Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

Costco ZT Affinity AMD Phenom II x4 945 Win7 Home Premium Review

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Out of box:

The expectation and included pictures had it that the machine had PS-2 plugs for both mouse and keyboard.

It had one PS-2 plug labeled with a keyboard picture.

The included Microsoft keyboard and mouse were both USB.

Turns out, that’s perfect for me. I could use an extra, junker, USB keyboard for a current project. USB mice are as good as PS-2 mice. After I get the machine set up I’ll use one of the old NMB (AT/PS-2) keyboards. I’ve stopped using the IBM AT boards because programs want F11. And, the AT boards take too much juice to be run from a USB port, powered or not. Anyway, it’s important on a main machine to use a PS-2 keyboard port because of the Control key problems with PS-2/USB keyboards.

The system is a better configuration for me than what I thought I had bought. No negative points.

Let’s fire up Win7…

Win7 comes up asking your country, time, etc. There’s a glitch in the day selector’s display attributes and for some reason the time zone was Pacific but the time was Eastern. No biggy. No points plus or minus.

Norton comes up with a huge buy button labeled “Activate Now” and tiny text link: “Close without enabling security”. Negative points.

After the Norton thing, the UI went to the Control Panel. Since I always set XP systems to Windows Classic, the Win7 Control Panel was unfamiliar. It did not take long to remove Norton. And I spent a couple minutes playing with desktop backgrounds and such. Postitive points.

Played two or three games. The presentation was very good, both audio and visual. Ties to the net were well balanced. The whole “experience” in the game area was smooth, comfortable and pleasant. Many positive points.

Aside from Norton (a program that remains on PCs because the US government IBM-ed Microsoft), the only clutterware on the box was something called “Express Gate”. There was no indication of what it was, though it seemed to want to copy bookmarks from browsers. A quick web search found that it’s ASUS’s quick-OS. It boots Linux from motherboard flash memory in a few seconds when the PC powers on. That makes a PC act like a countertop device, able to hit the web quickly without all the time a full OS needs to start. Negative points for presentation inside Windows. Express Gate is not useful to me as I keep main machines on 24×7. But I know no downside to Express Gate being on the machine.

Express Gate: Must be turned on with an “Enable” buried in the BIOS. So only geeks would know it exists. There really should be something at the Windows level to explain it and to turn it on and off. But, it’s nice. Quick and clean. I didn’t look at it enough to see for sure, but the big gap appears to be no concept of a user. Without a user, the 3 communications pieces (Pidgen, Skype and Firefox) are not integrated and Firefox has no secure password storage. It’s easy to see why there is no integrated user name / password, though: slippery slope and probable customer troubles. They have links for support forums, etc. which I did not explore. The games page had its own feedback thingee. I was impressed by Express Gate. With an integrated, secure password store I can see a consumer PC not being fully booted very often.

Anyway, just to be clear, positive points for lack of clutterware, ZT.

Alerts: Win7′s alerts seem nice enough. Perhaps a bit too quick to go away and I did not see a way to get a history of them. With no Norton, they lead you quickly to IE8 and a Microsoft web page with a large list of anti-virus products. Once IE8 comes up you’re also led quickly and easily in to Windows Update, where the first download seems to be Microsoft’s anti-virus program. The “experience” is not too in-your-face and justified as it will be some time before anti-virus/firewalls disappear in to the fabric of the universe. Slight positive points. YMMV.

A Win7 background picture of note is the startup/shutdown/logon image. Its Rorschach ink blot impression to me is that it covers the human demographic completely. In the South East corner there is a leaf or snowflake or white bird or something appearing out of the glare. I’m thinking, “aromatherapy”. There’s estrogen in the South East, y’all. But, now look at the North West. Jet trails. Why no tiny outline of an F-16, I cannot understand. Anyway, the whole picture is Bauhaus sparse, but weird. Positive points.

Disk organization: It appears they’ve gone Unix-like to put users in their own directories off C:\Users. Positive points. But a hassle for me as the root directory is admin only and I have a lot of system things off root in my standard setup. Turns out, this was not a lot of trouble even for my evolved setup. A couple of environment variables and all the important things went under C:\Users\alex.

