So, I hopped on to NewEgg and picked myself out some components that I knew I’d never have a chance of buying for myself and waited for them to come.  Well, they came . . . and I’m a little blown away by it all.  

• Intel Core i7 2.66GHz Quad-Core, Hyper-Threaded 64-bit CPU (a total of 8 virtual cores)
• 12GB DDR3 RAM
• 4x 300GB Velociraptor 10K RPM drives in RAID5
• ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 with three DVI ports.

Was it a little over the top?  Maybe.  But as an old friend of mine once told me “You don’t steal in slow-motion.”  Allow me to show you what my desktop looks like now!

Special thanks to Dave over at Blogography for the custom pic (it wasn’t easy to find a background that can span a 5040X1050 space, but he found a pic from his collection and modified it for me).

So, why the title of my post today?  In my excitement, I went right into the Windows Vista rating system to see what my new rig was rated at.  Imagine my surprise when it’s only a 5.9!

I did a bit of research, and it turns out that 5.9 is the highest Vista can rate ANYTHING.  Never mind the fact that the computer is running Photoshop, Illustrator, compiling SQL, AND transferring a large amount of files on the network and STILL getting a 5.9 (yeah, I rated it while it was really busy just to see what it would do).  So, I guess I hit Microsoft’s little “level cap” and have therefore “beaten” Windows Vista.  I’ll have to wait until they release a new patch and raise the level cap to 70, and maybe give me some new content before I can actually test this thing!

In the mean time, I’m going to throw everything I can at it!

At the end of my last entry, I sort of bashed on the iPhone unfairly.  It’s not that I have an actual issue with the iPhone per se, but it was the best example of Apple’s “we can charge you extra for what PC user’s have had for years!” mentality.

In truth, where Mac OS shows everything that making a computer “idiot proof” can do wrong, the iPhone shows where “idiot proof” isn’t such a bad thing!  (special thanks to my friend Robert, a Mac user, for the phrase “idiot proof”).

Also this last weekend, my phone fell apart.  I’m not making that up either; part of the screen fell off and the center 5-way directional wheel peeled away, leaving a nice glue spot to press against my face.  I’ve never had a phone, much less a Motorola, suddenly do this and it was more than annoying.  Since I can’t go out and just buy a new phone (not with all the features I want, anyway) I was in a bit of a spot until some friends came to the rescue.  Welsdog and Robert both let me use their phones till I could save up for a replacement one of my own.  Since Robert’s was more advanced than Welsdog’s, I settled on it out of the two.

The “old” phone is an HTC 8525 on AT&T’s network running Windows Mobile 5.  Well, it was for about ten minutes anyway; I had the SIM unlocked to use my T-Mobile card and the ROM upgraded to Windows Mobile 6 within minutes.  I’ve used Windows based smart-phones before, and they’ve always left me wanting.  Sure, they are little powerhouses compared to most small electronics, but the interface is downright maddening!  

In a device that is going to be primarily used as a phone, I don’t want to have to use a stylus to do everything.  And I mean everything!  Answering a call should not be a chore when I have a touch screen!  You should not bury the keypad under 4 menus!  This is a phone first, and a mini computer second!  Windows has problems with that, it seems.

While waiting for my iMac to create its backup image and let me know if it was going to work or not, I started modifying the very nature of my phone’s interface.  I decided that, for all faults it might have, the iPhone interface is actually very finger friendly.  The fact that I can read and scroll through all my contacts without bringing the phone up to my chin was appealing to me.  After a lot of reading, experimenting, and cursing at various applications, I was able to completely transform my Windows Mobile 6 smart phone into an iPhone clone.  Only this one actually has hardware you’d want to use (and can cut & paste).

Just so we’re all up to speed on this; I made an Apple product run Windows, and made a Windows product behave like an Apple one.  But I can justify this by the type of products we’re talking about!  Apple’s OS X (as I previously pointed out) likes to treat a desktop system like it’s an electronic toy; to be reset and replaced on a whim.  That’s not how you treat an actual workstation!  That’s how you treat . . . well, an electronic toy.  Sort of like a phone.

