The SoapBoxers

Editor’s note: make sure to enter The Soap Boxers’s NCAA pool (last chance, folks). Details can be found here.

Generally, I’m fairly up-to-speed on technology.  I’m not in the first batch of early adopters, but I’m generally not too far behind.  I really missed the boat on social media, though, dismissing it as irrelevant for years.  Eventually, I jumped headfirst into blogging.  I’m still not much of a Twitterer – my tweets are mostly notifications of new blog posts.  I’d love to tweet more, but Twitter seems to lose out in the time crunch.

I’m also a Facebook user.  A couple of years ago, I received an invitation from a longtime friend of mine (thanks for dragging me into Facebook, Amy …)  I’m not really a hardcore user, but I do spend time on Facebook when I get the chance.  How do I spend my Facebook time?

Mostly, I look for women who are interested in playing Scrabble®.  Why just women?  Am I using Facebook as some sort of dating service?  No, of course not.  That behavior would be really unacceptable for a married father of two.  However, a significant portion of male players on Facebook are indeed just looking for dirty talk in their Scrabble® games.  This seems quite odd to me – why not simply use the actual singles areas of Facebook?   In any case, this means that I often end up playing games against women.

Technically, I don’t play Scrabble®, but play Wordscraper instead.  Wordscraper is very similar – so similar that Hasbro sued the makers of Wordscraper.  Happily, an out of court settlement was reached, and Wordscraper remains alive.  There’s also an official Scrabble® game on Facebook, but I like Wordscraper better – the screens seems to render and refresh much more quickly.

How good am I?  Sadly, not particularly good.  I’d like to think that I know quite a lot of words, but my strategy doesn’t seem to be very good.  Part of this is probably the fact that I always try to open the board more, and part is just a deficiency of skill.  Who are the good players?  I’ve played a lot of games against Johnny Goodman, and he’s quite dominant.  Gabe Tyndal is really good too.  I haven’t played enough games against Gabe to determine is he’s at Johnny’s level or not.  My chiropractor, Doc Schroeder, is also really good – but a notch below Johnny (who, I repeat, is REALLY good).

Catching up with high school friends.  About half my high school class is on Facebook now.  That allows me to keep up on things that would otherwise elude me.  I’m also the creator of a Facebook group for my classmates.  I enjoy making people “officers” in the group and assigning them interesting roles.  Archduke (that’s me), Countess, Bloodletter, Stable Lad, Arrow Catcher, Ponzologist, we have them all.  I currently need to think up roles for a few more people.

Catching up on my favorite TV shows.  I am notoriously bad at keeping up with TV shows – TV just doesn’t rank as that high of a priority.  However, by becoming a Facebook “fan” of a show, I’m able to get alerts about the show.  Oh, hey, I should probably become a fan of NCIS 🙂

Ignoring people. Facebook has a built in chat feature.  Although I’m not as popular as some people, with 170 friends on Facebook, it was pretty common to have a half dozen people chatting with me at once.  That could be a real trick to juggle, especially as I was trying to do other things on Facebook.  I hated telling friends that I didn’t have time for them (seemed a bit rude), so I stay in “offline” mode 99% of the time.  (Hey, if you’re a Facebook friend of mine, send me a “message” – I do read the messages in my inbox and reply.)

Here we are at the Winter Olympics once again, the home of patriotism, teamwork, athleticism, and technology? Yes, technology, the Winter Olympics is full of it. Just two years ago I can remember reporters discussing how changes to swimsuits have lead to faster swimming, and even then I couldn’t help but think of how much bigger a part technology plays in the Winter Olympics, and how much of an effect it probably has on the outcome.

The Winter Olympics definitely outweighs the Summer Olympics in the “gear” category. From bobsleds to skis, from ice skates to guns, gear is the name of the game at the Winter Olympics. It might just not be the best man who wins, but the man with the best equipment who wins in Vancouver.

I believe the king of the Winter Olympics technology has got to be the bobsled. In a sport where every second counts the quality of the equipment is going to matter that much more. An olympic bobsled can cost upwards of $100,000 USD. This is just an insane amount of money, you want to talk about a sport for only the rich. Polo has nothing on bobsledding.

I can’t help but imagine how well a $100,000 USD bobsled would perform compared to a $5,000 USD bobsled. With years of testing in wind tunnels, scientists fine tuning every angle, and air drag cut down to near zero, I’d hate to believe that the difference between gold and silver medals might come down to the research and money put in by the host country to develop a high quality sled.

