Lowlymarine's Blag-o-nets

15-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2011) Review: Welcome my son

2011-11-13T23:02:00.001-05:00

To say that my relationship with Apple’s product lines over the past few years has been somewhat adversarial would be a significant understatement. I essentially despise the iThings the company has become so focused on in recent years, and Macs, while not necessarily bad computers, have traditionally represented very sub-par value.

Recently, however, I came to need a machine that ran the Mac OS for work. While simply running OS X on a traditional PC - a Hackintosh, if you will - is an option, it’s often inelegant and unstable. Having a more steady income from my nine-to-five, I decided to purchase a Mac of some kind. I narrowed my choice down to the following:

15” MacBook Pro - To replace my U30Jc, as I no longer need the extreme portability of a 13” notebook, and using such a small screen for any extended period of time is less than ideal.
27” iMac - To serve a dual purpose as a fairly powerful OS X machine and as a high-quality IPS display for my primary desktop (in target display mode).
Mac Mini - To serve as a home theater PC.

Then, in late October, Apple updated the MacBook Pro lineup with faster CPUs, larger HDDs, and more powerful discrete graphics for the 15” models. It would seem my decision was made for me. In early November, I ordered a Late 2011 15” MacBook Pro from Apple’s online store.

The overview picture: Not ~~stolen~~ creatively acquired this time!

15-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2011) Specifications (as reviewed):

Intel Core i7 2720QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3, 4 cores w/HyperThreading, 3.3 GHz Max TurboBoost clock)
4GB DDR3-1333 RAM
512MB Radeon HD 6750M, dynamically switchable with Intel HD 3000
15.4” WSXGA+ (1680x1050) Glossy LED-backlit LCD
500GB 5400RPM Samsung Spinpoint M8 Hard Drive
8x DVD+/-RW “SuperDrive” (slot-load)
Broadcom BCM 4330 Dual-band a/b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0
Broadcom BCM 5701 Gigabit Ethernet
8-cell 77.5 WHr integrated LiPo battery
Full-size “Chiclet” keyboard + Multi-touch trackpad
Dimensions: 14.35” x 9.82” x 0.95” (36.4 cm x 24.9 cm x 2.41 cm)
Weight: 5.6 pounds (2.54 kg)
1-year hardware warranty (including 1BD guarantee) + 90 days complimentary phone support

There are three significant upgrades here from the early 2011 model. The first is the slight bump in the processor from a 2.0 GHz i7 with 2.9 GHz max Turbo clock (The i7-2630QM, for the curious) to a 2.2 GHz i7 with 3.3 GHz max TurboBoost (the 2720QM). This provides a significant boost in single- and dual-threaded applications, as well a slighter boost in fully multithreaded tasks. The next is the bump form a 320GB to 500GB HDD, the benefits of which are immediately obvious. Perhaps the most significant upgrade, however, is the jump from the dire Radeon HD 6490M in the early 2011 base model to the much more capable HD 6750M (previously found in the much more expensive second-tier 15” MBP, which now sports a slightly faster 6770M).

There is, however, one more significant change with the Late 2011 MacBook Pro that doesn’t show up in the hardware specs: It’s the first MBP to officially ship with the latest Mac OS, 10.7 Lion, from day one. This means support for Lion Internet Recovery and the online version of the Apple Hardware Test, should anything ever go awry. It also means some slight changes to how bundled software is provided and restored, which will be addressed later.

Build and Input

The MacBook Pro is, as ever, a beautiful machine. Apple have spent a lot of marketing money ensuring that you are keenly aware of the supposed benefits of their unibody aluminum design. The entire notebook is machined from a single piece of aluminum, resulting in an aesthetic that is at once classical and spartan. The real benefits of such a design, however, are more dubious. Aluminum is a versatile and commonly used metal for four main reason: it’s light (good for a notebook), it does an excellent job of transferring heat (less good), it blocks radio waves (also not great), and it’s quite inexpensive (good for Apple’s bottom line). The second two points lead to the MacBook Pro’s major design issues. Firstly, it gets uncomfortably warm on the bottom - far warmer than any competing machine, and this is compounded by the design’s focus on reducing thickness resulting in sub-par airflow. Internal components heat up to levels that frighten long-time overclocking enthusiasts such as myself, and the machine simply isn’t practical to use on your lap for more than basic web browsing and word processing. Even watching movies with the machine on your lap seems as though it would seriously hamper your future offspring production prospects. The MacBook Pro also has a well-documented disparity in wireless connectivity range and speed depending on which side of the machine is facing the access point or wireless device, though the addition of antennas behind the glowing Apple logo (which is plastic, rather than aluminum) have nullified this somewhat.

As for the durability of the aluminum unibody, that is another point of contention. Certainly it is a very rigid design, but again that is a mixed bag. Rigidity is good for protecting the internal components from being crushed by external force, but also transmits the force of the impact directly to those same components without reducing it through crumpling. For example, while the lid seems to flex less than that of my U30Jc, pressing on it with moderate force easily causes rippling on the LCD - the first time I’ve seen this since my ill-fated Averatec laptop in 2005. This isn’t likely a cause for concern during normal use, but it doesn’t seem like the MBP’s lid will protect the screen from a serious impact, either. In 2007, Lenovo demonstrated their improved magnesium rollcage design by famously driving a motorcycle over an R61 and demonstrating that it still turned on and that the screen was undamaged. Let’s just say I don’t see that happening with my MacBook Pro, but I also don’t think it will break if the carrying case it’s in is bumped around a bit. Unlike my ASUS U30Jc, there’s zero flex or creaking anywhere in the body - one of the true benefits of the unibody design. The hinges are also very sturdy, holding the lid exactly where you position it, but still being mobile enough to open the machine with one hand.

The keyboard is a “chiclet” design, and readers of my U30Jc review will recall that I was thoroughly unimpressed with the design there. I was prepared to make the same laments about this keyboard, but put away the bile umbrellas: this keyboard isn’t nearly as bad. The throw, travel, and tactile feedback are all excellent - not as good as my ThinkPad’s, of course, but then again what would be, except another ThinkPad - easily eclipsing any other chiclet keyboard I’ve used. The keys are spaced far enough apart that accidentally striking two keys at once is a rarity, but still close enough together to be within the standard QWERTY spec. The left shift key is full sized, as is the number row, as is the spacebar - yes, I had a laptop where it wasn’t. The Function keys are half-height, but that’s not a serious impediment to typing anyways. The keys are also backlit, so in a dark room you can find your footing (fingering?...yeah, probably not) if you get lost, or if you aren’t quite as proficient at typing as you perhaps could be. The level of backlighting is also adjustable with the F5 and F6 keys, as well as by the ambient light sensor. One more nice touch is that the Caps Lock key does not trigger immediately at a slight tap - you have to keep it depressed for a fraction of a second, preventing those annoying ACCIDENTAL CAPS LOCK MOMENTS.

The keyboard is far from all flowers and puppies, though. There are some major stumbles in the layout. Most notably, my arch nemesis the outside Fn key makes his dastardly return after being absent on my U30Jc (this was also the sole blemish on my ThinkPad’s otherwise perfect keyboard). The arrow keys are half-height so as to fit them all on the same row. The key previously mapped to the questionably useful Dashboard has been replaced by a key that triggers the unquestionably useless Launchpad. There is simply no left control key at all, which is slightly annoying as I’ve grown accustomed to Ctrl+Arrow keys to navigate Mission Control and Spaces at work. There are no navigation keys either - Home, End, Pg Dn, and Pg Up didn’t show up for work at the MacBook Pro factory. But what is truly galling is that their vital colleague Mr. Fwd Delete decided to pull a no-call-no-show as well. In order to perform the traditional Fwd Delete function, you have to use Fn+Delete, which is more than a little cumbersome. There is no numeric keypad despite ample room for one either, but I suppose I’m just nitpicking at this point, as so few notebooks do have tenkeys. On the whole though, the keyboard is perfectly serviceable, if not quite the best to ever grace the mobile computing market.

In my U30Jc review, I mentioned that touchpads aren’t really exciting input devices anymore, and I suppose I should retract that statement. The MacBook Pro’s trackpad is often regarded as the best in the business, and with good reason. The entire trackpad is one large button, which eliminated one of the most annoying parts of using a trackpad: that you had to either lift your finger or use another finger entirely to click after reaching your intended clicking destination. With the MacBook Pro’s trackpad, you simply move your finger over the area you want to click, and...click. It really does make a world of difference in those situations where you have to use the trackpad. The trackpad also supports a variety of multitouch gestures and clicks, allowing you to click with two fingers to perform a right click; use two fingers to scroll, zoom, and rotate; use three fingers to sweep through Spaces and trigger Mission Control and Exposé; and use four finger gestures to trigger Launchpad and show the desktop. It’s the most complete set of multitouch gestures I’ve ever seen on a touchpad, which is why the one omission is so utterly maddening - there’s no way to middle click out of the box. As you are likely aware if you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade, middle click opens links in a new tab in every major browser - yes, including Safari - and is a feature that many of us are probably quite dependent on at this point. Fortunately, there is a third-party application called BetterTouchTool that lets you add custom gestures for the trackpad, including the missing three-finger click for middle click that should have been available by default.

I’m not necessarily sold on the whole “touchpad to replace traditional mouse input” thing as some people seem to be. However, I’ll share this: the extra mouse I had intended to use with my MacBook Pro, a Logitech MX518, isn’t support by Logitech’s control panel software on OS X, meaning that the 3rd-5th buttons don’t work, and the acceleration is wonky. As a result, I’ve been using the trackpad exclusively for the past few days, and by and large it hasn’t been terrible. I still intend to get a mouse that I can use properly on OS X, but in those times when a proper mouse isn’t available, Apple clearly has the next best thing.

Screen and Speakers

The standard MacBook Pro’s display is a 15.4”, 16:10 aspect ratio LED-backlit LCD with a native resolution of 1440x900, but I opted for the “high-resolution” display, which packs a native resolution of 1680x1050 for a $100 premium. The display is simply stunning. Despite being a twisted nematic (TN) panel with simple WLED (White LED, as opposed to RGB-LED, or Red+Green+Blue LED) backlight, the MacBook Pro’s display has one of the broadest color gamuts in a notebook computer, falling behind only Lenovo’s RGB-LED backlit ThinkPad W series and Dell’s similarly RGB-LED backlit XPS 15 (in both cases, this type of advanced backlighting is a ~$100 CTO option). Blacks are among the most faithful I’ve seen in a TN panel, outpacing even those of the iPad’s S-IPS display to my eye. Normally making the bezel of a TN LCD black is a mistake, as it showcases the light leakage and grayish blacks of the panel, but here it serves only to reinforce just how good of a panel this is. On the other end of the spectrum, the display is also blindingly bright. This is the first notebook I’ve owned where I keep the brightness about 3-4 levels down from maximum during typical indoor usage, as maximum brightness actually borders on uncomfortable to use without a powerful light source (i.e. the sun) shining directly on the screen to overcome.

The viewing angles are similarly impressive, not washing out horizontally until well beyond the 120° mark, and remaining tolerable all the way out to 170°. Vertical angles are not quite as superb, but remain faithful to color accuracy until about the 70° mark, and don’t invert entirely until about 150°. If the display has one fault, it’s a slightly below-average response time, resulting in some noticeable ghosting during quick scrolling or fast-paced games and movies. My panel arrived with no malfunctioning pixels, but Apple also guarantees the display against any more than one failed pixel under the limited warranty. It’s not quite ASUS’s zero-bright-dot guarantee, but it’s certainly closer than you get from anyone else.

I was prepared to write another rant about tinny speakers in notebooks, given the MacBook Pro’s diminutive speaker footprint, but I’m glad to say I was gravely wrong about this as well. In fact, the speakers on the MacBook Pro may well be the second-best I’ve ever had in a notebook, second only to my Dell Inspiron 9300 (before those blew out). And this is in a machine that is about 0.6 of an inch thinner and weighs nearly three full pounds less - an impressive feat, even with the 6 year gap between those two models. The MacBook Pro may be one of the few notebooks out there with which you do not necessarily need external speakers or headphones to enjoy a movie or some music, even in a larger room. Bass is surprisingly rich and maximum volume is staggering for such small drivers, though the highs tend to be overblown in the top 10-15% of the volume range. Given the amazing screen and impressive speakers, this is a machine that you could easily use to watch a movie with a couple of friends, and not have to worry about anyone missing the action - or the dialogue.

Connectivity

The MacBook Pro takes a bit of a dive in the connectivity section. This is the most pathetic array of ports I have ever seen on a full-size notebook, much less a 15” desktop-replacement class machine. You get a measly two USB ports, and both only 2.0 ports to boot. There is also a 9-pin Firewire 800 port, for the both of you who have devices that connect that way. You do get Gigabit ethernet and an SDXC card slot, at least, though be warned: the 17” model has an ExpressCard34 slot in lieu of the SDXC slot, which is unlikely to be preferable to most people. For audio, you get the standard minijacks for analog and digital in/out, though again another word of warning in that the 13” model only has one jack used for both input and output (the 13” model, however, also only has a dual-core CPU, integrated graphics, and pitifully low resolution LCD, so it really should be avoided for many more important reasons than the audio jacks). For display, you get only Mini DisplayPort, which is going to mean expensive adapters to connect to those DVI displays, VGA projectors, and HDMI TVs you already own. That MiniDP connector is also the MacBook Pro’s one claim to fame in its port selection, though: it’s also the ThunderBolt I/O port, the Intel-designed standard formerly known as LightPeak. Thunderbolt provided a staggering 10 Gbps of throughput over two channels, meaning you can easily connect massive displays and powerful external storage solutions to the port, even in daisy-chain. For now, there is very little available to take advantage of Thunderbolt, possibly owing to its current Mac-exclusivity, but as other PC manufacturers begin rolling out the port, I hope to see more peripherals for it. It would be a shame if such a powerful technology becomes another Firewire - fortunately Apple isn’t trying to bilk anyone for royalties this time (since they didn’t actually develop it).

Wirelessly, however, the MacBook Pro covers all the bases. The wireless card in the Late 2011 model is a Broadcom 4330 dual-band a/b/g/n model with 3x3:3 MIMO. This is basically as powerful as it gets while still complying with FCC regulations, provided 3x3 bandwidth with 3 spacial streams over every imaginable channel (except 40 MHz, which Apple reserves for Bluetooth). Speaking of, the included Bluetooth chip is upgraded to 4.0 with the Late 2011 model, and though currently no Bluetooth peripherals take advantage of the new technology, it still provides power consumption benefits for the notebook itself. The WiFi is able to see as many networks as my U30Jc’s Atheros card, if not more, despite the all-aluminum body, and has no difficulty holding a strong connection to my ISP-furnished Motorola b/g/n router throughout the apartment. If you have a current-generation Airport Extreme, with its face-melting output power, you could likely get a decent wireless connection from around the block.

The MacBook Pro lineup still contains an optical drive, a luxury slowly disappearing from Apple’s product lines. The drive in my machine is another Matshita drive, much like the one in my U30Jc, though the one Apple has chosen here lacks DVD-RAM support - not that most people have ever even seen a DVD-RAM disc, much less used one. There’s still no Blu-ray, and it doesn’t look likely Apple will relent in their refusal to include Blu-ray drives any time soon.

Finally, there’s the webcam, or what Apple calls the “FaceTime HD camera.” It’s certainly better than the miserable VGA model in my U30Jc, but it’s still less than one megapixel. Specifically, the resolution appears to be 1080x720, which I’m not even sure should constitute “HD,” but there you go. The sensor seems to actually be fairly high-quality for an integrated webcam, providing images with very little noise and only slight blurring. The integrated microphone is one part of the setup that is actually fairly rubbish. It’s incredibly insensitive by default, and even adjusted to be as sensitive as possible there’s a significant amount of distortion and background noise. The “reduce ambient noise” checkbox in the sound preferences pane doesn’t seem to do very much to help, either. Again, this setup would be more than acceptable for Skype calls, recording lectures, and the like, but don’t expect to do any professional voice recording or concert pirating with this thing - unless you really want to sound like someone calling into an AM radio show on their iPhone, that is.

Now with "HD" ugliness! Also, I just realized that my U30Jc's camera mirrors everything for some reason.

Performance

As I’ve said before, performance is really the meat of a computer review; the delicious smoked turkey breast lying beneath the rye of build quality and lettuce of webcam test photos. While you do need bread to make a sandwich, a sandwich that was just bread could hardly be called a sandwich could it? And on that note, the MacBook Pro is something of a mixed bag, which is disappointing for such an expensive machine. That’s not to say the performance is by any means bad, it’s simply not awe-inspiring, which is what one should expect from a notebook of this price.

The CPU is certainly not to blame, however, being one of the fastest notebook offerings available. The Core i7 2720QM is a quad core, HyperThreading-enabled CPU based on Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge architecture, nominally clocked at 2.2 GHz and capable of utilizing Intel’s Turbo Boost technology to reach up 3.3 GHz under single-threaded workloads, at least as long as the pre-designed thermal and power envelope is not exceeded. Intel claims that Sandy Bridge offers up to 20% per-clock performance improvements over last year’s Allendale core, while maintaining a similar power profile. Sandy Bridge also brings with it a vastly improved integrated graphics chip called the HD 3000, which finally allows for small notebooks to play some basic games without needing to resort to cards like the 310M or integrated solutions from nVidia or AMD that must be coupled with slower CPUs. The MacBook Pro blows through every CPU-intensive task thrown at it, and has no difficulty keeping several applications open.

That is, until you run out of RAM. Apple ships this machine with only 4GB of DDR3, which is frankly sad for a nearly $2000 computer. As I write this review, I have open the following applications:

Firefox Aurora, 2 tabs.
Pages, 1 window.
Mail, 1 window, two accounts set to check every 10 minutes.
iTunes, 1 window, playing music.
iPhoto, 1 window.
Activity Monitor, 1 window.
Finder, 1 window.
Safari, 0 windows.
Dashboard, 4 widgets.

Sure, Firefox may be using up over 4 times as much RAM as Safari, but Safari doesn't actually have any windows open.

Not an unusual workload, and the system is using 2.6 of its meager 4GB of RAM. And when I say “using,” I don’t mean “has stuff in” (which is normal and all modern operating systems should have something in as much RAM as possible), I mean “actively using.” As in “cannot be freed without closing processes.” Part of the blame for this state of affairs lies on Mozilla’s shoulders, as even with only two tabs open, Aurora is gobbling down well over 300MB. But a lot of it falls on Lion, which I’ll cover later. Suffice it to say, I’ll be swapping in 8GB of RAM as soon as possible - myself, for $40, rather than having Apple do it for a galling $200.

The other major impediment to performance is the 500GB, 5400RPM hard drive. While I was somewhat forgiving to the 5400RPM drive in my U30Jc about 20 months ago, I’m somewhat less inclined to be nice to the same spindle speed in a computer that cost over twice as much, nearly two years later. There is simply no excuse for Apple to include a 5400RPM drive in a premium machine - with a premium price - in this day and age when the difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM is typically less than $10. Yes, there are other advantages to 5400RPM drives over 7200RPM ones other than price - slower drives are a little quieter, produce less heat, and in some cases use a little less power. But they’re also slower. A lot slower. There’s no two ways about it: this drive is slow. The machine boots up reasonably quickly - about 20 seconds from startup chime to log-in screen and barely 5-7 more to a usable desktop state - but from there it’s all downhill. Icons bounce seemingly endlessly in the dock before opening. Just now, I opened Keynote, and it took about 6-7 “bounces” and then 2-3 more seconds to even bring up the presentation type selection, then about 5-7 more to actually load the template. Compared to Powerpoint on my SSD-packing desktop, which launches in less than 3 seconds to a new blank template, this could easily be a major productivity dampener. And that’s after the machine has been running for a few hours; immediately after boot, even Safari can take 7 or 8 “bounces” to come up.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. The machine takes about 5 seconds to enter sleep, but so long as it does not need to enter hibernate due to low battery, it comes back out literally instantly - there’s no delay at all before the screen is ready for your password upon opening the lid. Shut down, always a strong suit of the Mac OS, takes roughly 10 seconds as well.

Last but certainly not least is the graphics card. The Late 2011 MacBook Pro starts with a 512MB Radeon HD 6750M, rather than the HD 6490M in the Early 2011 model, and the difference is worth the wait for anyone who may wish to unwind with a game, or needs to do professional 3D, CAD, video, or photo work that uses the GPU to accelerate the process. The 6750M uses 480 Whistler-PRO VLIW5 SPUs, similar to the Turks-based desktop 6670, albeit at a significantly lower clock speed. The higher-end MacBook Pro also gets an upgrade, though it’s a much more modest one to the 6770M; essentially a factory overclock of the 6750M with more VRAM. Both cards sport 128-bit GDDR5 RAM, clocked at 900MHz (3.6GHz effective) in the 6750M. The performance of the chip should be broadly comparable to that of the original DirectX 10 champion, the GeForce 8800GTX, if that gives you an idea of just how far GPUs have come in just a few short years.

Of course there is an impediment to putting hard numbers with these performance analyses: Mac OS X. There are Mac versions of more games than ever today, thanks to Valve’s effort to port Steam to the platform and (slowly, mind you) growing adoption of Macs since the move to Intel. Still, there are few Mac-compatible benchmarks - no 3DMark, no Unigine, no PCMark. Even the Counter-Strike: Source stress test is absent form the Mac version. The lack of FRAPS makes it difficult to get average performance numbers for games without benchmarks, as well. That said, the following are some subjective impressions game performance in a few major Mac titles, with some numbers attached where possible.

Source engine games like Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 run at about 35-60 FPS in hectic situations at native resolution with maximum settings and 2x AA/4x AF. The hard drive rears its head, though, as when a new sound plays or new texture appears, the game tends to hitch momentarily as it is loaded.
Starcraft II runs at a very consistent 30+ FPS on high settings at native resolution. As long as you stick to single-player and one-on-one games, you could likely get by with turning a few settings up to Ultra. Again, the loading pauses here and there as data is pulled off the hard drive can be a nuisance.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm can run, again, at native resolution and high settings. Some large, particularly graphic intensive raids may bring that framerate down to the point where you may want to turn some settings down, but then again that was true even on my old desktop’s HD4870. As WoW is a very large game, the loading pauses should be most noticeable here. Bizarrely they're barely noticeable at all. Go Blizzard?
World of Goo and Crayon Physics run just fine. Not even any hitching!

The limited game selection on OS X can basically all run just fine, which bodes well for simple 3D rendering and video editing projects as well, if that’s more your style. Again though, professional editing tends to be very I/O intensive, so you would definitely want to invest in the 750GB, 7200RPM CTO option, even if it is a galling $150.

Heat and Battery Life

Where the fan on my U30Jc spun nonstop while the machine was on, the fan in the MacBook Pro is if anything too hesitant to turn on. This is compounded by the relatively poor ventilation on the machine - a single vent lines the back, pointing directly at the LCD hinge. The base of the machine gets very warm under even moderate usage; so much so that you would do well to avoid using the machine on your lap if at all possible. Once the machine has been on for a few hours, the keyboard and palmrests heat up noticeably as well, though the trackpad remains approximately at ambient temperature. Yes, the machine is very quiet unless you’re playing a game or doing processor-intensive tasks like compiling or converting video, but that silence certainly comes at a cost.

Internally, the CPU tends to idle around 50-55° C, which does not bode well for load temperatures. Under full load, the CPU reaches over 80° C, which is simply ridiculous. If you intend to use the machine for CPU-intensive work frequently, you’re going to want to seriously consider that AppleCare Protection Plan - you’ll need it when the CPU dies from overheating. The GPU does a little better, idling in the 40s, but under load also ventures into the lower 80s. Under full load the fan becomes very audible, and it’s easy to see why. I shudder to think of the temperatures if this machine weren’t essentially one giant heatsink.

The battery life is less negative, at least. The machine gets about 5-7 hours of browsing, word processing, email, etc., depending on factors such as screen brightness, Bluetooth on/off, WiFi signal strength, and so forth, which is perfectly acceptable for a 15” notebook of this calibre. This is probably enough for most users to get through the day, but if you’re going to be working nonstop for a full work day, you’re probably going to need to bring your charger. It’s worth noting, however, that doing anything graphically intensive, including something as seemingly simple as watching 1080p video, will invoke the AMD discrete graphics chip and plunge your battery life to around 4 hours at best. Just plan accordingly for your usage, as always, and you should be fine - this isn’t a brick with 2 hours of battery life like some 15” desktop replacement-class notebooks, by any stretch of the imagination.

Operating System and Software

Perhaps the biggest change in the MacBook Pro from the Early to Late 2011 models is that the new machines ship by default with the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion. Unlike Snow Leopard, which was the very definition of “paid service pack,” Lion actually does bother to change a few things that are visible to the user. I’m not going to go into the Mac OS in great detail, as I’ve already written several thousand words on the changes in Lion. I’ll just briefly mention here some changes since that developer preview, as well as some other general notes.

First is that Resume, the feature by which applications can restart automatically with the computer, is not quite as much like hibernate as I had originally thought, both for good and ill. It allows applications to restart with the computer, even after a kernel power off, but is also checked by default and that default cannot be changed, so if you don’t want everything you had open last time resuming with your computer, you better remember to uncheck that little box. Many applications do not yet behave properly with Resume, causing them to simply open at log-in in their default state - a functionality that could easily be achieved by simply adding them to your log-in items.

Having the state of the application resume requires that the application also use Lion’s new Auto-save framework, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Applications like Pages and TextEdit (and even Safari) periodically save their states, so that if you need to reboot, you can do so without fearing for your data. This saving also happens every time you close the application completely, but only if it is closed correctly. If you have to force quit Pages or your machine loses power completely and you haven’t saved manually recently, all your changes since the last auto-save (approximately every 5 minutes, by default) are gone. With Safari, your pages are simply kaput if the application misbehaves. While this makes perfect sense from a technical standpoint, it is something to be aware of. “Save early, save often” remains the best strategy for protecting your files as you work on them.

Full-screen mode remains extremely limited in its scope, applying mainly to Apple-developed applications like Pages, iPhoto, and Safari. It’s as dubiously useful as it was during the developer preview, and indeed as it has been ever since Windows 95 added the capability 16 years ago.

Versions does not require an active Time Machine backup as I had originally thought, so it is functionally identical to the Windows Previous Versions technology, though there is a nifty feature where you can pull only part of a previous version forward to the current version. And of course, the interface is far more graphical than the Windows implementation.

I’m told the ability to minimize applications into their dock icon has existed since Snow Leopard, though it remains incredibly unintuitive. If you have 2 or more windows open in an application and minimize one of them, you can’t get it back except by right-clicking the dock icon. There are no live previews of the windows, so if they’re all named similarly, good luck. There are small icons to show the active and minimized windows of an application, but no way to differentiate beyond that other than window titles. It’s not as elegant as Windows 7’s approach, and as a result I actually ended up turning it off, as dealing with the normal schizophrenic placement of items on the dock is easier than navigating this mess.