Windows treats an electronic toy (which I’m sorry, all smart phones are, I don’t care what you use them for) like it’s just as important as your desktop computer.  It’s not!  It’s a phone!  You can reset the crap out of it and it will keep on chugging along.  You actually make backups of everything important on it every time you plug it in (kinda like a Mac!), so recovering from a massive failure literally only takes a few minutes . . . and involves resetting it and restoring from backup!

Don’t get me wrong; I like that the Windows Mobile environment is flexible and powerful enough to adapt to any situation I’m going to give it.  But like so many little devices, I’m only going to tweak it so much before I just let it be.  Can you imagine if Microsoft had used the same interface for their car-bound Sync platform?  People would die in massive pile-ups constantly!

“Sync, unlock, confirm unlock, access phone, contacts, scroll, scroll, scroll, home, main number, dial, yes.  I said yes.”

Don’t even start on how you’d access your music or directions, and that’s assuming they’d even keep the voice interface!

Sync: Microsoft's first true idiot-proof concept.

It’s not that I don’t understand or appreciate Apple’s simplified interface on a laptop or PC, I do.  I do, and I find myself enjoying it.  But it’s such a downer when you realize that the back end of the operating system isn’t any more complex than the pretty interface on top of it.

On the flip side, Windows seems intent on bringing the same “give you every option you could ever want” to its most simple devices, leaving them drowning in menus, screen taps, and endless file directories.

I can go on and on how I hate Apple’s advertisements and their pricing structures, but that really wasn’t the point of my posts.  On a design vs. design level, both Apple and Windows could learn a thing or two from each other.  In the end, one could summarize the difference between the rivals as such:

In OS X, you’ll be able to find your way and understand the entire system within moments of turning it on . . . but that’s as far as it will ever be able to take you.  You may never be able to learn all of Windows little secrets, but you’ll be able to take it farther than you ever thought you’d need to.

I would tend to think that I have a little more expirience using a computer than most people.  Not all people, mind you, but most.  I own a Mac and a PC and use Windows and OS X (sometimes at the same time).  I’ve had to teach myself how to recover from any sort of system crash in Windows, and that there isn’t really a way to recover from a crash in OS X (so don’t go screwing around in there).  But it wasn’t until this last weekend that I think I might have hit upon the fundamental difference between an Apple and a PC.

PC users expect more of their machine.

I know, it sounds weird to read it, and it really sounds weird to say it.  Even most PC users have bought into the idea that a Mac is very capable and pretty but just for people who want to do specialized things.  Mac users think that PC users just like to torture themselves with unstable operating systems and complex interfaces.  And to a moderate degree, both are right.  However, each one could learn something from the other.  

This weekend I decided to increase the size of my Windows partition on my computer.  My main machine is an iMac running OS X Leopard, and I had installed Windows Vista Ultimate using BootCamp some time ago.  When I had done it, I figured I’d be using Leopard as often as I used Vista, so I gave Vista a little less than half the drive.  Fast forward to present day, and my Windows drive was nearly full.

After searching around on the forums, it seemed there was no definitive way to re-size the drive partition.  Long time Mac users suggested simply blowing away the Windows installation and starting over.  Long time Windows users were aghast at such a suggestion.  No middle ground could be found.

After much searching and reading, I came across a method that involved saving an image of my Windows partition to an external disc (hopefully ensuring nothing was lost) and wiping out the partition.  After 5 hours of working, the image was complete and the Windows partition was no more.  I launched BootCamp again and told it to create a new Windows drive, this time giving vista 95% of the drive.  It churned for some time before telling me it couldn’t . . . something about files in the wrong place.

