Why Windows is so Expensive: Vista

As a continuation of the post Why windows is so expensive, let me tell you about two problems I had with Windows Vista this week. Let me first say that I personally do not use Vista, even though I have a free copy of Vista because I am a developer. I mostly run suse, but I do know my way around a windows box.

In the last week, I have had two friends come to me with problems which they could not solve.

The first problem was with networking: Vista and XP weren't playing nice with eachother. File and Internet Sharing doesn't seem to do anything when you enable it. The solution to the problem was nasty, to say the least. It involved updating and changing software on both computers, hacking registry values, and opening a few crucial ports between the machines. The part about this that confuses me is that both XP and Vista were written by the same company! I could understand if there were problems between two different operating systems, written by two different companies; Microsoft has access to Windows XP, right? If I were trying to sell software that was supposed to be able to share files with XP, and you bought it, and it didn't work, would you keep it? I would return the software and demand a refund. It's like buying an edible rock from a street-salesman who mysteriously vanishes and leaves you wishing you could regain your $200.

The inability to install firefox. Do you think....do you think that Microsoft did this on purpose? Well, the solution involved deleting files, ending processes, and clicking that stupid continue confirmation box like 50 times. It was fun in the same way that slamming your face into a cement wall is fun. I've done them both, but I only did one of them on purpose. Can you guess which?

As a sidenote, I do have a dual boot system for those few things that you can only do on Windows - sigh - like a few select video games. For some reason, when I boot windows, it comes up with an error message entitled "error": "The selected action could not be performed." There is no error number, no clue as to which dll or executable blew it this time, just the vague error message. And then, the dubious OK button. I don't think it's OK, and so I don't want to click it, but the X in the corner is grayed out, so windows forces me to conform to its aberrancy every time I run it.

I used to try to remember how to fix all my windows wtfs, and then I learned that masterful solution, the end-all to all Windows problems: insert the Suse disk and seek nirvana.

Busing our way to bankrupcy: whatever happened to capitalism?

I lived in Guatemala for two years as a missionary for the LDS church. During that time, my means of travel was mostly on buses like the one below. This didn't bother me at all; I enjoyed riding on the buses. I enjoyed being among the people, and feeling like I was one of them. I enjoyed talking to them as I rode with them. I couldn't find my own decent picture (or one I took) of one of the buses, so I borrowed this one from the web:

My first ride in one of these buses scared me and made me quite sick. It wasn't quite like the public transit I have used in my home town of Salt Lake City. First of all, the bus does not have air conditioning or a heater; it is either very cold or very hot inside. Secondly, the buses are much more crowded. I couldn't believe how many people they had fit into our bus. I thought there was no way they could possibly squeeze more people on, but we kept stopping, picking up people standing on the side of the road. Finally, the bus driver seemed bent on driving like a maniac. On the curvy mountain roads of Guatemala, my head started to spin as we raced past other buses. Later, it donned on me that the drivers go so fast to get in front of the other buses. It's simple capitalism to get to the passengers before the competitors. Over the two years, I became accustomed to the Guatemalan bus system.

Upon my return to the states, I again began using the buses as my primary means of transportation. I was rather unenchanted with their approach to transportation. Mass transit in Utah is unreliable, uncourteous, and overall quite disappointing.

There follows a table of my gripes with the Utah Transit Authority and the accompanying solutions as determined by hard-working Guatemalan bus drivers.

UTA	Guatemala
UTA buses arrive late to the stop. If you say you're going to be at the stop at a given time, I expect you to be there at that time or within 3 minutes of it.	Guatemalan buses do not have scheduled route times. They travel as quickly as possible to each destination. Whoever's waiting on the side of the road gets on the bus.
UTA buses arrive early to the stop, then leave early. I can't tell you how many times I have watched the bus pull away from the stop, and I have looked at the time and noticed they are two minutes early. Those two minutes mean the difference between getting somewhere on time and standing around waiting for a half hour. If they are going to have a schedule, they should be stringent about leaving neither before nor after the scheduled times.	Since Guatemalan buses don't have schedules, they can't leave early. However, since the buses are owned privately, they run a little bit more often. Also, if you are close enough to see the bus, and you wave your arms a little, it will wait for you.
UTA bike racks: 2 bikes, and that's all. If the rack is full, you can wait for the next bus or ride your bike wherever you're going. The bus can have two dudes on it, each of which has a bike, and be completely empty besides that, and you'll be refused entrance, even though there is plenty of room for your bike	Guatemalan buses carry things on top. You can carry live chickens, bicycles, luggage, desks, or anything else with you on the bus.
Next stop in fifteen miles. There are literally buses that don't have stops for fifteen miles. That's great if you don't want to stop in between, but if you do, you're just out of luck. Or, if you are standing on the road somewhere in between, and one of those buses goes by, you're not getting on it.	Buses in Guatemala don't have stops. They stop when you wave your arm at them. They let you off when you yell "BAJA!" and they do it all very quickly. Guatemalan buses get places quickly, even though they make lots of stops.
About half the bus drivers are old dudes who drive like 4.2 mph the whole time. Cars are passing you like you're standing still, and the driver is going so slow that a little jog would be faster.	Capitalism drives these guys to fly. If you get a reputation of being slow, you lose business. If you pass the other buses and get more customers, the other guy loses business. Buses are fast in Guatemala, not slow.
The UTA is funded by taxes and by stealing money from college students. That's right, every student at the University of Utah pays upwards of $60 each semester straight to the UTA. It's disguised as a "transportation supplementary fee" or something, and written on a big list of fees, so most students don't know about it. Whether you ride the bus every day or never, the fee is the same. Whether the bus is completely empty or completely full, it still runs every route. It is poorly managed and seems a little bit too far away from capitalism for my liking.	In Guatemala, every person on the bus pays the same price, and if no one is on the bus, the bus makes no money. It is completely capitalistic, and the prices are reasonable, since you have someone to compete with. The system is very well done.

