Give Them Hell (and Geek Wednesday)

Before I let the cat out of the bag for Geek Wednesday, here's a question that many of us should be asking Congress as it continues to walllow...that is, I mean, conduct, its debate on the Iraq War: the biggest four-star cheese in the U.S. military says that there's no evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on US troops. Now Gen. Pace is presumably an expert on military affairs, and might know a little more about what's really going on than a dyslexic political figurehead or his criminally psychotic VP. So...who ya gonna believe, Congress?

And let's say that the General is misinformed: after all, he does lack the advantage of having a golden earpiece exclusively tuned to the Voice of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, Inc. What about it? Don't you end wars by negotiating with the enemy? Or is it remotely possible, would you say, that Gen. Pace's bosses don't really have an interest in ending the war? Could it be that Gen. Pace, being a soldier, sees all too clearly what the result would be of ramping this war up into a large-scale regional affair, with the possibility of nukes becoming involved? Could this be the General's motive for effectively spitting in the eye of his clueless Commanders-in-Chief?

Meanwhile, 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans!) openly support negotiation with Iran and Syria. Once again, we are at one of those turning point moments where we will have to enforce our common will, our common wisdom, on these ignorant tyrants who are ruling us. We will have to especially be all over Congress on this one, because like them or not, they represent our main chance at the restoration of democratic process here. We are in the midst of an escalation; we could be on the doorstep of an explosion whose devastation will threaten the lives of generations to come, including those of our kids now. Here's an idea; use Progress Report's tracking form to keep tabs on how your local Reps and Sens are leaning or voting on both issues, and give them hell. Call them, write them, stop them on the street next week when they're back home for their winter break. Just give them hell.

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Geek Wednesday

Hey you nutty people, it's pawprints time at Geek Wednesday. My human is busy trying to find a job, and you know how people can get whenever there's an economic crunch—first thing that gets downsized is the poor kitty's food, and I'm not interested in getting scaled down to 9-Lives anytime soon.

So what's going on in geekdom these days? Yeah, I know, the web is more cluttered than a 3-cat litter box with talk of DRM, now that both Steve and Bill are competing to sound the grassroots-iest note on DRM.

Not bad, but let's get real for a minute: is it possible that Norway put the fear of heavenly retribution into Steve's heart? Or that Uncle Bill is ready to take the DRM locks out of his brand new OS (see below)? Yeah, and the Japanese are going to slap some sanity into Dick Cheney's head. Oh, and I'm going on an all-vegan program starting tomorrow...

But, given some time and more of Uncle Bill's stumble-over-my-shoelaces act, Linux might just take command in the enterprise and a solid bite in the consumer area. In this series, e-Week columnist and uber-geek Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts a variant of Ubuntu Linux side-by-side on the same hardware with Vista, and comes to some interesting, though hardly surprising, conclusions. One of these, by the way, is, "an operating system -- any operating system -- is not the place for DRM." Guess which OS he's referring to?

Vaughan-Nichols reaches many of the same conclusions that we've already arrived at in our prior posts here—namely, that dedicated audio and video hardware equipped with plenty of its own juice (no borrowing system RAM allowed) is required to run Vista in either its midrange or advanced flavors; that most of us will have to lay out at least a grand to get the gear necessary to run Vista without going the upgrade route (which in Vista's case is instant heartburn); and in short, that for the expense now involved in going with Windows, you can actually save money on new hardware (and certainly on software) by taking Vaughan-Nichols' last recommendation:

I have to say that my last thought on both Vista and Linux is that if you really, really want the best possible graphics... get a Mac.

Now that laptop you see me peeking around above is the Intel-equipped MacBook, which costs around $1300 with a 2.0 GHz Core Duo 2 processor, 80GB hard drive, and 1GB of RAM. We reviewed it here, and after six weeks, we're still happy with it. The only thing we'd add is something that won't impact most people: if you're a longtime Mac user who still has a toe or two in OS9, you don't want an Intel machine yet, because the Intel Macs don't play at all with OS9 apps.

