Coyote Blog

InfoWorld is hosting a petition to Microsoft to save XP and continue to sell it past the middle of this year.  You can sign their petition .  I signed the petition, but the real petition for MS may be the numbers coming in for XP sales, which are still strong.  On this Amazon bestsellers page, as of 2/1/08, places #1,2,3,5 where XP and only #4 was Vista. IT News builds on my Amazon analysis:

Gates, in
Las Vegas Sunday, boasted that Microsoft has sold more than 100 million
copies of Windows Vista since the OS launched last January.

While
the number at first sounds impressive, it in fact indicates that the
company's once dominant grip on the OS market is loosening. Based on
Gates' statement, Windows Vista was aboard just 39% of the PC's that
shipped in 2007.

And Vista, in terms of units shipped, only
marginally outperformed first year sales of Windows XP according to
Gates' numbers -- despite the fact that the PC market has almost
doubled in size since XP launched in the post 9-11 gloom of late 2001.

Speaking
five years ago at CES 2003, Gates said that Windows XP in its first
full year on the market sold more than 89 million copies, according to a Microsoft record of the event....

A survey published by InformationWeek last year revealed that 30% of corporate desktop managers have no plans to upgrade their company's PC's to Vista -- ever.

As de facto IT manager for my company, you can include me in that 30%.  My other posts on Vista here.

Update:  Face-saving suggestion for Microsoft:  Rename XP as Vista Lite or some such.  Then they can keep it and claim 100% acceptance of Vista.

Just about everything in the PC architecture has been upgraded -- much better microprocessors, more elaborate OS's, more memory, a much higher bandwidth bus architecture, etc.  However, one bit of 1980's era design still sits at the heart of the computer - the BIOS.  Sure, manufacturers have agreed to some extensions (particularly plug and play) and motherboard makers add in extensions of their own (e.g. for overclocking) but the basic BIOS architecture and functionality, which sits underneath the OS and gets things started when you flip the "on" switch, is basically unchanged. 

A few years ago, Intel proposed a replacement, but ironically only Apple has picked up on the BIOS replacement called EFI.  Now, it appears, at least one leading motherboard manufacturer for PC's is putting a toe in the water:

The specification allows for a considerable change in what can be implemented
at this very low level.

EFI is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating
system and platform firmware. EFI is intended as a significantly improved
replacement of the old legacy BIOS firmware interface used by modern PCs....

Graphical menus, standard mouse point-and-click operations,
pre-operating-system application support such as web browsers, mail applications
and media players, will all feature heavily within EFI.

From the PC Magazine Blog:

The venerable BlackBerry manufacturer launches a native Facebook client
that makes staying in touch with your Facebook friends a cinch.

Venerable?  BlackBerry?  ROFLMAO, as they say.

Frequent readers will know that I have reversed all the new Vista machines in our household back to XP and I have banned Vista from any computers purchased in the company (Dell is quite happy to sell XP rather than Vista).  Here is a how-to on how to downgrade to XP.

Now, PC World has voted Vista as the technology failure of the year  (I would also vote the box as the packaging failure of the decade, and the new user interface in MS Office as the hose-your-installed-base gaffe of the year).

I thought this was an interesting fact, from PC World several months ago:

Certainly sales of Vista aren't blowing away XP in stores. Chris
Swenson, director of software industry analysis for the NPD Group, says
that, from January through July of this year, XP sales accounted for a
healthy 42.3 percent of online and brick-and-mortar retail OS sales. By
contrast, from January through July of 2002, after XP's launch in
October the year prior, Windows 98 accounted for just 23.1 percent of
retail sales.

I made a similar observation using Amazon sales rankings of XP vs. Vista here. Finally, just for the heck of it, I checked the OS's of users coming to Coyote Blog.  In the past, our users have demonstrated themselves to be ahead of the technology curve (Firefox eclipsed Explorer as the #1 Coyote Blog brower long ago).  As you can see, Vista barely has 4% share, in a near tie with Windows 2000 and Windows NT and barely edging Linux:

HT:  What's Up With That

We are rapidly coming up on the first anniversary of Vista, and it has been a very rocky year for Microsoft.  New releases of an OS are always difficult, but many users have really turned up their nose on Vista.  My experience has been much the same as everyone else's:  Applications run slower in Vista (I know because I had a system set up to dual boot and A/B tested a number of applications).  Networking, particularly wireless networking, is much less stable than in XP.  Good drivers STILL don't exist for many legacy hardware devices, including may graphics cards.  I ran into any number of quirks.  The most irritating for me was that a laptop communicating with a printer via wireless network would lose connection with the printer every time the laptop was shut down in a way that could only be rectified (as confirmed by MS customer support) by reinstalling the print driver every time I wanted to use it.

Most computer NOOBs probably never noticed, not having anything to compare Vista with and only using their computers for a narrow range of functionality (ie email and internet browsing).  However, many of us who are more comfortable with computers and who rely on our computers as an important tool have either avoided buying Vista computers (Dell, for example, still sells a lot of XP computers) and/or have taken the time to roll back their Vista to a dual boot system or even XP only  (which I explain here).  Which may explain why standalone XP packages are better sellers on Amazon than Vista.

