© Menno E Aartsen 2010 and prior years. Scroll down for menu and more. Disclaimer and Fair Use statement at the bottom of this page. Most product links courtesy of Amazon Associates. Clicking on a picture will pop up a LARGER version.© Menno E Aartsen 2010 and prior years. Scroll down for menu and more. Disclaimer and Fair Use statement at the bottom of this page. Most product links courtesy of Amazon Associates. Clicking on a picture will pop up a LARGER version.
Watching Syfy's new series Caprica I see some interesting concepts, in terms of the human-machine interface, but nobody really seems to think forward adequately.
Take shopping, for instance. You don't see anybody shop, in Caprica, but if they were, they'd probably pay by credit or debit card. Nowhere is the shopping done by simply passing through a portal, which scans all RFID tags on the purchases, retrieves your ID from an implant, say, asks you which account you'd like to pay from, and sends you on your way. Similarly, the automated "Johnny Cab" in Blade Runner (stupendous on Blu-Ray
The problem may be that making these things visible on the TV screen is either hard, or it is easy, but very expensive. But we must start thinking four generations of automation ahead, like Isaac Asimov
I used to think Virginia didn't have much in the way of snowfall, but I certainly got cured this year. The next storm - the third - is on its way, and estimates range from 4 inches to a foot, or more. So bad I cleared out the other part of my garage, and put the SUV in, it was hard enough to dig it out after the first storm, in December, so now it sits once again in the garage.
The picture here was taken today, before the storm... I spent much of the day chopping wood - while I brought down enough to last me the winter, I had not anticipated needing this much, so ran out of ready firewood. I don't mind - it is excellent exercise (no, not by axe, chain saw and log splitter, you think I am crazy?). It is still a nice feeling to be self-sufficient, at least in terms of heating, although I do have the heat pumps going, to pick up when I throttle the stove overnight, and when I let it die to clean out the ashes.
It was a truly massive mistake to use Port-au-Prince airport to stage international aid. You don't do that at a half destroyed facility - you stage in nearby South Florida, where you have all of the facilities in the world, this while the US military brings the necessary heavy equipment, vehicles and helicopters into Port-au-Prince, and then you start airlifting presorted goods into Haiti, where soldiers and Marines unload aircraft, load their contents on trucks and helicopters, and keep the airport clear of goods and people. You chopper the international rescue teams directly to their assigned targets, with their gear, then bring supplies in as they call for them. I can't fathom how there isn't a Federal management team that can get this together, in a matter of hours - this is not rocket science, utilities do this all the time, whenever there is a disaster anywhere, we know how to do this.
If you want to use a mobile 3G connection to put your laptop online, cellular carriers will happily sell you a card or USB "dongle" to do that with, for which you need an extra cellular line/number. Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless, apart from the usual dongles and PC cards, offer "MIFI" devices as well, allowing the user to connect multiple WiFi equipped computers or smartphones to their EV-DO networks. I personally am not sure these devices are hugely useful, if you have four users hanging off of your laptop, how are you going to go to lunch, or attend a meeting? They all go with you?
One thing the carriers do not want you to do is tether, use your cellphone to connect your laptop to the internet. I have been doing it for years, T-Mobile has an internet plan that allows tethering with phones capable of acting as a digital wireless modem, I understand that the other carriers discourage and disable it as much as they can. The net result of tethering is that a student in a dorm room needs no more than a single smartphone to have voice, voicemail, faxmail and internet, in places where 3G connectivity is available. Especially for wireline carriers, traditional telephone companies, this is unattractive. So their plans don't allow tethered phones, and on top of that, you get a ridiculous allocation of bandwidth, like 5 gigabytes per month or so, over and above which you have to pay extra.
Does this make sense? There are probably still millions of people who cannot afford internet - cable company, FIOS, or most of the wireless carriers, you'll pay upwards of $45 per month, which is a lot of money for poor families, whose children should be on the internet to learn, but aren't. Assuming you need a telephone, T-Mobile will sell you that internet, with unlimited usage, for $25 over and above their regular charges, which you can further reduce by adopting a family plan, so that you and your sisters, say, share an account. Perhaps we should start looking at how to get deals like these to families that aren't affluent - a phone they all need, and just replacing their landline could save them a bundle..
If you want to flip the Google v. China, Inc. argument - Google does not need China. It does very well without the People's Republic, and what is more, it controls the English language search world. Yes, Baidu has much of the Chinese market - in Chinese. That is brilliant if you are the Chinese government, because the majority of Chinese internet users search in Chinese. And that is controllable. But for foreign trade, commerce, international development, the whole world speaks English. And English is something Baidu doesn't do. It can't. And the runners-up, Yahoo and Bing? Theyre American, they're all here. And they don't like the Chinese regulations, and its rampant theft of intellectual property. The other, closer English language experts? In Singapore, and Hong Kong. And they don't like the PRC either, Chinese though they are. Taiwan, ditto. A lot of the advanced technological stuff in China is made by Taiwan Chinese companies, which, again, have good command of English, and a love of democracy.
So if Google pulls out of China, others may follow. The Chinese market is huge, but the world market is larger. And China needs the world market, which it can't have unless it plays by its rules. That compliance can be postponed, but not indefinitely. Yes, China is rising, but hasn't yet to the point that most Chinese citizens can afford cars and laptops and smartphones and internet. For that, they'll need more money. Ours. And if there are more internet attacks from China like the ones just reported by Google, it may have to be censored, at China's borders. By us.
