I’ve previously said that Microsoft could be doing themselves harm if they were ever really successful in fighting piracy because Windows and Office could lose their position as the standard if everybody that didn’t want to put down several hundred dollars had to go with a competitor instead. I think that’s true of Microsoft Office, though less so for Windows. Even back when I was saying that, the case for Windows was precarious. I was living in a computing ecosystem wherein most people I knew built their own computers. To the extent that I thought about it, I figured that homebrew computers would become more rather than less popular. Not only hasn’t that been true, but the trending has been in the other direction because people that used to build their own computers are increasingly turning to laptops.

So as Microsoft turns up the heat to stop Windows 7 piracy, it’s probably a good business move. Particularly since they’re doing so in a way that is leaving laptops unthreatened. At least, for my ThinkPad machines, I don’t have to mess so much with the activation hassle even if I am installing from an independent CD rather than anything given to me by Lenovo. ThinkPads could be unique in that regard, though I doubt it.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott has been exploring the world of Windows 7 piracy and the pack and forth between Microsoft and those that want to use its software without authorization. For Windows XP and before it was the case that once you got through, you were golden. Increasingly, Microsoft will keep throwing things out there and so would-be pirates will have to keep downloading and implementing new workarounds. Given the shady, often virus-infested world of software hacks, that can be kind of risky.

But will it induce people to go out and purchase legitimate copies and thus increase sales? I really don’t know that it will. It won’t lead to widespread defection to Linux or Apple, but people going out and buying shrinkwrapped copies of their software is not really where their market is. Their market is with people that buy Dells and HPs and Gateways and so on. And in those cases, they get paid by the manufacturer. I also don’t see a huge market for people upgrading their existing laptops. First off, for most people it’s not worth the trouble. Second, you have to pay $100-200 for the inconvenience. Third, successive versions of Windows typically require new hardware (though Win7 is an exception in this regard). Fourth, the people that are going to be most excited about the latest copies of Windows are either not going to be put-off by spending the money or they’re going to accept the inconveniences of regular authorization requirement sidesteps.

There are a few exceptions and places where it could be worth their while and lead to increased revenues. A minor example is the laptop I am typing on. It has a copy of Windows Vista on it. I am using Vista because Windows XP and Linux won’t work on this machine. Windows Vista and Windows 7 do. Since I had a spare license for the former, I went that route. Otherwise, I probably would have paid for Windows 7. Of course, I only know that Win7 works due to a temporary illegitimate installation. If they were to prevent that from happening, I wouldn’t buy Win7 because I wouldn’t know if it would work. A slightly more common example is if somebody needs to run a particular software application that requires the latest version of Windows. There was a stronger argument for that before people bucked Microsoft on Vista in favor of XP. I think that sent a message to developers not to assume everyone is going to upgrade (if such a message was ever needed).

The biggest and most credible area of increased profit, though, is that it does force people to buy into their price-discrimination scheme. If they put up absolutely no barriers, people would just buy the cheapest version of Win7 on their laptop and then install Windows 7 Ultimate, depriving Microsoft of money. Given the increase weight Microsoft is giving to price discrimination, I suspect that this is where they are coming from with their increased attempts at beefing up piracy-blocking mechanisms. I really don’t think it’s because of increased piracy because I think that, thanks to the domination of the laptop, piracy rates have actually gone down somewhat.

Of course, none of this applies to Microsoft Office. Office does not come with most PCs unless specifically ordered. The temptation to obtain an illegitimate copy is therefore greater. MS Office also widely discriminates on price, to boot. Office also sports a significant barrier to exit insofar as they control the file types most frequently used in businesses across the country. I had previously hoped that the one-two punch of Microsoft uprooting its file format and the emergence of OpenDocument Formatting would change this, but it hasn’t.

This whole business makes me want to find an alternative to Windows. Unfortunately, Apple just isn’t for me and Linux isn’t ready yet (if it ever will be). Or perhaps I just haven’t invested enough in the latter. While Microsoft has thus far done a reasonable job of gatekeeping, I fear that at some point they’re going to start a serious crackdown wherein the inconvenience and expense of some legitimate users will be considered acceptable collateral damage. When I switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice a couple years ago, my motivation was not money but rather was simply not having to worry about licensing at all. That’s one of the big draws of Linux. But since most of my computers these days are laptops and most laptops already come with Windows, it is thus far not really worth the effort. We’ll see if that changes.

