more frequently than not has upwards of twenty tabs open in two browsers at the same time. Memory is important to me.

The other reason why I hated Aero was because I felt that it was flashy for the sake of being flashy. When everyone did a "Top Tech Of The Last Ten Years" list in 2010, many, if not most, of them had Windows XP on the list and talked about how Mac OS X from 2001 felt anachronistic and dated. Windows XP was just... Windows XP. It was perfect. It still looks perfectly fine, today.

Aero will not be that. Aero, by Microsoft's own admission, already looks "dated and cheesy." For the love of Pete, the windows have drop shadows! You don't get worse than that.

So, yes. I think that Microsoft's new UI direction looks great. I don't like Metro, but that's because I don't like tablets. But this new classic interface looks glorious. Truly glorious. I feel like we will finally get our follow-up to my beloved Windows XP... with SP2, that is.

A Second Thought On The New iPad

I was reading over a few reviews of the New iPad, and many of them have a similar sentiment to them: the new iPad is cool and all, but is, in many ways, a "meh" sort of product. Why is it "meh"? Because it doesn't blow the earlier versions out of the water. They are actually upset that the new version of a product doesn't render the old version obsolete and useless.

Seriously? Maybe I'm a total curmudgeon. Maybe I'm old and and cantankerous long beyond my years. But this just seems absurd to me. These reviewers are actually desiring the seeming need to buy a new, expensive toy, every year. I'm all for consumerism, afterall, it drives the American economy, but this just seems ridiculous to me.

I love PC's because it takes forever for my PC to become obsolete. I've been rocking the same laptop for four years, and many parts of my desktop are over a decade old. I very much enjoy indulging in the newest bits of technology (I was a serious, overclockin', water coolin', SLI'n PC gamer for awhile) but when an industry is predicated on people flipping out over the next shiny thing every year, and when you don't provide them said flip-out-worthy shiny thing, they get angry, the industry is broken.

No wonder you can't actually get anything done on an iPad. It's not meant to have anything done on it! It's meant to be a casual distraction. And with iPad versions having a lifespan similar to fruit flies, serious developers aren't given a stable-enough platform on which to do things. This might help to explain why the majority of both paid and free apps on the App Store are games.

I don't mean to be a cranky jerk. I don't mean to rain on people's parades. Man, if I wanted to go after conspicuous consumption, the iPad is a pretty minor offense. I think it irks me because computers are so great. They are a democratizing force. And instead of seeing computers heralded for their potential, they're being used to sell wan distractions to a bleary-eyed populace. Instead of people who worked to turn computers into a foundation of modern society, Steve Jobs, a man who sold "magical" stuff, gets candlelight vigils.

The iPad could be great, but in the mad rush to sell simple bits of wow to as many people as possible, and every year have an orgasm with the newest iProduct, it's not happening. I don't want to be hit with "wow" every year. I want a product that does something that I will want it to do for me, every day, for the next ten years.

It Is Not A Post-PC World

The seemingly endless talk about the "post-PC" era is beginning to drive me up a wall. There is no such thing. It reminds me of the same hollow buzzwords being thrown about in the "cloud" computing framework, even though EVERY idea in the "cloud" has existed, and in many cases been implemented, for a couple of decades. All that was missing was the bandwidth.

Likewise, I think that "post-PC" is a buzz word because the technology might be changing shape, but it is still the same technology. It's the same protocols, the same concepts, all simply shoehorned into a different interface. It sounds like I am belittling the advances made that allowed touch to work, of which there are many, but I am not. I am saying that the advances that were made had less to do with paradigm and more to do with form.

For example: touch and tablets. The iPhone was the first fully-touch interface that worked. Was there something paradigmatically different about it? No! Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian all could have done similar, even on older technology; they simply couldn't see past their old interface ideas and look at it from a true UX perspective. It was a problem of perspective, not technology.

Even if the pundits are correct, and the primary form of computing in the future is a tablet of some shape, it is still not the post-PC era. We will still have a dock at home, with a keyboard and most likely a mouse. All that has happened is that the PC has been made modular, which is a form in which we have seen experiments like the Asus Transformer tablet, Motorola's WebTop, and the recent announcement of full Linux running on cell phones. But even there, that is a transition that won't happen for some time since all it will do, at least initially, is increase cost and reduce performance.