The internet is, indeed, a massive threat to non-democratic societies. Even if you just forget about there being restrictions on speech and expression, in certain countries, the simple expedient of censorship is self defeating. Any society in which there is a massive organization dedicated to preventing the free exchange of ideas and opinions is essentially working on its own collapse. In China, the problems the Politbureau faces are even more serious. Much of China's technology elite is Western educated, you see, many have returned to China from senior positions in the United States.
These aren't people you can shut up. They're not Marxists or communists, will never be. They went to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, because schools of that caliber do not exist in totalitarian societies. They put up with the restrictions since they have the freedom to escape them, and China puts up with their ways because they are the only Chinese capable of bringing 21st century business and production methods to what was until recently a peasant society, with communal industries that produced mediocre products at huge cost. So the type of expertise Western Chinese, and there are plenty in Google, bring, is an expertise China needs to progress and move its peasant populations from the 19th into the 21st century.
I don't think China can afford to bite the hand that feeds it, which is what it does every day. Piracy is rampant, sophisticated cyberattacks, even if they are not carried out by government agents, are at least permitted - you can't tell me that if you're so good at rooting out dissent on the Chinese internet, you can't find and deal with the hackers in China. And China has not yet learned to deal with dissent in an intelligent way - something you learn of necessity in a democracy. You ignore the dissent, marginalize it, you leave the Tibetans and Falung Gong and the Uighurs be, leave them pursue their goals and given them a measure of autonomy, all the while encapsulating them in benevolence. There is no soceity I can think of that was not eventually brought down by the dissent it sought to suppress, a dissent that, by virtue of its repression, became much more important than it would hav otherwise been.
No, Google has little to lose, by putting pressure on an immature market. For that market to mature, China needs Google, not the other way around... How problematical the current position is for the Chinese government you can read here - Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, in which Yahoo owns a 40% stake, felt it necessary to criticize Yahoo for coming out in support of Google, this after Yahoo said it had been subjected to the same China-originated cyberattack Yahoo was. Slagging off your own shareholders is not something that is normally done, in the industry, for Alibaba to speak up on an issue it is not involved in, means simply - that Alibaba is involved. And therein lies the problem - companies don't have to support governments, at least not where I come from.
I have finally started looking for projects - meant to for a long time, but it just took forever to begin following up on. My only real project, at this point, is putting together a complete wireless communications system, comprising internet access, an alarm system with proximity warning, and a combination of voice and mobile telephony. While experimenting with it cost me a bomb, the system itself isn't hugely expensive, and it leaves the users with only having to get some kind of TV feed, probably satellite television. I have felt for a long time that the wires we surround ourselves with are obsolete, but at the same time wireless communications, which to a large extent use unregulated spectrum, can be unreliable. You can have your WiFi (and thereby your VOIP or UMA voice communications) knocked out in a second when somebody nearby starts up a car with a wireless backup camera, and the bad thing about that is that you have no way of telling that is what caused it. I only found out because I equipped two of my cars with wireless cameras, and had laptops kicked off my network every time I took a car out, or put it back in the garage.
So putting the system together, a full mobile telephony based communications system, complete with wireless alarm and internet, based around four T-Mobile cellular lines, with all handsets and other equipment purchased separately, you'll be amazed at the monthly bill - just $80. With a $10 unlimited text messaging add-on, $90 per month. That includes UMA, WiFi calling, which lets compatible handsets use wireless internet to place calls, Hotspot@Home, which allows one line to simulate landline service using a special internet router, and unlimited 3G data service on one line. The other two are regular cellular phones, albeit with UMA capability.
In other words, this setup replaces home phone, internet, alarm line, and two cellphone lines. Even nicer, this is no-contract subscription service - month to month, since there is no equipment to amortize (I had all of the gear in stock, so to speak).
Looking at all of the development going on, and the battles between equipment manufacturers, we tend to forget that a cellphone is a telephone. You can add all of the "apps" you want, it is still a communications device. Don't get me wrong, I understand how people go bonkers over the iPhone, the Droid, the Blackberry and Google's new Android, but these aren't phones - they are handheld computers. I like being able to read my email on my Blackberry, I've been trading stock on my cellphone for years, but the majority of the things I can do on my Blackberry I would rather do on my laptop - which by now has shrunk to the point I've been able to downsize the backpack I normally carry. Kind of the best of both worlds, as the laptop uses the Blackberry to access the internet, and I can still get my calls.
Dropping by Home Depot today, I noticed good quality LED light bulbs
Jeremy Clarkson, of Top Gear fame, had an interesting observation in The Times of London, the other day. Assessing vehicle technologies, he expertly takes down the Toyota Prius as a "mongrel". I happen to agree with him - apart from adding electric motors and battery capacity to store energy the car temporarily does not need, for later use, the Prius is a normal car with a gasoline engine. If I am to believe the New York Times, the Chevy Volt, the car that is going to save the American automobile industry, is more of the same - it does 40 miles on batteries, which Chevy seems to think is the average round trip distance an American drives in a day. I don't know where they get their statistics from, but they certainly haven't talked to their wives about this...