It’s kind of a long story, but starting right now I do not have any Internet access outside of the library and a couple of hotspots in town. Though I still have an unlimited data plan on my cell phone (for the moment), I run the risk of jeopardizing my entire family’s AT&T account if I continue to use it. So… my participation will be on the sporadic side until Friday. More details to come.

So the other day I took the Bartle Test. Created way back in 1978, it’s still relevant (more than many would think) in designing MMORPG’s (World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc).

In an overarching format, it does well describing why some games “win” and “lose” in the market. Games targeted to “Killers”, such as Ultima Online, Shadowbane, and Asheron’s Call 2, tend to die off. The problem is, if you populate with Killers and design around them, then the vast majority of players who are not primarily “Killers” will get tired of being picked on and leave the game. An all-Killer game will drive off enough players to not be financially sustainable.

The longest-running game I’ve ever played, MMORPG-wise, is City of Heroes. The nice thing about CoH is that the “Killer” mechanic almost completely vanishes. Player-vs-Player combat is only in certain non-storyline areas against “City of Villains” players (the “other side” of the game), or in the “Arena”, in exhibition matches where no penalty for losing exists in the main game. Meanwhile, CoH has a tremendous amount of room for exploration and the enjoyment of various storylines, quests, and options to try out. The end of my CoH play came when the “social attitude”, by which I mean a personality-based falling out with a guild leader, left me with the option of either shutting down my account, or paying way too much money to move my characters to new servers to avoid this “socially powerful” griefer’s behavior.

For those wondering, by the Bartle test I come up as an ESAK, with a mere 7% “Killer” score:

Description:

Secondary influences
…
Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.

In discussions of the iPad, I’ve seen comments along the following lines:

The only problem is getting consumers to understand what being open means…and care. Where Apple’s iPad will be restricted to running approved applications from the iTunes App Store – a business model that has raised flags when Apple’s app overlords blocked popular, rival apps from their store (most notably, Google Voice) – the model has proved incredibly successful for the Cupertino-based company. The iPhone OS is the most popular smartphone OS in the world with Google’s mobile Android OS trailing further behind.

This article actually takes a more critical look at Apple and the iPad, but I hear it more frequently from Apple-boosters that point to the fact that the iPhone came out of nowhere and became the number one such-and-such in the world. I’ve fallen in the same trap by referring to Apple’s entry into the smartphone market as “domination” without the appropriate qualifications.

The rise of the iPhone is nothing short of phenomenal no matter how you look at it. It’s done wonders in terms of getting people to talk about smartphones and getting people to demand more from their smartphones. It’s not inconceivable that, given time, they will be the worldwide leader. God help us all. But right now, their marketshare is not remarkably impressive and is only a couple notches above that of the Macintosh computers. There are two big differences, though. They’re not just “losing” the desktop marketshare wars, but (a) they are being dominated by a single entity and (b) they’ve not demonstrated the ability to climb out of their hole in any meaningful capacity. In the case of smartphones, neither of these really apply. The smartphone market leader, Nokia, is losing ground quarterly and right now their OS only controls half of the marketshare. So they’re not in Nokia’s shadow on smartphones the way that they are in Microsoft’s on desktops and because the market is so segmented, they’re not losing out on application development nearly as much because developers can’t just develop for one platform and then call it quits the same way that they can with desktops and Windows.

So there’s reason to believe that Apple can eventually get there, if that’s what they want. In the world of desktops, they’ve simply decided that OS marketshare isn’t that important. When they had the opportunity to release their OS generically, they passed. That seems similar to their plans with the iPhone except that with the iPhone there is even less incentive to because they already have strong enough market presence and buzz so that application developers are falling all over themselves to support it. So it seems likely that they will keep pressing forward, though it’s starting to seem less likely that talk of opening their OS to multiple cell carriers is going to come to fruition.

It’s notable that they dug in their heels with AT&T with the iPad. That doesn’t mean that they won’t open the iPhone up to Verizon and others when the time comes. It’s possible that the plan is to open up both the iPhone and the iPad eventually but during a product’s release it makes sense to go with a single carrier. But it does demonstrate that for all of the complaints about AT&T, Apple does not appear to have any regrets. The model worked for them even if it came at the expense of marketshare. To be blunt, all of the optimism about Apple opening up the iPhone is based on the belief by Apple people that (a) opening it up would be a good thing and (b) Apple does good things.

