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There's a clear pattern here: three times in a row now, or every seven years, Microsoft appears to have thrown a mediocre-to-bad version of Windows onto the market to buy time while it finishes the "good" version.

Today the problem is with Windows 8. Seven years ago it was with Windows Vista, and seven years before that the problem was with Windows ME.

When Microsoft executive Stephen Elop took the reigns in 2011 as CEO at Finland's Nokia he wrote a company memo that compared Nokia's predicament -- surrounded on all sides by challenges -- to that of a man trapped on a burning oil rig. In such a circumstance, Elop said, a person -- or one of the world's premier cell phone makers -- had no choice but to jump.

The memo became famously known as the "burning platform" memo. And Elop, a Canadian, was widely praised for telling it like it was.

Elop succeeded in getting Nokia to jump... into the arms of Microsoft, and he pocketed a healthy $25 million profit for his trouble (after which his old employer rehired him).

The praise has taken a turn towards Greek tragedy as Elop is frequently compared to a Trojan horse.

Now that Elop is back at Microsoft he's even been suggested as a possible replacement for outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer. That's all the more reason to suggest that he jumped from one fire into another one.

Microsoft, in fact, has several burning issues on its plate. There's the matter of finding the next great leader and the matter of making the next great operating system.

A team at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, is already hard at work building the replacement for the badly under-performing Windows 8 operating system.

[caption id="attachment_9463" align="alignnone" width="497"] 1960 ad for Ohio Art's Etch A Sketch. Look familiar?[/caption]

For better or worse the baby boomer generation of post-Second World War babies are amazing. Never have so many people been born in such a short time: Seventy-eight-or-so million children were born in the U.S. alone between 1945 and 1964 -- the broadest time span for Boomerdom.

Even their dreams are amazing: so many boomers have the same dreams at the same time, they can't help but become everyone's dreams.

I'm typing this post on one of those dreams: a laptop.

Boomers didn't invent computers, they invented personal computers, to replace the impersonal kind of main- and mini-frame computers their parents invented and which they used in colleges and universities around the world -- they were the most educated generation in human history after all.

[caption id="attachment_9430" align="alignnone" width="497"] The new arm race: Samsung Galaxy Gear, the Pebble and the Sony Smartwatch 2.[/caption]

Before cellular phones in the 1980s, pagers were the popular mobile device with professionals: little devices with tiny alphanumeric readouts that notified you when someone called your land line. Remember? No? Ask an old person, or a healthcare professional.

Cell phones made pagers obsolete over 20 years ago, but they're back again, retooled for the social media of the 21st Century and the irony?

The simple dumb phones that killed pagers, evolved into the complicated smartphones that are giving them a new lease on life.

Today's pagers still notify you of calls to your phone number; they also notify you of incoming SMS text messages or email or any social media nods -- they're all over Twitter and Facebook notifications. Most of them can "dial" your phone, and many of them can play MP3 files, and all of them can tell the time.

And "pagers" was so 20th Century -- they've changed their name to "smartwatches."

[caption id="attachment_9122" align="alignnone" width="497"] Maybe you can use your old "feature" phone as more than just an emergency paper clip.[/caption]

The most popular tablets are essentially scaled up smart phones that don't make phone calls. Critics who pointed this out back in 2010, asked why people with an iPhone would ever want an iPad. Today the question is reversed: people with iPads and Android tablets are actually beginning to wonder if they still need their smart phones. Maybe all they need are their smart tablets and a dumb phone.

Predictions of the death of old-school "feature phones" (that flip-phone you have in a box with your Palm organizer and VHS tapes) at the hands of iOS- and Android-based smart phones may have been premature. The same features that made smart phones look so good: touchscreens, applications, cameras and Internet connectivity, actually look and work much better on tablet computers.

I'm not a boomer, but I grew up with pocket calculators -- used them in school. I was also exposed to computers in high school -- writing and running programs written in BASIC. I don't remember much except I didn't demonstrate an aptitude for programming.