Clarkson makes the point that the 1,000hp $2 million Bugatti Veyron is much more of a technological advancement than the Toyota Prius - and although I rarely agree with Clarkson, whose universe consists entirely of being a celebrity, he makes a good point here. To master 1,000hp for everyday road use is true magic. The Prius is simply more proof that we are not able to generate power for transportation other than through fossil fuel. The same thing applies to all those smartphones we're being bombarded with. Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo made good points at CES - bringing more mobile telephony and applications to the developing world is probably the most important factor in technology development today. The Third World cannot progress without telecommunications and internet, and what Nokia does goes a long way in catering for that need. The cheapest Nokia phone I found in Asia costs just $23, affordable for the cab driver, contractor, and rural police departments. That is where we have to be heading, using technologies to bring economic advancement to those living at the margins of society. If nothing else, connecting those dependent on their imams for information to the rest of the world can't be a bad thing.
It has not been an easy month. It all began just before Christmas, when a tree blew down and clipped the edge of my roof, and a window. I was still figuring out how to get it fixed, and talking to the insurance, when this huge mass of snow descended on us. To give you an idea of how unusual that is, I gave away my snowblower when I moved down here from New York. There is some snow, every few years, but nothing like this..
If it weren't for the SUV I bought last year, I would have had a hard time getting around - the Durango came with a very thirsty engine, but it has four wheel drive, high and low gearing, a self-locking differential, and - something I actually needed - skid plates underneath engine and transmission. I ended up with big ice ridges at the end of my driveway, caused by the snow removal trucks, and without the skid plates I wouldn't have been able to get over them - I literally skidded over the top, a strange experience. There was so much snow that both my neighbour's Toyota truck and my Durango actually got stuck, we had to dig them out.
But it got worse. In amid all this snow, I went to shop, and asked my elderly neighbours if they needed anything. It had been clear to me from my first year in the Arlington office that Virginians aren't used to snow, when somebody wanted to send staffers home early because of a "snowstorm" - 2 inches. My CEO and I had a hearty laugh - he is Canadian, and I am quite used to snow growing up in Europe, especially since my father retired to the Austrian alps. This was all in the days before four wheel drives became ubiquitous - you'd sling snowtires under the car in November, and that was it - the farmers in the mountains didn't even bother with those.
So, smartass got to the store and back, delivered the groceries, then slipped on what was by that time solid ice, and cracked some ribs. Boyohboy. That freakin' hurt. It made my doctor laugh: "No good deed goes unpunished" he said. "Four to five weeks" he said. I couldn't sleep in bed because it was excruciatingly painful to lie down, and even more painful to turn or get up - when I tried, it took me something like ten minutes to get back out of bed. So I slept sitting up.. Said neighbours kindly brought me food, although I was able to pour boiling water on soup, but my firewood ran out and I was unable to replenish it from my wood pile. I don't even want to think about my upcoming electric bill, and as it was bitterly cold the heat pumps didn't exactly get it toasty inside.
Anyway, I am a lot better now, firewood is once again in ample supply, although I still get my mail by car, I don't want to take the risk of traversing my icy driveway - due to the injury, I couldn't clear the snow from in front of the garage, or the driveway entrance, all that is now big solid blocks of ice. Owell. Ready for the next storm, supposed to hit tomorrow....
You have no doubt seen all the noise about Google's new phone - there is some stuff behind it that the press does not seem to have picked up on.
First of all, what with T-Mobile offering service for it, although the phone is unlocked and can be used with AT&T Wireless service, it appears that both Google and T-Mobile are moving to the European / Asian method: you can get SIM card only service, and buy an unlocked phone. In Europe, Asia and Africa there are as many stores selling unlocked phones, as there are selling carrier-tied phones. T-Mobile now gives you a discount if you don't need a phone - that's step one.
Secondly, beyond T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone will support the Google phone. Vodafone happens to be the largest mobile phone company on Earth, and co-owner of Verizon Wireless. My take? Vodafone will support and sell the phone in those markets it has presence (see the list here) and in the US, it will be the first "4G" phone for Verizon Wireless. IOW: a GSM phone with a SIM card, no more CDMA. That's what I think... Verizon Wireless has announced 4G for... 2010. The Google phone will run on Verizon Wireless' network "in the spring of 2010". And I just don't know that Google/HTC will want to build a CDMA version, since CDMA is dead. Verizon Wireless Customers? 89 million. Vodafone customers? 303 million. But that does not include half of the Verizon Wireless customers, which are technically Vodafone's, too. Adjusted, Verizon has 45 million mobile customers, while Vodafone has 348 million....
May you find what you are looking for, in 2010, and if you aren't looking for anything, may beautiful surprises find you. I always hated the holidays, growing up, but then we had too many. in my family - Sinterklaas, Santa Claus day, celebrated in The Netherlands on December 5th, then my birthday, then my sister's birthday, then Christmas, then New Year's. Just too much. But, you enjoy. I see my friends really happy their kids are home for the holidays, and the festive atmosphere is certainly contageous.
