The Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Just a Tad Shinier Than The Previous Turd

So hopefully everyone who is reading this has already read my previous blog entry on Windows 8, where I sighted my numerous complaints. If you haven't read it please check it out, its entitled Why Windows 8 Will Fail, at Least In the Desktop Market...

Okay so now that I've gotten that out of the way, yesterday in Barcelona, Microsoft released its consumer preview of Windows 8. Immediately people started scrambling to get the download as fast as possible before the servers get clogged. The ISO is over 3GB, however Microsoft provided a nice little alternative to that in the form of an in-place upgrade install tool. The tool basically looks at what you have installed and only downloads and installs what is necessary to give you the consumer preview update. It's a very small file, took seconds to download.


Several people were reporting that if you wanted to install the consumer preview you would have to ditch the developer preview, this is just not true. I installed it just fine, using the upgrade tool. The tool will show you any applications it can upgrade and any it cannot. It then asks you what you'd like to do, install a fresh copy with no previous user files, or install a copy with your settings and files. I wanted to see how well the tool worked, so I chose to keep my previous settings and installed it. I know I have complained a lot about Windows 8, and I will have complained a lot more by the time you finish reading all this. Here's a couple of things I want to not complain about first, the in-place upgrade tool. Seriously whether Windows 8 flops or is successful, at least Microsoft has gotten this right. It is almost entirely automated and when its not, it's asking you a couple of important questions. It's exactly the way I would want an upgrade done. The second thing I liked was this was a little peppier than the developer preview, I figured they would fix a lot of the sluggishness I was feeling and I was right they did. And now on to the complaining.

After loading Windows 8 consumer preview for the first time, I was introduced to the Metro interface. It looks a little better, but not by much. So I clicked on desktop to see if anything changed and it looked ever so slightly better, but its still a turd compared to Windows Vista and Windows 7. I immediately noticed something odd, the Start button was missing. So I moved my mouse around and pulled it to that corner and nothing. So I figured maybe you need to use Metro to find it, so then I tried searching for a way to get back to Metro and couldn't find one. In the developer preview it was easy for me, on the desktop I'd just clicked the start button and it would yank me into Metro, clearly a bug, but useful for returning to Metro. The problem was, the start button was now gone, and there were no icons on the desktop to help, no shortcuts, no bars, I was screwed. I spent five minutes trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get back into Metro without having to reboot. It felt like if I was given a machine with only DOS on it, and someone removed the dir command. So several minutes later, on pure chance I hovered for a second in the top right corner of the desktop and a transparent menu appeared on the right of the screen. In the menu, I see an option called Start, so I assume this must be where they put the Start button, so I click it. And...It wasn't the start menu at all, it brought me right back to Metro. So I clicked on the Desktop tile and it occurred to me, the assholes at Microsoft have probably completely replaced the Start button with a shortcut to Metro, so on the desktop, I click my trusty Windows key on my keyboard and sure enough, up pops Metro. Here is a video of my experience:

So I click back into the desktop, I cannot believe the start button and start menu are completely gone. What a bunch of assholes. So having realized not only were they assholes for drastically changing a staple of Windows since 1995, they were assholes for making hidden features. You see Microsoft when you change something someone is so used to, they can do it in their sleep and on top of that hide it from plain sight, you earn the "Biggest Assholes in the World" award. It's like going to the home of a blind man, and rearranging all his furniture while he's away. The biggest problem with Windows 8 is its absurdly unintuitive. Frankly, I think people are going to need a manual to use it, which is tragic since manuals probably haven't been needed for windows since the days of Windows 95. So after my blood pressure dropped a little, I started moving the cursor all over the place, then I found that if I pull the cursor close enough to the edge of the screen in the lower left corner, a small box appeared. So I tried to click on the box, which promptly disappeared again. So I moved the cursor back and when it appeared, I tried again. It promptly disappeared again, so I tried again, this time I tried to right-click, still nothing. Ok, seriously this is starting to piss me off. I had no idea what to do, so I fidgeted with the mouse, moving it back and forth in the corner and clicking frantically, first with the left mouse button and then with the right, and suddenly a menu appeared. I realized now, you literally have to be right on the edge, touching the corner perfectly and then right-click the mouse to get the menu to appear. At first glance, I thought it was a context menu, since it didn't look like the start menu. Then sadly I realized Microsoft had fucked with the start menu making it an ugly gray dialog box with system shortcuts. I took a video showing you what it looks like and what you have to go through to see it.

I took a video of various things including my experience with the new Task Manager. I warn you its nothing special. Check the video to see what it looks like.

Here is a video I took of the new Internet Explorer version 10. Check it out, its radically different in every way. I hope it won't look like this on Windows 7.