For gamers, most of whom tend to be power users, Vista has been nothing but a negative, slowing games down and requiring use of buggy graphics card drivers (Microsoft crows that they get fewer customer service calls on Vista than XP, which may be, but I can gaurantee, from browsing gaming boards, that gaming companies get swamped with Vista calls from gamers who can't get the game to run on Vista). 

Looming over all of this, though, has been one word:  Crysis.  Gamers have been lusting after this game for over a year, with its promise of knock-out graphics and game-play.  To this end, Microsoft did something clever.  It updated its DirectX graphics engine in Vista to revision 10, and included in it all kinds of new capabilities that would really make a game look fantastic.  MS decided, either for technical or marketing issues, not to ever release these features on XP.  If you wanted DirectX 10 games, you had to upgrade to Vista.  Over the last year, graphics card makers have been releasing hardware to support DirectX 10.  Crysis was set to be the first game that would really take advantage of DirectX 10, and many hardcore gamers upraded to Vista solely on the promise of running Crysis maxed out with the new DirectX 10 features.

Well, Crysis was released a few weeks ago.  You may think I am building up to say it sucked, but just the opposite is true.  It is absolutely fantastic.  Easily the most visually stunning thing I have ever seen running on my PC.  First-person shooter games are not really my favorite, but I have thoroughly enjoyed the game.  (here is a trailer, but unlike most trailers, the game really looks like this in gameplay, maybe better due to limited resolution on YouTube.)  Click below for larger screenshots:

But here is the interesting part.  I keep my system state of the art.  I have close to the fastest Intel multi-core processor currently made running with two of the newest Nvidia graphics cards (8800GT's) running ganged together in SLI mode (don't worry if you don't know what all that means, just take my word for it that it is about as fast as you can get with stock components and air cooling). Crysis, like most graphics games, can have its settings changed from "low", meaning there is less graphics detail but the game runs faster, through "med" to "high" and "very high".   Only in the latter modes do the new features of DirectX10 really come into play.  So I ran the calibration procedure the game provides and it told me that I needed to set the game to "medium!"  That's not an error - apparently everyone else in my position who have a large monitor with high resolutions had about this experience.  I can set the game to higher modes, but things really slow down.  By the way, it still looks unbelievably awesome on Medium.

The designers of Crysis actually did something kind of cool.   They designed with Moore's law in mind, and designed the highest game modes for computers that don't exist today, but likely will in a few years.  So the game (and more importantly the engine, since they will likely sell the engine as a platform for other game makers to build their games atop) has some built-in obsolescence-proofing.

But lets return to Vista and Crysis being billed as a killer app.  As it turns out, none of the directX10 features are really usable, because no one can turn the graphics engine up high enough with their current hardware.  Worse, in a game where users are trying to eek out any tweek they can to improve frame rates and graphics speed, Crysis runs demonstrably slower on Vista than XP.  Finally, those who have run the game in its higher modes withe DirectX 10 features (presumably at the cost of low frame rates) have found the actual visual differences in the DirectX 10 graphics to be subtle.  The game boards are a total hoot, as folks who upgraded to Vista solely for Crysis are wailing that their experience on Vista is actually worse than on XP.

We have a strict no-console-game policy in the household.  Generally, when I see how other people's kids spend their time, I am pretty happy that we have stuck to this.  However, it has meant no Guitar Hero in the house. 

Well, finally, Guitar Hero III is out and is available in a PC version, though of course Amazon is back-ordered right now.

I won't go into my bad experiences with Vista, nor into the story of my purge of Vista from all personal and corporate computers, but you can read here and here.

Here are some interesting Amazon sales rank numbers as of 10/16/07 for Vista vs. XP, which Vista supposedly replaced 12 months ago.  All the following are sales ranks in the Amazon software category, with a lower number implying higher sales:

XP Home Full Edition:  #19
XP Home Upgrade: #105
Vista Home Basic Full Edition:  #277
Vista Home Basic Upgrade:  #174

Obviously this is unscientific, because it is just one channel.  Also, Vista has more different segmented SKU's, so the product comparison is not exactly apples to apples.  But it is interesting, no?

The OEM market is going to skew towards Vista because that is what OEM's tend to load by default.  But even so, Dell, for example, is still offering Windows XP as an OEM option, a pretty unprecedented move this long after a new Windows launch.  But the Amazon traffic is probably 99% OS changes, since almost everyone with a PC gets an OEM version loaded.  Most of the Vista purchases are going to be upgrades from XP, and most of the XP purchases are going to be downgrades from Vista.  Does this mean Vista downgrading is outstripping Vista Upgrading?

Postscript: It has now been two months since I downgraded to XP on my kid's laptop, and we are still amazed at how much better everything runs now.  I was afraid I could not get all the drivers for XP but in the end I was succesful and everything, including the sound, is working great.  There are a LOT of websites nowadays to help you downgrade.  Or you can try dual booting.

