Microsoft Office

What needs to happen for Linux to make it on the desktop

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , ,

I saw an editorial at Freshmeat that argued that there’s actually too much software for Linux. And you know what? It has a point.
I’m sure some people will be taken aback by that. The number of titles that run under Windows must number into six digits, and it’s hard to walk into a computer store and buy Linux software.

But I agree with his argument, or at least most of it. Back in my Amiga days, the first thing people used to ask me was, “What, do you not like software?” Then I asked why they felt the need to have their choice of 10 different word processors, especially when they’d just buy pirate Microsoft Word or WordPerfect anyway. (Let’s face it: Large numbers of people chose PCs in the early 90s over superior architectures was because they could pirate software from work. Not everyone. Maybe not even the majority. But a lot.) I argued that one competent software title in each category I needed was all I wanted or needed. And for the most part, the Amiga had that, and the software was usually cheaper than the Mac or PC equivalent.

Linux is the new Amiga. Mozilla is a far better Web browser than IE, and OpenOffice provides most of the functionality of Microsoft Office XP–it provides more functionality than most people use, and while it doesn’t always load the most complex MS Office documents correctly, it does a much better job of opening slightly corrupt documents and most people don’t create very complex documents anyway. But let’s face it: Its biggest problem is it takes an eternity to load no matter how fast your computer is. If it would load faster, people would be very happy with it.

But there is nothing that provides an equivalent to a simple database like Access or Filemaker. I know, they’re toys, and MySQL is far more powerful. But end users like dumb, brain-dead databases with clicky GUI interfaces on them that they can migrate to once they realize a spreadsheet isn’t intended to do what they’re trying to do with it. Everyone’s first spreadsheet is Excel. Then someday they realize Excel wasn’t intended to do what they’re using it for. But you don’t instantly dive into Oracle. You need something in between, and Linux doesn’t really have anything for that niche.

People are constantly asking me about a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux as well. I stumbled across one. Its name is GINF. Yes, another stupid recursive-acronym name. GINF stands for “GINF is not Frontpage.” How helpful. What’s wrong with a descriptive name like Webpage-edit?

More importantly, what was the first non-game application that caught your fancy? For most people I know, it was Print Shop, or one of the many knockoffs of Print Shop. People love to give and receive greeting cards, and when they can pick their own fonts and graphics and write their own messages, they love it even more. Not having to drive to the store and fork over $3.95 is just a bonus. Most IT professionals have no use for Print Shop, but Linux’s lack of alternatives in that department is hurting it.

Take a computer with a CPU on the brink of obsolesence, a so-so video chipset, 128 megs of RAM and the smallest hard drive on the market, preload Linux on it along with a fast word processor that works (AbiWord, or OpenOffice Writer, except it’s not fast), a nice e-mail client/PIM (Evolution), a nice Web browser (Mozilla), and a Print Shop equivalent (bzzzt!), and a couple of card games (check Freshmeat) and you’d have a computer for the masses.

The masses do not need 385 text editors. Sysadmin types will war over vi and emacs until the end of time; one or two simple text-mode editors as alternatives will suffice, and one or two equivalents of Notepad for X will suffice.

Linux’s day will eventually arrive regardless, if only because Microsoft is learning what every monopolist eventually learns: Predatory pricing stops working once you corner the market. Then you have to raise prices or find new markets. Eventually you run out of worthwhile markets. So in order to sustain growth, you have to raise prices. Microsoft is running out of markets, so it’s going to have to raise prices. Then it will be vulnerable again, just like Apple and CP/M were vulnerable to Microsoft because their offerings cost more than Microsoft was willing to charge. And, as Microsoft showed Netscape, you can’t undercut free.

But that day will arrive sooner if it doesn’t take a week to figure out the name of the Linux equivalent of Notepad because there are 385 icons that vaguely resemble a notepad and most of them have meaningless names.

Houston is Microsoft’s problem: Alternatives to Microsoft Office

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Houston had a problem. Now it’s Microsoft’s problem.
You see, Microsoft threatened Houston with the same threat they’ve been rattling around a lot of other places. Sign a multi-million-dollar, automatic-upgrade deal for Office and other Microsoft software, or face an audit. When you’re the only game in town and you suspect people have played fast and loose with your licensing agreement, you can afford to do that.

Except the Texans stared the bully down. When Microsoft said Houston needed to cough up some bucks for office software, Houston said fine, they’d buy it from someone else.

And now that Houston is using SimDesk instead of Microsoft Office, it’s making headlines.

The city of Largo, Florida, which runs itself on a thin-client environment based on Linux and KDE, is a PR coup for Linux. But Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States. And this is turning into a PR nightmare for Microsoft–now Chicago, the third-most populous city, is also looking at SimDesk.

For less than half the money, the cities get ease of use, cross-platform compatibility, centralized offsite file storage, and longer hardware life. SimDesk stands to save Houston far more than the $7 million on paper.

