Posts by Hoagiebot

There was already an absolutely excellent bio-pic on Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac (with a little bit of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure), and that was the made-for-TV movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" that was released by Turner Network Television in 1999. I enjoyed it so much that I bought it on DVD and still watch it regularly. You can see the Wikipedia page for the film here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley

Noah Wyle and Joey Slotnick did excellent portrayals of Jobs and Wozniak respectively in the film, and despite being only a made-for-TV movie it was very well done and very compelling to watch. I say just hunt down a copy of this film from somewhere and call it a day-- I can't imagine any film involving Seth Rogen in any capacity as being any better.

Trying to moderate spammers in Yahoo! groups now is abysmal!

I myself just experienced the sheer horror and lunacy of the new Yahoo! Groups user-interface first-hand. For nearly a decade now I have been the moderator of a small special-interest Yahoo! group. The Yahoo! Group that I moderate, while at one-time was once fairly active many years ago, has been completely dead since 2006 or so. Still, I refuse to look into shuttering the group completely because there are some interesting discussions, files, and other such stuff uploaded there, and I would like to leave that available for any members still remaining that might want to access some of that stuff someday. It's almost a nostalgia thing from a different era, you know? Since the group is for the most part completely dead, I don't check it as much as I should. In fact, I don't even log into the Yahoo account that I moderate the group with very much anymore-- I pretty much only log into it just often enough to keep Yahoo! from closing it.

With a long-dead Yahoo! group it is easy to become completely complacent about it, which to my discredit, I allowed myself to do. Well, I logged into the group earlier tonight, and despite the fact that all new members to the group are supposed to be moderated until I approve them to be able to post content, some spammers still managed to get into the group a few months ago somehow, and absolutely *trashed* the entire Yahoo! group on me. Yeah I know, it's my fault for not checking how the group was doing sooner, but as I said, after years of seeing nothing but tumbleweeds there you grow complacent. Anyway, in a relatively short amount of time the spam-accounts had posted several hundred new files to the group, new photo albums, dozens of new links, and worst of all, set up a daily re-occurring "event," which of course only contained a message on how to get to some spam site, that then posted daily reminders to the group for every single day for months, choking out the group's "conversation" section with dozens upon dozens of spammy reminder messages. This is where the insanity of the new Yahoo! Groups user-interface comes in, because removing all of the spam content and then the spammers themselves became a tedious chore of monumental proportions.

To explain what I mean, do you know how in most web-mail user-interfaces you can select several e-mail messages at a time, usually through check boxes, and then perform the same action on them simultaneously, such as deleting them all? Considering the fact that you have been able to do that sort of thing in web-mail user-interfaces for at least a decade-and-a-half now if not longer you would think that such a feature would become obvious to have when it comes to any web application where you have to manage a lot of messages. Sadly, whoever designed Yahoo! Groups "Neo" is apparently oblivious to the obvious, because I found myself having to select every single spam message one-at-a-time and then deleting them one-at-a-time, then repeating that process for the spam links, and then again for the spam files... It took me almost two hours to get rid of all of that cruft! The only thing that I was able to do in one go was delete the daily reoccurring spammer-created "event" all at once, which was nice because I was about to lose my ever-loving mind at that point!

I mean really, why can't I select a whole bunch of messages, or files, or spam links, or photo albums, or what have you, and delete them all with one click of my mouse? Why do I have to go through them all one-at-a-time? It's such a miserable and unproductive site design that it's absolutely painful! There is only one thing that I can say which must be painfully obvious to everyone by now (well besides the fact that I am apparently not that great of a group moderator that is), and that's that whoever redesigned the Yahoo! Groups site must never have actually *used* a Yahoo! group before in their lives! The usability of the new site-design is just so unbelievably poor its unfathomable! The horribleness is simply beyond words! There is no easy way to quickly do *anything* that you need to do as a moderator to maintain a functioning group! All I can ask at this point is what in the heck were the people at Yahoo! thinking? Why has 2012 and 2013 become the years that all user-interface design for just about everything gone off the rails? When did the patients start running the asylum? I just can't understand how so many organizations (Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ubuntu, The GNOME Project, et al.) could all lose the plot when it comes to UI design so quickly and completely! It's as if the people at these companies simply hate us, and want to make us all suffer for their pleasure or something! Either that or they are all hiring trendy hipsters to rewrite their UI's while simultaneously kicking sensible people out the door! I really hope that Yahoo! back-peddles on their new Groups UI design at least to some degree, because it is an absolutely abysmal user-experience as it currently stands!