My own experiences with consumers also do not support the new post-PC party line. No matter what cell phones or tablets people own, at the center of their technological world is a laptop or desktop. I know only a single person who actually relies on their iPhone for computing. Truly, nothing I have experienced indicates that the post-PC era is post-anything, much less the PC.

So from whence comes this talk of the PC's end? Magazine and internet writers in desperate need of something to cover are assuredly part of the drive. Sales for PC's aren't the shooting star that cell phones and tablets have become, which makes a numbers game especially conducive to this argument. But I don't think that either of those are truly the root of the debate.

I think that it is marketing, plain and simple. Marketing, specifically, from the very companies that conveniently have post-PC products to sell us. Apple started it, Google, Samsung, and Motorola all jumped on board. Now Microsoft is even making similar noise. That marketing people from the various companies both birthed and are now driving the post-PC conversation leads me to believe that they have... ulterior, motives. A recent computer purchasing trip revealed them to me.

My mother's computer recently, how shall I put it, shit the bed. So of course I, being the technowonder that I am, was called upon to make the situation right. After analysis of the nearly-seven-year-old computer, I decided that a new rig¹ was needed. I didn't have the time to design and build her a computer, so I hit the interpipes looking for a good one.

The old computer was a Sony Vaio, purchased in 2005 for about $950. It had decent hardware for the time, including a PCI Express slot for an external video card. It served my mom -who was the kind of user to simply install things until the computer stopped- in a more or less problem free manner. If her room hadn't been filled with dust and cigarette smoke, the computer would be 100% usable even now.

Think about that. A computer that is nearly seven years old still does pretty much everything she could ask of it. Compare that to the early 1990's. Imagine buying a computer in 1990, then trying to use that same computer in 1997.

In 1990, you probably would have had a 20Mhz Intel 486 (or AMD/Cyrix if you were a rebel), 4MB of memory, and a 50MB hard drive. The idea of external video processing was a dream, and CD storage of data was something that only the techno-elite had.

In 1997, you would have had a Pentium MMX 200MHz with perhaps as much as 64MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, CD's and CD burners were becoming common, and Vérité Quake had been out for a year. The two systems were in different leagues. The old system would have been essentially useless.

This was the era that birthed the complaint "I buy a computer and it's immediately obsolete!" Because, at the time, this was somewhat true. Computer hardware remained up-to-date for fleetingly short times. Today, people repeat the complaint, but it doesn't mean the same thing. Today, the complaint means "I just bought this shiny thing and now there's a shinier thing!"

And that is the root of this marketing-fed nonsense known as the post-PC era. A good computer from five years ago will do most of what you could want of it today. That is not sexy. That is not a money-maker. That doesn't drive sales numbers up. Companies don't like it when the turn-over rate on their products is measured in decades. That's why the "planned obsolescence" of the American auto industry included cars that rusted into piles after five years.

Initially, companies didn't need to worry about this. Through the likes of Dell, Gateway, and Compaq, they commoditized  high-turn-over computers below $1,500, then $1,000, then $500, and finally $200. Then, to the various computer companies' horror, even cheap, crap-boxes of computers started lasting for two, three, five years. Meaning that razor thin per-unit profits had to be stretched out over longer periods of time.

For example, the new computer that I bought included an AMD FX-4100, a 1GB Radeon HD 6670, 8GB of memory, and half-a-terabyte of hard drive space. Total cost: $600. That hardware will last, easily, for five years. So I could buy a high-powered computer, capable of doing anything that I want... or I can buy a tablet that is capable of doing little more than surfing the web. And, importantly, it will be obsolete in a very short time: awful for me, but great for the company.

Look at the way companies treat their cell phones, even though they already have a natural life-span of two years. They try their damnedest to get away with not releasing the newest versions of operating systems to them, even when the hardware in the phone could easily power it. They want to make the phone obsolete, because they are desperate to stop smart phones from turning into PC's. Glorious, beautiful, cheap, user-friendly, democratized PC's.²

This reality is being intentionally obfuscated by the companies who want our money, but it is also being unintentionally ignored by users because everyone has a computer. They are simply part of life. But to say that we are moving past this common aspect of everyday life is like saying that we live in a post-refrigerator world because they don't get coverage in the news like they did in 1910.