In this video you will see what Windows Explorer looks like now, its a copy of the Windows 7 version of explorer with a Ribbon interface. Check it out:

So I wanted to get a video of me playing with a bunch of Apps, check it out. Its a little longer than the previous videos, so I added music to it to help pass the time, and since I'm only commenting on some of the stuff I'm playing with I figured it would be a better experience.

I point out a couple of times during these videos how unintuitive Windows 8 actually is. It was while trying to shutdown Windows 8, that I found another blockade. I show you just how hard it is to find the Windows Shutdown command. While it seems easy after the fact, when I first went looking I just couldn't find it.

So I gave this version much more of a chance than the developer preview, which was a complete piece of shit. This preview is still shit, just a little shinier I guess. Everything about the OS screams, "Come and play with me, I'm a cartoony reincarnation of my once former glorious self." You know those cell phones you give old people and children under six, you know the ones with like three buttons on them you have to program. That's what Windows 8 feels like to me, it wants so bad to be one of these:

Instead its one of these:

I think if Microsoft wants even a chance at success with Windows 8, they need to lose Metro as a primary component of Windows. I'm sure its really nice on a tablet, but it sucks major donkey shit on a computer. If they are determined to have this Metro UI be part of Windows, they need to redesign some of the OS. First, when you setup Windows for the first time, it should detect you are not using a tablet and ask you if you'd like to disable Metro and just use the standard desktop. That's a perfectly acceptable way to make Windows 8 a little better. The next thing they can do is fix my fucking Start button and Start menu. If they want any chance at convincing consumers to hand over $300+ for an OS, or $800+ for a new computer they better fix this now before its too late. Consumers do not adapt to change very well. Microsoft already saw this with Windows Vista which flopped. Human beings like changes to be made gradually over time, not all at the same fucking time. It's how greedy oil companies trick consumers into forking over $5+ a gallon for gas. They didn't just raise the price of gas from a dollar to five dollars, they did it gradually over a decade. It's like the boiling frog anecdote. Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water and he will immediately jump out, however put that same frog in a pot of cold water and slowly raise the temperature to a boil, and the frog will boil with it. The last thing Microsoft can do to make Windows 8 more tolerable is fix the malware problem once and for all. If consumers have more to gain than lose, they're certainly more likely to pay for it. 

Almost everyone in this world has had their computer compromised at one time or another by something malicious. At least those people who don't consider themselves to be tech savvy. Considerable time, effort and money are spent trying to solve the problem. Consumers are bombarded daily with attempts to compromise their computers, and many of them have ineffective or no software that will protect them from the problem. Microsoft has the ability to lock down the kernel, preventing much of this code from actually harming the system. They could also take steps to prevent this kind of code from even getting on the system. Windows Defender was a good tool to include with Windows Vista and Windows 7, but it doesn't protect against everything and it stacks up poorly against other products of the same type. Then Microsoft took a major step by releasing Security Essentials, which combined an Anti-Virus solution with a Anti-Spyware solution making it one of the more effective tools in the fight against malware. So while anyone can download this software free of charge, it does not come included with Windows 8. This is a major boneheaded move on the part of Microsoft in my opinion. Also they definitely need to do something about Internet Explorer. While Internet Explorer 9 made great strides toward solving this problem, it is still a vector for infection. Microsoft needs to take a couple more steps in my opinion, first block ads by default. While some ads are harmless tools that allow sites to monetize, most ads are used to bring a user to either an infected site, or used simply to execute code that will cause them to be infected. If you want ads, then either one build a database of known good ad hosts, maybe set something up like the Certificate authority, or two only allow ads that do not run using flash, java, active x, or another scripting language. The second thing that could be done is to setup an intermediary between the browser and the source of a url. That is, when a user clicks on any url, the browser first checks the link through a third-party system that can scan the source of the link to determine whether its safe, and return it to the browser. If the link is not safe, the user gets a message telling them it has been blocked for their safety. Obviously if the user knows the source to be safe or wants to assume the risk, then you have an option for it to be temporarily disabled. This gives them security but also freedom. And lastly, Microsoft needs to release Internet Explorer as open source. The two other major browsers, Chrome and Firefox are both open source. By allowing the community to check the source code of the browser, exploits can be found, and patched more quickly, as well as give programmers an opportunity to develop additions to the browser to help improve and secure it. It would also make the browser more available by allowing developers to port it to a different OS. There is no reason to keep Internet Explorer as a closed source, they don't make money from it, its caused them only grief since they started making it and although they do have browser supremacy right now, over time that will change as Chrome is becoming more widely adopted. I did see something interesting with Internet Explorer 10 while I was looking at it in Windows 8. Much like Google and Mozilla, Microsoft has added the ability for the browser to update itself as soon as there are changes. This allows them to quickly get vital code changes to the browser when needed. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but it won't help Windows 8.

