Seen on Facebook...

Seen on Facebook...  Via my lovely bride.  I found it for sale here (on a site I know nothing about).  This could be a big seller around here!

Dell, crapware, and Windows 10...

Dell, crapware, and Windows 10...  My friend and neighbor Tim D. recently bought a new computer.  He chose an inexpensive Dell model sold through Walmart.  Shortly after he bought it, he called me for some help: his new computer was vastly slower than the one it replaced, and he basically had no idea how to do anything.

So I ran over to his house, delighted to be able to do something to help repay him for the weeks of assistance he gave me in the past couple of years.  I had no idea what to expect.

First thing I saw was that the Windows 10 screen was like some alien thing had taken over his computer.  I haven't used Windows for nearly 10 years now, but I expected to see at least something recognizable.  There really wasn't much!  Everything seemed to have new icons, new names, and new places on the screen.  Those bits and pieces of Windows lore that I could dredge up were largely useless.  If it's that alien for someone like me, who has lived and breathed computers for almost 50 years – imagine what it's like for a non-techie who has no understanding of the technology and uses computers only casually!  Poor Tim was completely and totally lost – and I wasn't much help until I did some online reading to figure out a few basic things.

Then there was the crapware.  If you're not familiar with the term, here's the Wikipedia article.  This stuff isn't on every new computer (it's not on Macs at all, for example), but it's on nearly every low-cost Windows machine.  Dell has a reputation for being amongst the worst crapware offenders, and after seeing Tim's computer I can understand how they got this reputation.

Some of the crapware is “opt-in”, meaning that you have to install it before it does anything.  Most of it, though, was pre-installed – very, very annoying.  Worst of all was a malignant piece of crapware called NowUSeeIt Player: it was not only pre-installed, but it came with no uninstall program.  I call it “malignant” because it was putting up dozens of pop-over ads per hour.  Most of these were for bogus “security programs” that had scary-sounding (and looking) screens that tried hard to look like a Windows error screen.  They tried to scare the viewer into calling (with their credit card ready!) a company that really was just a front, would do nothing to help your computer, but would take some money out of your credit card account.  Probably they'd steal your credit card number, too!

Altogether, over the course of about four visits with Tim, I probably spent 5 or 6 hours cleaning his crapware-infested brand new computer.  A non-technical person would have been there much longer, and might not have succeeded at all.  That's just awful on Dell's part (it was their choice to earn a few bucks per machine by installing this horrible stuff).  I'm sure they don't care, but ... though I've often recommended Dell to people in the past (and bought quite a few of them myself), I will no longer do so.  In fact, I will actively recommend against Dell until I can satisfy myself that they've dispensed with the crapware.

I did have one piece of this experience that made me chuckle.  I found a guide on the Internet somewhere that described how one could get rid of NowUSeeIt Player even though it had no uninstaller.  Mainly it involved deleting registry keys (The “registry” is a uniquely Microsoft invention that is mostly horrible).  I had no idea how to do that on Windows 10, but I imagined it was some new tool, with a new name, that worked completely differently than the old tool.  That led to the chuckle.  There's no new tool.  You just use RegEdit, the same tool one used on the earliest versions of Windows.  So far as I could tell, there was nothing new or improved about this notoriously awful tool.  Using RegEdit is roughly akin to being force to hammer in a nail by using your pen knife, with the blade as the handle.  Tim and I tediously deleted the 100 or so registry keys that the NowUSeeIt Player installs, and afterwards his computer was (a) blessedly free of those incredibly annoying pop-over ads, and (b) at least three times faster than it had been.

Dell, you should be ashamed of yourselves.  You owe your customers a heartfelt apology, at the very least.  You really should find a way to compensate them for the tortures you've visited upon them, too.  Along with their geekly friends who have gotten them free of your crapware!

Taxes...

Taxes...  Man, I hate this time of year, when I have to sit down and spend hours torturing myself as I calculate how much money I have to give our government – which it will promptly spend mostly in ways that I find abhorrent.  Not fun.  Since I retired a few years ago, this tax computation has gotten worse – the tax consequences of living off your investments are way more complicated than living from a paycheck that's had taxes withheld.

Last year was the worst of all for us, as the 2014 tax year was complicated by our moving from one state (California) to another (Utah), owning two homes most of the year, major investments changes, etc.  This year was considerably simpler, and the tax software I use (TurboTax) surprised me by making something else much simpler: for the first time it automatically imported all the tax data about my stock trades from my broker.  Even the basis (price I paid) was correctly imported.  This saved a lot of manual lookup and typing.  Bottom line: I did our tax return in just a few hours this year, instead of the several days I was anticipating.  That, at least, is a positive thing.

But I still have to let them steal my money and waste it on something stupid (or worse), and that really grates on me.  Argh!

