Anxiously Awaiting

As I sit here with my Mac dock lit up like a Christmas tree and enjoying total and smooth functionality of OSX, I look across the table at my poor little Microsoft standard issue Dell running Vista Ultimate and frown. The little guy is equipped exactly like my Mac, with 4GB of RAM (although only 3.5GB registers in the Vista Process Explorer), a 2.20 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and a Nvidia 6800 GS, yet it has to work so hard to provide me with a decent OS experience. To my Dell’s credit, it does have to deal with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and the many background processes that come along with it–but nevertheless I am highly disappointed with Vista’s memory management, overall responsiveness and user experience. At this point I’m probing the Microsoft ranks to find out what it takes to downgrade to good old Windows XP. Below are screen shots of my Mac’s system profiler and Vista’s ctrl+shift+delete magic. I will say that I am impressed that the Dell is as responsive as it is with less than 100MB of RAM available–were this XP it would be in a hard lock.

I hate parking tickets. I spent over $300 of my Student Loan money paying the Georgia Tech Parking Nazi’s for violations in addition to the $1000+ I spent on parking permits. My last year at Tech I found out that you can park on 8th street for free–as long as you don’t mind your car almost being stolen, and after the construction around the TSRB they opened up the Holy Grail of parking spots. There were six of them right outside the TSRB; open for those who can stand getting up at obscenely early times of the morning and showing up before everyone else. Alas, good things only last so long. They eventually limited those spots to 2 hour parking, which resulted in me accruing two tickets both because I fell asleep in the lab and forgot to move my car. I tried for nearly a month to pay those cursed things using the City of Atlanta’s online service, and my tickets never showed up in their system. I assumed they were forgotten, or that the officer didn’t turn them in.

Bad assumption. I got a letter from the municipal court of Atlanta stating that I have to pay both tickets with additional $25 late fees or they will impound my car. This has rekindled my hatred of all things related to parking violations. Don’t get me wrong I respect the police, I just wish they would find something better to do than ticket me, not allow me to pay the ticket, then harass me about not paying the ticket.

Windows Vista continues to piss off even the hardcore XP users. This article is a great case study of an old school XP user upgrading to Vista and breaking all the problems down for us.

The thing that irks me is that everyone that I have tried to turn away from Windows Vista always responds with something along the lines of “but it’s what I’m used to.” Sad to say, but with Vista’s new features you will do much better to either learn a Linux distribution (XGL looks way cooler than Aero anyway) or switch to Mac. As a matter of fact, as the above linked article points out, Vista has a learning curve. Windows XP users, open up Windows Media Player 11 and tell me where your context menus are. They aren’t there. Vista designers have decided to kill a 20 year old desktop paradigm. Hmmm.

Something else that I found disturbing is the incorporation of a small chip called a Trusted Platform Module (wikipedia) into some hardware. Apparently this little gem has been shipping quietly on motherboards for a while now. This isn’t related to Vista, but as you’ll find out later it enables some very bad things. It does the following:

1. Uniquely identifies your hardware (usually the motherboard).

2. Remote attestation - Creates an unforgeable summary of the software on a computer, allowing a third party (such as a digital music store) to verify that the software has not been changed.

3. Sealing - Encrypts data in such a way that it may be decrypted only in the exact same state (that is, it may be decrypted only on the computer it was encrypted running the same software).

4. Binding - encrypts data using the TPM Endorsement Key (a unique RSA key put in the chip during its production) or another ‘trusted’ key.

The first and second features are arguable threats to privacy, and the third and fourth are poster children for DRM. To make this concrete, imagine that I have a song that I download in iTunes. If sealing and binding were in place then it would be impossible (without cracking the keys on the chip) to transfer that song to any other electronic media that didn’t have an identical TPM chip. Since number one states that no two chips are the same, then you are hosed. Vista uses this piece of hardware in it’s hell-spawned incarnation of WGA.

Vista is not only the best case to stick with XP. It’s also a great reason to switch to Mac or Linux. Below are some links to some really good and usable Linux distributions. I challenge you to go to one of these sites, download a Live CD, and run it. All you have to do is stick it into your computer and boot to the CD drive and you can play around with a fully functional Linux OS.  Try that with Windows. My personal favorite distribution is OpenSuSE, but it really doesn’t matter to me what distro you go with. Ubuntu is notoriously easy to use, Fedora is the open source spinoff of the hugely successful Redhat 9, and SuSE is the most versatile without losing its usability. Pick one, try it, and install it on your computer after you convince yourself that it really is better. A word of caution to notebook users: wireless cards are amazingly annoying to get working in Linux. Check to see if yours is compatible (Anything centrino, or non-broadcom core will work without hacks).

OpenSuSE

Fedora

Ubuntu

I recently read an article written by a professor at New Zealand’s Auckland University. It can be read in full here. In short, this article describes a number of issues with Windows Vista’s methods of content protection, and the general way that the OS handles some key features for users. Naturally since I am an audiophile, I was pretty angry about some of the things I read.

In basic terms, among other things the article talks about Vista’s delivery of what it considers premium and non-premium content. Anything that is not considered to be premium content will be either “reduced in quality” or not played at all. The article privides a good scenario of this:

Say you’ve just bought Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released as a Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to play it under Vista. Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista disables it, and you end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

That’s enough to prevent me from upgrading to Vista at all right there. It seems that Microsoft is intent on tightening its grip on consumers by implementing things such as this. This system could also force manufacturers to get their sound cards or speakers certified by Microsoft before Vista will recognize them as “secure.”

Vista isn’t making it easy for Driver developers either:

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used to uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it’s (probably) genuine. In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation in the hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that produces a result that’s unique to that device type.

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of the device be kept confidential. Obviously anyone who knows enough about the workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it (for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS) will also know enough to fake the HFS process. The only way to protect the HFS process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device beyond a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other products.

It’s sad that facts such as these never reach the general public. Instead, all they see is the intense hype and marketing campaigns that companies launch. It would be interesting to listen in on a Vista configuration session for an average power user with a large non-licensed MP3 or WMA collection. Some people may not be able to tell the difference between “downgraded” premium content and the regular thing, but those of us who can would be very upset.

I’ll be the first to admit that Vista has it’s power points. Aero Glass looks great, but X11 servers like XGL and Compiz–which have been around long before Glass–look equally as cool. The SuperFetch feature that Microsoft is crowing about is nothing more than something Linux based operating systems have been doing for years. In the various Linuces, utilization of RAM has always been approached with the “if it’s unused, its wasted” philosophy. As a matter of fact, a quick look via top reveals that my system is using 811MB of my 1GB of RAM, and it’s perfectly fast.

I for one have almost switched completely to Novell’s SuSE Linux 10.2. All that’s left is formatting one of my 250GB drives in reiser and copying my music and video collections over. I’ll still keep my Windows XP partition for the occasional Visual Studio 2005 C# session, but in short:

Goodbye Microsoft.

So a while back I bought a new keyboard from Newegg. Unfortunately, it was german. Today, I received the replacement from Newegg. It is also……german. I called Newegg and the representative basically told me to RMA the thing for a refund due to errors on their order of those keyboards from Enermax. He credited me 10 bucks for shipping and gave me an RMA number. Unfortunately for me, it costs $12.80 to send the thing back via UPS 3-day ground. My other option would be USPS, but I won’t get the refund for the item until Newegg receives it, and I could use the cash I paid for it sooner. So, I’m taking the 2.80 hit for quicker access to the original amount I paid. Thanks guys.

Long live the Logitech MX Duo.