Franklin P. Jones
I don't know why this struck me as very funny this morning.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Subsidies
"It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon; which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to."
Franklin P. Jones
I don't know why this struck me as very funny this morning.
Franklin P. Jones
I don't know why this struck me as very funny this morning.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Friends with Vista
After nearly a year, I finally decided to figure out what I could do to make my Vista laptop a bit faster. The memory is maxed out at 2 Gigabytes and it has a dual-core AMD CPU. It had always been very very slow in completing trivial tasks, like opening a browser or the control panel. Copying and moving files took way too long, and I just never approached my problem with logic.
A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend about my experience with Vista so far, and mentioned to him that I didn't think it was a problem with Vista, but a hardware issue with my Gateway laptop. "It runs very hot," I told him. "The hard drive activity never stops. I just don't think the machine was designed well enough to support such a heavy OS." I'd never seen Vista so slow on any other computer, so why the hell is it pokey on mine? And what in the dickens is going on with my hard drive?
Then it hit me. Constant hard drive activity is an indicator of (1) a virus or crapware, or (2) an indexing service. Google Desktop search was deployed with the computer when I bought it; part of Gateway's image, along with all the other garbage like BigFix, AOL , and the Office 2007 90-day trial.
Having been a student of Vista before and during its release, I remembered something about Google and Microsoft having fits about desktop search. It seems that Vista includes its own indexing service to speed up searching, and Google was having a hissy over users not being able to choose a desktop search engine. The Windows Indexing Service is on by default, and I don't think any manufacturers have changed that in their production images. And it just so happens that Gateway included Google Desktop in every computer they released with Vista, and therein lies my problem: two indexing services, constantly running on my poor little 5400 RPM notebook hard drive.
After some thought, I decided I'm a fairly organized fellow and don't have the need very often to search for a document. Most of what I access anyway is on the network, and those locations aren't indexed by default anyway. So away went Google Desktop. Though I love Google, I have no need for that program on my mobile station.
And for that matter, I canceled the Windows Indexing service. No need to pick sides, you know?
Then for a final pick-me-up, I had Vista optimize the graphics for performance, which took away all the eye-candy and effectively made my desktop look like Windows 2000. I'm fine with that.
Oh, and one more thing: I shut off the UAC. Those pain-in-the-ass messages one gets when he tries to install a program, "Windows needs your permission to continue," are gone. I can now run a command window without specifying to run it as Administrator. I can change IP settings with fewer mouse clicks. A little bubble message when I log on warning me that User Account Control is turned off is the only annoyance I have now, and I'm sure that with a simple registry edit I can get rid of that too. Maybe I'll post it later.
I must say this little bottom-end laptop is pretty damn speedy these days. NetBeans opens in under 60 seconds. Outlook opens in under 5, and boot times are at their lowest since I got it. This doesn't change anything about the inevitable change to a Mac when I can afford one, but it certainly makes me more comfortable in delaying it.
A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend about my experience with Vista so far, and mentioned to him that I didn't think it was a problem with Vista, but a hardware issue with my Gateway laptop. "It runs very hot," I told him. "The hard drive activity never stops. I just don't think the machine was designed well enough to support such a heavy OS." I'd never seen Vista so slow on any other computer, so why the hell is it pokey on mine? And what in the dickens is going on with my hard drive?
Then it hit me. Constant hard drive activity is an indicator of (1) a virus or crapware, or (2) an indexing service. Google Desktop search was deployed with the computer when I bought it; part of Gateway's image, along with all the other garbage like BigFix, AOL , and the Office 2007 90-day trial.
Having been a student of Vista before and during its release, I remembered something about Google and Microsoft having fits about desktop search. It seems that Vista includes its own indexing service to speed up searching, and Google was having a hissy over users not being able to choose a desktop search engine. The Windows Indexing Service is on by default, and I don't think any manufacturers have changed that in their production images. And it just so happens that Gateway included Google Desktop in every computer they released with Vista, and therein lies my problem: two indexing services, constantly running on my poor little 5400 RPM notebook hard drive.
After some thought, I decided I'm a fairly organized fellow and don't have the need very often to search for a document. Most of what I access anyway is on the network, and those locations aren't indexed by default anyway. So away went Google Desktop. Though I love Google, I have no need for that program on my mobile station.
And for that matter, I canceled the Windows Indexing service. No need to pick sides, you know?
Then for a final pick-me-up, I had Vista optimize the graphics for performance, which took away all the eye-candy and effectively made my desktop look like Windows 2000. I'm fine with that.
Oh, and one more thing: I shut off the UAC. Those pain-in-the-ass messages one gets when he tries to install a program, "Windows needs your permission to continue," are gone. I can now run a command window without specifying to run it as Administrator. I can change IP settings with fewer mouse clicks. A little bubble message when I log on warning me that User Account Control is turned off is the only annoyance I have now, and I'm sure that with a simple registry edit I can get rid of that too. Maybe I'll post it later.
I must say this little bottom-end laptop is pretty damn speedy these days. NetBeans opens in under 60 seconds. Outlook opens in under 5, and boot times are at their lowest since I got it. This doesn't change anything about the inevitable change to a Mac when I can afford one, but it certainly makes me more comfortable in delaying it.
Monday, February 18, 2008
HD Coasters
It's in all the latest news, so I might as well chime in on it, too. HD-DVD is dying, and fast. Since Warner Bros. announced that it is dropping it from its DVD release formats in January, Netflix said they're not going to place any more orders for movies in HD-DVD. Then today I read that Wal-Mart is phasing it out. Seems like there's a clear dominant format finally.