But right now, they are only domination a specific place in the market: Extensive mobile web using non-business consumers within the United States. The business market is still dominated by Blackberry and though perhaps fleetingly, Nokia and their Symbian OS has a strong margin in the worldwide market. The problem for Nokia is that their attempts to break into the US market in a meaningful way. All of their connections with carriers on dumbphones has surprisingly failed to translate into high-profile arrangements for smart phones. And even internationally they’re faltering.

This provides a great opportunity for Apple and its competitors. Symbian’s fall, unless it’s reversed, will provide a tremendous void. There is a vacancy for a standard. My head tells me that it’s unlikely that a device as limited in variation as the iPhone is going to be able to fill it. It seems far more likely that Google’s Android, which is not dependent on a single manufacturer or limited variation of form factors, seems well-positioned to do so. Or it’s possible that with the release of Microsoft Windows Mobile that they will be able to apply the formula that won the desktops wars to smartphones as well. Or perhaps Nokia will rebound and figure out what they’re doing wrong, assisted by the fact that other manufacturers use Symbian as well. Or RIM, which follows a formula most similar to Apple’s, is just flexible enough to gain more ground in the consumer-grade market. My nightmare, of course, is that none of this will happen and that people will simply accept the iPhone as the standard simply because it is already perceived as being such.

But as of Q2 of last year, the most recent data I can find, the Symbian OS holds 50%, Blackberry 21%, iPhone 14%, Windows Mobile 9%, and Android 3%. In other words, the iPhone is closer to Windows Mobile than it is even the Blackberry. I’ve found Q3 numbers by manufacturer (from which you can inexactly get market position from OSes that are on devices from manufacturers that choose one OS and stick with it – iPhone and Blackberry, though not Android or Windows Mobile). Apple does better there, commanding 17%, but they’re still behind Nokia (40%) and Blackberry (20%). Notably, the Blackberry and iPhone grew at roughly the same pace between 2008 and 2009. So there is perhaps reason to be hopeful.

As you may know, I have a moderately anti-Apple bias. I spent my nights dreaming of sugarplumbs, fairies, and the iPhone being knocked off its blasted perch. However, though Apple engages in a lot of technical practices that I don’t like and I get endlessly frustrated with the computer people that give them a pass on things that they would excoriate Microsoft and others for, I do not doubt Apple’s design and marketing prowess. If I had any doubts prior to the iPhone, the iPhone relieved me of most of them. I figured the iPhone would be successful, but I didn’t think that it would suck all of the air out of the growing smartphone market. My bad.

So what to make of the iPad? For those of you that don’t pay attention to such things, the iPad is Apple’s entry into the nascent tablet market. They’re hoping to fill a gap that does not really exist (or at least has not been exploited) in the market yet: the area in between smartphones and notebook computers. Natural questions arise as to what, precisely, this means. With today’s announcement, Apple gave their answer to that question: a bigger and more expensive phoneless iPhone (also known as the iPod Touch).

Up until today, as more details have been leaked, I was extremely skeptical of Apple’s chances on this one. For instance, the rumors that it would include the Operating System of the iPhone instead of a lighter variation of the OSX left me underwhelmed. There are a lot of things that people will put up with a cell phone that they will not put up with on a computer-ish device that costs the rumored $1000.

The biggest example is the iPhone’s refusal to support Adobe Flash. I don’t have Flash installed on my smartphone. It’s really not that big of a deal. There are alternate applications for much of what I would use Flash for. YouTube has its own application on Windows Mobile (my phone’s OS) and I think that Rhapsody does, too. If I want to watch a video off the web, I’m more likely to use a laptop anyway. The iPhone has better Flash-circumvention support than Windows Mobile, so it’s even less of a deal for that device. If they want to use something that isn’t supported, such as Hulu, they can just go to their laptop.