Update:  The real indicator that this is Vista downgrade sales of XP is that the Full Edition is out-selling the upgrade edition, which is a reverse of history when XP was the lead product.  When I downgraded, I found I could not use the upgrade version of XP and had to use the full edition.  My guess is that others have the same problem, and that the very high sales rank of the XP full edition is very likely due to high downgrade demand.

The newly announced iPod, which is basically an iPhone without the phone but with all the same screen, interface, wi-fi, etc. looks pretty good.  The only problem I have with it (without having actually held one) is that the storage is pretty thin* at 16GB given that it is such a natural for movies.  Still, I can see having one of these for travel while keeping my current 60GB iPod for my music collection  (and by the way, new, thinner traditional iPods with more memory are also on the way.  160GB, woot!).  This is getting close to what I had hoped the Nokia 770 was going to be, but was crippled by lack of memory.  If they would make a folding wireless bluetooth keyboard work with this, it will be great.

* Spoken by the person who thought he would never fill his first 10BM hard drive add-in card on his first PC

Now, I won't argue that Vista will someday not suck - after all, give an infinite number of monkeys $30 billion a year in cash flow and they'll code Shakespeare.  Or whatever.  But I have to agree with this post by Glenn Reynolds that Vista is still not ready for prime time.  Now, I wrote this same conclusion over a half year ago, but incredibly, no updates of any seriousness have been issued.  It is still the mess it was then, and Moore's Law has yet to catch up to make the average machine run it acceptably  (particularly with laptops).   When I set up the dual boot back to XP on my kid's laptop, I did not make the XP partition large enough because my kids absolutely refuse to install anything on the Vista partition, which they use only because that is where MS Office is installed. 

Am I a lone wolf on this issue?  Oh my God, am I a Vista denier! Well, check out this announcement from Microsoft reported by ZDNet on June 28:

Microsoft is simplifying the processes via which its PC-maker
partners will be able to provide "downgrade" rights from Windows Vista
to Windows XP for their customers.

Microsoft will implement the first of the policy changes for its
Gold Certified (top-tier) OEM partners within the next couple of weeks.
The company will streamline downgrade-rights policies and procedures
for the broader channel somewhat later, said John Ball, general manager
of Microsoft's U.S. Systems Group....

Microsoft is working on ways to allow the rest of the channel to
take advantage of these simplified downgrade procedures, but is still
in the midst of hashing out the details, Ball said. He didn't have a
timetable for when Microsoft will make its more liberal
downgrade-rights policies available to the rest of its PC partners.

I am not sure this is the sign of a healthy product line when your top customers are demanding easier ability to go back to the old version.

As a side note, I have never, ever liked Macs.  First, I never wanted to be one of "the rest of us" and I enjoy tweaking and upgrading too much to be a fan of Macs.  Also, I thought their historic resistance to some obvious improvements, like the two-button mouse, was just stupid.  All that being said, I will admit that I really like the new iMac I bought my wife.  It is perfect for her, and it is gorgeous.  The keyboard is not great for speed-typing but it looks really cool and my wife is fine with that.  The iMac did a great job with the tough stuff - it immediately recognized the PC's on my network and was able to trade files with them (something our Vista laptop still balks at from time to time) and it set up a network printer on the first try.  And, for perhaps the first time ever on a Mac, I didn't feel like the things was wallowing in first gear when compared to my desktop PC.

Sorry Mac folks, but as a guy who builds his own PC's, I am rolling on the floor laughing with Charlie Booker (via Market Power)

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I
even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs
are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for
scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers
for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the
ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from
scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it
to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who,
incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze
pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is,
"I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational
ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button
feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be
standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts
while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands.

The two-button mouse thing has always been a mystery to me.  Clearly it is better.  Hell, I can't do without my two button mouse and its scroll-wheel.  Only a pathological desire not to copy anything from the PC world (copying from Xerox* is OK, I guess) has prevented Apple from adopting this no-brainer improvement.

* I may be one of the few people around who ever worked on the old Xerox workstations from which so much of the Mac was derived.  They had their issues, but they were unbelievable for their time.  I would put Xerox's failure to capitalize on this technology right up there with Amiga in the category of lost technological opportunities.  </dating myself>

I really hate voice mail.  It's like reverting back to the bad old days when data was stored on tapes and you had to spool through the whole thing to get what you want.  If you have 8 or 10 voice mails, there is no way to scan them to find the most important, you have to listen to them in order.  And how many times have you listened for five minutes to someone rambling on, waiting forever for them to get to the point or just give you their freaking phone number so you can call back.

So I am excited to try this service called SimulScribe.  Right now, it appears set up mostly for mobile phones, but I have an email into them about land lines.  Basically, you forward you phone to them when you don't pick up, and they record the message from the caller and then transcribe the message and send it to you by email or text messaging.  According to PC Magazine, it works pretty well.

