Digital Cowboy

Outer space has a smell! Not only that but it’s “a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation.” (I didn’t read the article or even check where the link went - that would violate The Slashdot Way - but I’ll bet you an authentic Lincoln Three Dollar Bill that the article was written by a Brit.)

(UPDATE: I was wrong. This particular idiot was born in Oregon. He must have picked up the brain-rot in college. It’s common there. I suspect it’s even infectious judging by the way it spreads on every campus.)

Thank Holy St. Darwin of the Galapagos for Science! This is such a relief to me. For years I’ve feared that outer space had no scent and that the hippies might get there first. Too much of the earth already reeks of that wretched Patchouli.

I seem to recall that a few years ago some fellers went out there. Come to think of it, I believe a lot of people have been out there. Of course, now that I’m being forced to think about it, none of them would have known how nice “outer space” smelled because they were all wearin’ them durn space helmets so they could breathe and what not.

That’s an unfortunate complication.

I’m the one using the “blind faith” to understand the world, right?

Just doing a “sound” check, so to speak. I just want to make sure I still have my bearings after “science” has discovered that outer space smells pleasant. And metallic. (What does metal smell like again? Oh. Nevermind. I remember now. I just found it on a website selling candles, thankfully.)

As a parting thought I need to reveal to you that one does not equal one. It’s just really, really close. A very highly educated mathematician I know told me that he once proved that. So it must be true.

Here’s something I just wanna throw out as food for thought.

Moral relativists often like to claim that “Life is not black and white. It’s just various shades of gray.”

It’s an interesting argument that I’ve sometimes espoused in the past and it’s almost singularly used to denigrate the idea that there are absolutes in this world - absolute right and wrong, mainly.

What I find interesting is that now that we’re in a “digital world,” we seem to be finding out that our best attempts to mimic the natural world can only be done with binary math.

The music you listen to on your iPod, the digital cable broadcast or HD satellite image you watch on your widescreen TV, the operation of every digital medical device, the video you watch on YouTube, the very words you’re reading right now… ALL digital representations of sight and sound.

Modern computer monitors, graphics cards and HD TVs are capable of representing BILLIONS of colors - more than the human eye can differentiate. Modern audio codecs can encode compressed audio that still has a frequency range greater than the human ear can hear.

Mankind’s science, with all of it’s learning and all of it’s arrogance has managed to re-create and reproduce (just) two of our five natural senses with near perfection. I’m not a skeptic that they can figure out how to do a couple of the remaining three soon. There have been promising efforts.

But it’s all digital. It likely will all be digital. “Digital” has come to be used in this age as a marketing term that is intended to imply “superior.” With good reason - it is almost always true that digital is superior. In many ways, it is the height of mankind’s discovery of how to recreate the world around him.

For those of you who aren’t geeks, let me clarify what “digital” means. It means that it is done with binary math. That is, bits and bytes. That is, ones and zeroes. Each bit is either on or it’s off. That’s how the computer that you’re using to read this, works. It all comes down to ones and zeroes. The chip in your computer - and every other microchip (currently) - only “understands” binary math.

On or off.

Black or white.

In all of our learning, we’ve managed to synthesize sound and sight (with motion) well only with microchips and binary math.

Black and white.

Now, the truly ambitious are speculating about the power we could harness with “DNA-based computing” - computers that use DNA as their base instead of binary. Many are excited about the possibilities. I’m not ruling out anything, but I’m not holding my breath either. I doubt they’ll pull it off any time soon. But even if they do, they’re still only discovering and imitating.

We live in a black and white world. Despite what anyone stretches their faith in science to believe, we are created in God’s image. That’s very different from being God. I find it fascinating that many of the same people that spout the “shades of gray” argument for many things, only have expertise in a binary world and don’t even see how ridiculous that makes the argument.

In the digital world, even shades of gray come down to whether the bit is set or not.

