grouchyfarmer

Computers that should have been great but weren’t

The item I wrote about the Epson HX-20 the other day reminded me about one of the other items I was supposed to try to sell for that business supply company, the Epson QX-10. This beastie:

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This particular example is, judging from the color of the case, an elderly one. The plastics used for computer cases rather rapidly turned an unappealing shade of dirty yellow. In its prime, though, it was a rather handsome creature, and it was both one of the most advanced, and the most useless computers I’d ever worked with.

At the time the QX came out the computer market was going through a shakeup and even more importantly, a shakeout. There were dozens of different computer makers back then, offering an astonishing variety of systems that ranged from the silly to the sublime. But at the time, IBM with its PC and the MS-DOS operating system was well on its way to becoming the standard for small business and, eventually, home computers. By the time Epson brought the QX-10 to market, its underlying hardware was already pretty much obsolete, and it’s sophisticated software and graphics weren’t enough to make up for it’s lack of horsepower.

Before IBM jumped into the market with the PC, the ‘standard’ for small business computers was the 8080 or Z80 CPU based microcomputers running the CP/M operating system. These computers were based on an 8-bit CPU and limited to 64K of RAM. Then IBM came along with it’s PC, which used the 16-bit Intel 8088 which could handle up to 640K of RAM, at around the same price as the 8-bit CP/M machines, and the rest is, as they say, history.

How did Epson hope to compete in a market that was already crowded with other 8-bit, Z80 based computers, or to compete against IBM and MS-DOS?

By coming out with a operating system of their own which was combined with a hardware package that made the QX-10 the most sophisticated system ever produced. Or so they claimed.

The QX-10 was admittedly pretty sophisticated. It had a high-resolution monochrome graphics system with up to 128K of dedicated video memory that blew away anything except dedicated CAD systems. It’s Valdocs operating system was incredibly advanced for it’s day with a built in Help system, 128 character long file names when everyone else struggled along with 8 characters. And it had 265K of RAM.

And it had what was possibly the first WYSIWYG ‘what you see is what you get’ word processor to become widely available at a (somewhat) reasonable cost. Boldface a word? It showed up in bold on your screen. Same with italics, underlining, etc. Virtually every word processor on the market at the time showed not bold face, but codes embedded in the text to turn on or off control functions, if they allowed things like bold face or italics at all.

They gave me one of these things and I had it at home for a few weeks while I learned it inside and out because I was supposed to support the thing. It was definitely sophisticated. The graphics capabilities were outstanding. It was undeniably an amazing computer when combined with the Valdocs system.

The problem was that it just didn’t work very well. Valdocs and TPM, the underlying operating system, were full of bugs. It seemed every other day I was getting updates and bug fixes. And since this is the pre-internet, that meant either dialing the company’s BBS system with a 300 baud modem and paying long distance phone bills, or waiting until they shipped me a floppy disk with the updates.

The biggest problem though was it was slow. Oh dear lord it was slow! Any kind of competent typist could easily outdistance the Valdocs word processor, getting forty, sixty characters ahead of the display update. So far ahead that you could easily overload the buffers and lose characters and words. And since we were supposed to push this as a word processing system because of the WYSIWYG display system, well, it’s pretty hard to sell a word processor that made you work slower.

The other problem was that there was no software for the Valdocs system except what was supplied by Epson. The word processor, calculator and drawing program and, I think, a rather brain dead database. There was a spreadsheet but it was so abysmally slow you could go get a cup of coffee while it was recalculating.

If you wanted to use it for actual work, that meant you had to reboot the system with the old CP/M operating system to actually do anything useful. And, of course, once you booted into CP/M, all of the fancy features Epson was pushing were lost and all you had was a generic and overpriced CP/M computer.

Then there was the competition. At the same time Epson was pushing the QX-10, the IBM-PC was becoming the standard for small business computers. There was lots of genuinely useful business software available for it. So basically there was absolutely no reason to buy the QX-10 with it’s outdated hardware, useless Valdocs system or the increasingly obsolete CP/M system.

Epson’s solution to the competition from IBM was to find someone to supply them with a plug in card that was basically an IBM-PC clone on card, while they scrambled to get the QX-16 system on the market. This ‘solution’ was literally a PC clone on a card that plugged into the computer’s internal bus, with an 8088 CPU, it’s own memory, everything. It worked, sort of. But it didn’t actually run MS-DOS, it ran PC-DOS which was an MS-DOS clone. It would run some MS-DOS based software. Sometimes. Maybe.

It also cost in the neighborhood of $1,500 if I remember right.

So you have a computer with a base price of around $2,500, already far more than comparable CP/M machines. And now you have to drop another $1,500 for a card to make it use MS-DOS software, and there’s no guarantee it will actually run the software you need…

Oh, brother…

Could it have been a great computer? I don’t think there’s any doubt that it could have. The QX was, on the surface at least, one of the most sophisticated systems to hit the market at the time. It had a lot of features that eventually became standard on later generations of computers; long file names, WYSIWYG word processor, high resolution graphics, etc.

