A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a new HP computer from Circuit City.  The machine is pretty nice and runs Vista Home Premium, 64bit.  Just about everything I’ve thrown at the OS has been problem free.  All but the bloody Zune Marketplace software.  It’s been nothing but a headache.  I’m having sign in issues, content that I’ve purchases no longer plays or, in some cases, does not even show up in the software.  I purchased several videos from the Marketplace.  Two of them I had to download twice..the first time I downloaded them, they only showed up as .TMP files.  I was able to figure out what they were, but I bought them to watch on the bloody player.  So, I downloaded them again.  This time, they downloaded correctly and, after RESTARTING the Zune software, they showed up under Collections/Video/TV.  The next video I purchased also required a second download. However, no amount of restarts seems to matter…they just refuse to show up in the software.  I can see them in Windows Explorer and even PLAY them using the Windows Media Player.  BUT…when I right click on them and select Play with Zune, the Zune software tells me that the content was purchased elsewhere and it refuses to play them.  

I never had a real problem with the Zune Marketplace software until now. I would read the forum posts in the Zune.net forums and see the problems that other said they had.  Some of them, though, I just dismissed because the writers seem to want to find problems and publicly berate the Zune and those who use.  I am starting to think, though, that those people were not far from the mark.  I like the Zune allot.  I love the Marketplace software.  But these problems are frustrating enough to make me want to move elsewhere.  I am hoping it is just a problem with the 64 bit version of the Marketplace software and that a fix will be coming.  I should not have to reboot my computer before using the software nor should I have to restart the software every time I purchase something.  If I do, I will spend the rest of points and never buy anything again from the Marketplace.

Microsoft needs to make sure that everyone has a great experience with Zune.  There is far too much competition out there for them NOT to ensure a great experience.  Granted, Zune Marketplace and iTunes are the only real ecosystems, I could surely marry the Amazon MP3 store to a nice smartphone (like the PRE when it is out) and use Microsoft’s own sync technology to move content around.  I have no problems doing so.  And, I’m sure, others would not have a problem doing so.  Most ‘normal’ people would just buy an iPod.  As atrocious as iTunes is, it does work. It may insist that the iPod you’ve had for a year is new every time you use it, it still PLAYS YOUR CONTENT.

I finally got around to installing the Safari 4 beta.  I have to say that it is notably faster than anything else I have been using.  It smokes Chrome and leaves Firefox and IE in the dust.  It seems to render everything correctly and, graphically, looks a bit more polished than previous versions of Safari for Windows. 

• What I liked

Of course, I like the speed…contrary to an earlier post of mine where I stated speed was not much of a factor to me.  It is nice not to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load.  It is even better when the page renders properly.  I also like the Coverflow bolt on.  I’m not a huge fan of Coverflow, but it seems to work here and is similar to a few add ons for Firefox and is also similar to IE’s quick view feature.  I rather like the minimalist approach as well.  IE and Firefox tend to get crowded in the upper quarter of the application. 

• What I don’t like

Those damn tabs.  They are in the wrong place.  I also don’t like the way it imported my links from Internet Explorer.  I have not found much else that I don’t like.  Yet.

After I have used the browser a bit more, I may post more about the experience, though I don’t know what more I can say.  It is a browser, after all.  Safari 4 works well enough to use on a daily basis, but I am still sticking with IE 7 for now.  It’s my comfort zone, I suppose.  Safari for Windows (and now, the Windows 3.1 version as well, see below) is a competent browser and if you like Apple products then you should love Safari.  I am not a huge fan of Apple, but they’ve done a decent job with Safari 4.

(the screen shot was taken while I was playing with a Windows 3.1 skin using Stardock’s Windowblinds.)

Television for the geekier among us has always been a feast or famine deal. It’s been mostly famine, unfortunately.  Especially among the ‘big four’ networks.  Last season, though, CBS gave us geeks our due.  A little comedy called ‘The Big Bang Theory’ debuted. The show, about four geeks and a sexy neighbor, is full of in-jokes, science fiction and comic book references is spot on with the geek culture.  I put myself in that culture, though I hope I’m not AS geeky as they are.  I am married and have a kid, so I think I’m already a step ahead.

Every episode, so far, has hit a home run in the comedy department.  I do, however, find myself laughing at things that neither my wife or son understand.  Sometimes, that makes me wonder about myself.

The show has the perfect cast as well.  Johnny Galecki, formerly of the Rosanne Show, and Jim Parsons are perfect.  Parsons is the perfect choice as Sheldon.  Sheldon makes Spock look human.  Parsons’ dead pan delivery and perfect timing is the key to the whole show and is what makes it work.  The other two geek characters on the show, Howard and Rajesh, augment Sheldon and Leonard and serve as the sidekicks.  The sexy neighbor, played by Kaley Cuoco, serves several roles on the show.  First and foremost, she is the object of desire for three of our heroes:  Leonard (who has the best shot at her affections,) Howard (the resident pig) and Rajesh (the silent one because he cannot talk to women while sober.)  She also is the straight one, i.e. not always in fantasy land.  Cuoco also has perfect timing and creates the right amount of sexiness and that ‘just got out of bed’ look. 