I just don’t believe that technology should play such a large part in the Olympics. I think the winner of the gold medal should be the most dedicated and talented team, not the group of guys thrown together in a sled that costs more than the combined income of my wife and I. That is just ridiculous. In this day of multi thousand dollar snowboards and uniforms made of materials originally designed for NASA, I’ve got to say, what’s the point?

One internet battle I expect to be fought in 2010 is the battle over net (network) neutrality.  This is not a new battle, and has been on the radar for a few years now.  I am hoping that 2010 is the year when the government finally draws a line in the sand.

What is net neutrality?  It is the concept that all network traffic be treated the same.  The tiny email you send to your mother has the exact same priority as your neighbor’s multi-gigabyte Youtube downloads.  Internet service providers could relieve network congestion by throttling (intentionally slowing) heavy use such as downloads – but this would violate a principle of net neutrality.

It’s easy to see why users are largely in favor of net neutrality – nobody wants their internet experience degraded.  Users would much prefer to see internet service providers (ISPs) make their networks more robust.

On the flip side of the debate are the ISPs, who would like to be allowed to throttle or force big internet companies to pay them for the privilege of allowing access to their site.  The ISPs claim that certain companies are getting a free ride.  Specifically former SBC CEO (and current GM CEO) Ed Whitacre claimed that Google was getting a free ride.  The idea has become a key point for the ISPs.

Is there any merit to this?  No.  Google pays enormous costs for its infrastructure, as well as paying for the bandwidth that allows people to access and download data from them.  Do they pay for the bandwidth required for my ISP to send the data along to me?  Of course not.  That’s what I’m paying for when I pay my ISP bill.  If the ISPs want Google and other web companies to pay for their costs, when why should I have to pay anything?  This is a blatant attempt to double dip.  Further, it’s blatantly dishonest; an obvious attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of some people who might not fully understand the workings of the internet.

My general rule of thumb is that if you have to lie to make your point, your point probably isn’t valid.

So, then, if I’m not in favor of putting the ISPs on GoogleFare (like welfare, but taking money from Google instead) am I am least amenable to throttling?  No.  My data, regardless of size, is no more of less important than anyone else’s data.  No data should be subject to any artificial constraint, other than the published bandwidth limit.  (Interestingly, I’m not actually a very heavy user – but that doesn’t prevent me from feeling the pain of those who are).

If you want to place limits on usage, go ahead – but I believe you should be forced to disclose these limitations in a very obvious way in advertising and on contracts.  Will this make it appear as if you are providing service that is inferior to that of your competitors, allowing them to eat your lunch?  Yes … but it’s only fair, since you actually ARE providing inferior service.

Right away, I’ll tell you which type of computer to buy. The one that you’re most comfortable with. There really isn’t a right or wrong answer. Now, we’ll move on to the rest of the article, which will focus on the Mac.

Personal Experience
The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe. I was soon writing code in BASIC, and was allowed to essentially develop my own curriculum when I was eventually able to take a programming class (since I had already covered the course’s subject matter on my own). I was later introduced to Macs, and thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.

For the last twelve years, I have worked in the systems department of a very large company – supporting a user community that uses solely Windows PC ☺ I even fix broken PCs for co-workers when asked.

Nonetheless, I remain a Mac guy. My home contains two Macs that are plugged in – a two year old (soon to be three years old) Mini that we use for most things, and a seven year old eMac that I write these blog articles on. Peek around the house and you’ll see an old Powerbook 5300, a Mac SE, a Mac Plus, and even a Newton Messagepad. You’ll also see the carcasses of a couple of PCs. I do not have the Amiga any more, as I sold that back to Frank (who, in turn, conned someone else out of good money).

Cost
Oh, you’ll pay more money for a Mac. If purchase price is your sole determining factor, get a PC.

Lack of software
One argument that you’ll hear from the anti-Mac crowd is that there is a dearth of software for the Mac. While it’s true that there is less software, the available software does a pretty good job of covering the bases for most users. If you’re a hard core gamer, you’re probably better off staying with Windows. But if you’re going to mostly use a browser and email client, either platform would be a good choice.