My first computer was an Apple II and I’ve been using Macs since 1985. (I couldn’t afford them when they first came out and I didn’t get my hands on one for a year.) For quite a long time, Macs were more expensive but so far superior that they were still well worth it. Then there was a short time in the late 90’s when they were still expensive and the operating system road map had seriously lost its way. Microsoft caught up and technically surpassed the Mac OS briefly but I was still an apologist for Apple because the usability and interface was always superior. (It was a tough few years to be an Apple fan but I bought my first brand new Mac when even some of the apologists were concerned that they might go belly up.)

Then there was the Second Coming of Steve. Not long after that came the iMac and then OS X. It made up for all of the lost time and lost ground, practically in one fell swoop. It was far superior to anything Microsoft was offering and today that’s more true than ever. Vista is a desperate, flailing joke, albeit a $6 billion one. Microsoft will never catch up now.

OS X really is that advanced, it’s constantly being improved and Microsoft’s incompetence has finally caught up with them. They can’t buy their way out of this one because they lack the fundamental management skill required to recover from the mess they made. It’s very much like selling your soul to the devil. They’ve taken every underhanded sleazy, unethical shortcut they could find to ham-hand their way to a “monopoly.” It’s over and was short-lived. It’s time to pay the piper. I saw that all along and, combining that with my anarcho-capitalist principles, I was always opposed to government anti-trust intervention. “The market will correct it,” I said. I was right and the correction has begun.

It’s not blind Mac fanboi-ism that fuels my predictions of Microsoft’s demise in the OS space. It’s convergence - Ubuntu Linux has recently reached the tipping point where it’s better than any Microsoft OS, even for Mom and Pop that just want email and web browsing with no headaches or geek stuff. Right when Apple’s firing on all cylinders and Microsoft can’t find a way to stop tripping over their own feet - or is that their fundamental incompetence?

They’ve never, ever competed successfully in an open market without an unnatural advantage. They’re basically a complete failure as a company that has been propped up for 20 years by sleazy practices building on an unnatural monopoly that they stumbled and fell into. They have nothing of value to offer and that’s always been true. They’re an inept middle-man always trying to find a way to get paid for bad copies of popular products, by positioning.

That’s why they’re scrambling to spin what is the most colossal failure in their history - the train-wreck that is Vista. They devoted the lifeblood of the company’s resources for 5 years developing it. In the process, they spent $6 billion and hung the future of the company on it. As with everything else they’ve ever done, they failed. But this time the market noticed. And they can’t cover it up because they have legitimate competition. The computer industry has outgrown them. This is the end-result of unearned success - an unsavory combination of arrogance and incompetence.

So, Apple introduced new iMacs yesterday.

I was bored today when I saw FSJ’s post about the new iMacs that contained a link to Dell’s website. So I clicked. And then clicked a few more times and configured me a Dell Optiplex 745 Ultra-small Form Factor hunk o’ crap as close as I could get it to the new iMac base model. (That Ultra-small Form Factor thing is clearly designed to compete directly with the iMac; it even has an option to mount it behind the display in the flat panel’s stand.)

As usual, I couldn’t exactly configure something truly comparable because they don’t offer an integrated camera (ala iSight) and microphone or the exact same processors among other discrepancies. But I got as close as I reasonably could. In the end, the Dell had a slightly inferior processor, no webcam, no microphone, no Firewire, inferior audio and vastly inferior video. (They offer nothing better than Intel GMA integrated graphics in the Ultra-small.) I’m also not sure about the wireless capabilities of the Dell because I didn’t care enough to look, but I doubt that it has Bluetooth or 802.11n.

Anyway, the Dell was pretty much maxed out to come close to comparing to a base model iMac. (The hard drive was maxed out; the largest they offer for that form factor is 250GB. I could have added more RAM, a better processor and bigger flat-panel monitor to compare to the higher end iMacs but then the hard drive would be too small as well as widening the gap with their pathetic GMA graphics and making the price disparity even worse.) It was $1527 without any of the anti-virus or “security” options - mostly certainly necessary if you really hope to compare any Windows OS to the OS X experience. So we should add about $150 + annual subscription for that. But I didn’t out of mercy.

