The Anti-Netbook

For Christmas this year, I bought my kids (ages 4 and 5) their first computer: an Acer Revo. I call this the anti-netbook, but it actually shares a lot of things with a netbook. First is its processor, an Intel Atom clock in at 1.6 GHz. This helps to make for an incredibly small form factor, especially for a desktop computer. It has a 160 GB hard drive, but no optical drive.

When I bought the computer, I had exactly one reason for it. I wanted my kids to play educational games on it. That was all. The Revo came with Windows XP installed on it, and this was perfect. I needed Windows on there to get the largest number of potential games for it. Windows 7 seems to be much less of a resource hog than Vista, but I am still wagering that XP comes with less overhead.

I had another somewhat unusual plan for the Revo. It is completely isolated. No network access, not even local intranet. This is why I call it the anti-netbook. I want no Internet on it, I only want software that I personally installed to ever run on it. It is like a miniature Battlestar Galactica. Now I know there are a lot of websites with great games for kids, but I don't need them. I can find plenty of shrink-wrapped software to buy at incredibly cheap prices. However, this did lead me to some problems with the computer.

The first problem was how to install all of this software, since I had no optical drive. I was prepared for this. I simply copied the software to a flash drive and plugged that into one of the four USB ports on the Revo. This is where I encountered my first problem. Many of these titles require the original CD to be inserted into an optical drive in order to run the game. I suppose this is an anti-piracy tactic, but it really caused me problems. For a couple of the games, I could leave the flash drive plugged in and they were happy. This did not work for most of the games.

So I bought an external optical drive that could be connected via USB. This worked perfectly well, but it does mean that to change the games, one has to generally change discs in the external drive. This is not something that I trust my kids to do yet... I had one more nasty surprise in store for me. Many, actually most games published these days require the game to connect to the Internet, either to install or to play or both. There was a PBS Kids game we bought that was like this, and it was complete fail when we tried to install on the anti-netbook. So I had to make sure to only buy games that did not explicitly list an Internet connection as a hardware requirement, which generally meant buying a lot of older games. Still I found plenty of such games to choose from.

At some point I will want my kids to be able to do more with a computer. They will need a word processor. Of course I would like to teach them both to program. I would like to get them something like Mathematic/MatLab. And of course by then, they will need a computer that is connected to the Internet. When that day arrives, I will get them a Mac -- but probably not an iPad. I will teach them the old school ways!

Vista Annoyance #432

A few weeks ago, I watched Guy Kawasaki's interview of Steve Ballmer at MIX. Kawasaki gave Ballmer a hard time about Vista. It made me think of some of the problems I have had with Vista. I started thinking "well things seem better now.' Then this morning I try to log on to my home system and get an error message saying that Windows could not load my user profile. In the event viewer it says:

Windows cannot load the locally stored profile. Possible causes of this error include insufficient security rights or a corrupt local profile.

DETAIL - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

Luckily I rebooted and everything was ok. Yep, rebooting is still the best way to fix most Windows problems. Things haven't changed much in the last fifteen years.

Actually I still have other problems with Vista. I still get problems caused by Windows Firewall. Vista was so unstable on my MacBook under Parallels that I replaced it with XP. In December, my Vista install was completely corrupted. After several minutes of use, its network and memory consumption would go ballistic making the system unusable. I thought at first it was a virus or malware of some sort, but I never found any evidence of either. I wound up re-installing Vista to fix the problem.

Now Vista SP1 is out. I don't know if I should be hopeful that it will be a remedy for all of my pains ... or if it will just be fuel for the fire and cause me to "upgrade" Vista to XP.

The End of Computer Viruses

Remember back when the news was filled with stories of some new computer virus or worm that was wreaking havoc with corporate networks and home computers all over the country and world? Remember Melissa, I Love You, Code Red, Slammer, Blaster, and MyDoom? Of course you do, it was only two years ago when "malicious" code and "outbreaks" were in the headlines on a regular basis.

Do those days seem long gone? We really haven't seen any kind of "outbreak" in the last two years. The last worm that got any kind of press was Zotob. One can argue that the only reason it got a lot of press was because it hit CNN's website.

So what's happened? Are people much better at keeping their OS updated with the latest security fixes? Do we all have anti-virus software that is also frequently updated? Those things are probably true. You have to give credit to Microsoft, too. The mighty XP Service Pack 2 (and Server 2003 Service Pack 1) plugged a lot of holes. It turned on firewalls and it annoyed the crap out of you if you didn't have the latest patches and an updated anti-virus program always running.

Vista is even more secure than XP-SP2, with Microsoft finally realizing that having every user as an administrator by default is a flawed strategy. However, is the extra security even needed? Maybe it will provide extra deterrence to spyware, but the age of the computer virus appears to be over.

I'm not just saying this because of the lack of notable outbreaks over the last two years. I recently had coffee with a friend of mine who works for a major security software company. He told me the entire emphasis in the company has switched from viruses to spam. It's not nearly as high-profile. There's not going to be a story on CBS about spam making it into your inbox, but that's where the money is now. The only capitalist conclusion is that viruses are dead. Of course to put my money where my mouth is, I should turn off the antivirus software on my computers...