It is Parsons, though, that really carries the show.  The guy deserves an Emmy for his work on the show. I don’t wish to slight the other cast members-they are all terrific-but if Parsons left, the show probably would not last. 

The writing is superb.  The writers had to be geeks themselves or, at least, lived with or was around a geek quite a bit.  The references made, both real and those set in science fiction, are spot on and some of them just aren’t mainstream.  For example, on a recent episode, references were made about a movie, Saturn 3, that starred Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett.  The movie was set in a mining station on a moon of Saturn.  The film was a flop at the box office and is not widely known. What show would throw out such a reference?  Ok, the Simpsons might.

I hope this show survives.  It is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise mediocre schedule.  I cannot think of another comedy that is funnier.  The Office lost it about four episodes after it began.  The junk that follows Big Bang never was funny.  Scrubs should have been scrubbed years ago.  I could go on.  I think you get the picture, though.  If we only had more of the Big Bang Theory and, quite possibly, Pinky and the Brain, television would be much better. 

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, the United States was a protectionist country.  It did not openly get involved in matters foreign to its soil.  It scoffed at the League of Nations, an entity that it helped create.  It took two world wars before the United States realized that it was sharing the planet.  This lesson, apparently, has been lost on the EU. 

Currently, the EU is engaged in a discriminatory lawsuit against Microsoft.  The antitrust lawsuit-yes, another one-against Microsoft concerns the bundling of the Internet Explorer browser.  They contend that by doing so, Microsoft limits consumer choice.  Never mind that one can very easily download Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari.  This, apparently, is not good enough for the wise ones in the EU.  At one point, supposedly, they wanted to force Microsoft to remove IE completely. That would even out the playing field, right?  Well…how do you download and install a browser if you do not have one?  Yes, I know one could use the FTP client or put one on a thumb drive, but, for ordinary people, that is not an option.   However, I am sure the wise ones in the EU would have thought of that.  Right?

Well, maybe not.  Now, word is they are leaning toward forcing Microsoft to include the competing browsers.  Now, I don’t have a real issue with this…IF there were good reasons to do so.  There aren’t.   This whole thing was brought about by Opera, who now just look like a group of whining children who didn’t get their way before, so now they go running off to mommy.  No one cares about Opera.  More people use the crappy browsers that come with their cell phones.

Now, Firefox and Google have joined Opera in this petty little squabble.  They see mommy about to spank the big, bad brother and decide to chime in like more jealous, whining siblings.  I’m just waiting for Apple to chime in as well.

The whole thing is just stupid.  Other companies do exactly the same thing: Apple bundles Safari, the various Linux distributions include browsers, you get a browser with your cell phone.  Why is Windows any different?  Don’t give me market share crap either.  It might have been valid ten years ago, but not today.  No, this is just the EU’s way to strike back at both Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, the United States.  I have to wonder if Microsoft were a Canadian company or a European company, this would be a non-issue. 

To me, this strikes as a more protectionist practice than anything else.  Opera is, after all, the home grown browser in the EU.

Now that the ‘product’ has had a bit more time to develop, I thought I should revisit the browser wannabe.  My first impressions, months ago, were mostly negative.  In hindsight, I was probably a bit harsh on the browser.  I remember getting a bit miffed when my blog was not displaying correctly.  I used the browser, off and on, for a few weeks.  I eventually uninstalled it.  I got tired of wondering if I were seeing sites the way they were supposed to be seen…that is, complete. I wasn’t. I’d go to Firefox or IE and see far more of the site than what Chrome was rendering.  Curious, and knowing that it was built on WebKit, like Safari, I decided to fire up Safari to see if it were having the same issues.  Well, it was and wasn’t.  Safari rendered more than Chrome, but I found that it, too, was not completely rendering sites, my blog included.  I had not paid much attention before, but Safari was not rendering all of the sidebar content nor the Sprout plugins…odd, since Sprout is an Apple thing now.  Go figure.

So, I downloaded the latest version of Chrome and install it on my Vista 64bit installation.  Guess what?  It runs fine.  It *SEEMS* to render things completely.  I *APPEARS* to be fast…but only after you’ve visited a site a few times.  This blog rendered slowly at first, but the next time I went to it, it came up pretty quickly.  Other sites, like CNN, came up right away.  Of course, Google took no time to render, but even the twisted sister browser on my Motorola Q renders Google fast.  Hell, so does the Kindle. 

Speed does not seem to be a problem overall, though.  I was happy with the speed that most sites rendered in, but I would not go so far as to say it is the fastest browser.  I still think Safari is faster.  I kind of like Safari for Windows.  Though I don’t use it as my everyday browser-that is still IE 7-I find myself using Safari more than Firefox-which has just gotten meh, why bother?  But, we’re talking some Chrome here.  As long as I don’t have to wait more than a few seconds (10 to 25, at most) for a page to display, I’m happy.  Any longer, I start to get frustrated.  All of the browsers I use render in adequate time.  I don’t place as much emphasis on speed as others do.  I would rather have a functional browser that renders the page completely than something that pops up in a second, but leaves half the content behind.  And, by the way, I suspect the reason that Chrome was so fast in it’s earlier incarnations was because it was not rendering everything.  Just a thought.

