Ursus Pacificus

This Business Week article is actually about HP’s efforts to make their MS Windows PCs differentiated in the marketplace and/or (maybe) offer their own slicked-up version of Linux for consumer use (a la the Apple/FreeBSD relationship).

That’s the point of the article… one paragraph up from the end, there a little blurb about MS unveiling something this coming October, which will allow a user to:

…start a Power Point presentation from her home computer, store it on the Net, and then pick it up from her office PC. Windows’ ubiquity makes the software “very practical,” says Bill Veghte, a Microsoft senior vice-president.

wow. You mean like.. SFTP or SCP? … like this?

scp me@my.domain.com:/home/me/file.odp ./

Say, that is groovy!

…of course, she could also just save it to a thumb drive.

Those Microsoft guys are so clever… what’ll they think of next?!

Just saw the new four minute and thirty second Microsoft ad (with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld)… and … I have to say… While it doesn’t have much of a story, the characters are utterly one-dimensional, and nobody is a better person by the end of it… It’s almost completely inexplicable… I mean, it makes Jaws: The Revenge seem… almost worth watching… In spite of this, it does a pretty good job of showing how pointless, obtrusive, out dated, out of touch and unwelcome Microsoft products have become over the years. …although I don’t think that was the aim. Have a look:

[Bummer. The video got pulled from YouTube. If it shows up again, I'll stuff it back in here. --ed]

The father says, “I’m so disappointed in the both of you.” The little boy chimes in “You guys are so dead.”

Really… What more needs to be said?

The Mojave Experiment is, apparently, Microsoft’s response to the bad press Vista has getten just about continuously since its release. The Economist pulls some of the wool off this “experiment”.

Here’s how it worked, according to The Economist (and what I’ve seen of the result):

1. Find 140 people who’s never used Vista and had heard nothing but bad stuff about it (shouldn’t be too hard)
2. Re-badge “Vista” as “Mojave”
3. Set up 20-something hidden video cameras to capture any positive reactions from every concieveable angle.
4. Give them a 10-minute, one-on-one demo of “Mojave” performed by an experienced Vista user on the dole of the ad agency.
5. Edit tiny snippets of positive reactions to provide the appearance of an overwhelmingly orgasmic response.

I had the pleasure of talking to a Microsoft-paid rep (college kid on summer break) at a computer store recently, and he and the staff at the store were having a little trouble getting the Mojave Experiment videos to play properly on a big screen in the laptop department… on… wait for it… Vista!

The MS rep touted the “features that Joe Average User are interested in”, like the search functionality. OK, most modern Linux distributions also come with file indexing. …and from what I hear the Mac file-indexing functionality is second to none. Ultimately, he admitted he runs a mix of platforms at home (Linux and Windows… can’t afford Mac), and that Vista will really only perform (spread its wings, so to speak) on “new hardware”. This means you need a machine with a dual-core CPU, at least 2GB of system RAM and a video card with at least 512 MB of VRAM. I also was terribly surprised to learn that he (as an individual) advocates “throw[ing] morality out the window” (his words, not mine), when it comes to software licensing… Yeah, go ahead and run cracked/pirated copies of Vista. At the risk of stacking soapboxes upon soapboxes, I told him that one of the reaons I run Linux is moral in nature, but it ties into an economic reality. I have a fleet of machines at home. It would cost me thousands of dollars to legitemately license MS Windows and all the software I use (if it’s even available for Windows)… or I could just run Linux, which is free (as in speech and as in beer), easy to use and super powerful. So the choice is be a criminal (whether or not you’re caught and/or punished) or be a cooperative, good citizen. He chooses to be a criminal, and I choose to be a cooperative good citizen.

Ultimately, MS Windows Vista was, is, and , as far as I can tell, ever will be a pig. No matter how much lipstick you put on it, it’s still a pig. That Microsoft has to resort to this level of deception, just to get its products in front of people is telling … and a little sad and pathetic.

Mostly, tho, I feel bad for the participants in The Mojave Experiment. First of all, the time they spent in that sparsely appointed room is time they’ll never get back. Secondly, some of them may actually run out and pick up an upgrade copy of Vista Home Basic, install it on their three-to-five-year-old hardware, and discover that a good chunk of the fancy features aren’t there, to say nothing of the abyssmal performance ther’yre likely to see.