“My …” directory names? Negative points. Childish. A single word is good. i.e. Music, Pictures, etc. That keeps the space character out of the directory name, too.

Let’s play “find the IP address” – without cheating and running ipconfig. Or going to the firewall and viewing its table. … … Buried where it’s not too hard to find. But buried. A less buried window that shows “IPv4 Connectivity — Internet” could have included the IP address directly. I’m guessing that anyone who knows what IPv4 is would be able to guess what 192.168.17.100 meant. Negative geek points.

What? Hold on. Let me check the date. 2010. Yep. And Windows dialog boxes are still not expandable? I fuss about Linux not remembering window size and locations. (Yes, “Linux”.) Negative points.

Windows versions: Home Premium (whatever that is) is like XP Home in that it does not remember networked drive connections. The bait and switch is still there. You can tell Windows to store your “credentials”. You can tell Windows to connect the drive when you log in. But Windows doesn’t listen. Negative points. And sloppy.

Negative points that Home Premium does not allow remote desktop. No ssh server either. Hmmm. Can 4DOS do ssh server? No. Cygwin, then. Yuck.

The usual negative points for Microsoft’s money stream of product differentiation. Windows comes in 11-teen confusing versions. You don’t care. You get whatever happens to be pre-installed on the box you buy. But these 11-teen versions remind you that Microsoft is – like any bank, insurance company, telephone company or government – not on your side. Count your fingers, my friend, after you shake these guys’ hands.

All in all. ZT gets a thumbs-up for a clean system. And Win7 gets thumbs-up for the same. Win7 does not scream “DOS 4.0″/”ME”/”Vista”.

Now. The grass sure looks green. Do I go back to Windows from Ubuntu?

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The Great Oil Crisis of 2008

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

A couple things seem interesting about the recent oil price spike:

  1. Where is the “Oil Crisis”?
  2. Where is the mention of the trash-by-the-freeway effect?

Huh?

  • Consider #1. If it were 1973 or 1979 (gas-line years in the States), buckets of ink and hours of heavy-breathing news anchors would have beaten the “oil crisis” in to us. Why not this time? Is it because Nixon and Carter aren’t president? Not literally “because” of them, perhaps (though a silly argument could be made for that), but rather, is the mind-set that yielded Nixon and Carter as presidents no longer with us – even in the media!

    (Just to be clear, a “crisis” is what we have when someone wants to “do something”. If you don’t know what that means, wait a few years and watch the results of a few “do something-ings”. Hint: The guy who wanted to “do something” will never, ever mention it until they have successfully shifted the blame.)

    Or is this “oil crisis” missing to only me simply because I’m not exposed to these media guys. Every few nights, does NightLine lead off with a dramatic graphic mocking The Onion’s “War for the White House”, followed by talking heads wringing their hands and pronouncing this week’s events a turning point in the history of mankind and proof that there is no end to the “crisis”. …Uh. … Ah. … Is NightLine still on TV? … Whatever.

    My bet is that there is a different attitude out there from the one that was prevalent in the ’70s. The air’s simply been cleared. We don’t breath that stench any more.

    Consider what a true and beautiful thing that is, oh you who bemoan today’s world.

  • #2: A queue or flow system flowing near a critical density will crystalize from the occasional, tiny distraction. Think of how a piece of cardboard blowing slightly toward the traffic lane of a packed, fast-flowing freeway can cause a 1 hour traffic jam. You have driven through such a big slowdown but have seen no cause for it.

    The was no “cause”.

    Such slowdowns are a natural characteristic of dense, flowing material in this universe.

    The way I understand the world’s oil system is that it’s a flow of material from underground muck to hot air thousands of miles away. The “oil” changes hands many times. It’s a huge system and highly, highly optimized. There are predictable elements to it – both on the source end and on the sink end. But, it’s so leanly built that the predictability is optimized out of the system. Leaving a classic, saturated, queue/flow system.

    Which leaves us with “This will happen. You can’t predict it.”

    That is not satisfying. … Hence, we have plenty of left-brains ready to supply an explanation for why the coin, this year, came up heads.