Overall, the new version of Chrome is far better than that first version I played with months ago.  BUT…I find myself wondering why I would use it.  I already use IE, Firefox and Safari on my PC.  Why would I want another?  The only compelling reason to use Chrome is the ‘make it look like an app’ feature.  That is not enough, though.  It suffers the same thing that Opera does…why use it?  Scraping the crud from the packages and you are left with adequate browsers.  It is a matter of which features do you use the most?  I suspect the majority of people reading this use Firefox and use it because of the plug ins.  That is the only real reason to use it versus Safari, IE, Opera or Chrome.  I’m not big on plug ins, I do like a few, so I use IE, mainly.  I use Safari often, mostly because it is not Firefox and does an adequate job.  I use Firefox to take advantage of some of the plug ins when I want them.  I just don’t have much need-or desire-to use Chrome or even Opera (even though Opera is probably the best of all of them.)

Windows Mobile 6.5

Last week, Microsoft showed off Windows Mobile 6.5 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  The ‘new’ version sports a new front end to the otherwise old and somewhat tired underpinnings we lovingly call Windows Mobile. 

Microsoft has added more gestures to the operating systems UI.  They have added this odd honeycomb home screen that contains your program icons.  There’s also a Zune like menu system (but it is NOT Zune’s interface grafted onto the UI.  It is only similar in that the menu is lowercase, top to bottom.)

IE Mobile is now more like the desktop version of IE 6.  Wonderful…they took the already bad browser that was in WinMo and made it like the bad desktop version.  The positive thing about bringing IE 6 to the phone is that you will get a better browsing experience.  At least IE 6 renders pages more faithfully than that ancient browser that was included with WinMo.

From the videos I’ve seen, Windows Mobile 6.5 is better than the version in my Motorola Q, but, overall, I don’t think it is much of a leap and certainly not enough to get people to buy a phone using that OS versus, say, the iPhone or a Blackberry.  Personally, I’m wanting the Palm Pre.

Palm Pre

Speaking of Palm,  Engadget is running a story about a skin for Palm OS that makes it emulate the UI of the Pre.  Check it out here.  The front end is not free, it costs $14.95.

Palm confirmed, last week, that there will be games for the phones webOS operating system.  They also said that no native applications are going to be allowed on the phone.  I am guessing that means at normal people who want to create applications for the device.  They are going to release an SDK for webOS.  You’ll develop applications using web standards-JavaScript and HTML.  I guess that is fine.  One notable application we WILL see on the phone is Flash.  Take THAT, iPhone! 

Apple

Rumors, rumors, rumors…Yet another rumor about a $99 iPhone circulated last week.  Turns out, that there really is a $99 iPhone: an 8gb REFURB iPhone from AT&T.    Another rumor swirled around Apple locking up Samsung flash memory through April.  That COULD mean a new phone or phones are in the works.  Possibly for a June release.  Stay tuned.

I’ve never thought much about the whole ‘social’ thing that seems to have taken the internet by storm.  The most ‘social’ I’ve been is probably this blog and the comments system.  Then Microsoft expanded the ‘live’ part of the Live Services.  I also created a Twitter account, use Friendfeed and, more recently, created a Facebook account.  I use Twitter, but not like most of the people I follow and at least 30 people find my few posts interesting enough to follow me.  While I find Twitter interesting, I am not sold on it.  I feel the same about Facebook.  Facebook is a puzzle to me.  While I’ve been fortunate enough to find so dear friends from high school, I find it is too much work to actually use. 

I feel that web destinations like Facebook and Twitter should be fun or, at least, informational.  I find Twitter to be very informational. Most of the people I follow have interesting things to say and are, for the most part, informational and/or entertaining.  Andy Ihnatko, for example, is a blast to read.  So is Dick DeBartolo-the GizWiz.  Others, like Long Zheng and Paul Thurrot often tweet newsbits about Microsoft or Windows.  I follow a few, though, that tweet all damn day.  They never stop.  Some of it good stuff, most is just noise.  It’s like radio for the internet, in 140 character snippets.  Kind of weird.

Facebook, though, is another thing.  The site is very busy.  The menu system is just awful.  I get these really weird invitations to ‘play’ some game with someone who generally is not even around when I am.  What the hell is that?  The damn thing just takes too much thought to use.  It, like Twitter, seems to be something you should be on all day.  I just don’t have that kind of time.  And, frankly, I don’t care that someone is having a cup of coffee and eating a donut while watching Battlestar Galactica and I am pretty sure no one cares what I’m doing while watching that same show or anything else, for that matter.  Well, maybe my wife would. 