I still think the new iCal and Address Book look dumb, but the new Mail is actually brilliant, easily tying Windows Live Mail as my favorite desktop email client. If it were more stable, it could win out, but sadly it crashes about a quarter of the time when trying to open or close it. That’s still better than at work though, where it crashes about 60% of the time, and brings the whole system down to a crawl when it checks for messages.

iCloud is useless to me, as I can’t use it at work (and wouldn’t really want to anyways) and don’t own any iOS 5 devices. Since I already have all of my contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, and mail on Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud servers, I’m not really itching to add another cloud service - especially not one that doesn’t work with my Android phone at all and requires that I use Outlook on my Windows PCs. If all you own are Macs and iThings, though, I could see it being pretty snazzy. You know, if you could avoid killing yourself over having to use that atrocious abomination of a smartphone operating system, that is.

Lion’s biggest problem is that it’s just such a bear. The operating system is using up a preposterous amount of system resources. Animations for things like Missions Control are often sluggish, the kernel process is gobbling down a preposterous amount of RAM, and many applications need to be force quit with anomalous frequency, especially Mail. I’m sure there are growing pains related with Lion that will be sorted out somewhat, but I really can’t help but feel Apple should have included a speedier hard drive and more RAM with such an expensive machine, if for no other reason than to help compensate for Lion’s added weight. Professionals who live by their email and rely on massive applications like Final Cut to be responsive are going to be pulling their hair out.

Once again, the pack-in software of a new OEM computer is causing me headaches. No, it’s not that there is any unwanted bloat (other than Safari, *ba dum tish*). I’m not even talking about the fact that Apple no longer includes iDVD and iWeb with new computers. No, its that what they did include doesn’t work. You see, since Lion started shipping on new Macs, Apple has stopped including installation DVDs. Now, you get iLife (or part of it, with Lion) pre-installed, and can activate them on the App Store with you AppleID. Or at least that’s the theory - except that it doesn’t work. Trying to activate the applications returns an error stating that “These applications cannot be accepted on this computer.” After going through all manner of troubleshooting steps, I finally contacted the Mac App Store support via email, and their response? Erase and reinstall Lion (yes, on my brand new computer, on day one) and pray it lets me re-download iLife. Good plan. I’m not likely to ever use iPhoto or iMovie that much anyways, so I’m just going to let it go for now. Mind you, they run, I just can’t update them or re-install them if needed since I can’t register them to my AppleID.

I think I may have finally run out of snarky things to say about pictures. You're safe, for now.

Conclusion

So here we are. After just over 6,000 words, what’s the TL;DR verdict on the 15” MacBook Pro? Is it everything I’d hoped? Would I heartily recommend it, or am I about to send it back before my 14 days are up?

Well first, I’m not sending it back. I kind of need it, for one, and there isn’t really a better option. But that’s not to say I’m suffering here. Don’t get me wrong: This is a very good computer. It is not, perhaps, everything I’d hoped, but at the same time it’s more than I expected. Despite the sluggish hard drive and tight RAM allotment, it’s still very fast and incredibly capable for most uses. The processor and GPU are both top-tier parts that should satisfy anyone without patently unrealistic expectations for a 15” notebook. RAM upgrades are easy, inexpensive, and are the one upgrade that does not void your warranty. I’m far from sold on the Mac ecosystem, but it’s not terrible - a worthy alternative to Windows, even, and probably the only *nix usable by human beings (no matter what Ubuntu claims).

So, would I recommend the machine? Maybe. If it were $1200-$1400, I’d eagerly give a blanket recommendation. But at $1900 minimum (including tax) for the base model with the high resolution display I have here, it’s a dicier proposition. Do you have the money to drop two grand on a notebook every couple of years and not worry about it, and do you like the Mac OS? Then absolutely, get the MacBook Pro. You won’t be disappointed. However, when you consider the competitors - like the ThinkPad W520 and Dell XPS 15 - it’s hard say the MacBook Pro is worth the extra cash unless you really want or need the Mac OS. Still, it is a very slick machine. So I suppose I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to drop the few extra Benjamins anyways.

At the end of the day, you just have to do the research yourself and go with your gut. If I just needed a high-performance 15” notebook with a nice screen, and the operating system was irrelevant, I’d probably go with the XPS 15. There are merits to the MacBook Pro, though, so you really do have to decide for yourself. Maybe that’s not the kind of conclusion you want from a 6,600 word review, but it’s the best one I have.

Android vs. iOS: AT&T’s Newest Flagships Compared

2011-10-05T00:32:00.004-04:00

So today was the big announcement of the iPhone not-5. Likely not-so-coincidentally, the AT&T version of the Samsung Galaxy S II also landed Sunday; it is also largely unmolested by the Death Star, much to everyone’s pleasant surprise. It’s worth noting that 75% of iPhone owners are still on AT&T, and only AT&T iPhone owners could possibly be eligible for an on-contract upgrade any time soon anyways, so it would seem apt to compare the specs of these two new flagships (at least as much as possible given the utter dearth of hard technical specifications on the Apple “Tech Specs” page).

	Galaxy S II	iPhone 4S
Processor:	1.2 GHz Dual-core Cortex-A9 Samsung Exynos	~800 MHz Dual-core Coretex-A9 Apple/Samsung A5
RAM:	1 GB LPDDR2	512MB LPDDR2
Graphics:	ARM Holdings Mali400 MP4	Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 543MP2
Storage:	16 GB Flash	16 GB Flash
Expandable storage:	MicroSD up to 32GB	None
Display - Technology:	SuperAMOLED Plus	S-IPS LCD
Display - Raster resolution:	800x480	960x640
Display – Physical size:	4.3”	3.5”
Display – Aspect ratio:	15:9	3:2
Display – Color gamut:	114% sRGB	75% sRGB
Display – Contrast ratio:	Technically infinite, measured at about ~12,000:1	952:1
Wireless connectivity:	WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC, HSPA+ 21.1 Mbps	WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, HSDPA 14.4 Mbps
Weight:	4.3 ounces (122g)	4.8 ounces (137g)
Dimensions:	125.9mm x 66mm x 8.9mm	115.2mm x 58.6mm x 9.3mm
Battery:	Removable 1650 mAh	Integrated 1420 mAh (assuming same as iPhone 4)
Main Camera:	8 MP F/2.8 Autofocus with LED Flash	8MP F/2.4 Autofocus with LED Flash
Front Camera:	2 MP	VGA (0.35 MP)
Video quality:	1080p30 h.264 High Profile	1080p30 h.264, unknown profile
Price - Two year contract:	$199 from AT&T, available for ~$149 at many retailers	$199
Price – Outright:	$549	$649
Available:	October 2, 2011 (Available now at time of writing)	October 14, 2011

For once, I am not endeavoring to pass judgment, merely to educate. I’ll just let the numbers speak for themselves.

We’ll Make it Up in the Volume: HP TouchPad Review

2011-09-12T20:00:00.001-04:00

The HP TouchPad is a device with a troubled history. It started out as the Palm TouchPad before that company met with serious financial trouble following the failure to see widespread adoption of its WebOS handsets, the Pre and Pixi. Once a giant in the mobile world, the ailing Palm was snatched up by HP under the leadership of Mark Hurd. Hurd had wanted to turn Palm's WebOS into an all-purpose operating system for inexpensive desktop and notebook PCs, tablets, smartphones, printers - just about anything with a screen. Unfortunately, mere months after completing the acquisition of Palm, Hurd departed the company under questionable circumstances, leaving Leo Apotheker to take his place as the new CEO of HP. Apotheker did not see eye-to-eye with Hurd on many of HP's consumer businesses, WebOS included, and issued a simple mandate to the WebOS team: Make your tablet an instant success in the already iPad-strangled ARM tablet market, or get your pink slips. Somehow I doubt I have to explain how that went.

So here we are. Apotheker, in his haste to dump the consumer product divisions at HP, has decided to essentially give away remaining stock on the ill-fated TouchPad tablet, selling the remaining inventory for $99 a piece, a loss of over $200 for each unit sold. In the first weekend of this "fire sale," HP and their retail partners cleared their entire remaining stocks of the devices long before demand was met, selling roughly three-quarters of a million of them. Demand was so great, in fact, that HP has decided to do additional production runs of the tablet just to fill existing orders. While the future of WebOS remains in doubt, one thing is certain: there is a significant market for a reasonably-priced ARM tablet. The first company who can create a reasonably competent device at the sub-$200 mark without losing money hand over fist is sitting on a gold mine.

But what we have now is an excellent bit of hardware sold well under cost, and I can't complain too much about that. Then again, what would a review be without petty complaints? On to the whinging!

Specifications

1.5 GHz Dual-core Qualcomm APQ8060 Application Processor (underclocked to 1.2 GHz)
Qualcomm Adreno 220 GPU
1 GB LPDDR2 RAM
16 or 32 GB NAND storage
9.7" XGA (1024x768) LG S-IPS LED-backlit LCD with Capacitive multi-touch digitizer
WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1+EDR with A2DP
1.3MP front-facing camera and microphone
Integrated stereo speakers
Integrated 6300 mAh Lithium-polymer battery
MicroUSB 2.0 and 3.5mm audio
Integrated inductive charging loop
Light sensor, accelerometer, magnetometer, 6-axis gyroscope

Design and build

You may have noticed that Apple has recently taken to suing a variety of Android tablet manufacturers for having the nerve to ship devices that are vaguely similar to their own flagship iPad tablet, in that many of these devices are rectangular and have screens. Some are even black! Meanwhile, here sits the HP TouchPad, a device that is so similar to the iPad that you'd probably not even notice the difference if it weren't for the HP logo on the back (exactly where the Apple logo would reside on an iPad, natch). The TouchPad shares essentially the exact same dimensions of the original Cupertino slate, features the same aspect ratio and resolution (it is, in fact, the exact same LG screen used in the iPad), has all the same external controls in all the same places - including a single home button bottom-center - and even places the MicroUSB port where Apple places their inane proprietary...thing. There are a few other minor differences: HP placed a pair of stereo speakers along the left side (or bottom, in landscape mode), the original iPad lacked a forward camera and the TouchPad lacks the rear camera of the iPad 2, the TouchPad's home button is a rounded rectangle rather than a circle and sports a light in the center, and the TouchPad is a little under 0.1 of a pound heftier than the original iPad.

As you might imagine, those minor distinctions don't do much to differentiate your new TouchPad from Cupertino's tablet, for better or for worse. As for why Apple has yet to sue HP over the design: some would argue that it's simply because they don't view Palo Alto's slate as a threat, but personally I think there's a more…legal reason.

Input

The TouchPad uses yet another capacitive digitizer. It's responsiveness is less than stellar out of the box, though this a correctable software issue that will be addressed later. Suffice it to say, once patched up you'll have no difficulties getting the TouchPad to register your presses. The external buttons are few and easily mastered, producing nice tactile clicks when depressed. The volume rocker is particularly clicky and satisfying to press, for some reason. You can use a swipe up from outside the screen to trigger the multitasking interface (more on that later), though I found it occasionally triggered while scrolling web pages near the bottom edge of the screen, and ultimately turned this gesture off in favor of simply using the home button (which performs the same action by default).

As a slate tablet, the on-screen keyboard will be your primary method of interaction with text fields on the TouchPad, which is why it's a good thing that it is among the best soft keyboards I've ever used. This a full five-row affair, with the traditional fully-staggered QWERTY layout that we've all become accustomed to flanked by a half-height number row and a full spacebar. The main screen of the keyboard features period, comma, apostrophe, and dash keys, with the expected alternates to the number row plus slash, question mark, quotations, and an underscore accessible with only the shift key. The remaining punctuation marks, including several you wouldn't expect such as the degree and GBP symbols and a variety of smilies, hide under the alt key. Despite featuring an entire additional row for numbers, the landscape mode keyboard at least takes up less of the screen than the iPad's. Of course, it does this by compressing each row slightly, which possibly increases the number of typos until you're used to the smaller space. Still, it's a worthwhile sacrifice for the dedicated number row and additional screen real estate in text fields.

This keyboard is so good, in fact, that I typed this entire review on the TouchPad itself, though the editing and posting process will have to be done on my desktop to avoid going insane. One reason for this is the lack of any sort of cursor positioning. There are no arrow keys available on the soft keyboard, and there is no cursor widget that appears when you tap on entered text as in Android or iOS. There is a text selection widget that appears after you long-press and begin selecting, but that's a bit of a round-about process to correct one letter. The auto-correction engine could stand some improvement as well. While an early update to WebOS 3.0 did bring auto-correct for common mistakes such as “dont,” there remains no way to tell the TouchPad to stop "correcting" things that aren't wrong like proper names and acronyms. In fact, as best as I can tell, there is no user-defined dictionary whatsoever; a major leap backwards from Android's powerful system. Finally, there is a button to dismiss the keyboard at any time, but unfortunately there is no way to invoke it at will as on Android.

Output

There's actually very little to say about the screen of the TouchPad, because it's literally the exact same LED-backlit S-IPS affair you know and love from the Apple iPad. Colors are fairly accurate, blacks are about as rich as you can expect from a mobile LCD, and the pixel density and aspect ratio are every bit as disappointing as they are on the iPad. A simple step up to 1280x800 would have done wonders for this thing. That said, there's not a lot to complain about with the screen, as it's perfectly functional for what you'll likely be using this device for. Still, it is pretty disappointing compared to the gorgeous SAMOLED display that adorns my Galaxy S.

The speakers on the TouchPad are, however, outstanding. I'm simply amazed that a device of this stature is able to produce such rich sound at such volumes. It's by no means going to replace your 7.1 speaker setup, but it will certainly be good enough for listening to music while browsing or showing YouTube videos to a friend. These speakers are definitely better than the tinny little rejects on my U30Jc, which is saying something because that's a full-sized notebook that cost nearly $900. Who that is saying something about, exactly, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Connectivity

The TouchPad has the most comprehensive WiFi connectivity in a tablet today, with full 2.4 and 5 GHz support for every variety of loacl wireless internet you might encounter. Unfortunately, it lacks somewhat in other areas. The Bluetooth on display here is unfortunately simple 2.1+EDR, not the newer 3.0 and 4.0 implementations we're beginning to see in higher-end devices (even my now-aging Galaxy S features 3.0, although the iPad 2 naturally does not).

Data transfer and charging are most efficiently accomplished by way of the MicroUSB port located on the bottom of the device. Though you can use any MicroUSB cable you might have laying around for data transfer, the TouchPad infuriatingly won't trickle-charge over USB, even if connected to a USB3 or otherwise higher-power port. The irritation doesn't end there, however. If, like me, you are chronically forgetful and leave the included AC adapter behind, don't expect to simply use your phone's charger - it won't work, even at a slower rate. These restrictions are simply maddening, and obviously in place to force you to buy a replacement charger from HP if you lose your original - other tablets, including the iPad, can trickle-charge from USB, albeit very slowly. And speaking of, the TouchPad is absurdly slow to charge. It takes about 4 hours to go from ~10% back to 100%, significantly longer than it takes to charge my laptop's four-times-as-large battery the same amount.

There is one other way to charge the TouchPad, however, and that is with the integrated inductive charging loop. HP sells a dock for this purpose that runs a staggering $80, and takes even longer to charge than the already geologic rate provided by the AC adapter. The tablet does enter an "exhibition mode" when placed in the dock, however, functioning as a sort of digital photo frame/alarm clock/weather station, and at $179 for both the TouchPad and the Touchstone dock might actually be cheaper than buying a dedicated device with the same functionality.

The real issue though is that well - that's it. No cellular data (though a dummy SIM slot exists on the bottom-left side of the device, it contains only a plastic pullout with the serial number and WiFi MAC address). No NFC. No GPS, at least according to the official specs, although the device can mysteriously pinpoint its location to within 5 meters when outdoors. Regardless of whether the device sports GPS or not, there's no API so navigation apps don't work. There's no ability to use this as a wireless hotspot or to pull up a map when away from WiFi. The list of drawbacks over a smartphone is huge in this area.

Software and Operating System

If there is one thing that might hold people back from buying the TouchPad, even at fire sale prices, this would be it. WebOS is essentially a dead end at this stage, meaning that what you see is what you get, at least for the foreseeable future. So is WebOS as-is a worthy alternative to Honeycomb and iOS, at least for the price? That's a very difficult and complex question to answer, so go fix yourself a new glass of your favorite beverage before moving on.

While there's hardly room in this review for a full history lesson on the trials and tribulations faced by by Palm's last hurrah, the TL;DR version is this: WebOS was a good OS hampered by poor hardware and code optimization. So how has that changed for the TouchPad? Not enough, unfortunately.

Thankfully, as this isn't a carrier-subsidized device, there's no crapware to be found. The pre-installed applications are varying degrees of useful, but by and large do what they're supposed to. The glaring omission is that there's no way to use the camera as a camera out of the box, though there are apps on the HP App catalog that can alleviate this deficiency, both of the free and paid variety.

On that note, the HP App catalog is pretty sad. The poor sales of the TouchPad have resulted in barely a page of tablet-optimized apps in most categories, the vast majority of which are paid apps. As it is, there's no Netflix, no Google Voice/Talk/Music/Plus, no Amazon MP3, no Doodle Jump or Cut the Rope. What there is, however, is a tablet-optimized, multi-paned Facebook app (the only one of its kind so far), a Kindle reader app, and a decent (and free) third-party Twitter app called SpazHD. With luck, the significant influx of new blood from the recent clearance will drive those numbers up over time, but you're likely never going to find Android or iOS variety here. But hey, the TouchPad comes with a free copy of Angry Birds HD, so what more do you really need?

Left: HP TouchPad @ 1.5 GHz; Right: Samsung Galaxy S Captivate @ 1.2 GHz

The WebOS 3.0 browser is, if we're brutally honest here, terrible. Oh sure, it's got hardware acceleration and serves up the desktop versions of pages by default and even has full, GPU-accelerated Flash 10.3. However, it's incredibly slow compared to the likes of the Android and iOS tablet browsers. With a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon behind it, this thing should fly. The lack of the out-of-order execution pipeline doesn't adequately explain the significant performance deficits. An average 20% performance-per-clock benefit on the A5 and Tegra 2 shouldn't be able to overcome a 50% clock speed advantage.

Yes yes, they changed sides. Hopefully you can figure that out.

As you can see from these comparisons with my 1.2 GHz, single-core Hummingbird-powered Galaxy S, the performance differences here aren't in line with the clock speed and generational differences in the processor, or the improvements that should have been made to the browser in the intervening 8 months between Gingerbread's release and HP's release of WebOS 3.0. The standards compliance isn’t exactly a home run either, lagging again behind Honeycomb and iOS 4.3 (and even Gingerbread on some tests, as seen here with Acid 3). There's also no Find On Page functionality in the browser, which is a mind-boggling omission. The worst part is that HP isn't the first to make it, either - iOS lacked such a simple feature until very recently as well. I don't see how two massive computer companies could both miss something so obvious that has been in every web browser since the mid 1990s, but there you have it.

Just keeping you on your toes.

Then there's the Flash performance. It, too, is inexcusably bad. Using Govnah to monitor CPU usage during Flash video playback, I can safely say this isn't a CPU limitation, but rather a coding one. There's more than enough GPU horsepower in the Adreno 220 to drive 720p Flash/h.264 content, so why does the TouchPad struggle with it? My Galaxy S and its severely underclocked PowerVR SGX540 has no difficulty with 720p content, and in many cases drops fewer frames playing 1080p content than the TouchPad does on 720p. That's simply ridiculous. Compounding matters is that the Flash plug-in on WebOS can't be updated independently of the OS as on Android - meaning that even if Adobe and HP saw fit to improve performance, they'd need to push out a full OS update to do so.

Compared to Tegra 2: 50% clock speed advantage – 20% performance/clock disadvantage = over 20% slower? Yeah, nah.

But it isn't all bad on the software front; far from it. The core feature of WebOS - around which much of the operating system is built, including multiple "tabs" in the browser, is the ingenious multitasking system. Each application window is run in a separate "card." A quick press of the home key flies you out to a view where you can swipe through the active cards to quickly and easily change active applications. To close an application, simply grab the card and swipe up, off the screen. To rearrange running applications, you can grab cards and move them around, placing them on top of each other to form groups. Furthermore, this is true multitasking, a la Android, not the pseudo-multitasking present on iOS where inactive applications are frozen except for access to certain basic background APIs. This is far and away the best system on any mobile OS, and much like the Windows 7 taskbar, you'll find it hard to go back to the other, inferior systems after growing accustomed to this one. Put simply, this is how application switching on a touchscreen should be handled. The icing on the cake is that the TouchPad's monstrous full GB of RAM - twice the iPad 2 and iPhone 4's 512MB and four times the iPad's paltry 256MB - and powerful dual-core CPU allows you to open a truly staggering number of application windows at once without slowdown or having applications closed automatically in the background.

The “cards” interface is truly a thing of beauty.

The other major part of a mobile OS that WebOS does right is the notification bar. On the top left corner of each running application, you find the name of the running application that doubles as the menu button. Tapping here brings down a list of options like Preferences, Save As, Help, and About. This might sound familiar to anyone who used a Palm OS device in the days of yore, because it featured a similar system, and it still works here. Moving toward the right side of the bar, we encounter the notification area. Here, notifications, say for new e-mail or a completed download, appear in full for a moment, then slide into the notification button. From here you can either tap on a notification to be brought immediately to the item awaiting your attention, or swipe it away to the side to clear it. Applications can even use their notifications to provide controls, such as player controls for a media player. Oh, and remember how I said there was a light in the center of the Home button? It pulses when you have a pending notification, which is a nice touch.

Also featuring the keyboard, for your viewing pleasure.

Finally, we get to the "system tray" area, where the clock, battery, and wireless icons reside. Tapping here drops down a menu where you can see exact battery level and the current date at a glance, configure WiFi, Bluetooth, or a VPN, and toggle airplane mode, a rotation lock, or mute. To say that all of this trumps the broken mess of a notification system in iOS is a severe understatement. Maybe that's why Apple has decidedly to directly copy and paste Android's notification bar into iOS 5, though I'm tempted to say Palm's implementation trumps even Android's robust system.

The e-mail application uses a similar paned system to most web and desktop e-mail clients, like Windows Live Mail and Gmail. It features push email support for both MS Exchange servers and Gmail out of the box, and the integrated accounts manager also offers to set up sync for contacts, calendars, IM accounts, and even document sync where applicable. It's incredibly robust, rivaling Android's system and once again leaving the disastrous iOS mess in the dust. I think it's a big plus that here you actually use the Gmail option to set up a Gmail account, rather than having that option be a trap with no practical use.

The included productivity suite is Quickoffice HD. Just how much of a "productivity" application it really is is a matter of some debate. Out of the box, it ships with a ludicrous limitation that renders it nigh useless: it can't edit or create documents. HP promised this would be fixed quickly at launch, but it ultimately took over two months for the update to ship enabling this critical functionality; this is part of why I'm only now writing this review. Even with that hurdle crossed, it has a couple more. Firstly, like its smartphone counterpart, Quickoffice HD can't edit PowerPoint presentations. Secondly, and much more severely, the already limited auto-correct engine for the soft keyboard doesn't seem to work inside Quickoffice, meaning any mistakes must be caught and painstakingly corrected by hand, a task complicated by the aforementioned lack of any control for the cursor. Whether or not we will see additional updates to correct these remaining issues is unknown at this time, but for now Quickoffice provides a reasonably capable solution to basic productivity needs on the TouchPad.

The remaining applications are rather more mundane, being things like the alarm clock and memo apps. They're all fine for what they do, as you'd hope. The only remaining minor nitpick is that YouTube "app" just leads to YouTube.com in a browser window. As the TouchPad has full Flash support capable of at least 480p playback, it's at least as good as an app would be anyways so this isn't much of an issue. I do wish I could remove the pointless link from the app drawer, though.

Performance and Battery Life

I've already addressed the questionable browser performance, but how does the rest of the system perform? The first thing you'll likely notice is that the cold boot time on the TouchPad is geologic. While my Galaxy S can recover from a freeze or dead battery in roughly 40 seconds, and my SSD-packing desktop can spring to life in just under 20, the TouchPad takes ages to boot. I just timed a cold boot, even after installing several patches and a custom kernel to optimize performance, and it still took a staggering 1:09. There was a time when boot times in excess of a minute were perfectly acceptable, but it passed 5 years ago.

Speaking of those patches and kernels, you'll definitely want to take advantage of them. Installing Preware is a fairly straightforward operating which you can learn all about over at xda-developers, along with which patches and kernels are best for you. For what it's worth, there's basically zero risk or downside to "overclocking" the CPU to 1.5GHz, as that is the reference clock speed specified by Qualcomm for the APQ8060 (and therefore the speed at which all benchmarks herein are run, similar to the 1.2 GHz clock for the Hummingbird). HP claims that they downclocked the CPU to save on battery consumption, but battery life in a typical usage scenario is largely unaffected because they didn't accompany that underclock with any undervolting. With these user-made patches (including an ad blocker and one that corrects the touchscreen sensitivity issues) and kernels, the TouchPad truly springs to life, bolting past the more sluggish Tegra 2 and A5 chips in general usage. For the more adventurous, there are even kernels supporting up to 1.9 GHz overclocks, but be warned that dragons of warranty-voiding and permanent heat damage may lie that way if you're unlucky.

After the painful boot process, application load time is actually fairly decent. The browser springs to life in about 2-3 seconds, as do most other apps. The App Catalog and Quickoffice both take a little longer, moving into the 5-7 second range. Switching between running applications is smooth as butter, and I've never had an app misbehave so badly that I could not simply go into the card view and kill it normally. This is definitely an operating system designed for multitasking, and as I've said, the hardware is definitely up to the task.

Battery life is a less rosy story. At either 1.2 or 1.5 GHz, expect to get about 8 hours of typical usage. That's far from terrible, and certainly better than the 2 hours you'd get out of an awful Walgreens $99 Android tablet, but it's not up to the ten-hour mark achieved by both the iPad and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and it's worlds away from the EEE Pad Transformer's staggering 16 hours of untethered freedom. If you crank the clock speed up beyond the 1.5GHz mark, expect to have to head for the outlet in even less time. Still, ~8 hours is easily enough to make it through a hard day's use or several days of lighter usage. Speaking of which, what the TouchPad lacks in use battery life, it makes up for standby time. The TouchPad absolutely sips battery while idle. If you finish charging it before bed and unplug it before conking out yourself, you will wake up to your TouchPad still sitting at 100% eight hours later. Despite this, it still manages to get your e-mail as it is pushed out over night and wake you up with its alarm right on time in the morning. The TouchPad could easily last a week between charges for a light (~1 hour a day) user, while even a totally idle iThing will blow through its battery in 4 days or less.