At the risk of being way to geeky here, I would like to ask the computer world if they could find some way for me to have a RAID disk drive array on my custom built PC's without having to also buy and install a floppy disk drive that I only use once.  For those who don't know, a RAID is an array of multiple, usually identical, hard drives that can be combined together for redundancy.  For example, two 250GB hard drives can be combined in a RAID such that they appear to be one 250GB drive to the system, but all data is mirrored on both drives, so if one fails, you still have everything, even without making backups.  I usually build RAIDs into my computers, either for redundancy or, if that is not needed, at least to combine multiple drives into one drive letter.  You can even build a raid where all files are split between the two drives, which is a reliability problem but makes for wicked fast drive access (kind of like splitting calculations between two CPUs)

Unfortunately, on most motherboards, the only way to install the RAID drivers if I want to install Windows onto the RAID is to load them with an old 3-1/2 inch floppy.  Which means I usually install a floppy drive on every build -- OK, its only $20 or so, but it still seems like a waste.   On my own computers, I just have one redundant floppy I pass around, but when I build for others, I don't want to leave them hanging if they have to reinstall the OS. 

I would think that this should be doable via a USB key, but I have never tried it.  Anyone out there know a better way?

</geekiness>  OK, I will now return to economics and business.

Back in the stone age (say, about 20 years ago) we used to have this quaint concept for media we purchased called "fair use."  I won't get into the legal definitions, but it meant in practice that if I had a book, I could read it at home, or I could take it into work and read it there.  In college, I would read novels in the back of boring lectures, and soon hit on the tactic of xeroxing 20-30 pages of my book and putting the copies in a folder to disguise what I was doing.  Fortunately, fair use let me do so without penalty.  Sometimes a friend would read an article in a magazine he thought was cool, and he would xerox a copy of the article (a sample of the magazine, so to speak) and share it with me.

Increasingly, in the digital age, none of the behaviors are allowed anymore.  For years I used to install my copy of turbo tax on both my home and office computers, and carry my tax file back and forth on a floppy to work on it.  Then, a couple of years ago, Turbo Tax installed a form of rights management that required that I buy a second copy of the same software for my own personal use for my office.  In effect, I could no longer carry my novel to work -- I had to buy a second copy if I wanted to read it at the office.  The same situation has prevailed with digital music files - increasingly recording companies are taking the position that if you want a digital file on both your iPod and your home system, you need to buy two copies.  And the sampling and sharing we used to do all the time with magazine and newspaper articles are not longer permitted for digital media.

Having firmly established the principle that multiple uses by the same individual of the same digital media should require multiple purchases, where do we go next?  Well, I think that we will look back on the release of Windows Vista as the next great milestone in killing fair use.  Microsoft may have left out nearly every product enhancement they originally promised for Vista, particularly the revamped file system, and tried to hide the fact with some pretty desktop eye candy, but they found plenty of time to add numerous DRM and copy protection schemes to the OS. 

Because, having killed fair use for multiple copies, believe it or not, the media companies are attempting to kill fair use even for the original media by the original buyer!  I know this sounds crazy, but in Windows Vista, media companies are given the opportunity to, in software, study your system, and if they feel that your system is not secure enough, they can downgrade the quality of the media you purchased or simply refuse to have it play.  In other words, you may buy an HD DVD and find that the media refuses to play on your system, not because you tried to copy it, but because it feels like your system *might* be too open.  The burden of proof is effect on the user to prove to the media companies that their system is piracy-proof before the media they paid for will play (emphasis added). 

PVP [a new Vista DRM component] eliminates these security gaps, enabling a series of DRM measures that keep
a high-resolution content stream encrypted, and in theory completely protected,
from its source media all the way to the display used to watch it. If the system
detects a high-resolution output path on a user's PC (i.e., a system capable of
moving high-res content all the way to a user's display), it will check to make
sure that every component that touches a protected content stream adheres to the
specification. If it finds a noncompliant device, it can downgrade the content
stream to deliver a lower-quality picture -- or it can even refuse to play the
content at all, depending on the rights holder's preferences.

So you see the next step.  First, they prevented fair use of copies.  Now, they are going to prevent fair use of the original.  Back to the book analogy, its as if the book will not open and let itself be read unless you can prove to the publisher that you are keeping the book in a locked room so no one else will ever read it.  And it is Microsoft who has enabled this, by providing the the tools to do so in their operating system.  Remember the fallout from Sony putting spyware, err copy protection, in their CD's -- turns out that that event was just a dress rehearsal for Windows Vista.

As Rosoff's statement implies, many of Vista's DRM technologies exist not
because Microsoft wanted them there; rather, they were developed at the behest
of movie studios, record labels and other high-powered intellectual property
owners.

"Microsoft was dealing here with a group of companies that simply don't trust
the hardware [industry]," Rosoff said. "They wanted more control and more
security than they had in the past" -- and if Microsoft failed to accommodate
them, "they were prepared to walk away from Vista" by withholding support for
next-generation DVD formats and other high-value content.

Microsoft's official position is that Vista's DRM capabilities serve users by
providing access to high-quality content that rights holders would otherwise
serve only at degraded quality levels, if they chose to serve them at all. "In
order to achieve that content flow, appropriate content-protection measures must
be in place that create incentives for content owners while providing consumers
the experiences they want and have grown to expect,"

Nope, no arrogance here.

Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at research firm Directions On Microsoft, asserts that
this process does not bode well for new content formats such as Blu-ray and
HD-DVD, neither of which are likely to survive their association with DRM
technology. "I could not be more skeptical about the viability of the DRM
included with Vista, from either a technical or a business standpoint," Rosoff
stated. "It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when
it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to
impose."

More links on Vista DRM issues here

Update:  OpenOffice 2.1 is out.  We love OpenOffice at our company.  We stopped buying MS Office a couple of years ago and have been thrilled with the decision.  The version 1 release was weak but since version 2.0 it has been a very strong offering.  It is nice to see Sun getting its Microsoft hatred out in a more productive manner than suing them all over the place.

I am not sure this even needs an introduction.  Comparisons to "1984" are invoked in political discourse almost as much as those to Nazi Germany, and most are overblown, but the George Orwell novel is all I can think of when I see this:

It may be almost 2007, but it feels more like "1984" at Michigan
State University. The university's Student Accountability in Community
Seminar (SAC) forces students whose speech or behavior is deemed
unacceptable to undergo ideological reeducation at their own expense.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is challenging
Michigan State to dismantle this unconstitutional program, which
presents a profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of
conscience.

 

"Michigan State's SAC program is simply one of the most invasive
attempts at reeducation that FIRE has ever seen, yet it has been
allowed to exist at the university for years," FIRE President Greg
Lukianoff said. "As bad as it is to tell citizens in a free society
what they can't say, it is even worse to tell them what they must
say. Michigan State's program is an immoral and unconstitutional
program of compelled speech, blatant thought reform, and
pseudo-psychology."

 

According to the program's materials,
SAC is an "early intervention" for students who use such
"power-and-control tactics" as "male/white privilege" and
"obfuscation," which the university cryptically defines as "any action
of obscuring, concealing, or changing people's perceptions that result
in your advantage and/or another's disadvantage." Students can be
required to attend SAC if they demonstrate what a judicial
administrator arbitrarily deems aggressive behavior, past examples of
which have included slamming a door during an argument or playing a
practical joke. Students can also be required to attend SAC for
engaging in various types of constitutionally protected speech,
including "insulting instructors" or "making sexist, homophobic, or
racist remarks at a meeting." When participation in SAC is required,
"non-compliance typically results in a hold being placed on the
student's account," an action that leaves the student unable to
register for classes and thus effectively expelled from the university.
Students are required to pay the cost of the SAC sessions.

 

Once in the program, students are instructed to answer a series of
written questionnaires. In their answers, students must specifically
describe how they are taking "full responsibility" for their offensive
behavior and must do so using language that the director of the session
deems acceptable. Most students will be asked to fill out this
questionnaire multiple times, slowly inching closer to what
administrators deem to be "correct" responses.

PC indoctrination at our nation's universities is alive and well.  It just astounds me that a group of adults thought this was acceptable.

I really don't understand the good reputation that Apple enjoys as the sort of anti-Microsoft.  iTunes and Quicktime are by far the most irritating and buggy programs that reside on my PC.  Quicktime spams my screen about 20 times a day with a request to check for updates, most of the time returning an error or "the server is down" when I click OK.  iTunes has just hung up yet again during an installation.  That makes something like three versions in a row that has done that.  When iTunes encounters a problem in installation, it leaves one's computer in this weird limbo where the installer refuses to run, saying that an installation is already in progress, but iTunes won't run either.  I remember being in this limbo before, but I can't remember how I got out of it.

I could spend all day discussing the follies of anti-trust law.  But one of the memes that still seems to hang on is that anti-trust was designed as a form of consumer protection, with the government protecting consumers from the monopoly power of consolidated enterprises.

I am not enough of a business historian to comment on whether anti-trust has ever been used for consumer protection, but it is clear that it is not any more.  That has been one very expensive lesson we can all learn from the Microsoft anti-trust cases, both in the US and Europe. 

If you remember the US cases, Sun, Netscape, Oracle and other Microsoft competitors, having failed to best Microsoft in the marketplace, went running to the FTC to get them to sit on Microsoft for them.  And they were successful, with a series of high-profile settlements.  Nowhere was there even a hint that these cases were about the consumer -- in fact, the settlement demanded was to remove functionality and free add-on components from the Windows OS, making it less attractive to consumers.

We can see this again in the recent decision by an EU court, which seems very happy to use anti-trust law to step on an American competitor in favor of local companies (my emphasis added).

Microsoft was fined $357 million, on top of the record $613 million
fine it paid in the original order. It also faces new penalties of
$3.82 million a day beginning July 31....

The commission has said that it is concerned about Vista's Internet
search capabilities and method of managing digital rights. Regulators
also are worried about the implications for competitors of a new
technology for saving documents that is similar to the Portable
Document Format developed by Adobe Systems Inc.