We are not in the post-PC era. We are in the PC's golden age. It is an age when a powerful computer that will last for years and do everything that a user could ask of it, including games, can be had for the price of an iPad.

This golden age is not sexy. It is not highly profitable. It is not predicated on accelerate obsolescence. In many ways, it is an era in the control of the users and not the companies who are trying to define and control a new zeitgeist. And that is why it's being ignored.

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1: Rig is an ultrageek term for a computer. It stems from us geeks usually custom building our own "rigs."
2: Apple doesn't feel the need to do this since they play the "this new thing is shinier than my old thing" market like a fiddle.

I Hate Tablets

I hate tablets. I don't like the iPad, I don't like any of the Android examples, I don't like the Blackberry. I hate them all.

I hate them because all of the tablet fanatics out there, perhaps intoxicated by Steve Jobs exaltations, believe that tablets will one day be the predominant form of computing. At least for now, this is total nonsense.

Every time you talk to a developer, they talk about one of two things: "specific considerations" of tablet development, if they're careful about the words they use; or "limitations" of tablet development, if they aren't. I prefer to use the term "limitations" of the tablet platform. Essentially, until we have neural connections with our computers, tablets are a much more limited form of communication between user and device. That is undeniable. There are simply fewer channels of interaction.

Moreover, the media community and even the tablet developers continue to make those limitations even worse! First was Apple's exclusion of Flash, which was a real bummer, since the iPad's best at media consumption, and that means Flash. Then, it was the media companies trying to block pretty much everything from the mobile browsers. Even on Android, you can't watch music videos on YouTube. You can't watch Hulu.

That is in no way a comparable experience. It's not even different. It's inferior.

When Windows is on tablets, I'll bite. That way, a tablet will be an actual computer. Not a toy.

Watson Isn't AI

Not unexpectedly, Watson's dominating Jeopardy appearance is being billed as man vs. machine, but that's not at all accurate. Watson doesn't "remember" things, or think, or even really process. He knows grammatical rules, and is programmed kinda' sorta' with a custom version of Google. Imagine if someone playing Jeopardy was able to type very quickly, and when a question was asked, they could type that question into a search engine. The average person could dig up the answer very quickly, and we certainly wouldn't claim that person "won" anything. That's what Watson is doing. In fact, it's not even impressive enough to be voice-recognition. He receives the question via text.

That's not to say that Watson isn't incredible. He is. Essentially, the advances made in Watson could be put into newer and better search engines, letting users find answers to actual questions. Much like Ask Jeeves used to advertise, back in the day. Currently, finding difficult answers in search engines requires skill, silly as it sounds, in searching. You have to know how to use key terms, how to combine them, which tangents to follow, etc. Watson could significantly reduce that requirement.

American Prudishness

There's an article over at The Register asking whether American prudishness is ruining the internet. The author's thesis is, essentially, that most of the internet is dominated by American companies, American companies are beholden to American advertisers, and American advertisers are beholden to the American people, who are morons who hate naughty words and naked bodies.

I do not take a pessimistic perspective on this. In fact, my perspective is downright Pollyanna. Even though major corporations rule the web and, in many ways, force American cultural norms onto their users, this sort of restriction is almost always fleeting. The internet has shown that it is repulsed by censorship and restriction, and while a system or company that advocates and/or uses those two tools may succeed in the short term, in the long term it crumbles. I can think of no better example than AOL.

In comparison to AOL's sleek interface, the internet of the late 1990's and early 2000's was a no-man's-land, but it won out. Not only did it win out, but by the end of the conflict, one of the world's biggest corporations had been reduced to a website. Apple is a good example that is playing out right now. Apple won over users and got them to buy into Apple's ecosystem of products with sleek design, wonderful user interfaces, and great advertising.