If you’re looking for Office, Photoshop, Quicken – they are all available on the Mac platform. I’m a bit of a tinkerer, and over the years, have played with a lot of stuff on the Mac. I have edited video, run a web server using PHP/MySql, installed a J2EE environment, and even done a bit of coding with the developer tools that are included (at no additional cost) in the OS. Mac OS X is actually built upon BSD Unix – which means that a lot of unix application will run on the Mac. For example, the graphics program GIMP runs on OS X under the X11 environment. At the cost of FREE, GIMP is hundreds of dollars less that Photoshop and provides much of the functionality. (Yes, I hear you, power Photoshop users, it doesn’t provide 100% of the functionality). Many of the graphics on the site (such as the lion header) were created with GIMP (in spite of my lackluster graphic skills).

Single Source
If you buy a Mac, you’re getting hardware and software from the same company. (One quick caveat – in theory, you could hack together a setup that allows you to run OS X on a regular Intel-based machine, but if you have the skills to do this, you’re probably not reading this article.) This means that there are a relatively finite number of possible combinations, and that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. If there is a problem, nobody can point fingers. Regardless of whether it’s a hardware problem or a software problem, it’s an APPLE problem. Contrast this to the PC world, where Microsoft and a PC vendor could each blame each other for a problem.

Speaking of the actual software, Macs come with a full copy of the operating system on DVD. As far as I know, Macs have always come with a full version of the OS. For reasons that I can’t fathom, some PC makers ship computers without as much as a restore disc. If your hard drive dies (and I actually mean WHEN your hard drive dies, because it is guaranteed to die at some point) you have to contact the computer maker to get a restore disc – and pay shipping for the privilege!

Viruses and Malware
For a variety of reasons, viruses and malware are less prevalent on Macs than on PCs. Mac fans say it is due to an inherent superiority while Windows fans will say that it’s because the Mac user base is smaller, and less not as big of a target for hackers. Quite honestly, I really don’t care what the exact reason is – I’m just happy with the result. Several of my co-workers have impressive horror stories about their virus/malware experiences. A couple of days ago, one of them said “Maybe I should have taken [Kosmo’s] advice and just bought a Mac.” I think it’s quite likely that he’ll do that when they buy their next computer.

I run my computers naked (er, I mean to say, without anti-virus software) and have never had a problem with a virus of malware. Is this the safest idea in the world? No – it would certainly be safer to spend the money on antivirus software. I’m willing to take the slight risk avoid the cost of antivirus software. If the worst were to happen, I’m confident in my ability to wipe my system clean and restore data from backups in roughly an hour.

Would I ever suggest that the owner of a Windows machine forgo anti-virus software? Hell no.

Best of Both Worlds?
With the newer (Intel-based) Macs, you can actually install Windows and have a dual boot system. You would have to purchase your own copy of Windows to do this. Alternately, you could use a product such as Darwine which allows you to run Windows application without having Windows installed. I actually tried out Darwine as a proof of concept, and it seemed to worked reasonably well. I just use it that once, though – Darwine sits on my hard drive gathering dust today. I simply don’t have the need to run Windows applications.

In closing – buy whatever computer best suits your needs. I do ask you to take a fresh look at the Mac if you haven’t worked with one in a few years.

Recently the New York Times has reported that a deal has been struck between the online music application Lala and Apple. Although the specifics have not been released the deal has been speculated to be around $80 million. This purchase could mean big changes for Apple’s iTunes.

Lala is an online-based music application that allows users to “buy” streams of music for 10 cents a track or a dollar and album. Users are also able to purchase full MP3 tracks for 89 cents each. I love this service and currently use it daily. I’m anxious to see what Apple does with it and how it integrates this service into iTunes.

Apple has claimed that they are not really interested in the company behind Lala, but the people. They are buying the ideas and engineers behind the program. This means that they are interested in getting the experience Lala engineers have in streaming music distributed from a cloud. This could mean quite a few different features brought to Apple’s iTunes.

The first possibility is that Apple will directly port the Lala service to iTunes, allowing people to purchase the right to stream music for a cheap price instead of having to pay full price for other music formats. This seems unlikely to me as Lala’s business model doesn’t seem to be working currently and the other options seem to be more Apple friendly.

The next option is a subscription music service. Many of iTunes competitors already offer this already. Napster and Rhapsody allow you to have “all-you-can-eat” music for one low monthly price. They even allow you to download the music to portable mp3 players for listening on the go. Apple could leverage Lala’s streaming music service to bring a subscription streaming service to iTunes.

