Tech Paladin

I’m really digging Boxee, a free, open-source media center program. Basically, it’s a piece of software that turns your computer into a TV by aggregating online videos and such from places like YouTube, the Onion Online (which is hilarious, by the way), ComedyCentral.com, and other places that have lots of awesome free content. It also plays your own local videos, no matter what format they happen to have been encoded in. All you have to do it hook up the computer to a TV, and you’ve got a pretty compelling living room entertainment center.

I have it on my media center/gaming PC and it’s pretty wonderful. It loads at boot, so I only have to look at Windows XP’s ugly mug for a second or two before it opens. I have access to my ripped DVDs and quite a few intertubes worth of content, and the user interface is quite nice too. Alas, it has a pretty silly logo:

Well, it is open-source! [rimshot] In all seriousness, there are some quirks and things you have to do for yourself, such as figure out a way to control it from your couch. That was actually one of the biggest issues I had with it for a while. I would lug over my big ol’ 104-key keyboard, which sort of breaks you out of the illusion that you’re not actually sitting in front of a Windows box. Luckily, there’s a free Boxee app that basically turns your iPhone into a remote control! Problem solved.

Beyond that, I really only have only good things to say. It’s obviously not for your grandparents as it requires creating on online account and manually installing and configuring it, but anyone who can use a web browser and Word can accomplish it all easily enough. And did I mention it’s free?

This is a multi-part series about my journey on the road to becoming a real PC owner and user. As a Mac guy tired of being left behind when it came to new games, both in terms of software and hardware, I finally decided to take the plunge and build a gaming PC.

Time for the basics. At its most basic hardware level, a computer needs a processor so it can actually do anything, some RAM so that the processor can process more than a few megabytes at a time, a hard drive to store data on, a motherboard to let that stuff talk to one another, a power supply to fuel everything, and a case to dump it all inside.

On top of this, of course, I’d need an optical drive to actually install the operating system for the first time (and probably all the subsequent times in the future as well if you’re using Windows). Since this was going to be a gaming rig, my new computer would also require a beefy graphics card. As I wasn’t interested in stringing ethernet cables all over the place, that meant I’d need a wireless card to connect it to my home network. Happily enough, I already had a keyboard, mouse, and speakers that functioned perfectly well, so I kept those. Finally, I’d need an actual operating system to install. Necessity dictated that some version of Windows was the only choice for games, and I happen to have been lucky enough to already have several licenses of various versions of Windows handy.

There were a couple of restrictions I imposed on myself to guide my search before I actually started surfing for parts. First of all, the case itself would have to fit on the second shelf of my little rolly-caddy thing (hey, what would you call it?) and function normally when laid horizontally:

This put some serious cramps on size, but that’s okay since most of the larger cases tend to look more like car accidents due to all their flashing lights and caution-tape-like aesthetic anyway.

Second, I wanted this thing to be cheap. Not knowing how much to spend on the screen, I decided to shoot for under $500 for the actual computer itself. If you think about it, I sort of cheated, because of course the screen would be extra and would most likely tack on several hundred dollars, but for some reason I wanted to focus on the price of the actual computer itself, so I did. For the record, that’s a full computer consisting of a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive, optical drive, beefy graphics card, and wireless card, and in order to keep below that budget, I’d have to spend an average of $55 or less on each component. Time to hit the internet!

Next up: Shopping time!

I bought my current laptop, a now two-year-old 17″ MacBook Pro, for 3D animation and gaming. I figured I’d need its capacious screen for Maya’s enormous and bloated user interface, and that the extra size would allow the machine to squeeze out more power from its X1600 graphics card, which was pretty good in November of 2006.