[caption id="attachment_8651" align="alignright" width="106"] The classic 1984 Mac calculator DA stayed virtually unchanged until 2002.[/caption]

By the time I picked up the thread of computers again in the 1980s, every desktop system I saw was graphical. By the late 1980s all desktop operating system had a calculator desk accessory -- it was like the one-celled organism of computer programs. It's fair to say the Mac's calculator desk accessory set the bar for everyone else.

[caption id="attachment_8657" align="alignleft" width="118"] Palm Treo 680 smart phone from the Late Pleistocene -- 2004.[/caption]

If the personal computers of the mid-1980s were the writing on the wall for pocket calculators then the cell phones of the late-1990s were "The End." PDAs like the Palm Pilot telegraphed the ending by the mid-1990s. Ironically they were also killed by cell phones.

Pocket calculators still barely survive because, a) boomers who grew up with them still survive, and, b) they can do math but they can't do Facebook -- many teachers bar cell phones with their built in calculators because they can, at the very least, distract students. Click the photos to enlarge them.

There's been a threat of snow in Vancouver's weather forecast for a few days. This is in contrast to my friend's iPad -- no matter how much she wants it to snow on her iPad, it's forecast to stay clear and bright through the holidays and beyond.

It's a WordPress.com thing. You know... the free Internet blogging dew-hickey?

My friend couldn't really think of much to do with her WordPress blog, after a friend created it for her. Then she heard about the festive feature to make it  snow on a her blog until January 4th.



She turned on the "Snow" option in her WordPress General Settings, but waited in vain for the expected flurries -- not a single snowflake. Even her friend with a 7-inch, "door-crasher special," generic Android tablet could see snow on their WordPress blog -- and I could see it on my Windows 8 waffle iron, if I cared to -- it was only her new iPod Air that couldn't. She wasn't happy about that. It didn't help any when she found out we could all see the snow falling on her blog.

WordPress.com explains the feature is "disabled on mobile devices because it’ll drain the battery too much." So to WordPress, all iOS devices look like iPhones.

[caption id="attachment_7818" align="alignnone" width="497"] The lights on your router blink Morse Code messages... Okay, that's a lie.[/caption]

After a thief stole my friend's iPad last Friday. Apple made sure that the new one she bought had the content and settings of the old one. There was only one glitch: she couldn't connect to her Wi-Fi at home.

Her home network was visible in the iPad's list of available networks, It's entry showed a locked icon denoting it was encrypted and required a password. When she clicked on he home network it just failed to connect, except occasionally for a moment. It never asked for a password.

She spoke on the phone with two tech support people and one technician from Shaw Communications, her Internet provider. She also made one or two trips to her Apple reseller. The technician suggested her wireless router wasn't broadcasting a strong enough signal, but no one she spoke to could give her a solution. A service visit was scheduled for Thursday.

[caption id="attachment_7801" align="alignnone" width="497"] Artist's sketchy reconstruction of the theft of my friend's iPad at McDonald's.[/caption]

Over the last six years Apple has done a remarkable job of making their iPhones and iPads very desirable items. Recently Apple has actually been adding features to their iOS to make the devices less desirable -- to thieves.

I don't mean to make any asparagus... I mean disparaging remarks about peoples' tastes, but clearly something is wrong when the the colour white can edge out metallic silver as the number one car colour. That's just mixer, eh, mixed-up. Silver has been the most popular vehicle colour for ten years, but this year white took the top spot. According to press reports, PPG Industries, the leading supplier of automotive paints, says 25 percent of the paint this year was white, up 3 percent from the prior year. Silver and black tied for second, with 18 percent each. That's baffling, white is so wishy-washy; abstract -- it's not even a real colour. Metallic silver is a concrete, real-world thing.