In fact, some veteran Mac users among you may want to keep a PPC machine around even after you've migrated to an Intel box. If you want to get a sweet deal on an old PPC machine but still get a robust warranty, try the TechRestore link at the top of the sidebar—they come highly recommended, and if you buy a machine through that link, you'll be helping us out, too. You could actually get a new Intel Mac AND a 1GHz PPC iBook for the price of a loaded Vista box that has everything it needs to get going and give you some hope of keeping going.

Incidentally, why is it that Vista can't reliably support an upgrade path? We hadn't even thought of that when we did our upgrade from Jaguar to Panther and then to Tiger on the Mac: it just worked. You stick the cd (or dvd, in the case of Tiger) into the drive, take a nap while it's installing, and then get back to your Mac geekery without a hiccup. But every discussion board and geek pundit we've read has warned against an XP to Vista upgrade, and recommended a "clean install" (that is, wipe the HD clean or install a new one, and then do your Vista installation). Hell, if you humans want to throw away your money, I've got one unemployed human and a distinct hatred of cheap cat food: you can toss away your bucks right here:

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And a final word about our stats: as you can see, 45% of our traffic still comes from IE (W3C released their most recent global usage stats today, here). Now I understand that a lot of you don't have any choice: you're at work or on somebody else's machine that only uses IE or sets it as the default browser. But for the rest of you, you'll need to make an effort to get yourself out of that IE dog pound. Firefox and Opera are still the best cross-platform alternatives (that is, you can run current versions of them in Mac, Linux, or Windows); and Safari is still the best choice on the Mac by itself.

And I don't want to hear anything out of you about you not being geeky enough or not having enough time to pick, install, and use a decent browser. How do you think lousy stuff gets to dominate the consumer marketplace everywhere? I'm betting you have time to compare brands when you're at Home Depot or the supermarket, and you carefully choose what is best, not necessarily what's right at hand or cheapest or that carries the most prominent advertising. Same with browsers and software: think of how  much you use it (I wish corporations did!), and how important it is to use what's safe, reliable, fast, and fun.

Firefox and Opera win easily on all those fronts over IE, so what do they lack? How about a few billion to spend on marketing? That's the only thing that distinguishes MS: massive amounts of $$$ to spend on advertising. Fools enough people to make them the monster in their industry. But it all comes back to the people who don't have enough time (or think they don't) to make sound purchasing or usage decisions. Bottom line is, it has nothing to do with geekdom, but with smart shopping, even if the products are "free" (IE is no more free than Vista is--you pay for it with the OS). You don't have to be a geek to make the right choice, you just need the information and the will to use it.

But advertisers today count on a lazy marketplace populated by consumers who imagine there's no time to decide freely, so why not just take what they're shouting about on TV the most and what's in the first aisle or in the window display (which is there by virtue of marketing $$$ as well). 

Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, Betamax was clearly the better product for clarity of display and playability over its competitor in the home multimedia market; VHS won because corporations put marketing $$$ behind it. Back in the mid 90's, IBM's OS/2 Warp was obviously a better, more reliable, faster, more user-friendly OS. But NT and Win 95 won out because of...you got it, Gates's marketing $$$ (and IBM's laziness and stupidity--they had the cash but not the marketing acumen). Gates had already bought or beaten the rest of his competition, so he hired Mick Jagger, staged Windows-mania in the media and at the storefronts, and won on the back of money and manufactured hype. That's how monopolies are made: you buy out competitors and potential competitors, and then you let the marketing and hype machines drive the rest of them into the grave.

That, fortunately, won't happen to Firefox, nor to Linux, because people are waking up to the fact that they have choices; and that they can choose a better OS, a better browser, a better government, if they care to ignore the advertising and find the one that really works for them.

So let me finally get serious with you people for a minute, because many of you are good to us animals—that is, you treat us as equals. Here's some advice, from a cat who's been around the block and seen your good and bad sides:

Strip off the masks. Tear down the facade that the collective built over your heart. Dissolve the scales of conditioning that are covering your eyes. Feel freely the light that has glowed within you since before you were born, and let your heart and your brain work as one, with no image or inhibition to disguise or enshroud them. Let your true and total self be felt by all and touched by some; and you will dance on the skull of evil, transcend the ghost of death, and continually expose and dispel the shades of deceit.

And always remember: meditate every day with your favorite animal beside you. Good luck, people.