Unfortunately, design decisions crippled it. The decision to go with the Z80 processor meant it would never have enough raw horsepower to live up to the hype. The graphics system’s hardware was woefully slow. The Valdocs system, while very nice, was bogged down by the obsolete hardware and inefficient programming techniques. Even worse, Epson never brought out any software that ran under Valdocs except that which was included with the computer. That meant that in order to run the popular business software of the day, the computer had to be rebooted into CP/M, and that turned it into nothing but a vastly overpriced, generic business computer.

Valdocs itself acquired a reputation of being buggy. I never really ran into serious problems with it except it’s woefully slow speed, but I wasn’t using the computer under actual business conditions.

There were rumors flying around that over at Rising Star, the company that made Valdocs and its underlying OS, TPM, programmers were routinely fired as soon as they finished work on their assigned modules, leaving people who were unfamiliar with the code to try to support and debug problems.

I was told that large parts of Valdocs and even TPM had been written in Forth, of all things. Forth is not exactly what I’d call user friendly. It was never designed for large projects. It was originally designed as a hardware control language used to control telescopes. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but oh brother… I’ve programmed in Forth and I wouldn’t want to use it for any kind of complex system.

Epson went on to bring out the QX-16, an interesting machine that was intended to compete head to head against the IBM PC. It had both a Z80 and 8088, and would run either Valdocs, CP/M or PC-DOS. Alas, it wasn’t very good either.

The upgraded hardware didn’t cure the system’s speed issues. The word processor was faster, but screen updates were still unacceptably slow. The spreadsheet was terrible. Reviews at the time claimed that a spreadsheet that would recalculate in just five or six seconds in MS-DOS or CP/M spreadsheets, would take minutes to recalculate under Valdocs. And while it could run some MS-DOS software, a lot of it wouldn’t run at all.

Computer Memories

I ran into this little item in a nostalgia piece in a UK magazine called Gadget, and it brought back a lot of memories. I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years, some better than others, and one of them involved trying to sell these things–

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I’ve been involved with the personal computer industry in one way or another since 1979, and in 1983/1984 while I was back in college studying business, computer science and electronics, I was also working a part time job for a business supply company that sold, among other things, this — this thing.

Epson’s claim to fame was making relatively inexpensive, relatively well made, dot matrix printers. Not computers. And when the company decided to move into the lucrative personal computer market, things didn’t go all that well for them, largely due to things like this, and the famous, (or infamous if you had to try to sell the damned things) QX-10 computer.

The HX-20 was, to put it bluntly, utterly useless. The 4 line, 20 character long display was was too small for any kind of serious work. And while the built in thermal printer was a nice feature, well, it doesn’t do you much good if you don’t have any software that actually does something useful, and the HX-20 had pretty much no software support at all. As the blurb above points out, the rechargeable battery usually didn’t. Recharge, I mean. And it certainly didn’t last 50 hours, especially if you used the printer or the tape.

The Epson factory rep took me out to dinner and dumped one of these things on me in the hopes I’d help him get my boss to buy them. I fiddled with it for an hour, the battery went dead, the printer only worked when it felt like it, and the tape deck immediately ate the one cassette tape I tried using. With the wonky battery, the dodgy tape deck, the ridiculously tiny display, and total lack of any kind of useful software, I refused to have anything to do with it.

Somehow he managed to talk our boss into ordering a dozen of the damned things, and now it was my job to try to sell them.

Meanwhile Radio Shack was coming out with the TRS-80 Model 100, which was the same size, had a 40 character by 10 line display that was actually useful, all kinds of goodies like a built in modem, built in bar code reader, real standardized I/O ports for RS-232, a ROM port for speciality software, and, better still, you could buy actual, real and useful software for it. And it cost less.

The things are probably still sitting in a box in storage somewhere. We certainly never sold any. They’re probably with the dozen or so QX-10 computers he was talked into stocking that we never sold, either.

Conversation Becomes Shouting in a Society Without Authority – The Daily Beast

We are now at a point in politics, a new book warns, where reality has lost its authority: Facts are considered a matter of opinion.

Source: Conversation Becomes Shouting in a Society Without Authority – The Daily Beast

I put up that post about the ‘Age of Stupidity’ too quickly, or I could have brought up this item over at the Daily Beast, which also touches on the matter of belief vs. facts.

The writer of the article believes that is due almost entirely to a lack of some kind of authority figure.

I don’t believe that’s true, however. We are in a situation now where a significant number of people base their beliefs not on actual fact or evidence, but on what someone tells them to believe, exactly such an ‘authority figure’ that the writer claims we need.