I suppose if Vista had something genuinely useful to offer beyond bloat (and a further-extended revenue stream from a creaky, old product with flashy new paint) I might be a little more sympathetic.

Posted by me today on http://slashdot.org/ in response to this Slashdot article about the launch of a new search engine, called “Cuil“. Reposted here for your convenience. [ed.]

*crickets*

OK, I will.

My website is http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/

I could find no search results pointing to my website on Cuil. Nor could I find any results indicating any websites out there in the series of tubes link to my site. Tried with quotes and without… Tried lopping off the path. Tried lopping off the protocol spec. Tried lopping off the “www” and the TLD. Nothing. All I got was a bunch of links to dating sites which have apparently scraped my profile from sites I’m actually on. WTF?

Long lost friends have found me by googling me.

I know my website has some visibility by googling myself.

Having cuiled myself, I’m left wondering whether my website is even up at all! …wait… there it is.

And how does one *pronounce* “cuil”, anyway?!

I tend to think it’s homonymous with “soil”

[ A couple months ago, I turned off the "auto-renewal" on my eHarmony account. Yesterday I got a "please come back and give us another try" email. Not gonna do it. When I tried to email them directly (using an email address listed on their "we're sorry you'e leaving" page) about why I was quitting eHarmony, the email was rejected, and the rejection notice said, "At this time, we are no longer accepting e-mail inquiries that are submitted outside of our FAQ web form." Fine. Like everything else on eHarmony, telling them to get stuffed is time-consuming, painful and ultimately unrewarding. I decided that, instead of telling them to get stuffed, I'd tell all of you that I told them to get stuffed and they told me to piss off. I am pissed off, and here's why. -- ed.]

To whom it may concern,

I have had a handful of “first dates” with women I met on eHarmony, and have had no second dates. This is not because I’m a horrid individual, and it’s not because the people I’ve been introduced to are horrid. It’s because your “highly scientific, 30 dimensions of compatability” matching thingy is not suited to me, and has introduced me to people who don’t suit me.

My personality cannot be boiled down to two hundred or so multiple-choice (strongly agree => strongly disagree) answers to ostensibly simple (but actually complex) questions that require complex answers.

Your matching system makes no accommodation for people who don’t believe in spooky, invisible men who live in the clouds. I am an atheist, and I am not interested in meeting people with strong (or even weak) religious beliefs.

The long, arduous process required to simply greet someone in my own words is painful, and given my results, I see no value in devoting the time needed to send a simple email to someone on eHarmony.

The “security timeout” feature is immensely irritiating. If it takes me more than 10 minutes to write an email (not unlikely), when I go to send the email, I get bounced out, and all my careful writing and editing is lost.

…and when you couldn’t find me anyone *you* thought was compatible, you’d send me “matches” which were so far off base, I couldn’t help thinking they were drawn from a hat. Then, you encouraged me to expand my search radius and open my criteria… No. I set my search radius to what I wanted it to be. I don’t want to drive more than 30 miles. Period. Stop telling me I should be looking a hundred or more miles away for romance. If there’s no one within my desired radius who is compatible with me, fine. I can live with that. I’m not going to lower my standards or spend countless hours on the road just to feel wanted.

Oh, and, on the subject of children, I fall into a minority category. I have no children, and I don’t want children of my own. I would be open to dating the right woman if she had a couple kids, but that does add a measure of complexity to the compatability equation. You have no checkbox or radio button for that.

All in all, I found eHarmony to be an abominable experience cloaked in pretty colors and new-age lingo, which I would not wish on anyone.

I hope, for the benefit of your “millions of members”, that you can make it work better in the future.

As for me, at a hundred and eighty bucks for six months, I’ve had my fill. I have closed my account and will not be returning.

Sincerely,

Paul Tourville

Seemingly taking a hint from Microsoft’s playbook, Apple, Inc seems to have botched the iPhone 2.0 launch so badly that the v1.0 iPhones felt the tremors.

The “it just works” mantra repeated so often by Apple fanboys and fangirls seems to have hit a snag.