As usually happens in life, things didn’t work out quite the way I’d planned. First of all, I became more and more frustrated with Maya and eventually ditched it for the far more space-efficient modo, substantially reducing the necessity of not only the machine’s 17″ built-in screen, but also the 24″ Dell display I had purchased for more space in hopes of satiating the screen real-estate monster that is Maya. Not only did I never manage to do so, but when I tossed Maya, I discovered that such an enormous palette really wasn’t necessary for modo, so I sold the screen when cash was tight. The size of the built-in screen had repercussions, too: though at 6.8 pounds, my computer is exceptionally light for a 17″ laptop, that’s cold comfort when I have to carry it around all day, and I must admit that I long for a pound or two shaved off. Even my bag is complaining, as the shoulder strap has begun to tear under the weight.

Second of all, I neglected to understand the rapidity of graphics-related innovation. A decade of Mac fanaticism and a decidedly software-centric focus had left me relatively sheltered from the hardware innovation on the PC side of things, and while I considered my laptop’s midrange X1600 relatively sufficient, the rest of the world was just waiting to laugh at me. In six months, I discovered that I could no longer run games on their highest settings. Within the year, I was down to medium settings for the new ones. A month ago, my fiancée bought me S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky — the sequel to one of my favorite games ever. Unhappily enough, the thing wouldn’t even run on the lowest settings without looking like junk and playing like it derived some perverse pleasure from viewing blue screens of death.

I begged a friend to let me play on his computer, and he generously agreed, but something felt not right about imposing on him. Eventually enough was enough. I started hitting Newegg and shopping for parts, more out of fantasy than any sort of plan, but my jaw dropped when I saw how much prices have fallen in the last year. The time seemed right; I resolved to build my own gaming PC. T’was a night of online shopping.

Stay tuned for more. Next up: plans!

The Microsoft of today is the Apple of yesteryear; directionless, adrift, unpopular, deserted by the technical elite, and home to mostly shitty software. Microsoft produces a thousand different products with no unified vision or purpose, and most of them bleed money. Like the Apple of the 1990s, research labs belch forth an unending stream of interesting but irrelevant tech-demo-products that suck away funds and talent from the popular products and the money-makers.

Windows Live Writer, for example. I’ve heard it’s quite good, but why isn’t it bundled with Vista or XP? Since you have to go out and find it to use it, its audience will be very small, dooming it to near-irrelevance in the elephantine-huge scheme of things. It’s also got no real business model behind it save a tenuous link to Windows Live, which itself is free and relies on ads to support itself. Soooooo… what’s the point? Has the product group in charge of Windows Live Writer actually produced anything valuable to Microsoft? If WLW were bundled with Vista or Office or sold for a profit, then it could begin to contribute value to the company. As is, it does nothing. It’s subsidized freeware with a small audience.

And what about Windows Life Photo Gallery? How does it differ from the Windows (non-Live) Photo Gallery that comes bundled with Vista? If you already uses one, what’s the benefit of the other? How does it enhance Microsoft’s bottom line or contribute to its technological prowess or enhance existing products?

For that matter, why does Windows Live itself exist? Microsoft isn’t any good at search and doesn’t make money from it, so Live Search is a dud. Windows Live Hotmail likewise doesn’t earn the company anything, and it’s a constant poster boy for poor software design among nerds.

And what about PhotoSynth? Sure it makes cool panoramas, but where’s the money for it coming from, and what revenus it it bringing in? None! Nada! Zippo!

This stuff is exactly what Apple did during the mid-90s. Its research labs produced plenty of amusing curios, tech demos that never materialized into successful products, and free add-ons for the Mac OS that did nothing but suck resources away from the money-making products. The Newton, for example, was hailed by its few users, but at the time it was a failing product that merely drained Apple’s coffers. An adjunct to the Newton was the eMate, a low-cost laptop with a lilliputian stylus-driven monochrome touchscreen. It was unclear at the time why Apple was producing such products when its Macintosh line was stagnating and public opinion was turning against them, and it was years before Jobs returned to trim the fat.