Bushonomics: My Five Year Plan (and Geek Wednesday)

Boy, are you folks ever in for a treat today. You see, I've got this great new accountant that I hired for the upcoming tax season, you know. Southern guy, Yale-educated, smooth as the silver ink on a brand new $20 bill. He spent just a few minutes listening to my financial situation, took note of my considerable problems with both old and new debt, and came up with a foolproof plan to get me out and way ahead in just a few years.

Check this out, you'll probably learn something: he says if I can remain unemployed as I am now, while spending around 15 percent more than I have recently (he suggested I put most of it into wild vacations in foreign lands), and even go on a few lavish sprees with some well-heeled friends (I'll be footing the bill for those, but my accountant says it'll all come back to me eventually, like a hurricane windfall), give up sending the kids to college and make a firm commitment to living without health insurance or any other kind of insurance, for that matter—guess what—I can be debt-free and in the pink financially as early as 2010, definitely by 2012. My kids will be sent to special private schools where he says they'll get an education that will beat anything even the Ivy League could offer—said he wished this plan had been around before he went to Yale. He calls it "God's Five Year Plan" and says it's guaranteed to work. He added that he won't be around to see me make it to my economic promised land, because he's kind of riding into his own sunset in a couple of years, since he started his plan earlier than me; but he assured me that if I ever had any questions, all I had to do would be to look back at the little book he gave me with all the detail in writing, and I'd be set straight right away.

Best of all, I don't have to read the whole book at all: just the four-point plan on the first page, which has everything I'll need to know right there:

1. Spend more.
2. Give away your money to the richest guy in town. Use all your credit cards if you have to, to make it the biggest donation that you can make for him. He'll know what to do with it.
3. Don't get sick, and keep your kids at home.
4. Have faith.

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Beginning today, we are honoring The Occupation Project, the ongoing work of the Voices for Creative Nonviolence. These are the people who are going to help lead this nation out of its current darkness. Check out their blog and note carefully how they put sanity and justice above partisanship: yes, they worked McCain's office, but also Obama's and Hillary's. It is time the Democrats got more of this message, that they are not immune from criticism because they won some elections 3 months ago. In fact, the time to put the pressure on them has never been more immediate than it is now. So whether you're a rock star or a slick lady with a Lotto slogan, you need to be relentlessly reminded of one great American's words from over 150 years ago (check the sidebar to the right for complete texts):

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it...Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

Or, to put it another way: we should be humans first, and Democrats afterward.

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Geek Wednesday

It's getting pretty messy in the tech corporate pig pen—I mean there's more mud-slinging and ankle breaking going on than you'd expect to hear at the Scooter Libby gang-pluck (thanks again, Molly). It's all as regular a string of fumbles and malapropisms as the first half of the Super Bowl or a Bush-Biden debate. Let's try and round it up:

Uncle Bill's feelings were hurt, about a year after those pesky Apple ads featuring sleek Mac vs. portly PC debuted. Here's part of what he had to say:

"I don't know why [Apple is] acting like it's superior," the Microsoft boss told Newsweek. "Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it?"

Well, this week we found out what Bill was really spouting over, and it's a page out of his own book, which is why it's got to hurt twice as bad.

For Apple has suddenly revealed that it somehow forgot to upgrade iTunes to be compatible with Vista, even after it pointed out back in August that Vista was plagiarizing Apple design for its new OS. They say they were just too damned busy making peace with the Beatles. In fact, the Cupertino gang is urging poor PC users to beware: not only will iTunes not play with Vista, iPods may be corrupted by it.

Now, would you say that Apple is using its virtual monopoly on the music player market to kind of leverage (that is, break ankles) on poor little old MS? Is it possible that the Fruit Boys are scared enough to lay a smokescreen out in front of Vista while the last lines of Leopard are being written and tested? Could Apple be strapping on the same brass knuckles that Uncle Bill has used innumerable times in the past, with IE, antivirus software, WMP, xbox, and more? Has the sweet little fruity innovator from the Garage Band turned into a hairy and fanged corporate goon?

