The Blog From Another Dimension: Computers and the Internet Archives

Skype Stuff

Skype still works fine, and the latest version has an incredibly useful feature: echo cancellation. In the past, you had to use headphones when using Skype, else your voice emanating from the other person's speakers would re-enter the microphone and come back as an annoying delayed echo, making it hard to speak. The new echo cancellation works great, making "speaker-phone" conversations comfortable and clear.

My parents have started their annual visit to their cabin on an island north of Seattle, and often Skype in to share a sunset. It's kind of nice--like a private web cam, in that use of Skype. If my camera weren't planted in the face of my Mac, I'd be able to give them the same kind of view. I should see if I can attach my video camera and use it that way--I think I can if I want to.

My father's camera is an iSight, the kind detached from the computer, so he can move his around... and we found, to our mutual surprise, that we could use the camera with a spotting scope. See the small red circle in the sunset view below? My father wanted to show me the people he could spot on the spit between the bay and the channel--and was able to, but putting the camera lens up to the eyepiece on the spotting scope. Cool.

Next time he sees an Osprey or other cool bird perched in a nearby tree, he promises to call me and share that with me. Real-time, remote-control trans-Pacific birdwatching!

Analog to Digital

Things have changed. I remember when I was a little kid, my father used to work at SRI, a research institute, and took me in to work sometimes. I remember the big computers lining the walls of some rooms, the desktop calculators almost as big as some desktop computers today. But that technology, in the late 60's/early 70's, was still almost a decade from even starting to infiltrate the home.

I first worked on a computer at home around 1980, maybe 1981. It was an Apple III, a honking big thing intended to outclass the Apple II. Word processing then was like coding a web page today using a text editor--you had to type in style changes manually. The printout was from a dot matrix printer with a resolution of maybe 8 dots tall for 12-point text. Hopelessly primitive by today's standards, it was top-of-the-line for home use then. Before that, my brother and I enjoyed using our father's home terminal that connected to the mainframe at SRI via a modem which you activated by placing a telephone handset onto it (we played a lot of text-based Star Trek games on it). Before that, aside from trips to my father's work, we got glimpses of the upcoming technology from our father, an engineer who did educational stuff for us at home like building a binary calculator on a plank of wood.

I bring this up to point out that I was privileged, in a way, to witness a transition. As a child, I grew up in an analog world, and have watched it change to a digital one. Very much like people who lived before the Space Age and after it, or before the Nuclear Age and after it. The transition that I and everyone else who has lived through it is much more significant. Nuclear power has ebbed in its importance and frightfulness; space travel has not changed us as much as many thought it would, especially after it was mostly abandoned after the Apollo program. The Information Age, on the other hand, has transformed how we live.

One important aspect of this is to remember that virtually all information can be made digital--text, numeric data, sounds, images, video... and perhaps more information when sensory technology improves in the future (touch, textures? tastes and smells?). Computers can then juggle and sort the digits, doing just about anything with the data, limited only by our imagination and what software authors can bang out. It is so early on in the Information Age that we have not yet even scratched the surface of what is possible.

I refer to it as the Information Age and not the Computer Age because computers (not counting hand-driven machines like the abacus) have been around for quite some time (the first ones were in the mid-19th century, running on steam; the first electronic ones came in the 1930's); however, the greatest impact from computers has come with the Personal Computer, and the ability of computers to affect all our lives, not just researchers and corporations. In fact, the real impact came not in the 80's, when more and more households got PCs, but in the mid-to-late 90's, when computers started becoming ubiquitous, and the Internet started to get popular.

I remember researching an essay in high school. I remember going to the library and searching for books, using the card catalog. I remember looking through tables of content and indexes, skimming through chapters while standing between the book stacks, checking to see if the book had information which could be useful for me.

Today, I see my own students sitting down at a computer and pulling up Google or going into WikiPedia, and pulling out far more data, far more focused and relevant, in just a few minutes--work that would have taken me hours when I was their age, and which would not have been as fruitful. It is in this observation that you begin to see the impact of the Information Age, in just one of its aspects.

And yet, I still get badly-researched papers from some of my students--not because the technology failed them, but rather because they did only the minimal work necessary to bang out an essay. I shake my head and refrain from giving them the "when I was your age" speech; I don't need more than the gray hairs I've already got to make me look like a geezer.

But look at what else there is. Ordering books and whatever else you can think of from Amazon or other online sellers. Finding a good restaurant (did that just yesterday--tomorrow is Sachi's and my first anniversary since meeting), or checking movie times. Buying music, or videos online. Getting news from countless sources. To mention just a few of the more popular activities now possible using the technology.

Sure, most of that is stuff you could have done before; you could order through catalogs, look through issues of newspapers, visit local shops, or subscribe to any number of magazines or perhaps see them at the local library. But many of these older options included travel, cost, or both, and netted far less depth of information, far less wealth of choice.

Then there is communication; sending email instead of posting letters as I used to when I first came to Japan. Making expensive long-distance telephone calls instead of using Skype or other messaging software.

So much of this may be trite, stuff you know or have considered before. But it is part of an ongoing process so long and vast in the making that, I believe, most people overlook it and do not see the significance of the change. Instead, you get a lot of people complaining about the down sides, about viruses and spam and Internet-based crime. That's falling off now--I remember back in the late 90's and early 00's when it was chic for the media to report on this crime and that crime committed via the Internet. Baseless in meaning--after all, they never ran stories about how telephones or surface mail helped propagate crime, any more than they focused on how criminals use cars. But the Internet, being new and big and scary, got the blame for people who used it instead of older media.

We seem to have transitioned into the realm of the digital without fully appreciating how it has changed us. And that is not significant just so that we can say "wow!" or wonder at gadgetry; it is significant because after seeing where we were and where we are now, we can get at least a vague sense of where we will be in another twenty or thirty years--time enough not only for digital technology to permeate virtually everywhere, but for transmission speeds and data storage capacities to make the unthinkable today mundane tomorrow.

But even more important than the technologies is how they will be put to use: what we'll be doing digitally, what we'll have access to, how technology will help us find, sort, evaluate, and execute. As much as computers and other electronics seem to have advanced, we are still in the infancy of the Information Age. The Internet has only been widely used for a decade or so; the GUI-based computer just over two decades. Barely enough time for us to get introduced to the field, and not nearly enough for us to discover what we can really do with it. What applications will be serving us in 2030?

In a few minutes, Sachi and I will be going out to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I'm not too thrilled, and neither is Sachi. We bought advance tickets a month or more ago, and the timing was never right to go see it. This is our last chance before it leaves theaters, considering our schedules. Sachi is not thrilled because it has to be the late show, starting at 8:40 and ending not long before midnight. I'm not thrilled due to stomach cramps, which will ebb perhaps just enough to be tolerable throughout the show. But it's a choice of going now or tossing the tickets.

Why mention this? Because in ten or twenty year's time, our choices will be significantly different. We'll probably have the option of seeing first-run movies at home on Ultra-HD video over the Internet, with the flexibility of choosing times and moods to fit our schedules far better than now.

That might not sound like much to you, but it appeals to me greatly at this moment. And that is just one, small, tiny corner of what will change between now and then.

Editor's note: I wrote this yesterday, when I had zero time to edit and polish, so I did the editing and polishing this morning. A paragraph or image added here, words changed or tacked on there, the odd spelling error corrected. Sorry for the delay.

Gadget Shopping

I stopped by a few electronics stores today to look for some gadgets. Usually the best stuff is to be found in the discount bins, but I was looking for a new mouse today as well. I have been using a Logitech Click! mouse, a dependable old variety that I got at Yodobashi a few years back for just ¥2000. It's corded, but that's the better alternative here in Japan; the good part is that it's a nice, dependable mouse with four buttons (one is the scroll wheel, the fourth just below the wheel). But they're getting aged, and my Logitech V270 Bluetooth mouse seems to have crapped out on me, so I went looking for a replacement. I wanted a mouse that (1) had 4 or more buttons, (2) was regular-sized, not that tiny "portable mouse" crapola, (3) tracked well on all kinds of surfaces, and (4) cost close to ¥2000.

What I found was the Sanwa Supply MA-G9DS. It has, surprisingly, seven buttons: two in the normal places, a scroll wheel button (also normal), and two buttons on the left side above your thumb--but the scroll wheel can also be pushed left and right for two more button actions. It's marked as only working on Windows, but my Mac detects all seven buttons just fine. It tracks better than the Logitech (no skips so far, much better than any mouse I've used to date), and is simple. One strange point: the cable has a weird, almost metallic mesh sort of feel to it.

But I can live with that just fine. It even has a built-in USB plug cap--not that I've ever had problems with loose stuff in my bag getting into the USB connector. It costs ¥2680, but that's close enough for what you seem to get.

Next, I was surprised to find that flash memory is coming down in price. Just a few years ago, 32 MB was the size memory stick you got for ¥2000; now it's 128 MB. But they had a surprise in the store: an import, a Kingston USB flash stick... 1 GB, for ¥1980.

It was big enough (in capacity) and cheap enough that I decided to pick one up, just as a spare (I already have two 256 MB flash drives). I have seen cheap USB flash sticks at Costco, but none this cheap for this price, and certainly none outside of Costco. The same product does cost $13 in the US, about $3.50 less than it does here, but such low-priced stuff is not easily findable in Japan; it was certainly a bargain.

Finally, an old item at a new price: one of those F. A. Porsche-designed LaCie USB 2.0 external hard drives (250 GB).

I didn't buy it for myself, actually (I already have two of the things), but for a friend looking for such a drive. My two have done fine for me over the past three or so years, and when I saw it on sale for ¥9800 ($83--$15 cheaper than Amazon in the US!) I recommended it to him, and he said to buy it. The image above is not the one I bought today, it's one of my old ones--but it's nearly identical. Small vents have been added to the back left side, and the power on-off was changed from a switch to a button, but it's mostly the same.

