Andrew Busey: My Musings

Ok, so everyone is talking about Apple these days. There was a good Fortune article on why Zunes don’t matter, regardless of how good they might be. (The Trouble with Zunes) This got me thinking.

Windows is obviously a very successful product for Microsoft. (Captain Obvious.) The reason it is successful is because it created a very powerful ecosystem - developers, CPUs, hardware vendors, etc. I once saw a really insightful slide (from some analyst - no idea who or where to find it again) that showed how much Dell / HP / Compaq (shows how old the slide was), Intel, and Microsoft, spent on R&D and how nearly impossible it would be to catch up with that. Clearly it was right - no one has caught up. I think it missed the developer angle - the ability to develop interesting applications coupled with the right development tools and a critical mass (of consumers for the apps) is very powerful. And even more difficult to overcome.

Apple seems to get this on several levels:

1. The basic ecosystem: creating a linked system (a closed one is easiest) that just works from end-to-end is critically important. That’s why ipod+itunes has seized the music space. It’s also why once they get AppleTVs and AppleHomeServers right they’ll control the living room. Unless Microsoft wakes up and recognizes not just the importance of this ecosystem (I think they do) but that the only way to win is through a fully linked-up, coherent ecosystem, Apple is going to win this war too.




2. Design matters: Not just industrial design, but also interface and system design. And, probably more importantly, it is a heck of a lot easier to design a great product when you control the whole ecosystem. System design - basically how everything that is involved works together - is the hardest parth and is, again, made inherently easier in a closed system. Bill Gates is a great system designer. The problem is that at Microsoft I don’t know who else is. If there is one (or a group) it’s probably either the Office team (brilliant integration of formerly disparate applications to make them so co-mingled it’s hard to imagine them not being a suite) and/or the Xbox team (this is a good system Xbox 360, Xbox live, Xbox first party, and Xbox thrid party.)

Apple (or maybe just Steve Jobs) clearly gets these two things. They also have the inherent power and charisma of Jobs at the top which forces everyone else to at least try to think like him. I’d wager that everyone working on a product team at Apple is always thinking “omg, omg what if Steve comes in here and looks at my product - he better be blown away”. When everyone is thinking like that, you get 100x better outcomes. I’m pretty sure there aren’t many people thinking that way at Microsoft these days.

The third axis of tech power, Google, is somewhere in the middle. They have a lot of really smart people thinking up really smart things. However, I’m not sure they have a lot of system thinkers running around. All their stuff seems like amazing spot solutions with little overall cohesion. That’s why Android (their phone effort) has little (imo) chance to unset the iPhone. If they really got someone in there thinking about the overall system, this could change. It’s not beyond repair in my opinion.

If you want a clear example of this, look at their authentication system. Admittedly they are trying to fix this, but it’s pretty bad right now.

BTW, it’s hard to do this stuff. As an entrepreneur I try to do it everyday. It doesn’t always work out the way I hope - ecosystems (and systems in general) are pretty complicated and it is hard to figure everything out. It’s even harder to do with the limited resources of a start-up.

So the day after my post, Alienware added an nVidia 9800GT2 SLI option. So I decided to go for it, even though the SSDs were not available. I did go read a lot of reviews on SSDs and they are still a little mixed. I mostly cared about speed and silence. I got the Alienware Acoustic Dampening ($99) and am hopeful that it will deliver on the silence side. As far as speed, most of the reviews I’ve read indicate the SSDs are great for boot-up but don’t offer a super-meaningful speed increase in general performance. Since this is a desktop and will be on most of the time, boot-up speed isn’t of primary importance.

– I welcome any posts on SSD performance from anyone that may read this.

Also, I’m happy to note that after a bit of escalation I found out that upgrading your video card does not invalidate your warranty. Obviously the new card (unless you bought it from Alienware) isn’t covered by the warranty, but the basic warranty is still valid. That’s good news.

My new Alienware is now in Phase 6 - “Integration” and I hope it will ship soon. I’ll be posting a review as soon as I get it.

I’m excited to see what Quad-SLI is like. Not to mention the cool Alienware case.

I can’t tell you how much I want to buy an Alienware. Their cases look amazing, they have acoustic dampening (which may or may not be a scam like undercoating, but I want quiet), and they are usually on the cutting edge.