This had s snowball effect, where users bought one or two Apple products, but eventually bought more and more, until a god chunk of their digital life revolved around Apple products and services. But see what is happening, now. The flagship of the closed Apple system, the iPhone, is seeing its market share and dominance give way to the inherently open Android OS. Whether Android is actually open or not is open for debate, but it's certainly far more open than Apple. Once people buy one or two products outside of the ecosystem, they're far less likely to buy back in (I actually have data to back that statement up... just wish I could find it).

We can also look at cultural movements over the course of the past ten years. Remember when the Paris Hilton sex tape came out? Remember the controversy? The news coverage? We now have sex tapes released almost every month... and no one cares anymore. Or for examples more quantifiable, look at acceptance of homosexuality in America. Five years ago, a majority of Americans did not support gay marriage. Now, less than half a decade later, even in the face of ceaseless attacks from the religious right, a majority do. Staggeringly, men also now outnumber women in their support of gay marriage. Cultural shifts of this speed and magnitude have never happened before. Why did it happen? The only variable I can see that didn't exist before is the internet.

It is perhaps the "wild west" nature of the web that has made the major companies act the way that they do. The internet at large is free and uninhibited. To differentiate themselves, they hew closely to the tactful ideal, with no naughty words, nudity, or raunchiness. While I understand this strategy, I think that it's dangerous. They risk damaging their brand when cultural norms begin to accept the very activities that the big companies now censor. When that shift happens, people won't want to be associated with the companies that now represent the censorship they are escaping. Why do you think that CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and every other old-world news service have demographics with an average age in their 60's?

So while I think that major American companies are stupid to try and censor, because of the damage it can do to their brand, I don't think that it's a problem for the rest of the world. The internet is free and freedom is better than no freedom --people like the ability to do things-- so any shift towards censorship will be isolated both in time and digital space. It is this seemingly inherent mechanism to the internet, perhaps because it's as direct an extension of the human psyche as is technologically possible, that will keep it free and will continue to have an increasingly large effect on society at large. I think that the greatest decades of cultural change are in front of us.

When Geeks Ruled the World.

I’m a computer geek. Been one for years. My first computer was this strange TI computer that had no disk drive and, as such, anything you did was deleted when you turned it off. It was a TI-99, and I was old enough to know how to turn it on, turn it off, and copy stuff from an instruction manual to such a degree that I sometimes achieved things. What I was achieving was beyond me, but the screen did stuff which made me positively ecstatic.

My first real computer was a Commodore 128. Yeah, bitches. We splurged on the 128 model. Too bad almost all of the software required us to run in 64-mode, which kinda’ negated the need to buy the more expensive 128. It was a great first experience for me. I had to debug problems, learn how to run software, and played LOTS of Impossible Mission and Ernie’s Magic Shapes. Being a cultured five-year-old, I also enjoyed the finer pleasures in life, like Astro Grover. And I will never forget the pleasures of printing out signs and banners with... Let's Make Signs & Banners, and doing it verrrrrrrrry sloooooooooowly. Dot-matrix printers weren't exactly speed demons back then.

My dad always had laptops from his work, including the very first Compaq notebook, so I usually had up-to-date hardware and operating systems, which allowed me to stay current. My adult awakening happened when a friend of mine brought me to my first computer fair. It was great. The internet was around, but the selection of hardware was limited, so fairs were the best place to get selections of the wildest computer shit around.

I still feel a great nostalgia for those days. While I would never want to go back, I like my cell phone way too much, there was something special for us geeks in the days of exclusivity. Computers in the 1990’s were old enough to have a large, robust market, lots of games, cool hardware, but still esoteric enough to be exclusive. It was still mine. It wasn’t everyone’s yet.

At this point in history, companies no longer make stuff for us. The greater market of general users is, obviously, ten times the size, probably more, of the geek market. I completely understand why companies are leaving the geek market for the market of tech-hungry average users who showed their numbers with the creation of the iMac, and have since turned Apple into the most valuable technology company on the planet, having recently passed Microsoft.

But I still kinda’ miss those days. It was a different world, a different demographic. For example, Roberta Williams (founder of Sierra and creator of Kings Quest) mentioned in an interview how she had become disillusioned with the computer market. When she had started in the late 1970’s, the computer market was a highly affluent, educated market. As such, the computer game market was dominated by puzzle games, wonderfully written adventure games, and the occasional action games.