The news is otherwise not that positive. President Obama is trying to jump start America's future, but unlike in previous decades, we don't have anything to sell. Our car manufacturers don't make cars the world wants, technology innovation is done in Taiwan and China, not in Silicon Valley, and nobody is helping the American public understand we are dependent on other countries, not the other way around. We increasingly lose out to European competition, Europeans internationally considered to be nicer people with a better grasp of starting from small, a lack of Predator drones, and increasingly that is where the major multi-nationals are headquartered and Americans go live for the quality of life. I know Obama is trying, but this will take more than four years, especially after eight years of swimming in the wrong direction. The most amazing occurrence this week? Nobody even wonders how come the Nigerian bomber is ignored even by the permanently staffed Homeland Security desk at.. Schiphol Airport.
And do not get me started on the war on terror - a war that cannot be fought by Westerners against Islamic extremists, but needs to be fought by Arabic speaking Muslim soldiers, who are the only ones that can command respect from Afghanis and Pakistanis and Yemenis. The more we are involved, the more it is a modern version of the crusades. Until we make the Saudis, Pakistanis, Malaysians, Indonesians, and countless other majority Muslim nations responsible for cleaning up their religious mess - and that is what it is, a religious mess - there will not be a lasting solution. They have to step up to the plate.
Alors
I have now received the Avertv Hybrid Nano Express
That is not nothing, considering Windows records HDTV in its TV format to the tune of more than 4GB for a 45 minute movie - 92 MB per minute. And it does that while displaying the movie in 1080p resolution - 1920x1080 pixels at 60 Hz, although the cable signal is 1080i, 1920x1080 pixels at 30 Hz. I am honestly amazed. Yes, I upgraded the laptop - Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, running in 8 GB of RAM, which the Lenovo can handle, but that still does not make it the fastest graphics machine in the world. It has to (and does) produce the accompanying Dolby 5.1 audio at the same time!.
The two pictures you see here show you how small this card is, it actually sits flush in the laptop (lower left in the other shot), and it shows you the quality of the display. Granted, partly that is due to the excellent quality of the Philips 47PFL7403D HDTV
A recent question on CNET had to do with transferring HD video from a high end camcorder to DVD. Most respondents took the questioner at his word, providing several ways to store video on DVD. You can view the entire discussion here. Curiously, just about nobody thought that the loss of quality you incur by downscaling HD video to DVd was an issue. Because DVD is not capable of handling the resolution an HD camcorder provides, if you store your videos on DVD, you will lose that lovely HD quality forever. While it is true that the new AVCHD format will let you put HD video on a DVD disk, a DVD can contain some 4.7 GB of data, and a BD (Blu-Ray) disk can store 25 GB. You'll understand that if Blu-Ray was intended for 1080p HD, AVCHD on DVD can't possibly provide the same high resolution, or Dolby/DTS audio. You get what you pay for.
I have one comment on their mention of "preserving on DVD". It is very brief: DON'T. Writable DVDs are an unreliable storage method, they are easy to damage, there are compatibility issues between different brands of drives, in short - great for distribution, not great for storage. I recommend getting a multimedia server with gobs of disk space, if you have the wherewithall you can set up a simple cheap desktop with a large RAID drive, like a 2 terabyte Fantom
Although I am returning the Avertv Hybrid Volar Max
Let me take the opportunity to laud Amazon for its terrific customer service - when my order did not arrive even though the USPS said it did, I emailed customer service, and within an hour I received an email stating Amazon had put another unit on order, with two day UPS shipping at no charge. A followup email provided a no-charge mail link so I could return the other unit should it arrive. The second unit shipped that day. Impressive customer service, people.
Having said that, I tried this tuner only under Windows 7, with the Windows Media Center that is packaged with that operating system. The software that comes with the unit works, I think it is intended for PCs that have no tuner software, but it does not work very well, and my suggestion is to use the Media Center, which, under Windows 7, runs this tuner like a native. You can find the drivers-only for the tuner as a separate download at the Avermedia website, and I would suggest you install those and try to run the Media Center first, you do not need to install the packaged software at all. Under Windows Vista and Windows 7, you see, a TV tuner is recognized by the operating system (that is part of the reason Microsoft has integrated the Windows Media Center in those versions of Windows), and handled as an integral part of your computer, it isn't an "alien" device, so to speak.
Once the drivers are loaded (do this before plugging it in for the first time!), the Avermedia device is recognized and the Media Center will offer to have it detect and program all available broadcast channels - analog TV, digital TV, digital radio and FM radio. If your computer is set up to display HD TV (which normally requires an HDMI connector, and an HD flat panel TV set up to display at a 1920x1080 resolution at 30 or 60 Hz) you can watch and record HD TV "at full throttle", so to speak - please remember, most PCs do NOT provide that resolution natively, but need an external HD display for it! If connected via an HDMI cable, and with a Dolby decoder built into the TV, or connected through the TV, this unit will provide full spec HD. Pretty amazing.
Other reviewers have tried this unit with antennas - my reason for buying it is that I wanted to put a recording device on my Comcast cable feed. I do have a Tivo with a Cable Card, but when connecting a new flat screen to my home theatre setup, I noticed that Comcast pumps a complete unencrypted TV feed down the cable wire, apart from what it sends to the Cable Card the Tivo needs to function. I discovered this accidentally, they don't tell you there is a "standard" cable feed as well. It is worth checking out, mine has 180 channels, partly digital, some of which do not appear on the Cable Card.
