I know, I know. Late to the party, but I’m still seeing ads for Microsoft’s attempt to stanch the hemorrhage of mind share being fueled by Vista - The Mojave Experiment. And I have to call a bit of shenanigans. Yes, I must question the rigour.

If you’re not familiar with the play, MS ran a faux focus group to supposedly introduce people to the next version of Windows, what they called Mojave. They started by sitting people down and asking their opinion of Vista, and of course what MS shows in the videos are people’s near unanimous dislike, despite or perhaps because of never having actually tried it. They then proceed with a “demo of Mojave” and to a one, the people ooh and ahh and generally drop their drawers about it. The point seems to be, “See? Vista ain’t so bad. Even people who were ostensibly predisposed not to like it were blown away!!!”

As I watched a few of the videos I saw a few things, though. I noticed indications that the people were generally Windows-friendly, probably because they had little or no experience with the alternatives, but essentially, they wanted it to work. I won’t quibble with that. I know plenty of folks who don’t care about the OS, they just want it to work. That’s fine, but it does constrain your frame of reference somewhat. Another thing was that I didn’t notice that the people they showed appeared to be particularly technically oriented. This may be related to the first point somewhat and I have to be careful not to make too many assumptions based on the video bites they include on the site. I’ve sat through enough demos, though, by people trying to sell me something to ask a few groundwork questions like what are the specs of the machine you’re running and for something like Vista, which appears to come in about a zillion different flavours, which version of Vista are you showing me? The Home Basic or perhaps Home Premium, which I suspect is what comes on most pre-installed systems, differs in a number of significant ways from the top of the line Ultimate, which is without a doubt the version they were demoing in these videos. And for only better than double the retail price.

The importance of the hardware specs can’t be overstated either. Hardware that’s even only a couple of years old would struggle to do all the bells and whistles in Ultimate, if it could do some of them at all. By Microsoft’s own estimate (and we can trust them, right?), Ultimate requires a 1 gHz processor, 1 gig of memory and a 3D accelerated video card with at least 128 MB of memory. Experience tells me to add 50% to whatever MS says about their hardware requirements. A lot of the informal reviews I’ve read have said much the same thing. The upshot is, if you’ve got hardware that’s more than, say, a year old, expect to have to upgrade if you want the shiny. The Wintel-opoly rolls on.

My own experience with Vista is mixed. I bought a laptop last year with Home Premium pre-installed and after a few initial hardware woes - I’ve given up on getting the ethernet to work consistently - I’ve pretty much settled in. I never really seriously considered downgrading to XP. Whatever else Vista is, it is 5 to 7 years ahead of XP and it’s what MS will be supporting going forward. That said, I won’t be upgrading our desktop machine anytime soon. Overall, I’d summarize my opinion of Vista as such: It’s modestly attractive, in a conservative sort of way, but it takes up too much space, both on the HD and in memory for what it does. In typical MS fashion, they go to some length to hide the gory details of what all it’s doing protect the user from having to see what all it’s doing. Maybe my dabbling with Linux has spoiled me, but I like being able to see under the hood a bit more easily. Sure it can be a bit messy, and anymore it’s not like you need to “get your hands dirty” with the modern distros of Linux, but MS’ black box approach sure makes it difficult to tweak the system to get better performance. They don’t make it impossible, but they sure make it hard.

Microsoft’s seeming ineptitude at clever marketing is near legendary, but this effort is probably a modest stand-out from the rest. They had to do something though, seriously, because Vista was turning into another ME or, god help us, Bob. Of course, technically, Vista is nowhere near the level of sheer crap either of those two were, but that is the impression a lot of people who really don’t know any better have about it. Given the amount of time, money and effort that went into it, the situation was not tenable. Dire situations call for bold efforts, I guess and this shows it, even if some of the underlying reasoning was a bit hinky.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an old PIII with 256 MB of RAM gathering dust that I think might make a good gOS pc, just for a bit of sport.