More memory memories...

More memory memories...  This article discusses several old computer memory technologies.  Most of these are things that I actually worked with back in the '70s when I was in the U.S. Navy: magnetic drums, Williams tubes, mercury acoustic delay lines, and magnetic core memories.  I also worked with a couple others not mentioned here: electrostatic dots and steel wire acoustic delay lines (photo at right, not mine).

I feel old today :)

PEX rules!

PEX rules!  What is PEX, you ask?  It's a (relatively) new technology for plumbing, one that's now nearly the universal way plumbers use when plumbing a house.  Wikipedia has a good article about it.  The photo at right (not mine) shows a typical PEX connector (the brass fitting), PEX tubing (the semi-transparent tubing), cinch clamp (the silver strap around the tubing near the brass fitting), and the crimp cinch tool (the big tool working on the clamp). 

I was at my brother's cabin yesterday, installing a new pressure tank for his water system.  The old water tank was a teensy 2 gallon job that was mounted right on the wall, directly threaded into some copper pipe.  The one I installed was a 20 gallon, floor-standing tank.  We had to run about 6 feet of pipe between the old tank's mount and the new tank.  If I had run copper pipe, I'd have had to cut four pieces of pipe to precisely the right length, plus three 90° elbows and two solder-to-threaded adapters for the ends.  I'd have needed a box full of tools, probably five or six hours, and an enlarged cussing vocabulary to cover all the mistakes I made.  Plus it would most likely have leaked the first three times I tried it.

What a difference with PEX!  Because it's quite flexible, I only needed two fittings: adapters to threaded pipe at each end.  I only needed one piece of pipe, and no elbows.  Cutting the pipe was as easy as using a pair of scissors – the cutting tool slices right though the pipe like scissors on paper.  I'd never used PEX before, so I wasn't sure how hard it would be to use the crimp cinch clamp tool.  Turns out it's about as challenging as a pair of pliers.  You just put the tool onto the clamp and squeeze – you're done!  Then when I turned everything back on, it didn't leak a drop.  Total time was about 30 minutes, and most of that was just me being careful with techniques that were new to me.

Count me as a new PEX advocate.  I'm actually thinking about re-plumbing the mechanical room of our house.  The current setup is an incrementally-installed copper pipe mess.  I sometimes have to study the pipes for fifteen minutes just to figure out which of the maze of valves I need to turn on or off.  With PEX I could easily make a manifold-based system with individual valves for every water destination...

Same thing for Trump, or Sanders...

Same thing for Trump, or Sanders ... and about 90% of our Senators and Representatives.  They aren't the problem – it's the low-information, low-cogitation voters who vote for them that are the problem.  I periodically suffer from an attack of the dooms precisely because I don't see any viable path to fixing that problem.  Via my pistol-packing mama, who isn't voting for Hillary...

Curiosity...

Curiosity ... is into some new and exciting things as it climbs Mt. Sharp on Mars!  These are from today's dump of raw images, and there aren't any notes on them yet.  The first one, to my amateur rockhound's eye, fairly screams “water!”  Those whitish deposits look like minerals that crystallized after having been dissolved in water; we see things like that on Earth all over the place.  The second photo appears to be taken looking across the slope that Curiosity is climbing – it looks fairly steep, though I'm not sure the camera was level when it was taken.  It also looks quite hazy, presumably from dust and not water vapor...

Morning chuckle...

Morning chuckle...  Via my lovely bride, who found this in some dark corner of Facebook (which really is just a giant bucket of dark corners)...

Update: Debbie tells me it was The Federalist Papers web site where she found that, not Facebook.  But Facebook is still just a giant bucket of dark corners...

Chladni patterns...

Chladni patterns...  This video is a great introduction to the magic of Chladni plates and the patterns one can make on them. 

I first ran into these back in the '80s, when I was doing some consulting work for a company that was using microphones listening to rotating machinery to monitor for impending failures.  The most success they had was with ball bearings, where some (relatively) simple fast Fourier transforms could be used successfully.  Even the slow computers of the day could do this math in near real time.  The company wanted to do some more sophisticated things (which is where the Chladni patterns came in) that involved math that they just couldn't make fast enough. 

They hired me to optimize those calculations by using assembly language and every hacky trick I could come up with.  They needed to speed up their calculations by a factor of about 1,200, but the best I could do was about 200 – still six times too slow.  I could only get that large speedup because the program they started with was written by scientists who basically had no idea how computers worked :)  They chose a terrible language (FORTRAN) for such a project, then compounded the error by writing terrible code.  It was great fun for me, because they were completely blown away by (a) how fast my code was, and (b) how small my code was – the assembly-language program I wrote was half the lines of their (horrible) FORTRAN code.  Also fun: they paid me on time, with a check that cleared...