I panicked.  Sure, my Windows image was secure on my external drive, but what good was that if I couldn’t access any of it?!  The exact error message even suggested that I blow away my Leopard installation and start the whole computer from scratch.  After a LOT of searching online, it became very clear that most other Apple aficionados didn’t find this a bit odd in the slightest; if that’s what the error message said to do, there’s no reason not to do it!

At some point, an explanation came up as to why the computer was having a fit.  It would appear that after I installed Vista, Leopard just started saving files willy-nilly all over the drive.  Now that I wanted to resize the drive, Leopard couldn’t handle that because some files were sitting in the space I was wanting to use!

The average user is either scratching their head right now, or stopped reading this awhile ago.  The average PC tech is thinking, “No biggie . . . just defrag the drive!”  Except Leopard doesn’t have a defragment utility!  According to Apple, the OS does it automatically without ever involving you.  Of course, they lie, since everyone on the Apple forums who runs into this problem is surprised to find that their drive is heavily fragmented.

The solution?  Either wipe out the entire computer and start over (as the error message told me to) or buy a 3rd party program to do a task that the OS should have had included.  Long story short (too late!), I was able to get everything redone just right (more than doubling the space that Vista has available to it) without resorting to a full format of my machine.

How does this relate to my observation at the beginning of this post?  Well it sort of came to me when everyone on the Apple forums and Support were telling me to go ahead and format my machine and reinstall from CD.  When I explained that I really didn’t feel like reinstalling everything I had ever done, they asked me why hadn’t I ever done a backup.  It’s apparently expected of people that if they are going to buy a Mac, then you are also going to buy a backup drive, because there is no way to recover from system errors than to format the sucker!  

PC users expect more of their machines: They expect them not to crash and lose everything you might have done and swallow it into the Void, never to be accessed again.  They expect to have the ability to upgrade the system past its original specs, and not have to scrap the whole thing to buy the latest model (and migrate their files with the obligatory backups they’ve been creating).  They expect to walk into an electronics store and have everything in the store work with their system!

Meanwhile, Apple still touts normal funtions like they are revolutionary!  A perfect case in point is the newest iPhone ads, going something like this:

This is how you play music on it.  This is how you can play games.  This is how you can read your email, texts, and the internet on it.  This is how you use it to get directions.  This is how you can even find and download new applications.  And this is when you realize . . . IT’S ALMOST LIKE YOUR PC!!!

I made up that last part, but I think you get the idea.

Part two for tomorrow.

The term “enthusiast” is not one I’ve used all that often to describe myself.  If there were a scale to describe how much of an enthusiast a person could be, I’d imagine I’d be rather low on the scale.  But the fact is, I’m still ON the scale.  There is a very sad down side to being an enthusiast (well, there are probably a few); those same devices that you find you can’t live without aren’t usually everywhere you might need them.

Case in point (and most relatable example I can think of):  you have standard, run of the mill broadband internet.  It doesn’t need to be the fastest thing on the planet for this example to work, but it’s better than a 256k ISDN.  You use it at home to browse, do email, read blogs, whatever.  You then go over to your parents/friends house, and while there you try to show them something you found online (like our awesome website here) . . . only they are on dial-up.  And slow dial-up at that.

That’s the downside I’m talking about here.  To point back to Schmidty’s announcement of Chrome; it’s so fast and nice that it’s all I use . . . except at work where I have to use IE to work with Oracle and I nearly scream every time it takes 5 minutes to load a page simply because the browser is so bloated.

Well, there’s another device that’s in this category; the DVR.  Call it a TiVo, an HTPC, a DVR, or whatever else you want, these little babies will change your life.  Anyone who owns and regularly uses them will testify to you just how much they will change your life in regards to TV.  I’m not trying to make them out to be like a religious experience or anything, but they really are that pivotal.