These guys are just like the Republicans in Washington: when they start talking like tear-stained, hard-done-by little swallowtails caught in the cathouse, with pushed-out lower lips muttering about honesty, then you just know the closet's bursting with skeletons and the septic tank's backing up fit to explode. This is a time for the rest of us to nuke some popcorn, hang plenty of flypaper, and watch the shit fly. The should be more fun than Prince's guitar hard-on at the SB halftime show.

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Geekdom 101: Gimping Out a PC

While the monoliths of the West duke it out, maybe some of us might be spending our time looking into Linux on the PC. As we've pointed out before, Linux is charging hard on the enterprise side (thanks largely to SuSE, Red Hat and Larry Ellison); and it's inching along on the consumer side as well, mostly spurred by the burgeoning popularity of Ubuntu. I've been working more and more on my Linux partition on the Wintel box here at home, and while it has a ways to go to catch up with the likes of Mac OS X for usability, compatibility, and cool, it sure shows a world of promise.

First off, it runs great on fairly meager hardware. I have it going just fine on a 5-year old Gateway 1.4GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM. I have Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Thunderbird Mail installed and working to handle online chores; Google Picasa for photo and image management; Open Office for word processing and spreadsheets; and the remarkable GIMP graphics editor for beating Photoshop at its own game. If you've got an old or slow PC or can only afford the $100 it takes to buy a used Dell P3 on eBay, then Linux is your OS; and once you get used to it, you may never look back.

So let's say you're like most people, though: you've got a PC that's been around a while, it runs XP or Win2k passably, but you'd like a little variety in your geek life, but can't afford the bucks for Apple hardware or the new MS software ($300 for your average version of Vista; $400 for the "new" Office 2007—and Uncle Bill's whining that no one can afford Apple's Intel machines).

Go to Ubuntu's site and take your pick: you can freely order a cd version of the "Dapper Drake" (6.06, the late-model version), or you can cheaply ($10) buy a dvd or cd of "Edgy Eft" (6.10, the brand new release of Ubuntu Linux). If you have a broadband connection, you can of course download either and get started immediately.

If you go the download route, what you'll have next is an ISO file which you'll need to copy to a disk. Ubuntu sagely recommends that you first verify the download's patency by running an MD5 checksum on it. The instructions for that are here. However, if you download from an official Ubuntu mirror and are working on an uncorrupted, uninfected copy of XP or Win2k, then you'll probably be able to skip this step.

Next, you need to actually burn the ISO image onto a cd. For that, you need a utility that does such a job. Ubuntu recommends the Infrarecorder application, which can be quickly downloaded here. If you're doing this in Windows, as is most likely, simply download the top file in the list at that page, the 32-bit windows file.

Once you've run the install on Infrarecorder, you'll have an icon for it on your desktop. Stick a blank cd in your PC, wait for Windows to recognize it's there (if it prompts you with any helpful hints, tell it to shut up and go away), and then open the icon for Infrarecorder. There, select Actions from the menu and "Burn Image" from the drop-down. Select your ISO file from its location (probably the desktop), and click "Open" then "OK". Soon you'll have a live Ubuntu Linux cd.

Once that's done, it's time to get it up and running. We'll pick up that thread next time, but if you'd like to race ahead and get going fast, here's a nice guide with pictures and screenshots to help you along through the partitioning and installation process. The tricky part that remains is a partitioning of your hard drive that leaves your Windows installation intact and available. My experience with the Ubuntu partitioning utility has been positive; that said, anything can and will happen if you're not prepared. If you're running Windows in particular without a backup plan or system in place, you're walking a razor's edge barefoot every day. So if you need to start there, begin with an investigation of Win-tel backup systems, and return to this Linux idea another day.

Geek Wednesday: A New Vista Yawns

Starting...theWOW ...Wow... oww... ow... ow... owgh...

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that dull echo you faintly heard Monday night and Tuesday morning was the sound of the Vista release parties—half a billion dollars' worth of marketing glitz met with relative silence—where, according to the geek press, one might have found more reporters than customers attending. On the east coast, in New York:

the launch itself was a quiet affair in a midtown CompUSA store (the chain had organized midnight events at several of its stores), where it seemed like there were just as many reporters and camera crews as there were customers hoping to take home a copy of Vista.

...And even where Steve Ballmer was gracing the retail stage, the indifference was only cloaked by the presence of reporters:

The event, ostensibly aimed at showing the retail excitement around the new products, drew a crush of reporters.