This is what Microsoft must do: trim the fat. Reduce the bloat, concentrate on Windows and Office, and produce only software that can either be sold for a profit, or comes bundled with the operating system to enhance its value. Apple did this and turned around its fortunes in a year or two. So can Microsoft.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked (in the role of Windows IT guy) to fix printing problems, install various basic PDF utilities and disinfect malware-infested computers, I’d have enough money to buy all the Macs needed to banish these routine issues for good.

Seriously! It’s 2008 and Windows still doesn’t include PDF support or anti-virus software out of the box,¹ and keeping printers working reliably is still a nightmare.

1. let alone not needing it to begin with [↩]

So a particularly embarrassing email written by Bill Gates and made public during the company’s antitrust investigations was just put all over the internet, and boy is it a doozy! Here goes:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

If you happen to head to the original page, you’ll probably notice that there are one hundred forty thousand million comments. Seems BillyG is pretty popular!

Are you an IT person? No? Well, pretend that was a yes for a moment. I’d like to take a few moments to talk about Microsoft Windows as it relates to IT. The particular issue I’ve been having at the moment that out of the box, WIndows XP, well, just can’t do anything. You have to install some crufty third-party software to do extremely basic things, such as:

• Disk image creation
• Disk image mounting and management
• Hard disk cloning
• PDF reading
• PDF creation
• PDF editing (watermarking, rotation, etc)
• The capacity to install the operating system on a USB-connected external hard drive

I actually lied a little on that last one. You see, that last one simply isn’t possible at all! The situation was this: I had a small form-factor PC that needed a 2.5″ IDE hard drive. So I figured, with my Mac-accustomed brain, “I’ll stick its blank hard drive into an external enclosure, plug that into a PC, then run Windows setup from there, setting the external hard drive as the target of the install.”

No dice. Now first of all, the procedure that I just illustrated works in the Mac world. It works. I can install OS X on any sort of connected hard drive; via USB, via Firewire, from one Mac directly to another’s hard drive over Firewire, over the network via netboot—any way I like with whatever infrastructure I have available. So it was somewhat frustrating when Windows stubbornly refused to install. It would see the drive; I could even partition and format the drive, but install Windows? Nope, nada. Sadly, I’m pretty used to this sort of cantankerous hocus-pocus, so I started thinking about how I could actually get around the problem to accomplish the goal.

I had a mad combination of external enclosures that supported different drive standards and some of which didn’t work on some computers, and I also had several types of drives; 2 SATA and 1 IDE. Here’s what I wound up doing: connecting one of the 2.5″ SATA drives to some PC’s internal SATA connector, thus temporarily making it an internal drive. I then installed Windows on it. When I was done, I removed the drive, reconnected the PC’s original 3.5″ internal drive, and booted it up. Then I put the 2.5″ SATA drive into an external enclosure and attached that to the PC, and then did the same with a 2.5″ IDE drive. Now, as luck would refuse to have it, the IDE drive was being used for backup, so couldn’t just clone the SATA drive onto the IDE one unless I didn’t care much about that backup. So I copied its backup onto the SATA drive, giving me a SATA drive with a Windows install on it sitting alongside a copy of the backup, and an IDE drive with the original backup. The next step was to clone the SATA drive with everything on it onto the IDE drive, whereupon I deleted the backup from the IDE drive (didn’t need it there) and deleted Windows from the SATA drive (don’t need Windows on a backup disk). Finally (finally!), I put the IDE drive into the computer and…

DISK BOOT FAILURE

…and so on and so on and so on. The nightmare continued throughout the whole day, and in the end, I still didn’t manage to get the PC up and running. In the end, I ended up attaching an internal optical drive to the motherboard’s ATA connector¹ and an AC to molex adapter, and then I installed Windows from there finally I went through the refreshingly usual nonsense of hunting down drivers, and even then it took about 3 hours to get the LAN drivers working for some still unknown reason. Thank goodness it was only two days of lost time.

By contrast, here’s what the process would look like if this situation had involved Macs:

1. Boot the Mac into Firewire Target Mode and connect it to another Mac.
2. Pop an install DVD into the connected Mac and use it to install Mac OS X on the Firewire Target Mode computer.