What or who could be causing this? Could it be... Apple! Darn right. As if to cement their reputation as a leading trend maker, analysts say the Cupertino computer maker's white stores and devices have made white fashionable. And before white, what was the dominant colour of Apple's devices? That would be metallic silver. Click the image to enlarge it.

It's an interesting fact. though, not very interesting, that 40, even 30 years ago, if you said "apple," people assumed you meant the kind that grows on trees. Now, there's a better-than-even chance you mean the kind that grows in a Foxconn plant in China. Click the image to see the vintage fruit box label enlarged.

Who wants an iCicle? I do, I do! Except that I don't really. The new, happy, shiny, plastic iPhone 5c, with it's candy colours, and rounded edges and corners, really pushes my buttons, which is ironic, given Steve Jobs' famous war on buttons. Pictured above, coconut flavour -- my favourite!

[caption id="attachment_4382" align="alignnone" width="497"] Well... Halo runs on Xbox doesn't it?[/caption]

How sad. Microsoft could be competitive in less than a year. The Redmond-based software-and-hardware company announced today that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer would be stepping down within 12 months. Microsoft stock rose nine per cent on the news.

Steve Ballmer went to college with Microsoft founders Bill Gates, and Paul Allen, and started with Microsoft in 1980. He became CEO of Microsoft in 2000, after Bill Gates stepped down.

Ballmer is said to be smart as a whip, but he's always come off publicly as more than a bit of a clownish huckster. Elevation to Microsoft's CEO in 2000 only magnified his "bull in a china shop" optics. Steve Ballmer had the misfortune of becoming Microsoft CEO the same year Steve Jobs became Apple's self-proclaimed "iCEO" In the i-era, Jobs completely out-general-ed, out-coached, and outmaneuvered Ballmer at every turn. Ballmer probably couldn't have helped Apple more if he had worked for them. He blithely, and blindly laughed at, and ridiculed, each of the iProducts, as they pushed Apple back into profitability, and, in 2012, past Microsoft in market capitalization.

Ballmer seriously hated on opensource and Linux, infamously calling Linux, "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." ► Balmer repeatedly threatened to sue opensource developers for patent infringement. Even without merit backing up it's claims, the threats alone, given Microsoft's legal resources, were designed to have a chilling effect on the opensource movement.

Steve Ballmer  tenure as CEO has been a near-total disaster for Microsoft. Under his tenure, Apple came back from the dead to become a thriving innovative tech darling, and opensourse, with Google's help, has come out of nowhere to dominate cell phones. Microsoft has repeatedly been caught off-guard, and left playing catch-up against it's rivals. It's responses: Zune for the iPod, Vista for OS X, Windows 8 Phone for Android, and Surface for the iPad, have all failed.

Microsoft's board has reportedly begun the process to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. Ballmer himself is quoted in Microsoft's announcement as saying:

“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time.”

Wrong again Steve -- 13 year, and 7 months ago, would've been a perfect time. From all the Apple users, and Linux users you slagged, and tried to terrorize with your "fear-leading" tactics: Don't let the door hit you on the way out!

[caption id="attachment_4203" align="alignnone" width="497"] When I first saw the attractive Fuduntu cloverleaf logo, which embodied an "f" for Fedora, I suppose, I thought it also, evoked the Windows logo, and the Apple cloverleaf key.[/caption]

I've continued to gnaw away at why Funduntu turned out the lights; I'm like a none-too-bright dog -- and no, that's not a Puppy Linux crack. I love Puppy.

Of course Andrew Wyatt, and company would rightly say they've explained why, but I didn't quite get it (see above dog reference). So I've been reading, back to 2010, and forwards to just a few months ago. For better or worse, here's what I get: Fedora's a bit of a mess under the hood (and they didn't have enough mechanics), and the Fuduntu team wore their name like an albatross around their collective neck for nearly three years. The former explains rebasing on OpenSUSE, and the latter explains the new name for the new distribution.