This is in contrast to today, where most games are action games and laptops are sold at Wal-Mart. Look at all of the best-selling, big budget games of today, almost universally, they involve shooting lots and lots of things. The world has changed. I’m sure that’s good, but I’m not trying to be rational, here. I’m being a curmudgeon, dammit. The computer world used to be mine, furiously loading up the newest hardware into a gigantic, beige box at two in the morning. Things weren’t shiny, they were geeky, and that spoke to me.

Sigh. Progress. She’s a bitch. But man, I love it.

UPDATE 8/24/10:

To further add to my nostalgia, Windows 95 is 15 years old, today. I clicked through the links and listened to the Wind95 Startup sound, made by Brian Eno. It instantly elicits and incredibly strong gestalt of memories. By transport, I mean it really does transport me to my bedroom, fifteen years ago, building computers and otherwise geeking out.

Hearing that sound immediately draws out palpable memories of other sounds and images. Like the first time I played through Myst (the sound of big clock or seeing people in a book), or Kings Quest 7 (the opening movie). My first time downloading and playing the demos for Command & Conquer or Warcraft 2, and playing them a lot since I couldn't afford the actual games.

Windows 95 was there right as I experienced my aforementioned adult awakening into technology and computers. I bought a bootleg copy at a computer fair for, $5, I think. Good thing. I had no money. Most of my hardware was used or second-hand, and my software was either pirated or discount bin. I have more, powerful memories of this time than basically any other time in my computer history. I love those memories and I think that saying that I cherish them is not too strong a word.

My own adventures with Windows Vista

I have two systems blessed with Windows Vista. A high-end Hewlett-Packard desktop, and a Sony laptop. The Sony is the VGN-SZ670N and the HP is the M9080N. If you look up the specs, you'll see they're both kick-ass machines.

I have had NOTHING but problems with Vista. My laptop Blue Screens on a pretty regular basis. No clue why. I've read multiple threads online from other people discussing how they have had blue screen errors from Vista on my laptop and tons of other laptops, both from Sony and from other companies. I want to document and post my experiences in hope that they will help someone else who is having similar problems.

The laptop. Talk about a pain. First off, Sony's customer service is abysmal. I was directed to do the usuals, and finally directed to the either Microsoft's service, or to use the restore disc to just wipe the computer and start over fresh. Or, as fresh as Sony's bloated, crap-filled initial install could ever be described.

Microsoft was also no help, simply telling me that the likely culprit was a driver. At least Microsoft led me in a some, ANY, direction. They were right, but what they couldn't explain is why Vista seems to suddenly take a disliking to random drivers in my laptop. The last time this happened, I had to install new video drivers. The next time, it was my DVD drive, a matshita dvd-ram uj-852S. If you Google it, you'll find half of the people on Earth are having problems with that drive. It eventually required this fix.

How did I know the DVD was fucked up, because it suddenly was no longer recognized by Windows. Just one day! No real reason. Upped and stopped working. Brilliant.

The next time, the USB host controller. The USB problems required complete uninstalls of drivers and re-installs of the SAME driver. Vista also stopped liking my USB wireless mouse. I think it may have been the thing that caused Vista to suddenly hate its own USB. I have no idea. I bought a new mouse, stripped Vista of any and all remnants of the USB drivers via regedit.exe, then re-installed reference drivers from Intel's website.

I would have installed reference drivers from Nvidia's website, but ohhhh, right, Sony is using some wacky-ass custom hardware for which only they can provide drivers. So I headed over the Sony's update website, which is terrible. It has a BIOS update that seems to think it's already installed, Nvidia drivers that always fail, and an update to some of Sony's crappy software that I uninstalled months ago. Terrible, UTTERLY TERRIBLE.

So, if you are getting repeated Blue Screens, otherwise known as BSOD, it is almost undoubtedly drivers! Head into control panel > system > Device Manager and see if there are any exclamation marks indicating failed driver loads. If so, go to the websites of the manufacturers and desperately seek out the most recent version. Find reference drivers, anywhere you can. Sony's drivers are unstable and damn-near-impossible to install.