I think about one more thing Microsoft can do to help sell Windows 8. Bundle Microsoft Office with it, at least in the Home Editions. You don't need to give consumers access to all of the tools, most people have no use for Infopath, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Outlook, or Visio. Just give them the basics, Word, Excel and Powerpoint for free. It will help save consumers some cash, by not having to purchase the suite for a couple of apps. Most people have no idea what most of those applications are actually used for with the exception of Outlook, but Outlook is dated for average users. Its now used mostly in corporate settings with an exchange server. I think most people today have some kind of webmail, its rare for anyone to still have a pop3 account to get their mail. And although Outlook can be configured to get webmail, since most people are in their browsers probably 99% of the day, it may be more convenient to get it from the web. Also most people feel its safer if they store their email online, at least from the perspective of disk failure. Why store thousands of emails locally on a hard disk that is just waiting to fail, when you can store them in a cloud where you can get tons of free space that is protected by redundant backup solutions.

So those are a few things Microsoft could do to help sell Windows 8. Of course no amount of help is going to solve the arrogance they have shown toward the consumers who buy their products. While this kind of thing may fly with consumers when it comes to Apple products, I doubt very much that it will fly for Microsoft. If you want to be innovative, inventive and hip, then give people a choice. Give them two competing products, and ask them to choose. You can say, "Hey would you like this outdated, insecure, pretty, standard, product or would you like something new? Something that can be used on many types of hardware, features cutting edge technology and was built with the mobile user in mind." You may not get the result you wanted but at least people will be given the choice. And that's all people really want.

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Social Media Tracking. How the U.S. Government is Spying on You.

We've probably all heard the stories. Don't say certain words on the phone when talking to someone, because the  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will show up at your door uninvited. Well its not likely those rumors are actually true, though not many would actually test such a thing. It's a little like standing in the mirror and saying "Bloody Mary" three times, everyone gets to the second one, but stops before the third. Why take a chance, you know? Well when it comes to FBI wiretapping, with a warrant, either issued as part of an open criminal investigation, or a FISA warrant requiring you meet certain guidelines of being involved in espionage, this kind of story seems silly. In Katz vs. United States, 1967, the United States Supreme Court ruled regardless of the location, a conversation is protected from unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment if it is made with a “reasonable expectation of privacy”. So unless you fall under the two categories I've already specified, you can expect your conversations on the telephone to be private.


But what about the Internet? It's been a long standing tradition that you DO NOT have any such expectation of privacy when connected to the Internet, after all your ISP sits in between you and the Internet, so you would expect that they could be spying anytime. We all accept that our ISPs are probably spying on us, though not like we think. They already have the most useful information about us, Name, Address, Phone Number, Credit Card, Bank Information, and Social Security Number. They already have enough information to find out anything about you, and you gave it to them willingly, a sacrifice for a connection to the Web. Though they probably log all sorts of information, its only likely tied to an IP address, which if needed can be later converted to a name.


Not many people expect the Government to be tracking them, after all according to statistics there are over 245,000,000 people using the Internet in the United States. That is a lot of people to watch, so most of us expect that the government only tracks people who are under criminal investigation. In January it was revealed that the FBI was looking for programmers who could write Facebook and Twitter monitoring software. People concerned with privacy immediately sounded alarms. However, this isn't the first time this has happened.

In February 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data. The proposed initiatives would gather data from "online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards" and disseminate information to "federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners." EPIC immediately filed a freedom of information act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DHS. The House Committee on Homeland Security's subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence recently held a hearing on the matter of what was revealed in this lawsuit. The program is called "Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records" and it collects information available on social media, shares it with other government agencies (including those in other countries) and private companies, and retains it for five years. 

It was revealed a company called General Dynamics was contracted by the government to spy on individuals, though they were not invited to the hearing themselves, Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan of the DHS was invited. Subcommittee Chairman Patrick Meehan grilled Callahan for sometime on the subject of the government spying methods. He wanted to know how the government was protecting the information being collected, and how he could be assured the government wasn't using the information to target individuals who believed they were part of a kind of quasi private community, often found on message boards and online forums. Callahan revealed, that the information was being used to identify public dissent of the government. Representative Meehan then asked "What can we do to assure that the activities of monitoring are not going to create some kind of chilling effect on individuals willingness and readiness not only to comment, but frankly, to make comments which may be critical of the government." To that, Callahan had no real answer. "To be very clear, it is the what, not the who that is being identified and that we are concerned with…we are just focusing on the event, the situation, and not worried about the individual." Of course looking at the agency's own documents, it appears that was a lie. The document which was submitted, says:

"Names of anchors, news casters, or on-scene reporters who are known or identified as reporters in their post or article who use traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed"

Callahan reveals that the use of keywords and software is being used to capture the information. She was then asked about the Chain of Command, of who is in charge? Callahan skirted the question by repeating the previous statement. The contempt on the part of the DHS was clear. She ended by saying she would get back to them with better answers for their questions.

