Here’s what happens when your tinfoil hat’s too tight

Interesting theory, I suppose.

I wish to ponder whether Microsoft might have directly or indirectly encouraged three prominent bloggers to publicly and passionately implore the company to delay the release of its long-awaited Vista release of Windows.

No, I don’t have evidence that Robert McLaws, Robert Scoble, and Ed Bott were involved in a conspiracy to give Microsoft cover for a significant delay of the next major release of its franchise operating system.

Still, the context of this three-part remonstration is awfully convenient for the executives back in Redmond.

Thank goodness Jim Garrison isn’t around anymore.

How old is too old?

As an experiment, I just resuscitated a Y2K-era notebook with a few inexpensive hardware upgrades, split its hard disk into two 20GB partitions, and installed Windows XP with Service Pack 2 on one and Ubuntu Linux on the other. The results were surprising. (You can read all about it in Linux, XP and my old PC.)

That six-year-old PC turned out to be far from obsolete, which got me thinking about the nature of PC obsolescence.

My first IBM-based computer was built in the early 1980s by a Korean clonemaker and sold under the Leading Edge brand name. It had an Intel 8086 processor running at 8MHz or so and 512K of RAM, if I recall correctly. It had a monochrome monitor, at least one 5.25” floppy drive, and a hard disk whose capacity was measured in some small number of megabytes.

I replaced it with a succession of computers over the next ten years, each with incrementally larger hard disks and slightly faster processors. When I was testing beta versions of Windows 95 (then code-named Chicago) in 1993 and 1994, I was probably using a 33MHz 486 processor with 4MB (or maybe an eye-popping 8MB) of RAM.

Would you expect any of those ancient PCs to be even marginally useful today? Don’t make me laugh. Even the first-generation Pentium 133 and 166 models I spent more than $2000 to purchase in 1996 and 1997 would be nearly useless a mere decade later.

I was able to run the first release of Windows XP (including beta versions from 2000) on PCs built around Intel’s Pentium II series chips from 1998 or so. XP on a 233MHz wasn’t fast, but it worked. I wouldn’t do that today, however, mostly because the cost of the EDO memory chips it used would be prohibitive. It would probably run $100 to bring it up to its max of 192MB!

Basically, I think any computer using the Pentium 3 family or later and built in 1999 or later should probably be usable with Windows XP today, assuming you can find memory upgrades at a reasonable price.

Robert’s right: Windows Vista needs more time

Robert McLaws says Microsoft needs to delay Windows Vista. I agree with about 90% of what he says:

I’ve been defending Microsoft’s ship schedule for Windows Vista for quite some time. Up to this point, I’ve been confident that Vista would be at the quality level it needs to be by RC1 to make the launch fantastic. Having tested several builds between Beta 2 and today, I hate to say that I no longer feel that way.

Robert says Microsoft should “Push the launch back 4-6 weeks and launch at the end of February [and] add another beta to the development cycle.” Make that “end of March” and I’ll sign up too.

There’s some truly great stuff in Windows Vista, but current builds are not at the quality level they need to be at for a release candidate to appear in the next few weeks. If management insists on hitting an arbitrary January ship date, the results will be disappointing at best, and potentially nightmarish.

Jim, are you listening?

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

No one outside of the 98052 ZIP code seems to believe that Windows Vista is really going to ship when Microsoft says it will. The latest skeptical word is from Wall Street:

Where on the horizon is Vista?

Officially, Microsoft said last week that it is sticking to its most recently announced schedule of shipping Vista to business customers at the end of this year and launching it for consumers and on new PCs in January.

Few, though, are taking Microsoft at its word.

“Our estimates have already assumed a delay in the Vista launch to March or April,” Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund said in a research note Friday. [emphasis added]

Another slip in the schedule won’t be disastrous, but it will be embarrassing. My best guess – and that’s all it is, a guess – is that the next time Microsoft makes an official announcement about Vista’s schedule it will contain an actual release date. Better to suffer in silence for another few weeks (or more) than to make another vague pronouncement.

When did Gordon Gecko join the Rolling Stones?

Greed is good, apparently. That’s the takeaway I get from this story:

Rolling Stones tour with phones

Can’t make it to Europe for the current tour by the Rolling Stones? No problem.

Dial a toll-free number and listen to them perform all down the line in real time for $1.99 per seven minutes.

[…]

According to a statement, U.S. fans can buy in by calling [a toll-free number] from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time. At the six-minute mark, a voice will warn them that the time is almost up, which makes bootlegging the concerts a challenge.