The final possibility I see Apple possibly considering is custom web radio. The current up and comer in the online music world is Pandora.

Pandora is probably one of my most used web applications. Pandora allows you to rate music you like and chooses new music for your online radio stations based on your ratings. I love Pandora, it does a great job, and it’s growing at a fantastic rate and I can’t imagine that Apple doesn’t want to get into this. Apple already has a recommendation engine with their music Genius, they could easily incorporate Lala’s streaming service to build their very own Genius radio to compete with Pandora.

How Do You Like Them AAPLs?

If you had bought shares of Apple Computer (AAPL) in July of 1997, you would have paid $13 per share.  At the close of the trading day on Thursday, shares of Apple were worth more than $200.  Certainly, having an investment return fifteen times your original outlay twelve years later is a great return – it would be an annual rate of return of 25%!

That’s only a quarter of the story, though.  Apple’s stock has also had two splits (2:1 splits) during the timeframe – meaning that one share in 1997 is the equivalent of 4 shares in 2009.  Your original investment of $13 would actually be worth more than $800 today – a 40% annual rate of return.

Michael Dell, founder of the company that bears his name, when asked what he would do with Apple, once remarked “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”  Apple’s market capitalization of $180 billion is now roughly six times that of Dell – and also more than that of IBM ($160B) and Cisco ($140B).  In fact, Apple’s market value is even approaching that of longtime rival Microsoft ($250B).

In 1997, Apple was on the brink of disaster.  The product matrix had become quite muddled, and the company appeared rudderless.  In the midst of the chaos, the company turned to co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs has co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak (Woz).  Woz was the technical genius, while Jobs was the savvy salesman.  Jobs was forced out in a power struggle with CEO John Sculley in 1985.  Ironically, it was Jobs who had hired Sculley.  (So, what happened to Woz?  He left the company in 1986 and is heavily involved in philanthropy … when he’s not Dancing With the Stars).

When Jobs was booted out of Apple, he didn’t pout about it.  He took some cash and bought an animation studio from George Lucas for $10 million.  He took more cash and founded a technology company  – NeXT.  NeXT’s computers were technologically advanced – and very pricey.  NeXT eventually transitioned into a pure software company.  Apple bought NeXT in 1996 for $429 million.  Apple had been struggling with their next generation operating system, and NeXT’s NeXTSTEP technology served as the foundation for Mac OS X.

Shortly after Apple bought NeXT, the board of directors fired CEO Gil Amelio and hired Jobs as the new CEO.  The rest is history.  Jobs quickly discontinued many projects and supervised a new, more focused future strategy. 

Under the leadership of Jobs, Apple has launched wildly popular products such as the iMac, iPod, and iPhone as well as the cash cow iTunes Music Store.

While Jobs is a highly compensated CEO, it might be hard to find many investors who would complain about the cost of his leadership – clearly, the company has thrived during his tenure, and shareholders have reaped golden rewards.

And whatever happened to the animation studio that Jobs bought from George Lucas?  Disney bought that studio in 2006 for $7.4 worth of Disney stock.

The name of the studio?  Perhaps you’ve heard of it – Pixar.

Microsoft Windows 7

In an effort to confuse anyone who is trying to decode their product naming system, Microsoft launched Windows 7 on Thursday.  Old version, Vista.  New version, 7.  Yep, definitely a natural progression.

I’m also unclear on why this is Windows 7 when I can think of at least nine different versions (1, 2, 3, 95, 98, Millennium, XP, Vista, 7).

The strongest selling point of Windows 7 is that it is not Vista.

In Japan, Microsoft partnered with Burger King and introduced a product to help promote Windows 7.  I know what you’re thinking – a 7 patty Whopper.  You people have crazy imaginations – that would be just nutty.

I mean, yes.  That’s exactly it. A 7 patty, two thousand calorie burger.  And it doesn’t even come with cheese!

On August 12th, an employee of Rocky Mountain Bank sent a spreadsheet with 1300 names, address, and social security numbers to a GMail (Google email) address. Unfortunately, the person sent it to the wrong address. The data was apparently unencrypted (this is a conclusion that I have come to, based solely on RMB’s subsequent actions).

The bank employee sent another email to same address, asking the recipient to contact the bank, and also to delete the file without opening it.

The bank has not heard back from the email recipient, so they asked Google to disclose the GMail account holder’s personal information, so that they could initiate another form of communication with the person.