It would make a great conversation piece a couple decades from now...

One of these brand new Mac Pros would look absolutely fantastic sitting on my shelf next to my NeXT Cube workstation. However, based on the astronomical cost of new Macs and the fact that I was never a MacOS fan, I think that I will happily wait some 19-years to buy one from a vintage computer festival for relative peanuts just like I did with the Cube...

If only there could be "Silvermont"-based netbooks

I currently have a little Acer netbook that has an Intel Atom N455 "Pineview" microprocessor in it, and I love it. Understandably, the little netbook is no processing powerhouse, but then again I don't need it to be. Instead, I like its light weight, small size, portability, and adequately-sized keyboard. It's great for taking notes at developer user-group meetings, it's satisfactory for browsing the web, and when I am working out of a hotel room I can easily type e-mails, short documents, or edit Excel spreadsheets on it-- all without having to lug around a much larger and heavier laptop, and without having to payout hundreds upon hundreds of dollars to buy an expensive "Ultrabook."

Why do I bring this up? Well, I just can't help but think about what could have been. With how much I like my trusty little netbook now, I would absolutely *love* to buy one sporting one of these new "Silvermont" Atoms in it. Think about it-- if they could produce a netbook with more than 3-times the performance of the current ones and still somehow keep its cost within the typical netbook range of $250, that would be a real winner as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, that will almost certainly never happen. To the best of my knowledge all of the current big PC manufacturers have completely discontinued their netbook lines, and the netbook form-factor has been eagerly declared as "dead" again and again and again by the media. To think that I would have to shell out some serious $$$ to buy an overpriced Intel-based tablet or "Ultrabook" to experience the benefits of these new chips in a portable form factor is just depressing.

Even the dead work harder...

Man, I wish that I worked for Microsoft's marketing department-- from the looks of it, it appears that Microsoft's brand marketers do even less work on a yearly basis than the Porsche 911 body-style designers do at Porsche!!! I mean seriously, I don't think that Microsoft's branding team have performed any service requiring anything even close to the firing of a single brain synapse in years. For example, calling the new ARM version of Windows 8 "Windows RT" when both the ARM and x86 versions of Windows use the WinRT platform was anything but brilliant. Naming their new tablet PC the "Surface" when they already had a touch-based UI table computer called the "Surface" was even worse, and now this whole "Windows 8 style" term for the UI of Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 7.5, Xbox 360, and Windows 8 is potentially the most confusing naming blunder of all. I swear, if these jokers had to name a car they would call it the Microsoft "Drive Shaft," and then call its gauges and steering wheel (e.g. its "user interface") "Horse and Buggy Style," even though it doesn't involve a horse or have reins! *face palm*

CDE is 20% cooler with ponies!

Check out the photos of the Sun SPARCstation 2 running the Solaris 7 CDE desktop in this article:

"Rainbow Dash Pulls a Kevin Flynn" - Equestria Daily

http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/10/rainbow-dash-pulls-kevin-flynn.html

Rainbow Dash can make anything look good, even CDE! :)

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Full disclosure for those of you who are interested: I am the same "Hoagiebot" that is mentioned in the Equestria Daily article above, and the SPARCstation 2 that was photographed in the article is from my exhibit at last year's Vintage Computer Festival Midwest (VCF-MW). I had spruced the machine's CDE desktop up with the custom MLP:FiM "Rainbow Dash" X PictMap backdrops to make it more eye-catching and a better conversation piece for the festival's attendees. The other items shown in the photo are Sun Microsystems-related in nature, and were also part of my little exhibit. The plush toy dog and cheetah were actually promotional items handed out by Sun Microsystems at some of their conferences back during the 1990's. The plush dog was based on a real Greater Swiss Mountain Dog named "Network" the dog, which was Sun's animal mascot through the late 1990's and a real-life pet of Sun co-founder and then-CEO Scott McNealy. The plush cheetah was handed out to promote the Sun UltraSPARC III microprocessor, which had the development codename of "cheetah." The blue mat that the two plush toys are sitting on is actually a Sun Microsystems Field Service Kit that I own. The second Sun SPARCstation that you can partially see in the far right of the photos is an even older Sun SPARCstation 1.