That made the considerably smaller number of store customers at 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday nearly as popular as Ballmer, with video crews lining up to get their thoughts on the new software.

C-Net concludes its coverage of the big event with two warnings: Don't buy Vista for the security; and Don't delete XP. Wow.

Here at the Donohue Camp for Unemployed Geeks, I spent a few minutes Monday night removing XP from my MacBook. Honest, I didn't even realize the timing of what I was doing until much later. It's just that I wasn't using those precious 12GB of hard drive space, and finally decided to re-run Boot Camp and remove the partition (that's all you have to do to get rid of a Windows install on a Mac, by the way: it takes about five minutes and the Mac then restarts like a rocket, as if it had just thrown a gorilla off its shoulder). Then I saw the C-Net poll featured in this graphic. My only question about those results is: "where are the Linux users represented?" (for more on that, see below).



So much for Vista, except for...um...one more thing. About three months from now, or even less, Mac OS X Leopard arrives to take another bite out of XP/Vista; after a year in which sales of the Intel Macs helped shoot the value of Apple stock well beyond Dell's.

Curiously, the only question mark for Apple's future is another really stupid, Martha Stewart-style piece of corporate greed. The Apple stock dating scandal is yet another example of how wealth can turn smart people into absolute idiots. If Steve & Co. survive that bit of folly, their products and their geekery will only grow in popularity, even--gasp--in the enterprise realm, where MS dominance is already being weakened by another UNIX-based OS, Oracle-Red Hat. Gartner is already calling this one for Larry Ellison, and the uncertainty over Vista will only make it easier for Oracle. Your average enterprise desktop lacks standalone video, sound, and sufficient RAM to run Vista, and the cash required to upgrade thousands of boxes to accommodate Vista will be nixed by most corporate bean counters.

But people like having MS-friendly hardware and software, and Red Hat might not be the best solution for many. Enter the Mac Mini running off an xserver network, with windows XP, UNIX compatibility, PERL, Apache, Java, you name it, the Mac can now run it in 64-bit mode on Intel-powered hardware.

I know it sounds kooky, and I don't pretend to claim that Apple will take significant market share away from MS next year or the year after that. But 5 years down the line, Red Hat and Apple combined could account for 40-50 per cent of the enterprise IT base; and Microsoft resorting to its old market dominance tricks will only accelerate that trend.

The amazing piece to this Vista release is how Gates and his cronies could have missed the obvious, which is that this OS will further endanger their stranglehold on IT in the enterprise realm. But in corporate America, it is as in corporate government: dissent is considered treason, even—or especially—if it contains truth that will help the company (or the republic). Thus, executive row lines everyone up and delivers the edict: you will aggressively market this impactful new product (note to all corporate dweebs: "impactful" is NOT a word); and if you have any questions, there's the door and here's your pink slip.

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Finally for this Geek Wednesday, a few more gems from my Webby Award reviewing pile.

Activism Down Under: This is a terrific site with a focus, spirit, and research base that makes it the equal of any MoveOn or AfterDowningStreet on this hemisphere. I've now got it bookmarked, and I would recommend you do too.

The Global Dialogue Center is another activism site, but with a more highbrow image. However, once you get into the guts of this site, you'll find audio and text content from the likes of John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man), Dr. Masaru Emoto (The Hidden Messages in Water), and a memorial to Viktor Frankl.

I also went through a few science sites, and this one stood out: BBC's Science of Memory. Take the test yourself and see how you do; you'll learn a lot in the process.

And if you'd like to learn about population and living standard trends on a global, 3-D matrix that offers a lot of perspective, try Google's Gapminder tool.

Now as long as I'm not painfully employed for the moment, I'll probably have lots of time to survey more Webby entrants, so there may well be more to come of these.

One last note to all our readers: January brought us 2,000 unique visitors and some 14,000 pageviews (one of these Geek Wednesdays, we may take some time to explain how to accurately interpret web usage statistics, which is a wildly twisted and abused metric, especially in the corporate realm). For us, that's a really solid month, and I'd like to once more thank you folks for coming by and reading our stuff. I'd probably do this on a deserted island with not a soul to see it, because I'm just that kind of nuts about writing, but knowing that you're all out there makes it a lot more fun.