Don’t misunderstand me, though.  I’m not saying these things are bad.  If you like and enjoy them, that’s great. Facebook is more of a mystery to me than Twitter.  While Facebook and Twitter are both blocked where I work, I can still sneak a peek at them during lunch.  Both have mobile versions of the sites and both kindly offer to send me text messages if I want them.  Thanks, I’ll pass on them for now.

Friendfeed is very useful.  It can aggregate your rss, Twitter and other feeds into one page.  It dynamically updates itself.  It is extremely useful.   I would suggest you go there and create your own account.  It’s free and easy to use.

Microsoft has done a fair job integrating more ‘social’ features into the Live Service.  Though I did read an article today about how they want to turn it into another Facebook, Live, right now, has just enough social features to be useful, but not over done like Facebook. 

I think my biggest problem with all of these types of sites is that I just have not integrated them into my life.  I tend to not think about Twitter or Facebook.  Sometimes it is days before I tweet (I don’t count the automated tweets that are sent when I post to this blog) and other days I use it allot…for me, anyway.  Besides, do you really, really care that I just finished watching Battlestar Galactica and was confused beyond belief?  I didn’t think you did.

Well, it seems the judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit feels that the lawsuit does not, after all, warrant class-action status.  Judge Marsha Pechman ruled that the ‘plaintiffs cannot demonstrate that common questions predominate over individual considerations.’ That means that each PC buyer must initiate their own legal actions if they want damages from Microsoft.

While the good judge fell short of dismissing the suit entirely, it is, nonetheless, a big victory for Microsoft, which could have faced a significant verdict.

The financial hit to Microsoft, from this case, is much less than it could have been should the case go against Microsoft. The release of more potentially embarrassing emails from the company is also significantly reduced.

The whole case seems ludicrous to me.  The PC’s that got the ‘Vista-capable’ stickers were, in fact, capable of running the operating system.  They may not have been able to take full advantage of the operating system, but they could run Vista.  The few that I remember looking at all had the disclaimer that some features of Vista were unavailable.  The bigger problem, though, is that Microsoft failed to make it more clear what the differences were.  They also should never had bowed to Intel.

I suspect Microsoft will not repeat this mistake with Windows 7.

So, as I recently wrote, I bought a new computer.  It is fast, really fast, or so I thought.  Last night, on the drive home, I stopped by a local, soon-to-be-shuttered, Circuit City store to see what was left.  I have to say, I felt dirty doing so.  Circuit City is a home town company and it is sad to see them go this way.  But, they are liquidating.

Anyway, I was walking down the computer games aisle and figured I would buy a game that would take advantage of all of this new found power I have.  So I bought Crysis, from Crytek and EA.  Now, this game, when it came out, had very high requirements.  Requirements, by the way, that are ONLY found on a piece of tape on the bottom of the case.  My computer seemed to exceed those requirements by quite a bit.  How much computer would I need?  This game came out almost two years ago, after all.

Once installed, I started the Vista Game Explorer-yes, I use that-and it said that Crysis required a machine with a Vista Performance rating of 3.0 but a machine with a rating of 5.0 was recommended.  Since my machine clocks in at 4.0 (all of the ratings are 4.3 or higher, with the processor, memory and hard disk clocking in at 5.9-the graphics are what bring it down to the 4.0.)  So, I thought I’d be OK with the game set at the mid-level graphics.

Well, I was wrong.  The game seemed to be running at a frame rate of 10.  SLOW.  I thought, what the hey?  How many Cray Supercomputers do you need to play this thing?  Holy cow.  I’m not even sure a Cray could handle this.  Maybe that cluster of PS3’s that NASA used might be enough.  Maybe that AND the Cray.  Not sure.

I guess if I keep this game for the next three years, this computer’s replacement might, just might, be able to run the game.  Of course, I probably won’t care then. 

A bankruptcy judge has approved the sale of the Hard Rock Park near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  The park is to be sold to FPI MB Entertainment LLC for $25 million.  The park cost $400 million to build, making the sale quite the bargain.  The sale, to close on Thursday, was challenged by another company, Coastal Entertainment.  The judge denied Coastal Entertainment, saying the offer was ‘too little, too late.’

FPI MB Entertainment LLC has, among it’s partners, two of the original investors in the park.  Baker Leisure Group, a Florida company who has worked with Disney and Six Flags, is also among the partners in FPI.

According to Myrtle Beach Online, FPI said it had agreed to destroy the Hard Rock branded merchandise before the park reopens IF they could not reach a new licensing agreement to continue using the Hard Rock brand.  FPI indicated that they did want to continue to use the brand.

This has been a most bizarre saga.  The park, a victim of bad timing and poor PR management, is nice little park and is a heck of a steal at $25 million dollars.  The parks two major rollercoasters, Maximum RPM and Led Zeppelin, cost more than that.  Its admission price was way too high and tourism in that area was down.  Add to that the high gasoline prices and a general lack of promotion and you have a recipe for failure.  The pullout of a major investor did not help either.

The new owners hope to have the park open before Memorial Day weekend.

