Tag Archives: Microsoft

Microsoft Surface

I was at the mall today, and saw that a Microsoft Store had opened. My wife was clothes shopping, so I thought what the hell, I’ll go and look at the new Surface tablet.

The Microsoft store is obviously modeled on the Apple Store. It’s almost embarrassing how much they want to be Apple; it’s a bit like your dad putting a baseball cap on backwards and pretending to be ‘gangsta’. The ratio of staff to customers exceeded 1, and I was quickly approached by someone. I said that I was interested in seeing the Surface tablet that I had read about, and he showed me over to one.

I’d read about how the sales people were trying to avoid letting people play with the actual device, but if that was ever the case it isn’t any longer. The first thing he did was pick it up and hand it to me.

“It’s the lightest tablet on the market,” he said.

It clearly wasn’t. It felt significantly heavier than my Nexus 10, about the same as the original iPad. Not objectionable, by any means, but not something I’d want to use for reading e-books.

He ran through a bunch of features, pointing them out. The cameras, the magnetic power cable, the magnetic clip attaching the keyboard. I was eager to try the keyboard. He set the tablet up on its kickstand, and I began typing, using the fabric touch keyboard.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

I looked at the screen. Perfect accuracy. I have used a lot of touch keyboards, mobile keyboards, and rubber keyboards. This is the best keyboard I’ve ever used that didn’t have physical key switches.

He grabbed the other keyboard from another device, and swapped it over. No cables or plugs, just magnetic connectors. I could now try the physical keyboard. I typed a few sentences again. Even better. It’s surprising how much difference even a tiny amount of key play can give you. I imagine that typing on the fabric keyboard could be fatiguing on the hands and wrists after a while. Even though it’s accurate, it’s like you’re tapping your fingers on cardboard.

Lots of other details about the tablet are impressive. It has an SDXC slot, hidden away under the kickstand, so it’s both convenient and out of the way. The main camera is angled so that you can stand the device on a table and video record a business presentation, without needing a tripod. Similarly, the front camera is angled appropriately for video conferencing.

The sales guy showed me how to navigate around the UI, and that’s when I started to have doubts.

Back in ancient history — the 1980s — graphical user interfaces had a notion of discoverability. It was one of the biggest benefits of the Mac UI. The idea was simple: there should be no essential functions that were hidden away. Everything you could do should be represented by some sort of control on the screen, labeled to suggest its function.

Hence the menu, which set out all the things you could do, arranged into a series of drop-down lists. Icons, which represented documents and could be moved around to perform filing operations. Scroll bars, showing that there was content off-screen that could be brought on-screen by clicking and dragging on their buttons.

With the iPad, Apple ditched that fundamental principle. Menus were mostly replaced by buttons labeled with icons, and if you didn’t know what the icon indicated, there was no way to find out — no “hover over” tooltip. Functions like zooming and scrolling were made totally invisible, now performed using ‘gestures’ on the screen.

Surface takes the iPad approach to the next level. Where Android at least gives you a set of soft buttons for “back”, “recent applications” and “home”, Surface dumps you into an application with no apparent way to get back. To go to the home screen, you have to know to swipe in from the right side of the tablet to make a home button appear. Swiping from the left side rotates between currently open applications, not that there’s any indication of what applications are currently open. Swiping from the top does something else I forget, and swiping from the bottom does yet another thing I also forget. Oh, and you can also swipe in and back, which is different from just swiping. Do that on the left and you get a menu of applications, I think.

I’m someone who has space for about 10 arbitrary keystrokes or gestures in my head. That’s why I use Vim — you can get a lot more done with 10 Vim commands than with 10 Emacs commands, because Vim commands can be assembled into combinations. But I digress. Point is, I have problems with undiscoverable interfaces and remembering gestures. I’m pretty sure there are two-finger and three-finger gestures on the iPad, and maybe even on Android, but I don’t use any of them. I have a trackball with four buttons, but I only use two of them because I can never remember what the other two do.

I’ve a hunch that I would find the Surface UI frustrating. I’m pretty sure my mother would want to throw the whole thing out a window. I know that there are lots of people who have no trouble remembering gestures and keystrokes, and for those people I’m sure the Surface UI is fine, but for us average clods who forget which keystroke refreshes a window, it’s a bit of a disaster.

Another odd thing is the schizophrenic nature of the UI. You start off in the horizontal scrolling tiles metaphor, but once you launch an application you suddenly have a task bar again, just like good old Windows 95. It’s rather jarring, like someone taking off a suit jacket to reveal that they’re wearing overalls underneath.

The sales guy moved on to what he clearly felt (or had been taught) was the biggest selling point: Microsoft Word.