Basically, my conclusion is that buses in Guatemala are motivated by a true return, while buses in Utah are a leech on society. It might pose a problem for some people if the bus system in Utah were completely capitalistic like the one in Guatemala, but I think that if the bus were more reliable and reasonable, many more people would ride it, especially with today's gas prices. This reminds me of the way the government controls the space program and purposefully stints the privatization of the space industry. The government doesn't have any business regulating the way we live our lives. Its true purpose is to protect us from ills and menacing entities, not to run empty buses through our towns and waste all our money.

Why Windows is so expensive

Today I think I finally understood why Windows is so expensive. A few people have suggested that it is superior to other operating systems, and well worth the price.

So for some stuff at work, I needed my windows logon to be something other than "Administrator," and so I created a new user "nsmith" with administrator priveleges. Here's what Windows did in response:

1. The Administrator user disappeared. I can no longer log on as Administrator.

2. I lost all the stuff that was on my desktop. I could see the desktop folder from the Administrator, but not access it.

3. Every file the Administrator user ever created has become read only. So, all the code I was writing cannot be modified. Yes, I could copy everything into a different part of the hard drive, but by then I would be wasting 100+ GB of space.

Here was my solution:

1. Uncheck the read-only box on all folders in my entire hard drive. As soon as you close the properties dialog and open it again, they are read only again. If you have the properties window open and the box unchecked, you can delete files, but only if you do so one by one. You cannot modify them.

2. Attempt to access my hard drive using cygwin. I could not start cygwin because I was not allowed to write into the folder where the logs are stored!

3. Ask everyone at the lab if they know how to fix the problem. They don't.

4. Dig around in microsoft's documentation for an hour or two. No luck.

5. Dig around in the properties folders for a few hours of various folders. No luck.

And finally,

6. Open the properties page for my hard drive, find a place in the securities tab where I can change the owner of the files, and change it to my new user.

7. Wait for twenty minutes while windows changes the permissions of every file.

8. Attempt to access files. Files are read only and belong to Administrator.

hmm...

9. Insert Suse, Ubuntu, or any other Linux CD

10. Move on with my life!

So, that's probably why Windows costs so much. The same thing could have been fixed quickly and easily with a few calls to chmod and chown, but that has to be done in a terminal. Windows is so expensive because it's so easy to use!

Confusing the matter

Isn't it interesting that, over 50 years after Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat on a bus, racism is still rampant in nearly every college today?

I went to a scholarship fair a few weeks ago at my school. I wasn't surprised that almost all of the scholarships that were available had nothing to do with merit or acheivement. If you are a Latin woman studying engineering, you have many more scholarship options than a white male in the same program. I have nothing against women or latins, but I do not have anything against men or white people either, so why the selectivity? It seems like the only applicable gauge of scholarship worthiness should be acheivement and personal merit. Otherwise, a very gifted student with a high potential might not get financial help which I believe he deserves more than a less gifted student. As a consequence, his potential might actually be lowered, since he will have to devote a larger chunk of time to earning money to buy food, instead of the academic pursuits which might be of more use to him - and society! - in the long run.

Of course, many people will refute my claims with arguments that it is more difficult for a black man to get into college than for a white man, or that there are less women in the engineering students than males, so the University must provide means for these "minorities" to have an "equal" opportunity. I wonder, isn't it racist to make blanket statements about a race, like "it is harder for black men to get into college"? Is it sexist to say that less women choose to study engineering? Is it convenient for you to call it sexist, or is it convenient for you to call it equality? Terminology aside, it's no secret that high school is free (and ridiculously easy) everywhere in our entire country. Any student who does well in high school is showing his merit as a student. Any student has the opportunity to do well. Students with bad grades chose to get bad grades. So, I believe it is immoral to give scholarships based on race or gender, since anyone capable of graduating from college is also capable of graduating from high school. The only pre-requisite to doing well in high school is the ability to read.

My ideal college wouldn't include any information about "minorities" in their recruitment information. On the "about" page at the university where I study, a prominent section of the page is devoted to "Student Demographics." Why would I care how many kids at my school are from India, and how many are from California? I don't care. Some day a school somewhere will get a clue, and their recruitment information will be something closer to, "We only recruit students whose current acheivements match our high level of excellence." I would rather study in a school where every student is qualified to study in a university, even if they are all of the same race, than a place where stupidity abounds, but there is a nice distribution between gender and ethnicity.

Maybe I'll write more on this later, but for now, content yourselves with two articles by Thomas Sowell: Supreme Farce and The New "Yellow Peril"

First post

I'm just sitting doing computer vision homework in the lab, and of course I am sick of doing homework so I found a distraction. That's about it for now. More later!