But SimDesk isn’t the only other game in town. WordPerfect is still hanging on, one of the few survivors of the era when there were a dozen or more word processors, spreadsheets, and databases available for the PC. It’s still solid and capable today, and it’s a good choice if you’re looking to go a fairly traditional route. StarOffice is cheaper but still capable. The 602Suite (a.k.a. 602office) is either free or inexpensive, depending on the feature set you want.

Unfortunately, the highly regarded Gobe Productive is off the market, and efforts to raise the money to purchase the source code for the purpose of releasing it as GPL appear to have quietly failed. The good news is that the declination seem to indicate Gobe expects to have some kind of future.

If you want free, go with OpenOffice, which is StarOffice’s free, open-source twin brother. And if you’re willing to dith Office and Windows, you can run KDE and KOffice, or a variety of Gnome productivity apps, such as Evolution, AbiWord, and Gnumeric.

Most of the alternatives don’t offer all the functionality that Office includes, but few people use more than about 20% of Office’s functionality anyway. The alternatives have all of the essentials down.

The main thing tying most companies and organizations to Microsoft Office file format compatibility. An obscure piece of software called ConversionsPlus takes care of that problem. I’ve used ConversionsPlus to convert literally hundreds of files at a time to and from Microsoft Office format, and the process only takes a few minutes.

Disadvantages of Windows 3.1

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

Note: I wrote this way back in 2003, so my advice as far as replacing Windows 3.1 is a bit dated, but the strengths and weaknesses remain valid. If you’re thinking of a new computer, please don’t run anything older than Windows 7.

I found a search in my log analysis for “disadvantages of windows 3.1,” which I found interesting. I can talk about that.
Someone asked for it, and I aim to please. So let’s head down memory lane.

In all fairness, let’s talk about what’s good about it first. The main thing is that it’ll run–or at least load and execute–on pretty much anything, as long as it’s old. It’s anything but ideal on a 286, but it’ll execute. And on a 386DX, plain old Windows 3.1 is reasonably zippy if you cut down the number of fonts it has, only load a few applications, and install 16 MB of RAM in it. On a 486 or a low-end Pentium, it’s plenty fast.

Windows 3.1 freeware doesn’t have much in the way of strings attached–no need to worry about spyware. That’s a good thing.

Fine. Now for the hatchet job. To be completely honest, I didn’t like Windows 3.1 in 1993 and 1994 when it was what everyone was using. I ran it for a few months and then went out and bought OS/2 and never looked back. So you’re getting a perspective from someone who’s been willing for a long, long time to run anything other than Windows 3.1. But I’ll do my best to be fair.

You may have trouble running it on newer hardware. Let’s face it, it came on the market 10 years ago and not many people use it anymore. There’s not a lot of demand for drivers, so it can be hard to find a modern video card with Windows 3.1 drivers. And not only does Windows 3.1 have spotty capability with new hardware, it’s very limited in its ability to take advantage of anything made since 1995 or so.

More importantly, modern operating systems give full pre-emptive multitasking, or in the case of Windows 95/98/ME, at least something that vaguely resembles it. Under pre-emptive multitasking, the OS decides what applications get CPU time and how much. In Win3.1’s cooperative multitasking, the apps just have a knock-down, drag-out fight for CPU time. If you send an application to the background, it’ll get some work done, but not as much as it would under a newer OS.

My biggest beef with Windows 3.1 was its crashes. If you just run an app or maybe two all the time, it works reasonably well. But I’m the kind of guy who always has three or four or twelve apps open–the first multitasking systems I ever used, Unix and AmigaOS, had no problem doing that–and if you try that with Windows 3.1 for very long, you’ll see a lot of blue screens.

I wasn’t a fan of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager interface. I’m not in love with the Explorer interface of newer versions either, but it’s easier to use and faster to navigate than Progman was.

And although its software selection is pretty good, I guess Windows 3.1 now falls victim to the same argument I heard time and time again against my preferred alternative operating systems: What, don’t you like software? Sometimes Windows 3.1’s available offerings are adequate and sometimes they aren’t: Microsoft Office 6.0 is certainly adequate for 99% of all people’s needs. If you dig deep enough (I found a copy here), you can find Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows 3.1. It’s not the best browser in the world but it’s the best one you’ll find for Win3.1 and it may be good enough for you. Sticking with Windows 3.1 limits you to a much smaller selection of software than newer operating systems. At this point, ironically, even Linux, which was once notorious for its lack of software that Joe Sixpack would want to use, now has a better selection of mainstream software than Windows 3.1 had.