I don’t think I’ve used Microsoft Word in almost 20 years, but I know there are people who swear by it, and also a lot more people who swear at it. Many people seem to do both, which I find a bit mysterious, but I suppose it’s Stockholm Syndrome or something. Anyway, I’d seen video of Surface running Word and having trouble keeping up with normal typing, so I was curious to see how that would work out.

Well, performance may have been a problem once, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem now. Or at least, not with an empty document. The ribbon actually seems to make some sense when you have a touch screen. I’m sure Word gets bogged down once you have more than a dozen pages or so in your document, but it always has done, hasn’t it? Certainly Word on the Surface seemed as performant as (say) LibreOffice on my work laptop. All the other apps seemed to open and close smoothly and quickly too.

So, here’s the surprising conclusion: Speaking as someone who has disliked Microsoft’s software since the mid 80s and hated the company since the early 90s, I was very impressed by Surface. The hardware is excellent, if a little on the hefty side. There’s a lot of attention to detail in the physical design, though I’m not sure how resilient the kickstand and fabric cover will be in the long run.

On the software side of things, it’s Windows. If you live for Microsoft Office, then you poor bast er, you’ll love Surface. If I were a salesman traveling around writing Word documents and messing with Excel spreadsheets all day, I’d pick Surface over an iPad or an Android tablet, no question about it.

But I’m not, and that’s where the problem lies. Microsoft has always been about closed ecosystems; if you had a Windows CE phone, it was pretty much crippled unless you ran Windows on the desktop, and used Exchange for e-mail. Similarly, the Surface will connect to my Xbox and my Windows desktop and my Exchange server and read my Office documents… except I don’t have an Xbox, or a Windows desktop, or documents in Office format, and my e-mail’s all on the Internet. Once you step outside the ecosystem at all, the entire thing becomes a pain. That’s a winning strategy for keeping people loyal when they have to use some of your products, but there are increasingly many people who have realized that you can live a full and productive life and have a successful career without ever using Microsoft software. Surveys suggest that the main reason consumers aren’t interested in Surface is the ‘W’ word; while Microsoft itself is a somewhat tarnished brand, “Windows” really has no positive association with consumers at this point, what with Vista and Windows 8.

So ironically, Microsoft have their first decent portable offering in… well, ever, really, at exactly the moment when nobody is interested in what they’re doing any more. I’d feel sorry for them, except they have nobody to blame but themselves.

Nokia, then and now

“Our fundamental belief is we would have difficulty differentiating. The commoditization risk was very high.” — Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, 2011.

“We need to compete with Android aggressively. The low-end price point war is an important part of that.” — Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, 2012.

That’s right — Android would have be a race to the bottom, so Elop decided to go with an OS nobody wants and try and dig to the bottom even faster.

What a brilliant strategy. No wonder he got a €473,070 bonus.

Console wars

GamePro reports NPD sales data:

Console June sales
Wii 666,700
PS3 405,500
Xbox 360 219,800
PS2 188,800

Of note, these are sales to end users, not number of consoles shipped; Microsoft prefers to cite the latter.

The Wii is now the #1 console in the US by installed base. So it seems as though as predicted, the Xbox 360′s best days could be behind it.

Once Sony got their act together and shipped a bundle with the rumble controller packaged along with the console, sales took off. When the 80GB PS3 with rumble controller replaces the current 40GB package, expect sales to rise again. It won’t take long to erase the lead in installed base Microsoft has.

This week, people are making a big thing about the announcement that Final Fantasy XIII is going to be cross-platform, appearing on the 360 as well as the PS3–but only in the US, as nobody in Japan has a 360.

I don’t see the Final Fantasy announcement as all that big of a deal, when you look at all the former Xbox exclusives that are now on the PS3 or will be soon.

  • Saints Row was the Xbox’s supposed GTA-killer, and Saints Row 2 is going to be on PS3.
  • BioShock was the 360′s highest rated game of 2007 on Metacritic. It’s now coming to PS3, with "graphical improvements".
  • Half-Life ‘s developer Valve was always a staunch Microsoft supporter, with Half-Life 2 an Xbox exclusive–but The Orange Box came out for PS3 earlier this year. (I’ve picked up a copy–FPSs aren’t really my thing, but I want to play Portal.)
  • Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion made it onto the PS3.
  • Dead or Alive 4 is being ported, and it’s rumored that the sequel may be PS3 exclusive.
  • Ridge Racer 6 was Xbox 360 only, Ridge Racer 7 switched to PS3 only.
  • Full Auto was Xbox 360 only, Full Auto 2 is on PS3.