Your spouse wants to talk to you during the game?  Just pause the show.  Your show is only on at 1:00 AM? Set it to record!  There’s an interesting documentary on squid that you know you’d be interested in but just don’t feel like watching it right now?  Record it for later!  Kids are killing each other?  Dinner is on the table NOW? Don’t like commercials?  Guests come over unannounced?  You get the idea.  Our favorite use is to record a whole bunch of shows the kids like and have them at our fingertips whenever we want to reward them.

Screenshot of Vista Media Center from MSDN blog

The down side is that not everything is hooked into a DVR.  We don’t have one in our bedroom, so when I miss something important that was said I can’t jump back to hear it again.  If there’s something interesting I want my wife to see, I can’t pause it and wait for her to get in the room.  I find myself listening to the radio on my way to work in the morning and habitually reaching for a remote that doesn’t exist to jump back 15 seconds or so to re listen to something that was said!  That’s how messed up I’ve become.

If your computer can barely run Windows XP SP2, I don’t want to touch it (sadly, that’s my computer at work).  If you have a whole 5 channels on your TV, please don’t ask me if I want to watch anything (everything I’d want to watch is already recorded at home anyway).  I know this makes me look like a snob, and to a degree I am one.  But the secret fact of the matter is it’s just painful for myself and other enthusiasts at times.

Sure, we’re in a 1st world nation, with access to some of the best technology in the world (not counting cell phones where we seem to be permanently stuck in 2002), but I’m not interested in what technology could do for me five years ago; I’m interested in what it can do for me tomorrow.

I am currently trying out the Instinct by Samsung with Sprint!  Was told it was Mac-compatible by the sales lady – so not true!!  But I’m trying to find my way around the inability to hard-sync with my desktop.  The phone is so new that Sprint tech support takes as much time as driving to New York City would!  Then they say “I’ll have to call you back” … yeah, right!  They just don’t know.  So, here’s some issues that might work for you on your blog site: with the given being that I have a Mac and am unable to [transfer from] the enclosed CD software … there’s a “microSD card” that has a little docking card – I put that in my SanDisk gizmo, transfer a file folder of jpg’s onto it, transfer the card back into the phone – says the saved file is “empty” on “My Photos” and that there is “no media file” in that location.  I double-check the microSD, and the file is there and easily opened.  Now, they advertise the Instinct as being very flexible as to how it receives and sends data – hence the docking card.  But there isn’t a way on the phone itself to select the card memory over the phone memory.  I’m told it should do that automatically, but … it’s obviously not.  There’s one lone soul at Sprint who is still working on this (and has actually been calling me back), but one of the reasons I wanted this phone was to be able to show people pics of my listings!

Another issue that they haven’t even been able to get to is … okay, so I get an email, and it has an attachment.  I’m supposed to be able to open attachments (within a reasonable size).  I get a 1-page xls attachment, try to open it, it downloads it onto my phone first (like the blackberry does), I try to open it … nothing.  No message that the file is too big, can’t be read, just nothing.  So, I figure it can’t open it and try to delete it.  There’s no little trash-can icon in this screen to delete it!  So, I delete the email, but the download is still there, still unable to be deleted.  Now, would the software that I can’t [install onto] a Mac take care of this?  No idea!

And here’s another thing people who are converting from any PDA to the Instinct need to be aware of regarding their emails (and this is not written in the manual!) … it acts as another computer, not a PDA, so when you delete your email on your phone, it is deleted from your email account permanently.  And unlike a PDA where you can choose to have this feature (turn it on or off), it’s not a choice with the Instinct – it deletes it and that’s it.  I was told by Tech Support that deleting it on your phone moves it to the “Deleted” file and you can still access it and select another folder.  Well, you have to be fast!  Because it only stays in the phone’s “deleted” file until another email comes in, and it does NOT transfer phone-deleted email into your email account’s “deleted” folder!  Also, I haven’t been able to  figure out how to create different email folders on my phone – that might be another feature that is accessible only from a PC and then synced.