The camera is atrocious, but what can you expect from a 1.3MP shooter intended only for Skype and the like. Since it's front-facing, it isn't very practical for taking still images anyways. As I mentioned in my U30Jc review, I don't do video chat, but I'm not going to complain about the inclusion.

OH GOD KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Conclusion

So at the end of the day, any review of the TouchPad today must answer two questions. In a way, they are both academic. The first is whether or not the TouchPad is worth the current $99 price tag, and the answer is an emphatic yes. It's not perfect; in fact it's got a lot of flaws and missed opportunities, both endemic to the giant-smartphone "tablet" form factor and specific to the TouchPad itself. But basically anything short of simply not working (as many other sub-$100 tablets do) or perhaps dispensing flesh-eating beetles from the headphone jack can be excused by the price tag. At $99 this is an impulse buy, not an investment. You don't really care if it's amazing for everything, because it's great for couch-surfing and that's good enough. I look at it this way: now my phone easily lasts two full days because I use it a lot less around the apartment, and a spare battery for it would have cost at least $30. The larger screen for couch surfing is at least for $70 to me, and probably to you as well.

The other question is whether or not the TouchPad has a future. Again, most people who would buy one during this sale but not before don't really care. HTML isn't likely to undergo some radical, fundamental change in the near future that renders the browser totally useless; most people still use IE8 or earlier to browse the web, for crying out loud. There's no reason the TouchPad should be unsuitable for checking e-mail or writing memos any time soon. But for what it's worth, HP has promised at least one more over-the-air update, and is technically only canning the WebOS hardware division, and as Apotheker moves the company towards a software-focused future, WebOS could still play a significant role in that vision.

Even if it doesn't, you still have a $99 tablet that you can use to browse the internet from the toilet. And really, isn't that where 4chan is most appropriately browsed?

iOS: The Part Where I Make Gentle Coos and Reassurances

2011-08-01T06:01:00.001-04:00

I think it is abundantly clear by this point that I am no great fan of Apple ~~Computer~~, Inc., their ~~ham-fisted dictator~~ Chief Executive Officer, Steven Paul Jobs, their products, chief among them the iPhone, iPad, and various Macs, or their operating systems, i~~Phone~~ OS and Mac OS X. But perhaps I am being overly critical of Cupertino. After all, they are the country’s third-largest computer OEM (sort of) and the world’s fourth largest manufacturer of cell phones (again, sort of). They probably didn’t get there if their products were entirely crap. So in this article I will force myself to examine only the virtues of iOS. I won’t pull a Yahtzee here. No backhanded compliments. No smarm. *Deep breath* Here we go!

Let’s start with the browser. Apple, Microsoft, and Google all believe that the future of computing revolves increasingly around the internet and therefore the browser, and well, if they all think that then they pretty much will be right because they combine to hold 99% of the home PC market, 95% of the search market, 75% of the smartphone market, and 70% of the browser market. So if the browser is central to Jobs’ vision of the future, it must be good, right? Well, in fact, it is. At the core of Safari for iOS is a GPU-accelerated renderer that sadly hasn’t yet made it to the stock Android browser, on the phone at least. Scrolling and zooming is stutter-free on all but the largest web pages as a result. The browser also has an excellent JavaScript engine that is currently second to no other stock browser on equal hardware, at least in terms of speed. The stock browser also trumps Android’s current phone offering in HTML5 readiness, which will be key in the coming years. it goes without saying that Safari for iOS also tramples all over RIM’s shoddy browser and WP7’s IE8-based monstrosity (though WP7.5 Mango will be bringing IE9 to the platform this fall).

Next I should mention the top-notch Exchange ActiveSync support in the stock email client. I mean, there’s not much to say about it, but it is frustrating that Android, WebOS, and even Microsoft’s own desktop email client, Windows Live Mail, have such shoddy EAS support.

Moving on to the other applications, the camera application loads quickly, takes pictures quickly, and has a nifty “HDR” mode. The App Store certainly has a very large selection of apps, or so I’m told. The top 10,000 or so in every category are all available on Android, but I’m sure there are iOS exclusives buried in there somewhere. NO WAIT BAD PHILIP NO SMARM. Um, the presence of a stock notes app is a nice change from Android’s leaving you at the mercy of your device manufacturer or a 3rd-party app for one. And as of iOS 4.3 they don’t use Comic Sans as the default font anymore!

From discussions with and reading articles by developers for both platforms, the actual process of developing for iOS – not counting the bar for entry, the App store policies, et cetera; just the raw coding aspect - is easier than developing for Android due to clearer documentation and a passionate loathing for Java among many enthusiast programmers. Curiously, most Android developers don’t seem to encounter issues with the fabled “fragmentation,” but rather with the Android frameworks themselves being unreliable and poorly documented. Certainly Google is working feverishly to improve the development process, as the constant tweaking of the Android framework and the Market itself in Gingerbread and Honeycomb shows, which suggests that many problems remain. Plus, while only tangentially related to iOS itself, many developers enjoy working with Xcode a lot more than Eclipse, and iOS’s software emulator is much more reliable than the Android SDK’s.

Moving on to the hardware, the iPhone 4’s 960x640, 3.5” IPS LCD remains the industry leader in terms of pixel density, and having a dedicated mute switch is quite handy. On the iPad, it can even be used as an orientation lock switch, though this convenient option is curiously absent from the iPhone.

So that about wraps it up. See? I can say nice things about Apple. Now join me next time while I ~~totally eviscerate~~ thoughtfully examine the downsides of iOS.

iOS and Android compared: Recovery, or: There and Back Again

2011-07-24T18:40:00.001-04:00

Getting into recovery on Android: Either boot the phone with both volume buttons held down (the exact combination may differ based on the specific model), or select “Reboot into Recovery” from the power-off menu. Once you’re in recovery, it will be immediately obvious because it will say “Android Recovery 2e” or similar at the top of the screen and there will be a few options.

Getting into recovery on iOS: Turn the phone off. Hold down the power button for two seconds, then hold the menu button AND the power button for 10 seconds, then release the power button and hold just the menu button for ten more seconds. The device should now be in recovery. It’s easy to tell because…oh wait, no it isn’t, because recovery mode looks exactly like being off. Nothing is displayed on the screen at all. The only way to know if you’re in recovery mode, really, is to try to get back out.

Rebooting from recovery on Android: Either hold the power button for ten seconds, pull the battery and re-insert, or scroll to “Reboot system now" in the recovery menu with the volume keys and hit the power button.

Rebooting from recovery on iOS: Either use iTunes to restore the device, losing all data, and hope and pray that it actually works (which it appears from both personal experience and a quick Google search, it usually doesn't), or download an unsupported 3rd party application and use it to force your iThing out of recovery. Or take it to an Apple store, I suppose.

More of that Apple commitment to quality at work.

iOS and Android Compared: App Store vs. Market

2011-07-24T00:38:00.001-04:00

iOS: Launch App Store. Lengthy (10+ second) load. Find and try to install app. Kicked back to desktop. Be told you need to log in to an Apple account. Log in. Be told account is deactivated for whatever reason. Use browser to re-activate it. Have to try twice to get e-mail to actually send. Go to computer and complete reactivation rigmarole. Re-launch App Store. Same atrocious load time. Log in again. Try to install app. Kicked back to desktop again. Be told you need a credit card on file even to install free apps. App Store now loads, slowly, AGAIN. Put in Apple account password. Input credit card info. Some more loading. Pop-up says app will now install. System freezes here for about 3-4 seconds. Then kicked back to desktop AGAIN. Pop-up saying terms have changed. App store re-launches AGAIN. Have to put in your password again. Have to scroll down to get to "agree" button. Pop-up appears to make sure you actually, really, truly agree not to use iTunes to make chemical weapons or whatever. A little more loading. Pop-up appears informing you that app will now install. Again. Another couple seconds of freezing. Kicked back to desktop AGAIN. App finishes installing this time. Re-launch app store. Find and try to install next app. Have to input password to install. Kicked back to desktop while it installs. Turns out that you're kicked back to the desktop between every app install. You have to wait through the app store load between each and every app. Similarly, it asks for your damn password on EVERY app install, even the free ones.

Android: Launch Market. 2-3 second load. Asks you to log in to Google account. Log in. Terms come up. Agree button is right on the page. Tap it and the market loads. Find and install as many apps as you want at once. That's it.

Yeah, how about that awesome Apple commitment to quality, eh?

OS X Lion Developer Preview: Impressions

2011-06-21T23:34:00.001-04:00

This will be an expanded compilation of my pseudo-tweeted pseudo-review of the OS X Lion Developer Preview. If you missed out on that, it’s all here, more or less verbatim, alongside more details, some stuff I missed, and even some screenshots.

The default OS X Lion desktop (plus Aurora and a thoughtfully auto-mounted network drive). No points for noting that it looks awfully familiar.

The first thing you’ll notice upon booting Lion is that not much has changed. Depending on your view of OS X, that could be a good or bad thing. The persistent menu bar remains, a stalwart relic of the early 90s that Apple just refuse to let go. The dock is essentially unchanged from Snow Leopard, though it seems a little easier to tell which applications are open. One of the small changes is that you can now force applications to minimize open windows into their pinned application icons rather than to random places on the far right of the dock, a welcome addition that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has used Windows 7. Unlike Windows 7, however, this isn’t the default behavior, so dive into the dock options and tick the checkbox next to “Minimize windows into open application icon” to finally smite one of OS X’s more persistent inconsistencies.

This one.

Pinning folders to the dock still causes the little fan thing to appear, which is brilliant if the only operation you want to do on any of the files contained within is to open it in the default application. But since these “stacks” refuse to acknowledge right-clicks, just adds an extra step to the “open folder” mechanic if you want to do anything else. There’s no ability to turn this off, though you can make the “stack” open with a different graphic if you so desire.

This should also be pretty familiar to Snow Leopard users, since bugger all has changed about it.

Speaking of adding extra steps, the “About This Mac” dialog now opens a bigger dialog with a little more detail when clicking “More Info…” requiring you to click “System Report..” on this new dialog to actually get it to cough up the detail view we’re used to. Still, this screen provides some useful basic info like how much RAM is installed in each slot and how many slots are open, a detailed view of how much of your HDD is in use and what file types are stored on it, and some very basic information about your monitor and GPU. It’s just a needless extra dialog to click through for power users who know what they’re looking for in the system profiler, but maybe now typical Mac owners can actually find out what their graphics card is when they come onto forums to complain about WoW running too slow or whatever.

It also seems to have a bit of a whoopsie when exposed to K-series Sandy Bridge CPUs.

Among UI changes that make less sense, let me introduce you to a checkbox for which I reserve quite a bit of ire.

This one.

Not only is this box checked by default, but it is one of the most counter-intuitively named pieces of UI chrome I have ever seen in 20 years of using computers. You might think that “move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling of navigating” would refer to the typical scrolling mechanism, i.e. you move the scroll wheel/two fingers down to scroll down. But no, what it actually means is that the page itself “moves down” so that you can see new stuff that was previously off the top of the page. This is how scrolling in iOS works (and how scrolling in Windows Mobile and PalmOS worked before that). The problem is, while it sort of makes sense on a touch screen, since you’re “pushing” the page up with your finger, it makes no sense with a scroll wheel, which we have been using for well over a decade and have mentally mapped to the “scroll up” and “scroll down” mechanisms. It’s just change for change’s sake, and it’s going to lead to a lot of bewildered users wondering why their two-finger scrolling suddenly “broke” when they upgraded to Lion. With any luck Apple will correct this bit of silliness before launch, or at least throw up some sort of dialog the first time you try to scroll in Safari saying “OH HEY BY THE WAY, WE ARBITRARILY CHANGED THAT FOR NO BLOODY REASON.”

The last major UI change is the new scrollbars, which look like the ones in iOS. They function exactly as before though, so it’s a purely visual thing. In my view it’s a bit of a downgrade but I’m not a professional UI designer. Of course given the idiotic scrolling change mentioned above, I wonder if anyone at Apple is, either.

Moving on, it’s worth giving a brief mention of the fact that there’s TRIM support now.

That was it. TRIM support is not new or exciting; it’s been in Windows, Linux, and BSD for ages. It should have been added in Snow Leopard since Macs were already selling with SSDs by that point, but Apple are nothing if not willing to lag years behind in necessary changes. See: iOS 5 finally fixing the utterly broken iOS notification system (by shamelessly copying and pasting Android’s, natch).

While we’re talking about storage-related features, lets discuss two I missed in my tweet-review, owing to the fact that I completely forgot these were new to Lion. One is the ability to save the state of open applications when you shut down the computer. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because every other operating system has had this capability for yonks under the name of “hibernation.” It first appeared in Windows 95, for crying out loud. That’s not the most ridiculous part – OS9 supported it too, and then it was removed from OS X for no reason. But wait, there’s more! In 2005 with the PowerBook G4, OS X added a feature called “safe sleep” that stored the contents of volatile RAM to disk when putting the machine to sleep. Then, in the event of a power failure, the system could still recover from sleep, just much more slowly. That sounds an awful lot like hibernation, doesn’t it? That’s because that’s exactly what it was. Now Apple are giving the user a way to simply cut out the middle man and go straight to hibernation again, and calling it a new feature. Yes, this is technically slightly different – the kernel state isn’t saved, only the state of all running applications. Presumably this saves a little bit of hard drive space during hibernation at the cost of potentially breaking applications that rely on certain core OS features and aren’t specially coded to play nicely with this feature. But to the user the difference is going to be totally transparent right up until they have unsaved work in some legacy application and it doesn’t recover properly. Calling this a “magical and revolutionary new feature” is lazy even for Apple. Oh, and of course the check box doesn’t remember your setting, so if you DON’T want all of your applications re-opening on next boot (and since the red “x” button doesn’t actually close applications entirely in OS X, that could be basically everything you launched last session) you have to clear the “save open applications for next boot” check box on the shut-down screen every single time.

Speaking of which, the other “new” feature I missed is called “Versions.” At least they’re calling a spade a spade here. It’s a carbon-copy of Windows’ Previous Versions feature that has been around since XP. (Well, they cut the “Previous” so I suppose it’s more like calling a spade an “ade” but whatever.) It’s built on top of the volume shadow copy technology added to OS X in Leopard under the name “time machine” and shares the same gratuitously graphical UI. While we’re on the subject: yes, volume shadow copy was added to Windows in XP as well.

Finally we delve into the headline features of Lion, “Mission Control” and “Launchpad.” Mission control evokes a mash-up of Expose (one of OS X’s best features) and the SPINNAN CUBES that always seem to accompany demonstrations of the Linux desktop.

Mission control in action.

From here you switch to any running application by clicking on it, just like Expose. But you can also switch to the dashboard (though F12 accomplishes the same thing so this seems needlessly roundabout) and add new ~~virtual desktops~~ “Spaces” with the little plus-sign you see in the top-right corner. You can also close open Spaces with a little “X” that pops up in the corner when you hover over them, just like tabs in the iOS browser. For all the talking up of this feature at Macworld, in practice, this is just merging Expose with the Spaces switcher. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; Expose is a as good as ever, though I would have liked the ability to close windows from here like you can virtual desktops. If you were wondering, the traditional Cmd+tab window switcher STILL doesn’t have live previews; clearly Apple just want you to use Expose.

As for Launchpad, I’ll be blunt: it’s utterly useless. It spreads your application folder over your desktop in a giant, iOS-style icon grid. By default, Apple-packaged applications all appear on the main screen and then non-Apple apps get relegated to subsequent screens, even if there’s space on the main screen for them. You can hold down Alt (Option?) to make them all start shaking and can delete non-Apple applications from this UI, which is really its only potential use. But you can do that from the application folder anyways. As for launching individual applications that you don’t have pinned to the Dock, why would you launch this thing, and then hunt down the application in question and click on it, rather than simply hitting Cmd+Spc and typing in the first couple of letters of the application name and hitting enter? It’s just a huge, useless clusterf&$k. And predictably, there’s no way to uninstall, hide, or otherwise rid yourself of the stock Apple applications. This might be vaguely useful on a slate PC, but Steve has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t believe desktop operating systems like Lion belong on tablets, so I just can’t see the point.

The totally-pointless Launchpad in “action.”

So nothing too interesting on the core OS front. We finally get the TRIM support which we should have had in Snow Leopard, we get the expected minor underlying tweaks to networking code and so forth, we get a nifty upgrade to Expose, and we get a totally useless iPad-style desktop replacement…thing. But Apple are all about the apps these days baby, so why don’t we dive into the bundled applications?

First up is the most critical application in any operating system’s arsenal, the browser. Safari gets a minor upgrade to version 5.1. And when I say “minor” I really mean it. I couldn’t find spot a single meaningful difference from 5.0.5 other than the incremented version number in the “about” dialog. It seems no improvements have been made to the pack-trailing Nitro JavaScript engine, which still falls behind every other major browser on both the SunSpider and Kraken benchmarks. Tabs still can’t be closed by middle-clicking on them, an increasingly bizarre omission in this day and age. Nothing about the UI or performance seems to have changed at all since 5.0, so there’s not much to say. Just for, you know, reference, Firefox 5 was released today. Here’s a download link, you know, just in case. Hold on to that.

Next is Mail, which Apple claim is inspired by the iPad mail client and totally NOT Windows Live Mail. And to an extent that’s correct: Windows Live Mail is a lot more visually appealing and feature-complete. This is just an e-mail client, with very loose integration with iCal. It’s about as Spartan as you can get without having a god-awful action movie made about you. But you know what? That’s fine. If Apple want to keep the address book and calendar and e-mail client all as separate applications, who am I to tell them they shouldn’t? It’s perhaps overly simple but it works and that’s what Apple are all about I suppose. If you’re wondering how this differs from the previous OS X Mail application, rest assured that you aren’t alone. It turns out that there wasn’t a preview pane before. So Apple have finally met feature parity with Outlook and Thunderbird from a decade ago. Well, in that one regard anyways. Speaking of Thunderbird, here’s the download link. You’ll probably want to keep that, too.

Names concealed to protect the innocent. Note how I didn’t cover my own name.

Finally, there’s the newcomer, FaceTime. I don’t really have any way to test this because a) I don’t have any iThings to call, and b) I don’t have a webcam on my test machine. I’ve heard it works just like the one on iOS, and I’ll have to assume that’s correct. It is perturbing that not having a webcam simply causes the application to refuse to work, though. What if I want to see someone else? What if they desperately want to show me their new cat or whatever and are too apocalyptically lazy to just turn their iPhone around and take a picture? I mean sure, that doesn’t bode well for the cat’s future feeding prospects, but the point is Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, etc. all allow this. It’s just a pointless limitation. Also, it’s completely black, because apparently Apple agrees with Microsoft that keeping a consistent theme in your bundled applications is for losers. I’d provide a download link to Skype just to keep the smarm train rolling but I’m sure you already have it.

Does the excitement ever end?

So that’s pretty much it. None of the other bundled applications have received any noteworthy updates beyond minor visual changes, usually in the vain of “destroying visual consistency with the other applications.”

The new iCal theme. I have no idea what’s supposed to be going on here. The torn paper I get, but the leather and stitching?

Of course the real problem with selling an OS upgrade on the promise of improved bundled apps is that there’s no adequate reason most of those apps couldn’t simply be backported to the previous OS, and indeed usually are. You’ll also note I made no mention of iLife applications. This is partially because the Lion DP doesn’t ship with iLife but largely because Lion won’t either. iLife continues to be a separately-purchased upgrade.

Overall Lion is just another $30 service pack to Leopard. Apple once again claim about eleventy billion “new features” but as usual they’re counting every single button with a slightly changed shade of gunmetal gray as a “new feature.”

There are two very significant changes I’ve not yet mentioned, and that’s because they cannot possibly be construed as “good” no matter how much spin you try to put on them. First is the complete removal of the Rosetta PPC emulation technology. If you were still hanging on to any applications or games without universal binaries, such as pretty much anything released before 2007, this is important: they will not work on Lion. Period. Rosetta is going away folks, and with it what little legacy application support there was on OS X. Second is the delivery method for the Lion upgrade. Steve announced at WWDC that the only ways to get Lion would be a) pre-installed on a new Mac or b) through the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard. If it wasn’t already painfully obvious that Lion is just a paid service pack, the lack of physical media should be a dead giveaway. But this raises some questions: What if you never upgraded to Snow Leopard? Well you get to buy Snow Leopard first, then install that, and only then can you upgrade to Lion. What if you want to do a clean install of Lion, say because you don’t trust the upgrade process for whatever reason? You can’t. What if you need to reinstall because your main system drive dies, perhaps because it was a cheap SSD running for years without TRIM? You get to install Snow Leopard first and THEN install Lion. Ridiculous. I can only hope this was a mistake on Steve’s part, because if true it’s one of the most pointless and idiotic changes I’ve ever heard.

In my “tweet review” I went into some of the stuff that should have been changed but wasn’t, like the blurry font rendering and lack of proper OpenGL 3+ drivers and random keyboard shortcuts, but frankly that just seems like kicking a guy while he’s down at this point. There are enough blisteringly idiotic decisions specific to Lion that harping on the bad design endemic to OS X isn’t really necessary. So I’ll do that tomorrow instead.

iOS, Android, and the “smoothness” Lie: A Preface

2011-05-17T20:40:00.001-04:00

This is a topic I’ve wanted to address for a while, and I figured I’d at least throw this up here. I came across a forum post today in a discussion about whether a poster should buy an iPhone 4 or Samsung Galaxy S II that I think sums up the “herp derp iOS is smoother” idiots:

ITT: We judge performance purely based on the smoothness of scrolling the settings menu.

I mean sure, the SGSII might have 3 times the processing power and 20 times the GPU horsepower and twice the RAM of the iPhone 4, and sure Android 2.3.3's JS engine might be 50% faster than iOS 4.3's, and yeah the SGSII might be able to output 1080p over HDMI where the iPhone doesn't even have video out, and sure SGSII might load all applications four to six times faster than the iPhone, and yeah the SGS might have a best-in-the-industry WM8994 DAC and support for several times the media formats, and sure the SGSII's screen might have better viewing angles and a wider color gamut and better sunlight readability and literally infinite contrast, and sure the SGSII has a MicroSDXC slot where the iPhone charges you $100 to upgrade to the maximum of 32GB total storage, and sure the SGSII's screen might be 0.8" larger for much better viewing of web pages, and yeah the SGSII might still manage to be lighter and thinner, and sure the SGSII might have more accurate GPS and Bluetooth 3.0 vs. 2.1 and proper 802.11n WiFi instead of 2.4GHz only, and yeah the SGSII might have a totally unlocked bootloader while the iPhone is more locked down than Alcatraz, and sure the SGSII can make and receive phone calls no matter how you hold it, and okay sure the SGSII has HSPA+ data and support for more wireless frequencies and channels, and yeah the Gingerbread keyboard might be easier to use and actually have the period and comma on the main keyboard and take up less space because of the aspect ratio and still have bigger keys because of the screen size difference, and sure the Android notification system isn’t a half-implemented mess, and yeah the SGSII might have more than one hardware button, and yeah the SGSII lasts much longer than the iPhone 4 on one charge, and sure the battery is removable so you can just carry an extra or replace the first when it starts to lose capacity, and sure the SGSII accepts the SIM card you already have without having to take scissors to it, and yeah the SGSII has better cameras on both the front and back, and sure Android supports voice and video chat over Google talk and Skype instead of just a proprietary Apple protocol, and sure SGSII has a Gorilla glass screen that won’t scratch or crack; but I mean really, who uses their phone for applications or games or web browsing or watching video or listening to music or sending text messages or making calls or tethering data or taking pictures? It's all about scrolling that settings menu all day!

Consider The Following

2010-10-20T20:32:00.001-04:00

Here is the text of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, in its entirety:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Now with the above in mind, which of the following are okay things for the Federal government to do?

If you answered that any of the above were okay, you clearly cannot read. Sadly, it seems like a lot of government officials can’t either. Welcome to “conservative” America, enjoy your stay.

As Good as It Gets: The Samsung Galaxy S on AT&T

2010-08-24T19:28:00.001-04:00

For those of us who have been following AT&T’s entries in Android smartphones so far this year, it’s been a rather disheartening spread. First we get the dismal Motorola Backflip, a usability disaster with sluggish performance that released at a staggering $199. It took months to get a “proper” Android phone from the big blue menace, and even then HTC’s Aria was released at a disappointing $129 and with specs that paled in comparison to comparably priced phones on other networks. It looked like Dell’s Aero was the last, best hope for a reasonably priced mid-range Android phone from AT&T. So you can imagine my chagrin when, over a full month after initially rumored release, the Aero is announced for official release in mid-August with a whopping $99-with-contract price tag and no definite upgrade path beyond the stock Android 1.6.

It was around this time that I heard the Aria was on sale at Wal-Mart for $89. A better deal than either of the $100 offerings I was considering (the 8GB 3GS and the Aero), I stopped in my local Wal-Mart to check it out, when I noticed that they also had the new Samsung Captivate (AT&T’s Galaxy S model) for $149. My mind was made up more or less on the spot; the gorgeous Super AMOLED screen and actual modern smartphone hardware, combined with a promised upgrade to Froyo next month, was easily worth an extra $50-60. After some contractual shenanigans, I finally had my new Android smartphone in hand on the 11th.

I’m in a pretty lucky position for an independent reviewer: I have easy access to an iPhone 4 for comparison courtesy of one of my flatmates. Since the Galaxy S is squarely aimed at Apple’s newest iGadget, expected to see plenty of comparison between the two devices.

You know how they say the camera adds 20 pounds? It does something similar to glossy screens, only it’s 500 fingerprints.

Samsung Captivate – AT&T (USA)/Rogers (Canada) Galaxy S – Specifications

1GHz Samsung Hummingbird SoC (ARM Coretex A8 CPU, PowerVR SGX540 GPU)
4” WVGA (800x480) Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen
Automatic brightness adjustment/screen turn off through light and proximity sensors
512MB RAM (only 256MB usable until Froyo)
16GB ROM
Expandable MicroSDHC slot – up to 32GB
5.0 MP rear camera
GSM Quad-band/HSDPA Tri-band Wireless
Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11b/g/n WiFi (2.4 GHz band only)
Standard GSM SIM only (CDMA providers have their own versions of the Galaxy S)
A-GPS and network-based triangulation
1500mAh Lithium-Polymer battery
Standard MicroUSB charging port
Rear mono speaker and top 3.5mm headphone jack
Noise-cancelling microphone
Hardware On/Off/Hold switch and volume rocker, four hardware touch buttons (Menu, Home, Back, Quick Search)
Dimensions: 122mm x 64mm x 10mm or 4.8” x 2.5” x 0.4”
Weight: 118g or 4.2oz

Design and Build

From a design standpoint, the Captivate doesn’t really push any boundaries. It’s all piano black on the front, save for the AT&T and Samsung logos, and it’s the same story on the top and bottom. The sides and top/bottom sections of the back panel are gunmetal gray, and the battery cover is a checkered matte gray/black with a silver GALAXY S emblazoned near the top. The various touch-sensitive buttons on the front are nearly invisible without the backlight, for better or for worse. The side buttons (power/hold and the volume rocker) stick out plenty far enough to easily find with your hand, but not enough to be visible from the front. The sides curve back slightly to accommodate this.