At this point in time it’s hard to recommend Windows 3.1. PCs capable of running Windows 95 adequately are very, very cheap (I see 133 MHz Pentium computers sell for $35 when people are willing to mess with them, and a 66 MHz 486 will run Windows 95 decently and just about anyone who works in the computer field can find one of those to give you for free if you ask nicely enough), and although support for Windows 95 is starting to dry up, it’s much easier to find hardware and software compatible with Win95 than it is for Windows 3.1. Windows 98 is better still, but I definitely recommend a 200 MHz Pentium and more than 32 MB of RAM for Win98. Still, that’s doable.

And if you’re thinking that Windows 3.1 is adequate for you and you’re not totally strapped for cash, you might want to give the $199 Wal-Mart PCs running Lindows a look. Lindows is basically Linux with a pretty graphical user interface, and it’s perfectly fine for word processing, web browsing and e-mail. The budget Wal-Mart PC is hardly a barn burner, but it’s much faster than any computer you’re likely to be running Windows 3.1 on, and since it will be much newer, the hardware itself will also be a lot more reliable. Double check with your ISP before you buy one to make sure you can get connected (they’re probably getting used to that question by now), but if you can get connected, think about it.

Why I dislike Microsoft

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Windows 2000,” I muttered as one of my computers fired up so my girlfriend could use it. “Must mean something about the number of bugs that’ll be discovered tomorrow.”
She told me she liked Windows and asked me why I hated Microsoft so much.

It’s been a while since I thought about that. She speculated that I was annoyed that Bill Gates is smarter than me. (Which he probably is, but aside from a couple more books in print, it hasn’t gotten him anything I don’t have that I want.) There’s more to it than that.

I’m still annoyed about the foundation Microsoft built its evil empire upon. In the ’70s, Microsoft was a languages company, and they specialized in the language Basic. Microsoft Basic wasn’t the best Basic on the market, but it was the standard. And when IBM decided it wanted to enter the personal computer market, IBM wanted Microsoft Basic because nobody would take them seriously if they didn’t. So they started talking to Microsoft.

IBM also wanted the CP/M operating system. CP/M wasn’t the best operating system either, but it was the standard. IBM was getting ready to negotiate with Gary Kildall, owner of Digital Research and primary author of the OS, and ran into snags. Gates’ account was that Kildall went flying and kept the IBM suits waiting and then refused to work with them. More likely, the free-spirited and rebellious Kildall didn’t want to sign all the NDAs IBM wanted him to sign.

Microsoft was, at the time, a CP/M subcontractor. Microsoft sold a plug-in board for Apple II computers that made them CP/M-compatible. So IBM approached Microsoft about re-selling CP/M. Microsoft couldn’t do it. And that bothered Gates.

But another Microsoft employee had a friend named Tim Patterson. Tim Patterson was an employee of Seattle Computer Products, a company that sold an 8086-based personal computer similar to the computer IBM was developing. CP/M was designed for computers based on the earlier 8080 and 8085 CPUs. Patterson, tired of waiting for a version of CP/M for the 8086, cloned it.

So Seattle Computer Products had something IBM wanted, and Microsoft was the only one who knew it. So Microsoft worked out a secret deal. For $50,000, they got Patterson and his operating system, which they then licensed to IBM. Patterson’s operating system became PC DOS 1.0.

Back in the mid-1990s, PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak wrote something curious about this operating system. He said he knew of an easter egg present in CP/M in the late 1970s that caused Kildall’s name and a copyright notice to be printed. Very early versions (presumably before the 1.0 release) of DOS had this same easter egg. This of course screams copyright violation.

Copyright violation or none, Kildall was enraged the first time he saw DOS 1.0 because it was little more than a second-rate copy of his life’s work. And while Digital Research easily could have taken on Microsoft (it was the bigger company at the time), the company didn’t stand a prayer in court against the mighty IBM. So the three companies made some secret deals. The big winner was Microsoft, who got to keep its (possibly illegal) operating system.

Digital Research eventually released CP/M-86, but since IBM sold CP/M-86 for $240 and DOS for $60, it’s easy to see which one gained marketshare, especially since the two systems weren’t completely compatible. Digital Research even added multiuser and multitasking abilities to it, but they were ignored. In 1988, DR-DOS was released. It was nearly 100% compatible with MS-DOS, faster, less expensive, and had more features. Microsoft strong-armed computer manufacturers into not using it and even put cryptic error messages in Windows to discourage the end users who had purchased DR-DOS as an upgrade from using it. During 1992, DR-DOS lost nearly 90% of its marketshare, declining from $15.5 million in sales in the first quarter to just $1.4 million in the fourth quarter.

Digital Research atrophied away and was eventually bought out by Novell in 1991. Novell, although the larger company, fared no better in the DOS battle. They released Novell DOS 7, based on DR-DOS, in 1993, but it was mostly ignored. Novell pulled it from the market within months. Novell eventually sold the remnants of Digital Research to Caldera Inc., who created a spinoff company with the primary purpose of suing Microsoft for predatory behavior that locked a potential competitor out of the marketplace.