It's a shame that Oracle no longer produces Sun workstations-- you can't really put technicolored cartoon ponies on database appliances! What fun is that! *sigh*

"We’ve just passed the 500 million licenses sold mark for Windows 7, which represents half a billion PCs that could be upgraded to Windows 8 on the day it ships. That represents the single biggest platform opportunity available to developers."

There Microsoft goes again, happily spouting that any machine that can run Windows 7 can also effortlessly be updated to run Windows 8. Unfortunately, that is simply not the case. Apparently Store Partner Program Manager Ted Dworkin must not be taking into account all of the millions of Windows 7 Starter edition netbooks that are out there with 1024x600 resolution screens. They can run Windows 7 just fine, but if you install Windows 8 onto them they will not be able to launch a single Metro app due to the inflexibility of Microsoft's seemingly arbitrarily defined Metro 1024x768 minimum screen resolution requirement. The best that a poor netbook user can do in that case is alter a value in the Windows registry to enable screen downscaling, but then you have to put up with a distorted and very blurry display just so that you can click on that Metro weather app.

I bring this up because it is a real personal thorn in my side since I own one of the before-mentioned Windows 7 Starter netbooks. I installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview onto it thinking that it would go as smoothly as Microsoft hinted that it would only to later get the rude awakening that Metro apps refused to work. I realize that it has become popular lately to try to marginalize the millions of netbook users that are still out there and pretend that they just aren't as important as all other Windows customers, but don't outright lie either and claim that all 500-million Windows 7 PCs that are out there are all capable of flawlessly running Windows 8. They aren't.

Don't forget the absolutely horrible epidemic of "capacitor plague" that struck the computer and electronics industry about a decade a go due to many Taiwan-produced electrolytic capacitors that had a botched formula for their electrolyte. I mention this as a massive example of "counterfeit" parts causing problems instead of just "defective" parts causing problems because the electrolyte formula was originally proprietary to a Japanese company, but then was stolen and delivered to the Taiwanese manufacturers in question through industrial espionage. Unfortunately, the worker that stole the electrolyte formula copied it down incorrectly, so the millions of knock-off capacitors that the Taiwanese manufacturers produced weren't stable and leaked or exploded after a relatively short amount of time. Dell alone lost around $300-million identifying, repairing, and replacing computer components that contained these bad capacitors. In fact, I personally still have a pile of early 2000's-era computer equipment ranging from computer motherboards to terminal servers with blown or leaking electrolytic capacitors in them that I still need to re-cap and repair if I ever want to get some of them to work again.

I also have heard first-hand tales told to me about the plague of counterfeit steel bolts being produced by places like China. They are labeled as being made of a particular strength and quality of steel when in reality they are made from much poorer and weaker steels. It has gotten so bad that now many organizations are having to take the time (and money) to test all of the bolts that they buy to make sure that they actually meet the specifications that they are labeled for to keep these potentially dangerous counterfeit bolts from being accidentally used in their products.

This counterfeit part problem can be potentially very serious depending on what kind of system the part is installed into and how off-spec the part is. There are real reasons for organizations such as the military, the aerospace industry, and even consumer electronics manufacturers to be extremely concerned-- should the device that fails due to counterfeit parts be particularly important, it could mean the loss of a large amount of time and money, or in some cases possibly even lives.

Why is MSFT forcing a "False Dilemma" with Windows 8?

I just don't understand why Microsoft is so suddenly against allowing users to be able to customize their Windows using experience so that they can no longer use Windows the way that they want to. Why does Windows Aero Glass *have* to now be completely removed from the desktop side of Windows 8? I can understand Microsoft's motivations to want to make the desktop side of Windows 8 look more consistent with the Metro side of Windows 8, because currently the Windows 8 Consumer Preview looks like exactly what it really is-- an operating system with multiple personality disorder. And I can also see how the simplified new Metro-esque desktop-look would benefit battery life and system performance because it would take so much less resources to render onto the screen. However, with that said, I still don't see why customers shouldn't still be given the option to be able to switch back to Aero Glass if they want to, or even the Windows 2000-esque "Classic" look if they want to.

