In other news, I’m giving up installing Windows on the external drive. I’ve passed the point where the expense of time and effort has bypassed the expected benefit. I can’t help but be annoyed–doing this with linux takes no effort–but I guess I can’t be too disappointed. Microsoft software is designed to make profits for Microsoft, not to benefit the user. It’s useless to be disappointed each time this manifests itself.

It’s been a convenience, but like most things chosen for price alone, robustness was not one of its qualities. Last week its power jack died beyond my ability to wiggle the plug into a workable position, and last weekend the final dregs of battery gave out. Given that I had a Best Buy gift card from christmas, I took it in to see if they could do anything with it. They pointed out that shipping alone would cost a quarter of the price of a new computer, and that replacing the motherboard would eat the rest. Replacment was the more practical option.

I’m typing this on a new computer, whose numerical statistics are (with astonishing precision) precisely double those of the computer this is replacing. However, like any other brand new machine, it was practically uselses out of the box: it had a crappy OS (Vista Basic) and a hard drive full of adware and demos. The ideal scenario would be for me to just throw the old machine’s hard drive into an external enclosure and boot from that, but Microsoft in its infinite wisdom has installed logic to prevent that from happening. After all, if the boot disc for an XP license was portable, a user could just carry that disc around to whatever machine happened to be handy at the time, losing MS the OS sales for each of those machines.

Luckily for me, in software there is no such thing as having the last word. If there is incentive to do a thing, no force in the world will prevent someone on the internet from figuring out how to do it. Wait long enough, and the knowledge will even be refined into tutorial form.

The process isn’t perfect. I’ll have to back up everything of importance, then customize, format, and reinstall windows onto the portable drive. Then I get to reinstall all the applications. It’ll probably eat at least one weekend to get things running properly.

Still, the result is what matters: I’ll have a Windows installation in a wallet-sized drive that I can plug in whenever I need it, and whenever I don’t, there’ll be nothing preventing me from using this nice new ubuntu box as my general-purpose portable. It is hard not to see this result as being an upgrade in all respects.

I have to laugh at parts of the release document. For example, the claim that programming languages started simple and easy to learn, and that the high-level concepts of modern languages discourage people from learning to code. “Hello World” is a one-liner only in a high-level language; it’ll take a beginner a few days of work and tons of documentation to accomplish in assembly. I also loved the section titled “Rules for naming Variables”: “[TODO]”

In general, this looks like a rehash of QBasic, of which all the warts are still present. The language lesson introduces GOTO long before talking about subroutines. Subs (not functions) access and modify global variables, and are limited to the current file’s scope. The major differences seem to be that most of the library functions have been rewritten in an object-oriented style and additional libraries for GUI stuff and Turtle programming have been added. Even though the library uses objects, the user has no way of writing their own.

I can see some junior coder at Microsoft doing this as a project for promotion points. It very much feels like a student project. However, I can’t see any programmer using it to actually teach programming. Small Basic might be useful if your ambition is to one day work up to Visual Basic as an enterprise programming language, but people interested in learning modern programming techniques would be better advised to look elsewhere for their first language.

Constructing a broad menu tree no longer noticably slows down the speed at which the menu is displayed! It may have, many, many years ago, but at this point computers are stupidly fast!! Putting multiple menus in a single dialog box is always a better idea than sequentially leading a user through eight chained dialogs!

The entire course is based on this book, which is horribly dated. It’s dated to the point where most of what it tries to teach is no longer relevant. But I have to muck around with it anyway.

I’m not even going to go into the problems with .Net, except to say that it failed to install because the installer couldn’t find required files on its own fucking setup disk! After dragging me through half an hour of useless setup procedures, it FAILED.

This is not a night that has made me happy.

And it just made my problems worse. Before, some (fairly crucial) drivers were broken. Now, I’m lucky if I can get the thing to boot at all.

Sometimes the keyboard glitches, and no matter how much I type, the computer sees none of it. More often, the machine just freezes at various stages in the boot process, usually just after finishing one or the other of the two mysterious progress bars which accompany the booting of this OS. My favorite, though, is when it gets through the BIOS stuff, but before it even starts anything Microsoft-related, it hangs with a black blank screen. Or seems to–if I then pound on the keyboard a few times (any keys seem to work, but any one keypress won’t do it) it proceeds to the ascii-based progress bar screen, and then gets all the way through that progress bar. Then it freezes.

