February 2007 Archives

Well, I've tried this stunt before, but some things are so much fun that we want to try them over and over. I suggested to members of a monthly tasting group I attend that we try a blind flight of California chardonnays with one French chard and see what we thought. Several members of this group pride themselves on being Burg experts and they were just as certain as the attendees of The Judgement of San Francisco were that they would never mistake a California chardonnay for a white Burg.

According to Information Week: 90% Of E-Mail Will Be Spam By Year's End.

This cannot be what J. C. R. Liclider and Ray Tomlinson had in mind! The unanswered question is what percent of Internet backbone capacity is consumed by e-mail?

Here is a remarkable sixty-second television ad. And, not to give anything away, it is certainly the soundtrack that is remarkable. Forty years ago, it would have seemed less shocking. But even though we are all used to being shocked, there is an open question: wll it sell more shoes, or more copies of a certain CD? And, another possibility, will it sell LESS shoes?

(Thanks to Alex Ross @ The Rest is Noise for the pointer).

This is the best list I've seen today: 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names. I knew five of them. My favorite is #28.

(Thanks to TT @ About Last Night).

Here is the link to the Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 Resource Center. Note the four marketing blurbs on the left below the text.

Things have really changed in this industry. It used to be that product announcements might say: "Produce professionally typeset documents at Home!" (Apple and HP Laserwriter). That was something!

Now we get: "Help Protect & Manage Content" Ugh. It's really hard to get excited about that, and it certainly doesn't make my checkbook itch. Some may say this is driven by grey-suit-itis at Microsoft. I think it is more the maturity of the industry, and the fact that we aren't seeing really cool things for the first time, but it also sounds like marketing by a committee.

So, I listen to what Microsoft was saying about all of tremendous improvements made to Office 2007 and Window Vista and I couldn't wait to try it. Good marketing, eh?

First I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, and it advised I needed a new video card, and that I should have a copy of the device driver for my Network Interface Card to use after Vista was installed. New video card procured, and CD with drivers in hand, I figured I was 30 minutes away from experiencing the splendors upgrade heaven. 'Twas not to be. I was installing a clean copy from scratch onto a new hard disk, and the Windows Vista install program spent a very long time (10 to 15 minutes) sitting there was a splash screen, finally letting me pick the language. Then it proclaimed "Required cd/dvd drive device driver is missing" and there was no further progress to be had. A search of the web (on another computer) suggested I needed to have the IDE ATAPI drivers at hand, but that didn't seem right. I unplugged the CD drive (leaving the DVD drive containing Vista installed) and tried again. Same result, but at least I knew it wasn't unhappy with the CD drive.

Finally I removed the DVD drive (a recently acquired LiteOn LH-18A1P) and replaced it with an older model. This time everything worked. There were no abnormally long waits and no complaining. My guess is that the Liteon is too new for the installer, and since it didn't know about my 3Com 3C940 LOM NIC either, it couldn't go out on the web and get updated drivers. So I was almost stuck, only being saved by the stacks of computer equimpment I have lying around, and by the desperation to try anything necessary. After Vista was installed (including the NIC drivers) I swapped back to the LH-18AP1 and it worked fine.

Googling around using the error message text shows that I am not the only one to find this bug. Here's hoping that Microsoft fixes this soon in an updated distribution disk.

UPDATE: It turns out the LiteOn drive didnt' work well after the install. It would read the TOC, but had trouble with actually reading data. Turns out I was using a 40-pin IDE cable and this drive needs an 80-pin cable! So it was user error all along.