I’ve been planning to buy a really high-end desktop for quite some time now. I cannot figure out why Alienware doesn’t have a reasoanble configuration. So I asked them about adding another video card (for SLI) to an Alienware ALX (which supports SLI, but they don’t offer the new nVidia 9800gt2 or 9800gtx cards in an SLI configuration). I figured I’d just buy a second card (but it needs to match) and pop it in. This would also require an SLI bridge which normally comes with the motherboard, but I don’t know if they ship it. So this is the answer I got:

John L.: Hi, my name is John L.. How may I help you?
andrew busey: i want to buy a new alienware, but i want 9800gtx or 9800gt2 in SLI - can I add my own to the new A-51?
andrew busey: and if so will the SLI bridge ship with the computer and which 9800gt2 card do you guys use so I can get another one
andrew busey: or will you be offering it soon
John L.: As to whether we will offer it soon, I am unable to say as that information is not given ahead of time. Also adding it yourself would void the warranty.
andrew busey: adding a video card voids my warranty?
andrew busey: does that mean upgrading my video card voids my warranty?
John L.: Yes adding it on by yourself would. If you wish to upgrade it you would need to contact our tech support department for them to do it.

These guys are selling to the high-end, enthusiast market. This audience upgrades stuff in their PCs frequently. I’m pretty sure most of them don’t know it voids their warranty. If they did they probably wouldn’t buy Alienwares. Personally I’m guessing the CSR was just clueless, but I’m going to call and find out.

In the meantime, Alienware:

• Please add an 9800gtx or 9800gt2 SLI option!
• Please add an SSD option on the ALX. You have it on the ALX Crossfire - but frankly I’m not fond of ATI.

They also couldn’t answer questions about overclocking either. Very disappointing. Oh well.

Anyone that wants to recommend high-end PC makers that make quiet, very fast computers please post in the comments. Some of the guys I’ve looked at use these really obnoxious or cheesy cases, which sucks… but I’m running out of choices and I don’t really want to build it myself.

One last plea to Alienware: I want to give you guys my money. A lot of it. Please offer cutting edge configurations.

/rant

UPDATE: Please also read Alienware Redux.

There has been a lot of talk about Mac vs. Windows recently. I think I might have posted about switching to Mac OS X previously. So before I continue, I want to say I love Apple - especially its industrial design… and most of its software. I have an Apple Cinema Display, an Apple TV, an iPhone, and a bunch of iPods (that I never use).

I love the MacBook Pro as an industrial design triumph. I still remain confused as to why not a single PC maker can make a laptop of similar quality, form factor, and aesthetic. I mean it is the same exact stuff. In fact, I used Boot Camp + XP for about 9 months and never booted into Mac OS X. It was a little annoying to have to carry a 2 button mouse around, the keyboard had some minor issues, but other than that it worked great.

So I switched to Mac OS X along with all my new co-workers at Challenge Games. It worked ok.

However, there are several things that really, really annoyed me about the Mac OS X. It’s like they had to do some things a certain way just to be different. And in this case different isn’t good or better, it’s just obnoxious and inconvenient. Like the CTRL key, ALT key, and Apple Keys. They are just different enough that using keyboard shortcuts on a Mac and Windows gets really confusing. Why? Totally unnecessary. I suspect it was someone at Apple deciding they couldn’t be the same as Windows. Who cares? Make it easy to switch. The home and end keys do weird things too. I know not everyone uses keyboard shortcuts for everything, but making them different just to be different is annoying. If they really want people to switch they should offer a Windows keyboard mapping option that make things do what we’re used to them doing. I guess that’s the Microsoft monopoly advantage. (I once heard something similar about Heinz Ketchup, but that’s a different story and would require me to go do some research…. maybe I’ll get around to it.)

Microsoft did a good job on one of the other major issues: Office. I actually really like Office 2007. It changed the interface a little (annoying), but mostly made things better and more efficient. On the Mac you’re stuck with a really old Office with a weird interface (Mac-ized) or the new iWork suite. Let me be clear on my opinion of iWork - it sucks. Numbers is horrible… to the point of being useless (IMO… lot’s of reasons that I’m not going to go into for now.)

Another thing about Mac OS X is its organizational model. Somehow I always ended up with a billion files on my desktop. Maybe that makes it easy for a novice, but man it was hard to ever find anything. My Documents might not be brilliant, but it works. I also find, particulalry in Vista, that the ability to organize files (save them in the right places, create folders at the right times, etc.) is just much better.

Then there is a the one button mouse. Don’t get me started on that.

So the end result of this is that I switched back. I got a Dell XPS M1330. (Ah the elegant naming systems of Windows PCs… that could use some work.) It’s a great computer. I’m really enjoying it a lot more than the MacBook Pro. I like Vista. I really like Office 2007.

My only gripe with the M1330 is the construction could be a little better. Frankly I wish Dell would just hire Ideo or someone to make a spectacular laptop that competes with the MacBook Pro. (Not the MacBook Air… Also there is a new 15″ Alienware laptop, but they made it to big.)

Speaking of MacBook Air, I’m confused. I bet they break. Several of my friends commented that when they heard I didn’t want one they were immediately predicting failure. I have an addiction to acquiring any new shiny technology. But, for some reason, have no real interest in the Air.

