The blog is dead, long live the new blog

I've decided to move my blog to Wordpress instead since Blogger doesn't seem a priority to Google.

My new blog is here: http://barbedwirebytecodebaconburger.wordpress.com

The dumbest and most faulty sentence ever in a tech-article

Taken from this article on Forbes.com:

Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says

And "he" being "Vince Vizzacarro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing". That sentence is riddled with enough erronous information to make me cringe.

One, Ubuntu is a version of Linux, which in turn is a Unix-like OS. If I was gonna nitpick I could also state that Linux is in fact not an OS - it's an operating system kernel and operating systems based on it are called distributions. But never mind...

Two, X11 is not an operating system or anything close to it. X11 is windowing system software used by most desktop system for Unix-like OSes, like KDE, Gnome or XFCE for example.

So now I wonder who the idiot here is. Is Vince Vizzacarro with his fancy title as completely misinformed as he seems or has he been misquoted by the writer of the article? Either way it's a disgrace.

Why I'll never buy a high-end PC ever again

Although I've been a computer geek since forever, until two years ago I'd never really forked over the bigger bucks for a PC. I've always bought the model or the parts that were not great but did the job acceptably well, almost never the cheapest junk though.

About two years ago it was time for a serious upgrade, i.e. a new PC, and this time around I decided it was time that I owned a really high-end machine. So I did some research, bought the right parts - some of them released no more than a week earlier - and built a pretty awesome PC based on a nice Intel Core2Duo CPU, sporting dual 17" TFT-monitors with the appropriate Nvidia-card to drive them, three hard drives (two of them in RAID1) and buckets of RAM. The box set me back about 19.000 SEK (which is roughly $2600 with today's rates). Granted, this was not a crazy ass machine but on a scale of 1 to 10 in awesomeness, with 10 being the most insane gaming rig money can buy, I believe it was at the time a solid 8 at least. Since I hardly play PC-games at all, I'm a console kinda guy, it was more than sufficient to satisfy my needs and much more.

Well, two months ago I bought myself a 20" iMac and consequently had less use for my monster-PC. So I decided to sell it.

I read somewhere that a PC supposedly loses about half of it's worth in a year so in two years a PC is worth one quarter of it's original price. Since originally buying the PC I'd upgraded it a little bit with some more RAM and better cooling so I thought that I should be able to get 4.500 SEK for it right? Wrong.

It seems the second hand market for complete PCs really doesn't exist. PC-parts is a whole other thing, but a complete box just isn't worth anything at all it seems. I've been trying to sell my PC through multiple channels (auctionsites, ad in the newspaper, etc.) for weeks now and the interest is really non-existant. I've gotten a couple of e-mails from people asking me to lower the price or asking if I'll sell it for less with this or that part taken out, but no one has taken the bait for real so far.

I'm completely dumbfounded here. What is it that makes the second hand value of a PC virtually zero? The only machines that seem to have any real second hand value are Macs. I mean, there are old G4 MacMinis with half the horsepower and a quarter of the storage going for almost the same as I'm asking for my monster-PC. Are the Apple-fanboys the only ones that have money to spend or what's up with this? It's just crazy.

It's not like I thought I'd make my money back selling my two year old PC, but I thought that in a world where the majority of people use PCs there would at least be somebody enticed enough by the prospect of owning said machine. I guess I'm just really surprised that my assumptions were so wrong.

I discussed the whole thing with a friend and we came to the conclusion that most people don't really get the quality of hardware that's in my machine, all they see is a two year old computer that costs as much as a low-budget Dell that's brand new, so they go buy the Dell instead because it's, well, new, although it's way crappier than my machine is. Also, the people that do understand the real value of the machine would probably rather buy new parts and build their own rig so they pass on it for that reason. So basically, once again, the market for second-hand PCs (and high-end ones in particular) is shit.

However, the market for second hand PC-parts seems to be a little better so if my PC still has no buyer by next week I'm chopping it up and selling the bits and pieces individually. That should make me enough money to buy me and my girlfriend a decent sushi dinner at least :-P

So lesson learned, never buy an expensive PC again unless I really, really need that much juice. From here on any PC I buy will be just enough to get things done. No more, no less.

Authorize buddy? Not so much

Seriously, who the hell authorizes a request that looks like that? Epic fail fuckhead.

Eee used to be a sweet brand

Seriously, what's up with the people at Asus and why are they so thoroughly raping their own brand? I'm talking of course about the Eee.

What started with a small revolution in the notebook-market, the tiny but nice EeePC, has now become pretty much a farce. First of all, what's up with the millions of different configurations of EeePCs? Can even Asus keep up with all of them? Secondly, it seems that every other new piece of hardware coming out of their factories now sports the Eee-logo. Every week there seems to be a new model or a new product called the Eee-whatever. It's getting a bit much in my opinion.

The original EeePCs were made affordable partly because they ran Linux, a modified Xandros-based version that provided a super-simple interface that even your grandma could use without much trouble, making them a good buy for the computer novice not only because of the small price. But it wasn't long before market forces pressured Asus enough to start offering new models running Windows XP. Fine, if people really wanna run Windows XP let them. I just think it kind of defeats the whole point that the original EeePCs were making with their sleak Linux-powered and almost idiot-proof interface. An EeePC running Windows XP is just like any other cheap laptop, only smaller and with inferior hardware. Plus, the EeePC-models running Windows XP are more expensive than the ones running Linux. The ones that are the same price and model-number although running varying OSes have differences in their hardware specifications, i.e. smaller and cheaper harddrive to pay for the Windows XP-license.

There are now desktop-PCs wearing the Eee-logo popping up on the market. First there was the EeeBox, which I kind of see how it would be useful. It runs Windows XP or Linux, just like many of the netbooks of the brand. And now there's a all-in-one touch screen PC called the Eee Top. I don't know much about it yet but apparently it runs Windows XP infused with something that looks like the Easy-Mode UI on the EeePC netbooks. Judging by this video it doesn't run all that well though...

Too me it seems that Asus are a bit dizzy by the success of the first Eee-branded products and now they think that anything wearing the Eee-logo will become a money-printing machine and by drowning the market in different models and products they may actually kill their own brand in the end.

I'm personally aching a bit for one of the EeePC 901s running Linux and I already own one of the original EeePCs, a 701 4G (with touch screen installed), but this flood of Eee-products leaves a bit of a foul taste in my mouth none the less