One good feature is that I can upload my contacts into Sprint.com, and then do a wireless sync to make changes.  So that information is able to be backed up!  Whew!!  Have only played with the SprintTV a little – not a whole lot of options on it, and it really uses your batteries up – but they have a back-up battery that can be charged and carried with you.

Anyway, the jury is still out as to whether I, as a mac-user, can make the Instinct function well enough to be able to really use it for my business.

Now, she might have been inviting me to post this here because she thought it’d be a good fit for the blog.  Part of me can’t help but wonder if she suggested it because I was the one who suggested the Instinct to her in the first place.  Oops.

This isn’t the first time companies have advertised cross platform compatibility and forgotten to actually test it on said systems.  I will freely admit it happens far more often from the PC side going to Mac than it does in reverse.  I personally believe it’s because Mac users (and programmers) just assume it WON’T work on the PC and so don’t advertise it as such.

The ONE TIME I had the issue with Apple was when I was upgrading to OS X 10.5.  For those who are unaware of the process; when you install Bootcamp onto your system and use it to install Windows onto an Apple computer, it used to offer to let you burn a disc of drivers to fully enable all your hardware under Windows (there’s a lot of weird little integrated devices that Windows won’t recognize otherwise).  With the 10.5 upgrade, they just put the drivers right on the OSX disc, so you use the same disc in both OSX and Windows.

Only Windows can’t read a disc formatted for Apple OSX . . . so the drivers were stuck where they are.  Thankfully I was able to find them online from someone else who was more adept with file extraction in OSX than I was.

My point is this: if you are going to advertise your “something” as being compatible with “something else” shouldn’t you at least TEST IT first?  Did you think no one will notice if you don’t?

This sounds like I’m horribly behind the times, but in fact I’m only a year behind. I’ve played through all of Halo 2 on the Xbox, mastered the multiplayer, pwnd n00bs and l33ts alike, and have enjoyed the game like crazy. However, at some point, long ago, I stopped playing on Xbox Live and canceled my account. Then the world moved past me.

Suddenly we’re on Xbox 360 and Live has been totally retooled. You can now opt to NOT play against foul mouthed 9-year-olds (you can even mute specific people), and giving negative feedback about someone actually does something to them!

Not having the funds for a 360, I kept the multiplayer experience for video game parties at friend’s houses. And I was happy with that (my thoughts on anonymous multiplayer changed drastically when I realized I seemed to be the only person who wasn’t practicing Halo like I had nothing else to do in life).

Fast forward to my birthday; Schmidty and Squishy game me a copy of Lego Indiana Jones and Star Trek Legacy for Windows (more on that in another post). I booted them up, and realized I MUST have a better way to control them than the keyboard and mouse, so it was off to the store to get an Xbox360 controller (the USB one is easily recognized and used in Windows Vista).

Suddenly, I was in a new world of gaming! The new “Games For Windows” approach that Microsoft has put together is brilliant! All the games work as they are intended and match their console counterparts exactly! I can play all the greatest Xbox360 games on my PC, and all I have to do is wait a month or so for them to be released. Add to that, the fact that some Games For Windows are Live enabled (and Live is free for GFW players)!

Play multiplayer games with your friends, or play against new opponents online using our exclusive TrueSkill™  matchmaking system – with other Windows® players or with or against XBOX 360 players.

Excitedly, I looked it up . . . YUP; Halo 2 for Vista is right there on the list!

* Includes 23 Multiplayer Maps
* Plus Bonus Map Editor
* Plus Exclusive Content
* Games for Windows – LIVE enabled

So, I got it home, signed up for Live (had to create a new account, whole other gripe about that), and got Schmidty online to frag.

Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t even receive his invites.

After much internet searching, I came to the ONLY source of information concerning the problem over at Joystiq.com.  It seems that Bungie, in all their wisdom, decided that Windows users wouldn’t WANT to play against Xbox 360 users and created a new gaming network for Windows only gamers.  On top of that, Windows users probably don’t want their achievements shown on their gamertag at Bungie.net

From Bungie.net: Correct only xbox stats are shown.