Caldera and Microsoft settled out of court in January 2000. The exact terms were never disclosed.

Interestingly, even though it was its partnership with IBM that protected Microsoft from the wrath of Gary Kildall in 1981, Microsoft didn’t hesitate to backstab IBM when it got the chance. By 1982, clones of IBM’s PC were beginning to appear on the market. Microsoft sold the companies MS-DOS, and even developed a custom version of Basic for them that worked around a ROM compatibility issue. While there was nothing illegal about turning around and selling DOS to its partner’s competitors, it’s certainly nobody’s idea of a thank-you.

Microsoft’s predatory behavior in the 1980s and early ’90s wasn’t limited to DOS. History is littered with other operating systems that tried to take on DOS and Windows and lost: GeoWorks. BeOS. OS/2. GeoWorks was an early GUI programmed in assembly language by a bunch of former videogame programmers. It was lightning fast and multitasked, even on 10 MHz XTs and 286s. It was the most successful of the bunch in getting OEM deals, but you’ve probably never heard of it. OS/2 was a superfast and stable 32-bit operating system that ran DOS and Windows software as well as its own, a lot like Windows NT. By Gates’ own admission it was better than anything Microsoft had in the 1990s. But it never really took off, partly because of IBM’s terrible marketing, but partly because Microsoft’s strong-arm tactics kept even IBM’s PC division from shipping PCs with it much of the time. BeOS was a completely new operating system, written from scratch, that was highly regarded for its speed. It never got off the ground because Microsoft completely locked it out of new computer bundles.

Microsoft used its leverage in operating systems to help it gain ground in applications as well. In the 1980s, the market-leading spreadsheet was Lotus 1-2-3. There was an alleged saying inside Microsoft’s DOS development group: DOS ain’t done ’til Lotus won’t run. Each new DOS revision, from version 3 onward, broke third-party applications. Lotus 1-2-3, although once highly regarded, is a noncontender in today’s marketplace.

Once Windows came into being, things only got worse. Microsoft’s treatment of Netscape was deplorable. For all intents and purposes, Microsoft had a monopoly on operating systems by 1996, and Netscape had a monopoly on Web browsers. Netscape was a commercial product, sold in retail stores for about $40, but most of its distribution came through ISPs, who bought it at a reduced rate and provided it to their subscribers. Students could use it for free. Since the Web was becoming a killer app, Netscape had a booming business. Microsoft saw this as a threat to its Windows franchise, since Netscape ran well not only on Windows, but also on the Mac, OS/2 and on a number of flavors of Unix. So Microsoft started bunding Internet Explorer with Windows and offering it as a free download for those who already had Windows, or had an operating system other than Windows, such as Mac OS. In other industries, this is called tying or dumping, and it’s illegal. Netscape, once the darling of Wall Street, was bought for pennies on the dollar by AOL, and AOL-Time Warner is still trying to figure out what to do with it. Once Microsoft attained a monopoly on Web browsers, innovation in that space stopped. Internet Explorer has gotten a little bit faster and more standards compliant since IE4, but Microsoft hasn’t put any innovation in the browser for five years. Want popup blocking or tabs? You won’t find either in IE. All of the innovation in that space has come in browsers with a tiny piece of the market.

One could argue that consumers now get Web browsers for free, where they didn’t before. Except every new computer came with a Web browser, and most ISPs provided a browser when you signed up. So there were lots of ways to get a Web browser for free in the mid-’90s.

And when it came to the excesses of the dotcom era, Netscape was among the worst. But whether Netscape could have kept up its perks given its business model is irrelevant when a predator comes in and overnight renders unsalable the product that accounts for 90% of your revenue.

Allegations popped up again after Windows 95’s release that Win95 sabotoged competitors’ office software, such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Within a couple of years, Microsoft Office was a virtual monopoly, with Lotus SmartSuite existing almost exclusively as a budget throw-in with new PCs and WordPerfect Office being slightly more common on new PCs and an also-ran in the marketplace. It’s been five years since any compelling new feature has appeared in Microsoft Office. The most glaring example of this is spam filtering. Innovative e-mail clients today have some form of automatic spam filtering, either present or in development. Outlook doesn’t. “Microsoft Innovation” today means cartoon characters telling you how to indent paragraphs.

And the pricing hasn’t really come down either. When office suites first appeared in 1994, they cost around $500. A complete, non-upgrade retail copy of Microsoft Office XP still costs about $500.

Pricing hasn’t come down on Windows either. In the early 90s, the DOS/Windows bundle cost PC manufacturers about $75. Today, Windows XP Home costs PC manufacturers about $100. The justification is that Windows XP Home is more stable and has more features than Windows 3.1. Of course, the Pentium 4 is faster and less buggy than the original Pentium of 1994, but it costs a lot less. Neither chip can touch Windows’ 85% profit margin.