The Courage of Retreat (and Geek Wednesday)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, a few notes on the war and the maniacs running it from the safe distance of half a world away (I recall the Roger Waters song, "The Bravery of Being Out of Range").

First, click the graphic to watch Stewart and Oliver in another gut-busting moment of insight. Stewart reveals Rumsfeld in the same corporate-speak that we were discussing yesterday; and Oliver beautifully tilts the rhetoric onto its tail, thereby exposing the depravity of the delusion that has fueled this insanity.

Next, Code Pink delivers this firm and clear message on the vapid reality of the Iraq Study Group (click the link to add your voice to theirs):

In the 1968 presidential campaign Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam, but would not tell anyone exactly he would do it. In as many words this came to be known as his "secret plan." Yet, after his election the war still dragged on for another five years with 20,000 more American deaths and 100,000 wounded.

Now along comes the Iraq Study Group supposedly with a plan for extricating ourselves from the strategic disaster in Iraq, if not the moral one. And let us be not deceived, their proposals will make no meaningful difference whatsoever in really bringing the troops home. John Murtha, who so far has only spoken out for redeployment (something short of immediate withdrawal), has said he believes they represent no actual change of policy. They are just kicking the can of casualties down the road and trying to fool us into thinking they might in fact leave.

Every military historian and tactician worth his salt knows that retreat takes more courage than does attack. Think of those moments in your own life where you had to step back rather than move aggressively forward: didn't it test every ounce of energy and resolve that you had? The ancient Chinese knew this very well—just read Sun Tzu, or the 33rd Hexagram of the I Ching:

RETREAT. Success. In what is small, perseverance furthers.

Conditions are such that the hostile forces favored by the time are advancing. In this case retreat is the right course, and it is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength.

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Geek Wednesday

Before we get to the goofy, meaningless stuff, our thoughts go out to the family of C-Net editor James Kim, and our hopes that he is found alive and safe. I have had abundant praise for the geek press in general, and the quality of C-Net's and Kim's work is what distinguishes the geek media and places it so far above the network MSM for the quality of its journalism and its unflinching adherence to the search for truth (if you'd like an example, just read their story on Bush's privacy oversight commission). Let's all hope that Mr. Kim is returned safe and sound to his family.


Can anyone tell me what exactly is wrong with Google these days? Have Page and Brin been spending time at Redmond, or is this what happens when your stock price goes over $500 per share? Whatever, Blogger Beta is a piece of Microsoft-style ordure: I've been struggling with failed uploads, vapid error messages, image corruption, and generally batty, turgid behavior on Blogger's part since I moved to the new beta version. We are currently working on a migration to Movable Type, which isn't as easy as you might think. We've got our own Nearly Redmond Nick on the case, so I am confident of a good result.

But I had kind of gotten used to Google beta that worked as well or better than Microsoft production releases, so I'm a little confused at the performance of Blogger these days. If you've had any wacky experiences with Blogger Beta, post them in the comments, and maybe the boys from Stanford will take note and shake a leg.

Ars Technica has a roundup of system upgrades and purchase possibilities, just in time for the holiday (oops, sorry BillO—I mean, Xmas) shopping season.
But it all may have been changed by the release of AMD's new 65nm chip. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for PCs sporting this new processor. And as always, the thing to do in buying expensive tech gear is to wait until after the New Year for the best deals on the greatest gadgets.

Why does Apple shrink from surveys that show its products appeal to us older folks? Could it be that we live in a culture so obsessed with youth and its imitation that to be merely statistically associated with the over-50 set is an abomination? Get real, Steve: the baby-boomers constitute the prime market of the decade, and the one to come. Of course us oldsters favor Apple hardware and Mac OS X: we've lived long enough to tell the soil from the shit.

And let's not leave out our buddy Gates (no, not the one the Senate confirmed today for the post-Rummy Defense job): Vista is out and no one cares. One of the last things I did at my AIG desktop before I got booted out of there was to run the Vista upgrade advisor on a Dell 2.4 GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and onboard Intel video, and I found out that Vista wouldn't play nicely. For one thing, I didn't have enough disk space on the box: Vista needs 15GB (compare that to 3 GB for Mac OS X Tiger), and Vista demands a video card with 128MB of VRAM and a dedicated sound card.