I am, however, in the market for a desktop. Alienware and Dell are really pissing me off. The Alienware I want doesn’t have an nVidia version and has a late March ship date. The Dell version ships next week but isn’t overclocked and, well, isn’t as cool as an Alienware. They are marketing this new XPS 630 that might be cool but building hype for a PC too far in advance seems like a dumb marketing move.

I just want a really high powered desktop that is quiet. My current desktop (Dell Workstation) is really noisy and is getting a little old so I’m looking to upgrade.

Well Im going to stop my midnight rambling for a bit.

Here are the things I like about Vista:

1. I like the new UI.  It’s nice looking and comfortable.  Not too far from XP to be annoying (which is sometimes the case in the switch to Office 2007), but cleaned up enough to be a reasonable step forward.  I’m pretty sure my system isn’t running all the cool stuff (because my PC for some reason has a 5.0 Windows Experience Index), but it is still pretty nice. 
2. I like the way sharing works now.  I think it’s better - Sync / Make Available Offline is definitely way better.  Microsoft, if you are watching, a suggestion:  there appears to be some issues with out connecting - I am mounting shared folders from another system (XP) and they show up with the X (as in not connected) pretty frequently.  Clicking them sometimes requires a password (another suggestion - let me have it remember my password or put it in that Card Folder thing) and then things work again.  This stuff should auto-connect.
3. The Sidebar is a cool idea… I like have time and date up there.  I haven’t gotten Outlook 2007 to work with RPC yet so I’m not sure if the calendar thing or Outlook in general integrates with the Sidebar, but if it does that would be really cool.  (Free new feature idea!)

Uhm.  Well.  Cough.   Anyway, I do like using it.  Once all the drivers are stable I’m hopeful all the issues that have been haunting me will fade away.

Here are my biggest problems with Vista right now:

1. Sound periodically stops working.  This is kind of annoying.  At first I thought maybe it was an iTunes / Vista compatibility problem, but now I’m pretty sure it’s not.  I’ve had sound cut out in World of Warcraft, Ventrilo, and iTunes.  Rebooting fixes it, but strangely there are sounds from the OS as it shuts down.  I’m sure this is probably some driver problem, but I’m a little paranoid about updating drivers.
2. Hold ‘Em, a Vista Ultimate add-on, looks pretty cool.  Except that all the text flickers like crazy.  So I looking around on the Microsoft site - nothing in the knowledge base.  I did find a discussions (that I would link, but I closed the browser already) in their community area.  It seems it is a problem with the nVidia drivers.  Seems strange that a bug would show up in text rendering in a simple game and no where else, but alas that appears to be the case.  And I’m running the “non-beta”, “certified” driver too.
3. I think there must be a major memory like somewhere - either in Office 2007, the Sidebar, or IE 7 (possibly related to Flash).  My computer has 2 GB of RAM, 2×3.6ghz HT Xeons, and an nVidia 8800 GTX and things get really slow sometimes.  I’ve even had them come to a screeching halt - this never happened on XP.  I also only get a 5 on the Windows Experience Index, which seems kind of low give that much horsepower.
4. Alt-Tabbing between a full screen game and Windows is pretty chunky.
5. Lack of drivers - I want to use the cool features of gaming keyboards (I have a Logitech G15 and am also testing out the new Razer Tarantula).   I’m afraid to install the XP ones.
6. (Yeah I know I said 5.)  The freaking security alerts get really annoying.  Those Mac ads are right on (and especially hilarious if you have used Vista).  Another annoying thing is that I have to run World of Warcraft in Administrator mode to get updates to install - what a hassle.

To be fair, there are a lot of things I actually like about Vista (one of the two reasons I haven’t rolled back to XP - the other is I like testing out the cutting edge stuff).  So I will write a Top 5 things I like about Vista.

Vista had another major failure today, but it seemed to automatically recover from this one.  After it rebooted it blamed it on video hardware.  So I downloaded the latest nVidia 8800 GTX Vista 32-bit drivers (which came out today - 100.65).  They didn’t install so well (ie: there were errors and stuff seems to be missing) and I don’t currently have an nVidia control panel.  This may be because I have to run everything in “Run as Administrator” mode to get crap to install.  Anyway, the video seems to be working and I’m kind of afraid to reinstall the drivers because more stuff might break.

FYI:  This “Run as Administrator” stuff is really annoying.  If you play World of Warcraft make sure you select “Run as Administrator” when you run World of Warcraft for the first time on Tuesdays because if there is a patch you can’t install it without doing this.  So if you forget the patch will fail and you’ll have to do it again as administrator.

One last thing…  maybe this should be its own entry, but Vista and iTunes are not working so hot after this weekend’s fiasco.   I can run it, play my purchased songs, etc… most of the time.  Sometimes iTunes just sits there while I press play over and over, laughing at me but playing no music.  I’m not sure what is causing this closing and relaunching seems to fix it sometimes and when that fails a reboot has, so far, always done the trick.  I hope Apple delivers a Vista version of iTunes soon.