I am not sure how well this attitude will carry over to something with the screen space afforded by the iPad. The screen on that sucker begs to watch videos on it and its inability to watch videos that don’t circumvent Flash will likely prove to be a lot more frustrating. And unlike YouTube, Hulu doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot of motivation to make it easier for people to watch shows from more places. For one thing, the networks feeding the content don’t want it to be too convenient lest people start declining to buy the DVDs, watch it on regular TV with all of the extra commercials, or subscribe to cable to get access to the programs. Maybe that will change once Hulu goes to the subscription model, but maybe it won’t. I also know that while I can watch Netflix on a laptop, I don’t know if that would be true for the iPad.

There are other issues along these lines. People are already complaining about the ability of the iPhone to multitask. But it’s a phone, so a lot of people give it a pass. Would they be similarly be willing to give a pass to something with screen space more similar to that of a netbook (where multitasking is possible, albeit not optimal)? There are reasons to believe that it won’t.

What Apple needs to do, then, is to let people know up front that this is not a laptop. this is not a skimmed down laptop. This is not a netbook. This is something different, much more similar to the iPod Touch, and people that want a laptop should buy a laptop. Apple seems to realize this because they’ve been playing up its relationship with the phoneless phone and downplaying it as the middle step to a laptop.

The biggest problem with all of this was poised to be the price. Apple’s control over perception may be impressive, but it is not without limitation. People that pay more for an iPad than they could pay for a laptop are going to expect it to do laptop things. There’s just no getting around it. So when rumors were that the iPad was going to cost $1000 or so, I just couldn’t see it being embraced. Yesterday, however, they announced that while people that want to spend a grand can (Apple never likes to displease that brand of customer) the starting price is actually $500. That actually opens up some possibilities.

Granted, $500 won’t get you a whole lot. People that think that they’re getting a neato netbook are going to be just as disappointed as the people I was suspecting were thinking would get a laptop. But people that think that they’re getting a more muscular, more versatile, and more expensive Kindle should be relatively satisfied with the low-end iPad. Right now Kindle sales themselves have not been very good and that’s an important point. However, Apple does manage to address some of the bigger reasons that I myself would not buy a Kindle. Among other things, it appears as though I will be able to read digital comic books on it in color. It appears as though there will not be the PDF limitations that the Kindle has. That’s even leaving aside the sorts of things that nobody would ever ask a Kindle to do such as play music and video. Which brings me to the other potential buy that could come out of it relatively satisfied: the potential iPod Touch buyer. It addresses some of the reasons that I have not bought an iPad touch: Namely, it answers the question “What can this thing do that my cell phone can’t and is it worth buying a separate device for?” The answer to that was previously “It can run iPhone applications!” That answer was insufficient. “It has a more usable keyboard” and “it has a larger screen” on the other hand, do provide a sort of answer to that question.

Does that provide a $500 answer? Right now, it doesn’t. At least, not for me. It’s something I’ll keep an eye on. The multitude of applications that are available on the iPhone/iPT but not on its competitors is a seductive army. Despite Apple’s unconscionable app-blocking policy, there is simply no other smartphone platform that can really compete if I simply pretend that the applications blocked simply never existed. Advanced users will jailbreak their iPads the same way they jailbreak their iPhones. Non-advanced users like my sister-in-law will simply go on as though the programs don’t exist. The counterquestion is, though, how useful are these little apps on a device that’s not as portable as an iPhone? A lot of the value of iPhone applications are that they are on a device that you have with you nearly at all times.

But the biggest question to whether or not the iPad will succeed or fail has less to do with Apple and more to do with us. Contrary to what Appleheads say, the iPhone did not invent an industry. It belatedly joined a burgeoning one and then dominated it. The distinction is important. Had the iPhone never been invented, there may be less smartphones out there than there are today, but there would still be a whole lot more of them than there were just a few years ago. The current market for tablet devices just does not have the same sense of destiny as did smartphones three years ago. They won’t be able to rely on the “I was thinking of buying this sort of product anyway, so I should buy Apple’s variation.”

How big of the iPhone’s market segment is this? I think it’s a lot more than most techheads realize. I like to use my sister-in-law as an example. She’s happy with her iPhone, but she chose the iPhone after she decided that she wanted a more muscular phone. The likelihood that she will buy a tablet of any sort is remote. That leaves the market mostly relegated to techheads. Techheads are probably most likely to be take notice of the things that the iPad is not capable of doing. There are many that will give Apple a pass because it is Apple, but those that are not Apple partisans are less likely to join the bandwagon this time around. In other words, I see the iPad running into the same sorts of problems as the Kindle, except moreso.