OK, so I’m listening to the This Week in Tech podcast.  This week, Leo Laporte, John Dvorak and Molly Wood were discussing the Sirius XM Radio situation.  The company is in serious trouble.  Both Molly and Leo were wondering why in the world anyone would subscribe to the service and Dvorak chimed in with ‘$120 a year is expensive.’  Then, they go on to suggest that other alternatives are better and PROCEED TO EXPOUSE THE iPhone.  WHAT?  Why the hell does it always come back to this device?  Leo suggests that you can use some application from the iTunes store on your iPhone to listen to streams in your car.  Whatever.  Look, I don’t have an iPhone.  I don’t plan on buying one anytime soon.  $120 a year is NOT expensive to me, considering Sirius XM is the ONLY place I can get some of the content I want.  I do not use my satellite radio for music only, in fact, I listen to very little music.  I listen NASCAR radio.  I listen to the comedy channels.  I listen to the news stations.  I rather enjoy not having to search for radio stations while travelling.  Satellite radio is worth the money, IF it has something for you.

I don’t know what planet Molly Wood lives on, or Dvorak or even Laporte.  It generally like all three, but there are times I just have to wonder what reality they live in.  I must be a California thing.  Since most of the podcasts I listen to are out of California – San Francisco, mostly- it just seems like a different world.

TWiT is not the only one.  I have written about this before.  Alex Lindsay and the This Week in Media crew are another shining example.  To these people, broadcast media is non-existent.  Alex wonders why people buy magazines.  The TWiM crew use the internet to get television programming…why would you limit yourself to times and days for a program?  While that might be a good point, the fact is they are in a minority.  A very small minority.  And, seriously, until I am assured that Comcast won’t cut my service for going over some arbitrary bandwidth limit, I am not going spend much time watching Hulu or where ever else I could get programming.

So, how do you get your news and entertainment?  Do you subscribe to Sirius XM?  Do you still watch television?  Share your thoughts.

This week in Apple

• Another iPhone lawsuit.  Picsel is suing Apple over the graphics rendering technology in the iPhone.  They claim Apple treads on several of Picsel’s patents.  If successful, Picsel stands to gain a truck load of cash.  Isn’t capitalism…er, our patent system, great?
• AdMob claims that iPhone owns 51% of the US smartphone traffic.  Nokia is number one worldwide, but iPhone beat all in the US and beat Motorola by ten percent.  Impressive for a device that has been out for less than two years.
• Apple claims that jailbreaking your iPhone is illegal.  Apples says that to jailbreak or ‘free’ an iPhone for third party applications requires breaking the mechanism that prevents adding an application to the device outside of iTunes and that violates the DMCA.  Apple and the EFF are arguing the issue.
• Snow Leopard to do something Windows has done for a long time: load printer drivers on demand.  Yep, for years, Windows has only installed drivers for printers as needed but, apparently, Mac OS X has installed all drivers, regardless if they were used or not.  Starting with Snow Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X, only drivers for existing printers will be installed.  Call it progress.
• Apple ‘requests’ that Google leave out multi-touch in Android.  I suppose that due to the tight relationship between the two, Google will do what ever it needs to protect that relationship, including bowing to Apple’s ‘request’ that multi-touch be omitted from Android, Google’s smartphone operating system. An Android powered smartphone with multi-touch would be too much of a threat to iPhone. 
• Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter is on the way.  In another cash generating move, Apple put these funky mini DisplayPort connectors on the new notebooks, making it more difficult-and costly-to use said notebooks with normal display devices.  So, for a mere fifteen bucks, you can now use those displays with your new notebook.

Over the last few days, I’ve purchased a new desktop computer and, today, a printer.  Both are HP and are of good, not great, quality.  The computer, an HP Pavilion a6750f, I purchased at Circuit City.  Because of the liquidation sale, I got the computer at a decent price.  The computer came equipped with an AMD Phenom x64 (quad core), 8gb of RAM, 750gb HDD (sata) and has Windows Vista SP1 (64bit).  I have to say, setting it up was a snap.  It took about thirty minutes for it download all of the updates and configure itself.  This thing screams.  I knew it was going to perform better than the machine it is replacing, I just didn’t realize how much better it would be.  The old was starting to feel a bit on slow side, but only because it is choked with an underperforming video card and 2gb of RAM.  Oh, the hard disk is REALLY sluggish.

The 6750 has a wonky DVD drive, or, rather, the door is wonky.  When you eject a disk or open the disk door, the tray comes out as it should. But when you close the drive, the door gets in the way of the tray.  You have hold the door down just a bit so the tray  can retract.  It is not broken, just poorly designed.

Vista 64 is awesome.  I knew it was better, more stable, than Vista 32 as I had installed it on a separate partition on the old machine and my son’s HP laptop is Vista 64.  His laptop has 4gb and the thing is fast.  It has yet to blue screen or freeze or mess up.  And he plays all of his games on the thing.  Vista 64 just works.