So its pretty clear the government is using data-mining techniques to gain information about individuals through the use of keywords on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but also on message boards and websites where you may have logged in as a security measure to protect privacy. Well consider this, its pretty clear the government has at their disposal methods that allow them the ability to spy on anything you type anywhere on the Internet, this by itself has a chilling effect on privacy. After all, you expect certain things to be private like email, even though they are truly not. The White House just proposed a bill that would help individuals secure their privacy online, which kind of gave me a chuckle since the DHS answers to the President of the United States. So its with full knowledge that at the same time President Obama talks about protecting people's privacy he is fully aware the government is violating it.

One thing that seemed pretty unbalanced is the line where the DHS states that the information is to be shared with government agencies as well as private companies. Hmm, who could that be? Well I don't think the government is spying on people so it can sell the information to companies to increase ad revenue. It's in my opinion pretty clear that this is a way for the government to give the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the information they need to find pirates without needing warrants.

When was it that our government started the long con? Was it under George Bush? Bill Clinton? or maybe it was long ago, even before the Internet was created. I don't know, I don't think we will ever really know that answer. The truth is our government was founded on principles that simply do not exist today. Men of moral character who truly cared for their nation fought to secure it, and give to its inhabitants freedom from tyranny. Looking at our government today, its pretty clear that moral character plays no part in any of our representatives minds. The moral principles that may be a reason to get into public office, soon disappear when faced with the reality of opportunity. An opportunity of greed can corrupt even those who consider themselves of the highest moral character.

Each day we move ever so closer to being that Police state, except it won't be a typical police state, because this one will be run by a corporation. And just imagine that day when you need help and you call 911 only to be put on hold, listening to music and interrupted by a voice that tells you, "Your call is important to us, please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly."

"Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty." - Edward Gibbon

I wanted to include a list of the keywords that your government is using to red flag you online, but I thought if I just post every single keyword in my blog the FBI might show up at my door, so instead I created a little video that you should watch. Pay attention to some of the words they look for, it will amaze you and scare you at the same time. A little background about these keywords, the DHS breaks them into categories in their documents, so I had to type everything out in individual frames, all 350 keywords they look for. You will see them broken down by the categories they break them down into. I recommend you watch this in fullscreen mode so you can see the words as they might be small if you watch it in the box provided. You can do this by clicking the tiny box at the bottom of the video on the right-hand side. Hovering over it, you will see it say Full screen.

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Anonymous Hacker Group Announces Plan to Shut Down the Internet on March 31, but Can They?

You may have heard of a group of hackers who hit the seen back in 2003 calling themselves Anonymous. Although much of their time was spent in secret, in 2008 they starting creating a fuss by using distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to take down major corporate websites. Since then, they have begun a campaign that targets major corporations in a fight against piracy and governments who align themselves with these corporations. On January 19, 2012, one day after the major internet blackout against SOPA, the Justice Department and FBI raided the offices of MegaUpload and shut them down. Anonymous retaliated by taking down the websites of the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Universal Music Group and Broadcast Music, Inc. Very quickly these sites were brought down with a relentless assault of packets, an attack that lasted days.


February 12th, 2012 someone representing themselves as a member of the Anonymous group posted some content on the pastebin website. In the message the hacker said some interesting things like:

To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved

bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of

sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down.

He continues on with plans of how the attack will take place, including a list of the 13 rootserver addresses, the internet uses to resolve names to ip addresses. The servers below are the 13 primary DNS root server addresses that propagate resolution requests to the authoritative servers. 

1. A       198.41.0.4
2. B       192.228.79.201
3. C       192.33.4.12
4. D       128.8.10.90
5. E       192.203.230.10
6. F       192.5.5.241
7. G       192.112.36.4
8. H       128.63.2.53
9. I       192.36.148.17
10. J       192.58.128.30
11. K       193.0.14.129
12. L       199.7.83.42
13. M       202.12.27.33

By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web. Anybody entering "http://www.google.com" or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to 'kill' the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.

I won't copy everything that is in the document, but he goes onto explain in a little detail a type of attack referred to as packet spoofing or IP spoofing. The plan is to take down the rootservers with an incidental attack, not directed at the rootservers themselves but rather compromised nameservers. The nameservers will be given the task of sending queries to the rootservers except the packets sent will have a spoofed source ip that matches the rootserver causing the packet to die on itself. They will then flood all 13 servers taking down the Internet's resolution system, after all if users can't get to Facebook, the Internet must be dead.