    There is actually a reason why I’m guessing that a large part of the oil price spike was simply a traffic jam. I looked all around and found no information that accurately filtered from the “price” of oil the effect of the dollar’s drop against other currencies. Of course, there are calculations out there, but they sure looked like horseshoes and bombing. If the effect of the kahuna of “explanations”, the dollar’s value, is a wild guess then one might suppose that the oil guys who were stuck in the traffic jam simply didn’t know when that jerk right ahead of ‘em would get off the d****d phone and move, for Christ’s sake!

    Quick argument against this: Where are the traffic jams in food? It’s an old story that “major cities only have 3 days of food; we’re all gonna starve; blah, blah, blah”. The food chain is very evolved and optimized. Where are the (mathematically) catastrophic spikes in the system? Answers I can think of off hand:

    1. Major cities have a lot more food stocked than 3 days’ worth.
    2. There are many alternatives to each type of food. This makes the system robust in the same ways that non-deterministic packet switching systems are robust compared to older systems, and in the same way that traffic flow is more robust through a grid-pattern city than through a more modern, flow-controlled, tributary-to-artery system.
    3. Hey! Remember the toilet paper “crisis”? Well, toilet paper’s kinda like food.
    4. And, panicing lunatics played the OH MY GOD! ALL THE RICE IS GONE FROM COSTCO! card this year.

      So, maybe there are serious traffic jams in the food system.

Posted in Bloggy Things, Money, Opinion | No Comments »

Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 3

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Note files:

Notes for me so I won’t spend a 1000 hours in the same Google-is-your-friend territory again:

http://www.tranzoa.net/~alex/public_stuff/going_to_spring.txt

And for running TSE under Wine:

http://www.tranzoa.net/~alex/public_stuff/running_tse_under_wine.txt

With luck, they won’t get a lot more added to them.

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Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 2

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Lots of particular lessons learned.

Here’s the latest:

If Ubuntu’s System Monitor program and the Linux “top” program are to be believed about CPU and RAM usage, then modern computers are not memory or CPU bound.

They are disk bound.

After 30+ years of being RAM bound.

Now, spring is a modern, dual core Intel with 8 gig of memory. The CPU is rarely busy to any extent. Memory use doesn’t go above 3 or 4 gig after running for a couple weeks – with the XP VM running, remember. And lots of other things running (including throwing away those 20-30k emails every day).

But.

But, the cursor freezes – especially in the VM. And there are long delays in routine operations while the disk drive is busy, chattering to itself.

Test it yourself: rsync a 400 gig drive’s contents to your main drive. Don’t expect things to work well while this is going on. Programs will spend a lot of time in hourglass mode, whether they show the 11th century timepiece of not. It’s bizarre how the VM’s XP’s cursor goes in to mondo-lag mode, too. Huh? What’s going on? Is the cursor location cached to disk in a blocking thread?

This is interesting because of the current transition in mass storage.

Let’s review.

1) The optical guys muffed the transition up from DVD. Yeah, you can’t beat the media price of optical. 10x under hard disk. But that boat left the dock and they missed it futzing around with Blu-Ray/HDVD/whatever wars. It’s over. The gamers and Hollywood might use these things to pack better quality stuff and more content on ‘em. But the computer world simply doesn’t have any need for cheap storage in the 10-100 gig range. Maybe not even in the 100-1000 gig range! Hard drives are too cheap and they don’t have the insert-the-11-teenth CD problem. Hard drives provide the bottomless bucket in which to put stuff now. Thumb drives and CDs satisfy the sneaker-net need.

2) NAND flash has plummeted in price. It’s possible to get a working drive for a couple hundred bucks and that will drop in a year.

The latter, I figure, is the reason why the drive manufacturers’ stock prices look like buggy whip companies. The Wall Street guys may all be running flash drives in their laptops already.

I have also figured a couple of things:

1) You can’t have too much storage. You’ll fill it with video and the like. And dupes. And backups. And history of everything ever done on your system, or seen or heard by your system, or whatever.

2) Hard drives are still staying 10x cheaper than flash.

And wondered, can a hard drive with some brains and a few gig of cache look like a terabyte flash drive?

The predicted death of disk drives (caused by bubble memory) was my key, early lesson to ignore hysteria-hype. Since learning that lesson I’ve only bought in to two hysteria-hyped things (with, by definition, no false negatives):

  1. The internet.
  2. Leave #2 for another time.

Heck, I even backed off predicting the death of CRT tubes for all these years. By the time it finally happened, it had been hashed over so many times that it was, “Uh. Yeah. Finally. … So, how ’bout them Ducks?”.