That’s just a tick over 25% more than the iMac it almost competes with. The better equipped iMac being $1199 and in addition to it’s other advantages, being gorgeous while the Dell is bland at best and butt-ugly in my opinion. Add to that the fact that you can run any OS that the Dell can run (and quite a bit better), in any combination along side OS X on the Mac, for free. Also the Mac’s usable life will be longer and should you choose to replace it before its usefulness is exhausted, it will have double to triple the resale value of the Dell.

At this point, the anti-Mac zealots generally respond with something like, “But I’m not buying a Dell either. Macs are expensive. I can build a computer better than the iMac for X.” (Where X is generally $400 if said zealot is delusional and/or lying and as high as $900 if they’re just delusional.)

In that case, you can subtract the Dell’s few nearly-comparable strengths (Small form factor, time-savings over build-yourself, integration and warranty) along with the $300 you’ll save over the iMac. If I’m feeling particularly vicious, I point out that the Mac comes bundled with useful software that would cost you more than $300 to replace on the white-box with horribly inferior knock-offs and you still need at least $100 worth of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-adware and anti-suck software for the privilege of using a terribly inferior operating system.

So I’ve decided I’m going to just smack the next person that I hear say, “Yeah, those Macs are nice, but they’re expensive.”

And I’m also going to start listening for any mention of Dell so I can pipe in with, “Yeah those Dells are bland, boring, mediocre quality and can’t run a decent OS, but at least they’re a lot more expensive.”

And this, class, is why Apple is reporting record profits and growing sales at THREE TIMES the rate of the overall PC market.

The times they are a changing. I put little stock in market share numbers because they’re skewed against Apple in a variety of ways. But even if you believe them as they’re reported, Apple has doubled their market share in two years or so. That’s no small feat. At that rate you Apple-haters are going to have to ditch the term “niche” in just a couple of years.

This is just wild speculation, but I predict that 5 years from now someone will find a reasonably reliable method of measuring actual market-share (some web stats will be a more accurate measure by then) and the numbers will look something like 30% Mac, 10% Linux and 60% Windows, with the the Mac and Linux numbers still growing. In addition to Windows being on the decline it will also be harshly (to Microsoft) fractured at roughly 45% Windows Vista, 45% Windows XP SP3 (you know they’re gonna have to) and 10% Windows Whatever-the-&*^$-They’re-Calling-It-By-Then. Beta 2.

I was tagged

I don’t normally play these games, but…

• I like this guy. He makes me laugh.
• I haven’t updated this blog in a while.
• This one’s open - no specific questions - just 8 odd facts.

I can do that. Buckle up. Here we go…

Wait. They have to be odd and they have to be factual? Maybe this is harder than I thought. Either/or is easy. Odd and factual both is a challenge.

1. Despite what my critics would like to believe, I really am a “digital cowboy”. I live on a working ranch and make my main living - for now - doing web development.
2. At the moment, I’m a single father of two young daughters. Not only did I choose them, I flushed the rest of my life at the time and spent tens of thousands to “achieve” it. (And I have no regrets. Nothing has ever cost me more or been a bigger bargain.)
3. I taught myself to program on an Apple IIc in 1983.
4. I escaped lower middle class without college degrees. I currently own two businesses and I’m developing a third. I’ve never been in a college class.
5. My IQ qualifies me for - at the very least - Mensa but I’m not a member because I’m not impressed.
6. I believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. This is putting it a bit lightly for the purposes of public consumption. If you have a quibble, it’s you… or more likely, the stupid religion that messed you up.
7. I fear nothing.
8. I have a craving to experience the best of everything this life has to offer. I’ve experienced much of it and found it lacking. I’ve come back to biblical principles and Kingdom life as aspirations.

There. That’s eight. I don’t know if they’re all odd, but they’re all factual. That’s me in eight easy points.

No, wait. Here’s a ninth, bonus one. I want you to have the whole picture.