At the same time, though, I am really reluctant to actively bet against Apple. The success of the iPhone, which I understand completely on one level, completely elludes me on another. I’ve always been a little surprised at what Apple fans are willing to pay for when a product is made by Apple, but the iPhone demonstrated pretty clearly that they know something even about non-Apple customers that I don’t. As a computer guy, I tend to be more understanding of the average user than a lot of other computer guys, but apparently even I have my blind spots. So I really don’t know whether the iPad will succeed or not.

Jon Last makes the following astute observation:

With nothing more than the iPhone OS, it’s a super-slick smart-phone/Kindle/netbook hybrid. Only it lacks a smartphone’s portability, the Kindle’s readability, and the netbook’s power.

That could be a bad thing, although it could be a good one. If someone doesn’t need it to be quite as readable as the Kindle because they’re so used to reading off screens, doesn’t need it to be as portable as a smartphone because they’ve got the phone thing squared away and don’t need a or have with it a PDA, and doesn’t need a netbook’s power because they have a notebook or netbook… it’s a great way to have something that’s not as restricted as the Kindle, more portable than the netbook, and not attached to a phone plan like a cell phone is. He asks if we really need a third device. No, but the same could be said for a second device and people have been predicting the death of the desktop since forever and yet people still buy them.

So… it looks like it could be a pretty neat toy. But who will want to pay for it? Apple can often get away with lower sales numbers because they have such high margins, but they seem to be taking a different tact with this one. At $1000 a pop, they could get away with only the enthusiasts buying it, but does $500 provide that kind of margin? It seems to me that they’re actually banking on more widespread adoption for this to be considered something less than a failure. Apple has succeeded in the past largely by not playing that game. Now the question is… do they have the constitution to play and win it?

In addition to know knowing whether or not the iPad will succeed, I also don’t know whether I hope it succeeds or not. The more I think about it, the more attractive I find the notion of tablets. The more I like the idea of an iPad, even if I am unlikely to purchase one myself. If Apple is successful, I have no doubt that competitors will come out with their own products and I suspect that what the competitors come up with I will be more likely to buy myself. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if the smartphone market has been actively damaged by the iPhone by this point. It was previously beneficial to the industry and could remain so if it gets knocked off its perch and more open-minded competitors take over. But if iPhone’s (relative) domination does not stop, we’re going to be stuck with a standard where the hardware, software, and user is largely controlled by a single entity. Everything computer people accuse Microsoft of doing… except this time far more real.

Addendum: The Atlantic has a couple pieces on the iPad that are worth reading, one pro and one con. David Indiviglio makes a point that had occurred to me that I didn’t really explore, which is that this is a better device for good economic times when people are looking for cool things to spend their money on. It’s a luxury device in non-luxirious times. That could prove to be a problem. Derek Thompson takes a more positive view.

Some conservatives and libertarians are gloating over the failure of Philadelphia’s WiFi service. It seems that few of the WiFi models are working as intended.

For libertarians and conservatives, this is a positive development because not only were they right, but by and large they didn’t want it to work in the first place. Personally, I consider this to be rather unfortunate. Though the government is failing when it comes to WiFi, it’s not like the market has produced a better track record. When I was at the mall the other day and wanted to check my email on my phone, I couldn’t use the WiFi without paying a subscription fee or an exorbitant one-day charge. A subscription could be worth it, except that different places use different carriers and unless I intend to go to the same places on a regular basis, getting widely available WiFi service would cost a pretty unreasonable amount. If we had a good city-wide system, though, the subscription prices could be far less unreasonable.

It’s not too much unlike the big, bad old days of cell phone usage before we had national networks. While many lament all of the cell phone carrier mergers, it’s had the wonderful effect of creating nationwide coverage available without roaming fees. Back when I was with a local company called ColColl, leaving the city meant paying extraordinarily high rates. It’s possible that the market could do for WiFi what it did for cell phones, but it hasn’t happened yet. Our best bet, at this point, is through cell phone towers. These yield lackluster speeds and reliability, though that could change. It would have been really, really nice if cities could have picked up the slack here.