Microsoft's chief crime is not doing enough to help competitors compete against them:

The fines announced Wednesday come after the EU told Microsoft to
supply "complete and accurate technical specifications" to developers,
so they could make software for servers that help computers running
Windows, printers and other devices on a network talk to each other. It
accused Microsoft of using its monopoly position with Windows to elbow
into the server software market.

Kroes said Microsoft's earlier efforts had not come even close to a readable manual developers could use.

Again, settlements are taking the form of defeaturing the product consumers get:

Smith said Microsoft had suggested various ways it could offer Vista in
Europe, to address concerns about XPS. One option is to ship Vista
without it, while another is to include ways for PC makers or others to
either remove certain XPS utilities or make them invisible.

And, by the way, this certainly gives one a lot of confidence in the due process the courts in Europe are going to give you as an American:

"In some ways, these fines are only partially about complying with the
... prior case, and half about sending a message to Microsoft that the
European Commission is not going away,"

You get that?  It sounds like a mafioso beating someone up because they didn't show him enough respect.

By the way, I am frustrated with Microsoft and their pricing as well.  Rather than run to the government, though, I have employed this and this and this.

About ten years ago, I remember Microsoft started to get pounded by observers for "missing out" on the Internet.  One of their responses was the development of Internet Explorer, which, thanks to a good design and the fact it was bundled with the OS, quickly beat out Netscape and other incumbents.

Recently, PC-Pundit John Dvorak has argued that Microsoft's foray into Explorer has been its biggest blunder.  I'm not usually a Dvorak fan (I find him to be too much of a technocrat, tending to favor top-down standard setting over messy bottom-up innovation) but I thought his take was pretty interesting:

I think it can now be safely said, in hindsight, that Microsoft's entry
into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser
into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision"”and
perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe"”the company ever made. I call it
the Great Microsoft Blunder....

If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then
it's the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the
never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security
problems. All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat
is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first
advertised.

All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems
(in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to
put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there
would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses
column"”billions.

Yeah, I know, the Internet was supposed to be the next platform for applications taking over from the PC.  This has always been a slow phenomena to emerge (I LIKE having my applications on my own PC and available even if Cox cable is having another hiccup) and its not at all clear you need a browser to play well anyway.  While Microsoft has screwed around with Explorer and dot-net, Google has become the gold standard of web-based applications, and they don't have a browser at all.

By the way, if you are waiting for the new version of Explorer, just get Firefox instead.  It is everything Microsoft is trying to make Explorer and it is there already.  And you don't even have to think in Russian to use it.  (OK, did anyone get my movie reference there or am I a total loser?)

Hat tip to the Mises Blog.

Well, I had a number of emails asking for the specifics of my computer build, so all you non-geeks can move on.  Hopefully I will get a post up on the USA Today putting for-gods-sakes ethanol on the front page of today's paper.  Anyway, here is my computer build components:

• ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard.  This basic motherboard platform is rock-solid.  The premium version mainly brings a quieter heat-pipe design to cool the mobo chipset and a software rather than hardware switch for single to dual SLI.  It is one of the better overclocking platforms, with good BIOS options.  It has a couple of quirks, probably the most important of which is that it tends not to like RAM in 4 sticks -- better to use two.  I chose not to use the newer A8N32-SLI, which is supposed to increase the bandwidth when 2 SLI cards are used.  However, I think the Nvidia chipset for this was rushed (to please Dell) and tests show its not necessarily faster, even with 2 SLI cards, than the one I bought.  Also, I wanted to shy away from bleeding edge for my first build
• AMD 64 Athlon X2 (dual core) 4400+ microprocessor.  This is the 2.2Ghz Toledo core with the larger cache.  As I mentioned yesterday, its a notch or two less fast than the top of the line, which tends to be a better value.  And the consensus opinion is that AMD is dusting Intel right now.  I got the large cache because you can always overclock but you can't overcache.  The dual core is clearly the wave of the future, and more games and programs will support it in the future.  I was a bit worried that I would have some compatibility problems at first, but I have had none, even on Star Wars Battlefront 2, which was reported to have a compatibility issue with dual core
• 2 gigs of memory from Corsair, in 2 1GB sticks.  Corsair is a top company in memory.  I can't tell you how many people struggle to overclock their PC a few percent but have too little memory.  Tests show even going from 1 to 2 gigs shows real results.  I got the Twinx-2048-4000.  I debated between lower speed (ddr 400), lower latency memory and higher speed (ddr 500) higher latency memory.  I went with the latter, hoping that it was better for overclocking, but this is one issue not well addressed online.  The answer is probably here, but I decided it would not matter that much for me.  If you go with 512K sticks rather than 1 Gb sticks there are more options for memory that is both low latency and higher ddr.
• I wanted to try my hand at overclocking, so I wanted a good CPU fan.  Zalman has a lot of great products, so I went with the CNPS9500, which looks cool too.  Its quiet and keeps the cpu ice cold.  It looks huge but it fit fine.
• I may have made a mistake on the case.  I went with an Aspire X-Navigator, which is cool looking and keeps everything cool inside but is loud.  I might next time research for a quieter case.
• I splurged and went with dual SLI, because I love games, and bought two evga 7800GT sli cards.  I never really understood the variations in their 7800GT cards - some variations of memory speed, I think.  The nvidia sli chipset right now blows anything else away - it is the ONLY choice for gaming.  A pair of GTX's would have cost me $400 more.  Again, I find the best price-value point a step or two below top-of-the-line.  I didn't realize until later that DirectX 10 will be a pretty substantial upgrade, which will require new chips to support it.  That means that if you are a gamer, you will probably want a new card in 12-18 months.  Knowing this, I certainly wouldn't pay for GTX right now and might have only gone with one rather than 2 cards.
• I bought a couple of 250Gig Seagate SATA 3gb/s hard drives and put them in a raid 0 configuration.  This makes a 500 gig hard drive that is fast as hell.  This is cheaper than buying a single 500 gig and it is faster, but it will be less reliable since data is "striped" across the two drives, so that if either fails, you lose ALL the data.  Because of this issue, I bought a smaller 160 gig drive that runs separately as a backup for my data.  By the way, this was the one issue I had with my install.  Basically I had to leave this 160 gig drive unplugged until I get windows installed on the raid 0 drives and make them bootable, or else the system would get confused.  Once windows was installed on the raid drives and was bootable, then I plugged in the third drive and partitioned it and all was well.
• Power supplies seem to be a nightmare in terms of failure rates.  I use a 650 watt Silverstone Zeus and it has been fine and it had all the cables I needed.  Note you need at least 500 watt and probably 600 if you are going dual sli.
• Other components include a fast NEC DVD read-write drive (whichever one was highest rated on newegg), a floppy drive (you HAVE to have one to load the drivers for this self build if you are using a raid drive array) and a nifty little drive that accepts all kinds of memory cards on the front panel.  And windows of course.