The phone is light in your hand, noticeably more so than the iPhone 4. Compared to my old Samsung SGH-A707 flip phone it’s definitely heavier, but it doesn’t really feel like it since the larger surface area spreads the weight out more evenly. It’s ever so slightly thicker than the iPhone 4, putting it roughly on par with the 3GS in this regard and it certainly doesn’t feel even the least bit husky. It fits perfectly in the hand for use as a phone, though due to the size of the screen, one-handed operation with your thumb is out of the question for anything more complex than operating the media player.

Input

The Captivate uses a standard capacitive touchscreen, just like 99% of all smartphones. The touchscreen is very responsive, and some simple testing shows that it has almost perfect tracking, which is something of a rarity in smartphone touchscreens. The screen has some basic multi-touch support in the form of pinch zoom, but it’s maddeningly absent in a lot of other cases (most notably while using the on-screen keyboard). This makes it easy to miss letters while typing quickly, if you fail to lift one thumb off of the keyboard before lifting the second back off of your next letter. Fortunately, the keyboard has some (curiously, disabled by default) auto-correct functionality that can help with common misspellings. Still, you might want to proof-read anything you type with the Captivate before sending it, to make sure it auto-corrected your rapid tapping correctly. For example, despite having owned the device for nearly two weeks now, I just went into the memo application and typed in the classic typing test sentence and got “the quick bronze fox jumped over the lazy dog.” Close, but no ~~hangar~~ banana.

Speaking of the keyboard, you have three options in that department, and they’re all worth investigating to find which one you like best. There’s the stock Android keyboard, of course, which while otherwise unremarkable has support for voice dictation that works surprisingly well. Realize, though, that you’ll likely look like an idiot dictating e-mails or forum posts into your phone in public (and may well get arrested, depending on what kind of forum we’re talking about). The custom (and default) Samsung keyboard lacks this feature, instead having a few options for using different types of keypads – there’s the standard staggered QWERTY, two different Palm-style handwriting recognition fields (that work about as well as Palm’s, for better or for worse), and even a T9-ish number pad for those who miss typing text messages into “dumb” phones for some reason. While the Samsung board also features auto-correction, I can’t help but feel it’s quite a bit more aggressive than the stock Android keyboard’s, to the point where it can get somewhat annoying with its “correcting” of names and acronyms - and words it doesn’t know, of which there are too dam many. Finally, there’s the Swype keyboard. Although you can tap away at individual letters just like the other options, you can also drag your finger across all of the letters in the word you’re trying to enter in one motion (no pauses necessary, except a looping motion on repeated letters), and the phone automatically determines what word you’re trying to type. It’s pretty snazzy and works as advertised, and there have been some reports of people reaching impressive WPMs with it, but for what it’s worth I ended up settling on the standard Android keyboard.

There is one last gripe I’d like to express, and it’s about the hardware touch buttons near the bottom of the device. The backlight on them turns off very quickly, and as I mentioned above, they’re almost impossible to see without it. It’s less of an issue now that I know where they are, but it’s frustrating when you’re first learning to use the phone, and there doesn’t seem to be any option to alter their backlight timeout (which is independent of the screen’s).

Output

Allow me to sum up this section in four words: The screen is gorgeous. If you’ve been let down by AMOLED screens to date, prepare to have your faith in the technology renewed. Samsung has really been pushing the Super AMOLED screen of the Galaxy S as the devices major selling point, and for good reason. This is the best screen on a handheld mobile device, ever. The resolution is a bog-standard 800x480, yes, but that’s easily enough for a 4” screen – you can discern the individual pixels, but only at distances of less than a foot or so. The 4-inch screen is noticeably larger than than the 3.5” display of the iPhone, and the 15:9 aspect ratio feels much wider than the iPhone’s 3:2 display, even if the difference is fairly minimal in the long run. Color reproduction is brilliant, easily better than my laptop’s LCD, along with blindingly bright whites and perfect blacks - AMOLED screens don’t suffer from backlight bleed as LCDs do, and it really shows side by side with other, LCD-driven devices. Pictures and video look absolutely amazing on the Captivate’s screen, making the phone a shoe-in to replace your PMP of choice. The maximum brightness of the screen is easily readable even in direct sunlight, and indoors the screen usually defaults to somewhere around 30-40% brightness. The viewing angles are incomparable – after the abysmal angles I complained about in my U30Jc review, it feels nice to be able to say that the viewing angles on this screen are easily enough for the display to be readable in a 170-degree arc in all directions.

Some may recall that at WWDC, Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone 4’s S-IPS display was “better” than Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology. Unless we’re now defining “better” exclusively in terms of pixel density (something that Apple should be the last company to do, after sticking to 1280x800 on their 13” notebooks while the competition all moved to 1366x768), Steve is eating crow on this one.

It’s unfortunate that the device’s single mono speaker can’t follow the screen’s example, but then again I suppose to do so it would need to somehow produce 500 watts of 7.1 surround sound. (Have I mentioned that the screen is really, really beautiful? I have? Okay, good, though I might have missed mentioning how incredibly awe-inspiring the screen is.) The speaker is noticeably tinny, though it is capable of putting out decent volume at least. The 3.5mm headphone jack is standard issue, with a third band for data. The included headphones have a pause button and are the worst headphones ever constructed by mankind. They even look like they may not suck, being IEMs instead of standard earbuds, but the sound they produce is sub-par even next to Apple’s notoriously-awful earbuds. They are, in fact, tinnier than the built-in speaker, if you can believe it. I quickly tested the phone’s headphone jack with a cheap pair of Philips headphones I have laying around, as well as my Logitech Bluetooth headphones, and confirmed that it is in fact the included headphones that are terrible, not the phone’s headphone jack or audio stack. I don’t know if all Galaxy S phones include such terrible headphones or if this is a fluke or an AT&T thing, but you’ll likely want to invest a few bucks in a decent pair of headphones either way. (For the record, my money’s on AT&T, knowing them.)

Connectivity

The Captivate features both Bluetooth 3.0+A2DP and 802.11n WiFi, meaning it’s ready for pretty much anything you throw at it from a wireless connectivity standpoint. I don’t actually have any PC Bluetooth adapters above 2.1, so I can’t speak for how much 3.0 improves transfer speeds. I do have a Wireless-N router, however, and I don’t have any difficulties connecting the Captivate to it. I can maintain WiFi connectivity a pretty substantial distance from the access point, but unsurprisingly it’s no where near as strong an antenna as the one in my U30Jc; I only see about half of the networks at any given time. It’s worth noting that the WiFi adapter in the Captivate is 2.4GHz only, so you won’t be able to connect to 802.11a networks, or certain 802.11n networks (as N supports both frequencies).

The device is both charged and connected to your PC through a standard MicroUSB port, and so should be compatible with the data cables from Motorola, HTC, and others (except Apple, obviously). The MicroSD and SIM slots are beneath the battery cover, but are both accessible while the battery is installed. Removing the battery cover is a simple matter of sliding down the bottom rear panel and removing the cover; the sliding panel locks the battery cover securely in place when the phone is in use. Compared to the procedure for use replacement of the iPhone’s battery and external storage devices, you’ll note that the Captivate’s is substantially more existent. *ba dum tish*

One thing to note is regarding the GPS functionality. It does work, but it’s not always the fastest to acquire a signal, and even minor obstructions can render the GPS useless. Samsung has acknowledged this and claims it’s merely a software problem, and that an update is forthcoming to correct the issue. I’ll update this when/if said update materializes, but in the mean time be aware that if your car’s roof is made of lead you’ll probably not be able to use the Galaxy S as a navigation system. For what it’s worth, it’s worked every time I’ve used it here in Orlando, but in Deltona it took nearly 5 minutes to get a satellite lock.

Software and Operating System

How Apple convinced AT&T not to install crapware applications on iDevices is still a mystery to me, but it appears Google has had no such luck. There are quite a few more-or-less useless AT&T applications on the Captivate out of the gate, many of which incur additional fees to actually use. Annoyingly, they cannot be removed on the stock device, either. Fortunately, rooting your new Galaxy S is an extremely simple procedure. (Albeit one that I won’t discuss here, for obvious reasons. Here’s a link to Google, I assume you know how to use it.) From there it was a few simple steps to removing the AT&T crapware.

The Samusng “TouchWiz” UI is a wholly unnecessary but overall fairly decent modification of the stock Android UI. It’s clearly intended to make the Android user experience more “iPhone-like,” and whether or not you want that is your call. There have been some complaints that TouchWiz is slow and unresponsive, and while I wouldn’t say that it was sluggish, I wouldn’t call it snappy either. I ended up replacing it with LauncherPro pretty quickly, but I’d at least give it a shot. The major difference is in how the application tray is handled – it’s a side-to-side, multiple window affair a la iOS, rather than a single vertically-scrollable tray in the standard Android UI.

The browser is the stock Android 2.1 browser with Flash Lite 3 (which has so far worked with next to no embedded Flash other than the occasional ad). It’s got multiple windows, simple bookmark organization, and decent scripting performance. There are, as always, other options in the market if you don’t like it. DolphinHD is fairly popular and features ad blocking and better bookmarks/tabbed browsing support, for example. Froyo should bring with it an updated Android browser with true Flash 10.1 support and much better scripting performance.

I could go into each application included with the phone one by one in exquisite detail, but we’re 2,500 words into this review already and it would be simpler to just say this: “Yeah, so, the media player/memo app/e-mail app/whatever does exactly what it says on the tin and is reasonably snappy about it.” As always, there’s a ton of other options for everything in the Android market, and even more if you feel comfortable rooting your phone and enabling side-loading of unsigned applications. Hell, the Android SDK is free for Windows/OS X/Linux, so you could even write your own, without having to buy a ridiculously overpriced Fischer-Price computer!

Speaking of Froyo, Samsung has promised us an update to the latest version of Android sometime in September. There’s not much to say about that, other than that it’s great news if they can keep to their word this time.

As for the selection of applications and games on the Android Market: It’s nothing like the iTunes App Store (yet). That’s both good and bad – the iTunes App Store has easily 10 times the available applications as the Android Market, but the ratio of useless crap to actual useful applications is generally much higher as well. For me, the real test comes down to the free apps and games – I just can’t bring myself to spend money on simple apps or games for my phone, sorry – and in that area, the Android Market actually seems to have a slight edge, due to the much more open development environment. (App Store developers have to cover the Apple tax they paid on their computers, after all, as the iOS SDK only runs on OS X.) I was able to find a fully-ODF compatible office suite, an e-reader application with direct access to all the Project Gutenberg works, along with a variety of other useful (and some not so useful) applications and games, all in a few quick searches. There really is a ton of stuff to be had, especially if you’re not worried about dropping a few bucks. A word of warning, though: some games were designed with a physical keyboard in mind and may not play well on a fully-touchscreen device like the Captivate. As more and more smartphones shed their physical keyboards – and Android gains more market share in general – expect that to change, however.

And so we reach the point where some sort of verdict on Android versus iOS must be passed. It’s undeniable that iOS is a hugely successful platform - again, for better or for worse. However, Android sales recently surpassed iOS on smartphones globally. (Note: Apple’s figures for iOS market share are not only on smartphones, and include iPod Touches and iPads as well; hence why they continue to assert that they have more market share than Android. Curiously, though, they don’t seem to include Android or Windows CE on other devices. Go figure.) Android has made a lot of strides since 1.0, and while iOS has as well, It seems like the trend towards more and more Android sales is not going to abate any time soon. While quarterly iOS gains have slipped to low double-digits, Android saw multiple-hundred-percentage-point increases in both first and second quarter of 2010. In a time when Apple is quick to cite the double-digit percentage gains of OS X on the desktop, they’ve fallen oddly silent about the uptake of iOS so far this year. It is my opinion that the iPhone will suffer the same fate as every other Apple product: It had an amazingly strong start, but the flood of cheaper, faster-evolving, and just generally better competition will sweep the iPhone away to a single-digit market share consisting almost entirely of ~~trust-fund hipsters~~ “artists,” just as Windows’ 90+% market share has buried the Mac.

Performance and Battery Life

There isn’t much to say about performance beyond “it performs well.” There aren’t a lot of benchmarks to run. For giggles, I ran the SunSpider test on the default broswer, and got a score around 14,000, which is hilarious next to the 250 (remember, lower is better) or so Chrome gets on my desktop, but that’s still faster than IE8 on a Pentium 4, and it’s definitely “fast enough.” It’s about 3,000 points slower than the iPad, and slightly faster than the iPhone 4, for what that’s worth. Samsung boasts that the Hummingbird SoC’s GPU is several times faster than the Snapdragon’s, though there’s little beyond spec sheets to prove that. I can say that I’ve tried a couple of free full-3D games and they’ve all ran just fine. There’s no lag switching between applications, and the only times the phone seems to slow down is during heavy “disk activity.” (There is a fix for this, though it should ship with the Froyo update so I’ll just wait and see; it’s not a big deal at this stage, anyways.) The Galaxy S is definitely the fastest Android phone on the market right now, excepting the nigh-impossible-to-find Nexus One running Android 2.2. If the promised update to Froyo comes through next month, the Galaxy S should blow away all of the competition with ease.

Battery life is less spectacular. When I was first getting situated with the device, I had to recharge it daily, but since then I’ve obviously been doing less intensive operations with the device, and I’ve only had to recharge every other day or so for the most part. That’s all pretty par for the course for a smart phone, but it’s still a long way from what you could get with most “dumb” phones despite the larger battery. Of course, this is largely because you’re using a smart phone more, though the larger, higher-resolution screens don’t help. Even with an incredibly energy-efficient AMOLED display, 50-60% of my battery is used up by the screen. (The Android settings applications has a nifty page that breaks down battery usage for you.) Still, it’s easily enough battery that you shouldn’t have issues with daily heavy usage as long as you charge the phone each night. Note that the forthcoming update to Android 2.2 should improve battery life as well as performance.

Call quality is excellent. The Captivate has an active noise-cancelling microphone, so the other party should have no difficulty hearing you, something that anyone who has tried to hold a conversation with someone on an iPhone 3GS can attest is most certainly not the case there. (The iPhone 4 also has a noise-cancelling mic, however.) The earpiece is actually easier to hear than my old flip phone, and I have no difficulty in hearing others. There is no variation in call quality or signal strength incurred by actually holding the phone, either.

The camera is the largest disappointment, for two reasons: the Captivate has no flash and no forward-facing second camera. “How can that be right?” you might ask. “The Vibrant (T-Mobile), Epic 4G (Sprint), Fascinate (Verizon), and reference Galaxy S (worldwide) all have both of those things,” you protest. And you’d be right. But this is AT&T we’re talking about. For the same reasons they saw fit to remove application sideloading, they’ve also stripped out these features. Can’t have anything looking better on paper than their precious iPhones, can they? The camera that is present is excellent, however. While only a 5MP model, it takes excellent quality photos, and is able to do an admirable job in low-light situations, considering there is no flash. The camera can also record 720p video at a solid 30 FPS without incident. The loss of a front-facing camera is unfortunate considering Google Talk and Skype apps are readily available, but I personally don’t even use my webcam on such services anyways, so I’ll never notice. It’s worth noting that the use of the iPhone’s front-facing camera for ~~Apple Talk~~ “Facetime” is limited to WiFi anyways, so you’d likely have your computer close at hand in any situation where it would come in handy.

It’s basically the same photo as above, see, but taken with the cameras reversed. Aren’t I clever?

Conclusion

So all that said, is the Captivate worth your money? If you’re in the market for a new phone and tied to AT&T, the answer is a definite yes. As for whether you should pick the Captivate or the iPhone 4 on AT&T if you can’t get the Captivate for $149 like I did, let me say that my personal opinion is that unless you really must have an LED flash or just have a massive lust for all things shiny and vapid, there is no good reason to pick the iPhone 4 over the Captivate. The iPhone’s screen is a higher resolution, but it’s diminutive size makes most of those added pixels an exercise in total pointlessness. In nearly every other regard, the Captivate outpaces the iPhone: Both have 16GB of internal storage, but the Captivate has an open MicroSD card slot. The Hummingbird runs circles around the A4, and Froyo will bring major performance improvements over Éclair, where iOS 4 has actually been a performance drop over iPhone OS 3. The Captivate’s screen is larger, brighter, and has better color reproduction than the iPhone’s. The list goes on, but the point is this: the Captivate is the best $149-199 you can spend at AT&T. The iPhone has more apps going for it –for the time being, at least - but one might raise the point that you don’t really need 35,000 different fart apps. When it comes to a phone that excels as a phone, as a media player, and as a mobile internet and productivity device, the Captivate blows the iPhone out of the water. And an Android 2.2 release next month will only tip that balance further in the Captivate’s favor, while any major update to iOS is likely at least a year away. Then again, I buy my technology based on concrete specifications and benchmarks, not how “magically revolutionary” it is, so what do I know?

Outside of AT&T, the Galaxy S is the top Android phone on the market, except perhaps the Droid 2 if you would prefer a physical keyboard. If you’re in the market for a new phone, wherever you are, you owe it to yourself to take a look at your provider’s Galaxy S model.

Why AT&T Is Evil

2010-07-16T22:26:00.001-04:00

So I recently had the great displeasure of attempting to replace a failed AT&T DSL modem for some family friends. Here is that process, in painful detail:

Go to nearest AT&T office.
Be told that they can’t do the replacement, and that the nearest store that can is in Altamonte Springs (bear in mind, I live in Deltona, and there can’t be less than a dozen AT&T stores between here and there).
Drive all the way to Altamonte Springs.
Wait on a “waiting list” to be helped for 10-15 minutes, despite the fact that there are clearly employees standing around doing nothing this whole time and only about 4 or 5 customers in the store.
Be told I can’t replace the modem without the receipt for the old one.
After some arguing and waiting, be told that they couldn’t replace it anyways because it isn’t my modem and the owner isn’t there.
More arguing and waiting, be told that I can just buy a new one for $75.
A little more arguing, discover that regardless of all the previous razzmatazz, modems are bought rather than rented with AT&T DSL so I would have had to pay the $75 anyways. Don’t even bother asking what all the “account holder” and “receipt” crap was about.
Fine, whatever, buy new modem.
Drive back to Deltona.
Connect new modem directly to PC. Modem still doesn’t work at this point.
Run install program on the included CD.
Several stupid EULA/safety/HURR HERE’S HOW TO PLUG IN AN ETHERNET CABLE prompts, complete with audio instructions.
Lots of spinny graphics while installer does god-knows-what.
Have to call the owners multiple times during this process because installer wants tons of account information, interspersed with spinny graphics and stupid prompts, of course.
Installer presents a dialog offering to install a bunch of AT&T-branded crapware no one would ever want. Naturally, half of the stuff can’t be opted out of. Still getting DNS errors until I accept the installer, though. Whatever, install it.
Internet is finally working! Now to install the router.
Insert router between modem and PC. That should be everythi…
Internet stops working, complete with little “internet” light on modem turning red again.
Clone PC’s MAC address to router. Internet light turns green. Great, modem is locked into one MAC. Brilliant. But DNS still isn’t responding.
Turns out modem is assigned to the 192.168.1.x subnet, causing conflicts with router, which is also on 192.168.1.x by default. Seems odd since owners bought router from AT&T’s in-home networking store. Change router to 192.168.0.x, problems solved.
3 Mbps internet!

Contrast this to the typical Bright House modem replacement experience:

Go to nearest Bright House office (in this case it would be in Deland).
Say “hey, can you give me a new modem? This one’s broken.” Note the lack of waiting on any list. At most there will be one person in line ahead of you.
Give them old modem.
Receive new modem, free of charge, no questions asked.
Go home.
Plug in new modem, along with router and whatever else
10 Mbps Internet!

AT&T’s DSL had better pay you to use it. Even then I don’t know that it’s worth it.

And I hate Bright House.

Quick Take: Health Care

2010-06-16T17:45:00.001-04:00

I saw this earlier today and thought it was hilarious. YMMV.

“This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issued by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

Then, after spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, I drive back to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and the fire marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log onto the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.”

A Brief Browser Battle: SunSpider Performance of the Major League Browsers

2010-06-09T06:28:00.001-04:00

Spurred by yesterday’s release of Safari 5, I decided to do a test of all of the major web browsers on Windows using Webkit’s SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.

First, the test system. This is my personal desktop PC, which may not be exactly representative of the everyman’s PC, but isn’t one of the super-powered behemoth systems used by most professional benchmarking websites, either. Results should as such be pretty indicative of what you’d get on a mid-range new computer, were you to buy today.

System specifications:

CPU: Core 2 Duo E6600 (2 cores/2 threads, 4MB L2, over-clocked to 3.00 GHz/333 MHz FSB/1333 MHz effective)
Cooling: Intel stock CPU cooler w/Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound, 1x 120mm case fan, 3x 80mm case fans
Motherboard: EVGA NF-68 680i SLI
System RAM: 6 GB DDR2-667MHz @ 4-4-4-12-1T
Video Card: 512MB AMD Radeon HD 4870
Primary hard disk: 250 GB Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM
Operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Running software during the tests:

The web browser being tested (and only that browser)
Logitech G15 Panel software
Sticky Notes
Microsoft Security Essentials

That should be everything even remotely relevant to the test. The great thing is that both Microsoft’s and Apple’s tests were also performed on 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duos, so this gives us near-perfect comparability. None of the running software has a measurable impact on CPU utilization (except the browser, obviously) and isn’t anything you wouldn’t expect to find running during a browsing session anyways.

Testing methodology:

The following browsers were tested:

Chrome 5.0.375.70 (stable)*
Firefox 3.6.3 (stable)
Firefox 3.7a5pre (trunk)
Internet Explorer 8 (stable)
Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 (“trunk”)
Opera 10.53 (stable)*
Safari 5 (stable)

(*Chromium 6.0.430.0 and Opera 10.54 Alpha trunk data were also collected but were discarded because there was no statistically significant difference between performance of the trunk release and the latest stable release.)

The SunSpider JavaScript test was run three times on each browser, restarting the browser and clearing all saved cache data between each test. Additionally, the memory usage of the browser (as reported by the Windows Task Manager, adding together the total from multiple processes if applicable) was recorded at the completion of each test. The results were then averaged for the 3 tests. Addons were disabled for the testing.

So, with all of that out of the way, onto the results:

OH NOES MAH SCREEN CAN’T HANDLE IT. Time to move up from XGA then, champ.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that Internet Explorer 8’s JavaScript performance is absolutely horrendous. This isn’t an error on the part of my testing or the benchmark itself; it’s fully repeatable and has been repeated by dozens of testers since the release of our eldest tested browser. Indeed, IE8’s abysmal showing actually skews the graph so far it makes the differences between the other browsers look meaningless. For that reason, here’s the chart again, but with IE8 removed:

Ahh, much better.

With IE8’s bungling out of the picture, we get a clearer view of where things stand among the other browsers. Chrome edges out Opera slightly to grab the JavaScript performance crown, and Opera in turn noses past the freshly-minted Safari 5.0 to claim second place. It’s a sizeable step down into 4th place, which is somewhat shockingly snatched by the Internet Explorer team with their IE9 preview release. Clearly Microsoft is determined to get it’s act together with this new release, something that will help web developers around the world breathe easier. Firefox is the bear of this benchmark, with the latest nightly trunk improving significantly over the current stable release, but not enough to push past Redmond’s latest.

As mentioned previously, I also recorded RAM usage by each browser after the completion of the final benchmark run, with the results of said benchmark as the only open tab. The results of that:

Bwuh?

Here we see a vastly different picture. Internet Explorer zooms past the competition in terms of memory usage. Don’t take that at face value, though: The trident rendering engine used by Internet Explorer is a core component of the Windows operating system, and so may not be included in IE8’s RAM usage. While the IE9 Platform Preview does have its own, self-contained renderer and JavaScript engine, what is dos not have is any browser chrome (address bar, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, that sort of thing). So those scores may be artificially low. Firefox has always been seen as a bit of a memory hog, and it seems the good folks at the Mozilla Foundation aren’t doing much to turn that image around with the upcoming release. Apple’s latest Safari release, on the other hand, puts in an impressive showing – even the download for the installer is larger than the in-use RAM usage, perplexingly. Opera claims second to Chrome in another category, but probably not in the way they’d want to brag about. And that leaves us with the head-scratcher; performance superstar Chrome gobbles up a ludicrous 143 megabytes of RAM just to render one page, and runs three processes to do so. I understand the stability benefits of the new-process-per-tab implementation – IE8 uses it too – but seriously Google? 143 MB to render one tab? It’s important to remember two things about these results though:

This is only for one tab, and scaling with multiple tabs will be different across browsers.
Even at a “staggering” 143 MB, Chrome’s memory usage is meaningless on an even semi-modern computer, which should be sporting at least a gigabyte of RAM, and generally no less than two.

In the end, what do these results mean to the average Joe or Jolene? Not a whole lot, really. JavaScript is just one part of the internet, and basic page rendering is so fast on all of the browsers that it’s basically impossible to benchmark. But for script-heavy pages – which we’ll only see more and more of as time passes – these numbers are pretty significant. Especially on a netbook or other budget platform where every ounce of performance matters, a browser with scripting performance as bad as Internet Explorer 8 could lead to a lot of waiting and frustration. Should JavaScript performance be your only factor when choosing a browser? Of course not; there are a lot of factors, including UI layout, customizability, extensibility, memory and CPU usage, security, and of course, a heavy dose of personal preference. I personally use Chrome almost exclusively, with dashes of Firefox and Internet Explorer for sites that don’t play well with Webkit, but I give all of the major browsers a thorough evaluation when a new version comes out. If you’re happy with your current browser, then by all means feel free to stick with it, but I always encourage you to give the competition a shot. They’re all free, quick downloads after all.

How Copyrights Cause Inflation

2010-06-01T21:56:00.001-04:00

After a couple of rather lengthy articles, hopefully it will be appreciated that this one is comparatively short and to the point.

Recently, small production studio Voltage Pictures filed lawsuits against 5,000 John Does for illegally downloading copies of it’s Oscar-winning film, The Hurt Locker. They’re requesting that the defendants destroy all illegal copies of the movie, as well as pay for filing fees and “unspecified actual or statutory damages.” If they take the RIAA’s lead on such damages, we could see requested fines as high as $100,000 per count of infringement.