I’m not sure which is more craptacular: The greed of the companies behind this, or the stupidity of anyone who would actually pay. Who is stupid enough to pay anything, even two bucks, to listen to seven minutes of a live concert over a freakin’ phone? I guess if a bunch of gazillionaires can convince their fans to cough up $100 each for a Platinum fan club membership that gives them the right to compete with other suckers, er, fans to spend $352.50 per ticket (plus convenience charges and handling fees) to see a rock and roll show.

Nice retirement plan you got there, Mick.

Dueling newshounds

The business press got mixed messages from Microsoft today.

From the Wall Street Journal (subscription only):

Microsoft Confirms Vista Schedule

Microsoft Corp. said it sees no impediment to shipping Windows Vista on time.

Kevin Johnson, co-president of the division that includes Windows, said Thursday the company has test versions of the operating system in the hands of millions of users. So far, nothing has turned up to keep the product from shipping to business customers in November and to consumers in January as planned, Mr. Johnson said at a meeting for analysts.

Bloomberg.com:

U.S. Stocks Slide on Earnings, Possible Microsoft Vista Delay

Technology stocks slid after Microsoft Co-President Kevin Johnson said the world’s largest software company will ship Vista, postponed in March, when it’s ready.

Who do you want to believe?

A Windows brain-teaser

Think you’re a Windows expert? Here’s a stumper for you. See if you can guess the answer.

On my primary hard disk, I have a folder filled with 430 digital image files in JPEG format. Collectively, they occupy a little under 300MB of disk space.

I want to copy those files from one machine to another using a 1GB USB flash drive I have hanging around. The flash drive is formatted and completely empty.

I open Windows Explorer, select all the image files, and drag them onto the flash drive icon. Windows begins copying the files to the portable drive, but about a third of the way through, the copying process stops with a cryptic error message containing the code 0x80070052: “The directory or file cannot be created.”

What’s the problem, and how can I fix it?

First one to get the correct answer wins a signed copy of Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition.

Update: We have a winner. See the comments for the discussion. Here’s a more detailed explanation:

The problem is that the flash drive, like many USB devices, was formatted using the FAT16 file system. Most Windows users haven’t had to deal with this disk format in years. FAT32 was introduced in 1996, and Windows XP has supported NTFS as the default file system since its introduction in 2001.

So what’s the problem? FAT16 volumes impose a strict limit of 512 entries in the root directory (you can have as many as you want in subfolders). A KB article, Errors Creating Files or Folders in the Root Directory, explains:

This problem occurs when all 512 root directory entries have been used. This problem can also occur with fewer than 512 files and folders in the root directory because Windows 95 uses additional directory entries to store long file names.

A table at the end of this article explains that long filenames typically use four directory entries, and my digital image files were definitely using long names. So at 4 directory entries per file and 512 entries total, I was running out of room to store filenames when I hit 128 files.

The solution was to create a subfolder on the flash drive and copy the files there instead. As soon as I did that, all was well.

Mother Nature packs a punch

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Photo: Michael Chow / The Arizona Republic

Unless, of course, you’re sitting in an airplane waiting to take off in the midst of this storm, as Judy and I were last night. For one awesome ten-minute stretch as we sat on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, lightning was striking several times per second all around us, and microbursts were blowing trees sideways.

We sat on the plane for more than three hours waiting to take off, as the storm appeared to leave the area and then circled back twice to sit over the airport and deliver more of the light show. After the first two-hour wait, we had to go back to the gate and refuel. We finally made it home just before 4AM, nearly four hours later than originally scheduled.

When we lived in the Phoenix area, we saw storms like this one every summer. The amount of damage they can cause is truly astonishing. I don’t miss them at all and I would gladly have skipped this one. I also don’t miss the summer temperatures. According to the Arizona Republic, the Phoenix area has already set a new record this summer with more than 11 days where the low temperature – that’s the low, mind you – has been over 90 degrees. And monsoon season is just getting warmed up.

Karma, Dell-style

If you stick your fingers in your corporate ears and go “la la la” when your customers complain, eventually it catches up with you.

(And when your products catch fire, melt, and explode, that doesn’t help either.)

The Vista time machine

Frank Schrader tells Andrew Tobias:

I installed the beta of Windows Vista [Microsoft’s new operating system] and one of the first things I tried was Managing Your Money DOS Version 12. It works just fine, which is great because I’m not ready to give it up yet. It still does everything I want it to and I have records dating back to 1987!

I used to use MYM DOS back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It’s startling to think that a program that’s nearly 20 years old actually runs under Windows Vista.