But surely the upgrade to Office 2007 is worth a play? Um...no—not according to geeks who know better.

Finally, I'm back in the saddle reviewing sites for the next Webby Awards. I'll be offering some impressions of this year's batch of sites in the coming weeks. The early returns are telling me that some things just don't change: Flash media continues to be overused, abused, and played into the ground on the web. Maybe they should have a category for "worst web design". There would be lots of candidates: PC World found 25 of them. I'll be picking some out of my Webby pile, and you're welcome to add your suggestions to the comments.

Geek Wednesday: Pig-Station 3

Before I let the cat out of the bag with Geek Wednesday, I'd like to recount an incident from my workday. I was checking the news headlines online and saw an item that made me want to reminisce with someone who could appreciate my feelings at the moment. I looked up and saw all the kids at their desks (the average age of our geeks is about 25), and knew it would be pointless with them. Then I saw one old-timer like me, and I called over to him: "Bill, did you hear about Altman? I remember as a teenager thinking that M*A*S*H was the greatest film ever made! Damn, I bet it's still good...Donald Sutherland was the Johnny Depp of his era...made you laugh just by walking into the frame...and Altman was the perfect director for him and Gould..."

This guy deserves the praise that is following him into the realm of the formless: he and his work were truly unique.

Geek Wednesday

Psychotic. You people have been sucked, brain-first, into an evolutionary vortex. Fighting, shooting, pushing, shoving, cursing one another...to get your hands on a machine that plays games.

Oh, hi everybody: it's Night the Cat here, with another edition of Geek Wednesday. Now mind you, I live in a psychotherapist's house, and I have not seen anything approaching the madness that you people will descend to in getting your gear. You're really, really scary when you get like this, do you know?

And guess where it all starts—with corporations and their advertising. Let's review the story that came out of Boston: the gamers themselves actually started out in good order—one of them organized a numbered list of people as they arrived to await the opening. Names would be called in groups, and order would be maintained. But then the store management (the store is owned by SONY) said that the list was useless and basically said, resign yourself to chaos, 'cause that's what you'll get.

So guess what they got? Yep, chaos, just as the corporate talking head predicted—and probably wanted. Sure, get it on the evening news, let the psychotic lust for the machine that does sim-warfare with brain-melting, addictive verisimilitude leap through the airwaves, infecting everyone it touches. This is the goal, the most devout wish for consummation that any corporate marketing dweeb can imagine: call it demonic viral marketing. Order is as repugnant to these people as the English language is to your President. Chaos fills the cash register.

Therefore, by the time the mayhem had started and the police arrived, the SONY marketers' ardent dream had come true: the crowd had turned into a mob. The cops made the store honor the original list that the gamers had devised. The whole story, and others even worse, may be found here.

Let's see if we can find any sanity in geekdom this week. Ah...no, never mind, not here: the Zune is incompatible with Vista. But in the name of Bast, you gotta love Microsoft: they're just so incredibly, doggedly incompetent that they make you laugh. Maybe that's why we keep giving MS our money, because they're so funny. Maybe that's also why Pelosi says impeachment is off the table: when Bush is gone, what will Stewart, Colbert, and Letterman have left to lampoon?

Another sign of lunacy: my human, the psychotherapist, calls it "emotional lability." Are MS and Novell friends (last week they were) or enemies, sniping at one another like a couple of Middle Eastern despots? If you care, then maybe you're just as certifiable as Gates and the whole lot of those corporate dogs...

All right, there's got to be some note of sanity in geekdom this week...let's see what Apple's up to, they're good for a little common sense most of the time, not to mention great products. OH NOOOOO, they're having a Black Friday event!!!!!

I give up—humans, you're on your own. As Roger Waters would say*:

And when you lose control, you'll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.
And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone,
Dragged down by the stone.

____________________________________

*Pink Floyd fans and lovers of great music: don't forget to bookmark Daily Rev (or use the links in the sidebar to add us to your RSS reader), because in January, 2007, we'll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of Animals, with reviews, insights, reminiscences from the band, and sound files of this epochal event in modern musical history.