So looking at the high profile well-reviewed Xbox exclusives, that leaves Command and Conquer, Project Gotham Racing, Mass Effect, Gears of War, and of course Halo. (Dead Rising is heading to the Wii, along with Beautiful Katamari.) It’s a good job Microsoft bought so many game companies, or they would hardly have any exclusives left at this point.

So the video game industry will avoid Microsoft domination for another generation. I think this is a good thing.

How to make a red ring of death

Ever wondered how Microsoft managed to launch a game console that routinely overheated, burned out, and had to be replaced?

EE Times has the story. Microsoft decided to try to save a few bucks by designing a key graphics ASIC themselves, instead of going to a company with experience in chip design. They sent their design straight to the fabricators. It was only when the console was in full production that they learned about the overheating issue. Oops.

Credit cards, medical records, and solving the wrong problem

One of the problems of working in tech is it can get annoying when you see lots of money being spent solving the wrong problems, or implementing completely ineffective solutions.

Take credit cards and RFID, for example. There’s a big push in the US to include RFID in every card. I’ve had a card with RFID for just over a year now. The benefit to me? Theoretically, I can hold the card against the card reader, instead of having to swipe it through the slot.

That’s it.

And I say "theoretically", because in the half dozen times I’ve tried it at local stores that have the equipment, it has only worked once. In every other case, I’ve had to fall back to swiping the card through the slot instead.

This is dismal. Why the hell are companies like American Express spending millions of dollars on this RFID crap that doesn’t even work, when magnetic stripes are far more reliable and get the same job done?

If they wanted to spend money on an actual problem, they could implement two-factor authentication like PayPal are doing and wipe out fraud. I’ve seen credit cards with displays built in, it’s quite possible.

Instead, they started checking expiry dates. Then when all the merchants started recording the expiry dates in their databases and the criminals got lists of card numbers with expiry dates, they added 3 or 4 more digits to the the card and called it a Card Verification Number. Now vendors are recording those, and in another year or two the criminals will be passing around card number lists with expiry date and CVN, and we’ll be back to square one.

Another great case of solving the wrong problem was in the news today. Google is going to spend money allowing people to put all their medical records on the Internet. This is in response to an earlier announcement from Microsoft of a similar HealthVault service.

C|net says it’s a "laudable goal". No, it’s not, it’s a stupid idea. Let’s go through some of the reasons why it’s stupid.

Firstly, as soon as you centralize your health records in this way, you have a single big target for criminals to attack. Right now, if some hospital screws up and exposes a bunch of medical records, the chances of my being affected are very remote; it’ll only be the few thousand people who used that hospital who are in trouble. If everyone’s medical records are stored on Microsoft’s servers and they screw up, tens of millions of people could be affected.

Secondly, you have a single point of failure. Microsoft’s service goes down, and suddenly nobody can check in to the ER. Yeah, great idea.

Thirdly, if you’re running a hospital, you don’t want to have your computers that are used for medical records connected to the Internet, for reasons that should be blindingly obvious to everyone. So in practice, hospitals will need extra Internet-connected computers to obtain the health records from these services, and they’ll then end up printing them out on paper like before. Either that, or they’ll take the risk and put their medical records processing systems on the Internet. So, ‘no benefit’ or ‘reduced security’, you choose.

Fourthly, a centralized record of all health information makes selective disclosure difficult or impossible. Right now, if I go to the drugstore, they have the medication I’m taking in a list and can flag possible drug interactions. That’s it, but that’s all they need. In the glorious future, they ask for my central database ID, and the guy at the counter can browse the results of my STD tests, see if I had therapy for alcoholism, and so on.

Now, it’s possible that Google are going to make an effort to allow compartmentalization of the information, with need-to-know disclosure. They’re smarter than Microsoft, they might have worked out why it’s a good idea. But it’s a hard thing to do. When I go to a drugstore for the first time, how is it going to be handled? Will I have had to log on to Google at home first and list the information that I want to allow the drugstore access to? Or will they have a web browser in the store so I can do that? (If not, what if I forgot something important?) If they have an in-store system that I log in to to allow them access to my info, how am I going to know I can trust it not to record my keystrokes?

This selective disclosure requirement is why a single national ID card for all government services is a bad idea. It’s why combining all the cards in your wallet into one universal card is a bad idea. And if we look at your wallet, we can see the obvious alternative: put the medical records on a card.

With the "medical records on a card" approach, there’s no central point of failure. There’s no way for criminals to get fifty million people’s medical records at once. There’s no need for hospital computers to be connected to the Internet. And selective disclosure can be done simply by having more than one card–a pharmacy card with my prescription drug list, perhaps a mental health card, and a full medical history card for my doctor. In fact, that’s pretty much what I already have, since several US pharmacies issue regular customers with pharmacy cards so they can check for drug interactions. All we really need to do is standardize the cards, put data chips on them to increase capacity, and get card readers in the hospitals.