You may not think that any of these are particularly new, fancy, or cheap--but remember, I'm looking for bargains here, not cutting edge, and this is Japan, where electronics usually cost 40-60% more than they do in the U.S. It was certainly good enough.

Not That I Expected Better from Microsoft

My school wants to buy Office 2007. We are an academic institution. We are fully eligible for the academic pricing. Except there are two catches: (1) Microsoft does not allow for multilingual software--unlike Apple, which makes all of its software multilingual out of the box, and (2) they refuse to allow us to buy the English version at academic prices from within Japan. They won't sell it in Japan, and they won't let us buy it in the U.S. and bring it in to Japan. A staff member says that they have a friend at Microsoft who says that the new suite "phones home" and tells Microsoft if a U.S. academic version is being used in Japan, at least more than one copy in a single location.

As a result, we probably will wind up not buying it, as the full price is prohibitive for our budget, and, as a college (accredited both in the U.S. and in Japan!), we should not have to pay that much.

Not that I'm hot to buy Microsoft stuff, but the Computer class kinda needs that software to avoid being hopelessly out-of-date (currently we're running Office 2000). Frankly, I'd much rather we just get all Macs and, assuming the upcoming version of iWork has a spreadsheet program, we just use that and Microsoft can go screw themselves. However, the school won't go for it, as not enough students use Macs and they want to teach what the students will be using. Circular logic--everyone uses it because everyone uses it--but that's what we're stuck with.

So, if anyone knows an end run around this stupidity so we can get Academic Office 2007 like we are supposed to be able to if M$ didn't have their heads up their arses, please let me know.

Zune vs. iPhone

After seven and a half months, it is estimated by Microsoft that they have sold a million Zunes. Of course, that figure is very sketchy and unsupported. It is based upon an interview with Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division president, Robbie Bach, where he was misquoted as saying that they had sold "a little over a million Zunes" by the end of May, when he really said that they expected to have sold over a million Zunes by the end of June. Furthermore, nobody is sure that they have actually sold that many to consumers, as Microsoft has the tendency to report shipments to retailers as actual sales to inflate their figures. (And, as a side note, Bach has recently been implicated in an insider trading scandal.)

While the Zune's release was rather uneventful (ten units sold at a San Francisco store was "better than expected"), the iPhone's release was manic, crazed, crowded and furious. After ten days, it is reported that nearly a million iPhones have been sold; by the two-week mark, the number of one million is perfectly reasonable to expect.

Which means that Apple reached the one-million mark in just 1/16th the time it took for the Zune to do the same thing. Of course, look at the comparison between them:

True, one is $250 and the other is $500, but Apple has a much bigger profit margin, and more expensive stuff should be harder to sell, right? But really, just in terms of industrial design, there's no comparison here. At right, you can see a side view of the iPhone. I was trying to get a similar image of the Zune to show a comparison (the iPhone is 0.46" thick, the Zune 0.58"), but I could not find a single image on the web of a Zune in full side profile. I soon figured it out: it's basically just a rectangle from that view. Oh, there's the line of a seam breaking it up, but from the side, the Zune is utterly nondescript. Which explains why nobody posts images of it that way.

The Zune is set for an upgrade--but then again, according to reports, so is the iPhone. And while the Zune can get software upgrades like the iPhone (both may get their wireless capabilities upgraded), the iPhone is far more upgradeable without having to buy a new unit, as it relies on the touch screen for the full interface.

Of course, we're comparing apples and oranges here a bit--the Zune is only a media player, and the iPhone is a media player, web browser, email/schedule/address book client, camera/photo viewer, and a telephone. But what happens when the first widescreen iPod comes out? It's been rumored to happen sometime this year, possibly in August, but probably later. When you get a full-screen, multi-touch iPod with the 3.5-inch 480x320 display? People have gushed about the Zune's "big" display, which is a 3-inch 320x240 screen--but that's half the resolution of the iPhone at almost the same size. If the new iPod will have Bluetooth and WiFi like it's cousin iPhone, then there won't be much to give the Zune any advantage.

Seriously, I don't know who is buying Zunes right now. If it were an independent company instead of a part of Microsoft, I don't see it's shares going up anytime soon. But then, I should add the disclaimer that I own a chunk of Apple stock, so I may be biased.

TV Online

OK, how can these guys do this? You'd think there was some law or something preventing the posting of massive amounts of copyrighted material like this. Interesting.

Vista vs. Mac

There's a six-month security report out on how Vista is doing, and according to the report, Vista is the most secure operating system out there. The report shows Vista to have fewer "high severity" vulnerabilities than OS X 10.4, closely followed by XP, and then various Linux brands. The catch: this report was authored by a Microsoft executive. Gee, I wonder if it skews the facts at all?

Naturally, criticisms have started to come out as to the validity of this claim. For example, the definition of "high severity" vulnerabilities is being challenged; if a Vista vulnerability allows someone over the web to take over the computer, and a Mac vulnerability allows a physically present user with an admin password to take over the computer, can both be grouped together in the same category? Some "high severity" vulnerabilities are far more easily exploited than others. Then there's the fact that the report discounts third-party vulnerabilities in Windows, which depends more heavily than the Mac OS on those types of apps. The count does not touch on all of the viruses, worms, spyware, or other malware which counts for the bulk of attacks that most people suffer from. And it does not factor in how many of the vulnerabilities are actually exploited in the wild.

In other words, just about every way the list could be skewed in Vista's favor, it has been skewed. Skew things the opposite way and Vista could be made to look like the worst OS ever. For example, this article sifted through the data released in the Microsoft report and discovered that Vista had fixed only 12 of 27 total vulnerabilities, unlike in XP, where in the first six months, 36 of 39 had been fixed.

But the fact remains that whatever you say about vulnerabilities, Vista is still susceptible to, and has been attacked by a wide variety of viruses and other malware, including adware and spyware, while the Mac has not suffered a single actual virus or worm attack in the wild, and has zero spyware or adware. The bottom line is that if you buy a Mac today, you're not going to have to even think about security, while if you get a Vista machine, you can still easily get infected by a lot of malware out there. And in the end, that's the only thing that matters to actual, real-life users.

XP Wow, Huh?

About a year ago, there were supposed to be about 400 million Windows XP users worldwide. Microsoft now says that more than 40 million copies of Windows Vista have been sold. That means that there should be about 360 million XP users and 40 million Vista users, very roughly speaking. About 11% of Windows users today should be Vista users.

According to my site's stats, about 84% of my blog's almost 25,000 visitors (that doesn't include spammers or RSS feed numbers) in the past month were Windows users, so I have a pretty good sample pool to study. In Google Analytics, you can break down visitors by OS version. Over the past month, five months after the release of Vista, only 4.4% of this site's visitors are Vista users. In contrast, 4.6% are Windows 2000 users.

Obviously, Microsoft is exaggerating things a wee bit. In fact, my stats may over-emphasize Vista users, if anything. Vista is likely more popular in the English-speaking world than elsewhere; it probably has not permeated China very deeply, for example. And as most of the visitors to this blog are English speakers, I should be seeing more than the average number of Vista users. Now, you might guess that since I write posts which are hostile to Vista, that might skew things; however, out of all Google visitors, only a few percent come from searches for Vista keywords, not enough to skew the results, and among Google visitors, the stats on who uses what versions of Windows remains consistent with overall visitor stats.

As I explained here, Microsoft has been caught cooking the numbers. Ever since early on in the Vista publicity cycle, Microsoft has been claiming amazing sales numbers--but those numbers included all the purchases of XP computers from late October, 2006, based on the idea that everyone who bought XP after that time got a coupon for a free copy of Vista. It doesn't matter if they never used the coupon. In fact, a good number of those last-minute XP buyers were buying XP computers so they could avoid buying Vista computers. Sales of RAM were not nearly as much as were predicted due to Vista adoption, causing a glut in the market. While there was a post-Vista jump, sales weren't as spectacular as predicted, nor as lackluster as thought before Vista was released.

More evidence of the numbers-cooking is that Microsoft is only counting their distribution numbers to retailers--not the actual sales to customers. Both this and counting XP purchases for three months prior to Vista naturally give an inflated view of VIsta adoption. The fact that Microsoft won't release specific sales details which would back up or refute their general claims lends itself to the thought that Microsoft is not being fully honest here.

But the numbers that you see in the real world are more telling than anything else, and the numbers I'm seeing are not so hot for Vista. Apple saw a larger percentage of its users adopt the Tiger OS in the first month than Microsoft has seen its users adopt Vista in five months.

One more thing: yesterday, I attended a meeting at my school where we discussed what computer software the school uses in the labs. I was asked whether we should upgrade to Office 2007 to replace our aging Office 2000 software; since students will be using 2007 more and more often, and since the interface and file type is markedly different, I said that we should. However, they didn't even ask about upgrading to Vista, and when I brought it up, they were obviously not inclined to do so.

But let me ask, to the 5% or so of my site's visitors who have upgraded to Vista: what's your experience? Is it positive, negative, or neutral? How does it compare to XP? Was it worth upgrading?

McCain Continues Implosion by Publicly Acting Like Technology Idiot

John McCain showed himself to be pretty damned stupid when he claimed that the streets of Baghdad were safe to stroll through and then, to prove his point, went there with a hundred troops, five helicopters, and a flak jacket. Now that he's gotten that out of the way, he attended a conference on technology and quickly made an ass of himself there as well.

First of all, he came out against Network Neutrality. You know, the protocol that was probably one of the most responsible for making the Internet successful. The one that has kept the Telecoms from turning the Internet into their private piggy bank, making everyone pay for everything and throwing their weight around worse than Microsoft does.

McCain, a self-described "free trader" and "deregulator" apparently does not understand what the hell "Network Neutrality" is. To be against Network Neutrality is virtually the opposite of free trade on the Internet, allowing a few companies to have constrictive proprietary control over the system. And it's not "deregulating," because there's no tome of regulation or any bureaucracy involved--just a simple rule, that everyone is truly equal and free on the Internet. McCain's statements were virtually spot-on to the scripts written by the Telecom lobbyists.