I used to blog a lot more than I do now and if I do say so myself, I was not too shabby at it. Somewhere in the bowels of one of my computers lies a back up of the old site’s posts that I keep threatening the ether with resurrecting - so low have I sunk and so deep is my vanity. What’s held me back is that I can’t exactly lay hands on it (the backup). I’m sure i have it, I just don’t know where it is. Well, one of those nerdly pursuits that make the web such a wonderful place for half-stepping geeks like me has re-reared its head in my awareness - archive.org and its tasty Way Back Machine. In addition to letting me see what Google looked like in 1999 (hint - not much different than it does now), it’s given me access to all my old posts, after a fashion. Makes me misty just thinking about it. Eeh. Not really, but a fun little diversion nonetheless.

Well, it’s the Christmas season, and while that does merit some attention on my part, I won’t be blogging about it here. One of my regular rotation of podcasts is the CBC program Ideas. The most recent episode (download) is talking about establishing a hydrogen economy. Now granted, the interviewee is a cheerleader and there are some rather significant hurdles (one link among many, I’m sure), but I’m one of those of the opinion that human-caused climate change is most likely real and the only real point of argument is how far along it is toward the point of no return. Sorry for the run-on sentence. The interviewee in this case sees dim prospects on that regard. The possibilities he holds out, however, are heartening and the one-two punch he delivers that would keep me from throwing up my hands is that (a) he may be mistaken about how bad things really are (ok, that’s my opinion, not his) and (b) people like to fight against the odds. There’s a certain industriousness that kicks in when folks are put up to it. The point for me, though, is that there are things to be done and with a bit of thought, we can do ‘em. As I put in the title, the kids are going to get it; the question is, what are we going to give them?

I’ll own up to having been lazy during the install process, but I updated my Zune software, and now the software won’t see the hardware. The next step is to uninstall the software and try reinstalling it. Nothing about this is killer. There’s nothing on the unit currently that I would lose if by some stroke it had to re-Zune the thing. Still, it’s a bit of a pain.

Before anyone gets started, I won it at a user group meeting about 5 months ago. I debated selling it on eBay or something, and perhaps a stronger man would have, but I kind of wanted something that would play video and the screen sure was perty. After playing with it for a while, I came to a sort of peace with it. I commented to an acquaintance who was asking about it that I had a short list of about 8 things that I want a player of this class (portable, large capacity, screen for video etc.) to do - at least one I’d be actually paying for, and this player does exactly two.

For the record and for the future, here’s my list. For what it’s worth, I think I’m aiming a bit too high - or low depending on your perspective.

1. use a standard USB connection: The Zune does not.
2. double as removable storage: not without a dodgy bit of hackery.
3. related is that it not require a proprietary piece of software to manage things like content and playlists: Right. Like that’s ever been the Microsoft way.
4. use standard battery size and have removable batteries (i.e. cheap rechargables): Nope.
5. play lots of formats, including Vorbis and Theora (apparently, a pretty tall order): See number 3
6. FM radio: Score one for the Zune over the iPod.
7. external video playback: Yep, with a dealie you plug in the headphone jack.

√ х (hey look, unicode characters - I’ll have to remember that)

And while I’ll put up with a Zune, an iPod is completely out of the picture. Any annoyance I have with the Zune would be magnified by 10 with having to deal with iTunes. Evil, vile software. Your mileage may vary.

Update - All is well. I had the goofy thing plugged in when I was running the update. Apparently, updating the software was a two step process: first the application software on the computer, then the firmware on the player. I’ve been hearing reports of updates wiping out libraries and losing ratings of songs and such. My library’s intact and I never really used the ratings, so even if it’s the case, it’s no big loss for me. So far my main annoyances are really just having to do things differently than before. The interface on the player is a bit different, with things not being where they were before. The app software on the machine has gone from the quasi-functional appearance of the old app to this way-froofy pastel pink thing with slide animations, rounded corners and anti-aliased fonts. It looks like one of those really annoying all-Flash websites. Eh. Prolly just my age.