There is only one problem with this. It won't work. Yes, there are technically 13 ip addresses, but way more than 13 servers. Through the use of a technology called anycasting, data can be sent to a single ip address, however the closest and quickest server attached to that address actually receives it. Those 13 ip addresses are actually attached to hundreds of servers. Thus any kind of attack that flooded one of these ip addresses with data would find it likely spread over many servers, reducing its effectiveness significantly. It is very unlikely that an attack could generate enough packets to take down one of these, let alone all 13.

So now that I've settled that, let's discuss how they could actually do some harm. Well if they really have a huge botnet, which they have used before to take out major websites, they could still attack the DNS system by choosing a more appropriate target. Look any attack against the rootservers, while unlikely to actual do anything, it will set off red flags and you can bet the top security guys will be on it in no time. However, an attack at say these five particular servers might yield a promising result:

204.74.66.132

204.74.67.132

66.220.151.20

69.171.245.32

66.220.145.65

You see these are the five nameservers that are used to resolve FACEBOOK.COM. Facebook has thousands of redundant servers all setup to prevent the site from failing but an attack at its name resolution might prove to be a very effective attack vector, since there are clearly less targets and although the servers will physically be available, without name resolution, to 99% of the Internet they will be down. You see you don't have to think big in order to be effective, taking down the entire Internet is ridiculous, its very design was to be redundant so that no one server could take it down. This isn't a set of Christmas lights, its a computer network with powerful hardware and huge backbones. It's unlikely that any one attacker or even a group of attackers would have much luck in taking down more than a few servers at a time.

I just want to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone try to take down Facebook, I was merely using them as an example and one that Anonymous has previously stated as a target as part of a global attack initiative. Now I don't agree with their methods, using denial of service attacks against anyone is a very childish act that doesn't actually accomplish anything. It only helps to solidify the position of your enemy, because if you are that rattled you need to attack their website they will assume they are getting to you. I see these kinds of attacks as ones done mostly by radicals. You know them, the ones who strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up taking as many people with them as they can. You see they only do this because they have no other effective means of attacking their enemies. It's what happens when two parts of human evolution collide. There was once a moment in human evolution when our brains experienced a new thought, a realization that a rock could be used to sharpen the end of a stick making a spear with which to hunt. But it was on the hunt of a great animal that another quirk of evolution emerged called the Fight-or-Flight response. Even today thousands of years later while the tools of the trade have changed, the instinct to attack or flee in a scary situation has not changed. So we are left with people who are backed into a corner and left with two choices, to fight or to run, often times choosing to fight. And like thousands of years ago we use what tools we have available to us and evolve a strategy around them. The members of Anonymous are no different, they consider themselves to be under assault and when backed into a corner they must make a choice.

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." - David Friedman

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Why Windows 8 Will Fail, at Least In the Desktop Market...

Well many of you are probably windows users, in fact estimates are that around 90% of all computers are running Microsoft Windows. Of that, nearly 50% of users are still using Windows XP. That means 50% of users are using Windows Vista, Windows 7, and even older versions like Windows 2000 or maybe something even earlier. If average consumers are anything, its frugal. Most consumers take a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, especially when it comes to something that is so expensive. The Operating System (OS) can cost 30% or more of the purchase price of a computer. Early adoption of these OSes by consumers is nearly impossible, most consumers opt to stay with what they are comfortable with, even after support has long since expired. This is probably the reason why most users are still using Windows XP today over ten years after it was introduced to consumers, its easy to use, requires little training, its very stable, and runs almost any application you throw at it. It's also full of security issues, is a major target for attack by hackers and exposes you to the world with almost no protection built in. A firewall was included with it at release but hidden to the average person, and not even enabled by default until a later service pack release. Although still considered a security risk, a well hardened Windows XP machine is still considered one of the most stable platforms to run.


As consumers purchase newer hardware they are forced into using OSes that come bundled with their hardware. Hardware manufacturers do not want to support older OSes so they deliberately do not create drivers for the older OSes, preventing a more tech savvy user from simply wiping the new OS and putting an older one in its place. After Microsoft released Windows XP, they went on to release the colossal flop Windows Vista. Windows Vista had many problems. For one, it introduced users to a new idea, security.

Most users had been using an OS which was considerably lax in security, evident by the amount of malicious software infection vectors available for it. Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Rootkits and Spyware are all part of a class of software know in the security industry as malware. Most malware created today take advantage of users through a technique called social engineering. Social engineering as it relates to computers, is the art of manipulating people into performing tasks or divulging information without even needing to meet them. A common practice is to get users to click on a link in a web page by convincing the user that its in their best interest to do so. Often times the user sees an image that shows them they are infected by a virus and they must click the image to clean it. This image will often look exactly like a security pop-up, even marked with the words "Microsoft Windows", making the user believe it to be legitimate. Once the user has clicked the image, they are infected with malware. On older OSes, even visiting the page to begin with would often cause your computer to become infected, achieved mostly through an exploit in the browser being used to view the page.