I for one always really loved the look of Aero Glass. I personally thought that it looked fantastic. I have Windows 8 Consumer Preview running on my netbook right now, and I have an orange-tinted Aero Glass theme which color-coordinates nicely with my current primarily yellow and orange-colored desktop wallpaper image. It's aesthetically pleasing to me, and the performance of Windows 8 Consumer Preview's Aero desktop has always been just fine on my little single-core Atom-powered netbook. However, at the same time I realize (even though Microsoft doesn't seem to) that what I think is aesthetically pleasing isn't necessarily going to be true for everyone else-- Some people may prefer the "Classic" Windows desktop look of Windows 2000, others may prefer the "Luna" desktop theme of Windows XP, and still others may actually prefer the brand new upcoming Metro-esque desktop look. As a result, people should be able to choose the desktop appearance that they like the best, and go with it. And while using a sparse, simple, low-on-resources blast-to-the-early-1990's-past Metro-esque desktop interface may make a lot of sense if you are trying to squeeze all of the performance and battery life that you can out of an ARM-based tablet, when you are using a multiple-core powerhouse desktop machine with one or more high-end graphics cards installed in it and running off of wall power, I doubt that the bit of extra resources needed to render the Aero Glass desktop in this day and age would really be of that much consequence. I swear, I think that Microsoft is repeating the mistakes of the past and taking a page out of Henry Ford's playbook where he famously said in 1909, " Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."

Microsoft would really make a lot more people happy if they would just allow generous levels of user-customization back into the Windows user-interface. They should really know by now that one-size doesn't necessarily fit all, especially when Windows 8 is going to be running on everything from touch-tablets to netbooks to laptops to desktops with multiple screens. With that in mind, people should be able to choose whether they want Metro or the Windows Desktop to be their default desktop. They should be able to choose what kind of chrome that their desktop has. They should be able to choose whether or not they want to use "ribbons" or classic menus. They should be able to choose whether or not they want a "Start" button, and if that Start Button leads to a Windows "Classic", Windows XP, or Windows 7-style Start Button menu. That way everyone can be made to be at least somewhat happy, everyone could use Windows how they are familiar with using it, and everyone can benefit from the enhancements that have been made underneath Windows 8's hood without having to sacrifice their user-experience to get there. This solution just seems to brain-dead simple to me, as it allows everyone to use the options that work the best for them.

Why in the world is Microsoft so hell-bent on making things in Windows 8 work only one way and then forcibly shove it down our throats? Just what do they have to gain by being so inflexible, and saying that their way is "right," and that all dissenting opinions are "wrong?" Sinofsky and others are acting like there is no other direction to go but their new vision, like they have burned their ships behind them and that there is no turning back. But we all know that this is a "false dilemma" logical fallacy that is simply not true-- the Windows 8 Developer Preview could still have its Start Button re-enabled with a registry setting change, and Windows 8 Consumer Preview still had an Aero desktop. If Microsoft could dike that stuff out in such a short amount of time like they have, then I would think that they should also be able to add it back in and make using it an option. For crying out loud Microsoft, give your customers some customization options and let us choose how we want to work! You can make all of your new GUI developments with Windows 8 be the default settings if you would like, but allow us to be able to switch back what we don't happen to want. What do you care if we happen to turn back on Aero or the Start Button after we buy Windows 8? After all, at that point we have already *bought* Windows 8 so you already got our money. How we configure and use Windows 8 after that point should be our choice. Operating systems are suppose to make our lives easier-- not frustrate or hinder us!

This could eventually kill retro-gaming

Like many of you here probably have, I grew up with the Atari VCS and the original Nintendo Entertainment System. However, as fortunate as I was to be able to have those two game systems, I had many friends who had other systems, such as the Intellivision, the Turbo Grafix 16, the Atari Jaguar, the Sega Genesis, etc. I would go over to my friends' houses and play games with them on those other systems, and I find myself loving a particular game and wishing that I could have that other game system just so that I could play that game. However, at the time when those game systems were new they were also pricey, and after my parents had just bought me my NES how could I go to them and suddenly ask for a Sega Master System, an Atari 7800, and a Turbo Grafix 16 too? I couldn't-- we didn't have that kind of money and my having the gall to ask for something like that would have sent them through the roof!

Luckily, thanks to the second-hand game market I can now try all of those games and systems that I never was able to own when I was younger. Even as late as the early 2000's my house was an XBox house, which meant that I never got to play any of the neat-looking games that were only available on the Nintendo GameCube or the Sony Playstation 2. As a result, when I saw a used Nintendo GameCube with a controller on sale for $15 on a dealer's table at a classic gaming convention some months ago I jumped at the chance to pick it up. I've been wanting to try both Starfox Adventures and Starfox Assault for about a decade at that point, and now I finally had the chance to do so and I wasn't killing my bank account in the process. If there was no second-hand gaming market, how could I ever do this?