Without getting into the practicality or legality of suing thousands of people by their IP addresses alone, let’s talk theft versus “piracy” for a minute. When you walk into a Wal-Mart and steal a DVD or CD off of the shelf, you are actively depriving Wal-Mart Incorporated of $10 or so. They have already paid out that money, and are dependent on selling that disc in order to recoup that loss. When you download a movie or song, however, you are depriving the record label or movie studio of money that exists only in their heads. No outlay has been made to produce that copy; there’s no guarantee – or even plausible reason to believe - that the copy of the movie or album you downloaded would have ever been sold. Unless you’re enough of a “moron” to believe that each and every person who illegally downloads your product would have instead legally purchased it in a world without the Interbutts, the most you can really accuse these “pirates” of is creating value out of thin air – causing inflation, in essence.

But what gives intellectual property (IP) that has never been committed to an actual physical medium intrinsic value? The magical world of copyrights and patents. Copyrights and patents are bigger business than fast food. There are entire companies that are worth millions but have never actually produced a damn thing. Others like Big Blue and AT&T may have plenty of physical products, but still make hundreds of millions using IP laws to terrorize their would-be competition. In the end, copyrights and patents, like downloaded copies of movies, represent money that only exists in the heads of those who own the IP rights.

Until the lawsuits begin, that is.

So say you’re Nicolas Chartier, president and co-founder of Voltage Pictures, and you feel that these nasty pirates are causing you “great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.” (I fully agree that this supposed “injury” can’t be “compensated or measured in money,” though something tells me that Nick and I are on different pages as to why.) So you sue a bunch of people for violating your copyrights. Let’s go ahead and say that all 5,000 cases make it to court, and win $100,000 in damages each. Well, now your company is, on paper, five hundred million dollars richer. As far as the paperwork is concerned, those settlements are $500,000,000 in your bank account. Except that the people you’re suing may not actually have $100,000 each to fork over to you. Even ignoring whether or not $100,000 a pop is a reasonable price for a copy of a movie, it’s not like they can make some deal regarding returning or selling the products they “stole” from you to get the money, because there was no actual money behind those “products” in the first place.

So now there’s $500,000,000 floating out there in a pile of paperwork that you have no doubt already spent on a shiny new Lear, but doesn’t actually have any real value to back it up. The people you’re claiming to be suing to get your money back from never had your money in the first place, so how can they give it back? They all have to declare bankruptcy, their lives ruined. When your company gets the bill for your jet, you pay it on the credit of that $500 million they’ll never actually see. Lear gets their money, you get your jet, your company lives on long enough for you to clean it out and be gone. Sure, the taxpayers get the shaft because bread goes to $5 a loaf when you do clean it out, selling all of your stock – you know, that was massively bolstered by that $500,000,000 you won a couple years back - for millions in cash that never actually existed, but who cares? Addressing the banks and press who come to find out why your company is going under, you call it a terrible tragedy. And of course, it’s all the fault of those dirty pirates that wouldn’t pay for their movies; truly a curse on the industry that needs to be addressed more aggressively in the future.

And then you get on your $100,000,000 Lear and fly to Paris to retire.

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”
-Mark Twain

U30Jc Review: ASUS takes on the 13” MacBook Pro

2010-05-13T22:20:00.001-04:00

Recently, my aging ThinkPad T61 suffered its fourth failed video card. While Lenovo repaired the machine for free despite it’s being out of warranty, I unfortunately can’t count on them to do so again, as the extended coverage for those of us hit by Bumpgate ends at three years. Since the issue of a G8x-based video card’s failure is not one of “if” but “when,” I set out on a search for a new laptop to replace my T61. With Intel’s new Core i-M processors just starting to penetrate the market, now was a good time to snatch a machine that was at the head of the class. My needs in a notebook computer aren’t unusual: moderate-to-high portability, at least 3-4 hours of battery life, moderate hard drive capacity, a processor that won’t leave me staring at spinning blue circles once I open 2 or 3 windows, a usable keyboard and screen, and ideally a video card capable of kicking back and playing some World of Warcraft or Team Fortress 2. I set out with a maximum budget of about $1000 to hunt down a laptop to last me the next 3+ years.

I narrowed my choices down to about half a dozen machines:

ASUS U30Jc - $870
Dell Alienware m11x - $970
Apple 13” MacBook - $950
HP dm3z - $790
HP dv4i - $920

The dv4i was a brief favorite, as it featured a blazing fast Core i5-540m, a speedy and monstrous 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, Bluetooth, a DVD burner…and an Intel GMA HD. Intel has made great strides in their graphics chips lately, but I wasn’t sold on going for an integrated chip. I liked the dm3z, but it lacked an optical drive and I was afraid the 1.6GHz Turion x2 Neo would bog down the system. The MacBook I threw out after about one glance – older generation processors, a tiny 250GB hard drive, and integrated graphics (even if it was an nVidia chip) don’t really spell “value for money” at $950. Ultimately, the real decision came down to the U30Jc and the m11x. The m11x featured a substantially faster video card, smaller footprint and lighter weight, Bluetooth, and a handful of nifty extras like an engraved nameplate, clutter-free factory OS install, and backlit keyboard. The lack of an optical drive, high heat output, non-full-size keyboard, and squint-inducing screen were notable concerns, but the killing blow to the m11x in my mind was the Intel CULV (consumer ultra-low voltage) platform. Running a 1.3GHz Core 2 Duo, I was afraid the performance just wasn’t going to be there when I needed it. ASUS’s outstanding factory warranty sealed the deal. On April 17th I pulled the trigger on an ASUS U30Jc from Amazon.com – unfortunately just hours after their stock had run dry. I finally received my U30Jc nearly a month later, on May 11th.

After both my digital camera and cell phone batteries died back to back trying to take a gorram picture, I ~~stole~~ borrowed one from the good folks at NotebookReview.com. However, not only did I opt to not leech their bandwidth, I even watermarked it for them (on which note, here’s a link to their review of the U30Jc for those interested).

ASUS U30Jc Specifications (as reviewed):

Intel Core i3 350M (2.26 GHz, 3MB L3)
4GB DDR3-1333 RAM
512MB GeForce 310M, hot-switchable with Intel GMA HD through nVidia Optimus.
13.3” WXGA (1366x768) Glossy LED-LCD
320GB 5400RPM SATA II Hard Drive
8x DVD+/-RW Drive
Atheros AR9285 b/g/n Wireless
Atheros AR8131 Gigabit Ethernet
8-cell 84WHr Main Battery
Full-size “Chiclet” keyboard + Multi-touch trackpad
Dimensions: 13" x 9.5" x 1.2"
Weight: 4.8 pounds with battery
2-year international warranty + 1-year accidental damage protection + 30-day ZBD gaurantee

ASUSTek’s target with their new U30Jc thin-and-light notebook isn’t hard to guess. With a standard 2.26 GHz Core i3, GeForce 310M graphics card, 4GB of RAM, internal DVD+/-RW drive, and 8-cell battery, the U30Jc is aimed squarely at the similarly-equipped 13” MacBook Pro. That being said, the computers differ in several important ways. The U30Jc is based on the newer Core i3 processor, as opposed to the 13” MacBook Pro’s Core 2 Duo. The GeForce 310M in the U30Jc, is, confusingly, faster than the 320M in the MBP since the 320M is an integrated card that shares memory with the system, as opposed to a discrete card like the 310M. And of course, the U30Jc lacks some of the niceties of the MBP like a backlit keyboard or Bluetooth. It’s also $300 less (MSRP).

Build and Input

The overall design of the U30Jc is very appealing while remaining professional and understated. The lid is a brushed aluminum with a simple ASUS logo, and the palm rest and touchpad are a similar brushed aluminum. The keyboard and base of the machine are a matte black, while the LCD bezel is a glossy piano-black finish.

The machine is very nearly the lightest notebook I’ve ever owned (I once owned a 12” Averatec 3270, which takes that prize). It’s noticeably lighter than my T61, and I don’t feel it would impart any burden even to carry around all day. Then again, I never really noticed the weight of my T61, either, while I’ve had a couple of people tell me they thought it was quite heavy. Still, I can’t imagine anyone having difficulty transporting this machine. The weight on the U30Jc is almost perfectly balanced, as well, at least while the lid is closed.

The lid is very thin, and feels like there isn’t really much protection behind the screen. Still, pressing the lid doesn’t result in ripples on the screen, though the lid does flex a bit. The hinges feel relatively sturdy, and easily hold the screen in place while the machine is moved about. The palm rests and base of the machine are, overall, rock-solid and support your wrists comfortably as you type, although I wouldn’t recommend picking the machine up with one hand on the side with the optical drive as there is some slight flex. There is also some noticeable flex as you type, as much as a millimeter in places. It doesn’t really impede typing, however.

What does impede typing, however, is the maddening “Chiclet” keyboard design coupled with a few other poor design decisions. I’ll admit I had never used a Chiclet keyboard extensively prior to owning my U30Jc, and that I’m quite spoiled by 3 years of using a ThinkPad keyboard (almost universally regarded as the best laptop keyboards available). That said, I don’t think I’m likely to become a fan of this design, even after extended use. The spacing, throw, and key travel all just seems “off.” It’s hard to say exactly what the issue is, but typing is not particularly comfortable, especially over long periods of time like this review. I find myself making an anomalous number of typographical errors on this keyboard, as well. The placement and layout of a few keys is questionable, as well. The right shift key is shortened to make room for the arrow keys, common in notebooks where form takes precedence over function and the arrow keys aren’t simply dropped down a line. The Home, PgUp, PgDn, and End keys are in a vertical row beneath the Delete key, as well. Again, I might simply be spoiled by years of using a ThinkPad, but I can easily say that the keyboards on both my Dell Inspiron 9300 and Gateway 7422GX are far more comfortable than this one. One nice thing that can be said for this keyboard, at least, is that the Ctrl key is outside of the [Fn] key, where (in my opinion) it belongs.

The touchpad is large and supports a variety of multi-touch gestures. The “buttons” are really one rocker-style button that requires a substantial amount of force to depress. They are also the one part of the laptop that is a shiny metal, and they show fingerprints badly. The touchpad isn’t terribly sensitive by default, and the brushed aluminum texture isn’t the most comfortable in the world. In general, though, if you intend to use the computer extensively you’ll want to purchase an external USB mouse to use when possible anyways. The multi-touch support includes two-finger scrolling (both horizontal and vertical) and one-, two-, and three-finger tapping (left, middle, and right click by default). There’s not a whole lot more to say. It’s a touchpad; they’re not really exciting input devices anymore.

Screen and Speakers

The screen is an LED-backlit 16:9 aspect ratio LCD with a native resolution of 1366x768. My screen arrived free of dead pixels, but there’s no need to fret over such issues anyways; ASUS offers a 30-day zero bright dot guarantee with all of their notebooks. The screen has one of the now near-ubiquitous glossy finishes, the kind you frequently hear called “Brightview” or “UltraBright.” It’s reflective, but easy enough to read indoors. I wouldn’t try to read it in direct sunlight, however, as the glare is far too great for comfortable use. Color reproduction is outstanding, with some of the brightest and truest whites I’ve ever seen in an LCD, and reasonably rich blacks. There is a slight “sparkle” effect on the screen, most visible on white backgrounds at slight angles.

Speaking of angles, that’s where the screen takes a dive. The viewing angles are very narrow, with substantial washing out as you go even slightly above the ideal viewing angle, and serious color distortion at wide horizontal angles. The backlight has slight leakage on black screens which may be noticeable when watching a movie. Overall, the screen is more than acceptable for general usage, productivity, gaming, and entertainment, but serious photo and video editors will likely want to look elsewhere, or at least invest in an external monitor.

The speakers are there mostly to make the fancy flourish at the BIOS, and they’re not even very good at that. There is no bass to speak of, and even mids are severely lacking. “Tinny” ceases to be adequate when describing these speakers. They output a passable volume when placed on a desk, but are lap-firing, meaning they’re going to be severely muffled if using the machine on your lap. You are going to want to invest in headphones or external speakers to watch movies or listen to music. Then again, you’re probably going to be using headphones extensively with such a portable machine anyways, aren’t you, you inconsiderate jerks who play flash games with the sound on in lectures YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Connectivity

The U30Jc features a solid selection of ports and connectivity options, but lets get the glaring omission out of the way first: The US version of the U30Jc does not have internal Bluetooth. Some foreign versions, do, however, so it’s possible the internal connector is present and a quick trip to eBay could rectify this oversight.

Other ports include three USB 2.0 ports (two left, one right), VGA and HDMI out, 3.5mm audio in and out, gigabit Ethernet, and an SDHC slot. There is no ExpressCard slot on the U30Jc, if you’re the one person out there who needs one.

Wirelessly, my U30Jc has an Ahteros AR9285 b/g/n wireless card, which has excellent reception, seeing more wireless networks than even my T61’s older Atheros a/b/g/n card. Some reviewers report getting Intel Wireless cards, however, which in general do not perform as well. I can’t tell how it’s decided which card you’ll get; it seems to be more or less random. There is no internal Bluetooth, and there is no option for integrated WWAN.

Perhaps most notably, the U30Jc is one of the last consumer 13” notebooks with an integrated optical drive (and some companies are even starting to leave the optical drives out of their 14” machines). The tray-loaded Matshita DVD+/-RW/DVD-RAM drive should handle any form of pre-Blu-Ray optical media you have on hand. (Harr dee harr, put that LaserDisc away.)

The webcam, I suppose, deserves at least a passing mention. It’s a simple VGA webcam, and while I can’t say as I’ll probably ever use it, I still wish ASUS had included at least a 1.3 MP model. The image quality is pretty bad, with video slow and grainy and stills pixilated even at the modest 640x480 resolution. The microphone isn’t very sensitive and has similarly poor quality. The setup isn’t spectacular but would probably be acceptable for recording lectures, Skype, and the like.

A rare photo of your elusive author, badly in need of a trim.

Performance

Now for the meat of any computer review: system performance. The most stylish and well-built machine on the market is worthless if it’s still running a first-generation Pentium, and even a somewhat shoddy machine can be forgiven if the performance per dollar is high enough. The short version is this: There is, to the best of my knowledge, no faster 13” laptop on the market for overall system performance. Sure, some smaller laptops may exceed the U30 in one way or another; the m11x has a substantially faster video card at the cost of a massively slower CPU, while the ThinkPad x201 has a Core i5 (and available i7) at the cost of offering only Intel integrated graphics. But all things considered, it’s hard to fault any aspect of the U30Jc’s performance.

The Core i3 350M is far from the fastest notebook CPU Intel offers, and it lacks the TurboBoost technology of the Core i5 and i7 that allows one core to overclock itself if the other is idle (great for older, single-threaded applications). But that doesn’t mean the chip is a slouch. Using wPrime 2.00, I recorded a time of 22.109 seconds for the standard 32M calculation. This is a staggering 5.5 seconds faster than my desktop’s Core 2 Duo running at 3.0GHz. It would seem Intel’s HyperThreading is finally paying off. General system performance is incredible. I have never witnessed the machine skip a beat on launching, closing, or switching between programs. Multitasking performance is excellent; in my use thus far, I have yet to encounter a situation which the Core i3 and 4GB of DDR3 could not cope with. I dare say the machine feels snappier than my desktop a lot of the time.

The GeForce 310M is far from a powerhouse, but it does run circles around my T61’s Quadro NVS 140M (an 8400M derivative). Source engine games (such as Half-Life 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2) are fluidly playable at the screen’s native resolution with maximum settings even at their most stressing, provided you leave the anti-aliasing at home. Command and Conquer 3 (and therefore, likely Red Alert 3 and Command and Conquer 4 as well) runs at medium settings and native resolution without skipping a beat, even in multi-player combat. If you’re looking for a rig that can play Crysis with all of the eye candy turned on, this isn’t it. However, if you’re just looking to kick back with a game of TF2 or maybe even StarCraft 2 while on the go, then you’re golden.

FOR SCIENCE I ran a couple of benchmarks on the integrated Intel GMA HD. Surprise: It’s crap. There’s really no reason you should use it for 3D gaming anyways, so let’s speak no more of it until we get to the battery life section.

The 320GB hard drive in my unit is a 5400RPM Seagate model with 8MB of cache on the SATAII bus. It’s not the fastest drive in the world, but it’s plenty fast enough for most usage. The system cold boots to a usable desktop state (measured by when a Chrome window launched as soon as the desktop appears finishes loading Google.com) in roughly 45 seconds. Once a password is applied, time from power button to log-in screen is 22.5 seconds. If you want a sub-30 second total boot time you’re still going to need a 7200 RPM drive or SSD, I’m afraid. Stand-by resume is nearly instantaneous. The system shuts down in less than 10 seconds, and enters stand-by in about 5. You’ll be hard pressed to fill the 320GB of hard drive space unless you’re using the U30Jc as your only machine, or insist on carrying a lot of 1080p video with you.

For those who are more interested in benchmark charts and screenshots, here you go:

Benchmark	Score
3DMark06 – Intel GMA HD	1733 3DMarks
3DMark06 – GeForce 310M	3721 3DMarks
CS:S Stress Test – Intel	62.21 FPS*
CS:S Stress Test - nVidia	125.71 FPS
Boot time (UDS)	~45 seconds
Boot Time (Log-in Screen)	~22.5 seconds
wPrime 2.00	22.109 seconds
WinSAT (Windows Experience Index)
Base Score	4.6
Processor	6.3
Memory	5.9
Desktop Graphics	4.6
Gaming Graphics	5.7
Primary Hard Disk	5.7

*There is also a noticeable reduction in image quality on Intel graphics.

Heat and Battery Life

One oddity is that the fan spins nonstop while the machine is on. It’s very quiet at it’s lowest speed, however, so it would only be audible in a completely silent environment – it’s easily drowned out by a lecturer or the air conditioner, so you’re unlikely to bother anyone. Even once the machine is stressed and the fan has to spin up, it remains very quiet – far quieter than the fan on my T61. It’s a testament to how quiet this fan is that even the god-awful speakers can drown it out completely. Despite the whisper-quiet fan, airflow seems solid at high speeds. The hard drive is inaudible while in use unless you place you ear against the chassis, and most importantly (to me, at least) is that there is none of the high-pitched whine that characterized Core 2 Duo-based notebooks. The optical drive does sound like a turbo-jet while in use, but that’s basically unavoidable, especially in a notebook this size.

Measuring internal temperatures has proven problematic. HWMonitor crashes despite some tinkering, leaving us at the mercy of a bevy of other utilities. CoreTemp reports the CPU idles in the mid 30s, and maxes out around 58-60C under full load. GPU-Z reports that the nVidia card idles at around 45C and maxes out at in the upper 60s. CrystalDiskInfo reports hard drive temperatures ranging from 35-40C under general usage. Overall ASUS seems to have implemented a very effective cooling system, especially considering the size of the notebook and the hardware it has to cool.

Even more impressive is that all of that heat is expelled through a single vent on the right side of the notebook. The keyboard and palm rests remain cool under continuous use, and the touchpad warms up only very slightly. The base of the notebook gets a bit toasty in places, but never becomes uncomfortably warm. This is a massive improvement over the MacBook Pro, which can be used effectively as a frying pan after extensive use. Using the U30Jc for a while will make it quickly apparent what benefits to user experience you can gain at the sacrifice of a couple tenths of an inch in thickness.

Battery life is nothing short of amazing, especially for a notebook of this performance. My limited testing shows a battery life of about 7-8 hours on the “Balanced” power profile with WiFi on, working on this review and browsing the web, with brightness at a little under half. I say “limited testing” because I’m not actually going to just sit in one place and wait for the battery to die for eight hours, so I just have to go by the drain rate and how much longer Windows says the machine has. Effectively, though, that means the machine isn’t going to die under a full day’s use away from power, which I see as sort of a “holy grail” for professionals and students looking for a machine they can take to class or into the field where they may not have access to A/C power. Even in power saving mode, the Intel GMA HD and Core i3-M provide more than enough horsepower for most uses.

No, this isn’t Photoshopped. Err, other than the cropping, of course.

Operating System and Software

The U30Jc comes standard with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and I’m glad to see manufacturers starting to really push 64-bit Windows, especially in machines with 4GB of RAM. Home Premium offers all the features most users are going to care about, though power-users should be aware that domain joining, remote desktop hosting, and the virtualized Windows XP mode are only available on Professional. A Windows Anytime Upgrade to Professional is quick and painless, but will set you back about $80 if you decide you need these extra features.

The factory-installed software is definitely the low point of this machine. The default Windows installation is practically unsalvageable. The initial boot takes up to 20 minutes, most of which is spent waiting on a non-standard ASUS-branded dialog to “configure your computer.” Dozens of programs run at every boot and you’re accosted by system tray icons every time you log in. The Unholy Trinity of an anti-virus trial (Trend Micro, if you care), an Office trial (still 2007, no less), and PowerDVD were all present. Boot times are geologic with all of this crap running. That post-boot performance remained acceptable is a testament to the speed of the Core i3 and the ample RAM the system ships with. I wiped my hard drive and re-installed Windows almost immediately.

I say “almost” because, as is par for the course these days, no restore discs are included. You have to burn your own with the included “AI Restore” utility. After starting the utility the first time, I was informed it would take four blank DVDs. The program churned away creating an image of my hard drive for about 20 minutes and then crashed. I ran it again, only to be told this time it would require five DVDs. Mercifully, it actually made it all the way through the backup process this time and I was able to set about the reformatting process – a mere two and a half hours of burning later (the software even tracks the total elapsed time, I suppose just to remind you of how maddening this process is). Oh, and if you’re wondering – yes, you do have to provide your own discs.

I ultimately re-installed only two pieces of software that weren’t drivers, the webcam utility and the (preposterously graphical) on-screen display for brightness and volume. Everything else was, essentially, useless.

Conclusion

So the real question is, how does the U30Jc stack up to the competition? Am I happy with my selection, or are the problems sever enough to induce buyer’s remorse?

Frankly, I’m very happy. The U30Jc achieves an almost zen-like balance of style, build, performance, features, and price. No aspect of the machine is perfect in a vacuum, but put it all together and slap on a sub-$900 price tag, and you’ve got a machine that’s hard to top. It’s certainly a better value for your money than either of Apple’s 13” offerings, providing superior performance to either machine for a lower cost. There are maybe one or two things I’d do differently; Bluetooth in lieu of the webcam would be the obvious one, but that sort of thing is personal preference.

In the end, the U30Jc is, in my opinion, the best computer in it’s class for your money. Sure, it’s not perfect, but then again who is, besides Gibbs?

My Computers: An Overview

2010-05-10T00:45:00.002-04:00

You’ve probably seen me mention quite a few machines over the course of this little adventure in internet pseudo-journalism. Out of boredom and personal interest as much as any inkling that anyone else gives a damn, below you can find a full list of computers I own or have at my more-or-less immediate disposal.

Personally owned:

Custom Desktop “Enterprise”
-Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.0 GHz, 2 Cores/2 Threads
-EVGA nForce 680i NF-68
-6.0 GB DDR2-667
-512 MB AMD Radeon HD4870
-250 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi
-320 GB 7200 RPM Seagate
-Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty
-Windows 7 Ultimate x64
-22” WUXGA (1920x1080) Sceptre LCD
-15” XGA (1024x768) HP LCD
-Built in January 2007, upgraded several times since.

ASUS U30Jc “Forward Unto Dawn”
-Intel Core i3 350-M @ 2.26 GHz, 2 Cores/4 Threads
-4.0 GB DDR3-1333
-512 MB nVidia GeForce 310M / Intel GMA HD Switchable
-320 GB 5400 RPM Hitachi
-Windows 7 Home Premium x64
-13.3” WXGA (1366x768) Internal LCD
-Bought April 2010

Lenovo ThinkPad T61 “Pillar of Autumn”
-Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2.0 GHz, 2 Cores/2 Threads
-2.0 GB DDR2-667
-128 MB nVidia Quadro NVS 140M – Has failed multiple times, most recently in April; warranty expires in July.
-160 GB 5400 RPM Western Digital w/free-fall sensor
-1 GB Intel TurboMemory Cache
-Windows 7 Professional x64
-14.1” WXGA+ (144x900) Internal LCD
-Bought May 2007

Dell Inspiron 9300 “Excelsior”
-Intel Pentium M 750 @ 1.86 GHz, 1 Core/1 Thread
-2.0 GB DDR2-533
-256 MB nVidia GeForce Go6800
-160 GB 5400 RPM Hitachi
-Windows XP Professional x86
-17.1” WXGA+ (1440x900) Internal LCD – Failing with vertical line defect.
-Bought June 2005

Modified Dell Dimension 4700 “Serenity”
-Intel Pentium 4HT 520J @ 2.80 GHz, 1 Core/2 Threads
-1.5 GB DDR2-400
-256 MB nVidia GeForce 7600GT
-80 GB 7200 RPM Western Digital
-160 GB 7200 RPM Seagate
-Windows XP Professional x86
-16” SXGA (1280x1024) IBM CRT
-Bought 2004, acquired by myself in June 2008.

Gateway 7422GX “Constitution”
-AMD Mobile Athlon64 3400+ @ 2.20 GHz, 1 Core/1 Thread
-1.0 GB DDR-333
-64 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9550
-100 GB 5400 RPM Seagate
-Windows 7 Ultimate x64
-15.4” WXGA (1280x800) Internal LCD
-Bought January 2005

Personally owned (functional but unused):

Custom Desktop “Grissom”
-Intel Pentium 4 1500 @ 1.5 GHz, 1 Core/1 Thread
-ASUS SiS650 P4S333-VM
-256 MB DDR-266
-16 MB (Shared) SiS 650 Integrated VGA
-20 GB 7200 RPM Western Digital
-Windows XP Home
-No screen
-Built early 2002

Owned by immediate family:

Custom Desktop:
-AMD Phenom x4 9850 Black Edition @ 2.50 GHz, 4 Cores/4 Threads
-ASUS nForce 570a M2N-SLI Deluxe
-4.0 GB DDR2-667
-256 MB nVidia GeForce 7900GT KO
-500 GB 7200 RPM Seagate
-Windows 7 Ultimate x64
-20” WSGXA+ (1680x1050) Sceptre LCD

Custom HTPC:
-AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ EE @ 2.20 GHz, 2 Cores/2 Threads
-BioStar nForce 430a MCP6P-M2
-2.0 GB DDR2-667
-1024 MB GeForce GT220
-250 GB 7200 RPM Seagate
-Windows 7 Ultimate x86
-42” WUXGA (1920x1080) Philips HDTV

Like I said, this is as much for my own cataloguing purposes as much as is it is for anyone else to read. But if you’re interested in computers, as I am, it may be fascinating to see just how much (this is only the functional stuff, I might add) hardware one computer nerd can accumulate over the years. Here are some compiled statistics for those interested:

Among these computers, I have a total of:
-9 physical CPUs with 16 physical processor cores, capable of handling 19 threads simultaneously.
-22.75 GB of RAM (not including video memory)
-954 shader units, 800 of which are on my HD4870
-2.32 TB (that’s 2,320 GB) of hard drive space; I have another 480 GB in external hard drives and a 60 GB iPod, as well.