Doing specifically this, the Avermedia tuner picked up all available channels flawlessly, and Windows Media Center downloaded the entire programming schedule for it, once I had told it my location and cable system. This is, to me, the only way to use this tuner - the TV schedule Windows pulls down from the internet is free, you can see what is on, program detail, and you can check the schedule a week ahead of time and program anything you want to record (provided your PC is fast enough - recording HD television with Dolby 5.1 audio, both of which the tuner receives and makes available, requires a LOT of horsepower.
But it is there, and if you want to play with TV, or if you want a cheap DVR/PVR, this unit works very well, and gives you all the advantages of a cable company DVR.
Of course, my best wishes for the holidays, Christmas seems to have somehow morphed into an annual party, despite the opportunistic Egyptian cleric who has pronounced a fatwah over the Christian holiday. If it helps Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi, turkeys are not Christian, they are birds. As such, they are not particularly tasty, it was just that Americans felt they had to have a larger indigenous chicken - everything is bigger here, after all. If they good sheikh wanted to polarize a little more, he has been very successful.
Just watching the festivities at Walt Disney World, it seems a good opportunity for people to celebrate their family relationships - New Jersey father David Goldman certainly thinks so - he took his recovered son Sean straight from Brazil to Orlando, which I think is a good move. Good show, after all, Mr. Goldman - for the boy's Brazilian family to parade nine year old Sean needlessly through the street "as a protest" was all the proof I needed that these folks are not responsible adults, and should never have been given custody by a Brazilian court in the first place.
My wish for the New Year? I hope we can expediently put a new health insurance plan into place, one that allows everybody in the United States to receive the care they deserve. I can't get over the scare-mongerers and assorted other politically engaged negativists. You would torpedo new health care legislation for political reasons, on the back of those Americans who end up in wheelchairs, respirators and coffins every day because we don't take care of them? You don't want a "European situation"? Death panels? What do you think the current system is, benevolent dictatorship? What makes you think you know anything about Europe? Most of you think you've gone abroad when you're in Queens, NY...
As a former Western European, I can tell you nobody where I come from ever needs to worry about getting a prescription, or about seeing a doctor. The system is not perfect, all systems have flaws, but I can't understand how you can call yourself "a proud American" and "the richest country on Earth" while denying something as basic as medical care to your own citizens, let alone all those others. I got lucky - without the employer provided lifetime health plan I have, I would have to move back to Europe, after retirement. That's how bad the European system is. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
I had been wondering for a while why I don't like playing the endless news videos CNN and ABC and NBC (etc.) make available at their websites. Worried a little that I am becoming too much "old school", you know, being a former printed press journalist and all that.. Until, today, it hit me, when I went to read an article at the BBC News website. It is because videos waste my time!
You see, I am a speed reader - taught myself to speed read in my teens, when I found it took too long to read a whole entire book. Which eventually led to me, on occasion, reading two science fiction novels in a day. Which my wife always thought was an expensive exercise. So what was my revelation? It is this: reading is a "random access" activity. You can scan over an article, see if it interests you, you can read some of it, go do some research, come back to where you left it and continue, all that good stuff. With video, you can't do any of that. It takes endless clicking and pushing sliders to scan through bits of video, once it is loaded, you don't know what the video is about, save for what the creator or editor tells you, and none of that provides any information about how and why this video was made. So, to all intents and purposes, as a news distribution device, video is a huge waste of time.
If you look at the BBC News website, you can see how it is supposed to be done: there is an article, and that is accompanied by a video, which provides, usually, more detail or an example of what the article tells you about. Like in magazines, where photographs and diagrams illustrate an article. Journalists ought to be mandated to write up their story to be posted alongside their video story.
So anyway, that set my mind at rest - I am not "losing it", I just like to be in control of what information I take in, and how I take it in. With video, the medium is in control, not the consumer. Maybe that is how TV advertising should be done, on the Tivo, as well - during the commercial break you get choices of commercials - "Click here for a larger penis" - without having to watch what you're not interested in. Like car commercials, I am not in the market for another car, so why should I be made to watch them? I have never believed in forcing people to watch things, I believe you're deluded if you think that sells products. I can't think that anyone buys Enzyte because you're shown these actors talk about it ten times an hour, without ever showing you their "new and improved" huuuuge schlong.
In many ways, shareholders should show more concern about how much of revenue is spent - or should I say: wasted - on advertising and marketing. We have grown complacent about the way we advertise, and I doubt very much that corporations have a handle on what advertising actually sells product. You see the same ads on most of the different television networks, and as a consequence the advertiser has no idea whether a product advertised on BBC America has a potentially higher return than the same product advertised on ABC. Umm, no, those surveys don't work either - surveys only work when everybody fills them out, if not, they contain no useful information, except about the people who do fill them out, and you don't know who they are. The worst are the surveys that pop up and ask you questions about a site or a product - before you have even visited the site, or used the product. Yet thousands of managers get bonuses because they present "survey results". Go figure.
Similarly, the networks are now infested with infomercials, which typically run in the middle of the night. I don't know about you, but do we know how many consumers actually watch those things? Most consumers will be in bed at that time, and I really do wonder how effective marketing to insomniacs actually is. It is strange to me that the abundantly available programming isn't run instead - perhaps the local network affiliate, instead of running marketing, should market its available broadcast space to cable networks, to rerun some of their shows, including advertising, for a fee. NBC Washington could run BBC America programming at night, so folks who do not subscribe to that channel can still get some of its shows. BBC America runs 24/7, so for them it would just be additional cost and advertising revenues.