Geek Wednesday: zzzzzzZune

Hey everybody, it's Night the Cat here with Geek Wednesday. My human thinks he might have finally found a job with—get this—a credit card company. Well, if you knew this guy like I do, you'd be laughing too.

Anyway, now that it looks like the tuna will be rolling in as usual here, let me show you my new Zuna. Heh, heh, had you fooled there for a second, didn't I? Well, if you're nuts (and if you're a human, you are) or just like to have the latest thing, they're $250 for 30GB—exact same price as the iPod, wouldn't you know. Microsoft, they're sooo creative.

So let's move on to the big geek questions of the week. What happened to the Diebold voting machine fix that we've been warning you about here? Well, one theory is that the GOP took a dive. Or it could be that these guys are so incompetent that they can't even cheat correctly. Or maybe they rigged the boxes to swing an average of five per cent and they lost most of their races by more than that.

My theory is that the machines rebelled. Hey, you've seen it happen; and as our buddy Nearly Redmond Nick has said, "sometimes I swear these machines have souls." But not this kind of soul.

Speaking of soul, here's the Woz reminiscing about the early days of Apple and PC's.

Even today, a week before the formal release of the candy-coated anti-operating system, there are still a few geeks out there who can make some elegant hardware and software. If you've got a Mac, check out The Omni Group. There's nothing these people do that isn't cool. The OmniWeb browser is like a blueblood Firefox; it delivers web pages with blazing speed and a cool grace. Here's a screen capture. The browser's now on sale for ten bucks, and it's worth every penny and more. If you've got a Mac, you won't regret having OmniWeb in your dock.



While you're there, check out their other stuff, especially Omnigraffle, which has all the features and functions of Visio but with a fun, user-friendly whiteboard interface; and OmniOutliner, which is an essential tool for writers, artists, and organizers. We got the Productivity Bundle here, which includes all of the above plus their Disksweeper utility. It's another great reason for using a Mac: the third-party stuff is just more creative, more useful, more fun, and in the end, cheaper, than Windoze garbage.

Don't have a Mac yet? Think they're too expensive? Wait till you see what you'll have to spend on hardware to run Vista (which could explain why Dell gobbled up Alienware). But there's lots of cool new features to it, like the "black screen of near-death" which the C-Net reviewers talked about (link above). After you're done looking at those wonderful new things from the anti-OS, check out this video. Then remember that for $600 you can get a kickass desktop machine that sports an Intel Core Duo processor and an operating system that really works (keep an eye out—the Core Duo 2's may be coming to the Mac Mini very soon).


Or you can go out on Black Friday and get a $99 laptop with a lame Celeron processor and a world of future headaches and expense. Your choice. See ya, humans.

__________________________

Well done, puss. The tuna's in the bowl and black's my favorite color. I've been thinking about what to tell people at the office as I prepare to leave after 3 years. Being a psychotherapist, I suppose it's natural to think foremost of the dysfunctional characters who inhabit the top positions there, and what they need to know in order to round off their sharp edges and recover some natural sense of humanity. Here are some notes I made for a message to the CIO:

Act from your center. Tolerate mistakes—those of others, but especially your own. Build consensus by example. Accord with yourself first, and others will effortlessly find common ground beside you.

Remember that technology is made by and for humans; robots are still the stuff of science fiction movies and search algorithms. Zero and One do not write the code; people do. Remind your colleagues of this, and especially, keep reminding yourself.

Above all, nurture humility. There is no quality so necessary, or so absent, among corporate executives today. But in order to nurture humility, you must first learn to recognize it—that is, to feel it within you. It is the affirmation of the individual in the context of the universal. It is the self-realization that finds its worth through a perspective on the whole; but it is never self-abasement.

I can only imagine how far you feel from it now, absorbed as you are in fear, hatred, paranoia, and aggrandizement. But none of us is ever far from humility. In a single moment's effort; with the instant it takes to demolish the black wall you've erected between your heart and its Source; in the second needed to call clearly through the cloud of ego for the help you need from the invisible realm—the great delusion is penetrated and humility is, in that moment, achieved.

When you find that moment within yourself, you will also discover the natural qualities of leadership that you have always thought are distant and separate from you. Learn to guide yourself, and you will become a leader to others.