Oh, and for those wondering, yes, all of my computers are named after ships. The names are all at least somewhat meaningful, so consider that a puzzle if you like.

Time to Face the Music: Ten Reasons to Move Up to Windows 7 from Windows XP

2010-04-25T19:10:00.001-04:00

There’s no doubt that Microsoft’s Windows XP has been incredibly important for the history of computing. Windows XP was the largest overhaul to the core operating system the consumer line had ever seen. The ancient, unstable MS-DOS core that had caused so many problems in the ambitious but ultimately failure-prone Windows Me was stripped away for good, replaced with the modern, efficient, and stable NT 5.1 kernel, a modification of the core technology from Microsoft’s hugely successful enterprise release, Windows 2000.

XP taught Microsoft a lot of important lessons they have since applied to subsequent releases of the operating system. XP was the first release of Windows to integrate the home, workstation, and enterprise terminal releases into one large upgrade cycle. XP brought the level of security and stability enterprise customers had experienced for years and come to expect to the home market, and Microsoft discovered that home users were thrilled to have such (comparatively) problem-free experiences. XP’s release of the (at-the-time) advanced Internet Explorer 6 drove the final nail in Netscape’s coffin, and Windows Media Player 9 was able to provide the home entertainment experience Microsoft had originally intended Windows Me’s WMP7 to ring in.

Basically, Windows XP made Windows good again. Me had tarnished the company’s reputation after it’s initial ambitions had been kneecapped by serious flaws in the core kernel and a rushed release schedule. XP benefitted from these mistakes, and provided end-users with a fast and stable (if admittedly not completely polished)experience that would leave a lasting impact.

That lasted. And lasted. And lasted. By the time Windows Vista entered public Beta testing in early 2006, Windows XP had been on the consumer market for more than four years, the longest any consumer release had endured in the product’s history. Even then, it would still be nearly a year before Windows Vista would officially launch. And then there were the performance problems. The Vista public beta ran like an overweight sloth on most systems of the day. Microsoft promised us that the performance would improve by the time of final release. As you are no doubt well aware, it did not. The final released of Vista required hardware that made Doom 3’s hardware requirements look lenient. How many people really had dual-core processors, fully-DirectX 9 capable 3D accelerators, and at least 2GB of RAM in January 2007? Not nearly as many as Microsoft had hoped. Those with the necessary hardware found Vista to be a bear, but usable. Those without the necessary hardware, though, spent more time staring at spinning blue circles than actually using their computers.

Vista’s performance was improved little by little with hotfixes, culminating in Service Pack 1 in mid 2008, which improved Vista’s performance substantially in key areas like boot time and shut-down time, file copy speed, suspend/resume time, and network operations. Combined with wider availability of dual-core processors and dropping RAM prices – improvements that, honestly, can be largely tied to Vista’s steep hardware requirements – Vista became a perfectly usable operating system with a great many improvements over it’s predecessor. But the damage had already been done. Vista’s public image was trashed, just like Me’s before it, and as they did with XP, Microsoft set out to create a new version of it’s operating system that would make people forget about the “disaster” before it.

And so when the first Windows 7 public beta was released in early 2009 I, along with millions of other tech enthusiasts, downloaded and installed it on release day. And like millions of others, I was shocked by what I found: a fast, stable, compatible, easy-to-use operating system that frankly could have gone gold right then and there and still been a vast improvement on the Vista launch. But Microsoft spent several more months ironing out every little bug, performance problem, and incompatibility they could find, and when Windows 7 finally was released to the public on October 22nd, 2009, it was the smoothest and fastest-selling release of Windows in the company’s history. And it’s no surprise why: Windows 7 is faster than Windows Vista on each and every computer it can be installed on, and provides superior performance to XP even on comparatively low-end systems – systems that would have choked under early versions of Vista.

I was recently forced to go back to Windows XP on one computer – my aging Dell Inspiron 9300 – not because of anything inherently wrong with Windows 7, but because nVidia has regrettably chosen to artificially cripple some GeForce 6- and 7-series cards on Windows Vista and 7 with bad drivers. And let me tell you, going back to XP after nearly a year of using 7 full-time is simply painful. So unless you happen to be one of the 12 people out there with a GeForce Go6800, do yourself a favor and move up to Windows 7 now. Like, right now. Stop reading and go get Windows 7. If you’re not yet convinced, however, try this list of ten reasons to move up to Windows 7.

Reason 10: New keyboard shortcuts

Lets start out small. Windows Vista actually added some of these, but after having gotten used to them on Windows Vista and 7, having to go without them is infuriating. The major one? Super+# to open or switch to the associated pinned taskbar item (or quick launch item under Vista). (For those who don’t recognize the terminology “Super-modifier key,” it’s the proper name for the key with the little Windows logo on it you’ll often hear called the “Windows key.”) Other stars include the new window manager commands. Super+↓/↑/←/→ are new commands that minimize/restore, maximize/restore, left align, and right align the current window, respectfully. These all seem like small concerns, but once you’re used to them, it’s painful to live without them.

Reason 9: Aero Snaps

Say you have two monitors, like I do on my desktop. You have a windows maximized on one monitor, and you want to move it to the other monitor. How do you do this in XP? Why, restore the window, drag it to the other monitor, and maximize it again, obviously *cough*. Under Windows 7, however, you can simply drag the title bar down from the top of the current monitor, onto the other monitor, and then to the top of that monitor to maximize it here, all in one fluid motion and with one click.

Reason 8: Aero Peek/Live Preview

Live Preview was added in Vista, but Peek is new to Windows 7. With Live Previews, you can hover over any running application window on the taskbar to get a real-time preview of the running application.

Note: Since Vista, Alt+Tab has also produced a grid of Live Previews, useful for those with a ton of applications running.

With Aero Peek, you can hover over the live preview of a window to bring that window temporarily into focus (or more accurately, to hide all other windows so you can see the window in question). And to close the window, there’s a handy little red “X” in the corner of each Live Preview. Like Snaps and the new keyboard shortcuts, this is a feature handier than you can imagine.

Reason 7: Aero in general

The new Windows user interface that debuted in Vista, dubbed “Windows Aero” by Microsoft, received a lot of early flack for being sluggish on slower systems and flat-out not working on older graphics adapters. But following several improvements to the UI and graphics drivers, as well as the massive improvements in both integrated and discrete GPUs in the interim years, Aero has become a major performance boon. Windows appear, disappear, scroll, and drag smoothly and swiftly, unlike the jerky effects and major ghosting problems with XP’s software-rendered interface. This is one of those performance effects that’s hard to quantify, but you definitely get used to after having it for a while, making going back to software-rendered UIs painful. And of course there’s the fact that Aero is much easier on the eyes than XP’s awful Fisher-Price-inspired “Luna” UI.

Reason 6: Superfetch

You’ve probably heard people – some of whom even fancy themselves technology journalists *cough*Mossberg*cough* - whine about how Vista and 7 “use up all of your RAM.” These people are idiots. If you look at the task manager in Windows Vista or 7, you will in fact discover that almost all of your memory – even on systems with scads of RAM – is being used for “cache” and very little is actually “free.” But cached RAM isn’t really being “used” in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s holding programs you’ve used recently so that they can open again without having to spin up the hard drive. This is called “pre-fetching.”

On Windows Vista, a new feature dubbed “superfetch” debuted. This feature allowed Vista to learn which applications you used frequently, and load them at points during the boot sequence when there was free hard drive bandwidth, and for a little while after boot (this is also the origin of the “Vista’s thrashin’ mah hard drive” complaints). This feature ultimately improves application load performance at little cost to boot time, but it’s hard to explain that to people who just installed Vista and won’t see the benefits for a couple of weeks yet.

Windows 7 refines Superfetch to improve boot times and application load times, which is great. But in another case of “perception is everything,” Windows 7 also makes one other “major” change – Superfetch-cached RAM isn’t shown in the Task Manager as in use, and there is a new line, “Available,” under the “Physical Memory” box, showing the Free + Cached RAM (so the amount that can be opened up if need be for a large application).

Oh, and so you know – Linux and OSX cache recently used programs as well (and have begun adding Superfetch-style pre-caching as well). They just don’t show the cached RAM as being “in use,” either, so no one noticed.

Reason 5: User Account Control

Thought I’d get all the misrepresented features out in a row. UAC has to be the most maligned feature that debuted in Windows Vista. For those who don’t know the name, it’s the security feature that pops up the little “Are you sure?” dialogs when you run applications that need administrative access, such as installers and system tools. Except in pre-SP1 Vista, where it popped them up for making folders, renaming folders, changing icons of folders, deleting desktop icons, changing any control panel setting, connecting to wireless networks, or clicking “Yes” in the previous dialog. Furthermore, the Vista dialogs often didn’t say what program wanted administrative access, making them confusing and largely useless. With Windows 7, you get a dialog that states what program wants access, and only for a much smaller range of activities (mostly just installing things or running those programs which should require administrative access). So there’s a simple rule for letting UAC protect you: if you didn’t do something to trigger the UAC dialog, DON’T ACCEPT IT. In Vista, this was impractical because almost everything incurred one of the little bastards. In 7, it’s become a useful security feature – if you can retrain yourself to not just blindly accept them.

Note: UAC also does a lot to protect you behind the scenes. For example, it’s critical for IE8’s Protected Mode that makes it one of the safest browsers you can use (yes, really), so please don’t turn off UAC, even on Vista.

Reason 4: DirectX 10, 10.1, and 11

These new versions of DirectX are seeing more and more use these days, and they simply aren’t available on XP. This is more of a niche thing, but if you have a DirectX 10- or 11-capable card you are truly doing yourself a disservice by sticking to XP. The lighting and shadowing effects that can be produced by DirectX 10 and 10.1 are stunning. And if you are fortunate enough to have a DirectX 11 card (currently only the AMD HD 5000 series and the nVidia GTX 470/480), DirectCompute and D3D tessellation promise huge performance and realism improvements in upcoming games, as well.

Reason 3: 64-bit compatiblity

Windows XP brought 64-bit to the consumer market, but XP Pro x64 was, to put it bluntly, terrible. There were few drivers and those that were available crashed a lot, software compatibility was miss and more miss, and there weren’t really any 64-bit ready applications to take advantage of the technology. But with Vista, Microsoft made 64-bit a priority. Originally both Vista and 7 were supposed to be 64-bit only, but you can thank Intel’s bull-headed decision to continue foisting 32-bit chips on consumers years after AMD had switched to an all-64-bit lineup for the survival of that version. But with Vista, at least 64-bit finally came into it’s own. Microsoft required device manufacturers to provide 64-bit compatible device drivers in order to obtain WHQL approval for their drivers, a critical part of OEM support. 7 doesn’t do much of it’s own on this front, but it’s a key (and to my mind, indispensible)feature of the new versions and I am talking about people who are still on XP here, remember?

Reason 2: UI layout redesign

I’ll be the first to admit that Vista and 7 aren’t perfect in this regard. But there’s one thing I feel you can’t argue: the layout of the UI is, on the whole, a lot better than XP’s. Let’s start with the new taskbar: The system of combining the Quick Launch and the running applications taskbar into one may not exactly be “revolutionary,” since it bears a not-surprising surface resemblance to the OSX Dock. But the new Taskbar addresses my major concerns with the Dock neatly. For one, multiple Windows for one application are always merged (or at least connected, depending on your view style), and while there is an easy distinction between active and inactive windows, inactive windows aren’t inexplicably moved to another section of the taskbar as they are on the Dock. The whole system just makes sense, which you’ll quickly come to understand after using it for a short while. And if you prefer an older, XP-style taskbar, there’s an option to do that, too.

The start menu is another obvious choice. The layout of links and icons makes it easy to access critical functionality while saving space versus older designs. One-click shutdown with a slide-out menu for sleep, hibernate, log-off, etc. is a huge improvement versus XP’s ridiculous dialog window + shift for other options…thing.

Taskbar Jumplists are just amazing, pure and simple. Want to start an incognito Chrome window? In XP you had to launch Chrome normally and open a new incognito window, or hunt down Chrome in the Start menu. In 7, just right-click the Chrome icon and select “Launch new Incognito window.” Recent documents are available for Word, Outlook, and the like right from the taskbar with a right-click.

The list of major UI improvements goes on and on: A finally sensible control panel layout. The breadcrumb navigation in Explorer. One-click access to wireless network connections. Homegroups. Just use Windows 7 for a little while, and you’ll wonder how you ever lived with XP.

Reason 1: Performance and Stability

After the wall of text for reason 2, you’ll be happy to hear this is one short paragraph. That’s because despite being the most important improvement in Windows 7, there’s really not much that needs to be said. Windows 7 is just plain faster than XP on modern hardware, and faster than Vista on all hardware. XP simply can’t take full advantage of the multi-core processors, beastly video cards, and scads of RAM new computers come with. I wouldn’t expect it to; it is over eight years old, after all. Windows 7 takes full advantage of this hardware to deliver a perfectly smooth UI experience. But even on aging machines, Windows 7 manages to provide equal general use performance to XP. And 7 just doesn’t crash. It’s stable as a rock on all of my systems: I’ve never once had a hard crash or seen a bluescreen that wasn’t the result of a legitimate hardware failure. If you use your computer a lot, you owe it to yourself to get the most productive time possible out of it. And Windows 7 is a great means to that end.

Conclusion

I should quality a statement I made earlier. While Windows 7 will run acceptably even on some pretty dated hardware, there are still some reasonable minimum requirements. I’d personally recommend only shelling out for the upgrade if you have a dual-core, 64-bit processor, a GeForce 8-series or better, and at least 2GB of RAM. Why? Because if you don’t meet those minimums, it’s probably high time you got a new computer. If you’ve got extra copies of 7 – from a TechNet subscription, say – feel free to put it on any computers it’ll run on. Just be warned that if you’re holding onto a Pentium 4 rig with a GeForce 6600 and 1GB of RAM to play TF2 on, you’re going to see performance problems from an upgrade to 7. Nothing’s perfect, after all.

But if you meet the very modest requirements I’ve outlined above, do yourself a favor, and invest in the move to Windows 7. You won’t regret it.

Lowest Common Denominator: Windows 7 on a Toaster

2010-03-10T23:16:00.001-05:00

To veer sharply away from the political ranting of earlier, let’s take a look at a more amusing topic. Today I’ll be chronicling briefly my experience with Microsoft’s latest operation system, Windows 7, running on what amounts to a couple of tin cans and some toast held together with Pritt Stick and string.

When it was first released, Windows Vista got a lot of (some deserved, some not) stick for some alarmingly steep system requirements. It’s not that new systems at the time couldn’t run it easily, it’s just that most people didn’t have brand-new systems. Those without the latest and greatest hardware who took the plunge into Vista anyways found themselves spending more time staring at little spinning blue circles than actually using their computers. Service Pack 1 came out about a year and a half after Vista’s Release-to-Manufacturing (RTM) and fixed a lot of the performance and usability issues, leaving a very snappy modern operating system in its wake. But by then, the damage had been done. People thought Vista was “slower than XP” and “full of annoying features.” And pre-existing perceptions are the arch nemeses of marketing departments. So Microsoft vowed to deliver a speedy, usable, fully-tested operating system right out of the gates with Windows 7. And by all accounts, they succeeded. Windows 7 has had one of the smoothest launches in Microsoft history, with no show-stopping bugs or incompatibilities casting their looming shadows over the release. For the first time since…well, ever, I can safely say that there is no need to wait for a service pack before upgrading to Windows 7. And any machine that shipped with Vista can run it capably – likely better than Vista – as well as many machines from the last years leading up to Vista’s launch. But a budget computer from when XP still lacked it’s second service pack? Stark raving lunacy, I tells ya!

Except not really.

First off, the specifications of the beast in question:

Dell Dimension 4700

2.8 GHz Pentium 4 HT 520J

512 MB DDR2-400 RAM

Proprietary Dell Motherboard based on Intel 915G Chipset

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900

16” IBM CRT (1280x1024@60Hz)

80 GB SATA1.5 Western Digital hard drive

8x DVD-ROM drive

So basically, a garbage processor, tiny hard drive, and almost no RAM saddled with bottom-of-the-barrel on-board graphics. This is an almost stock Dimension 4700. I say “almost stock” because the CPU heatsink was removed at some point, and I replaced the stock thermal compound with Arctic Silver 5. (And the stock HSF assembly screws with some wood screws from Ace, but let’s not get into that. Although it’ll look good on my résumé if I ever apply to work at nVidia.) Oh yeah, and the stock optical drives are in other computers, so it’s got one mis-matched DVD-ROM drive from an ancient husk, and one gaping hole where another optical drive should be.

This computer is so bad that it doesn’t even meet the minimum system requirements of Windows 7 (which thankfully aren’t checked during install). I expected calamitously bad performance, but Microsoft has proven that they really can improve performance when they want to.

Windows Experience Index for the machine. Note the GMA 900’s laughable 1.0 Gaming Graphics score, and that the fastest component is the hard drive.

Now, it’s worth noting that although the GMA 900 technically supports Shader Model 2.0/DirectX 9.0 and as such should be able to render Aero, Intel won’t release a WDDM-compliant driver for the thing. This was the cause of quite a bit of controversy around the already-rocky Vista release, as (a) there had been an Aero-capable GMA 900 driver early in Vista’s public beta cycle, and (b) machines with GMA 900s were being marketed as “Vista Capable.” But time either heals all wounds or makes fools of us all, depending on how you want to look at it, and while Intel never did release the promised WDDM driver for the GMA 900, no one seems to give a toss anymore. So there’s no fancy Aero effects on this system (taskbar and alt+tab thumbnails being the major losses). There is a driver that provides hardware acceleration, however, so you can get all proper resolutions and 3D acceleration for (snicker) games.

So how does the system run? Surprisingly well. Boot time is perfectly reasonable, easily on par with if not better than the time for XP on the same machine. General system performance seems a tad sluggish at times, and we’re no stranger to the spinny blue circle on this adventure, but the system remains overall fairly snappy in general use considering the rubbish hardware we’re dealing with. Chrome (my low-performance-system browser of choice, since Firefox is a bit bloated) springs to life in only a couple seconds, even after a cold boot. There are never any geologic waits for windows to come up or painful line-by-line redraws like the ones you may remember from trying to run XP on systems below its minimum requirements. (I once ran XP on a system with 64 MB of RAM and a 266MHz Pentium II. Yeah…definitely some 10-minute boots there.)

Here’s a screenshot of the task manager, with Windows Live Writer and a couple of Chrome tabs open, listening to music via Lala’s web player:

Lord, what a god-awful POS the Pentium 4 was.

Not too shabby. I’m actually not even overrunning the physical memory here, meaning Windows itself is sitting pretty in about 400MB of RAM. There’s not much room for caching though, so programs tend to be slow to load, even on subsequent launches. The processor is working pretty hard for just playing music and word processing, but the Pentium 4 was a truly awful chip, and this is a lower-end one at that, so I can’t say I’m surprised.

But I’m not content to just listen to music and type blog entries no one will read, no sir! I demand more from my garbage old computers! So to that end, I fired up Chess Titans to give the ol’ GMA 900 a workout. I had to turn the graphics settings down to level 3/6 (“High detail pieces”) to get acceptable performance, but from there it was smooth sailing, at least until my decisive and embarrassing defeat at the hands of the level 5 AI. While the GMA 900 proved itself to be crap (duh), it seems that even this old bucket can handle the most basic of games without issue. So onwards to something less basic! I installed the wonderfully artistic indie 2D puzzle/platformer Braid (which I cannot recommend highly enough, easily worth your $15) and fired it up. There was some noticeable stuttering during loading, but once I got into the actual game, performance was perfectly fine. I know Braid and Chess Titans hardly qualify as high-end gaming, but it’s worth noting that the machine doesn’t meet Braid’s minimum RAM requirement, either, and the fact that it can run both Windows 7 and the game on hardware theoretically insufficient for either is a bit of an achievement.

So basically, I guess my point is that you’d be hard pressed to dig up such a relic of a computer that Windows 7 wouldn’t be an improvement over XP. Being able to milk performance equal or better to XPs out of such an old rig, while gaining 7’s wonderful new UI and security features? That’s a deal you’d be stupid not to take.*

*Of course, one may argue that you’d be even stupider to invest $120 in Windows 7 and not $20-30 in a gig or two of RAM for the computer as well. One would be right, unless you’re doing it FOR SCIENCE.

First-what doctrine?

2010-03-10T15:53:00.001-05:00

“Second-hand game sales are a critical situation.” – Electronic Arts Europe VP Jens Uwe Intat.

I’ve talked here before about the rights we’ve already sacrificed in the name of protection from terrorism, protection from piracy, and of course protection from our children ever seeing someone’s naughty bits. But rarely do the people trying to take away your rights have the gall to come right out and say they’re doing it in the name of higher profits. Such bold-faced lack of concern for your customers is almost admirable, I suppose. In a retarded sort of way.

EA VP Intat made the above statement not too long ago in an interview discussion on “piracy” and the impact it has on the profitability of game companies. Apparently EA believes that second-hand sales of console games is an even bigger threat to profitability than counterfeiting (because I refuse to seriously use the word “piracy” until I get to pillage a coastal Caribbean nation with a torrent file). He wants EA to work with console makers such as Microsoft and Sony to find ways to discourage or even prevent second-hand games sales. Other publishers have echoed his sentiment. There’s one slight problem with your theory there, EA. It’s called United States Code, Title 17, Section 109. Here are the relevant bits:

[T]he owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.

See Jans? You can’t legally stop someone from re-selling their software. It’s all right here. Very formal. Very official. It also says you’re adopted, so that’s funny too.*

*Note: Fully aware of the irony of making a joke from a Valve game when Steam is one of the worst violators of first-sale.

Speaking of Steam, let’s have a chat about Valve and ActivisionBlizzard, shall we? From the WoW EULA, we have this:

You must lock your key to a valid Blizzard account[…]You may not sell, lease, share, or otherwise transfer your account.

And in the Steam FAQ, we find this gem:

Q: What is a Steam gift purchase?

A: […]Also note that you may only gift new purchases—you may not transfer games you already own. That’d be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you’ve used every morning for the past year.

What? What kind of analogy is that? If I happened to have a friend who needed a toaster, and I didn’t want my toaster anymore, why wouldn’t I give him my old toaster? And since when is it the place of the company who made the toaster to say if I can?

Imagine this scenario: You go to Wal-Mart and buy a new toaster. You bring it home and open the box, then plug it in and try to make some toast. But first, you have to connect to Sharp’s Toaster Authentication Server, and register your toaster with Sharp, and promise Sharp you’ll never use their toaster for making anything that isn’t on their “approved toastable items” list (and they’ll know because ~~your~~ their toaster constantly phones home with information about what you’re toasting), and then after you do that the toaster bolts itself to your counter with some sort of device that causes it to explode if you try to remove it. And oh yeah, you can’t return it because you opened the box. Sharp would get sued into the ground before they could even sell the first batch of HellToasters. So why the hell do we let software companies get away with this?

And before you say “but a toaster is nothing like a video game!” I’ll remind you that Valve made up the toaster analogy. To defend this stuff. And really, why isn’t a video game like a toaster? They’re both consumer goods that you walk into a store, buy, and walk out with, with the intention of actually being allowed to use as you want. If toasters aren’t working for you, imagine a book that did these things. Now we’re even in the realm of intellectual rather than just physical property. But RandomHouse wouldn’t dare try to tell you you can’t give away your book when you’re done with it, or even tear out the pages and make paper airplanes with them if you want. Even as hateful and sub-human and the recording industry is, they don’t try to tell you you can’t sell your used CDs. Why is software any different?

Answer: It isn’t. If you don’t believe me, or, you know, common sense, believe the Supreme Court. In 2004’s landmark Vernor v. Autodesk, the court ruled Mr. Verner had the right to re-sell a used copy of AutoCAD on eBay, as granted by the doctrine of first-sale as laid out by (told you this would be important) 17 USC 109.

So why do these sort of inane comments continued to be made? Perhaps Mr. Intat just didn’t know any better, or was misinformed by his superiors. But I refuse to believe Valve and ActivisionBlizzard’s attorneys don’t know better. They just don’t think anyone will ever call them on it. So what can you or I do? Honestly, not much, unless you have an army of lawyers in your pocket. You enter into extremely legally questionable arbitration agreements when you buy this software, so first you have to sue over the arbitration clause before you can even sue over the other parts of the agreement. There would be years and years of uphill legal battle involved. This is what happens when the legal system and the copyright system are warped into systems for protection the large corporations from civic responsibility, rather than systems to protect the individual from being screwed by those more powerful (see: everything that’s happened on Wall Street since about 2004).

How to Un-Bork an OEM Windows License

2010-02-17T03:55:00.001-05:00

If you install(ed) the new Windows Activation Technologies Update that Microsoft pushed out yesterday and find yourself with a black desktop and a “WINDOWS IS NOT GENULOL GIVE US MONEYZ NAO KK LOL” message, here’s how to fix it.

Step 1: Go to Add/Remove programs, click on “Show Installed Updates,” and remove the offending update. Yeah, it really is that easy to uninstall (for now).

Step 2: Disconnect your computer from the internet.

Step 3: Open an elevated Command Prompt.

Step 4: Type in the following command and press enter (no quotes): “slmgr –upk”

Step 5: Wait for a little dialog to come up, then type in the following command and press enter (still no quotes): “slmgr –rearm”

Step 6: Wait for the little dialog telling you to reboot, then do so.

Step 7: Reapply whatever activation method you originally used. For legitimate OEM licenses, this should involve replacing your OEM .cert-xs file and entering your OEM’s VLK with the “slmgr –ipk xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx” command (the x’s being your OEM’s VLK, which I will obviously not provide here). For, ah, “other” licenses…well, you probably know how to do this part already.

Step 8: Reboot. Voila, activated Windows once more.

Microsoft has claimed this update is “totally optional” and “will never be required,” which hangs a big question mark over why anyone voluntarily would install an update that cannot possibly have any effect other than to screw up their computer. Seriously, this “update” can only either (a) maintain status quo and additionally cause your computer to phone home every 3 months or (b) bork your installation. There is no way whatsoever that this “update” could possibly improve anyone’s user experience.

Microsoft is, of course, advertising this thing as some sort of service to end users. Right…

“Wait…you use Bing?”

2009-08-09T01:07:00.001-04:00

Before I start into today’s ~~rant~~ entry, I’ve got another technical announcement to make. Upon review of my latest entry, I’ve found that it doesn’t quite display the same in Firefox as it does in Windows Live Writer’s previews. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, as Writer undoubtedly uses Windows’s Trident rendering engine, the same one used by Internet Explorer. Oddly, Mozilla’s Gecko, IE’s Trident, and Safari/Chrome’s Webkit all display the layout of text and images slightly differently. Take the following example:

This blog as viewed in both Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (left) and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (right). The differences are subtle, but noticeable.