But then McCain made an even bigger fool of himself, by saying that he would put Steve Ballmer on his cabinet to advise him on technology issues (apparently unaware that such a cabinet position does not exist), and said he'd consider Ballmer for an ambassadorial position, maybe in China. The latter has been noted as a "joke," but probably because no one in his or her right mind could believe that a person could be so monumentally stupid as to seriously suggest such a thing. But then, was McCain's statement about having Ballmer as a technology advisor also a joke? Nobody thinks so, though pretty much everyone sees the idea as ludicrous. Who knows, maybe McCain seriously promoted the idea of Ballmer on his cabinet, then either because of laughter from the audience or an internal realization of how stupid the idea was, then tried to turn it into a joke by mentioning the China spot.

Either way, McCain is poison to technology. The man is dropping like a dead weight--sorry to see after he seemed so enticing in 2000. Either it was a sham then too, or McCain realized that the only way to be taken seriously was to sell out, big time.

Another One Bites the Dust

Interesting that Robert Alan Soloway has three names, just like serial killers or assassins. It's tempting to group spam kings with those other two professions; while the nature of the one may be far less heinous in some ways than the other two, the one makes up the difference with volume.

I heard people at the office talking about this arrest, in fact, mentioning reports that people might see a drop in the amount of spam they receive since this guy was arrested. I didn't believe it when I heard it, and that belief is now confirmed. There are just too many spammers out there, and like cockroaches, there are always more where that came from. There will always be more willing to fill the vacuum. After all, it was two years ago that the first big spam arrest was made, sending the creep to jail for nine years (his conviction was upheld), but spam did not ebb then, either.

That does not, of course, mean that we should not go to the trouble and expense of catching these guys, jailing them, and stripping them of all their assets and possessions. On the contrary, we need some form of payback, especially because of the fact that arresting them does not stop spam. I would suggest adding the touch of stripping them naked and forcing them to tap dance in front of large audiences armed with rotting vegetables and water balloons filled with noxious liquids, three times daily. I am pretty sure that this would not constitute cruel and unusual punishment considering their crimes, and there would be not trouble filling the auditorium on a regular basis, and we'd probably get some members of the ACLU and Amnesty International in the crowds.

Ztupid

A found item on Flickr:

The image caption claims that this is at the Zune headquarters. It has been noted that all of the iPods in the bin are of the same generation.

It seems clear to me that this is simply a stunt by the people in the office--but if so, it's a weird one. I mean, who would ever believe that anyone, even Zune employees, would toss several thousands of dollars of personal property in a box at work? Instead of, say, giving them to family or friends, or selling them on eBay? The expression "strains credulity" comes to mind. The only way I could see that happening was if the company offered a free Zune in exchange. (Lord knows they must have scads of the things available to give away.)

Instead, one would assume that the people in charge at the office set this up and put the iPods in there. But that doesn't make great sense, either; I mean, it's a pretty expensive stunt (assuming that they didn't just have a few dozen iPods around doing nothing), and what's the payoff? First of all, it immediately comes across as fake, and therefore as lame. Second, the bin is far too big; despite the expense represented here, the physical appearance makes it look like almost nobody participated. And third, how many people will see this display, and even if it were believed, then what possible impact would it have to make the expense worthwhile?

One might assume that it's simply meant as a humor item (the "bite me" on the sign suggests that), or a morale-booster... but then we get back to the whole lameness issue.

There is also the possibility that this is not from Zune HQ, that it's a hoax or something, but that's unlikely, considering the number of iPods in the bin and quality of the bin itself.

And then there's the faint possibility that it's intended to be real, that the Zune management believed they'd get employees to dump their iPods in there. I know, that's too stupid to believe possible. But we are talking about the people who made the Zune, here.

Another Stellar Vista Review

From Transit:

So far, Transit has been using Vista Business full-time for a fortnight. And so far, we've found nothing that works better than in Windows XP, dozens of things that are annoyingly different without being a functional improvement, and several things that work at best intermittently and at worst not at all. On the whole, we wish we'd never moved.

That's just the introduction, but it really says it all. They waited a while for the worst bugs to be sorted out before they upgraded, but that clearly wasn't enough. They found the new OS to be "hideously" slow, bad at basic network functionality, and gave no gains in productivity.

Vista Sales So Bad, Microsoft Has to Lie About Them

REDMOND, Wash., March 26, 2007 — Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP. These initial figures reflect the broad interest in the security and usability enhancements in Windows Vista.

-- Microsoft Press Release

Well, yes and no. When Microsoft made this announcement, it failed to break down the "20 million" figure, making a lot of people suspicious of how they got that number. It sounded way high to a lot of people, and some of them started checking it out--and discovered that the number is as phony as Microsoft's claims of "innovation."

The claim is that Vista sold 20 million licenses in its first month of sales (presumably between the release on January 30 to the end of February), and they compare this to the 17 million licenses sold for Windows XP in the first two and a half months of sales.

Here's how they cooked the numbers. First, they didn't just count the first month. Included in that "first month" were all the sales for Windows XP starting from October 26, 2006, as they included a free or almost-free upgrade to Vista. Regardless of whether the upgrade was actually used, the numbers were added to the first "month" of Vista sales. So, actually, the Vista numbers are for four months of sales, and include many Vista licenses that were never actually claimed or delivered.

Second, Microsoft counted "sales in" figures instead of "sales out." What that means is that instead of counting the number of Vista licenses that were actually sold at stores to customers, Microsoft counted the number of Vista licenses provided to stores, even if they were not ever sold.

Neither of these accounting tricks were used to inflate XP sales numbers. As a result, the comparison between the two numbers is invalid. An honest statement of the 20-million number would have to be worded:

While Windows XP sold 17 million licenses in the first two and a half months of sales, 20 million Windows licenses (including XP and Vista) were either sold or provided to resellers for sale in a four-month period starting at the end of October 2006.

Doesn't sound quite so impressive, does it? But wait, it gets worse: computer sales in 2006 were almost double what they were in 2001, meaning that in order to keep even with XP sales numbers, Vista has to sell almost twice as many licenses. So, adjusting for inflation, as it were, Vista has "sold" only about 11 million copies in four months compared to 17 million sales of XP in two and a half months. And even the 11 million number still includes unsold stock on store shelves.

Pitiful.

Are They Trying to Look Like Evil Bastards?

The RIAA strikes again. They are suing a 42-year-old disabled single mother who lives off of her Social Security check while raising her 10-year-old daughter. They are suing her for $1 million for downloading, among other things, Gangsta Rap at 4:24 in the morning on KaZaA.

The poor woman says that she doesn't even know how to download music, and has tried to surrender her PC to the RIAA so they can search it for themselves. The RIAA declined, and instead is now demanding that her 10-year-old daughter, 7 years old at the time of the downloading (and even less liable to have been up before dawn downloading Gangsta Rap), be deposed and put on the stand.

Details of the case are here. I almost didn't comment on this one because I thought it was the same case as one I reported on a few weeks ago--but that one was where the RIAA sued a paralyzed stroke victim, living on disability in Florida, for downloading music in Michigan. I thought it might have been another case I sub-referenced in that same post about a grandmother being sued for downloading rap music on KaZaA when she used a Mac which couldn't run KaZaA.

But no, it was neither of those. It was all-new unmitigated vileness from the sweethearts at the RIAA, as part of their overall attempt to use shotgun litigation to extort money from people.

New Microsoft, Old Microsoft

Wow. Business Week, not your run-of-the-mill pro-Mac publication, has a column on Vista which is pretty devastating. Just the title, Vista: Slow and Dangerous, is likely to put you off of upgrading. The article warns that Microsoft's stated minimum RAM of 512 MB is not nearly enough, and even a gigabyte will leave Vista sluggish; 2 gigs of RAM is what the author recommends. He then goes on a riff about how the security dialogs become a major annoyance, prompting people to disable them--which then also turns off vital security measures in the OS.

Seriously, Microsoft has royally screwed the pooch with this new OS. Unless they come out with an "SP1" version fast (and it pretty damned well better be free and not make you jump through "verification" hoops), they're going to see people going to Linux and Mac systems like no one has predicted so far. Already two different U.S. government agencies (the Department of Transportation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology) have banned their people from using Vista and Office 2007--and even IE 7 (which is actually less offensive, and could be called a major improvement over version 6).

Those two agencies are bad enough, but their reluctance is going to convince other businesses that they should not upgrade, either. New versions of Windows have always been slow to get started, but Vista is going to be the grandpa of all the slow starts. Funny how Microsoft is supposed to be well-known for making things backwards-compatible. Apple gets guff for having changed the whole shebang three times now (from CISC to RISC, from OS 9 to OS X, and from PPC to Intel), so people have to update to compatible software, adjust to new layouts, get new drivers, and so on (though the Intel switch is barely noticeable). However, new versions of Windows seem to have problems at least as troublesome at their release--while new Mac OS versions aside from the major paradigm shifts are smooth transitions and Mac users promptly snap them up.

Who knows, maybe the Zune wasn't just an isolated incident; maybe it's the New Microsoft.

So We Deleted Your Entire Email Archive. Get Used to It.

Is there a chance to recover it? If not, OneCare will have done more damage than any virus in my 30 years of active computing.

This was the question asked by one user who found that his entire mailbox had been deleted by Microsoft's anti-virus program because he had received an email virus. Microsoft's security software has a long-standing bug where the user's mailbox files and contacts, instead of just the suspect email, will be moved to quarantine or even deleted. This is not just a Vista problem, but would be particularly applicable to Vista users considering that many will now be using Microsoft's OneCare software by default, just as they use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express by default (because Microsoft pre-installs it that way). Which could mean a lot of trouble for new adopters; Microsoft's security system has been rated as the worst performing of the 15 available anti-virus programs, letting up to 20% of all malware through its filters.