Of course, I wanted to transfer some things from the old machine to the new. So I tried to use the Windows Easy Transfer utility that comes with Vista.  It started out working fine, but about halfway through, the old machine started dropping the connection.  I restarted the computer and tried again.  This time, WET kept telling me that the file had invalid data.  I finally gave up and just set up shares and did it the old fashioned way:  drag and drop.  Worked great.  Oh, file copy over the network SEEMS faster than copying to another internal drive or a USB connected drive.  Maybe it was just me.

The printer, an OfficeJet J6450, features wireless, two sided printing and has a sheet feeder.   Unboxing the thing was worse than setting it up.  HP uses more bloody tape and plastic sheets than I’ve ever seen.  Naturally, it uses different print cartridges than my old printer, so those last two carts I overpaid for are now useless.  Well, I will probably include them with the printer when I get rid of it.

I wanted to use the printer in a wireless configuration so everyone in the house can use it and I don’t have to worry about what my desktop is doing.  This way, everyone can print directly to the printer.  Setting it up was easy.  Install the software first, connect a USB cable, go through the ‘wizard’ so the printer can join your network, enter the network name and, if you have security (and I hope you do) you have to enter the passkey.  Unplug the USB and you are done.  You do have to install HP’s printer driver on each computer that is to access the printer. 

Overall, this has been a relatively painless and somewhat pleasant experience.  The last time I did this-about three years ago-it was a real pain in the buttocks.  Of course, it was XP then.  The more I use Vista (and Windows 7) the more I realize just how awful XP is now.  It’s funny how looking back on something that seemed so great at the time can be so different now.  XP is a real dog now.  It’s butt ugly, not as stable as some seem to think it is and is just a pain to work with.

As for Hewlett-Packard, I’m a fan.  I’ve had really good experiences with HP products and, for the money, I’ve not found anything better.  About the only non-HP products we use are the monitors.  The one HP LCD panel I had, it came with the last computer, just stopped working one day.  I did some research and discovered that it was an internal power supply issue-a capacitor.  It’s still dead.

Vista 64 bit should be the only version out.  It manages memory much more efficiently, seems more ‘peppy’, and, so far, compatibility has not been a problem.  Of course, in three years, I might be repeating my XP feelings when I replace this machine…

• Microsoft to open retail stores.  Microsoft, today, announced that it was planning to open a chain of Microsoft branded retail stores.  The stores would serve to showcase key Microsoft products such as Windows 7, it’s Live products and Windows Mobile.  David Porter, formerly with Wal-Mart and Dreamworks, is heading up the effort.
• Windows 7 could go to manufacturing in August, 2009.  CNet has a report saying that Microsoft is set to release Windows 7 to manufacturing.  That means the operating system would be in retail for the holiday season.
• Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight, has reached 1.0 status.  Novell released the milestone build on February 11.  The 2.0 version is slated for a November release.  The 1.0 release is available as a Firefox download for Linux and PowerPC based Macs.
• Google licenses Microsoft’s ActiveSync.  Google has licensed the technology so it can allow more tighter synchronization between the Google Sync service and Exchange.
• Ultimate Extras are toast.  Microsoft has confirmed the death of the ‘ultimate extras’ program-such as it was.  Even though there will be a ‘Windows 7 Ultimate’ edition, it will not have the ‘extras’.  Worse, if you upgrade from Vista Ultimate and have those extras installed, they will, reportedly, disappear.

It appears that a suitor has come forward to rescue the bankrupt Hard Rock Park.  The newly formed company, FPI MB, is going to buy the park for $25 million dollars-a fraction of the $400 million it reportedly cost to construct.  The company has put a $2.3 million dollar down payment.  The sale is subject to the Bankruptcy court approval.  A hearing has been set for February 17.

The company hopes to have the park up and running again by Memorial Day Weekend.

No word, yet, as to who is involved, but a Myrtle Beach local says one person ‘might be Russian.’  Journalism at it’s finest, no?

Once the judge approves the sale, the deal is supposed to close by the 20th of February.  If not, a million dollars is deduced from the price.  For each day beyond that, an additional fifty-thousand dollars will be deducted.

No word on whether or not the ‘theme’ of the park will be changed.  The prior owners had made a payment to the Hard Rock company for use of the name and brand through 2009.

This is good news for rollercoaster and amusement park junkies who live anywhere on the east coast of the United States.  This is a terrific little park.

Amazon announced the Kindle 2 eReader today.  The new Kindle is thinner, nicer looking and sports a new e-ink screen.  The new device, available on February 24, weighs in at 10.2 ounces and 1/3 of an inch.  It includes 3G wireless so you can download books in under sixty seconds and it’s still ‘free’. The battery is said to last 25% longer than Kindle 1 and includes 2gb of storage. 

The new screen is 20% more responsive and has 16 shades of gray, compared to four for the Kindle 1.

There are several new features, including the Read to Me feature.  Read to me does just that: it speaks whatever book/blog/magazine you want. 

Another new feature is the sync feature.  You may now sync between your Kindles and ‘other’ devices.

The new device also sports a mini-joystick for better control over ‘pointing’ to items on screen. Gone is the ‘elevator’ and thumbwheel from Kindle 1.0.