9. I’m a true, pure anarchist. I have no need or use for government and I believe that’s true for most rational, decent people. Men were never intended, nor are they capable of, ruling over other men. All government is then unethical and immoral. Irrational, indecent people would be subjugated by force as opposed to the current system that works in the opposite, where the worst among us are elevated to authority - the only currently “justified” use of unprovoked force. Anyone who seeks to rule over others is fundamentally evil simply because they seek permission to use unprovoked violent force. Thus, all government is a perversion of natural order.

Here is the message I sent to Progressive Insurance after a recent attempt to use their web site:

I came to your web site today with the intention of purchasing an auto insurance policy. I thought of Progressive first because of the TV commercials about how everything could be handled online.

Unfortunately, I can’t do business with you because your web site is broken. As a web developer myself, I can see that your site has been developed to work only with Internet Explorer. That was obvious to me, even before I saw your ridiculous compatibility warning, by the astounding amount of errors running up in Firebug’s Javascript validator at the bottom of my browser. (Do you really require IE 6?!?! Just one, out-dated browser?)

Internet Explorer itself is broken by design and only lazy or incompetent developers build to it. Quality web sites are developed to standards and then, because good business sense dictates accomodating as many platforms as possible, they are retrofitted with the hacks necessary to make them work even with poor quality browsers such as Explorer.

Obviously you are free to run your business as you see fit just as I am free to go elsewhere for my insurance. I would suggest you consider fixing your web site, though. It makes good business sense because with IE 7, Microsoft has once again demonstrated that not even Microsoft products are compatible with Microsoft products. It’s a costly and unnecessary moving target to develop to their intentionally corrupted specifications and with no benefit whatsoever except to Microsoft. In addition, IE is fundamentally insecure making it down right irresponsible to use it on the web. The world is waking up to this and the Internet Explorer market share is on the decline. This is why the U.S. Department of Transportation has banned all upgrades of Microsoft desktop products including Explorer, as just one recent example.

For the record, I have an old junky Win XP machine purely for the purposes of testing the necessary hacks to make my otherwise standard web sites work with IE. But I won’t use that junk just to deal with you.

It might also be wise to consider that for every person like me who feels strongly enough about this to tell you, there are probably 10 that will just move on and wonder why your web site is the only one they encountered today that doesn’t work.

The reference I made to the number of errors in Firebug - 153 and still counting on their main page when I finally found the “Contact Us” button.

I received a form letter reply that began “Our developers are aware that our web site does not currently work with (Firefox/Mac/Safari)…” It pointed out that the site is “optimized” for IE 6 and AOL and then droned on for three insulting paragraphs describing - in condescending detail - all of their “extraordinary” security - which amounts to the same web standard SSL encryption used at every ecommerce site on the AOLIntarweb. The first thing that went through my mind is that their silly opening sentence left out “(Navigator/ Linux/ Konqueror/ Opera/ Windows Vista/ Most of Windows XP/ Internet Explorer 5/ Internet Explorer 7/ OmniWeb/ Camino/ Flock/ iCab/ Epiphany/ All mobile platforms…)”

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they assume smart people are not their target demographic so they don’t bother with anything but last year’s Microsoft browser and AOL. Fair enough. They have plenty of competitors.

Also of note is that I don’t even need to go in the other room and turn on the XP machine to use IE 6; I have multiple options for running it right here on my MacBook Pro (in addition to Parallels or Boot Camp) and sometimes do. But I won’t, for them, for the same reason. And technically, according to them, my XP machine wouldn’t even work because it’s running IE 7 and Microsoft provides no easy way to revert to IE 6. (I suspect the Progressive site probably works in other versions of IE including 7, but that’s not the point.)

Take note budding web billionaires. This is not how you run an online business.

Live comment preview is now working in the pop-up comments. Try it out. It’s pretty slick. It gives you real time preview of your text, including tags. It can handle links (a href), ordered or unordered lists and blockquotes in addition to the more common bold (strong) and italic (em). It will even update as you modify text or tags in content you’ve already typed.

It’s been available in the traditional, embedded comments form here for a long time but I never got around to getting it working for the popups until now. That’s thanks to a complaint from one of my favorite readers that she was getting Javascript errors with every key stroke.