But we have ‘authority figures’, and they are part of the problem. The anti-vaccination crowd that puts it’s mindless belief in the ‘authority figures’ of B-list celebrities who know nothing of science or biology, the climate change deniers who blatantly ignore facts and evidence, and spout opinions based on ridiculous conspiracy theories, quasi-supernatural explanations or outright lies that offer them some kind of financial or other personal gain. The list goes on and on.

Charles Sykes, one of the right wing radio ranters here in the state, did an interview in which he explained how this is largely the fault of himself and people like him. For years now, he and others like him, like Limbaugh, Hannity, Jones and the other far right pundits, have been deliberately doing everything they can to undermine any kind of ‘authority figure’ that the public might rely on for accurate information. They’ve worked hard to undermine the mainstream media, government agencies, even science itself in order to further their own agenda.

The mainstream media itself has to take some of the blame for this current climate. In its effort to generate a never ending string of clickbait headlines, generate controversy where there is none, cause fear and panic in order to pump up its ratings and profits, it’s given voice to loony conspiracy theories, blatantly inaccurate statements by politicians and others, ridiculous health claims and I don’t know what all else. It’s failed to call out politicians over outright lies. It has just — just failed. In everything except generating profits, of course.

The Age of Stupid

Some people like to classify different periods of human development in terms of ‘ages’. We’ve had the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Steam Age, the Space Age, the Nuclear Age.

According to a friend of mine, we have entered what will be the last age of humanity, the Age of Stupid. And one of the problems is, well, this kind of attitude:

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This quote from William James, a philosopher and psychologist from back around the end of the 19th century, pretty much sums up what’s going on these days. This quote was bogus at the time, and it is bogus now.

Belief does not create fact. Belief does not alter the facts.

But that doesn’t stop millions of people from thinking that it does.

We seem to have come to a point in human evolution where a lot of people think that belief does indeed equal fact, is even superior to fact. All you have to do is turn on the television, listen to the radio, read on the internet, and you can see that.

Sometimes when I see the list of people who, for whatever reason, accept belief over fact, I despair about the future of the human race. I see it every single day. The anti-vaxxers, the creationists, the climate change deniers, the scammers selling phony cures, the conspiracy theorists… The list goes on and on. And the apparently endless string of politicians willing to exploit the ‘true believers’.

How did it happen? How did we evolve a culture where the claims of a former Playboy model are given more credibility than those of actual doctors? When did the beliefs of someone like Ken “Jesus rode a dinosaur’ Ham become more credible than those of actual geologists, paleontologists and biologists? How did we end up in a world where people share the ‘outrage’ of the “Food Babe” when she expressed horror that there was nitrogen in the air of an aircraft she was in?

Do we really live in the “Age of Stupid”?

U.S. Bites Into Cheese Mountain With Stockpile Purchase (1) | Agweb.com

Milk glut has pushed dairy prices to lowest levels since 2009.

Source: U.S. Bites Into Cheese Mountain With Stockpile Purchase (1) | Agweb.com

The buy by USDA will do little to improve farmgate milk prices, and in the long run might actually do more harm than good by temporarily improving wholesale prices and thus encourage even more overproduction.

It has not been a good time to be a dairy farmer almost anywhere in the world over the last year or two. A variety of factors, including wide spread drought one year and China stockpiling milk products led to a dramatic upturn in the farmgate price for milk. And for a time dairy farmers were doing pretty darn good.

Unfortunately, it seems that everyone, including a lot of people who should have known better, seemed to think that this situation was going to continue into the future, that dairy prices would remain high, and that there were massive profits to be made if they expanded production. As a result dairy operations began expanding all over the world. The EU lifted its production restrictions, farmers added cows, processors began building new production facilities. Fonterra, the world’s largest dairy co-op based in New Zealand, was investing heavily in the Chinese dairy industry because it saw massive profits were just waiting.

Well, it couldn’t last. And it didn’t.

China wasn’t buying up milk products because it really needed them. China was buying because it was first of all, getting a really, really good price. It wasn’t using the products it was buying, it was stockpiling them against future price increases. Chinese consumption of imported milk products was also being driven by a series of serious food contamination scares, including the deliberate adulteration of milk by criminals with chemicals that made the milk appear to have higher protein levels in order to get higher prices. The adulteration resulted in hundreds, even thousands of people becoming sick and some even dying. Ventures into marketing milk products in Southeast Asia were failing badly. The Chinese themselves were investing heavily in domestic milk production. China hates being dependent on imported foods for obvious reasons, and has been trying to do something about it. Western style mega-farms were starting to pop up, supported by the government. China was also cleaning house internally, launching extremely strict monitoring of food production to prevent things like the milk adulteration horror. They actually executed people for that crime.

So while China’s imports of milk products was shrinking drastically, world wide demand was flat, production continued to expand.

And milk prices plunged.

My father often said that a lot of farmers were their own worst enemy. Unfortunately he was largely correct.