My most recent blue screen and one from some time ago happened whenever I tried to open and then maintain a connection over WiFi. Programs such as BitTorrent, World of Warcraft, or even just simple downloads would crash the system. Upgrading the Intel 4965AGN drivers, even though the system crashed a dozen times during the stop/start download process, fixed the problem.

Do not rely on Sony's update site. Do not rely on Windows Update. Search for yourself regularly at the component manufacturer's website and see if you can find the most recent drivers manually.

Vista's catastrophic network problems continue on the HP. Free of critical system instability, Vista laughs at me by just never connecting to wireless networks. The stock A-G-N WiFi card in the PC had this convoluted antenna that snaked a wire throughout the case. After deciding the card needed to be replaced, I bought a D-Link card with three, holy-moly antennas protruding from the back. This fixed the problem only somewhat.

The problems appears to be that Vista finds it damn-near impossible to connect with networks that have multiple access points. My sister has a Vista desktop in her dorm room, from which there are nine access points all accessing the name network. At my house, there are two access points for the same network. At my house, Vista CANNOT communicate with the D-Link access point. It can only communicate with the router directly.

I have to use the D-Link utility that came with the card to force Vista to connect to a particular MAC address, namely the routers MAC. If left to its own devices, it apparently just tries jumping back and forth from the router to the access point, getting nothing done. And even now, Vista has some serious problems dealing with WiFi connections that are weak.

At the dorm, ALL of the access points are just that, access points. As such, even by picking out and forcing Vista to access only certain points, Vista will connect to only two of the nine. No clue why. We eventually gave up and just used a cat-5 cable. One of her roommates, when asked if she had heard anything about network access, laughed that she had a Mac and it "just worked."

Just worked, indeed. Cocky bitch.

So, yes. If you have the stock network card in your computer, download a network utility that allows you to pick out which networks and which MAC addresses to which to connect. Try Download.com. Then you can pick out specific MACs and see if any of them work. If not, try upgrading your network cards driver. If not, buy a new network card. If not, get a cable. If not, get a Mac.

And don't even get me started on the bloat of Vista. It takes up a jaw-dropping amount of system memory. Right now, with Firefox open and nothing else, I'm rocking 1.4 GB's worth of system memory taken up, and a 1.6GB page file. I know this is supposed to be good, because Windows dumps what it can into RAM, so why does it take Vista forever to boot? And why does Vista access the hard drive for the first 20 minutes of operations? And why does the promise of multi-tasking with a dual-core CPU seem like a shallow lie? And most importantly, why is XP noticeable faster for almost every application I have? Tests seem to show no difference between Vista and XP, even showing Vista to be faster, but in my real-world experience, Vista is noticeable slower in Fireworks, Photoshop, Flash, and World of Warcraft?

And why, OH WHY, in World of Warcraft, with Vista, does holding down an arrow for an extended time while running slow the system to a crawl? It bogs down something. Some buffer somewhere is having a seizure.

Vista's instability, wide-spread and extreme network problems, and bloated, inefficient nature mean that XP remains the standard bearer for desktop PC's. Only an idiot would get Vista. I'd ditch it in a heartbeat if my laptop wasn't so fucking optimized for Vista, and Sony has no interest whatsoever in making its Vista laptops, with all their annoying, custom hardware, friendly with XP. So, yeah.

In conclusion, Blue Screen on a Sony VGN-SZ670N is almost always a driver that needs to be upgraded. WiFi connection problems in Vista are because Vista hates access points so you'll need an application to force Vista to connect to certain MAC addresses, and even then it's dodgey. Don't buy Vista, it's a mess of instability. Don't buy from Sony because their customer service is shockingly bad and their software is terrible. Don't get me wrong, the laptop itself is excellent. Well made, sturdy, attractive; it's everything I could want. But Sony insists on using their own software for drivers, music, EVERYTHING, and Sony quite obviously couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag.

Windows XP on a completely off-the-shelf, hand-built desktop PC. Now that's paradise. Or a Mac, if you're a cocky art student who thinks she's just so special.