Oh, sure, I can lose my card. I can also disclose my Google login, though, and I’m betting average mouth-breathers are far more likely to choose bad passwords or write them down or tell them to phishers than they are to lose a credit card.

But no, we’ll spend money on the dumb solution instead, perhaps because it’s really all about control. Solving the problem sensibly wouldn’t give any company control over fifty million people’s medical records, and that’s what this is really about.

Update: Via Slashdot, a WSJ story on the perils of a single centralized healthcare database : a woman’s insurer gets access to her mental health records because they’re stored in the same place as her regular healthcare information, and decide she’s probably malingering and deny her claim.

The imminent death of the Xbox 360

When the Xbox 360 came out, it was portrayed as something everyone wanted, the amazing new console that was selling out everywhere. Yet the next week, when I walked into Costco they had a pallet piled high with the things.

When the Wii was launched, it became the console that was really selling out everywhere. But by then, Microsoft had moved on to their new story, that the Xbox 360 was the biggest selling next-gen console.

Except that it isn’t.

If you read the small print on Microsoft’s announced sales figures, you find that they’re not actually lying; but they count a console as sold as soon as it leaves the factory. Sony and Nintendo do the same, but there’s a big difference in how that figure relates to the number of consoles actually sold to gamers.

If you walk into any electronics store, you’ll probably see several dozen Xbox 360s piled up in the main store. You won’t see anything like as many PS3s, and you probably still won’t see a Wii. Think about that. Also, think about the fact that electronics stores don’t actually like to pile expensive items up in the middle of the store inside their boxes; it usually indicates that they’ve got even more piles of the things in storage out back, and have run out of space and are trying desperately to shift them. Have you ever seen a big pile of digital cameras in their boxes in Best Buy? A stack of dozens of Denon receivers in Circuit City? Nope. But you’ve probably seen a big stack of $30 Chinese DVD players on clearance…

Someone has put these observations together with some hard sales data. It turns out that the channel is absolutely bloated with unwanted Xbox 360s. Not only that, the 360 was almost matched for sales by the PS2, except during Halo release month, which is clearly visible as a statistical anomaly. When the release of a single game skews your sales that much, that can’t be a good thing either, can it?

In fact, Xbox 360 sales peaked in 2006. And with the PS3 now having a solid library of good games, I don’t see it improving. Also interesting is the analysis of how the 360 is actually more expensive than the PS3, once you factor in the add-ons to make it equivalent in capability.

KDE 4 UI critique

Human beings have different kinds of memory; they remember things in different ways. Three common classes of memory are spatial memory, visual memory and verbal memory. (There’s also chronological memory, but that’s not relevant to my point here.)

I have excellent spatial memory. It’s what I rely on most. For example, if I start to think about how to get to a given place in town, I literally find 3D visualizations of my route flashing into my consciousness. I also have pretty good visual memory; when I make the journey, I verify that I’m going the right way by comparing the visual appearance of buildings and landscape that I pass with the scenes I remember.

My linguistic memory is terrible. If you asked me to name the actual streets on the route, I’d have a hard time remembering them. My mental map of London, for example, only has 6 street names. This makes me a really bad person to get directions from. “You take the narrow road that heads off at a thirty degree angle, right at the place with the green copper roof, over the light colored bridge…”

There’s an upside to my condition. If you rely on verbal memory to navigate, as soon as you step outside your known area you are pretty much lost until you can find a familiar street name. In contrast, I have a pretty good chance of navigating between two known points, even if the area in between is totally new to me.

This hierarchy of types of memory also applies in my interaction with computers. When I want to find my password manager, I don’t remember its name. Instead, I remember that it’s in the bottom hierarchical menu of my KDE menu, positioned near the top, and has a green icon.

I know this experimentally, incidentally: back in the System 6 days there was a joke Mac INIT that removed all the text from the menus. I tried it, and was quite startled to discover that I could still use most of my favorite applications.

With that background out of the way, I would like to talk about why for me, the new KDE 4 application launcher is a user interface disaster of epic proportions.

Continue reading →

secdrv.sys

For the last 6 years, Microsoft has been quietly shipping Macrovision DRM software embedded in Windows, in order to “increase compatibility and playability” of video games.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug in the DRM code which allows privilege escalation. So Windows boxes are now being pwned across the Internet.

The best part: this video game DRM has been shipping in Windows Server 2003. Yeah, I bet lots of people need video game compatibility on Windows Server.

Oh, and Microsoft worked with Macrovision to fix the security holes in the Vista version of the DRM code—but they didn’t bother to fix the XP version. Classy.