The email bug prompted this comment as well:

This is the most unacceptable act Microsoft has ever committed. I run a small business, and I am screwed. I have no way to respond to e-mails because I made the mistake of trusting Microsoft ... and all of my e-mails and contacts are gone.

Fortunately, Microsoft has an easy-as-pie solution:

• Close Outlook or Outlook Express
• Click change OneCare settings in the main OneCare user interface
• Click on the viruses and spyware tab
• Click on the quarantine button, and then select the pst or dbx file, and then click on restore.

To ensure that the problem does not continue until the next update, users should also do the following:

• Click change OneCare setting in the main user interface
• Click viruses and spyware tab
• Click on the exclusions button
• Click on the add folder button
• Navigate to the specific folder that contains the .dbx or .pst file to be excluded.
• Click OK.

Yes, that's right, it's as easy as A, B, C, D! ... Er, ... E, F, G, H, I, J!

That, of course, is assuming that the user knows where his or her .dbx and .pst files are. Do you? Neither do I. Nice of them to include that little tidbit of information in their suggested fix, isn't it? This is also assuming that users will know about the bug before it hits them; otherwise, it's a little like closing the barn door after the horses have bolted, isn't it?

One professional user sums it up:

Software problems occur. Nothing is perfect. But companies I deal with normally are all over software updates to correct a problem. And we are talking about Outlook, a highly used software that holds critical data for most of us, especially business users...I almost get the feeling Microsoft does not really care about this product, that they came up with it just so they could enter this software market.

Vista Revisited

It looks like all my negative pre-reviews of Vista were pretty accurate; sales of Vista are sluggish, selling only half as much as XP did. Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer is actually trying to blame pirates in developing nations for the slow sales. However, most other people have other theories as to why sales are slow.

The biggest reason going around is the "so what?" factor. It's hard to get excited by the new-features list, which is pretty short. The increased security is no big deal; if you have an anti-virus app on XP, it's not worse than security on Vista--and might even be better, as Vista security is still untested, still settling in, and besides which it annoys the hell out of you with nagging messages (which many turn off, thus disabling security features that may not be covered otherwise). The faster search is nice, but if you used XP for five years, you probably learned to live without search, a necessary avoidance strategy--and so you probably won't have the urge to do much searching. The Sidebar can be done in XP using free third-party software. And unless you like shiny new eye candy a hell of a lot, there's really not that much else to make you want to buy it.

But then there's the price. Assuming even that you do have a machine that's Vista-ready and don't have to buy more RAM, a new graphics card, or a whole new machine... you still have to shell out for Vista. Wait, what's that? You only have to pay $100 for the upgrade? True, few people need to pay the full price... but $100 gets you the "Home Basic" version, which is essentially a crippled version of the OS. Unlike the Mac OS, which has only one flavor and the price is $130 for the full set of features ($200 for a 5-pack), Vista has a wide array of versions--which really means that to get the full set of features like in Mac OS X, you need to get the $400 package ($260 upgrade).

I discovered this by going to Yodobashi Camera to check out Vista running on one of their machines. I wanted to see the eye candy in action, so I tried to get the 3-D window flip, Vista's version of the Mac Exposé feature. But try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. After hunting down a salesperson, I was told that I was working with Windows Vista Home Basic--which didn't have that much-ballyhooed feature. This truly surprised me--as a Mac user, I'm used to getting everything in the basic package. I mean, I knew that the different versions meant different functionality, but I simply didn't get what that meant--that lesser versions were essentially partially-crippled versions.

What's worse, many Windows users buying a machine will not be aware of this--and so will get their nice, cheap new Windows Vista PC... only to find many of the features they anticipated disabled... and the only way to get them is to pay for a whole new upgrade to a system they already own.

And then there's the Mac side of things. People who want to run Vista using Parallels are in for a shock. Not only will first-timers have to pay the full price (no upgrade from OS X!), but Microsoft is forcing Parallel users to buy the $300 Business or $400 Ultimate editions--neither "Home" version will work in virtualization. While Microsoft cites "security" concerns, it's pretty obvious that they're just trying to shake down customers.

I'd like to say that Vista's aggressive DRM is slowing sales, but I'm sure that's not true; most people probably don't use the advanced video features that would get you into DRM territory. But just wait. To be certain, DRM is not a positive feature egging on sales.

And then there's compatibility--Vista still won't work with a lot of the old software and hardware out there, and even if it does, it all too often requires quite a bit of effort to get things working. True, this will get ironed out over time, but it's hurting Vista's image and not helping with initial sales.

As time goes on, you see more and more stories like this one, where the US Department of Transportation is actually forbidding its people from upgrading to Vista or Office 2007. Why? Because "There appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade." So no upgrades--that means you, Paul! Meanwhile, Linux and Mac are being looked at.

I have seen this effect first-hand as well. Only a few of my students have upgraded to Vista and Office 2007, and from their reactions, I don't expect too many more of my students to do so soon. I asked one student who upgraded what she thought--and the poor young woman actually winced. And no, I am not kidding, nor am I exaggerating.

In the end, it looks like the only way Vista will win widespread acceptance is by Hobson's Choice--you buy a new Windows machine, you get Vista, like it or not. Though I expect that the creative retailer who offers new machines with XP will find a profitable niche market.

You Were Saying, Bill?

Bill Gates said of the Mac OS in a Newsweek interview:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

What Gates was referring to was the MOAB, or "Month of Apple Bugs," an attack on Mac security taken by people who are obviously irritated and annoyed by claims of superior Mac security.

Of course, that claim is not nearly as bad as Gates makes it out to be. First of all, it was kept up for one month only--not every day of every year. They clearly planned for a month because they found 31 bugs, not 365 in a year. Second, not all the bugs were Apple's--only 22 or 23 of the 31 presented dealt with software created by Apple, the rest were 3rd-party bugs. And finally, Gates wildly exaggerated their seriousness when he claimed that each of these "daily" bugs could "totally" take over the machine. In fact, most were not nearly as caustic, causing instead local shutdowns of specific apps like Safari. And let's remember that we still have never seen any of these exploits do much damage if any at all in the wild--whereas Windows exploits have commonly produced massive damage. A friend of mine had to wipe her hard drive and re-install everything--twice--due to viral infections. That has never happened on a Mac.

But what about Gate's challenge for his own OS? "I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." Well, it's already happened. With Vista, no less, which has only been widely released for a week or two now, and was heralded by Gates as being the most secure OS ever. First, we saw that really embarrassing vulnerability where a sound file could start hacking into the system. And now there are reports of far more serious hacks, including a work-around of one of Vista's most-ballyhooed security improvements, one that limits administrative access:

Russian hackers posted instructions to an underground forum describing how to implement "privilege escalation," which could bypass some Vista security measures. This hack could escalate the "privileges" of a normal Vista user into that of a "superuser," allowing him to change anything he desired on the system. This would be particularly dangerous in a corporate environment where normal computer users have limited privileges, in that they cannot install programs, visit certain Web sites, etc. This threat is considered so serious that Microsoft has scrambled its "Security Response Center," which is ostensibly still trying to figure out what to do.

So, it looks like we have at least two exploits that are at least the equivalent of the MOAB in just one week--and there's no organization which has had time to stockpile Vista bugs and is now trying to publicize one-a-day Vista exploits. However, there are reports that many more exist.

Case in point: just because your copy of Vista hasn't been hit yet, don't feel all warm and fuzzy:

Reports are that, in order to steal as much money as possible, computer criminals are biding their time and building their arsenals, waiting for Vista to be installed on more computers around the world before unleashing their most powerful Vista-busting weapons.

The article reports "ongoing eBay-style black hat hacker auctions where attack programs that can be used to compromise Vista computers are being bought and sold for as much as $50,000." Certainly, it will be interesting to see if Leopard can be hacked this much this soon after its official release.

The Norman Transcript Report ends with a quote from "very irritated and frustrated Vista early adopter": "I should have bought a Mac."

Steve Jobs Gets It

This is one of the reasons I like Steve Jobs. He wrote (or at least published under his name) an article about DRM (Digital Rights Management software) on the Apple web site. DRM is what restricts your use of music or video from playing and copying freely. I have highlighted (boldface mine) the key parts of the following paragraphs:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

One has to wonder what the Big Four think of this letter. On the one hand, it must piss them off to be called stupid, albeit in such a subtle way. On the other hand, what Jobs says is so blindingly obvious, they should be perfectly willing to be called stupid. They should read this and say, we're just not doing this right, we overreacted and have required this completely unnecessary system that does not stop piracy one bit and just hamstrings paying customers, and yet we stick with it either through continued panic or just because it's there.

Of course, I then remind myself that we're talking about the music labels here, the genius folk which constitute the RIAA. "Stupid" is their business. And the video content producers are not much different.

What Steve Jobs is saying here is, naturally, not a new revelation. Almost a year ago on this blog, I myself wrote about DRM-laden video:

The copy-protect and limitations on which OS, browser, and media players can be used are stupid as hell. We're talking about movies that have already been ripped and are available for full-quality download over the Internet. So what is the copy-protect protecting? Not a damned thing. People downloading it for free from the Internet can do anything they want with the movie, watch it on any player, in any format. But paying customers hit all these restrictions. Stupid!

So what does DRM accomplish then, as Jobs asks? Here's another take, again from one of my past blog posts on DRM:

Copy protection is never perfect; somebody always finds a way around it. The only people it really hobbles are the people who buy the product and want to use it legally.

And that has always been at the heart of the whole "digital rights" problem--the makers of the media try to control their product long after they sell it or give it away, for fear that after it is sold, it will be taken and redistributed or resold at a later time. That attempt at control causes problems because it tries to reach criminals by running over legitimate users. ...

And that brings up the question of how much right the seller of a product has to follow a product after a sale. Not only for protection against illegal copying, but for control over what happens to a product and how it is used once it is privately owned. Because recent developments have companies using "digital rights management" to do far more than just protect against copying. ...