He was also enormously skeptical of government price support efforts, and he was largely correct there as well. While these government programs like this cheese buy are well intentioned, in the long run they only serve to make the problem worse by temporarily propping up market prices and encouraging over production. Once the program ends, the market ends up being worse than it was before.

Reboots and Remakes

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Oh dear lord I’m so tired of the remakes and reboots…

But I suppose we should start with some definitions, shouldn’t we?

A remake is where they look at what was originally a perfectly fine, probably good, maybe even outstanding movie, and they just make the whole damned thing all over again for no good reason.

This is, of course, theft, but they call it homage so they get away with it.

But, well, why? I mean, really, why? The original was a fine movie, perhaps even excellent. Maybe even a true work of art. So why the hell remake it? Just watch the original, for heaven’s sake.

A reboot is something else again. A reboot takes a film idea and fundamentally alters it, transforms it totally. Basically it is the reboot maker saying the original was crap, the director was crap, the writers were crap, so I’m going to do it better. It is arrogant beyond belief. It’s the director and film makers claiming they can do it better. But everyone knows they can’t because if they had any creative talent at all, they’d be doing something original and not be digging through the archives looking for something to steal.

I call it theft because that’s what it is. Remakes and reboots are both essentially theft. Oh, sure, they legally own the rights, but it is still the taking of ideas that were not theirs to begin with.

It’s sort of like house robbery.

The remaker breaks into your house, steals your TV, but does the dishes for you, waters your plants and feeds the dog on the way you.

The rebooter breaks into your house, steals your TV, smashes your dishes, urinates in the potted plants and shoots your dog on the way out.

The Fermi Paradox: Where the Hell Is Everyone?

I’m beginning to become a bit — irritated with astronomers, and especially with astronomy publications like, well, Astronomy Magazine, Sky & Telescope, the BBC’s Sky at Night. Even with NASA, the space program in general, and a lot of astronomers and astrophysicists in general, who start babbling like little children about stuff when they should really know better. The ‘mainstream’ media is even worse, of course.

It’s this whole life thing. As in life out there, on other planets, other star systems, other galaxies.

Every once in a while some news outlet that really should know better pops up a headline like “Life on Europa!” or “Life in Oceans Under Pluto!” or “Life Floating in Clouds in Venus” or, “Life Discovered at the Republican Convention”. It’s just — just silly. (Especially that last one.).

I’m sorry, but it is. And they really should know better. Even worse, most of them do know better.

The popular press and even otherwise allegedly rational real live scientists with actual degrees from actual universities who have actual jobs doing sciency stuff, have just gotten silly over this whole life thing.

So let’s talk about the Fermi Paradox for a bit. (Wondered when I was going to get around to getting to the point of the title up there at the top, didn’t you? Relax. It takes me a while sometimes but eventually I get to the point. Sometimes. Maybe.)

The Fermi Paradox has been floating around for a long time now. Jump over to Wikipedia and go look it up. I’ll wait. I don’t have anything going on at the moment. I’ll just babble along here until you get back. While you’re at it, look up the Drake Equation over there too…

I’m an amateur astronomer with actual telescopes and everything. I love astronomy. Fun stuff, astronomy. Nothing better than sitting around outside, shivering, your feet gradually turning to ice, wondering if your health insurance covers having your toes amputated because they turned black, chipping the frost off your scope while you try to get a picture of Jupiter that doesn’t have a bloody airplane track across the middle of it. Great fun. Highly educational and all that stuff. Highly recommended. I’m also a science fiction fan. I discovered SF when I was about 9 years old and never looked back. I grew up in a fantasy world filled with starships, exotic aliens, odd characters, bizarre societies, horrific space battles throwing planets at people, time travel, time paradoxes, alternate universes, time travel to alternate universes, time travel for the purposes of, well, weird sex. Have you read Heinlein’s later stuff? Oh my…

So I’ve more or less been living in a universe full of life. I’d love to live in a universe full of that stuff. Well, except when the Fnezeer come to, well, eat us. That I probably wouldn’ like.

The thing is, I know that is fantasy. It isn’t real, all that stuff. The zooming starships, the aliens with tentacles, the time travel incest (what the hell was Heinlein thinking?) the alien races around every corner… They’re made up. They don’t exist. Unfortunately a lot of the news media and, it seems, NASA and real actual astronomers and stuff, haven’t figured that out, or that’s what it looks like if you some of the stuff they’re pushing.

Oh, you’re back. Good!

Let’s get back to the Fermi thing, then now that you got done over at Wikipedia.

The Fermi Paradox basically asks the question, if life is as common as a lot of people think it is, where the hell is it? Why haven’t we found any? And why the hell hasn’t it found us?

Considering the age of the universe, the ginormous (that apparently is a real word, I had no idea) number of galaxies, the even more ginormous number of stars in those galaxies, and the even furtherly more intensely ginormous (now that I found out it’s a real word I’m going to use it a lot, damn it) number of planets, somebody, from somewhere, should have come ringing our doorbell to try to sell us something or try to convert us to worshiping a giant space turtle or talk us into a time share out in the Wompel Galaxy or something.