Not surprisingly, Google denied the request. The bank then went to court to get a court order to get that information, as well as having the account deactivated. Here comes the crazy part – a judge actually agreed!

Let’s do a sanity check here. What crime has this person committed? Um, none. It’s not a crime to be the recipient of unintended email. The person didn’t hack into the bank’s system or anything like that. There is exactly one person at fault here – the person who sent the email. If the same information had been sent through the postal service, would the bank have asked the postal service to suspend mail service?

There is the distinct possibility that the person doesn’t even realize that they have received this email. If they use “whitelists” to restrict their email to pre-approved address, the bank’s email would not have gone into their inbox. Even if the person did see the email, it’s very possible that they suspected a phishing scam and deleted both emails immediately. If the exact same thing happened to me, I would assume a phishing scam. I get a lot of emails that appear to come from banks.

Even if the bank’s request had some sort of merit, I’m not sure exactly what they intend to accomplish by having the GMail account deactivated, other than attempting the punish the recipient. If the bank thinks that the person hasn’t viewed the email yet, I could understand them requesting that Google simply delete that one email from the person’s account. I’m not saying they would be right to do this, but I could understand the logic.

If the person has already viewed the email, then this action will not accomplish anything. If the recipient wanted to take some action with the spreadsheet – such as forwarding to all their friends – then the horse is already gone. Not much point in closing the barn door. If the person already deleted the document, then the action also won’t accomplish anything.

Most disturbing is that this creates the opportunity for abuse of process. What is to prevent companies – or individuals – from “accidentally” sending emails to competitors and then going to court to deactivate the email account of the competitor?

In my opinion, a lot of today’s judges do not have the background to understand some of today’s technology. This is not the first situation where a judge has made a strange decision on a matter related to technology. As technology continues to advance, this is going to become even more of a problem. I would propose the creation of an agency that judges could consult in order to get an accurate and unbiased exlanation of how certain technologies work. This would, of course, have to be at taxpayer expense … but isn’t the cost of miscarried justice even worse?

What did you miss over the weekend?

• Friday feature the lack of fiction in No Fiction Today
• Johnny Goodman made his football picks
• Saturday featured a look inside Kosmo’s brain (pretty scary, huh?)
• Tyson explained his absence on Sunday

As the Internet continues to grow, it continues to become more and more a part of our everyday lives. The sudden explosion of web capable mobile devices and social networking has lead to almost everyone having a presence on the web. As the web pervades every day life, we must take advantage of the opportunities it presents.

Social networks give us the opportunity to network with people across the globe. Gone are the days of easily losing touch with old friends or classmates when people move across the country or even across the globe. With the advent of social networks we can now easily keep in touch with colleagues and share information. This is not just useful for finding out about Chuck getting married or Sarah having a kid, you can also leverage social networking to build a strong professional network.

When most people think of social networks they think of MySpace and Facebook. While Facebook may be useful for professional networking I would warn people to stay away from the abyss that is MySpace. When using Facebook I would also make sure to be cautious of what is public viewable. A better example would be LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site. LinkedIn allows users to post resumes, gain references, and even help other users with professional questions. You can also find other users linked to your network that might be able to help you in that job you’re applying for or that project you’re working on.

In this day and age a strong web presence is needed in this new Internet friendly professional world. Many employers now google prospective employees, do you really want the pictures of that party you got totally smashed at to come up when a prospective employer is considering you for employment?

Using Facebook for more personal contacts combined with LinkedIn for your professional network you can easily build a quick web presence that can easily be found on the web. This is only the start, from here you can build write a blog, twitter, or even build your own site.

We have decided to make the jump from cable to Direct TV, largely in order to get the sports programming my wife and I want.  We are about 15 miles north of the “home market” for her favorite NFL team, and nearly a thousand miles outside of the market for my favorite baseball team.

I’ll cover the Direct TV aspect at a later date (after we actually have the service).  However, we also switched over from cable internet to DSL (through Qwest).  Today, I’ll cover that.

Ordering

My wife spent 40 minutes on the phone with the phone company.  This was twice the time she spent on the phone with Direct TV.  Considering that we’re an existing phone customer and that she knew precisely what level of DSL we needed, this seemed like an excessive amount of time.