They want to ride the illegal-download horse all the way into your living room, and assert permanent control over the media on the supposed grounds that it might at some point leave your home and go to someone else's. But you soon find out that it is less about hindering criminals than it is about hindering you, limiting your abilities so you'll pay them again to do what you should have been able to do in the first place. They don't just want to control the distribution of the media; they want to control every aspect of how you use the media in the privacy of your home, which is far in excess of their actual rights.

And that, essentially, is what DRM is all about: an attempt to control and limit use so they can sell you the same thing again and again, and/or sell to different people at different prices so they can charge all the market can bear in each separate situation. For them, that DRM-free content is on CDs and elsewhere is not an argument to make everything DRM-free, it is a reason to make all the DRM-free content covered by DRM somehow. The content producers want the opposite of what Jobs is calling for. They have tried again and again to apply DRM to CDs and other media. They are frustrated that it has failed, but they will still try again and again.

Now, you can hedge Job's remarks any way you like. You can point out that Jobs profits from the iPods and not the music, so the DRM is not as important to him. You can speculate that he's saying this as a tactic in dealing with European demands that Apple's FairPlay DRM be scrapped. You might even say that he doesn't really mean any of this.

None of that, however, will make what he wrote not true. And at least on the face of things, one cannot blame Jobs for the DRM that chains the music sold by Apple to the iPod. Jobs is now on the record as saying that he wants those chains gone. It won't change the minds of all the critics, but at the very least it's pretty impressive that someone like Jobs said the kind of thing that he said.

Twice a Victim

Have you ever been assaulted by adware? Have you ever had at least one window open up on your PC without your bidding, and show you an ad for something? Maybe you've gotten that fake dialog-box security-warning attack? The one where it looks like a real warning which says that your computer has porn, or your web surfing history can be compromised, or that your computer is open to attack--and if you click anywhere on the "dialog box," it takes you to a commercial web page selling software of some sort. This fake dialog box may have even popped up when you weren't web surfing, so it looks even more like a real warning from your OS.

If you've been exposed to such a low-key adware trick, then you have only a small taste of what a full-fledged adware attack feels like. A real attack is when your screen fills with browser windows bristling with graphic porn ads, and any attempt to close one window will bring an onslaught of even more ad-riddled windows, in hydra-like fashion. The program must be force-quit to silence the ads, using the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) to end the process--and then the machine must be cleaned of adware.

It's bad enough to be attacked by spammers in this way. But then imagine being sent to prison for 40 years because you were the victim of such a spam attack.

No, I'm not kidding. If you have been following the case of Julie Amero, you'll know what I'm talking about. Amero is a substitute teacher in Connecticut whose computer suffered a malicious adware attack in her seventh-grade classroom. It almost certainly was not her fault in any way, but she's been prosecuted--and now convicted--for causing "injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children," and could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison. No joke.

Here's what happened. Long before Amero even saw the computer, it was infected with adware. A month before the offending incident happened, there was spyware/adware installed on the machine that started tracking the computer's activities. Before Amero's visit, some other teacher or student used to classroom computer to visit a singles dating service, well-known for its porn adware. Several other pieces of adware had already infected the computer before Amero arrived on the scene. Furthermore, the school itself had allowed the computer's parental filter software to lapse, and the machine was no longer protected against such material. The antivirus software was outdated and the firewall was not set up. In short, the school itself was negligent, and other teachers had caused the problems that eventually surfaced. Amero was simply the one present when the eventual attack came about.

On October 19, 2004, the day Amero was teaching, students were allowed access to the computer. The regular teacher logged Amero on to the system, told her that students could have access to it, and even warned her not to shut down the machine, else she and the students would lose access to it. One student visited a hairstyling site, and then 20 minutes later, the Crayola crayon site got visited. The hair style site was still active, however, and redirected to a different hairstyle site--one with porn advertising. The process that then led to the adware attack is laid out in detail here.

The screen filled up with porn windows, and the computer got locked in one of those endless porn loops. It's not clear from the stories I read whether kids were at the computer when the windows came up or not, but it seems that they were not. Still, six kids reported seeing the porn, and even though Amero kept the kids from the computer, and even pushed one student's face away from the screen, she still got into trouble--to put it mildly. The students told their parents, the parents complained loudly to the school--and the school not only fired the teacher, but had her arrested. The prosecutor pushed hard on the case, the police didn't see fit to even check for adware, and the judge denied the defense the full ability to present the case on adware--apparently because the defense was late in bringing that particular defense up for some reason.

The prosecution put on an "expert witness" who claimed that the only way to get those windows would be to intentionally visit a porn site--which supports what my father has always told me about purported "experts": that all too often, they're full of crap. In fact, the software this "expert" claimed proved the teacher went to porn sites could not distinguish between someone typing in a URL and the browser automatically redirecting to one due to adware or javascript.

On the weight of the prosecution's case, however, the jury convicted Amero. Of course, they got a very different view, like the one presented in this article, which claims it was intentional because Amero supposedly changed her claim from "students did it" to "adware attack," and that Amero did not get rid of the attack. However, if Amero was no computer-savvy and students triggered the adware or were at the computer when it came on, then it would indeed look like they started it--just like the judge and jury assumed of Amero, and they were wrong as well. Amero may not have become aware of the adware angle until later; changing a defense strategy in this manner is not evidence of guilt, and it is asinine to suggest otherwise. That Amero did not turn off the computer may have been simply her not knowing how to deal with it, and not thinking of turning the computer off, while thinking the screen was hidden enough not to be a problem.

This is scary. Hell, I've experienced this kind of thing in my own classroom. I teach an introductory computer class, and I give my chapter tests on web pages. A few years back, a female student opened up Explorer to take the test, and her screen filled with porn ads. She called for help, and I went to help, but got the same problem: every window I closed brought up at least three more new ones. I sent the young woman to a free computer, force-quit Explorer, and shut down the machine, not allowing it to be used again until the IT guys could clear it of malware.

If I used a Windows PC (Macs don't get adware, not that I've heard of at least), I might even have had such an attack when giving a demo. As it is, I use a virtual version of XP on which I put nothing but the basic software and use for nothing but teaching, so I'm clean and safe.

But I can fully sympathize with Amero. Unless you know the Ctrl+Alt+Delete trick, shutting down Explorer is near-impossible in that state. Sure, you could shut the whole machine down, but you could just as easily be attacked on startup again. And Amero may not have been computer-savvy enough to handle the situation, especially if it happened as she was teaching a class and could not sit down and troubleshoot a porn attack at the moment. Hell, I know a few teachers at my own school who would be at that much of a loss, at least. Most people would not even know what was hitting them, and so would not know how to handle it at all. Add to that the fact that in today's world, virtually all 12-year-olds, especially boys, have visited porn sites on the Internet themselves.

So of course, we should send this teacher who got caught by an adware attack to prison for 40 years. Since the verdict was handed down, it hit the newswires, and virtually the entire technical world is shouting down the decision, decrying it for the outright miscarriage of justice it so clearly is. Sentencing has not yet taken place, and in light of the whole furor now taking place (Norwich police admit to being "thrashed" by complaints and criticism), the judge will hopefully not sentence Amero to any jail time at all, and Amero can hopefully then work as a free woman to have the conviction thrown out and erased from her record.

However, since the prosecution is insisting that Amero intentionally visited porn sites, she may be marked forever as some sort of unfit teacher, and not hired by schools again because they would not want to take the risk that the accusations, however questionable, might be true. And so a teacher may have her career trashed and her life derailed because of spam, paranoid and overprotective parents, overzealous prosecutors, and lay people who just don't know enough about computers, who listen to legal "experts" who know almost as little themselves.

Vista "Vulnerability"

While the Mac OS has not yet been exposed to a virus or other malware that could actually spread and be a threat to anyone, there have been many "proof of concept" hacks and a host of "vulnerabilities," or potential attacks that were never actually carried out. Many of these depended on a set of highly unlikely circumstances, like having two Bluetooth-enabled Macs which had not been software-updated within the past eight months operating in the same room with Bluetooth set to "Discoverable" and one of the owners foolish enough to manually allow a reported "device" that did not exist to be accepted by the computer.

Well, now Vista has joined that club--albeit in a way that makes Microsoft seem a hell of a lot more stupid than Apple ever looked. A new vulnerability reported on Vista just a few days after its release involves the OS's speech recognition. Now, speech recognition on a Mac requires a keyboard button to be depressed while a command is given (with an option to instead have the user to speak a definable keyword before the spoken command). This is to ensure that speech commands will not be taken by the computer by mistake when the feature is turned on.

Apparently Microsoft didn't take these rather obvious security steps. It seems that when Vista's speech recognition is turned on and a microphone is active (which is usually the case, if there is a built-in mic), any speech that matches the commands in the computer's vocabulary will be executed.

The potential hack: a sound file which starts giving speech commands to open Windows Explorer and delete files. Delivery is simple: a web site that starts playing a sound file when you arrive there. It could also be delivered in any number of other ways, including fake song files that begin with real music and then start issuing voice commands, or even a malware solution of some sort.

Now, like many of the Mac vulnerabilities, this Vista vulnerability is highly unlikely. While it will be common to find Vista users with active speakers and mics, it would be less common to find users who have speech recognition turned on. But the greatest unlikelihood would be the user who would just sit there and watch while their computer started speaking to itself, giving commands to delete files.

Now, on the other hand, this set of events is not impossible by a long shot. I have known a good many people who are computer-unsavvy enough that they'd be stymied long enough not to know what to do if their computer started doing that. Alternately, some users could be unlucky enough to be out of the room when the commands started being issued. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. Still, I would doubt that this will ever really hit anyone.

Regardless of whether the hack ever happens or succeeds, the fact remains that it makes Microsoft look really stupid. I mean, that a computer's security system could be overridden by a frickin' sound file is just embarrassing. In their defense, Microsoft points out that because Vista no longer makes the primary user the system administrator by default, only files in the user's directories can be affected. Which is small consolation, as that represents all the personal files of the user; it just means that Vista itself will not be hurt. Whoopee.