The notion of city-provided Internet access is not inherently doomed to failure, though. Beyreuth, Delosa, where Clancy was raised and where her parents still live, have city-provided cable and broadband. The existing cable provider screamed bloody murder and tried to stop it legislatively, but they failed. Everyone out there, including my libertarian-minded conservative father-in-law, like it a great deal. When the profit-seeking, private broadband providers you have are relatively indifferent to your business because you have limited options, sometimes the government really isn’t worse.

So why did it succeed in Beyreuth and not Philadelphia? A few reasons, I’d wager. The first is that Beyreuth stepped into an existing industry. People were already comfortable with wired broadband and so they could count on a reasonably large customer base. In a way, they took advantage of the gambles that the cable providers had to take in offering the service in the first place. Another issue, though, is that Beyreuth is a relatively small city with an educated population (due in part to the local university). Such ventures may be easier in cities where there are large percentages of people who are demographically suitable for high-speed Internet. It’s possible that a WiFi program in Beyreuth could work where it would fail in a more urban area with a more economically diverse population.

Two of my big gifts this Christmas have been laptops. I gave one to my parents to accompany their main gift of a wireless router. I ended up getting two older used computers, one of which was to go to them. Unfortunately, both had mild problems. Then I won a free laptop, but it too developed problems. Somewhere along the line, Clancy’s computer developed problems.

Now, when I say “problems” I am using the term pretty loosely. They all work. One has a disc drive that works unless you’re trying to install an OS. One has a sticky keyboard. One has a hardware fault that won’t let Windows run on it but does work with Linux. Clancy’s old computer started overheating, though I think I got that under control. I can get all of these computers working, but the margin of error for my parents is much smaller than for me because they don’t immediately know how to work around them and don’t have the redundancy.

In the process of trying to figure out which computer they should get and attacking the various problems developing with my fleet of older computers, I discovered that Clancy needed a better computer than she has because of her tendency to tax computer resources with scores of open Firefox tabs. So I found a great deal on eBay for a replacement for her for a computer that could at least be upgraded into what she needed.

Of course, this meant taking two computers down from Cascadia to Delosa, one for her and one for my parents. And because she was a recipient, I couldn’t tell Clancy what I was doing. So I hid one in my Falstaff duffle bag. I told her that I was concerned about spending too much time on the laptop while visiting family, so I would only take the one going to the folks. Meanwhile, I hid the second in my duffel bag. I also had to hope she didn’t realize that I was giving away her superior laptop and relegating her to an inferior one (were I not getting her a newer one, I mean).

When we passed through security at the airport, I made sure to separate myself from her so that I could lay out the two laptops without her noticing. On the plane, I used her laptop, telling her that it was the folks’. When we arrived in Colosse, I hid the folks’ and used hers. She thought I was using theirs. They thought I was using my own. The day before Christmas, I packed theirs up in an Amazon box that arrived with books.

Meanwhile, I found out that the underlying reason for my parents’ new laptop was moot. Dad went and bought himself a wireless router. He said that he would buy a computer to go with it at some point, but for now he got a really good deal on the router. I suggested that maybe I would want to buy the router off him. Mainly, I didn’t want him to go buy a netbook or something while I was around to help him set it up.

The parents were suitably surprised and Dad still wanted to give me the wireless router, which I have no idea what I’m going to do with. While nobody was looking, I took the box I had wrapped my parents’ computer in and placed Clancy’s new computer in there. She, too, was suitably surprised.

So now I have an excess of mostly-working laptops and one too many wireless routers. The former is the cost of thriftiness. Having mostly-working laptops suits me just fine because I can work around whatever the problem is. Besideswhich, ThinkPads stopped coming out with S-Video Out ports, which I need for my TV hookup. With the exception of the Linux machine (which doesn’t output due to driver limitations), I have good redundancy if one of them kicks the bucket. Also, if the overheating problem occurs with Clancy’s old computer, I have a replacement.

Poor Clancy knew that I was a computer guy when I met her, but never imagined having this many around. I attribute a lot of it to a need to use what I have. It’s how I have kept so many desktops operative and now it’s occuring with laptops. One has a busted monitor but otherwise works. One requires Linux but otherwise works. One has a sticky keyboard but otherwise works. One has a slightly faulty disc drive but otherwise works. She also has an old laptop that is almost entirely dysfunctional, but I’m pretty sure I can get some old version of Linux running on it.