Installation

Since I’m an IT guy, we went with the self-installation.  The box came via UPS and contained the modem, install CD, DSL filters for the phone lines, and a couple of Ethernet cables.  For those who aren’t familiar with DSL, the filters (essentially, a little pass through device for the phone line) are placed on the phone lines that actual telephones are plugged into, to avoid interference with the DSL modem.  Interestingly, our wall mounted phone (which we never use) doesn’t have a wall mounted JACK, so we didn’t need the special wall mounted filter.

The install process wasn’t overly complex, but it was still more steps than necessary.  With the cable company (Mediacom) it had only been necessary to connect to hardware and go to their walled garden to provision the modem.  I also had to set at a Microsoft Live account just to be able to use the outbound (SMTP) mail server.  Again, this hadn’t been necessary with cable, as they authenticated through alternate means.  The mail servers weren’t listed on the instruction sheet, either – I needed to poke around online to determine what they should be.

So, while the installation wasn’t hard, it was slightly annoying, simply because I knew it could have been easier.

The service

The DSL modem actually had a built in wireless router (with 4 wired ports).  However, I decided against using this for a couple of reasons.  First, I really don’t think it’s necessary for the ISP to be able to know how many computers (and what type) are connected.  Second, you actually need to register computers on their web site when you add them to your network.  I didn’t delve into the reason for this (MAC filtering?). I fix other computers often enough that I don’t want to monkey around with adding and removing computers (the fix process often involves connecting to the internet to download several hundred megabytes of system updates).  So I connected my Linksys router to a wired port, and the other computers will continue to connect to that.  I turned off the wireless function on the DSL modem.

Now to the important part – speed.  We chose the 7 mbps plan (options were 1.5, 7, 12, 20).  This seemed roughly comparable to our current plan with cable.  7 mbps (mega bits per second) means that it will take slightly more than 1 second to download a 1 megabyte file (there are 8 bits to a byte).  We don’t put a lot of strain on our bandwidth by downloading huge files, so this will probably be sufficient.

I tested the cable speed on www.speedtest.net before switching to DSL.  The download speed was 7.35 mbps and upload speed was 0.72 mps.  As far as I know, the cable company never actually specified a specific speed – over the years, they gradually bumped the speed without rasing the price.

I tested the speed for the DSL and it came in at 6.1 mbps – about a 17% drop in speed.  (Why aren’t we getting exactly 7 mbps?  Because network overhead and other issue take away from the raw speed of a connection).  Upload speed was around 0.73 mbps.

We’ll watch the download speed a bit to make sure it’s OK and upgrade to 12 mbps if it is not OK.  I think we’ll be OK, as most problems of slowness we encounter seem to be related to overloaded web servers (Facebook, this would be you), and this is not something that can be fixed by having a fast connection.  I was pleased that the upload speed didn’t degrade, as I do upload large chunks of data on occasion.

What next

Once we have Direct TV installed, I’ll write an article about that process.  I’ll also document any billing and technical issues that might arise.

Today, we welcome James Bathgate on board as the technology writer.  He will write a monthly column, Reality Bytes.

It has been 3 years since the release of Windows Vista and a new version of Microsoft’s operating system is just around the corner. Windows 7 looks to be a more streamlined and user friendly version of Windows Vista. The developers at Microsoft have taken strides to make their operating system more secure, easier to use, and less of a general headache that Windows Vista was. Microsoft, however, seems to have overlooked one area when designing Windows 7.

When upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista many PC owners had to upgrade their machines in order to run the new operating system. This caused confusion in some of the users of the operating system who did not know how to upgrade their machines.

Now, when upgrading to Windows 7 it seems the majority of people upgrading are going to require a clean install. This means that anyone who does not qualify for an “in-place upgrade” is going to have to back up all of their data from their system before doing the upgrade.

(Click to enlarge)

A user who bought their machine pre-installed with their operating system which included software bundled with that operating system will now lose that software. Even worse, people who do not understand what a clean install means will end up wiping out all of the information on their machine without knowing. In many ways, I think this is even worse than requiring people to buy some new hardware for their machine.

Some may argue that it is a necessary task for people to wipe their machine and reinstall everything now and then and I agree with that, but I do not think anyone should be forced to do this without knowing what they are doing in order to upgrade their operating system. This upgrade is going to cause some unknowing grandmother to permanently lose the pictures of her grandchildren. Some confused self-employed person is going to lose some indispensable business data. Some poor student is going to accidentally lose an essay they are working on when they upgrade their operating system. There has got to be a better way.