When Windows Vista shipped, it included a new tool called the User Account Control (UAC) which was enabled by default. A user only had two options available to them, enabled or disabled. Leaving the UAC enabled caused the user to get prompted by a dialog box whenever a program attempted to access a part of the OS which was considered to be protected. Protected parts of the OS included the Windows folder, the Windows Registry and the User folder. A user who upgraded from Windows XP to Windows Vista would suddenly find out that everything you install touches the OS in a way that requires privileged access. Unlike its Unix and Linux counterparts, which were designed to give access to a privileged account called Root only as needed by an application, Microsoft Windows needs it for nearly everything. While a user of Mac OSX may get prompted only once per session to give something Root access, a user of Windows Vista may get prompted frequently, often many times for the same application. This annoyed average users and caused them to turn the UAC off, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by malicious code. Windows Vista was also one of the most resource heavy OSes ever made, an average machine could simply not run the OS without needing major upgrades. Worse still, a practice of computer manufacturers has always been to include the least amount of available ram in a machine that was needed to boot the machine and include not a stick more. The minimum specs for a Windows Vista machine were extremely under estimated and so manufacturers were including as little as 256MB of ram with newly purchased machines. Sure, this would allow the machine to boot into the OS, but make it usable, was another story. Windows Vista would run "OK" on a machine with a modern processor and 2GB of ram, but anything less would cause major problems. This practice of making consumers purchase additional ram just to make their OS usable hurt the industry and many consumers would not purchase a machine that was bundled with Windows Vista.

Well no one would contend that Windows Vista wasn't pretty, its inability to grab consumers to early adoption of the OS led Microsoft to speed up its release of its next generation of OS, Windows 7. Windows 7 while still a very pretty OS, was much easier to use. It gave users more options to control the UAC, by giving them a slider to determine the frequency of dialog boxes they would receive when installing and running certain applications. While the UAC in Windows 7 still pops up occasionally, its considerably less due to changes in the OS that allow certain types of applications access to certain protected parts while not to others. Windows 7 while still having the same minimum requirements of Windows Vista was easily installable on older machines that Windows Vista was not. This allowed consumers with older machines who wanted to adopt a newer OS, the ability to install the OS without having to make considerable upgrades. Although Windows 7 runs better on a machine with a modern processor and healthy amount of ram, it is quite adequate with less. This helped Microsoft to sell more copies of the Windows 7 OS than they had sold of Windows Vista.

Most modern machines are now running Windows 7, and I'd say 99% of their owners are very happy with the OS. Although Windows 7 does run on tablets, the interface was not specifically designed for it, as compared with something like iOS, available on Apple IPads. This led Microsoft to a new design plan for their new version of Microsoft Windows, called Windows 8.

Windows 8 will release either sometime late this year or early next year and I believe it will be a colossal flop just like Windows Vista was. For one, its ugly. While this may seem like a matter of opinion and it probably is, its an opinion that most people who see it, with the exception of Microsoft Executives, actually have. With the release of a developer preview and soon to be released, consumer preview users will get a real glimpse of the new OS and find a lot has changed. No longer are we using the desktop interface users have been used to since the beginning of Microsoft Windows 95, nearly 17 years ago, but a new style of interface called Metro. Metro is layout of familiar applications that are tiled together on the screen to allow a user easier access. Gone are the desktop and start button so many of us are familiar with. Sure you can still access them, but you must go through the Metro interface to actually use them, and once you are done, the Metro interface returns to the foreground covering the screen again.

While this interface will make using a tablet much easier as the Metro icons are very large and you can drag the metro interface from screen to screen with your finger, it makes using a mouse and keyboard much harder. Microsoft has designed an OS here for one purpose, tablet computing, disregarding the market that they built their entire business on. This will be a huge mistake, for one thing, your average consumer doesn't even own a tablet, most consumers find them too expensive, choosing to purchase a new computer which is a more useful tool for doing everything from creating documents, printing documents, playing games, browsing the web, installing applications, or playing music. A computer does everything better than a tablet does, with the exception of mobility. However, since most modern mobile phones are smart phones, being able to bring things like pictures, documents, music and the Internet with you is very easy. This leaves a small market of mostly tech savvy users available to Microsoft with which to adopt a new tablet. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this market is dominated by Apple with the IPad. Anyone who has used an Ipad would not trade it in for another tablet, for one its very expensive so buying one is an investment most users are not willing to simply set aside for something new, especially since it means investing more money into something they have never used before. Had Microsoft been earlier to the game, they might have had a chance to get in on the ground floor giving users a choice and creating a market that is more diverse. But simply put, the IPad is very usable, its very pretty, and its from a company that has dominated the hardware market since it began releasing the first Ipods in 2001.

