Helping Henry Waxman

Representative Henry A. Waxman is chairman of a House committee investigating the use of political e-mail accounts. This was written up in article today in the New York Times: Missing E-Mail May Be Related to Prosecutors by Sheryl Stolberg April 13, 2007.

The article says that Carl Rove and other White House "officials" maintain separate e-mail accounts for government work vs. political work and that Democrats in Congress suspect that the political accounts may have been used to "conduct official work without leaving a paper trail." And then the article gets more specific:

"...documents also revealed that a deputy to Mr. Rove, Scott Jennings, who works in the White House Office of Political Affairs, had used his Republican National Committee e-mail account, ending in gwb43.com, to communicate about the dismissals with a top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales."

Given a domain name (such as gwb43.com) any competent computer nerd can learn where emails to that domain are being sent. It may help Mr. Waxman find any missing email messages. :-)

Email messages sent to recipients at gwb43.com get stored on one of these two computers:

mailscan1.smartechcorp.net
mailscan2.smartechcorp.net

The IP address of the first email receiving computer is 64.203.97.101. The machine resides in Chattanooga Tennessee (latitude: 35.048100, longitude: -85.283302) and is registered to Smartech Corporation. See for yourself.

The IP address of the second email receiving computer is 64.203.98.245 and it is also in Chattanooga.

Background: Every computer on the Internet is assigned a unique number which us nerds call an IP address. It is actually a 32 bit binary number, but for ease of use is always written in decimal with periods in the middle of it.

Passing off opinions as fact

In the Wall street Journal on March 27, 2007 there was an article on page C12 called Microsoft's Brighter Vista. The point of the article is that while Vista is not selling well now, it may sell better in the future. The sub-title is “Soft Start for the System May Yield to Strength Ahead As Chip Glut Pares PC Costs”.

The starts out saying that Vista sales have been slow because Windows XP works well enough and hardly anyone will upgrade an existing computer from XP to Vista. Fine. But then regarding the “improvements” in Windows Vista the article says:

“Those that are important, such as easier searching and stronger security, do justify using Vista on a new PC….”

This is a matter of opinion all the way around, yet it is presented as fact. Whose to say which "improvements" are important and which are not? Who's to say what justifies Vista on a new PC? There is no one right answer and no consensus amongst us computer nerds. A non-technical business person, no doubt the standard WSJ reader, comes away with the wrong impression.

Also, changes in Vista from Windows XP are referred to as “improvements”. Is this a press release or an investment article? Sounds like a press release. Anyone who has used a computer knows that not all changes are improvements. Whether a change is an improvement is a matter of opinion. Again, opinion being offered as fact.

And speaking of facts that may not be facts, the article says that “20 million copies of Vista have been sold since the January launch”. I have seen this number disputed by someone more familiar with the details than I. However, whether the number is in dispute or not, since it comes from Microsoft, which has an obvious motivation to paint a rosy picture, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, the authors state this number as fact without mentioning the source of the 20 million number.

The article predicts a wave of PC buying due to lower prices and that these sales will boost Vista since “most PCs now come with it loaded…”.

This gives the wrong impression. Pretty much all personal computers marketed to consumers come with Vista (think Kool-AID). However, Windows XP is alive and well in computers marketed to businesses. They still buy XP because of reasons explained below and they have the clout to get what they want. After all, no one would turn down an order for thousands of Windows XP computers.

The reason they say "most" and not "all" PCs come with Vista is that anyone can buy a new PC with Windows XP pre-installed, a fact that I fear too-few people know. In my opinion (note: this is not a fact) opting for XP instead of Vista is the right way to go (more below). If nothing else, it's the path of least resistance. And there are other choices in new computers besides XP and Vista: the Mac and Linux.

Since the point of the article is that Vista sales may take off, the reasons not to get Vista on a new computer are omitted. There are many such reasons:

• Software incompatibly
• Hardware incompatibility
• Inevitable bugs in new software
• The learning curve

Heck, just two days after this article appeared, Walter Mossberg answered a reader question in the same paper that started with: “I have just bought a new Dell Vista computer. None of my backup software now works”. Join the crowd guy. In his response, Mossberg complained about the lack of Vista-compatible drivers.