After I fished the Apple PowerBook, featured in the previous post, out of the dumpster, I arranged, and photographing it (the couple who'd tossed it out, as part of moving out, or apartment-cleaning, offered me every subsequent bag of trash they brought out). A fly alighted on the PowerBook, and I tried to get a sharp closeup -- not something my dumpster-derived Samsung S860 excels at -- but today it was "The Little Camera that Could." Click the images to enlarge them.

[caption id="attachment_4111" align="alignnone" width="497"] Now I can tell people I've been reduced to eating cat food.[/caption]

Lazy binning day, with a bit of a Hello Kitty theme, which figures for Vancouver. First a can of pasta on top of a container bin, waiting in plain sight for anyone who wanted it. Then an older Apple Macintosh laptop -- I think a 2006-ish PowerPC processor aluminium PowerBook G4,, which was in a garbage bag, and then most of the AC adapter, which was in another bag, and the rest of the AC adapter, from another bag --- at least they were all in the same dumpster. But, I was in a catch-and-release mood -- not with the pasta. That was a keeper -- Japanese cartoon characters have forgotten more about pasta than Italians will ever know!

[caption id="attachment_4112" align="alignnone" width="497"] See the Hello Kitty tie-in. Tempting to play with, but no way did I need another laptop.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_4116" align="alignright" width="252"] Flies are always attracted to Apples in the dumpster.[/caption]

I gave the PowerBook to a bike binner who declared he could crack any password, and when I said it was PPC- not Intel-based, he countered by saying he had a program that would allow him to "install Intel on it." And he was sure it would be faster than his tower G4 -- I was only sure it would be easier to carry around in a backpack. I gave him everything, 'cept the fly, I saved that for my next post.

I'm sitting inside the Waves coffee shop drinking in the sights. I can see a customer outside on the patio sidewalk seating. He has his iPad in his lap, his dog is at his feet, and on his iPad -- he's using the forward-facing camera to watch his dog, cuz ... well, it's the 21st-Century, and he can -- and pets can't take their own "selfies." His beautiful dog is named Tinto, he's a Mexican Rescue Dog. Click the image to enlarge it.

It's been big news throughout Linuxland that Canonical's planning for mobile Ubuntu (let's call it Mobuntu) may include an application packaging system which sounds like it has more in common with Apple's Mac OS X, and iOS, than with Linux.

According to this mailing list posting by Colin Watson -- Canonical's Ubuntu Installer Team leader -- The Ubuntu phone/tablet could get a new, simplified packaging format and app installer, in line with the lightweight nature of Ubuntu mobile apps. The new packaging format, called "Click packages" would have no dependencies between applications, no maintainer scripts and each app would be installed in its own directory. That certainly doesn't sound like your grandfather's Linux, although it sounds almost exactly like the innovative, but currently quiescent GoboLinux, and It sounds a lot like what goes on inside a MacBook Pro, or an iPhone.

Wherein I pine for Apple's Preview, and Quick Open, but console myself by  installing Irfanview in Windows 8.



They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Well, I couldn't be any fonder of Apple's Preview application than I am right now, toying with Microsoft's "pieces o' eight" operating system. Preview is part of the Mac OS. Double clicking on PDFs, JPEGs, GIFs, TIFFs,, and 25 other image file types, automatically opens them in Preview. It's a cornerstone of the Macintosh User Interface. Users generally take it for granted -- until they don't have it anymore.

[caption id="attachment_3750" align="alignnone" width="497"] Penguins love apples! Click the image to go to the source page.[/caption]

Gotta love the future. People are always announcing the great things they're going to do there. Probably why there's a lineup to get in. For instance, in the future we'll be able to run Mac OS X programs in Linux! At least that's the goal of The Darling Project, which is hard at work, trying to create a "compatibility layer" approach to running Apple's Macintosh OS X applications within Linux, exactly the way the program Wine allows Windows programs to run in Linux. There is nothing to download yet, but this sort of "sexy" opensource effort grabs attention -- It grabbed mine.