Normally I’d blame this on Internet Explorer’s wild standards incompliance, but Internet Explorer 8 is actually fully CSS 2.1 compliant - direct your copy of IE8 over to the Acid2 test if you (understandably) find that difficult to believe. I seriously doubt there’s any HTML 5 or CSS 3 in Blogger’s code (and if there is then, well, that’s their damn fault for using non-final standards), so I’m at a loss to explain these differences. The fact that Webkit has a 3rd, still-different interpretation is even more perplexing - and indeed, Opera may have a 4th, but who gives a shit about Opera, anyway?

So I have a dilemma. I can code the HTML for my blog by hand from here on out and hope that every browser is equally competent in rendering extremely pedestrian HTML4, but that’s a time-consuming process (comparatively) and, frankly, Windows Live Writer is just too damn nice of a tool to give up.

So the moral of this story is that I’m going to do the unthinkable. I’m going to hand down the recommendation that for the full Blag-o-nets experience, you view this blog in Internet Explorer 8. But if, you know, you decide you want to stick with Firefox or Chrome (but not Opera, eww), I certainly won’t begrudge you…seeing as I fully intend to keep testing final entries in Firefox, my browser of choice.

Bada-Bing

So on to the main course of today’s entry. The other day a friend of mine was over, and in the course of our conversation I turned to my computer to look up some factoid. When I opened Firefox and typed my query into the search box, the result was returned via Microsoft’s new (sort of) Bing search, my new search engine of choice. The response I got was a quizzical look followed by the half-question, half-condescending remark for which this article is named.

There are a handful of reasons I use Bing instead of the ever-present Google, and why you should probably give Microsoft’s latest go at search a try, too.

I’ll get this out of the way first, however: One thing you’ll notice no more discussion of in this post is the silly branding of Bing as a “decision engine.” I don’t fully understand what that even means, but apparently Microsoft has decided that actually competing head-to-head with Google is too tough for them, so Bing is marketed as supplement to the search giant. Words can not describe how stupid this is, especially since searches phrased as English sentences are the one place Bing seems to lag behind Google. I’ll be more generous than some tech bloggers and say no more about this marketing pitch other than that it’s s#!%.

Google (left) and Bing (right) home pages. Uh, Google, the 90’s called…

But don’t de discouraged. When it comes to your daily keyword searches, Bing delights in several ways. The first thing I noticed about Bing was that it’s home page doesn’t look like the 90’s were about to call asking for their web designers back. I mean, Google’s simplicity is a huge asset in a lot of ways, but it’s just too stark. And despite the large-ish image and inviting tones of Bing’s home page, the cursor is immediately placed in the search box upon navigating to the page, before the image has even begun to load. Google, by contrast, has to load not just the header image but the auto-complete code before it automatically places the cursor in the search box. Sure, it seems like a minor gripe, but you won’t believe how many times I’ve clicked the little “Google” icon on my favorites bar and begun ticking away on a sluggish internet connection only to have 90% of my query not actually be entered into the search field and have to start over.

Type in a simple query like “GeForce 7900 drivers” or “amputee puppy porn” and both Google and Bing return a list of blue links to a billion or so web pages, 10 per page, perhaps with some images if you’re lucky (or unlucky, in the case of that second one). But type in a more specific search term like “Led Zeppelin” and watch where Bing shines:

In writing this, I lol’d at the changes Google’s made recently to copy Bing…err, I mean improve their end-user experience in a totally original way.

It should be noted that Google has improved these kind of results substantially in recent months, for example by giving video results their own section and adding a “related searches” list, totally in no way whatsoever to copy Bing I’m sure. Even with these changes, Bing provides a better experience in several subtle ways. Most notably, Bing groups results for searches like these into categories: “Led Zeppelin lyrics,” “Led Zeppelin tickets,” “Led Zeppelin interviews,” etc. Search for a medicine, and you’ll get categories like “Oxycodone usage,” “Oxycodone interactions,” and “Oxycodone side-effects.” It doesn’t seem like much, and isn’t applied to many searches yet (though Microsoft has promised to expand the engine that powers these “categorized searches” over time), but when it happens it is really handy.

For standard searches, Bing has in my experience always returned a results least at least on par with Google’s, if not better. Both engines can return umpteen-billions of results for even the most exotic search queries, so I really doubt finding what you’re after is going to be a problem. Both engines feature address lookup, surprisingly advanced in-field calculators, and unit conversions. But Bing has some other nice touches here, as well. See those video thumbnails at the bottom of the Led Zeppelin search illustrated above? Hover over one, and it begins to play. Hover over a picture result, and a larger preview pops up. Both search engines feature a “recent searches” capability based on being logged in to an associated account (G-Mail for Google; Live ID for Bing), but if you’re as alarmed by this invasion of privacy as myself, you can turn it off with two clicks from any search result in Bing. In Google, you have to hunt down multiple options in one of G-Mail’s gazillion preferences panes to turn this bit of nastiness off. And one of Bing’s potentially nicest features is a small “preview pane” to the right of search results. If you hover over the result for a second or two, the first few paragraphs of the page are displayed in a little bubble to the right of your search results. It’s not perfect, but it can help you spot a useless result on a slower or bandwidth-limited connection a lot faster than opening tabs of a billion image-heavy, ad-drenched web sites. It’s the small touches that really make or break a product as simple as a search engine, and Bing has more than enough small touches to make it.

That’s not to say Microsoft’s oddly-named new search toy is without it’s problems. For example, when I search for “Led Zeppelin” or “The Beatles” I get the nice categorized search results. But when I search for “The Who” I get a standard results link-spew. Sorry Pete Townshend, I guess you don’t rate as highly as Jimmy Page and John Lennon among Microsoft programmers. Furthermore, Bing’s predecessor, Live Search, had a nifty feature where if you typed in a fully-phrased question, such as “Who assassinated JFK?”, you’d get an answer based on some sort of “I’m Feeling Lucky”-style search above all the other search results. This feature is still present to an extent in Bing, but it seems to have been largely broken in the transition and 99.98% of such searches just spit back a standard search results page. For example, “Who assassinated JFK?” returns a blurb from Encarta about the ordeal above and separate from the other results, but “Who assassinated Lincoln?” does not.

Still, even with these imperfections, Bing is a very solid entry into the search market, and is worthy of at least a cursory trial by everyone. Microsoft probably doesn’t have much chance of unseating Google’s near-monopoly on search - especially seeing as with their “decision engine” sales pitch they’ve essentially capitulated, France-style, before the fighting even started. But what they will do is deliver a quality experience to those willing to make a switch from the norm…a surprisingly un-Microsoft thing to do, actually. Oh, and I’m sure the massive ad revenue from the Yahoo! merger is just a small bonus.

Windows Live Essentials Suite 2009 Review Part 1: Introduction and Windows Live Mail

2009-07-31T00:35:00.001-04:00

In a series of entries over the next week or so I’m going to review the various parts of the Windows Live Essentials suite. WLE is a set of free, basic Windows programs, including a photo gallery, blog authoring tool, desktop mail client, and more. Apple fanatics will no doubt be quick to point out that this all bears more than a little similarity to Apple’s iLife suite, but it should be noted that Microsoft has been bundling more primitive versions of most of these apps ever since Windows 98. Note, also, “free”: whereas Apple’s iLife is free to those who buy new Macs, if you want the latest versions of the included programs each year it’ll cost you a not-so-paltry $79. And the WLE suite (with some slight variations) is available to Vista and XP users in addition to those on the upcoming Windows 7.

So why has Microsoft chosen to debut it’s own version of iLife, anyways? The simple answer is that they’ve been forced to. Facing antitrust proceedings in both the United States and the European Union, Microsoft has decided to head off the complaints about bundling too much proprietary software with their OS by spinning off most of it into another suite of free, downloadable goodies that can be accessed from Windows Update.

Note: These are (rightfully) considered “Optional” rather than “High Priority” updates (and thus will not be automatically downloaded), and you must have enabled Microsoft Update to see them. OEMs can choose to bundle Windows Live Essentials with new computers, however, and it is likely that most will starting with Windows 7.

Though this new scheme will be devastating to both people out there still without broadband internet connections, there are several advantages for the rest of us in this new approach. Most notably will be the speed at which we get updated versions of the software. Windows itself has a traditionally geologic release cycle. By splitting development of Windows Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, etc. off into it’s own department, we can see updates to these programs much more frequently. Indeed, given the versioning of the suite (Windows Live Essentials 2009) we can probably expect at least annual updates.

Basically, despite my generally negative view of changes like this, I actually believe the unbundling of these apps like these from the core of Windows will mean good things for us, the end-users.

Say good-bye -riddance to Outlook Express: Windows Live Mail

Microsoft’s free desktop e-mail client, Outlook Express, has been in a sorry state for years. Despite the name, it was never a true subset of Microsoft Office’s Outlook. Outlook offered calendar and advanced contact integration, which Outlook Express did not; Outlook Express offered direct Hotmail support an RSS feed aggregator, while Outlook did not. In fact, the two programs had very little in common beyond the name and basic POP3/IMAP support…and the fact that they were both sluggish, byzantine crap.

The aging Windows XP itself is almost 8 years old, and Outlook Express still manages to look dated and byzantine by comparison.

With Windows Vista, Microsoft promised to improve this situation by evolving Outlook Express into a more secure and full-featured, yet slimmed-down e-mail client. They delivered only tangentially on this promise: the newly-renamed Windows Mail was slightly more svelte than its predecessor, and Windows Vista incorporated advanced contacts management and a calendar, though neither of these was integrated into Windows Mail. In terms of integrated features and, more importantly, security and ease of use, Windows Mail had been practically unaltered from it’s OE origins.

So enter Windows Live Mail 2009.

Windows Live Mail versus Outlook Express: Words are almost unnecessary.

If you look really hard, you can tell this is the same fundamental application (a desktop e-mail client). But the similarity ends there. Unlike Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail 2009 is fast, feature-rich, secure, and perhaps most importantly, a breeze to set up and use.

When you first launch the application, you are prompted to enter your e-mail address, password, and a name that you want to appear in the “From:” field on your outgoing e-mails. From there, WLM will try to set-up the connection itself, and I can happily report that this works a sizable majority of the time. WLM even supports almost every webmail service you can imagine, with the notable exception of Exchange “secure bullshit-o-mail servers” or whatever they are. I had one issue with it: My parents’ e-mail account (which ends in “@mpinet.net”) had to have server details entered manually, but this isn’t a major complaint since it’s actually an Earthlink account using an extremely rare grandfathered-in domain dating back to the dial-up era. After this, WLM loaded to the inbox, with all the server settings good to go, with sensible defaults: download on launch and every 30 minutes, leave mail on server until deleted (see that Thunderbird team? Learn from this!), that sort of thing.

The default window layout breaks from the traditional scheme by using a series of three columns rather than two portrait-oriented panes and a sidebar. Supposedly this was done to accommodate the now-prolific widescreen monitor better, but since the first thing I do with any e-mail client is turn off the reading pane it ends up looking the same as always to me. If you do like reading panes, though, I can confirm this is a surprisingly logical layout on a widescreen monitor.

As far as composing and reading e-mail goes, it’s a functional experience. The conveniently-placed Instant Search box would be a boon to those that keep an overstuffed mailbox, and all the important options are available from clearly labeled buttons at the top of the window. The little carat next the “New” button brings up a drop down that lets you compose a standard e-mail, a “Photo e-mail” (which is essentially just a regular e-mail that opens the attachment finder immediately), a calendar event (more on this later), a newsgroup posting (I’ve never once used a newsgroup in my life, but I guess they’re still popular among those that don’t understand what’s so funny about Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory), a contact (more on this later, too), or an e-mail folder. All of these actions have associated keyboard shortcuts, as well. Junk e-mail can be flagged by either a right-click submenu, or by selecting an e-mail or group of e-mails and hitting the “Junk” button at the top of the window; the junk filter seems to work pretty well but is a tad over-sensitive by default in my experience. Fortunately it is easily adjusted – in fact, you’ll be prompted to review it’s settings the first time you receive an e-mail WLM thinks is junk, a nice touch. In general, navigating around the e-mail windows, including various inboxes and compositions, is a breeze.

Now, I mentioned I’d discuss more about the calendar and contacts features later. The first thing I can think of to mentions is…why on earth were these integrated into the e-mail client? OK, so the contacts list kind of makes sense, but the calendar? It seems like they were just trying to rip off Outlook, and that’s not really a good goal.

That said, the Calendar is a very useful application. It can sync with a variety of online calendar services, including Google’s and Windows Live’s. It’s intuitive (quite a bit more so than the Windows Vista calendar, in my opinion), very easy to navigate, and quite snappy. A selected event can be sent in an e-mail, and the calendar can be configured to e-mail you a reminder some time in advance of the event’s occurrence. It can be configured to automatically show birthdays from your contacts, as well, which is good for the forgetful among us. There’s color-coding for the more artistically inclined among us, too. In fact, it would be quite possibly the perfect calendar application…if it was, in fact, it’s own application. But the fact that it’s buried in Windows Live Mail makes it all too easy to overlook; it’s just a small button in the bottom-left corner of the window. And if you want to check your calendar, you have to launch your e-mail client. It’s just a really frustrating oversight.

This is the only way most users will find the excellent Calendar function in Windows Live Mail. Nothing hidden about that, eh?

The contacts “sub-application” is similarly excellent, and doubly so because if you’re logged into a Windows Live account (and there’s no reason not to be), it’ll automatically import and sync all of your WL contacts for system-wide use. Snazzy. There’s not a whole lot to say about this one beyond that. It keeps e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, occupation information, birthdays, IM screen names, etc – almost too much information to be realistically useful, but it’s there if you want/need it. It puts the OE and Thunderbird contacts lists to shame, that’s for sure. This one, it’s more forgivable that it’s integrated straight into the mail client, but I’d have still preferred a separate application, à la Vista and OSX.

In conclusion, Windows Live Mail 2009 represents a gigantic improvement over Microsoft’s previous attempts at a desktop e-mail client, and indeed renders even Outlook largely obsolete. I’d put my money on WLM against any other free desktop e-mail client, including OSX’s Mail and Thunderbird (and don’t even get me started on the laughable “Evolution” client in GNOME). From what I’ve seen of the Thunderbird 3 Beta, the folks at Mozilla are probably going to be putting in a lot of late nights to get something completive out the door in time to matter. So while I’m forced to dock a point for the calendar/contacts-integration silliness, I whole-heartedly recommend you give Windows Live Mail a chance.

Final Rating: 4/5 Stars

What has science done?!

2009-07-27T19:33:00.001-04:00

I found this on Shamus’ blog this afternoon:

Link (YouTube)

I’m relatively confident this is one of the signs of the apocalypse. Let’s just hope Fox doesn’t hire any real reporters, or we’re done for.

How Far We’ve Come…

2009-07-19T13:43:00.004-04:00

Technical note: This entry marks the addition of more pretty pictures and associated captions, hopefully lending a more interesting, varies, and professional look to the Blag. It’ll probably be a disaster, like everything I touch, so bear with me.

OK, so the calculator app hasn't come very far.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the FUD-driven “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads Apple has been using since just before Vista’s release. I could dedicate an entire web server to pointing out the logical fallacies and factual errors in those ads, but suffice it say Apple’s marketing department would be right at home doing political advertisements.

But it would be a sad error in judgment to deny that those ads have been very influential. The market share of Apple’s OSX has risen more than 2% (and possibly as high as 4%, depending on who you ask) in the last 2-3 years. OK, so the difference between 3% and 5% is hardly a major threat to Microsoft’s monolithic 90%+ market share on the desktop, but it does indicate an upward trend for the folks from Cupertino. (On a side note, a belated congratulations to Linux for breaking 1% of the desktop market share.) That’s by no means a bad thing; competition breeds better products at better prices, after all. But frankly, I think most of Apple’s increased market share is misbegotten.

I’ll be honest: I myself am, despite several efforts to embrace Linux on the desktop (and a whole-hearted belief that it really is ready for the average consumer), a Windows man. I own 2 laptops and 2-3 desktops at any given time, and they all run Windows in some form (currently the Win7 RC on all but my ThinkPad, which runs Vista). There may be some Linux releases or OSX86 builds (shh, don’t tell!) thrown in there from time to time, but the end result is always the same: I end up using Windows to the exclusion of it’s competitors. And somehow I doubt Google’s Chrome OS will have any measurable impact on that fact. There are a lot of reasons for this dedication to a product I sometimes seem to revile so much, but after some though, I’ve come to realize the core reason is a simple one: Microsoft simply makes a better OS than its competitors.

It’s ok, take a minute to go find your socks that just blew off. First off I’ll throw out a few qualifying statements. I’ll readily admit there are a lot of things other operating systems do better. The NT kernel has some of the weakest kernel-level security of any OS on the market. The lack of a true centralized package manager and total reliance on 3rd-party drivers (though newer releases help out here) are a recipe for incompatibilities. And while seriously ballsy, designing an OS with no command line core to fall back on was probably not a great idea, since it leaves you with no way to recover if the window manager fails.

But while the various Linux distributions, Solaris, BSD, and even OSX have their places (servers, for example…OK, except OSX), Windows is simply the best desktop OS for most users. The combination of bundled apps, 3rd-party support, speed, usability, and security/stability (yes, you read that last one right) is simply un-matched right now.

Windows actually has a pretty lengthy history of being the best Operating System for the average consumer. Microsoft didn’t crush Apple into a fine powder throughout the 90s just because of Stevie’s stubborn refusal to license the Mac OS to 3rd-party hardware vendors (though that is a large part of it). Quite frankly, previous versions of Apple’s operating system were crap. OS7 and OS8 had some of the dumbest design decisions the desktop world has ever seen as a result of Jobs’ insistence that the OS favor style over efficiency. Even after extensive user feedback, OS9 did little to correct these flaws because Apple didn’t want to rebuild their operating system from the ground up.

Similarly, Linux on the desktop in the 90s was little more than the pipe dream of some Scandinavian guy no one had even heard of. Early versions of the K Desktop Environment made Windows 3.1 look positively inviting, not to mention hardware support more spotty than a leopard (no pun intended).

Frankly, by the time OSX and Ubuntu came around the fat lady had already sung. Microsoft had entrenched itself so deeply in the desktop world that it would require one hell of a fantastic advance in desktop operating systems to uproot them. And neither Linux 2.4 nor OSX were that advance. OSX breaking support for all legacy applications – yes including that brand-new, fully OS9-compatible program you bought the month before – certainly didn’t do Apple’s adoption numbers any favors. And Linux, frankly, still didn’t have any 3rd-party applications to break. Microsoft’s blockbuster new release, Windows XP, however, continued running software written for versions of Windows as far back as 3.1 with only relatively minor hassles. And Windows XP eventually proved to be so enduring and wildly popular that by the time Vista came around breaking support for most pre-XP/2000 era apps, no one cared any more.

But even if you have no 3rd-party applications that depend on Windows, I would find it very hard to recommend a Mac to you. Even assuming they didn’t cost nearly twice as much as equivalently powerful PCs, the OS is simply not as versatile as Windows. While Apple has worked hard to add new features that users have requested (or that Steve-O felt were “cool”), Microsoft has easily matched these efforts, while improving the existing features by leaps and bounds as well.

WordPad: That’s more like it.

Take the simple included word processor, for example. Back in the Windows 95 days, Wordpad and TextEdit were both jokes that no one could seriously consider viable word processors, lacking spell checking support, many formatting options, print previews, standard format support, etc. Nowadays both the Windows 7 Wordpad and the Snow Leopard TextEdit variants support a variety of new features, formatting options, and the industry-standard OpenDocument Text format. But while the Windows 7 version sports an Office-2007 style ribbon UI and easy access to all these new features, TextEdit continues to bury them under an interface that hasn’t evolved one iota sine 1995. And WordPad supports the new Office Open XML format in addition to ODF, and regardless of your feelings on OOXML (myself, I’ll stick with standards that weren’t bought and are actually clearly documented, thanks) it’s a nice feature to have, since no doubt a lot of Office users will be saving into the new default format.

Internet Explorer then and now: Is that even the same application?

Take another popular example: Safari 4 versus Internet Explorer 8. Both are now fully CSS2-compliant browsers, though Safari 4 is also CSS3-compliant, while IE is not even close. Safari 4 also benchmarks worlds ahead of Internet Explorer, and is theoretically more secure since it doesn’t utilize ActiveX controls. But while synthetic benchmarks and compatibility tests against standards no one uses yet may be great for ego-stroking press releases, what people really care about is what’s easier to use, looks more inviting, and is faster in real world use. And after using both extensively, that’s not much of a comparison. Safari 4 looks and behaves for all intents and purposes just like Safari 3 before…and like Safari 2 before that. Which in turn, is an awful lot like the old KHTML browser it’s based on. And seeing as Apple doesn’t even code the rendering engine for Safari any more, it kind of makes you wonder what they were working on for the last two years. IE8, on the other hand, not only has a completely revamped rendering engine, but a slew of integration and usability improvements, including a lot of awesome but as-yet-unrealized potential in the Accelerators feature. Tabs are automatically grouped with color coding and sorted by their originating tab, and new (wanted) pop-up pages are opened in new tabs by default instead of molesting you with a new IE window. Safari’s tabbed browsing, by contrast, looks like it was copy-pasted out of pre-alpha versions of Firefox, pages that are supposed to open in a new window will quickly leave you with a taskbar/dock full of Safaris, and Safari 4’s only new feature to speak of is a flashy cover-flow style way to look at your bookmarks and open tabs, which, while certainly…gaudy, is not terribly practical compared to IE’s tiled thumbnail views. Oh yeah, and since IE8 prompts you with a security dialogue for Active-X controls, and now runs in a secure mode that prevents Active-X controls from harming other parts of your system by default, you have to be pretty stupid to get any drive-by infections these days. And with regards to those benchmarks that show Safari so far ahead of IE in terms of Javascript speed – it’s never going to be noticeable unless you’re running dozens or hundreds of pages at once off of a local drive. Remember that internet connection that comes out of the wall? That’s going to be the real bottleneck in any modern browser.

Safari then and now: Well, the color scheme changed…

The list goes on: Windows Live Messenger, Windows Media Player, Windows Live Mail, and more have all improved dramatically from their early incarnations. Apple’s iChat, however, has only added features to keep up with Windows Live; iTunes looks the same now as it did at version 5; and the OSX Mail client is positively horrible (much like Outlook Express used to be, but from some time using WL Mail…Microsoft does learn occasionally).

Windows has come a long, long way in the last 20+ years. Windows 7 looks to be a major revamp of the Taskbar interface (which even in the Vista-era incarnation I vastly prefer to the OSX dock) that adds a slew of new features while maintaining basic usability and space-efficiency features. (If you haven’t had an opportunity to play around with the Windows 7 interface, let me tell you, you’re going to love it, Windows or Mac fan alike. Imagine a seamless merger of standard Windows Taskbar and OSX Dock ideals, without the silly contrivances that plague either. It really is that good.) Vista rewrote the networking interface and code into the most usable and snappy home networking protocol out there. XP, Vista, and 7 all updated the interface in beautiful but elegant ways. And yes, Windows really is getting faster and safer with each new version (heck, I find the 7 RC faster than XP even on some really dated hardware). Windows is many things (and OSX is, for all of my “bashing” of it, a great OS), but one thing Windows isn’t is “obsolete.”

And that is an assertion I’ll fight you over, Stevie.

The Apple Hypocrisy

2009-07-12T23:53:00.004-04:00

Let’s face it. There are a lot of people out there with a lot of different opinions on a lot of different subjects. If you’ve been around me very much, you’ll no doubt have learned by now that I’m no big fan of Microsoft and their “to Hell with standards” approach to software (and hardware) development. In fact, even reading this blog you’ll find an example or two of my displeasure with some of Microsoft’s design…decisions (if you believe anyone is stupid enough to consciously OK some of that stuff). But if there’s one thing I can’t stand even more than MS, it’s fanboys. And the most rabid and virulent brand of fanboy? Apple’s.

I find it amusing, actually, to listen to the ranting of Apple fanboys occasionally. By and large, it’s so amusing because they have no idea what they’re talking about, of course; repeating almost verbatim the meaningless drivel passed on from Apple head-honcho Steve Jobs. A favorite line is how Apple products are the “most advanced <product type> ever created.” What does that mean? How is OSX “the world’s most advanced" operating system? In what way is the 15” MacBook Pro the “most advanced notebook PC ever?” I suppose it’s the ideal marketing slogan: it plays up your product immensely, yet it’s so vacuous that it’s impossible to debate logically (much like Sarah Palin that respect *ba dum tish*).

Yet occasionally you actually get some direct comparisons from the Apple camp, including specific claims on exactly how their products are so gosh-darn awesome; or more commonly, why their products are better than Microsoft’s. Herein I’ll tackle some of these specific claims, with a hopefully fairly unbiased comparison of MS and Apple products. I’ll preface this by saying that while I have used Apple software somewhat extensively, I’ve never owned a Mac proper. I do own and even enjoy using some other Apple products though, and will openly acknowledge that in a lot of ways, they can be very high-quality products worthy of your hard-earned money – just like Microsoft’s can be. But just like Microsoft’s products, Apple products can also be heinously overpriced or even just plain rubbish.

Myth 1: “With Leopard, everyone gets the Ultimate edition.”

The above quote from Steve Jobs himself is a sentiment that was echoed by many during Vista’s bungled release cycle. As I’m sure many of you are aware, Windows Vista was released in a staggering number of editions all at different price points. Below is a table of them all:

Edition	Price (Full/Upgrade)	Notes
Starter	$99/NA	Not available in USA
Home Basic	$199/$99	Lacks Aero Glass
Home Premium	$239/$159	Standard home version.
Business	$299/$199	Lacks MC features
Enterprise	Varies; only sold in many-unit lots.	Corporate Workstation edition.
Ultimate	$399/$259	Everything imaginable.

Cowabunga, as they say. Needless to say, a lot of people were confused as to the differences between the various versions and didn’t really know what to buy or what the meaningful differences between them were. Worse, there were no real differences between the various discs, since any Vista disc could install any version of the OS; all you were paying for was a key that unlocked more features. Jobs' quip was obviously to imply that every single copy of Leopard came with every part of the OS enabled, a point on which he is correct. But I’d hesitate to compare Leopard to Ultimate. In fact, I would compare Leopard directly to Home Premium. Both are targeted at the average home user or media enthusiast, both come with a media-center style feature, both focus heavily on fancy UIs, both lack support for higher-level networking functions, both have crippled remote administration capabilities, both lack full-disc encryption capability, etc. The list of features included in Vista Ultimate that are absent from OSX is a mile long. Try to do a full-disc encryption in OSX, or host a domain, or host a remote access session, or even set a video as your desktop background. I’ll wait. Hell, that’s not even counting the features not present in OSX that even Home Premium has. Try to play Solitaire on your Mac, or format a drive in exFAT, or even find a simple plain-text editor (you never realize how awesome NotePad is until you try to use an OS without a format-less text editor). Aside from the ability to join a domain (admittedly a nice thing to have), I can’t really name one basic feature available in OSX Leopard that Windows Vista Home Premium lacks. Even if you want to bring iLife into things, the Windows Live Essentials package matches it almost blow-for-blow, with only one really notable exception.