And when Microsoft wasn’t busy sabotaging competitors’ apps, it was raiding its personnel. Microsoft’s only really big rival in the languages business in the ’80s and early ’90s was Borland, a company founded by the flambouyant Phillippe Kahn. Gates had a nasty habit of raiding Borland’s staff and picking off their stars. It didn’t go both ways. If a Microsoft employee defected, the employee could expect a lawsuit.

Well, Kahn decided to play the game once. He warmed up to a Microsoft staffer whose talents he believed weren’t being fully utilized. The employee didn’t want to jump ship because Microsoft would sue him. Kahn said fine, let Microsoft sue, and Borland would pay whatever was necessary. So he defected. As expected, Gates was enraged and Microsoft sued.

Soon afterward, Kahn and his new hire were in an airport when a Hare Krishna solicited a donation. Kahn handed him $100 on the spot and told him there was a whole lot more in it for him if he’d deliver a message to Bill Gates: “Phillippe just gave us $100 for hot food because he suspects after this lawsuit, your employees are going to need it.”

He delivered the message. Gates wasn’t amused.

It was a bold, brash move. And I think it was pretty darn funny too. But smart? Not really. Borland’s glory days were pretty much over 10 years ago. For every star Borland could lure away, Microsoft could lure away three. Borland’s still in business today, which makes it fairly unique among companies that have taken on Microsoft head-on, but only after several reorganizations and major asset selloffs.

The only notable company that’s taken on Microsoft in the marketplace directly and won has been Intuit, the makers of Quicken. Microsoft even gave away its Quicken competitor, Microsoft Money, for a time, a la Internet Explorer, in an effort to gain market share. When that failed, Microsoft bought Intuit outright. The FTC stepped in and axed the deal.

The thanks Microsoft has given the world for making it the world’s largest software company has been to sell buggy software and do everything it could to force companies and individuals to buy upgrades every couple of years, even when existing software is adequate for the task. While hardware manufacturers scrape for tiny margins, Microsoft enjoys 85% profit margins on its product. But Microsoft mostly sits on its cash, or uses it to buy companies or products since it has a terrible track record of coming up with ideas on its own. The company has never paid dividends, so it’s not even all that much of a friend to its own investors.

For me, the question isn’t why I dislike Microsoft. The question for me is why Microsoft has any friends left.

Building a budget PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

As I procrastinated by bouncing between projects, I put together a low-budget PC for a friend of a friend. It’s very much a retro PC, but I think it’s useful, especially considering the budget I had to work with. Read more

A different Monday, but not much better…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , ,

Moves at work continue, but unfortunately the electrical contractors we have are as incompetent as ever, and of course IT takes the brunt of the attack when computers don’t work. They don’t care if it’s an electrical problem or not; all they know is their computer doesn’t work, and of course it’s always IT’s fault if the computer doesn’t work. And with one person to keep 300 desktop PCs in tip-top shape, I usually can’t be up there and have the problem solved within five minutes.
In the last three weeks, we’ve lost three power supplies, two printers, an expensive proprietary modem, and a network card. In two instances, there was an honest-to-goodness fire, with flames and everything.

I think it’s time we sent an electrical contractor or two packing.

Meanwhile I’ve got incompetent department directors who plan moves without giving more than a half hour’s notice, and of course they throw a fit when the move falls to pieces and I’m off solving another problem. I also find myself not caring. Go ahead and yell. Davey’s not listening, la la la, and his boss isn’t listening, and his boss’ boss isn’t listening, and if his boss’ boss’ boss listens and says anything, he’ll have two, maybe three raving lunatics at his door in a heartbeat and I think he knows it.

Deep breath. OK. I feel better now. Kind of.

Let’s see what kind of hints The Big Guy may have been dropping with the day’s other events, shall we?

I had a meeting at church at 7 p.m. So I headed out to my car at 10 ’til 6, put my key in the ignition, and the engine coughed, and then nothing. No electrical system. Hmm. Time to find out how good Chrysler Roadside Assistance is, eh? Well, I called, waited an hour and a half, and they never showed up. So I paced in the beautiful October twilight, waiting for a driver who’d never arrive, thinking there are a number of things I’d love do at twilight outdoors in St. Louis in October (and waiting for a tow truck is very near the top of that list, let me tell you!) but it sure beats sitting in a meeting after dealing with irate, high-maintenance people at work for 9+ hours.

And I noticed something. I wasn’t at the meeting, and yet the world failed to fall apart.

Finally I gave up on the tow truck driver and asked one of my coworkers for a jump. Maybe the problem was a dead battery, even though I didn’t leave my lights on or anything. Indeed it was. I drove home, and about halfway there my battery light came on. I guided the car home, called Chrysler again, and asked them what to do.