Full image zoom is also available.

Kindle 2 costs $359 and should be available on February 24.

Kindle 1.0 Software Update

Kindle 1.0 owners also got some love today.  Software update 1.2 was released and has  added a few  new things and removed one thing.

New Features

• Device sync
• Image zoom
• Enhanced content management: You can now delete things from the home screen.  Scroll to the item and press ‘backspace’
• Improved character and font support:  New fonts include Greek character and monospaced fonts.

Since Amazon ceased the ‘Ask Kindle Now-Now’, they removed it from the Experimental Menu.

I’ve installed the new software, but have not noticed any significant difference, other than the menu changes.  I suppose that is a good thing.

Today, we have things like the DVD, the CD and digital downloads that we use to get our software onto our computers.  But, back in the day, we had paper tape, cassettes, the floppy disk if we were fortunate or, most common, our hands.  Yep, we typed in program code, frequently, in order to get our software onto our computers.  The most common ‘typed in’ code were Basic language programs typed in from listings in magazines.  Because BASIC was machine specific, if you did not have that machine, you had to debug the listing in order to get it to work on your computer.  Sometimes, though, the listings were either assembler code or-worse-machine level code. 

I remember my Dad buying a copy of SCELBAL 8080 BASIC for that Altair we had.  He got the package as a paper tape as well as a fully commented assembler listing with the machine code.  Well, we did not have the paper tape reader working, so … we keyed in all 8K of the language.  It took us several DAYS to key in the hex codes.  Unfortunately, we were not the smartest people on the planet and did not frequently save our work that first day.  It was during the summer and the electrical co-op was having supply problems and, well, you get the idea.  We must have started over three times that day before we starting saving what we had keyed in. 

Since the program we were using was just the ‘monitor’ program, my Dad had to improvise with the cassette input and output functions.  He configured it so that the cassette acted as both the screen and keyboard.  Anything displayed on the screen went to the tape on record and on playback, the tape acted as the keyboard.  I remember that my SC/MP based computer worked much the same way, only way slower.

Well after about three days, we had the listing all keyed in and saved…on several tapes.  We did a memory dump and compared it with the listing, correcting typos as we found them.  Finally, we were ready.  ‘G 0100’ was the command to start the BASIC.  It worked!  I can still feel that excitement even though it was nearly thirty years ago.  My Dad had the hardest time getting me away from the computer.  He had recently installed a ‘graphics’ card, so I was busy trying to adapt some code from another magazine to work with this SCELBAL thing and the VDM 100.  I eventually got it to sort of kinda work.  The VDM 100 was not quite a dot-addressable board, but you had full cursor control and lots of special characters that you could ‘glue’ together to make ‘graphics’. 

My first SCELBAL BASIC program, that I wrote, was a Space Invaders like game I called Zap the moon man.  There were two rows of three ‘moon men’ that danced back and forth on the screen.  My cannon was stationary in the middle of the screen, but you could shoot your missile in degrees, right to left, to hit the moon men.  It was not overly fast and could not multitask, so while the missile was drawing, the moon men stood still.  Then, the moon men would move and the missile would stop.  It worked well enough to impress my Dad and the neighbors.  And myself.  I was so excited. 

Over the years, I often wish that I still had a primitive computer like that Altair.  It was a lot of fun and aggravation.  It was slow, compared to the computer I am using now.  And noisy too.  It took minutes to load a program from tape or days to key them in by hand.  But it was a fun time.  And exciting too.  This was all new stuff.

There are times I wish that I still had that same excitement.  I don’t.  Now, it’s a job, a very good job, but still a job.  Hard to get excited over the next flavor of information tracking databases or Lotus Notes.  It pays the bills, though.

I was recently watching the movie “War Games” and couldn’t help but get a bit nostalgic over the technology in Mathew Broderick’s room.  The JVC Vidstar VHS deck, the HUGE 8 inch floppy drive and, of course the IMSAI 8080.  My father had the JVC (which was the first VHS deck ever made) and an Altair 8800, the IMSAI 8080’s main competitor.  Feeling all warm and fuzzy, I went down memory lane…

The Altair 8800 was, arguably, the first and, perhaps, most important, home computer kit that was affordable.  The 8800 held several ‘firsts’ including an industry standard setting bus-the S-100-and was the computer that got Microsoft off of the ground. 

First sold in 1975, the 8800 was designed by Forrest M. Mims and Ed Roberts.  The company, MITS, sold the kit for about five hundred dollars and thousands were sold in the first month.  The computer would be featured on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine.  MITS shipped the magazine the only prototype and, unfortunately, it was lost in transit.  A mock up was sent to the magazine for photographing.  Les Soloman, an editor for the magazine, eventually received an actual computer, serial number 0001.

The computer featured Intel’s then-new 8080 microprocessor.  The processor, at the time was over $300, way too expensive for the 8800.  However, Ed Roberts was adept at buying in OEM quantities and was able to purchase the processor for $75 a piece, thus making the computer affordable.