So, that’s it. Time for a fast hard drive.

Posted in Bloggy Things, Opinion | 1 Comment »

Scattering MegaSystem to Ubuntu/XP – Part 1

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Email stopped coming in.

I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to use gmail. Not on a $33 a month service … in 2008.”

So, poor asuka (aka tranzoa.net) almost worked its aged, 128meg, 200mhz Pentium II heart out hosting tranzoa.com.

gina (aka bran) overflew its 1 gig system disk and floundered its powerhouse, dual Pentium II 250mhz, 512mb trying to process email to the tune of 20k – 30k spams a day. It’s amazing what a 9 year old, $100 Boeing Surplus machine can do in a pinch.

The old ViewSonic 21″ secondary monitor faded to dark.

The replacement box, spring, took a week to find a working motherboard from Fry’s and had a hard disk failure in a month (power outage – maybe not something to even notice except that it failed on some data needed to boot).

To get spring running I managed to toast MegaSystem’s motherboard. This was not well timed.

For perhaps good reasons, perhaps not, spring’s OS is Ubuntu H 64. The new Megasystem XP runs in a VMWare box. That’s the theory. In practice, I have spent a boatload of time moving much of my personal computing operation to spring’s Ubuntu. Browser, email, IM, picture editing and much of the housekeeping stuff built over years.

This would be the fun part of computing if I were a computer person. Remember the verified, 70′s observation: “Normal people expect computers to treat them badly. Computer people demand it.”

I am not even a normal person. Computers exist for me, not the other way around. At 10 years old, I claimed as much while half-stepping arithmetic homework. And, I claimed right.

This has not been the fun part of computing.

Ah, well. I lied. There was one fun part. Since MegaSystem was dead, its 3 gig of RAM fit rather nicely in Scott’s old “tara” box with the Auburn VO stickers and all. So, to keep the status quo, asuka is still running on antiquated hardware. It’s just running on 10x the CPU and 20x the RAM. Makes a difference. Doesn’t take 5 minutes to deliver a web page, for instance.

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XP SP3 Install

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Wherein I promote a fleeting computer experience to cosmic proportions…

It was a slow night of continuing to get nothing done, so I figured, “Why not go ahead and do the XP SP3 update?” Why not, indeed.

Let’s go back to the late ’70′s or early ’80′s. At the time I called Microsoft “the GM of 2020″. Remember GM – General Motors? They are still around, losing a few billion dollars now and then. Cadillac and Saturn are both GM cars. GM makes some other cars, too. Something called a Chevrolet, for instance. Sold to corporate/government fleets, one must suppose. Anyway, back in the day, GM was the company. And my faith in computers said Microsoft would be the company in 2020.

Fast forward to 2000 or so, when Microsoft made their catastrophic decision to not split up in the face of being IBM’d by the feds. That was jolting. Microsoft had done a very good job of not catching the monopoly disease, but they took a wrong turn with that decision. The pundits said that Microsoft had rolled the feds. I was never sure what these guys were smoking. Microsoft is a rounding error on the fed’s budget. Charles Atlas can’t roll an aircraft carrier. Microsoft decided, in brief, to acknowledge that they were no longer a private company but were an adjunct of the US government. Brussels, too, continues to claim a piece of ‘em! Sad.

But I bought the stock. Heck. They were local. They had a lot of strengths and were fundamentally in great shape and would be for a long, long time.

Since Bubble 1, though, the big, center parts of Microsoft have been drifting. Their treatment of IE is a perfect micro-picture – ignored until the world has long passed them by. Then a sort of a “me too” upgrade.

They had caught the monopoly disease.

A couple of years ago, I test-installed Ubuntu on a new, vanilla box. Then, for fun, also installed the Vista RC1. Hmmm. Ubuntu struck me as very competitive against Windows from a few years before then. Ubuntu was “getting there,” but not quite “there.” It could have been called quite different from, but equivalent to Vista. Not quite up to XP level.

Recently, Ballmer decided that it would be a good idea … here’s the punch line … to buy Yahoo.