It takes about an hour. I’m serious; deadly serious. I’ve done this process literally dozens of times, and it’s alarming how much more time-efficient is is than swapping drives, cracking open cases, modifying ATA cables to fit, or fiddling and diddling with Windows. Even the installation of Mac OS X takes about half the time that installing Windows does; the copy of Windows I installed just this morning took an hour and 22 minutes, and that’s before I installed the drivers. By contrast, The version of OS X I installed about a week ago that needed no such post-install mumbo-jumbo completed in more like 40 minutes.

This is not my first IT job. Based on my experiences here at CLIQK Digital as well as those as my previous job, I can confidently say that Macs running Mac OS X are significantly more robust than either Windows PCs, or even those very same Macs when they’re running Windows. The Macs in my last workplace were a dream to support compared to the Dell PCs we had which routinely fell over and died as a matter of course. I can’t even begin to express how many times I spent a whole morning attacking a Windows problem so unique in its randomness that it surprised the entire department.

As an IT person, my primary goal is to make the machines I supports as robust and fault-tolerant as possible, for the simple and selfish reason that it makes my job easier. When PCs get overrun with malware or confused by floppy disks, it wastes my time fixing problems that don’t ever happen in Mac-land and prevents me from accomplishing other tasks, which often consist of far more meaningful things like updating important websites, creating policies for new computer use trends, training staff in new software, or transitioning to more efficient back-end systems. Having to install Acrobat Reader for the zillionth time or re-re-explain that opening random email attachments will result in lost time for everyone just adds to my already-full plate of technical tasks.

The intertubes are filled with stories of organizations that overcame their institutional inertia and saved trucktons of cash by switching to Macs or Linux. I believe it. Microsoft’s IT-centric technologies like Exchange and Active Directory are hellishly complex and notoriously unreliable without full-time support staffs (staves?) and backup servers up the wazoo. This is to say nothing of the tens of thousands of dollars routinely shelled out for outrageous per-user licensing fees for these products. And it’s not just lost money, it’s lost time; in my current workplace, we don’t even have the “luxury” of all of our computers being from one brand, so all of them need different drivers to run and different keystrokes to enter the BIOS, which, as you may be able to imagine, wastes. a. lot. of. time. Bottom line: Windows is expensive and unreliable; the very bane of IT. The sooner it’s replaced by something—anything—easier to maintain, the better.

1. Also, for some reason, this motherboard ATA connector actually used pin 20, so I had to poke a hole in my ATA cable to get the damn thing to fit, go figure. [↩]

I was reading Daniel Eran’s (of RoughlyDrafted) latest article on the history of Microsoft Office and a great point was brought up: despite Microsoft’s bluster about working with others, it routinely stabs its partners in the back when convenient. The general message is this: if Microsoft partners with you or buys your technology, it’s because they want to kill you. There weren’t many examples given in the article, though, so I tried to think of as many as I could. The results were startling.

Seattle Computer Products
IBM was working on the PC, but it needed an operating system. Originally, IBM looked into licensing CP/M from Seattle Computer Products, but it was too expensive. When Microsoft conned IBM into trusting it to provide an operating system for the PC, Bill Gates needed to somehow acquire an operating system they could convince IBM was good enough. He found a CP/M look-alike named QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) sold by the very same Seattle Computer Products. Bill Gates bought it for $25,000 by concealing his relationship with IBM, and licensed it to IBM under the name PC-DOS.^[1]

IBM
Microsoft’s PC-DOS license agreement with IBM did not preclude Microsoft from licensing PC-DOS to other companies as well, so that’s what they did, doling out expensive licenses to IBM’s primary competitors and getting rich in the process. Microsoft make a fortune selling out IBM.

Apple
As Daniel Eran explained, Microsoft partnered with Apple in 1981 to deliver office software for the Macintosh, then stole technical secrets from Apple over the next few years in order to build their own knock-off graphical computing environment called Windows 1.0. They then ported all of their Mac software to the PC, essentially giving the keys to the castle to Apple’s then-biggest rival, IBM.