Only they haven’t. There isn’t even a single sign that there’s anyone out there. Granted, the universe is a really, really big place. But if you run the math, a single, high tech civilization, could colonize an entire galaxy in a surprisingly short amount of time, maybe four, five million years. Sounds like a long time, but species even here on Earth have been around and essentially unchanged for far longer than that.

Of course maybe they’re busy, or just don’t care. Like these alleged life forms might look up and go “meh, the hell with all that noise”, and get on with important things. Like, oh, I don’t know, frelking, let’s say. I have no idea what frelking is, but it’s like really, really important to them and it’s way more important than stars and stuff like that. So they give up on the whole space thing and get with some serious frelking. Probably has something to do with sex, I imagine.

So that’s one theory about why no one has come to try to sell us time shares or convert us or eat us or something. They don’t give a flying fig.

This space travel stuff all assumes that the race in question thinks it’s important. And maybe it is. To us. Well, some of us, anyway. But that’s us. They, if they’re out there, don’t care, maybe. That’s the point. They are going to look different, think different, have different priorities. Like frelking. They don’t care.

The point is that they come up with all these excuses to rationalize why we haven’t seen anything out there. And they do have a valid point. I mean, frelking is really, really fun. Maybe.

But the other thing that no one seems to want to bring up, is that maybe there isn’t anyone out there. Just flat out isn’t.

Yes, I know, statically speaking it is a virtual certainty that there is something alive out there, somewhere. But we have scientists going off the deep end claiming there’s life everywhere almost.

So where is it? We don’t exactly have a good track record finding it, do we. Let’s see, well, there’s Earth, that has life (whether it’s intelligent or not is up for debate) And then there’s… well, that’s about it. One planet out of eight (nine if you’re a Pluto fan).

It’s entirely possible that Earth is just a fluke. For all we know life is an aberration that the universe gets rid of as soon as it can conveniently bash it with a rock.

And let’s talk about the intelligence thing. We want intelligent life, too. Well, come on, let’s face it. Intelligence really isn’t much of a survival trait, now is it? When it comes down to survival as a species, one could argue that intelligence is even a drawback, because the most successful species, the ones that have been around the longest, for tens of millions of years, function almost entirely on instinct, pre-programmed behaviors, not on intelligence.

I understand that it is statistically likely there is life out there. It is statistically likely that some kind of intelligent life is out there. But it seems increasingly likely that you’re not going to find it by just turning over a rock as some scientists are claiming.

But they keep at it. “Inhabitable planet found!” “Conditions on Europa favorable to life” and… It’s just silly. I’m sorry, it is. We know better. They know better.

So why do they do it?

Money, I suspect. Trying to drum up interest to get funding, get grants, convince congress to increase NASA’s budget. They figure we’re too stupid to understand things like pulsars and event horizons and how important the measurements of high energy particles is or why it’s important we understand what the hell happened to Venus to turn it into an acidic furnace from Dante’s Inferno. But, well, hey, they say, that alien movie made a hell of a lot of money. So did that Star Trek Clone Laser thingie that was in the theaters. So people like aliens, right? So, well, okay we can’t make it all up, but we can maybe pretend kind of that there’s something out there so they give us money.

Look, just stop it, all right? Stop with the phony press releases about life on space rocks. Stop with the phony press releases about planets made of diamond and places where it rains iron and all that. It’s hype and you know it. We know it. They know it.

Just tell us what you’re doing. Tell us why you think it’s important. Tell us why we should think it’s important. Stop trying to sell us space unicorns that we all know are b.s. Maybe you’ll be surprised.

The CEO of Soylent Is Enraging LA by Throwing Parties in a Shipping Container | MUNCHIES

The CEO of Soylent has run into trouble with the city of LA over his sustainable living experiment.

Source: The CEO of Soylent Is Enraging LA by Throwing Parties in a Shipping Container | MUNCHIES

If you aren’t familiar with Soylent and it’s more than a little irritating CEO, Rhinehart, let me give you the background.

Soylent Green was a 1973 movie starring Charlton Heston about a dystopian future where the world suffers from out of control over population, horrific environmental pollution, dying oceans and a seriously degraded climate due to climate change. Abject poverty is the norm. Housing is so bad a dozen or more people can be crammed into a single room. You know, sort of what like the “small house” movement wants to do to us, only they’re trying to make us think we want to do it.

Oh, dear, I just realized something. Horrific environmental pollution, dying oceans, seriously degraded climate, housing so bad a dozen people are crammed into a single room… Sort of like, well, what’s going on right now, isn’t it?