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The choice of OS on a new computer brings up an interesting point. Since XP has been around for so long, will it be this generations QWERTY keyboard? That is, will it be a good enough, usable standard that everyone is familiar with, so much so that changing to something else, even something marginally better, just isn’t worth it? We’ll see.

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The authors, Robert Cyran and Edward Chancellor don’t work for the Journal itself, they work for breakingviews.com an organization that claims on its website to offer “punchy, relevant, timely opinion to the world's financial elite.”

One of the credited authors has a background covering the pharmaceutical industry and a degree in economics. The other specializes in finance and investment. Perhaps not the best backgrounds for offering opinions on the pros/cons of a computer operating system.

Don't Forget a PS/2 Port

Keyboards and mice used to connect to computers via a PS/2 port. Its round and resembles an S-Video port. Now, most keyboards and mice connect to a computer using USB ports. The problem with USB ports is that you need a working copy of Windows to use them.

If Windows won't start up, us computer nerds often run diagnostic utilities, many of which are DOS based and run from a bootable CD disc. I just had to run the Sea Tools hard disk diagnostic program from Seagate on a computer with hard disk problems. But I couldn't. The DOS based utility would not recognize a USB keyboard and the computer had no PS/2 port to plug in a different keyboard.

The morale of the story: when buying a desktop computer, be sure to get at least one PS/2 port. If the computer is termed "legacy free" this is a bad thing, not a good thing.

WSJ article on running Windows on a Mac

This is a review of an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 20, 2007 called Apple Opens Doors by Running Windows by Nick Wingfield (only available to wsj.com subscribers). The subtitle is: Ability to handle Microsoft operating system may help macs make some inroads.

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The article says that you need to buy a copy of Windows to use on a Mac. However, it does not say which version(s) of Windows. There are many versions of Windows as we all know, except apparently the author, who repeatedly refers to "Windows" as if it were a single thing without different versions/editions.

To fill in the blank, the Parallels virtual machine lets you run pretty much all versions of Windows on the Mac, even Vista. In fact, it also supports many versions of Linux and even other Operating Systems such as OS/2. The Boot Camp feature from Apple is very different. It only supports Windows XP Home and Professional. No Media Center edition. No Vista. In fact, it only supports the SP2 versions of XP. And, it only supports the more expensive "full" version of Windows XP, not the cheaper "upgrade version". As of March 23, 2007 CompUSA was selling the upgrade version of XP Home for $100 and the full version for $200. The upgrade version of XP Pro was $200, the full version was $300.

The article refers to VMware as new "virtualization" software and refers to Virtual PC as older "emulation" software. They are, in fact, both virtualization software and compete directly. Not to be too nerdy, but they both do emulation.

The article says both Parallels and VMware on Macs take advantage of Intel chips to make it easier to run Windows. A little of this is true, but it gives the wrong impression.

First, from the user point of view, the process of running Windows is the same whether the software takes advantage of Intel chips or not. There are new features in Intel processors specifically designed for virtual machine software. And giving hardware assistance to virtualization software is also done by new processors from AMD. If you have one of these new processors, and a version of virtualization software that is capable of exploiting the new features, then your virtual machines will run faster. What is made "easier" is the programming job of VMware and Parallels as the processor can now do some of the work the software used to have to do.

Omissions

OK, we're running both Windows and the Mac OS on the same computer. Can they share files?

What about the copy of Windows you run on the Mac? Does it have to be a new copy? Can you take the existing copy on an existing computer and run that on the Mac? If this interests you, read about the transporter feature of Parallels.

The terms Host Operating System and Guest Operating System are not used, let alone defined. They are necessary terms when discussion virtualization software.

What about Linux? Articles on Macs and Windows never mention Linux. Likewise, articles on Linux and Windows never mention Macs. Readers need some perspective.

Windows on a Mac was possible way back, before the switch by Apple to Intel processors. The company that actually developed what is now known as Virtual PC was Connectix. Microsoft bought them out and wasn't very interested in software that ran on Apple computers.