IBM again
Microsoft partnered with IBM again to work on a joint project: a new, next-generation operating system called OS/2. After some public-relations blustering, Microsoft promptly ditched IBM and OS/2, stealing technology from it to incorporate into the still-unusable Windows (now at version 2.0).

All the other computer manufacturers
Aware that the PC clone manufacturers like Packard-Bell and Gateway were at each other’s throats, Microsoft signed exclusive licensing agreements with all of them to provide them with Windows 3.1, which was years ahead of the PC-DOS (now re-branded MS-DOS) it had previously licensed them. Microsoft then used this leverage to bully all of them into bundling its other software by using the threat of revoking their licenses or raising prices to put them at a disadvantage to their competitors.

Mosiac
Netscape was an outgrowth of NCSA Mosiac and was a popular web browser during the mid 90s. Microsoft licensed Mosiac, re-branding it “Internet Explorer 1.0″, and used its leverage with Apple and the PC clone manufacturers as well as its control of Windows to put Internet Explorer everywhere for free. Microsoft also added proprietary extensions to IE, ensuring that websites made for IE wouldn’t render properly on Netscape. Netscape couldn’t compete with the IE juggernaut as more and more web pages were coded for IE, and IE became the dominant web browser.

PlaysForSure
Microsoft licensed its PlaysForSure DRM technology to various partners like Yahoo! for use in their online music stores, which Microsoft hoped would challenge Apple’s iTunes Music Store juggernaut. When it became obvious that this plan was not succeeding, Microsoft built its own media player, the Zune^[2]. The Zune uses used a different DRM scheme, making it incompatible with all the songs sold by Microsoft’s music partners. Plays for sure? Really?

Apple again
After pledging to deliver new versions of Microsoft Office through 2010, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit announced that Office 2008 would ship without compatibility for VBA macros, which many businesses depend on. The lack of macro support effectively kills Mac Office in the enterprise, and forces IT departments that use macros to look into unstable open-source software or move to Windows Office.

That’s a lot of murderousness. You might wonder, “How the heck can Microsoft get away with this!?!” THe answer is that they usually don’t. The majority of the time, they get sued and lose, but their loss amounts to pocket change compared to their profits on the illegal deals themselves. For example, Microsoft paid 1 million to SCP in response to complaints about concealing its relationship with IBM to buy QDOS on the cheap. But in the long run, did it matter? Does anyone remember SCP? Who got the better deal? Microsoft knows this, and they consistently abuse the law because they know their legal losses will easily be eclipsed by the obscene profits they’ll make by avoiding legality.

^[1]
I find it terribly disheartening that the majority of the world’s computers at one time ran an operating system originally named “Quick and dirty.”

^[2]
Actually, the Zune is just a re-branded Toshiba Gigabeat; Microsoft did next to no hardware engineering of its own on the Zune.

People follow personal philosophies all the time, and many companies have corporate philosophies as well. Holding true to a core set of beliefs that inform and guide your decisions is a sure way to not only infuse your life or company with a sense of purpose, but also to attract those who agree with your philosophy.

This is why so many Mac and Linux users are rabidly fanatical about their operating system choices: they’ve found their ideal philosophical computing environments. Those who cherish digital freedom and love to tinker and build literally have a paradise in Linux, while the ones who appreciate the elegance of a well-designed whole and want maximum efficiency find their own heaven with Mac OS X.

Windows, on the other hand, has nothing of the sort. It’s a purposeless, directionless blob of features bound to the corporate aspiration to remain top dog forever.

The original mac had a goal: bring computing to the masses with brilliant interfaces that matched the way people thought. Linux too began with an idea: that computer users should be free to alter, modify, improve, and redistribute any and all of their software free of charge in order to further computing for all. These ideas didn’t exist in the tech world before their pioneers brought them into existence through technical skill and sheer force of will.