Never mind…

The movie was named after a food product, Soylent Green, which is the primary food source, often the only food source, for the vast majority of the population. Heston is basically a drone, an unthinking cop, an enforcer for the government/big corporations, mindlessly following orders and committing what are just flat out atrocities, all in the name of keeping the ‘peace’, including one horrific scene where they deal with a riot by bringing in huge armored garbage trucks and simply scooping up the protestors, dumping them into the back of the trucks, and presumably, well, squeezing them like garbage.

A key element in this new culture is death, and the promotion of death. Basically trying to talk people into committing suicide voluntarily in the hopes of attaining some kind of peaceful, more pleasant afterlife (I think — it’s been decades since I saw the thing).

The kicker to the whole story is that Heston’s character discovers that Soylent is made from people. Presumably the people the friendly government has been scooping up in garbage trucks and talking into offing themselves in pleasant, luxurious government operated death palaces.

Anyway, the new Soylent is all about food, as in not having to actually eat any. Seriously.

Rhinehart, well, apparently he doesn’t like to eat. (I say ‘apparently’ because I don’t really know. Never met the guy. While he’s probably a nice person, doesn’t kick stray dogs, doesn’t yell at the hired help too much and all that good stuff.) He seems to think eating, cooking and all that fun stuff that normal people like you and I enjoy, even relish, is evil. Total waste of time. He thinks everyone should just gulp down this green goo he calls Soylent a couple of times a day, and you’re good to go. This way you don’t have to cook, don’t have to go through all the hassle of, well, what he thinks are stupid things like enjoying time with your friends over dinner, and eating really tasty food.

The green goo (i.e. Soylent) is, he claims, supposed to supply everything you need to survive, all crammed into a drink a bit smaller than a Big Gulp.

Now as silly as this may sound, he apparently isn’t the only one who thinks this way. There are people, allegedly real live actual people, who actually pay allegedly real live money for this stuff, and allegedly even (down stomach, down boy…) drink it.

(Easy there, stomach. Hang in there, we don’t have much farther to go.)

And not just a few people. Him and his company are now supposedly worth about $100 million, for heaven’s sake.

Oh, and ignore the fact that there is at least one lawsuit going on at the moment over the alleged safety of this goo.

Rhinehart, not content with attempting to utterly destroy the joy of food, seems to be trying to expand his realm into also destroying our enjoyment of living in general. His solution to the world housing crisis is — shipping containers. As in shoving in a chemical toilet, cutting a few holes in the side to let in light, and living in them. And like all good ideas, he basically stole it from someone else. Using shipping containers as housing has been going on for a long time with mixed results.

And judging from the example he’s set up out in California, well, let’s just say that living in the original Soylent Green’s conditions is pleasant when compared to what he’s got set up.

The thing is, well, it’s just flat out horrific. It’s an old shipping container, a few holes cut crudely into the walls, a chemical toilet, and, well, that’s about it. Looks like there’s no insulation at all, so under the hot California sun interior temperature will… Well, let’s face it, you’re inside an uninsulated metal box. In California. You could roast a turkey in that sucker for heaven’s sake.

The photos, well, dear lord, it looks just bloody horrible, there’s no other way to put it. If this is Rhinehart’s “vision” of how he wants people to live… Well, considering what he wants us to gulp down instead of real food, trying to shovel people into what is little more than an oversized coffin with windows shouldn’t be surprising.

Rhinehart has, of course, never actually lived in the thing. No thank you. He claims that he has, true, but according to at least one source cited in the article, he’s never actually lived it in. He has a perfectly nice, luxurious real home to go to at the end of the day.

He has, however, used it for parties. Although how he got anyone to actually go there is beyond me. Now I admit that some of the frat houses from my college days were pretty much real, live, waking nightmares and you’d want to dip your entire body in sanitizer just looking at them. But this — this thing? Oh, my…

Well it seems the local government feels pretty much the same way, and is going after this pusher of green goo and his rather curious idea of what constitutes “housing”.

To get to the point, though…

Rhinehart reminds me of something my father once said about a particular Christian church with a reputation for being — irritating, shall we say. I was still a child and was curious about this bunch and asked him what in the world was going on with them

“They’re the kind of people,” he told me, “who live in constant fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun, and believe it’s their job to put a stop to it.”

Those weren’t his exact words, I’m sure, but it’s close enough.

But that’s not why I’m posting this. Oh, no.

This is a test. For the next thirty seconds, this station will be conducting…

Oh, all right, I know, really, really bad joke, but I tend to do that. Sometimes a lot, I fear. I blame my father. I think I inherited his snarky sense of humor. Which is curious because I’m not actually related to my father. Or to my mother for that matter. Or to my sister.

But that’s a different story entirely. I also tend to go off track, I fear.

Ah, now I remember!

This was a test. And a kind of shot across your bow, you poor people out there reading this. I just found the “Press This” tool! One click and bang! Up pops my editor, I drop in a few pithy comments, and instant post!

Well, okay, so I had the ‘press this’ thing for a while now, but I didn’t actually use it because the one from Tumblr is so wonky it hardly works at all and I figured this one was probably going to be wonky too.

