Gizmos Grabowski

Earth Round, Vista Flat.

The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to around the 6th century BC in ancient Greek philosophy and Indian philosophy. 
     - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth 

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My favorite headlines from bloggers discussing Microsoft hail-mary marketing for its rejected-by-Intel Vista operating system:

Windows Vista: The Official OS of The Flat Earth Society.
     - John Paczkowski

The world is round, says new Vista ad campaign.
     - Nicholas Deleon 

Microsoft ads to equate Vista-haters with the Flat Earth Society?
     - Benjamin J. Romano

Windows Vista as awesome as the Earth is spherical.
     - John Brownlee

There is irony in Microsoft's marketing firm trying to equate round Earths with flat sales of Vista, the irony being in the definition of its very name: Vista is a view seen through a long, narrow avenue.

And then there is this headline from Saul Hansell: Microsoft Tries to Polish Vista. I am not sure what Poland has to do with Vista marketing?

Readers at boingboing are photoshopping the Microsoft ad to make it more fact-filled (scroll down to see the artwork).

As Jeff Lynch says on CrunchGear, "Microsoft might be better served spending their $300 million [ad campaign] on making Vista start faster, run better and shut down quicker."

Visa 10x Slower at Printing Than Linux

Vista is painfully slow at printing to networked devices. This is particularly onerous on me, as I am working on a documentation project that involves some 400 commands. I am using documentation software that has to run on Vista, and it takes a long time to print sets of pages as I complete commands for my copy editor to check.

I wondered: did the problem lay with Vista? To learn the answer, I tested the print speed between my brand-new $400 Asus Eee 4G notebook computer running Xandros Linux on 512KB RAM, and my nearly-year-old $1200 HP tx1220 notebook computer running Vista Home Premium with SP1 on 2GB RAM.

The setups are similar:

• Print using Acrobat Reader.
• Print a page of mixed elements: black text, graphics, shaded text, and linework.
• Print over the network to the same HP LaserJet printer.

The only difference is that the HP notebook uses the latest update of the LaserJet 1320 printer driver written for Vista by HP, while the Asus uses the generic LaserJet printer driver written for Linux by OpenPrinting, a third-party foundation.

Here are the results:

Time to Display Print Dialog Box

• Vista = 31 seconds.
• Linux = 0 seconds (instant).

Time to Display Print Preference Dialog Box

• Vista = 38 seconds
• Linux = 0 seconds (instant)

Time for Page to Land in Output Tray 

• Vista = 156 seconds
• Linux = 22 seconds

Total Time

• Vista = 3 minutes 45 seconds
• Linux = 22 seconds

At least Vista is not as slow as the first time I experienced printing over a PC network. While I was technical editor at CADalyst magazine, a local reseller offered to install a 3COM network for free. If we liked the network, we could keep it and then pay for it. It seemed like a no-lose situation, but it ended up being lose-lose. Once installed, it took roughly a half-hour for the first page to appear in our central laser printer. During that half hour, the computer appeared to be locked-up. The reseller couldn't figure out the problem, ripped out the network, and we went back to walking floppy diskettes to the XT-class computer that babysat the laser printer.

That was 20 years ago. It's good to see that Vista is nearly 10x faster than that 3COM network which attempted to service our computers, all of which ran DOS and were limited to 640KB RAM + a few MB of extended/expanded memory.

But some things never change. Just as that 3COM network frozen computers for the duration of the half-hour-long print job, Vista also locks up the app for the 30 or so seconds it takes to display the Print dialog box. Progress it ain't.

Linux Trumps Vista

One the the primary headaches over Vista is its lack of support for peripherals. Even Microsoft executives bellyached that they couldn't get the rushed-out operating system working with their printers.

Like Microsoft executives, I cannot get my HP-branded notebook computer (which came with Vista installed) to connect to my HP-branded PhotoSmart P1100 inkjet printer.

I've been doing a bunch of stuff with my brand-new Asus Eee 4G notebook computer, which runs Xandros Linux OS. (I have a half-dozen Eee tutorials lined up for the next coupla' weeks.) This afternoon, I was able to connect it with the HP printer over the wireless network. Imagine my pleasure when the 4G included a driver specific to the PhotoSmart P1100 -- and effortlessly spat out a printer test page.

The driver is named "foomatic+hpijs," which was developed by the OpenPrinting workgroup of The Linux Foundation. This kills the excuse of Microsoft apologists that it is the fault of hardware vendors that crucial drivers are lacking in Vista. 

Frustrated Microsoft execs may want to take up Linux. 

Confession: I Bought Microsoft Software

I have prided myself in never buying any software from Microsoft. Ever.

The Microsoft-branded software that I have came either with the computer I purchased or was given to me by Microsoft. The list of free-bees from Microsoft included Office 97, Windows 2000, and Visio 2002.

But on Saturday morning, 9am, June 28, I entered Staples to buy a box of Microsoft software: Windows XP Pro Upgrade. It was, as I explained to my son, an insurance policy.

For the night before, I had been sitting at my 6-year-old workhorse of a desktop PC running Windows 2000 (the one whose copyright date is 1999), and these thoughts suddenly struck me: 

What if I need a new desktop PC?
I sure don't want to run Vista.

What if some crucial software requires XP or Vista, and won't run on 2000?
Some non-crucial software is like that already, such as Lotus Symphony and Solid Edge.