I think this will solve part of her problem, though a much better solution would be to use Firefox. Granted, in this case, the root cause was broken code on my site but a decent browser would handle that much more gracefully. There’s still a layout problem because IE 6 doesn’t handle floats right and I tend to not pay much attention to that (to my own detriment unfortunately) when writing style sheets.

Internet Exploder sucks more than most Microsoft stuff and that’s saying something. (I find myself saying that about more and more Microsoft products these days. I forget what the original standard of Microsoft suckage was. Maybe I need to start a “Bottom 10 list” to keep track of which MS products are worst.)

The MS fanboys say IE 7 is much better than IE 6. That’s probably true; it would be hard not to be. The problem is that in typical Microsoft fashion, they’re now more standards compliant but not really standards compliant. At the same time, now that they’re pretending to get with the program, they’re not compatible with the IE 6 specific hacks anymore either. So it’s just a new, different set of problems. Now they’re not fully compatible with the standards or sites that were specifically designed to accommodate the brokenness of IE 6.

(By the way, IE 7 is coming any day now and will be pushed through Windows Update. Don’t be surprised if half of the “interweb” is “broken” for a while after you install it. Almost everything you see correctly in IE 6 only works because the page is specifically hacked to work with IE 6. Millions upon millions of style sheets will have to be rewritten and retested to make them work with IE 7.)

It reminds me of the old cliche, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” In Microsoft’s case, the answer is, “When we need to renew the revenue stream or protect our control.”

On a related note, last Sunday I got an email complaint about the text being too small on voxday.net. I get one of those every couple of months. In this case, the tone of the email seemed slightly snarky and, worse, it caught me first thing in the morning before I had my coffee. I wasn’t even happy to be alive yet on that particular day so I was a little more obnoxious than normal in my reply:

The type face is only too small if you are using Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is a broken browser that doesn’t support web standards. Vox and I made the decision to leave the site as is in order to remind folks like you that Internet Explorer is not only a poor browser, it’s also a menace to the internet because of its plethora of security problems that spread worms and viruses.

Voxday.net is perfectly legible in either Firefox or Opera. If you insist on using Internet Explorer, even that poorly coded excuse for software can be made to render it properly by changing its default font size.

On commercial, for-profit sites, I accommodate Microsoft’s incompetence and terrorist market behavior. With voxday.net I have the luxury of ignoring their stupidity.

Mark

I will apologize to Bob for my snarky tone and really should “fix” (read: “hack”) voxday.net so IE can figure out how to display the basic text there. But since the site can be easily read even in IE just by adjusting IE’s font size I haven’t made it a priority and now IE 7 will probably fix that for me by the end of the month. There’s more to the story, though. Bob replied to me today:

Hi Mark,

At your suggestion I loaded Firefox. I have been trying it all week. I bagan to notice that once in a while it loads a web site but then presents only a blank white screen. The problem can be cleared up, usually, by using the reload function. Most of the time that problem is frustrating and delaying. Today it did the blank screen problem while I was using Firefox to order some materials. It went blank when my order completion should have been presented. I tried “reload” and got a warning that I might be duplicating my order. Now I have no idea if I ordered one, two, or not.

My experience: when accessing commercial, for profit sites, IE works, Firefox does not.

Conclusion: Firefox is unacceptable. It fails to present proper screens at critical times. Firefox results in expensive failures that cost time and money.

I’m sure you web programmers hate MS. Everyone hates the big guy on the block. But unless the others can operate reliably they just aren’t acceptable for commercial transactions.

Thanks

Bob

I understand Bob’s position but I’m quite certain he doesn’t understand mine, or care for that matter. Not that he should. He makes his point well and in doing so, perfectly illustrates the reality of the situation that I find so frustrating. His position is not unreasonable but I think it’s a bit misguided. I’ll address that in the next post.

The short preview is this: I don’t hate Microsoft because they’re “the big guy on the block.” I hate them because they universally suck at everything but cannot be ignored.

Buckle up. I had my periodic anti-Microsoft rant started and saved as a draft before I even got Bob’s most recent email.