All in all, after maybe 20 boot attempts, I have made this machine boot exactly twice; once in Safe Mode. I’m not happy. For almost a week now, it has been completely unusable as anything but a bookend, no matter what I try to do to fix it. I’m going to bring it into a repair shop, probably tomorrow, and see what their estimate to fix it is. If it’s anything more than $250, I’d rather just buy a new machine. Cancel that; I’d rather buy a new machine in any case, but I don’t think it’s worth budgeting that much money unless it would cost too much to fix this one.

“How,” I hear you ask, “is this man complaining so vociferously in an online medium if his computer’s such a wreck as he claims?” All I can say is that I’ve been lucky enough to be born into one of the most computer-enabled families I’ve ever heard of (we’ve averaged well over one working computer per family member since before I was born). My mom recently ordered a new laptop for herself, and I’ve been using that in the meantime to keep current on email and whatnot.

If anyone wants to make a contribution, feel free. I could use it right now. And if you want back anything in the way of original art, writing, music, anything like that, I’ll make sure you get what you want. I’m resourceful, and I like to think of myself as fairly talented (except, perhaps, at art). And I’m dead broke.

The funny thing is that I was always sort of assuming that it was simple laziness keeping me on my platform. However, the more I look into it, the more it seems that Windows, as much as people complain about it, isn’t the pure evil that everyone gripes about.

Start reading posts from this thread on Slashdot. If you don’t know already, Slashdot is a place where people who like computers tend to get their news. It’s a place where Linux, MacOS, and various other operating systems are enthusiastically supported. But there are a whole lot of people who post here and say that it’s more than the games keeping them using windows.

The biggest thing, of course, is the games. I’m going to generalize a little here, though, and say that games are just the most obvious example of the real category people are thinking of here: high-end applications. Whether you’re looking to run Dreamweaver MX or Unreal Tournament 2003, these products are developed, designed, and tested for Microsoft Windows. Linux and Mac releases, when they exist at all, come out months or years after the windows release; they are buggier and less well supported… basically, in most cases they’re a port, not an actual development effort. If I were to move to another operating system, I would have to find replacements, or just do without. And I get the distinct impression that without significant effort, it would end up being the latter.

But it’s not just the big, flashy software that I would need to go without. The everyday normal stuff would also need to change. Things that are running in the background right now, because they’re useful: trillian, winamp, eudora… I don’t believe that any of these have linux versions at all. Are there replacements? Of course. Would it be a pain to find and obtain replacements for all of these? A major one.

And then there’s the matter of the system shell itself. Don’t get me wrong, I loved dos and was amazed when Windows 95 came out and you no longer booted to a command prompt. I don’t mind tinkering around with a textual interface, writing scripts and mucking about with regular expressions. But we don’t live in a text-only world anymore; you have to use GUIS. It shouldn’t be a problem, as a well designed one is snappy and easy to use. But the only linux GUIs that I’ve seen, frankly, can’t hold a candle to Windows. Even the slashdot folk agree; they’re simply not as clean or as intuitive. Macs have a better case going for them, but though they’ve got talented designers and programmers, I personally disagree with many of the design decisions that they made. I’ll get into that in another post… It resolves to the fact that in terms of interface, I simply prefer Windows 2000. It’s certainly not the best design I can think of, but it’s the best one I’ve seen actually implemented.

I would love if linux (or any available OS for that matter) was stable, well-designed, and widely supported. I’ve just yet to see any that meet those qualifications. As far as I can tell, Windows 2000 is actually the best approximation out there. Which is kind of surprising,..

“The thing that I really don’t like about the military is that so much is based on your age.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t it that once you’re in active duty, if someone’s older than you, they have more authority?”

…

Do people really think that the military is this inefficient and stupid? I know that they have a reputation for it, but things like this just boggle the mind. As someone going into the military, I’d like to see them have a reasonable reputation, say, no worse than Microsoft’s.

And for clarification, your age, in the military, has nothing at all to do with how much authority you have. Your rank is based first off your position, then off your grade, and then off your time in grade. Age doesn’t come into question.