Lest we forget that in 1997, Microsoft invested pretty significantly in Apple, when Apple was not exactly on top of its game. A hundred and fifty million dollars at around five and a half bucks a share means Microsoft bought around 27,000,000 shares. Based on current a market cap of $152B and a share price of $172, Apple has around 880,000,000 shares outstanding. If MS still holds the shares it bought in 1997, and given Apple’s June, 2000 2-for-1 split, that means MS owns a healthy 6% of Apple. Not a controlling interest, by any stretch, but certainly a potentially influential interest. I wonder if the push to increase “shareholder value” made the iPhone release a rush-job? Certainly Microsoft has been more interested in increasing “shareholder value” than in putting out quality products… remember the releases of WindowsXP, Windows Vista and Office 2007? All met with cold receptions initially, and each only really took off because “it was the only option”, when Microsoft discontinued availability and/or support for previous generations of those products.

I’m waiting for Apple to come out with the “iDontgetit”… a product to appeal to folks like me who aren’t swayed by slick GUIs or stark industrial design, but are more interested in raw power and functionality.

Hi…

Well, the big day looms large in the headlights. The bathroom’s not complete, yet, but I HAVE to get out of that apartment!

Part of the move is getting my Cox business account moved to the house from the apartment. Well, Cox needs 5 days to do the move. That’s 5 business days. grr. What does that mean?! Well, I have to get the machines moved out of the apartment, so Ursus Pacificus will be going dark for a few days, while I wait for Cox to turn on my new service at the house. I expect the new service to be on early next week. So… Don’t worry… I’ll be back! Soon! Reall!

–Paul

This Slashdot article points to a bill that passed the House a couple days ago which would, if enacted, create an Intellectual Property Czar, whose job it would be to break down your door and seize your computer(s) if there is any suspicion that you are involved in copyright infringement, or could be, or have thought about it, or… basically, if you have a computer, and someone doesn’t like you, the IP Nazis can come and seize your computer, until you can demonstrate you weren’t doing anything illegal… which is pretty damned hard without access to your computer.

Yeah… The bill was introduced by House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers Jr. last December. He’s a Democrat. The House is Democratically controlled. This “business-friendly” bill passed. Yes, the Democrats are just as much in the pocket of BigBiz as the Republicans.

The House Judiciary Committee is supposed to provide Congressional oversight of the administration of justice by the Federal Courts. I thought the founding principle of the justice system in the United States was the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Has that officially changed?… and what about the 4th Amendment to The US Constitution? The Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee INTRODUCED this bill. I don’t know about you, but I’m utterly horrified.

This article on Billboard.com states that no companion bill has been introduced in the Senate. Let’s hope it stays that way.

This groklaw article is a little horrifying. It lays out Microsoft’s evangelism strategy from an exhibit in the Comes v. Microsoft litigation.

I always suspected Microsoft was operating underhandedly. This is flatly disgusting. There have been accusations flying around for years that Microsoft has been buying praise from journalists and “independent analysts”. This collection of 1997-vintage documents shows evidence that such practices have been in Microsoft’s toolbox for over a decade.

Microsoft should be abandoned. That’s all there is to it.

In a previous post I lauded the ASUS eee-PC. I still think it’s a really spiffy gadget!

Originally introduced to the consumer market as a Linux-only machine, it is now available with MS Windows XP (Sorry, Vista {he-he}) as well. That was a brave move by ASUS, in my opinion… While they didn’t exactly trumpet the fact that it came with Linux pre-installed, they did a fine job of fitting the versatile OS to the hardware and alleviatiing any ease of use concerns, and they marketed the machine with its Linux-based OS with a matter-of-fact-ness just short of arrogance. Their bet paid off. Microsoft was caught off-guard so badly by the success of the Linux-preinstalled eee-PC that they offered to retrofit a special version of their Windows XP operating system to the functional, but somewhat limited hardware. Not “Vista”, mind you. Windows XP.

Now, the product description on Amazon states:

Get the power of a full-sized laptop in the ultra-compact ASUS Eee PC 4G, which offers a full QWERTY keyboard, 7-inch screen, and preinstalled Linux operating system. (This laptop is also compatible with the Microsoft Windows XP operating system.)

“Also compatible”? Interesting. So, when was the last time you saw a consumer-market PC with MS Windows pre-installed that also included a statement in its product description like this: “This machine is also compatible with all major Linux distributions”? I can’t recall ever seeing that, even though in the vast majority of cases, it’s true.

I think who ever wrote the copy for that product description should be pressed to alter it to read: “(This laptop is also compatible with the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, not that you’ll need it.)”

On a related note, Best Buy has started carrying the MS Windows XP version of the eee-PC (but not the original, better Linux-based version). Too bad. They’re missing the point.