This article on the Corsair web site provides an outstanding walk-through of how to build and set up your PC, demonstrably sufficient for even the noob since it got me through it.  I actually found this after I bought my components so I was happy to see that the component selection in the article for a high-performance gaming box was very similar to mine.  I also have the logitech cordless keyboard and mouse shown and love those too.

Have fun.

Update:  In response to the question in the comments, this build cost about $2000, which is expensive for a desktop, except that I expect to get much longer life out of this thing with performance that stays top notch for a while and many upgrade paths.  It might have been more but several parts were on weekend sale at newegg and others had cross-promotions (i.e. if you buy the AMD procesor and the evga card you get an extra $30 off).  Also note that this is a very competitive system to gaming rigs (e.g. Alienware) costing over $4000. You could take a few steps to bring this under $1500:  One 6800 GT rather than two 7800GT graphic cards would save almost $400.  One graphics card would let you save about $50 or more in the power supply, and you could easily get a good case for $50-$75 less.  Making these subs would get you a very very good rig for under $1500.  Dropping down a notch on the CPU could save another $200.  Smaller hard drive capacity could save $100-150, though hard drives are so cheap, I think it is short-sighted not to overdo it a bit.  I still remember my first hard drive card for my original IBM PC.  It was 10 meg, and my thought was "I'll never be able to fill that much memory".  LOL.

The build time was probably 8 hours, including windows installation and disk formatting.  This includes three false starts:  one, when I thought the power supply was bad but I had just forgotten to hook up the on/off signal wire; two, when the floppy drive actually was bad and I had to run to compUSA to get a new one; and three, when I struggled, as mentioned above, to get windows installed with the hard drive configuration I had chosen.  If everything had gone smoothly, I could easily have done it in 4-5 hours.

Did I mention I love this rig?  Its like the geek version of showing up to your high school reunion in a Ford GT.

I bought myself a squeezebox digital music server for my Christmas present to myself.  I absolutely love this thing.  I have finally ripped about 400 of my CD's onto my computer in my office at home, using a FLAC loss-less compression.  I chose FLAC because it was supported in firmware by the squeezebox (which thereby reduces the load on the network and the server) and because it was loss-less.  Hard disk space is just too cheap nowadays - for home use, there is no reason to use anything but loss-less ripping of your CD's. 

The really cool part, though, is that the music menu and server controls can be accessed over the network.  That means that you can choose music, change the volume, etc from any PC on the network.  OR, even better, from any handheld.  I have a Dell Axim with wifi capability now sitting on my coffee table.  To pick any of my 400 CD's, I just scroll through the menu on my Axim, or search via the search function, and hit play, and the music starts.  Love it!

My wife, who has about 400 CD's of her own, has resisted the whole digital thing, in large part because of the process of selecting music.  Up until now, she could find a CD on the shelf (which she keeps much more organized than I do) and pop it in a CD faster than she could find it using some front-panel menu on a server.  But she loves this setup now and browsing on the handheld, and I may soon be getting to enjoy the fun of ripping another 400 CDs.

Right now, we are going to buy 2 more of these things to put in other rooms.  The server software will control any number of the Squeezebox devices in different rooms, and all the rooms can have different music playing or the same thing playing.  Highly recommended for those looking for a music-only server (you will have to look elsewhere if you are also looking to serve pictures and streaming video).