On my answering machine, there was a pair of messages waiting for me. It was actually one message, but my answering machine is extremely rude and cuts you off after about 10.5 seconds. OK, maybe 30. But it seems like 10.5 seconds to everyone else but me. So most people leave a message, get cut off, then call me back. Sometimes they call me back a third or even a fourth time. Usually by then they’re pretty steamed. But I digress, as always. The message messages basically boiled down to, “Hey Dave, I understand you’re planning to teach Friday, but I hear things are really hectic so there’s no need for us to stay on the regular schedule. I’ll teach for you if you want.”

I had no idea when I’d get a chance to put a lesson together, to be completely honest. So I called her back and said if she wanted to teach, she could go right ahead. And I thanked her.

Hints taken. So much time doing stuff for God there’s no time to spend with God. So I skipped out on the meeting and now I’m not teaching Friday. I might even show up a little late, for good measure.

And now something completely different. This is starting to sound like the Stress Underground, not the Silicon Underground. So let’s talk about silicon.

Dan Bowman sent me a link to a suggestion that businesses buy old Mac clones, then dump $600 worth of upgrades into them so they can run Mac OS X and avoid paying $199 for a copy of Windows.

Yes, I know I’m teetering on the brink of mental illness here. So I’m assuming that if I were completely sane, this would make even less sense.

The best-selling software package for the Macintosh is (drum roll please)… Microsoft Office. So all you’ve accomplished so far is paying a little less money to Microsoft.

I’ve seen Mac OS X. I’ve tried to install Mac OS X. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. And this was a copy of Mac OS X that came with a brand-new G4. Mac OS X is not production-quality software yet. Not that that’s much of a problem. There’s precious little native software to run on it. For native software, you pretty much have to download and compile your own. If you’re going to do that, you might as well just run Linux, since it’s free for the asking and runs on much less-expensive hardware.

Most businesses are a bit hesitant to put Linux on the desktop yet. Some are starting to see the light. But a business that’s reluctant to put Linux on brand-new desktop PCs even when they can pay for good support they’ll probably never need isn’t too likely to be interested in buying a four-year-old Mac or Mac clone, plus 128 megs of obsolete and therefore overpriced memory plus a hard drive plus a disk controller plus a USB card, from five different vendors who will all point fingers at one another the instant something goes wrong. (And we’re talking Apple here. Things will go wrong.)

And yes, I know there are thousands of people who’ve successfully put CPU upgrades in Macintoshes, but it’s very hit-and-miss. I spent two of the most frustrating days of my life trying to get a Sonnet G3 accelerator to work in a Power Mac 7500. It either worked, failed to boot, or performed just like the stock 100 MHz CPU. Any time you turned it on, you didn’t know which of the three you would get. The local Mac dealer was clueless. I called Sonnet. They were clueless. I struggled some more. I called Sonnet back. I got a different tech. He asked what revision of motherboard I had. I looked. It said VAL4, I think. He told me he was surprised it worked 1/3 of the time. That accelerator never works right with that revision of motherboard. He suggested I return the card, or do a motherboard swap. Of course a compatible motherboard costs more than the accelerator card.

And of course there was absolutely no mention of any of this on Sonnet’s web site. At least you can go to a manufacturer of PC upgrades and read their knowledge base before you buy. Sometimes you can even punch in what model system you have and they’ll tell you if they work. Not that those types of upgrades make any sense when you can a replacement motherboard and CPU starts at around $150.

Suffice it to say I won’t be repeating that advice at work. I just got a flyer in the mail, offering me 700 MHz Compaq PCs preloaded with Win98, with a 15-inch flat-panel monitor, for $799. With a warranty. With support. Yeah, I’d rather have Windows 2000 or Windows XP on it. The only reason Compaq makes offers like that is to move PCs, so I’m sure they’d work with my purchasing guy and me.

Think about it. I can have a cobbled-together did-it-myself 400 MHz Mac refurb without a monitor for $700-$750. Or I can have that Compaq. That’s like getting a flat-panel monitor for 50 bucks. As far as usability and stability go, I’d rate Win98 and Mac OS X about equal. But for the time and money I’d save, I could afford to step up to a better version of Windows. Or I could bank the bucks and run Linux on it.

If you’re already a Mac zealot, I guess that idea might make sense. I’ve spent several years deploying, operating, and maintaning both Macs and PCs side-by-side in corporate environments. I have no great love for Microsoft. Most people would call my relationship with Microsoft something more like seething hatred.

But the biggest problems with PC hardware, in order, are commodity memory, cheap power supplies, proliferation of viruses, and then, maybe, Microsoft software. You can avoid the first two problems by buying decent hardware from a reputable company. (No, Gateway, that doesn’t include you and your Packard Bell-style 145-watt power supplies.) You can avoid the third problem with user education. (It’s amazing how quickly users learn when you poke ’em with a cattle prod after they open an unexpected attachment from a stranger. The biggest problem is getting that cattle prod past building security.) Microsoft software doesn’t exactly bowl everyone over with its reliability, but when Adobe recommends that Mac users reboot their machines every day before they leave for lunch, you know something’s up. Even Windows 95’s uptime was better than that.