I have no idea what I will do with it… but then again, that’s not really the point.

You may have noticed that my posts lately have not necessarily been as involved and discussion-inducing as previous commentary. This isn’t really an accident. Since I’m visiting family, my time for commenting is limited, so those subjects that are most likely to provoke involved discussion have been sort of put on the backburner. Regular posting will likely return when I get back to Cascadia.

An update on the Mini vs Micro USB post from before.

Mom and Dad got a new phone that is apparently equipped with MicroUSB ports. The cables they got with them look a lot sturdier than the ones that used to break off at work, which is great to hear. On the other hand, their GPS has MiniUSB ports. They used my cell phone charger to charge it.

All of this confirms my initial point that having two standards is okay. Dad got his MiniUSB cables for a dollar a piece on eBay, which is just outstanding. And so long as these cables work with a number of devices, it’s money well spent. Heck, at a dollar, it’s worth it anyway. Same goes for Micro. It’s all working itself out.

Right now my workstation has three computers: Ryoko, Ayeka, and Washu. Ryoko, the most powerful desktop I have, has been sick lately. It started with some random USB problems that afflicted the other two but that PCI-USB cards resolved for the other two. The problem with Ryoko is that plugging in something to one port causes another port to stop working. The PCI-USB card simply added more ports to be incompatible. Then, about two months ago, Ryoko started (rarely) rebooting during periods of high usage. In the last week or so, it’s started rebooting regardless of what I am doing.

I thought that I had figured out the problem when one of the hard drives on the machine started misbehaving. I had run into similar problems with Ayeka and Washu and the problem was generally insufficient power. Given that it had previously been disinclined to work during times of high usage, it made sense. Further, I’d been adding hard drives to this machine and never upgraded the (600W) power supply to match the other two (850W and 1000W) even though it’s now carrying about the same number of drives (both by adding to Ryoko’s load and relieving the other by swapping more smaller drives for fewer larger ones). So I was preparing to buy a new power supply when Ryoko started acting more erratically. The aforementioned drive wasn’t just getting dropped, it had become full-blown problematic. Windows did it’s little thing where it says “Hey, there’s a problem with some sectors on this drive, so we’re going to take care of that” and then promptly erases the entire partition. Not a big deal in the case of this specific drive, but still disconcerting. I tried reformatting the drive twice and it rebooted each time.

This could still be power supply related. The dropping of the drive damaged some sectors or somesuch. Insufficient power supplies are the root of much evil, I’ve discovered. But it could also be something else. The best thing to do is to start swapping out parts to see what works. But since Ayeka and Washu are working so wonderfully, I don’t want to touch them. The most likely culprits are the power supply, the problematic hard drive, the RAM, or the processor. I can test around a lot of things (test the power supply by lightening the hardware load, the hard drive by taking it out, the processor by process of elimination). The biggest concern is RAM. I need some RAM to test out with, but I don’t have any spare DDR2 RAM laying around.

What’s really frustrating about all of this is two weeks ago I did! If this had happened two weeks ago, it would have been perfect. I ordered some laptop RAM and they sent me some DDR2 desktop RAM. It took us a week to get it all straightened out and in the meantime I had the RAM just sitting there. They even offered to sell me that RAM at a discount and I told them I would but I simply had no use for it. Now, of course I do. Possibly just for testing, but possibly for replacing. Fortunately, Linux LiveCDs often come with memory testing so I can probably isolate the problem there.

I am hoping that it’s the hard drive, which is one of the least important that I own. If it’s the computer, it’s going to get tricky. There are a number of IDE drives invested in that machine and IDE has apparently gone the way of the do-do. And, of course, DDR2 RAM is itself reaching obsolescence. And I would probably not feel secure unless I had a new power supply anyway, so that’s another hundred or two. So instead of looking at buying a cheap CPU/mobo combo for a couple hundred bucks, I’m looking at a near-complete replacement of $500.

Somebody, somewhere is saying “That’s why I own a Mac! So I don’t have that problem.”

Indeed. With a Mac, you would already be resigned to buying a completely new machine. And it would cost way more than $500. And it wouldn’t have the hard drive capacity Ryoko has anyway.