PS-  By the way, I described previously the little blogger vanity function that comes with this device.

From Robert Bidnotto, echoing thoughts I had here and also here, but he writes much more eloquently:

Okay, I have had it.

Not a damned thing distinguishes the Republicans from the Democrats
anymore...not a damned thing. "No Child Left Behind" in essence, and
unconstitutionally, federalized education. The GOP-engineered federal
prescription drug subsidy program for seniors was another huge and
costly step toward total socialized medicine. The Administration's
response to recent natural disasters -- here and abroad -- establishes
the premise of federalizing all local emergencies globally, and  reducing the U.S. military into becoming the logistics wing of the International Red Cross.

And so on, and so on....

To the Left, government should whip individuals into collective
lockstep regarding its PC-egalitarian agenda on such issues as smoking,
diets, guns, cars, nature-worship, land use, political speech and
rhetoric, equality of income and "access" to things that don't belong
to you, drafting kids for "national service," using schools to push PC
propaganda, etc.

To the Right, government should whip individuals into collective
lockstep regarding its traditional moral agenda, including abortion,
sex, Darwin, cultural speech and rhetoric, marriage, national
demographic purity, drafting kids for military service, using schools
to push religious values, etc.

Neither side wants a government of limited powers, and
rejects the initiation of force against others. Neither side respects
individual rights, and rejects using the "fearful" power of government
to compel the independent individual to toe its party line. Neither
side recognizes property rights, and rejects the redistributionist
welfare state.

More fundamentally, neither side rejects the cannibalistic "morality" of sacrificing the individual to the group.

Left and Right both agree that the individual is their private
plaything, a sacrificial lamb for their respective pet causes. The only
thing that they really disagree about is which individuals they are
going to sacrifice, for whose benefit, and in the name of what cause.

You know how when you grew up, your parents and grand-parents always said stuff like "I remember when I was a kid, we didn't even have X", where X was airplanes, or TV's or ice or whatever.  I actually found myself having one of those moments in the OfficeMax store today.  I remember when I got my first hard drive for my IBM PC in the very early 80's.  It was 10MB, cost about $500, and my one thought at the time was "I'll never be able to fill up this thing".

Today at the office supply store at the register I made an impulse purchase for a new USB memory key.  My son stole mine to use to take stuff back and forth to school, and I wanted a larger capacity drive anyway.  So here I was buying a 1GB key, with 100x the storage of that first hard drive in a package about 1/100 of the size of that hard drive, and I was buying it at the cash register from a rack next to the gum.  Pretty cool.

However, I am not going to let scientists totally off the hook.  I am still waiting for my hover car, my jet pack, and my vacation on the moon, which I expected to have long before now.

Two parts to this recommendation:

First, if you are still just using Outlook find or that horrible windows search function, get one of the free new desktop search programs NOW!  I have tried several, and in general they have been the most useful utility I have tried in years.  These programs index your email, hard disk files, and web history together for unified searches.  There is some overhead in the initial indexing (run it overnight) but from then on these utilities provide lightning search results to your whole hard drive.

Second, once you are ready to try one, get the Yahoo version.   Like Google's and others, it is free.  I have tried several of the others, including Google's, but the Yahoo version is faster, easier to use, and presents the results in a more useful format.  Also, I had conflicts between the Google version and Zone Alarm, and the Yahoo program got the editors choice award at PC Magazine.  You can download it free here.

Mobile PC has a great top 100 list of great gadgets of all time, from the swiss army knife to the pocket fisherman to the iPod.  Really cool idea for a list, and the authors range pretty far and wide for their selections.

Merry Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a happy version of whatever holiday they celebrate. 

Around our house, I am always the tech support guy, fixing issues ranging from computers to hitting all the right buttons on the home theater.  Because my wife has a Mac and I and my kids use a PC, just trying to keep everyone playing nice over the home network is hard enough (god, this is starting to sound like a Chaos Manner column).  Usually, this duty is spread pretty evenly through the year, but on Christmas day, our household has an influx of technology that often needs support.

Yesterday was no exception.  First, with the arrival of yet another new mini iPod, this one for my son, a new user partition had to be created on my wife's Mac.  Later in the day I was back on the Mac, helping my son when iTunes inevitable Christmas Day server overload caused him to have a few songs disappear on him during download.  In between, I was on the PC helping my daughter with Zoo Tycoon 2, given to her because Santa knows that she loved the first version. 

Finally, towards the end of the day, I was helping my son with his Star Wars Battlefront game install.  Unfortunately, the install code on the back of the CD box did not work, so with my son panicking when I told him he would have to wait 2 WHOLE DAYS for the the tech support people to come into the office, I swallowed my scruples and went to one of the pirate sites that publish registration codes for games and successfully used one of those to get the game started.  Unfortunately, those sites slam you with pirate-ware, so first I had to fire up my backup computer I use for such grossly unsafe surfing.

Whew.  I can relax now, everything is up and running.  Imagine my relief this morning when my kids wanted to play something low tech - Yahtzee.