From: Zuke [mailto:dontspamme@ever.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 10:53 AM
To: Bnet Bugs
Subject: No love for Windows?

I play Halo 2 for Vista on Live. Though I can see my gamertag on Bungie.net, it doesn’t pull any info from the “Live” games I’ve played. Is this by design?

At least Microsoft got it partially right by allowing achievements to be shown on xbox.com (for all the frakking good they do).

I’d like to say the PC Multiplayer is at least okay for now, except it seems the only people who are playing it are missing a hand and half their brain; though I’m always the one with horrid latency, making it look like people are teleporting all over the place, I am consistently killing EVERYONE.

Of course, being geeks, Schmidty and I are already at work on using a third party service as a workaround, but that is entirely beside the point.  They specifically state that Live enabled games will work across platforms.  Even after they updated their site, it still only says “on specific games”; no game site will say if it’s one of them.

PC Multiplayer using a remote game server is a 15 year old practice!  Where is the next-gen in that?  We were promised cross-platform playability!!

I hate the whole Mac vs PC thing. I hate those stupid ads, the zealots who think they actually have a valid argument, and I’m starting to hate white plastic because of them.

That out of the way, let’s clear some stuff up; yes I have a Mac, yes I have an Airport Extreme, and yes, I like them. So why do I have such a strong opinion against Macs? Well that’s just it, I don’t. I have a strong opinion against the whole “herd” mentality of Apple advertising, and the suckers who just eat it up.

We’ve all seen the ads. We all have chuckled at a couple, and been rather unimpressed with others, but have we actually believed all of them? Well, supposedly some people have. Mind you, not people who actually work with computers.

Mac: Hi, I’m a Mac (and a young, trendy hipster)
PC: And I’m a PC (circa 3.11)
Mac: Hey PC, what are you doing?
PC: >Insert some ambiguous reference to Vista and repeat the phrase “doesn’t work”<
fin

In reality, here’s how those ads SHOULD go:

PC: Hi, I’m a PC.
Mac: And so am I.
PC: You mean, even though you come in a neato color, and cost more than I do, and don’t accept many of the programs in the modern world, you’re still a PC?
Mac: That’s right! In fact, under the hood, we are exactly the same. All that’s different is our operating systems. But even those are becoming more and more alike and compatible.
PC: So, it’s almost like there’s no difference here, except one can run an extra OS?
Mac: That’s right.
fin

I really like my Mac. It’s compact, it’s silent, and it’s well built. It also runs Vista SP1 great! In fact, it’s faster running Vista than it is running OSX. I rarely ever boot over to the OSX side of things, and even then it’s only for a quick system update.

Speaking of system updates, I’m tired of people hearing how Vista “doesn’t work”. I know I’m going to get flamed as a Microsoft lackey here, but the fact of the matter is that Vista just doesn’t deserve it. Windows Vista is NOT Windows XP version 2.0 . . . it’s a whole new system. If you’re system is having problems running it, then your system was never meant to run it! Get used to it, it happens.

I have Vista running on my Mac, and on my HTPC (which is filled with 4 year old components, and yet still runs it perfectly). It runs smoothly, has no issues with hardware or software, never locks up, and is generally very enjoyable. It centers on the general computer user’s needs and it fills them very well!

SP1 does not screw up your system. It does not slow it down either, or introduce new bugs. That would be like saying OSX 10.5 that was just released by Apple will brick your computer; it just doesn’t make sense.

The honest fact of the matter is that both Apple and Microsoft put HUGE amount of time and resources into their operating systems (except ME). They are different and handle hardware in a completely different manner. They handle different applications. They take a different approach to using a computer. And in all fairness, different people will like one over the other for very good reasons.

I just hate Apple advertising; pandering to the fan boys, trying to scare people who don’t know better into buying their products. Don’t believe me?

Yeah, didn’t happen.