The sad fact is that if the game console creators and the game software developers find a way to block the sale of second-hand games, eventually the pastime of retro-gaming will cease to exist for future gaming consoles. Imagine if they had pulled this kind of crap with all of the classic Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, etc. systems 15 to 30-years ago? Nobody would be able to pick them up and play them now! Entire generations of classic games, from the original Missile Command to the very first Super Mario Brothers would be lost and unplayable to new generations of gamers. That's what is going to happen if they implement anti-secondhand market measures now-- in 15 to 30 years time no one will be able to play the favorite games of today any longer because the second-hand market for them will cease to exist.

I realize that today's game console makers and game development companies only care about what their bottom line is going to be during the next fiscal quarter, but I think that they will be hobbling interest in gaming in the long run if they kill the second-hand market. How will they get new generations of people hooked on gaming if they kill-off the cheap "gateway drug" that is second-hand games and second-hand systems? Someone playing a second-hand game or console may love playing it so much that they will eventually shell out for the current generation product. The game companies ought to think a little bit harder about that, as they may find that all of the cost cutting, price raising, anti second-hand market, and anti-piracy tactics in the world will be for naught if they erode their own customer base in the process.

I looked at the final vote results for the amendment, and just as I expected my local Congresswoman voted in the "noes" column. Had I known that this amendment was going to be voted on so quickly I would have mailed her a letter or at least sent her an e-mail informing her of my desire for her to support it. Not that it would have made a difference though-- I don't think my local Congresswoman and I see eye-to-eye on much of anything. I wrote her a letter once to support a pro-Net Neutrality bill many years ago, and she actually wrote me a letter back to explain to me how wrong I was. Naturally, for that reason and many others I have voted for her opponent every time that she has come up for reelection, but for whatever reason my distaste for how she votes seems to be in the minority opinion in my district, as she still gets reelected every time. *sigh*

I for one was extremely upset by the retirement of the U.S. Space Shuttle without a viable replacement reusable orbiter already developed, tested, and sitting on a Cape Canaveral launch pad ready to go, but there is a big difference between rallying for the restarting of the U.S. manned space program and *this.* I am all for being optimistic, but how can Newt possibly think that the U.S. could ever be able to even get to the moon in 8-years let alone have a permanent base located there after NASA has already been slashed, burned, and gutted so badly and our national budget deficit is so high that we have no money left to fund such an endeavor? Private enterprises aren't going to fund such a venture unless there is some serious money to be made to make up for all of the risk involved, and I seriously doubt that the materials that the moon happens to be made of is worth that kind of investment and uncertainty from a business standpoint. Either Newt is completely out of his mind, or he is really trying to blow some serious smoke up the asses of out-of-work Florida voters.

As an American, I am pretty embarrassed by both Newt and the impression that he is giving to the rest of the world right now with these kind of statements.

Does this move by Yahoo! even make sense?

Wait a minute! What is a company, that for years has been losing market share, playing musical chairs with CEO's, constantly under threat of buyout, and struggling for its very survival doing throwing away a huge pile of their ever-dwindling supply of precious money by investing in building an expensive new media production studio in a high-priced area like Manhattan? You would think that a company in this dire state would be trying to stop the bleeding that its current assets already have before it would go out and create even more assets that it has to pay to both build and maintain. It is almost like the members of the Yahoo!'s Board of Directors are sitting around their meeting table and saying things like, "I'm bored! This company is just taking too long to die! Hmmm. What can we do to make this joke of an organization bleed out even faster?"

I go to Yahoo! to visit the Yahoo! Groups that I am still a member of, check my back-up e-mail account, look up local movie listings, and *maybe* once a year use them for search when I absolutely can't find what I am looking for on Google. I also have always liked their map service better than Google's and use that regularly. Why can't Yahoo! just focus on finding a way to keep those kinds of useful services going instead of chasing after AOL-Huffington Post with this Yahoo!-ABC nonsense? The last I heard, AOL wasn't exactly doing spectacular either. Geez, when your company is suffering like this you really need to shore up your own core business before you start chasing after someone else's. I don't make much sense of what Yahoo! is doing, but maybe that is why I am not a corporate executive.