Of course, there is one other thing that makes the exploit truly unlikely: Vista's speech recognition sucks. Okay, commonly available speech recognition all sucks, but Vista is certainly no exception, as this demo gone awry which I reported on six months ago clearly shows. Nevertheless, some people reported actually being able to make the sound file hack work.

It should also be pointed out that Vista is still vulnerable to some of the most common pre-exiting malware, which can blow through Vista's much-ballyhooed defenses, and that Vista is not exactly immune to the host of new viruses that will inevitably appear in the coming months.

Like Zune, Like Windows

Just as the Zune was thoroughly hyped and failed to sell well, so goes Windows Vista. In Denver, initial sales have been slow:

Consumers in the metro area are apparently taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Vista - just as experts have advised them to do.

Stores haven't seen hordes of consumers lining up to buy the new Microsoft operating system.

"We've been selling a fair amount. There's definitely not high demand," said Jarred Dotterer, warehouse associate at Micro Center at the Denver Tech Center. "We're not low on stock."

The same is being reported in Jackson, Mississippi ("Jackson store reports slow sales of Windows Vista"). And Chillicothe, Ohio ("New Windows Vista not breaking any sales records around here"). And San Francisco, California ("No one is lining up for Windows Vista in San Francisco"), where crowds lined up to buy Mac OS 10.4 in 2005.

In fact, sales are slow everywhere; while some stores had even a few dozen people lining up at midnight, sales dropped off after the few eager beavers got their fix. It seems that everyone is realizing that Vista just ain't all that hot, just like they realized with the Zune. Unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates just does not know how to excite the fan base all that much--much less the public in general. Jobs has got everyone in a lather over a cell phone that'll sell for up to six times as much as Vista, and one can bet that a lot more people will line up to buy OS X 10.5 Leopard when it gets released--despite Apple having only about 1/20th the market that Windows has. (Some suggest that Steve Jobs missed a golden opportunity and should have opened up the Mac OS to work on PCs.)

Factors detracting from Vista sales are, of course, the fact that it is not revolutionary and contains nothing truly exciting, that XP works well enough for most, and that many would have to pop for a new computer to satisfy Vista's memory- and processor-hog appetites. And even some of its new features are disappointing--like the new-and-"improved" security, which is not only annoyingly intrusive, but also has been hacked and broken already.

What is happening is probably that most people are thinking, "ehh, I'll just wait 'til I get a new machine, and Vista will be on it then."

This cannot be good for Microsoft. Behemoth it may be, it is no longer a juggernaut. It has worked for five years to produce a single new version of an operating system, its flagship product, and virtually no one is all that interested in it. It will sell, eventually, if for no reason except that Windows comes on all new PC computers by default.

Some people are even looking at Macs because of Vista--and, factor in my Mac bias as much as you care to, it makes perfect sense, after all: if you're going to buy a new machine anyway, why not get a Mac? Not only do they cost much closer to PCs nowadays, but they even run Vista if you want 'em to.

Though my school is Windows-centric, the faculty is virtually all Mac now. In addition to myself, three other faculty and staff were already Mac users (myself and one other having recently bought new machines), but three others have switched and bought new Macs recently, and one more is on the verge of getting a nice Macbook. Two of my students just bought Macbooks as well. Now, I'd love to take credit for it all, but most of these switchers did it on the advice of others, though they of course heard my input as well.

Naturally, that's a microcosm. Hardly a trend. But then again, with Mac market share steadily rising, it is without doubt one small part of a much larger trend.

<sarcasm> Great Support </sarcasm>

Yargh. I related last week about how, when I got back from my trip to the U.S., I could no longer send email, though I could receive it OK. My entry focused on how the tech support people for the ISP (KDDI Dion) insisted that I do all of this stupid stuff to "fix" the problem, all based upon the assumption that they were not at fault for the malfunction--this after they did a quick and cursory "check" to confirm that they were not the culprits here--despite the fact that I had all kinds of evidence showing that it was them.

One thing I specifically asked about was whether they had made any changes to their system. They said no; I pressed them on it, and they swore that not a single change had been made to their service. They even went so far as to claim that Google and my two separate web hosts had all changed their outgoing email protocols within a 12-hour period.

What's more, to probe the problem further, they promised to set up my Dion email account again so I could test out their email service; if it worked, they claimed, then the problem would not be with them, but with someone else. Since it contained a password, they would have to send it by regular mail.

This was 6 days ago. I have still not received the promised package.

But it turns out that this is unnecessary. Today I figured out what the problem was. It was the ISP, like I suspected all along.

Turns out they did change their system. They switched on a security feature which requires all outgoing email to go through their SMTP servers. So all I did was change the SMTP servers to Dion's, and it all works smoothly now.

Not only that, but had they set me up with the email account that never arrived, it would have worked--and they would have claimed that this proved they had not changed anything, when they actually had.

I called up the same support line and got the same person. Before telling them what happened, I asked them to confirm that they had assured me last week that KDDI Dion had changed nothing; they agreed that this was the case. Then I laid out what I had found, and got the expected reply: oh, they had told me all about changing the SMTP servers the week before, didn't I hear them say that? Of course, it was easy to demonstrate that such was untrue, at which point they switched to telling me about how some setting had been changed at KDDI, but still the main fault was somehow my email providers. And then finally, after I'd pinned them down for causing me a week's email outage for no good reason, they resorted to saying that this was all just stuff they were relating to me from the Japanese tech support people. They ended by having me specify what I had done to fix the problem, expressing surprise that such was the way to fix things.

Swell.

Customer Support Motto: "It's Not Us"

Whenever you call customer support for a product that is not a closed system, that seems to be their philosophy. I'm having the same problem with my ISP right now.

I went on vacation in the U.S. for two weeks, and when I got back, my POP email wouldn't work right. (POP3 email is what you use with an email client like Eudora or Outlook Express, as opposed to web-based email like GMail or Yahoo Mail.) I can receive email all right, but I cannot send; the software says that the server doesn't respond. Whenever I have had that problem in the past, it has always been the ISP either having some problem somewhere, or demanding that you set your email software exactly to their specifications.

When I called KDDI-Dion (they have an English-language help center, though you don't get to talk to tech people, they mainly translate), they said that they ran a check of things on their end, and everything worked OK--so the fault must be on my end. I don't know how extensive their check was on their end, so I can't really call them out for not doing everything they could. And everything after that vague "check" was a suggestion that something was wrong somewhere else.

The thing is, it almost can't be somewhere else. Let me explain. I went to the U.S. on December 12. At that time, my email was working fine. In the U.S., I used my PowerBook, my laptop computer, and email worked fine. Then I came back to Japan On December 28, and immediately, the email didn't work. But that's not all: I have three computers, two email programs (three, if you count different platforms), and three different SMTP (outgoing mail) servers. On three computers, I have two Mac OS's and two Windows. I use Eudora 6.2 on both Macs, and Eudora 7 and Outlook Express on Windows. And I have two different web hosts with different SMTP server software, in addition to using Google's GMail POP service.

And on all computers, and on all software, using all the different SMTP servers, the problem is exactly the same: I can receive mail, but cannot send it.

That sends a clear message: it's not a software package problem, as three versions of two programs across two platforms cannot all simultaneously have the same problem. It's not a problem specific to the computer, because three different computers running different platforms all have the same problem. And it's not something different about the outgoing mail servers, because the same problem manifests itself with three different mail servers run by three different companies, and all started having the problem within a 12-hour period. While it is possible that all three companies involved all changed their mail server software within 12 hours of an upgrade, it is stretching things way too far to suggest that (a) this event just happened to occur exactly as I returned to Japan, and that (b) none of them released notifications of a change that would effectively disable outgoing email. Hold this up against there being a problem with my ISP somewhere, and there's just no comparison.

Naturally, logically, all the evidence points to a problem with the ISP somewhere, that at some point in the two weeks during my trip to the U.S. that something got out of whack and caused this problem--but because that would involve KDDI-Dion having to do some work to suss out the problem, they seemed unwilling to admit that possibility. So I went through the motions with the support person trying out all the different email programs on all my computers with different things turned on and off, rewiring my network this way and that.

And when all these efforts failed, they tried to claim that it was the people running the email servers who had somehow all secretly upgraded their security software at the same time. When the rep told me about it, she even declared it as if it was an actual, reported event that had been announced somewhere. She didn't say that they may have upgraded their security software, she said that they had upgraded it, and that was the problem. Had I been less well-equipped or less well-informed, I would have had no choice but to accept that line of bull, and would have been forced to deal futilely with my web hosts from then on about the SMTP server status.

All I can say is, thank god that I have so many different computers, programs, and email accounts available, otherwise I could not have insisted that they were almost certainly wrong on that one.

And of course, whenever you call tech support for just about any company that makes a product that in any way interacts with others, you get the same attitude: when it comes down to us doing actual work to solve your problem or blaming someone else, we blame someone else. That way, you make the other guys do the work before you do, even if all the evidence points to your system being the problem. I remember that even with Apple, in fact--one of the first things they would insist you do before they got involved was to blank out your hard drive and then reinstall everything from scratch, and only if the problem persisted after that, they would get involved. Well, thanks! All I have to do is a full day's work, probably unnecessarily, to prove to you that it's not my problem, but yours instead.

Now, that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the tough job tech support has. Believe me, I have had more than enough experience trying to solve computer problems for people over the phone. It can be painful. Being the most computer-savvy person that most of my friends, students, and co-workers know, I tend to get all the requests from people to help them when they have a problem. Which is why I am a very good tech support client, as I know to alert them to the details of my computer hardware and setup, tell them all the technical details about my software, and the precise nature and process of the malfunction, giving more detail rather then less.

Unfortunately for them, it also means that I don't accept BS cover-your-ass answers either.