Judging by Windows 7 ship date (just 1.5 years from now, of which one year consists of beta testing) and its code base (Vista), I doubt it can be any better than Vista. 

So, the green cardboard box is in its white-and-red Staples shopping bag waiting for some significant event that causes me to insert the CD and double-click on setup.exe. I wonder when that might be -- if ever. New data shows that Macs are running in 80% of businesses, and I've got Linux running on a notebook computer to my satisfaction.

In any case, by January 2010 virtualization or some other technology will make Windows 7 unnecessary. I predict that Microsoft will become so consumed over losing its monopoly that 7 will feature all kinds of consumer-hostile lock-ins.

MSFT Q3: Battling Headlines

Microsoft press release, dated 24 April 2008:

Microsoft Reports Record Third-Quarter Revenue

Bloomberg.com news report, dated 24 April 2008:

Microsoft Profit Drops; Forecast May Miss Estimates

The Hidden Meaning of Wow!

Microsoft marketing launched Vista with a single word, "Wow!" A launch phrase so vacuous served as an unintended warning of the operating system's lackluster content.

It takes some time to reverse engineer marketing slogans, but I think I've finally achieved it. WOW is short for...

Windows, ow!

Zip: Vista Creates New Security Problem

About 99% of my email is spam, and of the hundreds I get, these days many have an attached ZIP file. The file names are typically ls.zip and vs.zip, and contain HTML code for a Web site in China. (ZIP files contain one or more other files, and are compressed to save file space.)

I wondered why Chinese spammers are sending ZIP files. Spammers target the typical low-level computer user, who wouldn't know what to do with a ZIP file. Then today it struck me: Vista users.

Vista opens ZIP files as if they were folders. One click, and the content is revealed. Another click, and the malware is active. It is the mistake that Microsoft makes over and over again: by adding a convenience feature, the convicted monopolist makes vulnerable the data on its customers' computers. (Microsoft even screwed up a simple task as extracting ZIP files: Vista does so painfully slowly that one thinks one's computer is a single-floppy 8088 model from 1983.)

Why hasn't Microsoft been sued out of existence for its security foul ups? The nightmare list includes embedded VBA macros in documents, automatic ActiveX downloads, hidden file extensions, automatic software updates, and the blurring of the difference between computer and Internet. These convenience features have created much grief, lost time, and damaged files over the last decade. This new vulnerability -- treating ZIP files as folders -- is another.

How to examine the ZIP files safely:

1. Open the .zip file with WinZip.
2. Drag the contents into Notepad for viewing.

In the case of this Chinese spam attack, the contents are HTML files. Use an HTML editor to safely view the content. Don't click on any links.

Microsoft Emails on Vista Problems

The law suit against Microsoft's use of the "kind of, sort of works with Vista" labels is revealing emails between executives. Todd Bishop of the Seattle PI newspaper is summarizing important parts in Full text: Microsoft execs on Vista problems.

Reading it reminds me of this one thing:

AutoCAD Release 13

Prediction: MSFT/YHOO

My prediction: Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo will screw up Microsoft even more than it is now.

Ban the Crease

Dennis O'Reilly of CNET's Worker's Edge starts of the new year with this announcement in Dual-boot Windows and Linux, step 1: Get Ubuntu:

This is the year I kiss Windows good-bye. Well, maybe not entirely, but the writing is on the wall for Microsoft's flagship operating system, and all other desktop bloatware.

He plans to install Ubantu on his computer, and the first entry talks about downloading latest version and then burning the ISO image on a CD. I trust he will have better luck than me. I suspect he has, because the column reads like it was pre-written in installments. "Tomorrow's" parts 2, 3, 4... are probably already written and ready to post.

Still, his description of Vista as bloatware really struck me. As I move the cursor around the Vista desktop, sometimes it strays to the right where the gadgets are located. After a few seconds, a vertical line appears. It's job is to demarcate the gadgets area from the rest of the desktop.

Whence the Crease

The line fades into view. It has a slight 3D effect and it looks like a crease. When the cursor leaves the area, the line fades away.

Each time I see the effect, I wonder about the programmer(s) who job it was to write the code that makes the line appear and disappear. I feel sorry for them.

If they are younger, they might be proud of it: "I wrote the code that makes the gadget separator line appear in Vista, and millions of people see it!" they'll discretely boast to family and friends. If they are older, they'll wonder about their deadend job, writing code that simulates creases.

The crease represents some of what's wrong with Vista: the "wow" effects that get in the way of productivity. A project manager somewhere decided that programmers working on the crease is more important than ensuring smooth music and movie playback.

Decouple the UI

What Microsoft needs to do is to decouple the UI from the OS. Spin off the UI programmers as a separate company. Concentrate remaining programmers on the functions that OS are supposed to provide:

-- file access
-- low-level interaction with hardware devices
-- security
-- display generation, such as font smoothing and 3D graphics.
-- networking

In other words, focus.

And perhaps 2008 will be the start of the backlash against bloatware. Couple this with other current trends -- such as being greener, cutting back use of resources, and Apple's minimalism -- and we may find that simpler products like Google Apps and Atlantis (word processor) may become more trendy and more popular than Microsoft's bloated Office and operating systems.

Kind of like Google's search engine when it first came out: simple, and it did a better job.