While owning Apple hardware was once considered to be a part of the market reserved for elitists and the very non-technical people, through innovation and an ability to convince consumers of a need they didn't know they had, Steve Jobs took a once failing company and turned it into an empire. Apple hardware is now found everywhere. Everyone, from the very young to the very old, own something made by Apple, whether it be a mac, Iphone, Ipod, IPad or Apple TV. Since the early days of the Apple II, Apple has always been ahead of everyone else in innovating and adopting new technology. This has allowed them to create a market for things where none had been before. This gives them both the advantage of grabbing a huge market share, but also holding on to it as newer technologies are released to compete. Because Apple has always been ahead of the game, other competitors are always playing catch up, and consumers don't really like that game. Consumers tend to stick with the technologies they are used to and companies that give them the most innovations.

In such a market Microsoft will have a huge disadvantage, one they have always had in trying to take over something they didn't dominate first with. Examples of this are the Zune, their attempt at competing with the Ipod and to a lessser extent Bing, their attempt at competing with Google. They also made this mistake when they tried to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows. Although newer versions of Internet Explorer are way better than earlier versions, they are always behind the technology curve releasing a browser that is outdated  the day it is released.

While I applaud the attempt by Microsoft to try and bring consumers more competition and a more diverse market, they should stick to the technologies they dominate the most. After all, this is their bread and butter. They dominate in OSes with Microsoft Windows as well as productivity software with Microsoft Office. Both of these are examples of Microsoft taking something they are good at and sticking to that formula. Microsoft Windows though its gone through many iterations, has maintained a look and feel to it that has made many consumers comfortable with it since its inception. Microsoft Office has similarly changed very little since its inception, only making minor changes with each release, making its most significant change to the interface with the release of Microsoft Office 2010, introducing users to the ribbon. But even with the introduction of the ribbon, the core of the software hasn't changed and that's important.

We shall see if my predictions come true by next year and I believe they will. And when they do come true Microsoft will be left in a very tough position. For the first time they will have alienated their users beyond a simple change, like moving icons from one place to another, or taking a familiar application out of the OS. This time users will lose confidence in a company they have been buying products from since the mid 1980's and I believe it will harm Microsoft. Although they may recover by quickly releasing a new OS that returns users to the interface they most love and are most used to using, the damage will be done. Users will wonder when Microsoft will try and change their interface again.

If Microsoft should learn anything from this, it will be that consumers do not like change, they didn't like it in Windows Vista and they won't like it in Windows 8.

The Metro Interface

Metro Apps from the Microsoft App Store

A Video I created of me using Windows 8.

UPDATE: After the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, I created another blog post The Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Just a Tad Shinier Than The Previous Turd. Please check it out. 

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Why I Think Women Make Better Song Writers

I find myself listening to a lot of music and very often my musical taste seems to lean more toward the female singer-songwriters. It had never really occurred to me why, so I started to really think about it for a while.

Music is designed to connect to us on an emotional level, it tends to make us feel things we rarely experience or maybe experience too much. It invokes in us emotions we often don't feel or choose to ignore. Music becomes very personal to each one of us, a song meaning one thing to one person and something different to another. And naturally this is the domain of women, not to say that men are emotionless, far from it.

We all share the same emotions, but social norms accept an emotional female while a male showing emotion is considered contemptuous. Men and Women accept that women are emotional creatures, sometimes crying on a whim at the sight of a new born baby, newlywed bride, or the death of a fictional character in a movie. Women are comfortable with themselves and with their emotions, something most men are not.


Women have always made better poets because of this, and because they experience senses we as men cannot and never will. The experience of pregnancy and childbirth is something which gives women a perspective that no man will ever truly have. To feel life itself growing from nothing to something within yourself, to bring into the world a new child. It is in this domain that men are completely senseless. Nothing we can imagine could ever truly contend with the truth.

Through childbirth women truly learn to be selfless, not only through the act of carrying the child to its birth, but rearing it as well. This sacrifice allows her to know true love, the love only a mother can feel for her child. This is a bond that will never be broken. The cries of her child illicit not sympathy, but empathy, truly different from what a man might feel in the same situation.

But what of women who don't have children or have never experienced childbirth? We take on the roles we are programmed for. If history has shown us anything, men have generally been the ones to go out and start wars while women stayed home with the children. Now that's not to say that women are incapable of performing tasks as well as any man, in fact it says something even better, that women are capable of performing tasks men cannot. In this way women are truly superior to men, the argument being that while men and women can both destroy a life, only women can create one.

It is this biological programming that makes women natural caregivers. The idea that DNA has something to do with how we treat others may seem reaching but consider the idea that in our simplest form we are all just chemicals and energy commingling. So doesn't it make sense that such things might be programmed? Obviously humans are quite different in the world in terms of brain power, as compared to something like a insect or a rodent, but we are all made up of the same things and from insects and birds to fish and cats and and beyond, females are generally the caregivers.