I finally got off my perfectionism and decided to just get something done here even if it wasn’t the greatest thing that ever hit the blog world.

After all this time, I wonder if anyone but the spammers will even notice. I’m not telling anyone. I’m gonna wait a while and see if there are any comments.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

I haven’t been blogging much over the last couple of months for a couple of reasons. Initially, it was because I was just too busy and in transitions that made net access inconvenient. Now that things have settled, I have decided that it’s time to clean up around here, so to speak.

I’m about 60% finished with a complete blog redesign. I’ve already upgraded my test mirror to Word Press 2.0. I’m finishing up the new layout and tweaking the configuration a bit to add some new functionality. If all goes well, this blog will be reborn by the end of the week.

I also intend to adjust the content a bit to get back to what this blog used to be when it started. That will most certainly be a real improvement, so stay tuned.

Eaglewood asked if I had backed down from criticizing Microsoft because they had pushed me. I wish I was that important. No one at Microsoft knows who I am. What follows is a slightly enhanced version of a comment on the last post in which I responded to Eaglewood. I’ve copied it here because I want to be sure that everyone who reads here sees it:

No, Eaglewood. Even if Microsoft did come at me, I wouldn’t back down. I took it down because there were people, whose opinions matter to me, that took it differently than I intended it. Also, it not only could be, but was, misconstrued. I take all of the blame.

It was written in frustration and after rereading it, I realized that it was over the top of the obnoxious peak, even for me. (That’s saying something.)

I’ll never stop criticizing Microsoft and I’ll be ruthless with them. Microsoft has set the personal computer industry back by decades with their incompetence and greed. They are a huge drag on the U.S. economy. I despise everything they’ve ever produced and I think they should all go get real jobs that utilize their skills. (For Ballmer and Gates I would suggest sending resumes to Tony Soprano since it’s clear that neither of them know anything about technology except how to steal it, usually with intimidation and/or force.) As a company, they are parasites. That’s not surprising; any organization always takes on the character of its leader. Be sure to let me know when Bill Gates actually earns anything.

But that post was, quite unintentionally, offensive to decent people that matter to me.

Incidentally, in over 15 months blogging and nearly 375 posts, that is the first time I’ve ever removed one. There have been many I’ve regretted and a few of those could actually cause me legal problems. I’ve never removed them. My general philosophy is, “Once you publish, it cannot be unpublished.”

But this was different. It was personal and removing it was part of my way of apologizing for being too crass for even me.

I started to post a comment on the previous thread and realized that it was too much for a comment, It’s actually a follow up:

I loved the part where Bill Gates says that Steve bosses him around. That gets a belly laugh.

Being a true geek, I’ve done much reading and research about both Apple and Microsoft. Apple was founded by two geniuses. (Steve Jobs would probably be working as a doorman at an art gallery or selling Mercedes if not for Steve Wozniak.) The story of Apple and Jobs is almost magical.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was founded by a rich, autistic nerd. He was born with a silver spoon. He’s the richest man in the world and for no good reason. He got it by being ruthless and unethical. He’s never produced anything of value to the world. (That’s a slight exaggeration. He did create BASIC. Maybe I should change that to “he hasn’t produced anything of value to the world in over 30 years.”) I can argue, convincingly, that Microsoft has set the world back and hindered the development of technology. I can do that because it’s true. He’s a master of marketing and has no other real skill. It certainly helps to start rich and have nothing to lose.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I could “boss around” Bill, too. Despite being the richest man in the world, he lacks the confidence of having achieved anything. Because he hasn’t. He’s a fraud and he knows it. The nicest thing I could say about Bill Gates is that he’s shrewd. Two decades ago, he was groveling and licking boots at Apple just trying to get “in.” Then when he did, he pulled a knife and has been twisting it ever since he inserted it. Steve has pulled himself up from relatively nothing over and over. He’s made mistakes and learned from them. That’s what makes a man.

Bill Gates deserves nothing he has and he knows it. Steve Jobs has earned everything he has and he knows it. That’s why Bill can never be comfortable and Steve always has been.