Now back, if I haven't bored you enough, to my new BlackBerry
Interestingly, RIM has managed to get the Blackberry in the hands of consumers, private users. Two years ago, according to the Associated Press, half of all new users were business and government customers; in the current quarter, those comprise less than 20%. With a 59% increase in revenues for that same quarter, it looks like they are continuing to sell well to enterprise customers, but there is a massive increase in sales to the private user. This is of interest when looking at the popularity of the iPhone, which I continue to think is a handheld Macintosh, and as such, a fad. I keep hearing of the iPhone's popularity in corporate America, but have really not seen evidence of this - corporations need messaging devices, and I have a hard time conceiving of multinationals hooking their corporate networks up to iTunes. Blackberry, on the other hand, provides separate corporate server applications, offers a really tight integration with Lotus Notes, and from what I see is working on achieving a similar integration with Google mail. Gmail installs on the Blackberry as an enterprise application, using imap to ensure all mail is duplicated, and cannot be lost.
I wonder whether my being persuaded to buy the latest Blackberry is indicative of how RIM achieves this new trend. I am not particularly fond of how Blackberry messaging works - I discontinued my old 6230 back in 2003, because I needed a phone that I could use as a modem for my laptop, something the Blackberry did not allow, and at that time handsets from Nokia reached the market that provided that feature, and had messaging and POP mail besides.
Today, tethering works on most, if not all, Blackberrys. Even my old 6230, via the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager software installed on the laptop, now can be used as a digital modem. More importantly for me, the new Bold 9700 has both UMA (WiFi voice calling) and a full 3G implementation, and has been engineered to work worldwide (even including Japan!). This combination of features outstrips other manufacturers - there are other 3G+UMA handsets, but none that work on US frequencies as well as the ones in use in Europe and Asia. On top of that, I noticed, driving around in my neighbourhood, where cell service is spotty, that the Bold 9700 gets signal where nothing else does. And that equates with my previous (2003) Blackberry, which does that too. I don't know how they do it, but they do it very well. I just hope that outage (3am to 2pm, they say; midnight to 5pm, I say) isn't a harbinger of things to come, considering they have so many consumers to service - a volume, I think, beyond what RIM expected. Most business and government customers run their own Blackberry mail servers, so the load has probably increased exponentially.
As I had not seen the magic "3G" indicator on the screen of one of my cellphones in the US, I drove out towards Fredericksburg after receiving and setting up my new BlackBerry Bold 9700
"Elys Ford" designates where the North's armies crossed the Rapahannock river, during the Civil War - I live smack in the middle of the old battlefields. The Elys still live here, around the corner from me, and their forebears are by the side of Spotswood Furnace Road, in the family burial plot on their property.
What is important about 3G? As many teenagers and students already know, you can have reasonable speed internet, voice and your primary life databases all in one device. There really is no longer a need (depending on where you live) to have anything "wired" any more. Especially a device like the Blackberry, coupled with a technologically savvy phone company like T-Mobile, gives you everything.
The device itself has 3G internet, WiFi internet, voice telephony (Skype is rumoured), GPS navigation, and it can, in T-Mobile's version, be used as a digital modem for your laptop or desktop computer - something called "tethering". Having a separate data card for your laptop is completely obsolete - using Google Voice, you can even have a secondary phone ring when the primary does, so you don't have to break your data connection when a call comes in. The cost of the second line is only $10 per month, good if you do a lot of talking as well as a lot of internetting at the same time. Having said that, with your laptop connected to the internet using a 3G connection on a 3G phone, you would be able to use Skype for voice communications, and need not bother with the phone in that respect. One caveat nobody talks about, though, is that if you use a mobile handset to connect to 3G networking, you are limited by what the USB port in your computer can handle. That is nowhere near the nominal speed 3G can attain - 3.6 megabits per second. If you want true 3G speed, you'll need to use a 3G modem, like the 3.5G PC Express Card Bandluxe device I use.
What surprised me is the convoluted way this thing is managed, T-Mobile having to send authorizations to Blackberry, which then sends updates to your phone, including a bunch of crap you don't want. I can seen why Blackberry wants to have so much control over the phone in corporate or government contracts, but I am not seeing the need for individual customers. And I certainly have no need for Blackberry to put games and trial software links on my phone, I own this device and they can't put crap on it I haven't authorized them to, especially since my contract is with T-Mobile, not with Blackberry.
Now, I gotta talk to you about GPS. You know the GPS units we've been getting for the car - standalone GPS, maps loaded on the device, etc. And then there is the GPS mobile phone companies are trying to sell us, which actually isn't GPS at all, but just a clever application that uses the GPS chip that has to, by law, built into a cellphone in the US, these days. Its sole purpose is to let the emergency services know where you are when you make a 911 call.
Unlike "true" GPS, this method relies on the phone using the chip to figure out your location, then downloading local maps, provided yours is a wireless broadband phone - 3G or EV-DO. That's fraught with problems - if you lose your network connection your GPS is dead, I've just experienced that with the LG phone I was trying out, whose GPS application spent most of its time not working, when it cannot get a data connection in the rural area that I live in. When I leave the house, where it uses my WiFi connection, it dies as soon as I am halfway down my driveway.