Windows began with none of this. Its birth was a reaction to the Macintosh; an attempt to duplicate Apple’s success for Microsoft’s own profit once it saw that graphical computing was the future. Still, it took Microsoft a full 6 years after the Macintosh was released in 1984 to deliver a version of Windows (3.1) that anyone could use without retching. Five years later, despite the fact that Windows 95 was still playing catch-up to the Macintosh, it skyrocketed into dominance as a result of Microsoft’s shady deals with computer manufacturers and brilliant FUD-based marketing.

Windows became popular not because it was consciously selected over its competitors, but because Microsoft managed to position it as the only operating system available to PC manufacturers. When people bought PCs (typically because they were cheaper than Macs, not because they were measurably superior), they automatically got Windows and learned how to use it, unaware of superior alternatives. For those aware of noted alternatives, Windows was “good enough” or considered a small price to pay for customizable hardware, a larger software library, and good legacy support.

But what happens as “good enough” no longer is? What about when the bases are all covered and people start to realize that Mac OS X or Linux offer faster runners? Once people begin to become aware of alternatives, the ones who enjoy tinkering will gradually peel away towards Linux, and the ones who prefer great visual design and maximum efficiency will gravitate towards the Mac. Once the geeky, the practical, the creative, and the efficiency-conscious are gone, who does that leave for Windows?

I firmly believe that there is no place in the future for Windows. Architecturally, Windows is purposeless; it’s utterly devoid of any sort of comprehensive philosophy that might excite or attract choosy computer users. That will basically leave the technological luddites, people for whom Windows is dramatically unsuited due to viruses, malware, and endless driver conflicts and blue screens of death. A platform that caters to the lowest common denominator—especially one created by a company noted time and time again for its shoddy workmanship and draconian practices—is a platform doomed to mediocrity. With escalating security woes, over-complicated technology, ever-increasing restrictions, and a stagnant user base, the Windows ecosystem will begin to rot from the inside out. As users inevitably become more technically proficient and more informed about the choices and alternatives, are any of them really going to stick with Windows?

I got a pretty standard assignment today: a faculty member’s computer is on the fritz, so take a look and replace the machine if you can’t fix it on-site. Fair enough; I went down and took the requisite look. She had a Dell Optiplex something something 26-something, and on the dim screen was a blinking DOS command prompt. I tried typing on the keyboard, but no input was entered. Restarting did nothing, nor did fiddling with the BIOS settings. Eventually, I just grabbed the machine and replaced it with another one while Jesus took a look himself.

By the time I returned to the office, Jesus was happily tapping away at the now-operational Dell. I had figured that I had overlooked something silly, so I asked him what it was he did to fix it. Grinning, he held up a jet-black floppy disk and said, “Here’s the criminal. It was in the floppy drive.”

I was a bit bemused. “What’s so bad about a floppy in the floppy drive?” I asked naively. This was Windows we were talking about, after all.

“In the BIOS, it was set to boot off the floppy drive before the hard drive,” Jesus replied.

“But… is there an operating system on the floppy?”

“No…”

“Soo… why would it get stuck on the floppy if there’s no operating system to boot from, then?” I retorted, fully aware that attempting to make Windows conform to logic was an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, I had to try; my inner Techno-Paladin demanded it.

“Well,” Jesus said, “Sometimes it’ll get stuck on the floppy drive if it’s unformatted or something.”

“But in that case, wouldn’t this have been a routine occurrence back in the days of floppies when everybody used them for everything? I don’t recall an epidemic of stuck machines trying to boot off operating system-less floppies.”

“It could have been the floppy drive or there might be corrupt data on the disk,” Jesus replied, invoking the classic Windows user’s voodoo explanation for a problem with no obvious cause.

“Let’s see what’s on it, then,” I suggested. We popped into the now-functioning computer, and it showed without complaint, displaying two normal-looking Word documents. So much for the data corruption or bad drive theories.