Worst practices for e-mail

Dave Farquhar Viruses , , , , ,

If you want to wreck your computer with a virus and put your neighbors’ computers at serious risk, there’s a really easy way to do it. Just be really cavalier with your e-mail habits. Approach e-mail with reckless abandon, and you’ll quickly receive your just reward.
But if you like having a computer that works well, and you kind of like your neighbors, there are things you can do to minimize your risk. If, on the other hand, you want to leave your mark on the world in a negative way, do the opposite of the things I suggest here.

1. Acquire good anti-virus software and keep it up to date. I’ve been configuring Norton AntiVirus to update itself every day. It’s excessive, but since it’s impossible to guess when the next big thing will come out, and it might hit you before you know about it, it’s the only safe way. Update every day, and keep autoprotect on, so that files are scanned as they’re created. That way, if you get a virus, it won’t get far. I also set NAV to scan the entire computer–all files, not just executable files–at least once a week.

While sweeping the network at work, I found copies of Nimda, but I also found old friends like SirCam, Happy99, PrettyPark, and Kak. Obviously people were aborting the scheduled updates and scans.

2. If you do get infected, don’t count on your antivirus package to completely clean up the mess. Visit www.sarc.com or www.antivirus.com/vinfo/virusencyclo to download a specialized removal tool for the virus your antivirus package caught. Run it to remove any residual damage your antivirus package may have missed.

3. Don’t take e-mail attachments from strangers. I take an even stronger stance than that. Frankly, when someone sends me e-mail with an attachment, the first thing I do is delete the message. I don’t even open it. I don’t care if I’ve known the guy who sent it for 10 years. Some attachments can execute without you even opening the message, so the only safe thing to do is delete it.

The only exception I make is when someone e-mails me and tells me something’s coming. Sure, I’ll look at my friend’s resume, as long as he lets me know ahead of time that it’s coming and I should look for it.

Yes, I miss some good jokes and fun games that way. But you know what? I’d rather be accused of having no sense of humor than to have to rebuild my computer. I don’t have time to rebuild my computer. I’m already too busy rebuilding the computers that belong to people who open each and every e-mail attachment they get.

The virus of the week is W32.Vote.A, which masquerades as a chance to vote for peace or war between the United States and the Middle East. It doesn’t actually let you vote; it e-mails itself to your contacts and deletes files off your drive.

4. Don’t be the first on your block with the newest Microsoft software. Microsoft continues to refuse to take security seriously. No one in his right mind should be running Internet Explorer and Outlook Express 6.0 right now. Every single dot-oh release from Microsoft in recent memory has been an atrocity. Get Internet Explorer 5.5SP2 and stick with it. It’s fast, it’s as stable as anything Microsoft has written, and all the known holes that viruses exploit have been patched. Is the same true for 6.0? Who knows?

5. Don’t use a Microsoft e-mail client if you can help it. Microsoft’s the biggest kid on the block, so their mail clients are the most frequent targets. They also have more security holes in them than a vacant building in East St. Louis. There are a number of competent alternatives out there, including Pegasus, Netscape Messenger, and Qualcomm Eudora. (Just watch out for Euroda’s spyware–run Ad-Aware from www.lavasoftusa.com after you install Eudora.)

6. If you must use a Microsoft e-mail client, turn off the preview pane. Also, go to the client’s security options and put it in the Restricted Sites zone. That way when some idiot forwards you a message with hostile ActiveX code in it to automatically execute an attachment that e-mails itself to everyone in your inbox and address book and then low-level formats your hard drive, you won’t be affected. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for HTML e-mail to contain any ActiveX, Java, or JavaScript.

7. Don’t run any Microsoft software if you can help it. A Mac doesn’t count–the most popular Mac application is (drum roll please) Microsoft Office. Besides, there are plenty of Mac viruses out there to get you too. I’m writing this on a cheap PC running Linux. I use a tiny, lightning-fast mail client called Sylpheed. It takes up 733K on my hard drive. Outrageous, isn’t it? I use a tiny, lightning-fast Web browser called Dillo. It’s secure as a rock because it doesn’t do Java, JavaScript, or ActiveX. It renders pages instantly. It’s 240K in size. They’re both in alpha testing, but they crash less for me than Internet Explorer 5.5 and Outlook 2000SP2. And don’t be fooled by the tiny size: I compiled them for speed, not size. If I’d used size optimizations they’d be a lot smaller.

8. Don’t run your Web site on IIS. Even the Gartner Group is recommending everyone abandon IIS ASAP. It’s impossible to keep up with the patches well enough to prevent outbreaks like Nimda. Nimda knows about 16(!) security holes in IIS that it can exploit in order to send itself to people who visit your Web page. Yes, people try to hack Apache. Of course they do–70% of the Web uses it. But I hear of one Apache vulnerability a year. That compares to one IIS vulnerability a week. It is fiscally and socially irresponsible to bank your business on such an insecure, poorly written piece of software. (This site runs on Apache, and its only downtime in five months has been from a power failure. Zero crashes, no having to take it down to apply a patch. My system uptime reads 112 days.)