Garage Band is great and all, but I don’t think it makes or breaks an OS.

Myth #2: OSX is cheaper.

This myth seems true enough on the surface: a new version of OSX is $129, while even the upgrade version of Home Premium is $159. But let’s look at how many versions of each OS have been released and their respective price points over the years.

OSX was first released in mid 2001. Windows XP came out in September of the same year. So let’s start there.

OSX doesn’t have separate “Upgrade” and “Full-install” editions like Windows, but this is certainly not because of some underlying generosity on Apple’s part; it’s because you have to own a Mac to use OSX so every edition is an “upgrade” by nature.

So imagine the following comparison: You and a friend both buy top-of-the-line computers with the latest and greatest OS installed one day before the new latest-and-greatest comes out and have to start the upgrade cycle at the same time. You bough Windows and your friend bought a Mac. You pay $199 for an upgrade edition of XP Pro; your friend only $129 for OSX.

The next major releases are XP Service Pack 1 and OSX 10.1. Conveniently, these are both free upgrades. A little later, XP is upgraded to SP 1.1a. Again, for free. OSX 10.2, however is not a free upgrade; another $129 for your Mac-using friend. OSX 10.3 is shoved out another year or so later to the tune of another $129. Then comes OS 10.4 and XP SP2. The former, for another $129. The latter, free. But ho! Vista is released, and you immediately snatch up Ultimate, while your friend snatches up Apple’s latest, OSX 10.5 Leopard. You pay $259, while your friend shells out only $129. He, naturally, lords this over you.

Until, that is, you pull out a calculator. Over the last few years you’ve received roughly the same number of evolutionary OS upgrades. But while your Mac-wielding friend has paid $645 to Apple for his various upgrades, you’ve only paid Microsoft $458, not to mention come out ahead in terms of feature set.

Whoops.

Myth #3: Macs are safer because of some inherent superiority.

I don’t have as much to say about this because it’s one of the more esoteric claims (and because it’s partially true). Yes, Unix-based kernels are in several ways more resilient than Windows’ NT-based kernel; anyone who knows anything about computers can tell you that. But with Vista’s slew of new security features – culminating in the very valuable if incredibly irksome User Account Control – and a decent antivirus (such as the free and resource-light AVG), Windows can be just as secure. And remember, while it’s true that there are only a handful of viruses for the Mac compared to literally thousands for PCs, as much of this has to do with the fact that there are a dozen Windows PCs out there for every Mac as it does with Apple’s coding.

Myth #4: Macs are faster and/or have better hardware.

This is just plain malarkey. Apple computers use the same Intel processors and motherboards, off-brand RAM, Hitachi/Seagate/WD hard drives, Intel/nVidia/ATi GPUs, and Synaptics touchpads as everyone else’s machines. Apple doesn’t make the cases, LCDs, or batteries either; the cases are made by Quanta (the same company that makes Dells), the LCDs by LG and Samsung (who also make LCds for Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc.), and the batteries by a couple of different companies (Sony being one) that also make batteries for everyone else. There isn’t a damn thing in an Apple computer that isn’t also used by everyone else.

Myth #5: Macs just work/never crash.

lol

Myth #6: No but seriously, Macs Just Work®. And hey, OSX really is faster than Windows!

OK, I’ll grant you that if you buy a new Mac, it’s a fully functional computer minutes after you get it out of the box and powered on. A new Dell or HP, however, is an Olympic event to get to a usable state. In fact, I don’t even try to fix factory-default Windows installations anymore; the first thing I do with a new computer these days is burn off whatever drivers and recovery software it comes with and wipe the hard drive with a fresh copy of Windows.

But this isn’t Microsoft’s fault. You see, OEMs like Lenovo, Dell, and Acer sell advertising space (essentially) on their OEM Windows installs to companies like Norton, Roxio, and even occasionally Apple (ever had a computer come with Quicktime or iTunes preinstalled? Yeah). But this isn’t really a bad thing. It’s the fact that MS doesn’t sell it’s own computers, and that OEMs sell ad space this way, that allows us to get PCs at such substantially lower prices than equivalent Macs. Sure, it’ll lead to a lot of headaches for the less technically inclined, but then again that’s how those of us in the IT world make our paycheck. And really, it’s not as bad as it used to be. My grandmother recently purchased a new Dell, and I was able to clear it off and get it up to speed in less than 15 minutes with just a few clicks in the remove programs dialogue. And frankly, it wasn’t that bad out of the gates. To be frank, bloat drives up hardware requirements, which drives competition, which drives down prices, which is good for all of us. Lord only knows what the computer world would be if Apple ran everything, but something tells me we’d all still be using G4s with 512 MB of RAM and think it was amazing.

As for why OSX is faster than Windows on equivalent hardware, well…it’s really not. Yes, I’ll grant that it starts up and shuts down a lot faster - OSX has some lightning-fast shut down times; I’ve observed as little as 4 or 5 seconds before! But the amount of time it takes to launch programs on first use is geologic. Windows front-loads a lot of common system services, allowing say, Internet Explorer, to launch in 1 or 2 seconds, whereas Safari on a Mac can take as long as 10 seconds to launch after a cold boot. Vista, and even more so the upcoming Windows 7, are actually relatively speedy when you’ve pared out the OEM crap and run them on decent hardware

And speaking of bloat, Apple seems to know a thing or two about it. I recently installed iTunes – which I won’t deny is one of the best music library management programs out there, on any platform – and it installed 3 services, 2 processes, and a driver that load on every boot. All of which are by and large totally unnecessary, not to mention it also forces the god-awful Quicktime Player down your throat for no good reason (yes, I realize that iTunes uses the Quicktime codecs to decode AAC, but it certainly doesn’t make any use of the standalone player). Why can’t the iPod use the generic USB Mass Storage driver like every other MP3 player? Why does it also need a service, and then a separate service for iPhones? And what the hell is Bonjour and why do I want it running on boot?

Answers: It can (and used to), it doesn’t, seriously nothing important, and I don’t.

Conclusion

To be honest, I’ve probably spent the last dozen-odd paragraphs talking to a brick wall. Apple fanboys are mostly caught in Steve’s infamous reality-distortion field, wherein apparently statements like “<latest OSX version> is the most advanced operating system ever!” aren’t just meaningless marketing drivel. But hopefully somebody at least got a few chuckles out of this. And with some luck, I’ll get someone to rant at me about how wrong I am about everything, or at least accuse me of being an MS fanboy.

Join me next time when I stir up a real hornet’s nest by ~~pointing out that OSX’s kernel and Safari’s rendering engine are just forked open-source projects that Apple does very little of the work on~~ tackling some more politics.

I’ll close by saying that no matter how awesome Garage Band may be, Windows Live Writer is easily as awesome and has some practical use to boot (if you consider blogging a practical use, anyways).

A Brief Homework Assignment

2008-11-02T00:05:00.003-04:00

Here's a quick 4-minute project to get you thinking about the topic for my next entry: Go watch this video. Don't worry about the actual pretty pictures, just listen to the song and actually think about it. Lots of good stuff, but here's the thing I want you to think about:

Can we really trust a man who puts his words in the mouth of God?

PRO-RIAA

2008-10-27T21:12:00.005-04:00

Well here's that promised post for tonight; I apologize again for letting "regularly" fall by the wayside. I'll try to pick up the pace, but ~~classes~~ SSBB and Psychonauts have been sucking up most of my free time.

First off, I'd like to make a quick note: When did we get rid of tabs to open new paragraphs? I just noticed that even I've stopped doing it, and I sometimes think Shamus, Yahtzee, and I are the last holdouts of decent grammar and sentence structure on the internet (Shamus doesn't use them either, I see). I've even seen some recent books that don't do it, so if it started as an internet thing (which I can believe, since in many forum and blog softwares "tab" will move to the next item on the page) it's spreading into everything else. Oh well, another casualty of convenience I guess.

Now onto the meaty liberal goodness of this entry. Hopefully I'll be able to pull myself away from Nintendo's childish but incredibly addicting little white menace long enough to continue my Ubuntu series later tonight or tomorrow, so hang in there if you were waiting for that (as if anyone reads the entries I don't mirror on Facebook). So here goes this week's discussion topic: The PRO-IP act and the sorry state of politics in America in general.

Now, I imagine amidst the financial crisis, Wall Street bailout, oil prices being sky-high (yes, I know they've come down a lot recently but they're still three times what they were when Clinton left office, though whether this is Bush's fault is debatable), and of course the election, you haven't noticed some of the lesser evils working their way through our government. One of the most notable of such evils, at least in terms of my concerns, is the laughably named Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, known more commonly as the PRO-IP act. This act was signed into law this week by President Bush after passing the House in a landslide and the Senate with nary a nay (meaning that yes, both Captain Change and Senator McSame voted for it - more on this later).

Now, since I imagine that taking the time to look up the wording of this act - and then get out your dictionary to figure out what the legalese means - is not in your schedule, I will explain what it does, in broad and accurate terms (not the narrow "it helps the poor starving artist" crap that the official summary says). The PRO-IP act will create a division of the Department of Justice solely devoted to the pursuit of "pirates" and other violators of US copyright law, headed by an "IP Czar." If that last part sounds familiar, it's because the pointless "War on Drugs" in the 90s had this same inane system set up, complete with "Drug Czar," which of course has accomplished nothing but waste millions of taxpayer dollars hunting down, arresting, trying, and imprisoning stoner college students. Well it seems that Drugs^TM didn't stick as well as Communism^TM as an Evil Enemy of America®, and Terrorism^TM is fading as well, so it's Piracy^TM's turn in the limelight. Furthermore, it gives the Justice Department the authority to seize your computer without a warrant on the grounds of "suspected copyright infringement," with no provisions requiring that it ever be returned, even if you are found to be innocent. Apparently no one in Congress found this to be at odds with the fourth amendment, which reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Now I'm not a legal scholar, but it seems to me that this clause of the PRO-IP act flies directly in the face of the fourth amendment, but then again the fourth is our most trampled on amendment recently anyways, with anything from “suspicion of terrorism” to “the President asked nicely” being good enough reasons to spy on you, seize your belongings, and imprison you without warrant or probable cause.

So how did such a travesty get pass our glorious bipartisan Congress? Why didn't the liberals stand up to stop it because it violated our civil rights? Where was McCain and his anti-“pork barrel spending” maverickiness while the U.S. Senate voted to waste taxpayer dollars doing the **AA's dirty work for them? Well there are a few reasons.

The first, and most shocking, reason has to do with the numbers that the RIAA and MPAA produced to show the massive negative effect that piracy was having on our economy. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the industry's claims of billions of dollars in annual losses to piracy (based on dodgy-at-best statistics that hinge on the idea every single piece of pirated material would have instead been purchased were it not for the evil pirates). Well, according to the MPAA/RIAA, 750 thousand American jobs have been lost to piracy. The surprising part (unless you've listened to anything that any RIAA/MPAA/BSA spokesman has ever said before, in which case you'd probably be more shocked if they weren't lying) is that the numbers used by the RIAA to support the bill were completely made up.

The second reason is that tired old line about “what's good for big business is good for all of us” that the conservatives love to spew. That's another subject for another post though, so I'll be generous for now and say no more about it other than that it's a gigantic load of horse dung.

Finally, we come to the deepest reason: lobbyist money. The big record labels, film studios, software companies, etc. are among some of the largest individual donors to political campaigns. They've donated millions to the campaigns of the major presidential candidates and several big-name senators. Obama has received over 5 million from them; McCain about 1 million. Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton found themselves receiving similarly large windfalls when they had a chance. Oddly, the RIAA/MPAA seem to be more interested in Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, though whether this indicated some sinister side of the Democratic party or simply that they're more expensive to buy off is yet to be seen. Note that they're essentially equally happy to throw money at both McCain and Obama, though since Obama began pulling ahead they've heaped money on him – covering their bases pretty thoroughly, aren't they?

The gist of the issue? Lobbying like this has turned American politics into Alien vs. Predator – no matter who wins, we lose.

Boring Technical Stuff

2008-10-27T13:14:00.006-04:00

A few updates on the blog itself:

1) I'm going to try to keep this thing updated more often - perhaps even a post a day (ideally). Someone keep me to that.

2) I've enabled anonymous commenting, so feel free to be as mean-spirited as you want from safely behind anonymity. Also, those of you getting here via Facebook or NBR or Twenty Sided or what have you can post without Blogger accounts now.

3) My post on government in religion has apparently been mirrored and/or linked in a few of places around the internet now, so that's pretty groovy.

4) My now grossly out-of-date Notebook FAQ seems to have been mirrored in a lot of places around the internet - sometimes without credit, I might add. Oh well, I don't really care as long as someone gets something out of it, but Technology Guide probably owns the actual copyright on it so the ball's in their court if they care.

Another Joyful Adventure in MS Land

2008-10-27T12:01:00.004-04:00

I have another post in the queue, should be up later today; it's quite a long one but for now I'll leave you (assuming you exist) with this short rant:

This weekend I got fed up with Vista on my spare-parts "extra" desktop (because one can never have too many computers) and decided to wipe it off in favor of an XP x64/Ubuntu dual boot. So I put the XP Professional x64 CD that I got from Case (well, an nLite'd version that is unattended after partitioning) in the drive, reboot, and go through the usual motions, telling it to delete the Vista partition and create a new NTFS partition in it's place and install to that. It then proceeds to install the system on it's own and I go off to play Super Mario World on my SNES because that's just how awesome I am. I come back about 45 minutes later to the Windows XP desktop and set about installing drivers and basic software, as well as running Windows update. I go through all this nonsense for a couple of hours, and reboot into GPartEd to set up my Linux partitions. Here's where the problems started.

To start, I noticed that, for some completely baffling reason, the XP installer had set itself up as a logical partition inside and extended partition for absolutely no f@#%ing reason. OK, whatever, I can dig it. I deleted my NTFS storage partition too (after backing up my WoW installation directory to a handy 16 GB jump drive I snagged during a sale at Newegg for $25) because almost everything on it is useless. I finalized the operations, ejected the disk, and rebooted.

And then, to my horror, I see "NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot." I do as it says and again am presented with an error. I reboot into a Linux live CD and discover what happened: for whatever reason, it seems that NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM had been placed not on the C: drive but on one of the other partitions (most likely the NTFS-formatted storage partition, unless the NT kernel grew an ext3 extension when I wasn't looking). Why in the chuffing hell would it ever do this? I want to know which Microsoft toad programmed this behavior. No one in their right mind could possibly look at this and say "yup, this could never possibly go wrong." It's not like my storage partition was at the head of the drive either - in fact, the Windows C: partition was! There is literally no reason whatsoever for it to have done this.

So I rebooted into GPartEd, rewrote my entire partition table again, and made sure to leave the would-be storage partition as free space until after reinstalling Windows. I just told Windows to use the NTFS partition I made for it with GPartEd this time, and everything worked out - NTLDR is on C:, which is a good old-fashioned primary partition. I would just like to thank the Microsoft installer team - I really needed some totally frivolous way to spend those 4 hours I would have otherwise spent doing something you know, productive.

The Ubuntu Experience Part I: Installation and (Minor) Irritations

2008-10-14T13:34:00.006-04:00

In this series, I'll be chronicling the experience I've had with installing, setting up, and using Ubuntu primarily on my desktop, with notes about my laptops when appropriate.

I decided to use the standard desktop live install CD for the first time, having always used the text-mode isntallation CD in the past simply because it was faster. I have to admit, live CD distribution has come a long way in the past few years. The install was mostly painless - all of the critical hardware (except sound) was detected right off the bat and I had no issue with any of the setup steps, bar one. The partitioning in the live CD installer is scarcely better than that of the text-mode installer - in order to do anything other than let the installer wipe away chunks (or all) of your drives as it sees fit, you must set up the partitions manually by typing in the numbers for the sizes of each new or resized partition. What? That's just inexcusable with GPartEd already being a native GNOME application that's small and not exactly hidden. It's even in the Ubuntu repos, so why use this partitioner? I suppose I'm just being a tosser though, because it's still leaps and bounds better than the partition tools included with Windows and OSX, which can pretty much only do "wipe partition table and make a new one, taking out all of your data."

From there the installation was pretty painless, just putting in my user info and waiting. The entire process took under and hour and when done, quickly rebooted me into a (nearly) fully functioning operating system - a pleasant change from Windows, where your first reboot after installation a) takes eons and b) lacks any drivers for anything on modern hardware, meaning I hope you saved networking drivers somewhere first...

The graphics card had 2D support under the open-source "nv" driver, but I installed the official nVidia binary blob through the restricted drivers manager for full hardware 3D - two clicks, a reboot, and I was ready to roll. On my Gateway, I corrected the missing Broadcom and ATi drivers in the same way, no problems (though I did need a connection to the wired ethernet to get the wireless driver). The sound issue on my desktop was remedied by following these instructions, which left me with fully functional stereo sound with hardware mixing after only about 10 minutes and one more reboot. Overall, I can't complain about the installation and set-up procedures, by and large.

What I can complain about, however, is that ALSA doesn't support my damn X-Fi. The X-Fi came out in August of 2005, meaning by now the chipset is over 3 years old. It's also one of the most common dedicated sound cards these days, and until about 6 months ago, the most powerful. Creative even finally open-sourced the drivers back in June of this year. Sure, some of the blame lies on their heads for holding back the source code and releasing only a buggy, unstable binary blob that wouldn't compile on 95% of systems for years, but now the ball's in someone else's court. Since ALSA supporters love to talk about how OpenSound is "deprecated" and that ALSA features "better support for more systems," perhaps it would behoove them to at least catch up to OpenSound on this. Oh well.

As for the experience post install/basic set-up? More on that later/tomorrow, but I will say that I'm writing this in Ubuntu right now, so perhaps that's a hint.

The Role of Government in Religion

2008-10-12T22:19:00.003-04:00

I hope you'll excuse me while I put on my new "political punditry hat" for a moment.

After my recent foray into the roles of religion in government (which I concluded to be: "none", see here) I thought some about the roles of government in religion. Before I leap headlong into statements that will make me very unpopular with one side or the other of this heated debate, let us start by examining the role of government in general.

I would hope a reasonable plurality of us could agree that the primary roles of the government in a society are thus:

Protect the welfare and safety of the populace.
Protect the basic human rights of the populace.

Not necessarily in that order. To be more elaborate, it is the role of the government to a) protect us, the people, from those who would exploit, kill, harm, or otherwise do ill to us; b) to stand up for our inalienable rights, as defined by the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Magna Carta, and/or common sense; and to c) ensure that everyone has the equal ability to succeed in society without being held down or exploited by the already successful.

While I'm sure that we can all agree that the current administration is doing a decent job with part a, its efforts with parts b and c can be described as "deeply flawed" at best, and as woefully disrespectful of the very foundations of human decency at worst.

So what was I getting to with all this? Well, that simply put, organized religion as it exists today (and has for centuries) seems to be directly at odds with the role of government. I'll pull out a quote from Thomas Jefferson again here:
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."

So I suppose I'll go out into ultra-liberal territory for a minute. I think the government needs to step in and put an end to, or at least drastically reduce, the exploitation of the masses by organized religion. I'm not anti-religion/anti-God here; I uphold the right of every citizen to believe in whatever claptrap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H faith they choose, but there has to be a point at which the line between "leading people on to make them feel better about themselves" and "leading people on to make them finance our new $12 million mega-church and 12-person jacuzzi in the pastor's mansion" is drawn. So what do I propose?

Step 1: Stop giving tax breaks to churches.
This seems obvious to me. It boggles my mind why the government thinks it's okay to give tax breaks to churches and religious organizations. This seems to be directly at odds with the establishment clause - I bet if I wanted to set up a center to teach people about why not to believe in God, I'd find myself paying full taxes on the property. And somehow I imagine if I ran a non-profit organization that devoted most (if not all) of its money to paying its management and building new fundraising centers, I'd find myself in a wee bit of trouble with the IRS. Yet churches get by with these things as though it's business as usual.

The most lampoonable examples of this are the Church of Scientology and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon church); two "religions" that 99% of humanity can agree are obviously made up entirely by their founders for the express purpose of duping the weak-minded into forking over their cash, valuables, and social status. But when you dig deeper, how is the CoS requiring you to pay your way to higher ranks any different than the Southern Baptist Association's demand that you "tithe" part of your earnings to the church? In case any of you have seen Star Trek V: The Final Fronteir, let me remind you of Kirk's most famous quote from that film:
"What does God need with a Starship?"
What does God need with a Starship indeed? And what does he need with United States Dollars? Nothing, that's what. Your pastors/bishops/rabbis/televangelists/E-Meter maids/Pat Robertson, however, can put that money to great use buying themselves new gold-laced vestments and yachts.

Step 2: Arrest religious leaders who abuse their position for political or monetary gain.
I've covered the "monetary gain" part pretty thoroughly above, so I'll focus on the "political" part here. Put simply, it should be illegal for religious organizations, especially if they insist on calling themselves "non-profit" and being given tax breaks out the wazoo, to officially endorse political candidates...oh wait, it is. Yet they do it anyways. Maybe not by passing out "McCain/Palin '08" buttons during the sermon (in return for a nominal fee, of course), but they do it. I can't tell you how many churches I've driven past with signs that subtly (or not-so-subtly) endorse the Republican party as the party that "supports Christianity." And all of the FUD about Obama being a Muslim? Yeah, something tells me that probably originated in the Bible belt, coming from the mouths of pastors. Because who but religious zealots should give two shits if he's a Muslim or not? As long as he keeps his religion out of his policies - which he does - I don't care if he believes in the ancient Norse gods.

(For the record, Obama is NOT a Muslim, nor has he ever been. And OF COURSE he's a born US citizen, you kind of have to be to run for President. Props to McCain for taking on some of these misconceptions among his base Friday night, and boo to dumbass Palin for stoking the flames of hate.)

Step 3: Shut down repeat and particularly egregious offenders.
I kind of hate to say it, but the government should step in and shut down the more obvious scams like the CoS and the Mormon church, after a thorough bi-partisan review of course. The reason is obvious: pyramid scams are illegal, and the CoS and those like it are nothing more than pyramid scams. I'm not the first to suggest it; the Church of Scientology is actually already in hot water throughout the rest of the world. Maybe this would make other churches that lie further down the "obvious scam" list sit up, take notice, and knock it off. Okay, probably not, but it's worth a shot.

A key part of the government's job is to protect people from those who would exploit them; and indeed we have no problem with the government coming down on cults, scammers, slavers, and sub-prime mortgage lenders. What then, if you'll excuse the horrible pun, makes mega-churches so sacred? There's a quote attributed to Anthony Campbell, "[A] cult is a religion which you happen to dislike." What do the Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, etc. so quick to call out Scientology but so remarkably slow to find fault with themselves have to say to make themselves seem any better? Because I thought "I was here first" and "we have more friends" went out the window as reasonable defenses when you entered middle school.

And to the politicians so afraid to do anything about these issues: remember, it's the government's job to do what's right, what's in the best interest of the poeple, even if it isn't what's popular. Not just to get re-elected to another 6 years of passing earmarks and piddling away tax dollars on tax breaks to Tom Cruise.

Free at last, free at last.

2008-10-10T23:03:00.003-04:00

So as I'm sure some of you know (I say that as if anyone is actually reading this), I'm a pretty avid supporter of Linux, but have run into my fair share of issues with it over the years. Most notably, my desktop's X-Fi sound card suffers from painfully poor driver support, and my laptops' wireless cards are a parade of unsupported failure (Braodcom 4308 and Atheros 5418). But I'm happy to say I now run Ubuntu 8.04.1 side-by-side with XP x64 on my desktop, and 8.04.1 and 8.10 Beta2 exclusively on my Gateway 7422GX and ThinkPad T61, respectively. I'm still on Vista on my cobbled-together "extra" desktop, but I'll be wiping it clean tomorrow.

The most significant advancement is that v4.1-RC2 of the OpenSound System, once thought to be deceased and deprecated by ALSA, supports stereo output out of my X-Fi with full hardware mixing, out of the box. Similarly, my Gateway's Broadcom wireless card works with two clicks in the restricted drivers manager (Jockey), and my ThinkPad's Atheros card is supported natively by the Ath9k driver as of 8.10 Beta 1.

I'll write more tomorrow, after I scrub the foul stench of Vista from this last holdout.

That's What HE Said!

2008-10-08T12:30:00.002-04:00

So a short political post to round out the morning:

McCain and his vacuous sock-puppet Palin, continuing in their fine traditions of making stuff up and misquoting people, have trotted out the old out-of-context quote from Obama that our troops in Afghanistan are "just air raiding villages and killing civilians." But even setting aside that the quote was taken completely out of context, it turns out that - surprise! - that's exactly what's happening.

As McCain's polls plummet and even the conservative pundits bemoan his fade into irrelevance, I have to wonder: will the Republican party ever pull its head of its collective ass?

A Brand New Day

2008-10-08T11:37:00.001-04:00

I've long been considering writing a real blog, and upon logging into my ancient Blogger account remembered that this one is still around. Rather than delete it and start over, I'm repurposing this one. The link to the notebook FAQ will hang around over there to the right at least for a while, if you're interested. Not sure why you would be since it's so old it it refers to "Vista" as "Longhorn" and the Go7x00 series as "coming soon" but there you have it. I might get around to updating it, but since "updating" at this point would mean "completely rewriting" it'll be a while if it does happen.

So on to the meat of the post: what is this "repurposing?" Well I'm going to throw my hat into the already overcrowded blogo...okay, I can't finish that word with a straight face, so I'll say "world of online psuedo-journalism" instead. So if you've got a few free minutes a day/week/however often I end up updating this thing, join me now, won't you, in an adventure into politics, science, technology, and games. Okay, mostly games.

If you notice any similarities, at least in layout and themes, to Shamus Young's Twenty Sided Tale, it's not a coincidence, as his is one of the only blogs I regularly read and I have no shame in admitting it's my major inspiration here. And if you don't already read his blog, you totally should, at least if you're anywhere near as interested in technology, gaming, and the politics around it all as I am.

Temporary Redirect

2006-05-02T18:00:00.000-04:00

As you may or may not have noticed, Blogger/Google decided that a comprehensive guide to notebook PC's constituted spam and deleted my blog. Until I can get that set back up here, here's the link to the thread at NoteookReview.com:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=25451

Thanks for bearing with me.
-Philip "lowlymarine" Kiser