Mind you, in the 1975, this computer would have come with the case, power supply, mother board and CPU card only.  You would have to purchase a memory card, interface boards and some kind of storage and I/O devices.  It was bare bones, but you could configure it any way you wanted.

The computer also lacked an operating system.  This is where Microsoft came in.  The story goes like this:  Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed a version of BASIC for the computer without actually having the computer.  When they demoed the language to Ed Roberts, it crashed. They came back the next day and it ran flawlessly.  Roberts agreed to sell the Basic.  It pretty much got Microsoft off of the ground.  In the ensuing years, Gates would write two letters to the hobbyists pleading his case against software piracy.  See, there were more copies of Basic being used than were actually sold.

All in all, the Altair 8800 (which, supposedly, got its name from a Star Trek episode) was the spark that lit up the personal computer scene.  Before the two Steve’s begat Apple, there was MITS and the Altair 8800.

You might be surprised to know that you can purchase a NEW Altair 8800.  That’s right,  Go here to purchase the spectacular Altair 8800.

I was going through some links and came across a link to something called ToastyTech.  This site is, supposedly, dedicated to the history of the GUI.  In actuality, it is mostly just a site that takes every chance it gets to trash Microsoft. Indeed, there is an anti-Internet Explorer section on the site.  There is, though, some good stuff there. The author made a decent attempt to chronicle GUIs of yesteryear, like GEM, Visi-On, Mac OS, Lisa and Windows.  Finally, there is really nice links page.  And this where I discovered that there is still a decent amount of people who are clinging to Windows 3.1.

One of the links takes you to www.calmira.de.  Calmira is a replacement shell for Windows 3.1. It tries to make you think you are really using Windows 95.  I remember trying this several year ago on an old Toshiba laptop that I had around the house.  I had two hard disks for it: one with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 and another drive with Windows 98 installed.  The laptop barely runs Windows 98, but it ran DOS/Windows 3.11 just fine.

Calmira does a halfway decent job of replicating the Windows 95 shell.  Some of its users have even gone so far as to attempt to replicate Windows XP and one developer has even tried to replicate Longhorn, though it is not nearly as successful as the XP or 95 attempts.

Judging by the amount of screenshots and users on the site, Windows 3.1 still appears to be the operating environment of choice for many people.  Why, they do is beyond me.  I cannot imagine using Windows 3.11 for my primary system, but, I suppose, there are those who do so because they can or they are just in denial that the world has moved on.  Doesn’t matter.  If they are happy with it, who the hell am I to say otherwise?

There used to be a shell replacement that made Windows 3.1 look like Mac OS 6 or 7, but I don’t recall it’s name. 

Calmira is very clever and probably worth the download if you are still stuck in the past.  It is free.

By the way, the original site I went to has disk images for Visi-ON, GEM, Windows 1.01 (bootable diskette,) beOS and more. Check it out here (scroll to the bottom of the page for the downloads.)

• Palm Pre in stores in May?  BoyGenius reports that it found Sprint  documentation stating that the Pre would replace the Treo 755p, which is to reach end of life at the end of May.
• Microsoft to release six flavors of Windows 7, only two will be publicly available at retail.  Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional are the only two versions to be ‘pushed’ in Retail.  Windows 7 Ultimate will also be available, though in smaller quantities and NOT pushed by Microsoft.  Windows 7 Starter, Basic and Enterprise will be available to corporations and OEMS, with Basic only available in ‘emerging markets’.
• Zune to be releasing original video content.  Microsoft is partnering with MEAN Magazine to produce a series of videos called ‘Cinemash.’  Cinemash will ‘comedically reproduce’ classic scenes from popular movies.  The series will be free, ad supported and available via the Zune Marketplace.
• Microsoft to alter UAC in Windows 7…again.  In response to critics this week, Microsoft announced that two key changes to UAC will be made:  any UAC control panel will require elevation;  changes to UAC itself will require elevation.  It is good that Microsoft is listening to testers and critics alike.
• NASCAR comes to it’s senses and puts an end to the crazy points shuffling.  NASCAR, today, said the points shuffle is over and Marcos Ambrose gets the 35th points position, getting him each of the first five races of the season.  Through some funky ‘alliance’, Brad Keselowski, a rookie this year, was set to ‘inherit’ the Chip Ganassi #41 points, even though Keselowski drives for Richard Childress.  ACK!  Madness, I say!  Just race the damn cars already.
• Engadget thinks Multitouch in Windows 7 is a gimmick.  In it’s ten second hands on, Engadget concludes that the multitouch gestures are inconsistent and rather pointless.  But, let’s face it, unless you use your computer’s monitor as a tablet, touch is going to be rather pointless.  And, to be fair to them, Engadget really spent more than ten seconds.  It was at least eight minutes as this video demonstrates.
• Michael Phelps admits photo of him smoking marijuana was real.  While this is a major lapse in judgment and certainly tarnishes an otherwise clean image, it does not mean the man is bad nor should it preclude him from being a role model.  Kellogg has now announced that they will not renew Phelps’ endorsement contract.