Two chipsets from the AMD front

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday AMD formally unveiled and shipped the AMD-760MP chipset. Right now there is one and only one motherboard using it, the ritzy Tyan Thunder K7, which runs about $550 minimum. (Wholesale cost on it is rumored to be $500.) Considering its 64-bit PCI slots, two built-in 3Com NICs, onboard ATI video, onboard Adaptec SCSI, and four available DIMMs, that’s not a half-bad price. It’s obviously not a hobbyist board. This dude’s intended to go in servers.
At any rate, reviews are all over the place and the quality varies. Far and away the best I found was at Ace’s Hardware, where he tested the things people actually likely to buy this board would do with it: workstation-type stuff.

Anand does his usual 10 pages’ worth of butt-kissing and he’s living under the delusion that people will buy this board to play Quake. However, he does test the board with plain old Thunderbird and Duron CPUs (they work, but AMD won’t support that configuration). Skip ahead to page 11 after reading the story at Ace’s. His tests suggest that for some purposes, a dual Duron-850 can be competitive with a dual P3-933. That information is more interesting than it is useful at this point in time, but we’ve all been curious about dual Duron performance, so if and when an inexpensive AMD SMP board becomes available, we have some idea what we’ll be able to do with it.

All the usual hardware sites put in their two cents’ worth; by the time I read Ace’s and Anand’s and Tom’s reviews I stopped learning anything new.

Some of it bordered on ridiculous. One site (I forget which) observed that the AMD 766 northbridge looks just like a K6-2 and said they must have made it look that way just to remind us where the Athlon came from. Whatever. The AMD 766 northbridge and the K6-2 use the same heat spreader. The intention is to keep the chip cool. It’s not there just for looks–the chip runs hot. But that’s the kind of quality information we get from most hardware sites these days, sadly.

More immediately useful and interesting, but not yet available, is the nVidia nForce chipset. You can read about it at Tom’s and elsewhere. This is technically nVidia’s second chipset, their first being the chipset in Microsoft’s X-Box. This chipset is a traditional two-chip solution, linked by AMD’s high-speed HyperTransport. It includes integrated sound better than anything Creative Labs or Cirrus Logic currently offer (now we know what nVidia was doing with those engineers they were hiring from Aureal) and integrated GeForce 2MX video connected via a high-speed port that would be equivalent to AGP 6X, if such a thing existed. And nVidia pairs up DDR controllers to give dual-channel, 128-bit memory with a bandwidth of 4.256 GB/sec. Suddenly DDR provides greater bandwidth than Rambus in addition to lower latency.

Just for good measure, the chipset includes Ethernet too.

What’s all this mean? High-speed motherboards with everything integrated (and with integrated peripherals definitely worth using) for around 200 bucks. By the end of the summer, last summer’s monster PC will be integrated onto two chips and priced for building PCs at the $600-$800 price point.

This summer’s computer revolution won’t be Windows XP.

And, in something not really related, here’s something you probably missed, unfortunately. Start rubbing your hands together if you enjoy the Mac-PC or Intel-AMD wars. This is a hard benchmark comparing AMD Athlon, Intel P3, and Motorola PowerPC architectures and their relative speed. The methodology: under Linux, cross-compile a Linux kernel for the SPARC architecture (compiling native isn’t a fair comparison; this way they’re all creating identical code and therefore doing the same work, or as close to it as you’re gonna get). You know those claims that a Mac is twice as fast as an equivalent-speed Pentium III running Photoshop? I always countered that with Microsoft Office benchmarks, where a Mac is about 1/4 the speed of a PC, at best, when doing a mail merge. Neither is a fair test. This benchmark resembles one.

Anyway… Yes, a G4 is faster than the equivalently clocked Pentium III. How much faster? Roughly 10 percent. And an Athlon turns out to be about 20 percent slower than the equivalent P3. Of course, the Athlon reaches clock speeds the P3 never will, and the Athlon is also much more than 20 percent cheaper than the equivalently-clocked P3, so who really cares?

This still isn’t a totally fair comparison of CPU architecture, since chipsets vary (and it’s entirely possible that the difference between the P3 and the Athlon in speed is due to chipset quality), but if indeed the G4 was twice as fast as the P3, it would surely outperform it by better than 10 percent in this test. But it’s a decent comparison of real-world performance, because it doesn’t matter how much better your CPU is if it’s burdened by a chipset that doesn’t show up to play on game day.

Most telling is the end, where he gives the cost per speed unit. AMD wins that chart handily.

Enough of my babble. Read all about it here.

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