But at the very least, I ask them to work with me and not tell me to waste time hunting down by-the-book problems that I can logically eliminate as described above. In the end, I got them to do this. They were down to asking me to change the ports used by my SMTP servers when I insisted that we check out ISP equipment problems first. So soon I will do their local-equipment check of turning off the vDSL modem and router, then rebooting them while connected directly to just one computer. In the meantime, they are setting me up with a new password for the KDDI-Dion email account (I never use it and can't recall the password I chose 3 years ago), so we can test whether I can send mail through their servers.

I hope it'll clear up soon (and if anyone has any ideas about the problem, let me know!), because it can get really tiring dealing with a service which seems to be set up to do nothing but talk and slough off responsibility in every way possible before actually doing something.

iMac of the Year

Apple has got to be happy about this:

Image from Mac Daily News; alternate image from TIME here

The use of the iMac is not directly referential to the article; they simply had to use some computer, so they chose an iMac, probably for the simplicity of the appearance--though they over-painted the already-simple front-panel interface with a YouTube screen, used to indicate what you communicate over the World Wide Web. And as happy as I am that an Mac was chosen to represent the everyman's interface with the web, I am even more pleased at the subject matter it represents.

I think that TIME made a fantastic choice here, though in the flowery prose and short storytelling, they do not explain the central point or theme all that well. They did run a story recently which also spoke to the heart of this issue but which also only described it peripherally. Maybe there's an ink-and-paper version, or even an on-line one, which I am not seeing. But they do seem to be making a point here which I fully agree with, even if they are not making it clearly.

This is something of a special point to me, which I have blogged on before, about how the Internet is wonderfully subversive in that it opens up the potential for the individual to communicate to a world audience in a way never before possible. The main point is that before the Internet, communication was controlled by a very few people, a rarified "publishing class" to whom you had to genuflect in order to communicate with more than just a few hundred people in the world. The Internet bypasses the publishing class for the first time in history, and makes it possible for anyone to speak to the world based solely upon the strength of their message.

This is also one of the reasons I favor Network Neutrality so much: it keeps the playing field of communication relatively level and uncensored. Allow the Telecoms to control the Internet, and that becomes hobbled, with the average person's voice suddenly becoming muted and leveraged, potentially even destroying the Internet as the free tool of communication I describe above and instead supplanting that new avenue of social discourse with simply yet another stripe of the publishing class, controlling what you say and taking tolls on yet another controlled and muted road.

Hopefully the Internet will stay what it is; the Democrats taking control of Congress, while not a guarantee, is a very good sign that it will. As such, the Internet is not a perfect answer; it is not a solution to the problem of unequal speech, but it is a step in the right direction. And any public celebration of that aspect of the Internet is something that I gladly welcome.

Stumbled Upon

When you run a blog, you tend to get a steady stream of visitors. Some are regulars, and some come from the search engines. Every once in a while, the numbers surge, usually because a strong site somewhere linked to yours.

I used to get the occasional uptick in visitors from links on MacSurfer, a Mac news source; once as many as 10,000 people came in from that page, so many that I had to temporarily remove some graphics or else exceed my bandwidth limits. I haven't had a bump so large since then, and haven't been linked to by a rich source like that for some time.

However, twice in the past few weeks I have a new referrer, a site called "Stumble Upon." At first I thought it might be another spammer, but it showed up in Google Analytics (spammers usually don't), and a quick look at the site showed that it was some sort of web-linking/searching community site, probably like Digg. The first spate of links added up to just over a hundred, but today almost 2000 came through the site, going to my recent post on free Mac software.

Have you ever signed up for a service and then completely forgotten you did? That's what happened to me here. After finding the link surge, I tried to find out more about the site, but had trouble signing up--it told me that my usual sign-in name, "BlogD," had been taken. At first, I was a bit put-off that someone had taken my moniker--until I realized that the "other" person had my location. Apparently, for some reason, I had created an account with them more than two years ago and had never come back. Says something for the persistence of accounts with them...

Nevertheless, the site does not seem to be very easy to understand, or at least they do not make themselves self-explanatory. Maybe if I read some FAQ somewhere or dug around for instructions, I might be able to figure it out, but without that, the site doesn't feel very intuitive. And since I don't have time right now, it'll have to remain a mystery. But pretty soon, I'm gonna have to look into this whole Digg/Del.icio.us kind of connectivity fad; so far, when I've encountered it, I haven't really understood it (am I an old fogey already? I don't even have a MySpace site). Probably I could build readership on the site with it, but it'll take a bit of sitting down and figuring out.

For now, it looks like StumbleUpon may be sending some business my way, though that is based upon just a few spikes of referrals. (Is someone out there plugging my site into it? If so, thanks!) But it is also of note that I found out about it more than two years ago but only now is anything much coming from there.

Internet Cafes

As I am away from home for more than a day, I am using an Internet cafe to make this post. I was hoping for a cafe that would allow me to use my own computer (with my blogging software and browser bookmarks), but this place, at least, does not allow for that. No WiFi, and the Ethernet cable for the computer is too short and cannot reach my laptop.

This cafe also has a fair amount of privacy; all the computer areas are walled off, and though the doors do not completely block the doorways, you could easily imagine salarymen coming in at any time of day or night and doing... er, questionable things. You can ever rent a "pair seat" with a nice, cushy couch where two people could, er, well, you know.

But for those not lecherously-minded, there comes with the 400-yen-per-hour usage charge free drinks and bite-sized candies, not to mention free usage of manga comics, PS2 video games, or movies on DVD. Or, if you're willing to pay, meals (including beef bowls, pasta, curry and so forth). Printing will also cost extra, 20 yen for a B&W printout, 50 yen for color.

Not all cafes have such private booths; it ranges from open counters with rows of computers to a variety of openness in booths. Most train stations (hubs of commerce in Japanese communities) have Internet cafes, which offer a variety of services and styles to attract customers. Want to sit in a massage chair while you surf? This random choice of cafes might give you an idea of a small neighborhood cafe. Some cafes will go so far as to offer almost spa-like treatment, with relaxation booths for ladies that include skin treatments and manual massages. In other words, more than just your basic computer-on-a-counter.

90% Garbage, and One Solution

A new report says that spam email--already at record levels last summer--has tripled since June, and now accounts for 9 out of every 10 emails sent.

How long will these scum be allowed to operate before everyone out there says "enough!" and does what is necessary to cut them off at the knees? Already they have overrun our email, flooded our blogs, polluted the Internet with filth both illegal and barely legal. Probably a big chunk of what you pay for your Internet service subsidizes these sleazes, who take advantage of the free ride we're giving them so they can annoy us, harm us, and fleece us.

I am not one for restrictions or regulations on the Internet, so I would suggest as many self-healing techniques as possible, but beyond that, make the rules necessary to stop these rat-bastard parasites from bringing the Internet crashing down.

Almost exactly three years ago, I outlined a new email system that would immediately crush email spammers, and I reiterated the same plan a year and a half ago. A good idea never wears thin, so here it is again.

Call it "Email 2.0." Start a new protocol for email. It should be open-source, with profits, if there are any, going to fund new projects to stop spammers. No one company or country would be able to hijack the standards nor profit from them--the protocols and technology would be agreed upon by programmers and experts in the open-source project, and kept that way. Makers of email software would be given 6-12 months' lead time (or whatever is realistically necessary) to incorporate the feature into their email clients and other software.

In this new protocol, everyone would receive $1 credit right off the bat--you wouldn't even have to pay to start off. Those who would need to buy more credit could use a system that anyone could pay into--credit cards and PayPal would be possible, perhaps, but some other system, like a prepaid card or sending a money order to some location, would also be necessary.

Here's how it would work: whenever you send an email, it could potentially cost you a penny. But here's the beauty of it: it only gets debited from your account if your email winds up in someone's spam folder for more than three days. When that happens, you receive an automatic receipt informing you of the transaction, or whatever other notification system works best.

UPDATE: Oops. I misremembered my own idea. The idea was not to charge senders only after the email was reported as spam by the recipients. The idea was to automatically charge every email one penny and then forgive the charge once it was accepted by the user. This itself would cause problems, I'm sure--if your account were taken over by a spammer somehow, for example--but as I mentioned in the comments, a standard setting could be not to allow more than x numbers of messages to be sent within a certain time period. Again, stuff that could be worked out by smarter people. I know this whole system raises problems, and maybe it is unworkable--but I do have faith in the idea that some system would be workable, and we need to find that and implement it.

Most people would take years to eat up a dollar at that rate--have you sent 100 emails that wound up in people's spam folders in your lifetime? Maybe most people would never lose the original dollar.

But spammers would run out of money in the first few minutes of operation. Today, they depend on free email to send millions of spam out every day. But at a penny a pop, a million spam would suddenly become $10,000, and no spammer could afford to operate at the levels they now operate at. In November this year alone, 7 billion spam emails were sent; that would come to $70 million per month to the spammers. No way they could keep that up.

This system would not stop junk mail--after all, businesses still pay postage for snail mail advertisements. You'd still get spam--but you'd get a hell of a lot less of it, and that's the whole idea. Spam would no longer threaten to cripple our email systems.

The money paid for these spam emails could be split between the spam recipients and the open-source project, which would after all need some funding to survive. Even better, the recipient's portion of the income from spam landing in their inbox could be used to recharge their own accounts in case they lost some pennies from their own email accidentally landing in someone's spam folder. Beyond that, they could get a PayPal credit which could then be used for online shopping. What spam remained after this technological culling would actually begin to spur legitimate online shopping. And anyone who tries to nickel-and-dime their friends by collecting the spam penny off of legitimate email would probably not get sent any more email, not to mention they would not have their friends for long.

Because the system is, to a degree, exclusive, as well as self-correcting, spammers could not take refuge in spam-friendly countries or international waters. However, checks for fraud would need to be pretty good so that spammers couldn't hack in and create fake accounts full of credit. But we're able to do that with real money (PayPal manages, not to mention credit card companies), so hopefully that would not be a roadblock.