But it works!

Oh brother, you’re in trouble now…

The Decline and Fall of Yahoo and The Death of Tumblr?

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If you follow the business news, you’ve probably heard about the problems of YaHoo, the former internet giant that has, through an extensive series of bad management decisions, questionable, high cost acquisitions and other problems, driven itself into the toilet. Once valued at over $120 billion, Yahoo ended up selling itself, or at least large parts of itself, for just $4.8 billion.

Apparently unable to come up with new products, new technology or new business models to keep itself functional, YaHoo instead tried to buy itself out of trouble. It embarked on a spending spree, snapping up high profile start up businesses, often at premium prices.

Sometimes this works. If done correctly. Microsoft, Apple and other successful companies do this frequently. They discover a new company with new technology or new business models that would fit in with their core business plans, buy it or invest in it heavily, nurture it, foster it, and develop it into a successful part of the new parent company.

Unfortunately Yahoo didn’t seem to have either the expertise or the motivation to do that in many cases. A few were successful, but not many. Most performed poorly at best. At worst, Yahoo’s incompetent management and corporate policies quickly drove them into the dirt and many failed completely. If you scrounge around on the net and look at sources like Forbes, Bloomberg and other financial media organizations, you can find entire lists of the companies Yahoo bought, and ruined over the years for one reason or another.

How did they ruin them? Mainly through mismanagement, poor decisions, and often attempts to squeeze as much cash out of them as they possibly could while investing as close to nothing in them as possible. I know a few people who worked in ‘silicon valley’ over the years, and a lot of them were terrified about the possibility of being acquired by YaHoo because it meant they’d be looking for jobs in a very short time. An acquisition by Yahoo became regarded as sounding the death knell. It was automatically assumed, justifiably or not, that acquisition by Yahoo meant mass layoffs as it tried to squeeze as much cash out of it as possible, or being mismanaged into extinction.

But let’s talk about Tumblr… I’ve been on the service for more years than I care to think of now. By and large I’ve enjoyed it. Yes, I have other outlets if I want to blog, put photos or stories or bad jokes or whatever up for public view. This is one of them, after all. Most of those outlets are, frankly, a lot more flexible, more useful, and allow far more creative outlet than Tumblr ever did. Nor is the fact Tumblr is free much an incentive. There are, frankly, a lot better, much easier to use free services out there which allow far more creative freedom.

What Tumblr had going for it was a sense of community. It was as much a social network as it was a blogging service. A lot of the users developed friendships with other users of the service. The people reading your blog were almost certainly other Tumblr users themselves, with their own blogs, and you quickly accumulated an enormous collection of other Tumblr users you read, followed, and exchanged thoughts with. Some of us became pretty good friends. I know maybe a dozen people over there that I now consider friends because our interactions through the system. I’ve even visited some of them.

When Yahoo bought Tumblr for the utterly ridiculous price of $1.1 billion, a lot of us regular users over there saw, frankly, doom on the horizon. And not just because of Yahoo’s well deserved reputation of driving their acquisitions into the toilet.

Tumblr was a ridiculously popular service. But it had a serious problem. No one was able to figure out how to make money off it. The system that made it so popular made it very difficult to try to monetize it without destroying the very features that made it popular.

Tumblr’s main way of making money seemed to be silly things like trying to sell users stuff like ‘premium’ templates, fancy, pretty formatting for their blog’s home page. That’s fine, but I haven’t even seen my home page over there since I set up my account for the first time. Nor have I ever seen the home pages of any of the blogs I follow there. One of Tumblr’s features is that registered users have a dashboard, a more or less bare bones, distraction free system that aggregates all of the posts from the blogs you follow into a single page. Since virtually all of the readers of Tumblr blogs are also Tumblr users, we all have dashboards, and we do everything from them, reading, posting, commenting, everything. I follow a lot of blogs over there and I’ve never even seen the home pages of any of them. So why waste the time and money setting up a fancy premium template when no one’s going to see it anyway?

Tumblr survived largely by infusions of capital from outside investors. I’m not sure if it ever made a profit to be honest.

At the time Yahoo bought Tumblr, well, we figured that was going to be the end of it. Yahoo, with it’s reputation of running new businesses into the dirt, mismanagement, laying off the very people who had created the startup to begin with to save money, and above all, it’s desperate need to make money any way it could because the CEO was under pressure to resign or be fired and stockholders were up in arms, well, we figured this was going to be it. Yahoo would either utterly wreck the service, or gut it and turn it into a ghost town.

Yahoo did indeed try to do just that, but the enormous backlash from users forced them to pull back or at least make it’s attempts at monetizing the system less obnoxious. Attempts at censoring the massive amount of outright porn on the service pretty much failed as Tumblr users fought back, left in droves and otherwise forced the company to back down. They did a lot of annoying and damaging things that often made no sense at all, like completely removing the ability to comment on posts, one of the things that had turned Tumblr into a successful social network. Eventually they brought it back, but in ways that made it harder to use, more difficult to follow and extremely irritating. “Improvements” they promised either never materialized, or were completely useless, and often made the system more difficult to use.