Geez, before I can even finish writing this, Toshiba calls it quits. Forget I said anything, then. I guess it's really over. At least I didn't get the Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD player. Now there's 300,000 pissed-off people if you ask me. Hell, it took me until 2001 to buy a DVD player. Sometime next year I'll have a Blu-ray device, but not now.
Geez, before I can even finish writing this, Toshiba calls it quits. Forget I said anything, then. I guess it's really over. At least I didn't get the Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD player. Now there's 300,000 pissed-off people if you ask me. Hell, it took me until 2001 to buy a DVD player. Sometime next year I'll have a Blu-ray device, but not now.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
Microsoft Takes a Swing
Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo - Washington Post
This actually came as a surprise today. Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Preposterous!
That could change a lot about the web, but something smells. Microsoft is a huge company, and little-old Google seems to have them grabbing at straws to figure out how to catch up. I can look at any place on the web that Google produced and tell you exactly why their advertising makes so much sense. Why their e-mail works so well, and no user has to pay for it. Why they have so much available for free.
It's simply because they have but one reason: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's it. There are no software revenue projections, nothing to give the shareholders a hard-on, nothing about providing a service at a premium. Just to organize the world's information. This has been their goal since Sergey tried to download the Internet (or was it Larry? ...not important). Sure, they sell stuff. Useful stuff (except the lava lamp) even, like the Google search appliance and SketchUp Pro. But that is not their main business driver by any means. They're spending millions every year to scan books from libraries and make them searchable. They have a vast collection of scholarly journals and papers from around the world, and one may also search inside any of these.
This is just a taste of what Google is doing. They are successful because of something I don't have a name for, but it is something along the lines of know what you're doing and do no evil.
Most of you know that this blog is driven by the Blogger engine. I pay nothing for it, and it works much better than some of the other tools I've tried. Google probably bought it, but it has improved much over the years and it has never cost me anything. The funny thing is that there aren't ads all over it. Sure, there are ads on this site, but I put them there; they aren't some mandated advertisement justified for making my blogging free, it's just free.
No one has mentioned so far that Gmail doesn't inject ads into every message sent. It's just regular e-mail. The advertisements shown on the side of the Gmail window are only text-based, and they're usually relevant to what my e-mail is about. That way the advertising works. And if it works, people pay for it. So Google is king.
Microsoft and Yahoo! (and AOL, for that matter) are not because their interfaces are so heavy and the ads are very annoying. Their infrastructures are likely not as efficient as Google's (who else uses a hundred thousand servers?) and their business models are not in tune with what people want.
Okay, I changed my mind. Yahoo! and AOL are in the entertainment business. Microsoft is in the software business (I put that together all by myself!). Google, however, is in the search business. Does anyone remember when a Yahoo! search looked eerily familiar, as if the results of that search were the same as a Google search for the same string? It's because they were. Yahoo! used to use the Google engine for its search until just a few years ago.
The business of the web is changing, but there's no way I can predict anything. I only get feelings, and I'm usually wrong because business is definitely not one of my strong interests. If the major search engines are reduced to two, though, it could get pretty damn nasty by 2010. I'll likely not keep up with this subject, but it may be interesting nonetheless.
This actually came as a surprise today. Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Preposterous!
That could change a lot about the web, but something smells. Microsoft is a huge company, and little-old Google seems to have them grabbing at straws to figure out how to catch up. I can look at any place on the web that Google produced and tell you exactly why their advertising makes so much sense. Why their e-mail works so well, and no user has to pay for it. Why they have so much available for free.
It's simply because they have but one reason: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's it. There are no software revenue projections, nothing to give the shareholders a hard-on, nothing about providing a service at a premium. Just to organize the world's information. This has been their goal since Sergey tried to download the Internet (or was it Larry? ...not important). Sure, they sell stuff. Useful stuff (except the lava lamp) even, like the Google search appliance and SketchUp Pro. But that is not their main business driver by any means. They're spending millions every year to scan books from libraries and make them searchable. They have a vast collection of scholarly journals and papers from around the world, and one may also search inside any of these.
This is just a taste of what Google is doing. They are successful because of something I don't have a name for, but it is something along the lines of know what you're doing and do no evil.
Most of you know that this blog is driven by the Blogger engine. I pay nothing for it, and it works much better than some of the other tools I've tried. Google probably bought it, but it has improved much over the years and it has never cost me anything. The funny thing is that there aren't ads all over it. Sure, there are ads on this site, but I put them there; they aren't some mandated advertisement justified for making my blogging free, it's just free.
No one has mentioned so far that Gmail doesn't inject ads into every message sent. It's just regular e-mail. The advertisements shown on the side of the Gmail window are only text-based, and they're usually relevant to what my e-mail is about. That way the advertising works. And if it works, people pay for it. So Google is king.
Microsoft and Yahoo! (and AOL, for that matter) are not because their interfaces are so heavy and the ads are very annoying. Their infrastructures are likely not as efficient as Google's (who else uses a hundred thousand servers?) and their business models are not in tune with what people want.
Okay, I changed my mind. Yahoo! and AOL are in the entertainment business. Microsoft is in the software business (I put that together all by myself!). Google, however, is in the search business. Does anyone remember when a Yahoo! search looked eerily familiar, as if the results of that search were the same as a Google search for the same string? It's because they were. Yahoo! used to use the Google engine for its search until just a few years ago.
The business of the web is changing, but there's no way I can predict anything. I only get feelings, and I'm usually wrong because business is definitely not one of my strong interests. If the major search engines are reduced to two, though, it could get pretty damn nasty by 2010. I'll likely not keep up with this subject, but it may be interesting nonetheless.
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