Perhaps a greater problem would be the spammer's propensity for hacking into victims' computers and using them as proxies to send massive numbers of emails each--but hopefully protections of this sort could also be averted by beefing up email security, like adding a feature that would require user intervention to send email to more than three people within a span of ten minutes, say.

I truly believe that such a system is possible, workable, and should be done. It just requires enough people getting fed up enough to make the effort. Frankly, I am pretty surprised no one has tried to get such a movement going by now.

Surfing Conditions

One constant I have always noticed in the visitor stats for this site: readership numbers drop by more than half on weekends and holidays. Which brings me to wonder why: are people simply out of the house more on these days? It seems unlikely that this would be the case, as they are at home in the mornings and evenings and could surf then. It would account for some drop-off, but not so much--in fact, if surfing is done at home, one would assume that it would rise when people are at home more.

What seems more likely is that a large number of people surf the web at their jobs. That would make perfect sense--the drop-off happens when people don't have access to the web. Either they don't have access to computers and the web at home, or they just spend a lot of time at work goofing off. Interesting.

Um... but not you, of course.

I Forgot Something

I knew I was leaving something out of the Zune post. Another scam by Microsoft: their currency system. When you buy music from the Zune online store, you don't use cash, or even credit--you use Microsoft "points," like Disney Dollars or funny money.

How is it a scam? Well, first off, the points are not made equal to dollars or cents, there's an 'exchange rate' at play here. Microsoft never actually quotes real money amounts when stating the price of a song, they say it costs 79 "points" instead. That makes it sound like Microsoft is selling music for 79 cents, but because a $5 purchase of "points" gets only 400 points in your account, that 79-point purchase really cost you 99 cents--the same as the iTunes Store.

Of course, there are benefits to having the point system. Unfortunately, those benefits are for Microsoft, not for you. For you, it's nothing but a liability. In addition to fooling you with an exchange rate, Microsoft also does not allow you to buy exactly the number of points needed to buy music--you always must buy too many points. When you buy from the iTunes Store, your credit card is billed for the exact amount, 99 cents. But in the Zune Marketplace, you can only buy points in whole-dollar chunks, starting at $5. Since music costs 99 cents a song, you have 5 cents left over when you use up the purchase amount. Essentially, when you buy a song for 99 cents, Microsoft is not giving you your penny change. Or, at least, they're keeping it in their pocket until you buy 100 songs.

Now, to you, this may be small change. But imagine millions of customers buying less than 100 songs. Say, 10 million people buying ten songs each is an extra million bucks Microsoft squeezes out of the deal. Though you might think that a company worth umpteen billions of dollars wouldn't need to create a scam just to squeeze another million out of gullible customers.

But the scam doesn't end there: you can only buy Microsoft points in denominations of $5 or higher. Which means that you can never buy one song. You have to buy in chunks of five. Which, of course, most people will not do. Most people will either never use up all the points they have, or they will take time to do it, which means more millions of non-reimbursed dollars for Microsoft, and more time for the pre-paid cash to generate interest for Microsoft before they have to pass the money on to the music labels.

Of course, unless you read a review like this, you don't learn about it until you've plunked down $250 for a Zune player, by which time you're committed. And then you discover that Microsoft has no respect for you and believes you're just another sucker who'll do whatever they want.

So, What's the Advantage?

Zune is now out there. Kind of. It's not exactly flying off the shelves, apparently. Not like the PS3, for example, where huge throngs of people lined up to buy them and they sold out instantly. With the Zune on it's first day out, Best Buy in San Francisco sold all of ten units in the morning--which the store's manager said was "better than I expected." That kind of sums it up.

The Zune is obviously intended as an iPod-killer, but has been beset by problems from the start. First was the choice of names. I mean, really--"Zune"? Is that supposed to be a combination of "Tune" and. . . what, the letter "Z"? The logo they chose is not exactly all that spiffy, either. The Zune includes a logo sticker (again copying Apple), but who would want to slap that thing on anything they own?

What's more, the design ain't great; it's bigger and clunkier than an iPod, and though the plastic casing may be more resilient to scratches and smudges, it's also less appealing. The wheel/circle, apparently intended to be reminiscent of the iPod's scroll wheel, doesn't scroll, it just covers four buttons. And the colors include white, black, and. . . brown. And people say that the brown is the best-looking one. Maybe I'm prejudiced, but when your new product looks its best in the crap-colored version, you know something is probably wrong.

Microsoft is pushing this as being better than an iPod, touting two main features: the WiFi interconnectivity, and the larger video display. Neither of these selling points, however, live up to the hype. The screen is a touch bigger than the iPod's, but it is the same resolution--which just means that the image quality will be a bit poorer as well. Just hold your iPod an inch or two closer and the difference will cancel out.

But the WiFi "sharing" is the big thing. I remember seeing a clip from the Oprah show where all the audience members were given a Zune, and a guest (presumably from Microsoft) gave the selling point: you can send songs from one Zune to the other! If your friend has a song that you don't have, you can ask them to send it to you, then it's on your Zune! Microsoft is even using a new slogan, "Welcome to the Social!"

What the MS rep on Oprah, and MS' pitches in general fail to mention is that the "sharing" is limited by Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions. Any file sent from one Zune to another is only playable three times. If you don't use all three plays in three days, it becomes unplayable anyway. It does not disappear, though--it remains on your Zune as an advertisement linked to Microsoft's Zune music store. Wouldn't it be fun to litter your playlists with ads for songs? To see a listing and think you have music, only to have it not play, and instead urge you to buy it? Wheee!

Update: I forgot to mention--once you've sent a piece of music to a friend, you can never re-send it to the same person again. So, no loophole there. Also, to be fair, it seems that the 'littering' of sent-but-unplayable songs will be limited to an "in-box" and not your main library--I think. So it's possible that you won't be constantly tripping over unplayable music equivalent to ads.

But let's say you don't mind the DRM or the ad-littering. Still, how often will sharing be possible? Think about it. I have an iPod. So do many people I know, fellow teachers, students, friends. And yet I cannot remember the last time I encountered anyone using an iPod at the same time I was and there was any likelihood that either of us would share with each other. Maybe some people would use it more than others, but frankly, I think that this feature will go to waste for most people.

But the WiFi feature has other down points as well. Even non-protected songs get zapped by the DRM. Even if you make your own song, when it is transferred from one Zune to the other, it again gets zapped--three plays or three days. And WiFi should be a powerful feature--it could be used to connect to the web with the Zune as a mobile-phone-style browser, it could allow you to buy songs online at hotspots, it could connect to digital cameras and other devices--but the Zune does not. Hell, it won't even connect to your own computer via WiFi! It is currently only active for Zune-to-Zune transfers, and that is limited to photos and music files with the DRMs (no videos). One imagines that MS will eventually enable the other abilities, but for them to have it so limited at launch is disappointing.

Another down point of the Zune, this one not related to the user experience, is Bill Gate's decision to sell out to the music companies. Gates decided to give a cut of each Zune sold to Universal. It is only $1 per $250 Zune, but the precedent is the damning thing. It is virtually blackmail, and Gates is caving in so he can enter the market--but by ding so he is opening the gates for more gouging in the future, weakening Apple and other makers of players who until now have resisted the media companies' demands of extortion. More on that later, in a different post.

Finally, one last screw-up: Zune is incompatible with Vista. I'm sorry, but when your two big November releases are Zune and Vista, and neither will work with the other, someone isn't doing their job right. Especially when Vista has been in Beta forever and most software by third-party vendors will work on it. Both Vista and Zune have been in parallel development for so long that for them to be incompatible is almost unforgivable. I know there will be an upgrade by January (erm, I think there will be), but nevertheless, this is not a well-played release. [Update: Microsoft now claims that Zune will be compatible with Vista "by January 30, 2007"--presumably the release date for the consumer version of Vista.]

By the way, why do people seem to be grimacing in the Zune software images? It's not just the frame above, there are a few more as well. Maybe they tried to install it on Vista. . . If this is their attempt to show people singing, their photographers did a terrible job. It looks like the woman above is in pain. And are those other two women making out? What a bizarre image.

Okay, all bashing aside: Apple should be worried. Yes, that's right, I just said that. But why? Was I insincere in all the criticism? Nope. I think it is 100% accurate, and the Zune is a piece of crap. So why should Apple be worried? Because everything that Microsoft releases is a piece of crap. . . in the beginning. MS has a history of this: release a piece of crap. Then make an improvement, And another. And then another. And by the time the piece of crap is somewhat less crappy, MS has used their marketing thuggishness and 800-pound-gorilla status in the marketplace to sell a million of them and make people feel like the piece of crap is exactly what they should be using, for some reason they cannot quite pin down. MS Word was a piece of crap. Internet Explorer was a piece of crap. Windows was a piece of crap. And the Zune is a piece of crap. Therefore, with Microsoft's deep pockets to subsidize it for many years while they work their marketing magic, it could actually be a threat.

And Zune does have some potential. The WiFi, as earlier stated, could be expanded to include some very good features. The iPod went through redesigns, so the Zune will eventually look less like a really bad remote control. And if Microsoft has shown a talent for anything, ripping off Apple is it.

Of course, eventual Zune dominance is far from a sure thing. While we all know that MS would never improve anything unless someone was nipping at their heels, we know just as well that Apple would be improving things even if no one is within a mile of them. Apple will not rest on its laurels with the iPod. If Apple does indeed soon release its full-screen touch-controlled iPod, it will deliver a crushing blow to the Zune. And while MS can copy Apple, they can't duplicate Apple's finesse and coolness.

It'll be a competition, but in the end, I think Apple will win over Microsoft on this one--just like Google has. Despite Microsoft's best efforts, they aren't even close to Google in what Google does. And likely the Zune will be a repeat of this. I don't think the Zune will be as big a disaster as some predict; I think it will still be there ten years from now, but I don't think it'll ever get to be on top.

Behind the Curtain

Yet another of my Internet pe