Balcells Blog Home

watched the first episode of a new CW show, the vampire diaries. it's ok, a little girlie, but fine. i have another episode downloaded, we'll see. nice and a little cool out, pleasant. will head to bed soon, it's too late to start a movie, would not be done till 2 or so.

btw, spain won the european baskball championship, woohoo!

A few areas where computers still have a lot of improving to do:

1. wireless networking. we are a way aways from 100% compatibility across all access points and all wireless nic's. the claimed compatibility and standards work 99% of the time, which is annoying. for example, if you pair a dynex or linksys card with a netgear access point, it will work great for 99% of the time, but once in a while, when you really need it, for example, copying a lot of files, it will drop off the connection that 1% and mess things up, can't quite rely on the connection completely.

2. speed of mass storage. amazing how we are still stuck using hard drives. they are the slowest device on our computers by a long shot. everything else is incredibly fast, including CPU and memory, but hard drives are mechanical and are slooooow. whenever you are waiting for your computer to complete a task, chances are the hard drive is the bottleneck. not only that, but they get really bad when trying to write lots of little files vs. a single big one. they have to open, save and close constantly, and that is a very slow operation. there has to be a better way.

3. handling of hardware and peripherals. today's os's aren't very good at telling users what's happening with their devices. for example, if a cd has a bad block, the entire system slows to a crawl and the drive spins and spins trying to use error correction to make up for the damaged data. even worse for a hard drive, the system slows to a crawl but it doesn't tell you anywhere that there is a major problem. your cpu usage is low, memory usage is low, yet you can multitask or almost use any applications. it isn't until you look in the event manager that you would learn about something like this. the computer may eventually tell you after it happened 5,000 times, but by then you already will have had a puzzling and frustrating experience. even simply accidentally ejecting a CD in the middle of a software install will throw the computer into an weird state with awkward messages in most cases, and quasi system crashes. microsoft's os's are particularly bad with this, although at least you no longer get a BSOD, but still, not handled very graciously at all.

4. viruses and malware. this is worse with microsoft os's because they have such a wide footprint across so many versions, they are a sitting duck for attacks. the amount of malware out there is staggering. the os's need to come with powerful protection software built-in, users cannot be left to their devices to BUY a package, it doesn't happen. just strike deals with the big providers and for a small incremental feel, bundle it in on both macs and pcs. linux is fine, users are savvy enough that they can get their own.

5. proactive communication. some of the items above would improve if computers actually just told you what's going on, like "oops, looks like this CD may have a bad block, i can't read it, do you want me to try 10,000 more times and lock up your computer for the next 30 minutes, or should I not do that?". or when you hard drive light is on for an hour, it sure would be nice to know what the computer is doing: "should i run the indexing service now and lock up the computer for the next 2 hours, or should i wait until i detect no activity past 3 am?". or "should i create a restore point for next 30 minutes, and then install your software, or do you want me to skip this step now?"

6. integrity. the core components and operating system and any files that could mess things up should be separate and hidden from non advanced users. it should take explicit action to even see them. a random joe who is not very good with a touch pad should not be able to accidentally drag entire system folders into other system folders and cause mayhem that easily. the computer should be in "user mode" and not let anything like that even remotely come close to happening.

there is more. we are still years away from really good personal computers.

OK, 2 weeks away from the wedding today! Watched the Barcelona vs. Atl Madrid game on GolTV, Barca overwhelmed them on the first half, very cool. Took a long nap in the afternoon, needed to catch up on sleep. Very pleasant and nice out all day. I think we will stay in for the evening, chill. Maybe I will install Resident Evil 5 on the PC and take it for a spin.

it got kind of chilly tonight, like under 60 F, brr. may need the heat soon!

watching gossip girl's season premiere . a lot of scenes filmed in hans' building

got the new pearl jam (backspacer) and madonna (celebration) cds.

Mid week, pretty intense at work but fun. Nice weather out, mid 60s right now. We stopped by the Theory store in the meatpacking earlier, it was packed.

Nate called yesterday to go over various travel plans.

Catching up, reading the paper. May eat something soon.