Of course there are exceptions in nature to the rule, where evolution has determined this, leading even more toward it being programming since it can be clearly programmatically changed as needed. If you don't believe it, ask yourself who you are more likely to let watch your children, a man or a woman? Who are you more likely to get in a fight with? Who are you more likely to get a hug from? I'm not making these gender roles up, we just all seem to accept the roles we are given and seem to fit into.

Poetry is defined as literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. It seems to me since women are better at expressing their emotions it makes sense that it makes them better poets and what is music than poetry set to a melody.

When I listen to music, it invokes in me all those emotions that are socially repressed, the music touches my soul, metaphorically speaking of course. As a man I feel lots, but rarely do I express it. Though being a woman must truly be a difficult task, it must also be very rewarding. Women live as examples of what we all should be, how we should act and how we should feel, and truly how we express ourselves and how we treat each other.

Below I've included just a list of some of the female singer-songwriters that I like to listen to:

Adele
Sheryl Crow
Linda Perry
Jewel
Alanis Morissette
Avril Lavigne
Sarah McLachlan
Amy Lee
Tori Amos
Edie Brickell
Stevie Nicks
Fiona Apple
Beth Nielsen Chapman
Debbie Harry
Norah Jones
Lisa Loeb
Dolly Parton
Diane Warren
Poe
Tiffany

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Everything is a Remix

Everything is a Remix is a documentary by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson.

In part one of the series he examines bands like Led Zeppelin and hip-hop artists of the 80's who made millions of dollars by sampling or remixing other peoples creative works.

In part two he delves deep into the film industry and shows that most films today are derivative works of the past, copied sometimes scene by scene. He dedicates most of the second part to examining the film Star Wars, which gets most of its material from the old Flash Gordon serials of the 1930's and Akira Kurosawa films. He also talks at some length about modern Hollywood films sticking to the idea of genres.

In part three he talks about how many of our modern inventions are copies of previous works. He spends a lot of time talking about Apple's extensive copying of the works of a company called Xerox to create it's own personal computer and modern graphical user interface.


It's in the conclusion to this four part series that we are introduced to Copyright and Patent laws. He attempts to explain the idea that copying is a part of nature. The evolution of genes is a product of a three part process of Copying, Transformation and Combination. He goes on to explain that culture evolves in a similar fashion, only with memes using ideas, behaviors and skills, a kind of social evolution. He continues by explaining that we evolved by copying the ideas of old to develop new ideas, but a new form of meme emerged called Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property is the perceived ownership of an idea, and it came about because of an unusual psychological idiosyncrasy called loss aversion. Loss aversion basically refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains, which translates to the idea that copying is okay if you are the one copying, but distressing if its your work being copied. Disney is mentioned as a company who built their reputation and fortune on using the works of others through the public domain, however when it came time for Disney to give up Mickey Mouse to the public domain, they lobbied congress for an extension on copyright. Steve Jobs doesn't get by without a mention as someone who basically built an empire on the work of Xerox but criticized Google for copying the idea of the iphone and iOS to make its android phones.

He continues with examples from the music industry where artists extensively copy the music of other artists explicitly. Artists like George Harrison and Ray Charles are shown to have borrowed the melody of songs without permission to use in their own music.

He continues on with an explanation of patent laws, ip litigation, and secret international treaties.

He ends with some choice words that sum up everything quite well:

We live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast. The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by intellectual property. It needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform.

That’s social evolution and it’s not up to governments or corporations or lawyers… it’s up to us.

The documentary is only about 34 minutes long if you watch all four parts. Part four peeked my particular interest and I watched it first as it deals with the subject of copyright and intellectual property, subjects I am strongly against. After watching part four I went back and watched them all together. I even took the time to plug the four of them into Adobe Premiere , and create a nice single documentary, which I promptly torrented of course.

The filmmaker's website http://www.everythingisaremix.info has a lot of good info as well as some links to donate for upcoming projects. Although I started to watch the parts from his site, I found it quite difficult and was unable to do so. I couldn't tell if it was the site or a bad combination of Firefox and a beta version of the adobe flash player, which crashes quite frequently.

 

Everything is a Remix Part 1

 

Everything is a Remix Part 2

 Everything is a Remix Part 3

Everything is a Remix Part 4

Magnet Link to download torrent

Downloading this way may be much slower until the file has been properly seeded. However, right now it may be the only way to get the entire documentary as a single file. 
The movie was ripped into a 275MB XVID avi with MP3 audio.

This is a fantastic documentary and I highly recommend everyone check it out. And if you have a chance to donate to the filmmaker I highly suggest it to keep him making high quality work like Everything is a Remix.

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