wisdom watch

  • [thumbs down] Microsoft Win­dows. The Win­dows instal­la­tion on my com­puter at work was so screwed up that it would crash every time I turned the mon­i­tor off and back on again. And USB had stopped work­ing. So I backed up [almost!] all my data, for­mat­ted, and set about re-installing Win­dows in a smaller par­ti­tion so I could fill the rest of the hard drive with Linux. I used the Win­dows install CD that came with my com­puter. To my sur­prise, after the instal­la­tion “fin­ished,” the com­puter had no audio, no net­work con­nec­tion, and mar­ginal video per­for­mance. After some inves­ti­ga­tion, I dis­cov­ered that the instal­la­tion CD doesn’t install dri­vers for any of these sub­sys­tems. Win­dows offered to down­load the Eth­er­net dri­ver over the Inter­net, but of course my Inter­net con­nec­tion won’t work with­out a Eth­er­net dri­ver. So now my com­puter is pretty much use­less. Spe­cial thanks to Dell for mak­ing a recov­ery CD that ren­ders your com­puter less use­ful than before you “recov­ered” it. And thanks to Microsoft for mak­ing stu­pid sug­ges­tions for solv­ing the problem.
  • [thumbs down] The Intel EM64T archi­tec­ture. Before I zapped Win­dows, I burned an instal­la­tion CD for Debian ia64 Linux. I had read that my dual-core Xeon proces­sor was a 64-bit CPU, so I fig­ured that ia64 was the way to go. WRONG! I learned that Intel has two 64-bit archi­tec­tures: IA-64 (true 64-bit, used by pretty much nobody) and EM64T (32-bit with 64-bit “exten­sions”). EM64T is actu­ally a clone of AMD’s AMD64 archi­tec­ture. IA-64 and EM64T are incom­pat­i­ble. As a result, my com­puter won’t boot my Debian install CD. Now, thanks to my inop­er­a­ble Win­dows instal­la­tion, I can’t burn a dif­fer­ent one, so my com­puter isn’t run­ning Linux, either.
  • [thumbs up] Wal-Mart (for once). I read in the New York Times a few days ago that Wal-Mart is start­ing to offer incen­tives for man­u­fac­tur­ers to cut down on need­less pack­ag­ing. For exam­ple, they would like to do away with the card­board boxes around tooth­paste tubes (which have long been a gripe of mine, as the boxes are mys­te­ri­ously much larger than the tubes they con­tain). I applaud this kind of think­ing at Wal-Mart, even if I still refuse to shop there.
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May 18, 2007 May 18, 2007 archives by Scott [permanent link]