So: if you want a phone with GPS, you're best off getting one that can function as a standalone GPS unit. Like the Nokia 6110 Navigator I picked up in the Philippines in 2007 (they weren't sold in the US), which has a complete GPS unit, with Route 66 navigation software, and preloaded maps, those that are not included with the phone you can buy and download from Route 66. The Nokia (its successor is the Nokia 6120
I will be trying out RIM's own application, Blackberry Maps, which comes with the 9700, and which, from a quick peek, uses the on-the-fly download principle, but has a cache you can set the size of. I am hoping that cache will retain maps after they have been downloaded, obviating the need for 3G where there is none. At least this application comes with the phone for free, and can use WiFi as well as 3G and EDGE. With T-Mobile's Hotspot service, you could stop in at a Starbucks or MacDonalds, I suppose, and download local maps using their free WiFi. Something I had gotten used to with my Nokia, using an external Bluetooth GPS antenna, the 9700 can do too. Using a GPS antenna built into the handset in a car, where the metal prevents the GPS antenna from functioning properly, is a headache - the external antenna you can park on the dash, against the windshield, its rechargeable battery will easily last a day or so, and the phone does not have to power its built in antenna. I am using Nokia's LD-3W antenna, which set me back $100, a couple of years ago. Here
For the moment, that is really all I can tell you, not having used this unit extensively. I have moved all of my email addresses to the Blackberry, although final storage of my email happens on one of my laptops, but it is very convenient to have the mobile alert me to all emails, and being able to weed out the spam directly from the phone. I've tried to get rid of all of the links and applications I don't need, loaded a very few apps that are central to my life: Tivo, Maps, Google Voice, Google Maps (just because I like seeing a picture of my house from satellite ;), synchronization is now set to go to Yahoo rather than Outlook (which means you can sync your life even when you're nowhere near your laptop or PC) - Yahoo and Blackberry both use Intellisync to synchronize PDA data, if you want to know why it is Yahoo and not Microsoft's Live attempt at gathering even more marketing data from you.
I am genuinely not interested in running a million apps on my PDA. Its primary function is that of a phone (Blackberry's Bluetooth audio implementation is a cut above the rest, by the way), I run applications on my travel laptop, a tiny 10.5" Acer. Having GPS, calendar, address book and a secure document available is part of what I must have, even the Tivo app I do not need, I can log into my Tivo from my laptop using the Blackberry as a data modem. This is not a religion for me, it is a tool...
I can't say the BlackBerry Bold 9700
But then, as they say in the world of motor vehicles, we get under the hood. This thing (in the version that T-Mobile sells) has: WiFi (a.k.a. wireless networking), 3G, GPS (free) and: UMA! This is too cool. I know I was going to tell you about the LG GT505, but that's such a bad piece of - admittedly pretty and fashionable - technology I retired it 10 days after buying it. For one thing, its GPS application, provided by Apello, a Swedish company that isn't too smart at writing software, isn't able to use addresses from your address book, for another, it cannot switch between networks - if you have an application using WiFi at your house, and you drive away, it does not switch to 3G or EDGE, it'll just sit there looking for the network it was on, and your application will be completely unusable.
I am going to assume you're well familiar with the jargon by now, except perhaps for UMA. UMA, or Unlicensed Mobile Access, is a technology that lets you use a wireless Ethernet (WiFi, in common parlance) network for voice calls, using an otherwise standard GSM cellphone. It's been around for a while, and I've used the service for several years, but what excited me so much is that the Blackberry is the first phone T-Mobile offers that has both 3G and UMA. The terms I am using - 3G, EDGE, GPRS, UMA, all belong in the European GSM technical cellular standard, the same system that is used by T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless, in this country, a system that is in use in over 90% of the world. Verizon and Sprint are using an American developed technology called CDMA, which is, to all intents and purposes, dead outside the USA. American wireline companies, back when, had no option but to use this technology when cellular telephony was introduced, for very valid legal and regulatory reasons, but Verizon, Sprint and Nextel did not switch to GSM when they could, while other North American carriers did, and so their CDMA phones are unusable on anybody else's networks (with exception of a few specially designed hybrid handsets, which are effectively two cellphones in one, using two different carriers). A GSM phone you can buy anywhere, and use anywhere, provided it is a modern quadband phone, and it is "unlocked" (or "no-line", as it is called in parts of Asia) - all GSM phones can be.
But back to Blackberry's new Bold 9700, which I just began using. There is a lot wrong with it - the keys are too small, the display is too small, Blackberry has been trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. I understand they want to get as close to a "regular" cellular phone form factor as they can, while retaining Blackberry's PDA features, but they have gone too far, IMO. It is functional and usable, but a pain. The old Blackberry (my 2003 6230 you see pictured here) is the smallest form factor that is comfortable to use as a PDA.