Sighing, I returned to the faculty member’s office and replaced the replacement computer with the original.

This brings me to my next point: the whole song-and-dance took a little under three hours–three hours that I could have spent doing other work I was assigned. The uselessness of this particular random Windows-related problem wasted 180 minutes of my life. I can accomplish a lot in 180 minutes. Or, I can use that same amount of time to goof off or read the news. Windows prevented me from doing these things with its random problem. In short, it wasted my time. Wasting time is not something that a fast machine typically does.

So why then do PC users constantly claim that PCs are faster than Macs? All the evidence I’ve collected while working with them for 8 hours a day suggests that PCs wear out and get bogged down faster then Macs left in the same condition, and experience more idiotic time-wasting snags by far.

The truth is that when your average PC enthusiast says, “PCs are faster than Macs,” he really means, “I can build a PC from parts I bought on the cheap from Newegg and wind up with substantially faster hardware for less than you paid for your Mac.”

And this is true. But it also falls into the classic PC user pitfall: that of thinking too much about hardware and not enough about software. Once this tricked-out gaming rig is assembled, it’s time for some software. Windows is a must for gaming, but who wants to pay for it? Most PC enthusiasts steal Windows, and the cracking process often results in background daemons that block Windows’ built-in anti-piracy tools from working. That’s a performance hit.

Then come the drivers for all that fancy custom hardware. Windows drivers are typically encrusted with trial software, unnecessary system tray utilities, and replacements for existing components of Windows (I’m looking at you, video and WLAN drivers) that work fine. After installing all this stuff without manually cleaning out all the junkware that hitched a ride, performance is lowered significantly.

Then comes anti-virus and anti-spyware. Generally, the more you pay, the crappier it’ll be and the more resources it’ll take up, but all anti-malware software that runs in the background takes up valuable system resources. That’s another performance hit right there.

Next, it’s time to download all the other utilities and miscellaneous pieces of software that make Windows more functional. First comes Winrar, which integrates into the Windows shell with a standard install, stealing valuable system resources. After that is Acrobat reader, which is so bloated it’s not even funny. Acrobat slaughters idle processor time, so there’s another performance hit for you. Needing to play pirated games that come in ISO and .bin/cue files, these PC power users typically grab Daemon Tools to mount those disk images as virtual CDs. This, as usual, bogs down the system.

Firefox comes at some point, but because of the design of Windows and its Registry, each application installed slows down the system a teensy-weensy bit. The Registry is just a big database; as it grows in size, it takes longer for anything to access a given piece of data, since the whole registry is just one big file. Were it logically split into many small files–say, one per application like Mac OS X’s preferences system, then having more preferences would result in no slowdown whatsoever, since any random preference file that needed to be accessed would be the same size as it was last time. Basically, the more Windows is used, and the more stuff you install, the slower it gets. Big time. Ask any Windows user how fast their Windows is after a year or two; most reinstall it from scratch every 18 to 24 months just to keep the whole thing from collapsing from the weight of its own bloat. And before Vista, reinstalling the OS erases all the user data! Faster, indeed.

This isn’t even including the truly random problems that plague windows as a result of its system administrator-centric design, terrible security model, poor privilege separation, and necessity to run on arbitrary hardware. Windows just falls down and dies regularly–I see it every day. In the long term, Windows is just fucking slow, and that’s a fact of life.

That leaves games. Yeah, Windows plays lots and lots of them, and Mac OS X doesn’t. That’s true. And if you’re a hardcore gamer, you ignore the problems and game away. That leaves your computer as a big fancy game console. Hmm. What about the times when you need to use it as something else? Good luck!

So yeah, your processor is faster than mine. But yours is churning away on protecting you from viruses and spyware that your operating system is too stupid not to automatically install and coughing and wheezing to access the humongous Registry every five seconds, while mine is keeping my system snappy when I have 13 windows and 8 applications open (as it is at the moment).

Remind me again how PCs are faster?