I now recovered enough from this weekend’s catasrophe to share the solution I found and to offer some advice.

Advice:  Make sure you have a bootable DVD drive before you upgrade to Vista.  I had a USB DVD drive on this machine (it’s a Dell Precision Workstation 470 and I’m not sure really why I only got an internal CD-R) and it will not boot.  I’m not sure if this is a BIOS problem or what, but not being able to boot off the Vista DVD made this more difficult than maybe it should have been.

So basically either my Master Boot Record (MBR) or the partition table was corrupted was the starting point for all this.  The machine would not boot.  FDISK could not find partitions.

Here is what I did:

1.  I removed a DVD player from another PC and put it in this one.  Vista actually booted off the DVD, but wouldn’t do anything except tell me there were problems with a device (which I think was the DVD player actually).  It certainly couldn’t find the hard drive.

2.  I bought Partition Commander 10 from V-com Software at CompUSA.  (I also bought another, similar product but never tried it because Partition Commander worked.)

3.  I ran Partition Commander - the CD was bootable.  It found the drive and recognized it had issues.  So I had it repair the MBR, which in hindsight was probably a bad idea, but I did it anyway.  It didn’t solve any problems.

4.  I bought a $64 internal DVD player at CompUSA (at the same time I bought the partion management software, since I figured this was going to be necessary.)

5.  Installed the DVD player.  I needed to to do this to enable the Windows Vista DVD to boot.  It actually didn’t work at first, but I finally got to the point where Vista would boot off the DVD.  However, it didn’t see the hard drive.

6.  So I ran Partition Commander again and had it look for partitions.  It found one.  After messing around a bit I found an option to Undelete the partion.  So I did.  it wouldn’t boot off the hard drive.

7.  I rebooted with the Vista DVD.  It still didn’t see the hard drive.

8.  I downloaded the RAID drivers for my CERC / Adaptec SATA RAID from Dell.com.  This was more difficult than I expected since it was really unclear what was what, but I finally got them on a floppy disk.

9.  I rebooted again and Vista came up from the DVD.  I then had it look at the floppy disk which had the RAID driver.  It loaded them (although I had to choose one of 4 identically named drivers for it to load).  It found the hard drive!

10.  I clicked the Repair option on the Vista DVD’s main screen.  It worked!

11.  Next reboot loaded off the hard drive and all my stuff was intact.  Wow!

As you may have noticed this involved 11 steps.  I’ve excluded the steps that were either:

a. Unproductive / dead-ends / useless.

b. Involved me screaming profanities at my computer or smashing things.

So all in this was not a pleasant experience.  On the bright side things are working ok now.

Well I most have gotten lucky before, because after I repaired my partition (more on that in the next post) iTunes basically refused to play the songs I had purchased.  If you are having a problem, this: 

iTunes Repair Tool for Vista 1.0

Seemed to fix my issues.  It was not obvious on the Apple site and some of their other suggestions didn’t seem to work (or were difficult to follow - like Deauthorize all your machines, which it turns out is impossible unless you have authorized 5 machines, which is rather difficult to do without 5 machines.).

Anyway, I hope this helps anyone out there having iTunes issues under Windows Vista.

Well apparently some part of my Vista boot record or something in the partiion manager got corrupted and late yesterday afternoon Vista decide to stop booting up for me.  At first, I though this was a hardware failure - maybe the bios or the motherboard or something.  Some of the lights on the front of my PC were yellow.  Anyway, after messing around with everything I could come up with to try to fix or recover from this problem I called Dell tech support.  I actually got someone knowledgeable and helpful at about 2AM.  He helped me through some ideas and eventually suggested this was probably some kind of boot record/partition corruption.  

So today I worked to solve this problem.  The good news is I fixed it.  The bad news is it cost me $150 in hardward and software and about ten hours.  That’s a lot of wasted time.  Anyway, I’m going to go get a drink now because if I stay near this computer much longer I’m likely to break something.  (I already got so made I smashed a keyboard… man did this piss me off.) 

After I cool down I’ll have a whole right up on what I’ve learned about repairing Vista.  Also, I’m going to do another right up about some magical thing called Windows Recovery Environment.  Which according to all the blog entries (including one from Jim Allchin) should solve problems like mine with ease.  However, if it actually exists I can neither find it or figure out how to use it…  And I like to think I’m pretty good at this kind of stuff.  Anyway, it might be related to Windows PE, but I’m not entirely sure.  

Anyway, I’m going to stop now before I go off on a full rant.  I’m hungry and mad, a bad combination.  Perhaps a nice glass of Faust (Faust is an awesome new cab from the folks that make Quintessa, which is one of my favorite wines) at Cru will calm me down.