Norman doors...

Norman doors...  The video at right, despite coming from Vox, is an excellent introduction to human-centered design (no technical content at all).  The “Norman” is Don Norman, whose work inspired a lot of how we experience computers today.  Note carefully, please, that I am not saying that his ideas have been well-executed :)   Obviously, in many cases, they have not (I'm looking at you, Microsoft!).  But much of what's good about the user interfaces on modern computers can be traced back to his work.

I attended a lecture of his back in the '90s, when his work was just becoming well-known amongst software engineers.  Then, later, I went to a short course he ran (which the company I worked for then helped sponsor), and had a delightful dinner with him.  He went through everything on the table and analyzed how well (or not) it was designed, from a human perspective.  It was so much fun!  But also one hell of a learning experience.

He looked much younger then :)

There is one thing that I think is a bit misleading in this short video, to wit: the video makes it sound obvious and easy to get the design right.  At least with computer user interfaces, that is the exact opposite of the truth.  Why?  Because discoverability and feedback are highly variable from person-to-person.  Someone like me who has been using computers for almost 50 years might find a subtle change in color to be useful and appropriate feedback.  Similarly, I might find a right-click menu to be an obviously discoverable element.  Another person, however, might need a giant purple blinking square, with 50 watt audio accompaniment, before they'd ever notice the feedback.  And that same person might never think of trying a right click – you might as well have buried that feature in a 10 ton block of concrete, as they will never find it.  User interface designers constantly face this challenge: the interfaces they design must be usable by novices, but still useful to experts.  Sometimes a single design can do this well, but that's relatively rare.  More often, the job is either done poorly, or sometimes the only answer is to have multiple designs – one for the noobs, another for the dweebs...

Coloring books and Trump...

Coloring books and Trump...  Rob Long, writing on Ricochet, makes an excellent point...

Paradise ice...

Paradise ice...  Our trees are covered with sparkly ice this morning, as is our driveway.  The sun is shining brightly, though, so we're expecting this all to melt fairly quickly.  Meanwhile, here's a few photos for your enjoyment (click to embiggen, as always)...

Pharmaceutical development...

Pharmaceutical development ... is a very complicated thing.  Several things are simultaneously true, making it almost impossible for ordinary consumers to figure out what's going on:

• Some drugs cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, but benefit relatively few people.  The money for development costs comes from investors in pharmaceutical companies.  The only way those companies can recoup their costs and hope to realize a profit is by charging extremely high prices for those drugs.
• Some drugs cost much less to develop, but the pharmaceutical companies charge high prices for them because they have a monopoly (usually the monopoly derives from them having a patent).  That looks like gouging to most people, and sometimes it is – but sometimes those profits are helping subsidize the development of less profitable drugs.
• Government bureaucracies, most notoriously the U.S. FDA, dramatically drive up the cost of developing drugs by requiring the pharmaceutical companies to perform long, expensive tests of their prospective drugs for both efficacy and safety.  Without special (and difficult to get) exemption, the drug companies cannot supply those drugs even to terminal patients in the U.S. before those tests are complete.  Other countries have far less stringent drug approval processes, and it's common for new drugs to be available in Asia and Europe for years before they're available in the U.S.  It's not as clear as you might think that foreign consumers have more risk because of the less stringent procedures there.  It is very clear that new drugs that actually work are saving lives outside the U.S. before they can do so inside the U.S.  
• One country in particular – India – has the technology to produce the most advanced drugs, but has a much stricter requirement for drugs to qualify for patent.  Since most drugs are minor modifications of existing compounds (which don't qualify for patent protection in India), it's perfectly legal under Indian law for their pharmaceutical companies to produce them there – and of course, they are.  This provides a means for people outside India to get access to drugs that would otherwise be too expensive for them.  That sounds great – until you realize that that also means that the pharmaceutical companies who developed those drugs, at great cost, are not going to recoup their expenses, much less make a profit.  The Indian companies, by and large, are not innovating – they're copying.  Somebody has to pay for the innovation, or said innovation ain't gonna happen.  If the Indian gambit significantly suppresses the revenue for such drugs, it's easy to predict that the pharmaceutical companies will stop developing them.

There are some obvious avenues that could be taken to help with this problem. 

One favored by progressives is to fund drug research with public dollars.  This, despite the fact that private pharmaceutical companies in search of profit out-perform every government institution that's ever tried their hand at drug development.  The CDC, in the U.S., is a great example.  While they've had a few successes over the years, the payback per dollar spent is trivial by comparison with what the pharmaceutical companies have done.  In my own opinion, this course is a recipe for failure.