They made a real dog’s breakfast of it, but somehow managed to keep from completely destroying it. Barely.

But now… YaHoo just sold off almost all of it’s internet businesses to Verizon. The CEO will get a $53 million buyout. I suspect she’s the only one actually making money off the deal.

As for those of us who use the service…

We just got word now that they are going to be injecting ads into blogs. In order to make this less painful, less obnoxious, they’re even offering to actually pay the bloggers. With real money! Ooo, be still my beating heart…

Well, maybe they are. They’re “still working out the details” about exactly how they’re going to pay the bloggers, how much they’re going to pay, But we all know that any amount that eventually filters down to us, the people who actually write the content, well, we will be lucky if we make enough for a cup of really, really bad coffee. All we know for sure is that they are going to start injecting advertising now, and later, maybe, they’ll figure out a payment system for the actual bloggers. Yeah, right.

The advertising can, they claim, be turned off if you wish. We’ll see how that goes. A dozen or more people I’ve talked to are claiming that as soon as they turn it off in the settings, it somehow mysteriously turns itself back on again… sigh. Mine is turned off. We’ll see if it stays that way. Or if it does any good.

Some will probably do pretty well. Like the porn blogs, the spam blogs, the scam blogs. They’ll probably do very well indeed. They have tens of thousands of followers, largely due to the use of bots that tamper with, manipulate the system. I’ve heard rumors that something like half of the “users” of Tumblr are actually bots that fish through the system, following random bloggers in the hopes that it will lure them back to follow some automated porn or spam site.

Most of us, though? We’re lucky if we have a few hundred. Any money that would filter down to the majority of us would be little compensation for putting up with the advertising, and quite possibly could prove to be an enormous headache.

I took a look at the comments attached to the announcement from Tumblr’s staff, and they were about what I expected; Lots and lots of cursing, frustration, anger, outrage, and a nearly universal impression that this was the beginning of the end. This time for real.

Is this the end of Tumblr? Well, that’s why there’s a question mark up there in the headline. I really don’t know. I suspect not, but I do know I’m not really happy with what’s going on over there. Neither are most of the other users I know.

I’m not going to leave Tumblr. I have too many friends over there. But I don’t think I’m going to be over there as much.

Tumblr is — comfortable, like an old pair of shoes. Easy to slip into, kind of ragged around the edges, but who cares, it feels good. But sometimes you have to admit that it’s time for them to go live in that great dumpster in the sky.

I don’t think Tumblr has reached that point. Yet. But it’s getting close.

I’ve often asked myself why I didn’t switch over to this forum completely. It’s easier to use, I have an excellent off-line editor that let’s me write, edit, proof-read material easily. Grouchyfarmer is easier to use, give me more creative freedom over formatting, I don’t have to deal with Tumblr degrading my photographs, don’t have my drafts mysteriously disappearing (that’s happened a dozen or more times over the past year, so often I don’t even bother to try to save anything as a draft over there any more). The commenting system here is light years better than Tumblr’s… I have wonderful tools here that let me quickly refer to outside websites and sources. Basically this system here is light years beyond anything Tumblr has to offer.

I suspect that as time passes, as the ads start to become more obtrusive over there, as the service continues to degrade as the new owners try desperately to make it profitable, I’ll be turning up over here more often than there.

We’ll see…

Farewell AES

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Amateur Electronic Supply is going to be closing it’s doors on July 27th. The Milwaukee store along with it’s other outlets are all shutting down effective on that date. A press release by HRO (Ham Radio Outlet) to the ARRL indicates that HRO is buying most, if not all of AES’s stock, and will even be hiring some of it’s employees. It will also be buying the AES building on Good Hope Road in Milwaukee, and will re-open it as an HRO facility after remodeling.

I’m going to miss AES. I’ve been buying stuff from them for three years and I never had a problem with them. Unfortunately I seem to have been the only one buying equipment from them. It was the the only retail facility for amateur radio equipment that was actually in reasonable driving distance, about an hour and a half away. When I ordered something from them online, it almost always appeared at my door in less than 24 hours.

While their prices were a tiny bit higher than some other places, AES was generally my first place to go when I needed something.

Unfortunately, things like convenience, the reliability of the retailer, satisfaction with the purchase, seem to be worth very little in the eyes of most consumers these days. Up-front cost is everything, and I know a lot of people who will endure poor service, hassles with returns and other issues just to save a few bucks, even though that savings may be entirely illusory in the long run if one adds into the mix.

The people at AES always went out of their way to make sure I was satisfied. Well, granted, I spent a lot of money there, but still, they didn’t have to bend over backwards the way they did to make sure I was happy with them.

I’ll miss them.