I sold the stock.

A week or two ago I upgraded ‘alexlap’, the 7-8 year old Ubuntu Dell laptop. This upgrade was to Ubuntu “H”, Hardy Heron. 3 problems:

1) 2 obscure config files fussed about being changed and what should be done about them?

2) With those 2 files, I experimented with the option to see the “differences side-by-side.” The side-by-side display is unusable. And the UI flow is a little disconcerting when you step through the options to check out the config file differences. You can’t go wrong, but you’re given a single, ambiguous button after you view the “side-by-side” comparisons.

3) Apache (custom installed on ‘alexlap’s desktop version of Ubuntu) didn’t start up properly. Apparently, the machine name, “alexlap”, is used somewhere in Apache’s configuration. I’d not put “alexlap” in /etc/hosts as a special name. Or something.

Put another way, the upgrade went very smoothly. Surprising, as the previous “G” upgrade from “F” presented a lot more fussing to ignore. And the laptop is unquestionably unusual hardware stocked with extra programs left over from various experiments and tests.

So, last night it was XP SP3 time for my main PC. This PC is a stock box, already completely up to date with respect to Windows Update.

Result: Infiniboot.

Here’s the nice part about the XP update experience: They offer, as a pop-up when Windows is booted in Safe Mode, something called “System Restore”. I tried it because of the reassuring message that the “restore” could be undone. The system booted OK after it was “restored” to a couple of days in the past. So there is the good and troubling news: The Windows mechanism to handle catastrophic failure is quite smooth.

Cosmic conclusion: No new information. Microsoft should make a note to wake up when Apple’s consumer share shoots past 30. Can you say “Christmas 2008?” Is Microsoft on the road to specializing in fleet sales of their Impala of OS against a world of Crown Vic Linuxes?

Posted in Bloggy Things, Opinion, Product Reviews | 1 Comment »

Squished Glasses found. Now all we need is a free country.

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Those glasses that disappeared on the logging road were found. Not by me. I walked past them twice and didn’t see ‘em the third chance, even. But a woman waiting for her husband said she had seen some broken glasses near the car.

We looked about a quarter mile down the road.

Apparently, the woman, her husband, I, and 1 ATV had been on the road in the previous 24 hours. The ATV did not miss the glasses.

The frames were pretty flattened. The lenses were laying apart in the rocky mud.

I wiped the lenses. A little ding in one was all the damage. But, then poly-carb lenses are the only way to fly.

The frames? Well, that’s what’s amazing. They were flat. Later, at home, I figured what’s the harm in trying to bend them back in shape. They did! The lenses are now a bit off kilter in the frames. The frames are still a little twisted and oddly shaped. On the whole, not quite good enough. But usable in a pinch.

Which got me to pinch-land.

The glasses didn’t come from Costco. They were insurance fluff from a regular eye doctor’s office. So there was no way I was going to get a dupe of the frames to drop the lenses in to. Well do I remember back when vision insurance started “covering” glasses. Oddly enough, the price of glasses went up at the time (for me anyway) by exactly how much insurance covered.

So I went to Costco to order some lenses to fit one of my many old frames (Costco, $60. Lenscrafters, $255.)

Experience has taught me to keep my current eye script on my Palm. Guess what? “In this state we can’t make lenses without a signed prescription.”

Huh? I can’t get glasses without doing some kind of Bulgarian Post Office thing (stand in 6 different lines to mail a letter)?

It’s not hard to imagine how such a disgusting law got passed.

Back when I was young there was much discussion of “socialized medicine” (what the AMA called a proposed government medical system to make it sound as bad as possible). The AMA was really, really intent on not having the government get in to medicine. They were, even then, a closed guild and wanted the organization that protected the guild to butt out – of everything but protecting the guild.

Time went by and, as so many other groups have found, the AMA, et al, found that there are some good points to having a central system enforce consumption of product from one vendor. All to protect the consumer, mind you. Having your own army, paid for by someone else, can sure beef up the bottom line. But, anyway, at least they have a product! One can probably think of some tax supported entities without a product at all.

Whatever. My mind went back to when I had to get glasses made in a hurry while in some odd place where no one in the country had a head shaped and sized like mine. Apparently, that was a free country, where ever it was.

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