Another approach favored by some in every part of the political sphere is to (drastically) reduce the bureaucracy and regulation around drug approval in the U.S.  Many schemes have been floated to do this.  The naysayers (and there are many) have one easy line to attack them all: some variant of “These reformers want to kill your kids!”  So far that line has stopped every attempt to reform the FDA's drug approval process.

Progressives have recently floated another proposal: to allow drugs to be imported into the U.S. much more freely (this is highly regulated today).  This would, in particular, allow the Indian generics to be imported.  This would rather dramatically change the financial equation for pharmaceutical companies with respect to financing drug development.  Only those drugs that were clearly novel under Indian patent law would then be attractive for financing.  Depending on who you want to believe, that's between 1% and 4% of all drugs currently being developed.  That's something to think about very hard before implementation.  One thing that scares me about that one: the immediate political consequences of such a program would all be positive.  All of a sudden, a broad range of drugs would be drastically cheaper.  The impact of shutting down the drug development pipeline might not be felt for 10 or even 20 years, so long is the development cycle.  That sort of decision, to a politician, is unfortunately a no-brainer: they're going to go for the short term benefit.

I certainly have no easy answers for this one.  It's an amazingly complicated problem that most people don't even think about.  A lot of people – especially younger folks – seem to think that drug development should be a government function, and the profit motive should be eliminated.  That notion scares me more than anything else, because all my own experience tells me that drug innovation would practically halt at that point.  Government bureaucracies are motivated almost entirely by factors that don't affect their success on their mission – the U.S. Post Office being the canonical example.  Private companies pursuing a profit, on the other hand, are motivated almost entirely by success in their mission.  I'll take the latter every time...

This morning I did something I should have done a long time ago...

This morning I did something I should have done a long time ago ...  I closed my LinkedIn account.  Everybody I care about knows how to contact me already, and I have no interest in (a) LinkedIn's unceasing efforts to trick me into giving them money, contact information, or my phone number, and (b) the mechanical queries from almost unbelievable numbers of recruiters who completely ignore my status of RETIRED. 

So it's gone.  Back in the day I put quite a bit of effort into boosting my profile on LinkedIn, and I don't believe that effort ever paid any dividends at all.  The one and only value I can think of that LinkedIn actually delivered for me was that it let customers and prospects find me, back when I had a job where that mattered.

The world could use a good, transparent equivalent of LinkedIn.  One that wasn't annoying and grasping.  How that pays off I have no idea, but my intuition says there must be a way.  That's an opportunity for some entrepreneur who recognizes the incredible suckiness of LinkedIn today...

Snow in Paradise...

Snow in Paradise...  Our forecast for yesterday called for a half inch or so of rain.  Instead we got rain for a while, turning into slush, and finally into sloppy wet snow – about 2 inches of it.  Dang it!  We're hoping for a fast melt with the warmer temperatures forecast for the next five days.  But ... after that, the forecast has about an inch of rain followed by up to six inches of snow, over a four day period.  Double dang it!  We're ready for spring :)

Wood duck babies...

Wood duck babies ... 23 of them!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday morning I had three of my neighbor's kids over for their first tutoring session with me, on programming (with a touch of actual computer science).  We spent about a third of the session just exploring why they wanted to do this (all three seem highly motivated).  They have very different goals and interests – one wants (badly!) to build robots, another is mostly just curious about how programming works, and the other is interested in the math.  Since none of them have any substantial knowledge even of the basics, I'll keep them all together until we get past things like base arithmetic, Boolean algebra, etc.  After that might be a different story.  All of that assumes they want to come back, of course :)

Debbie gave them an extra reason to come back.  While we were working, she was cooking – and when we'd finished she served up the results to the kids: an oatmeal cake that was extravagantly good.  The cake itself was delicious, but so was the icing: a gooey confection of pecans and coconut.  She served these enormous pieces that I could not possibly have eaten, and two of the kids (the two girls) wolfed them down in no time at all, along with mugs of milk.  The youngest kid (the one boy) had a bit more trouble, understandably, since the piece of cake was roughly the size of his head!

I forsook eating cake with the kids, as I knew what was coming later that afternoon: baked Ora King salmon and roasted vegetables.  Once again, superb.  This time Debbie remembered to put Peppadew peppers in the mayonnaise sauce, and it was (of course!) delicious.  The roasted veggies included Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and carrots.  Man, what a meal!  The only problem with a meal like that is the aftermath: I could just barely move for about four hours...

I love these videos...

I love these videos...

I'm not sure...

I'm not sure ... that the majority of young people (say, under 30) in the U.S. will understand that this is parody.  If you do understand that, it's funny as hell...

Curiosity is climbing!

Curiosity is climbing!  The first picture below is looking behind its track, and it's easy to see that Curiosity is gaining some altitude as it climbs up the slopes of Mt. Sharp.  The second photo shows the Naukluft Plateau it's currently climbing up to.