But there is a lot more right with the Bold 9700 than there is wrong. For one thing, I live somewhere with little cell service, so UMA, for me, is the ideal solution - when I get home my UMA phones automagically switch to my wireless network, and then I receive and make my calls using that. Additionally, calls made over WiFi do not count toward your airtime minutes, all calls within the United States are effectively completely free of charge. I can't tell you how wonderful this is - T-Mobile (the only carrier in the United States that offers UMA) charges a flat rate across my account to put UMA on all lines - and "Hotspot service" is available at most MacDonalds and Starbucks outlets in the US, too. The only problem was that the choice of handsets was limited, and no handset was available that offered 3G as well as UMA. They do exist - the LG I mentioned has UMA, but that is enabled only when you buy the phone from Orange in the UK or France.
Enter the new Blackberry. It has 3G and UMA, and more besides, like WiFi and GPS, something I have gotten used to as I have been using the Nokia 6110 Navigator
So the Blackberry has all of the stuff that made Blackberry famous, the stuff that ensured that when you are on an air shuttle between Washington and New York, every single Federal employee, and most other commuters on those flights, pull out a Blackberry as soon as the plane hits the ground.
When you look at the Blackberries side-by-side, not much has changed. RIM, the Canadian manufacturer, uses its own operating system, continues to provide a store-and-forward email system that comes with the phone, has standard applications that have always been there, like apps to view Microsoft Office documents, it has an amazing battery life (my 6230 stays up for over a week - in 2003, partly due to its monochrome display), gets a signal where nothing else does, and, most importantly, it has a full QWERTY keyboard, so you can write emails and notes and it is easy to put new entries in your address book - for most other phones, I use my laptop to do that.
I can't tell you how important that consistency is. Nokia does it too - it has its own OS, all phones they've ever made work the same, have the same features... I picked up the Bold 9700 and found that everything is where the 6230 had it. I have not used that phone in over four years, but it was pretty much like coming back to your old house, but with icons and colours and other fancy stuff now. Kewl.
More about the Blackberry Bold 9700, on GPS in handphones, and on mobile services in general, on Thursday.
One of the real discoveries of living out here is the woodstove - or rather, the way a woodstove can provide ample heat for a (to my standards) huge house, and be ecologically responsible, at the same time. I burn, you see, about 50% wood from trees that have come down during storms, or have died from disease, and a recent article pointed out that the carbon dioxide that releases would have been released anyway, as the trees decay. The other 50% consists of trees that are close to the house, and have grown too tall since the house was built, in the 1960's. The equation needs to take into account that this resource is actually renewed - I have almost five acres of trees, and take trees that free up room (nutrition and light) for the trees next to it to grow faster. I've been keeping an eye on this - the tree shown at the top left grew from the stump left after I took it down, in three seasons. They do not all grow that fast, of course, but it is an indication of the rate of renewal. It should be noted, too, that the CO² I release is to some extent re-absorbed by my trees, and my neighbour's trees, actually "feeding" their growth, if you like.
But most importantly, this woodstove, the modern EPA type woodstove that uses secondary combustion, releasing wood gas through the burning process that then gets ignited with preheated air at the top of the firebox, a kind of woodstove afterburner, is highly efficient, and produces an enormous amount of heat - something like 75,000 BTUs/hr, or 22 KW/hr - in other words, as much heat as 15 space heaters provide.
How does this get achieved? To begin with, the house was fitted with ducting from the family room to two bedrooms upstairs - the family room is on one side of the house, so a warm airflow is created that runs up on one side of the house, then down again via the centrally located staircase. I have aided the proceedings by taking the registers off the ducts, and replacing them with thermostatically controlled fans. And then there is the Vogelzang Heat Reclaimer, a thermostatically controlled fan driven heat exchanger that sits in the stove pipe just above the stove. It reclaims waste heat from the flue gases - the combined effect of the stove and the heat reclaimer is that gas that is at 425° Fahrenheit at the top of the stove, leaves the heat reclaimer at 150° Fahrenheit, having given up 65% of its energy. I have to add that according to the Vogelzang website, this device should not be used with an EPA-approved woodstove - the only reason I can think of is that the exhaust gases of an EPA stove are not as hot as those from a "regular" stove, so you might get more creosote deposits in the chimney, which can be dangerous. The rest of the energy is used to maintain the draw in the chimney, the result being a smokeless fire, and ashes fully retained within the stove. In some urban areas, a catalytic converter to add an extra burn stage is required, this for non-EPA stoves.
The first couple of years I lived here, I paid no attention to the woodstove, and heated like I had always done, by turning the heating on. You're a city slicker or you're not.. Then a neighbour asked me if I was OK for firewood for the winter, which is a sort of standard question around these parts, I learned, where most everybody lives on five acres or more, and has plenty of wood. Round about the same time, a hurricane roared through the area, and took quite a few trees down - the ones that come down are normally the oldest, tallest, heaviest trees. The connection was soon made, and now I am a fervent woodstove user. I've discovered that this firewood stuff is great exercise, that I save myself hundreds of dollars especially when it gets down to 20 degrees, and that properly firing a woodstove is a good amount of work, especially if you want to burn "clean", which requires quite a high temperature inside the firebox, around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
But it is not for nothing that the Federal Government now provides a subsidy of up to $1,500 for the purchase of a "biomass burning stove or fireplace insert" that meets EPA standards, set currently at 75% efficiency. My Quadra-Fire 4300 just skirts by, at 79.8%. I like my measurement better, 65%, simply because the EPA number takes all sorts of stuff into account, type of wood, climate, you name it, and pragmatic as I am, I have more belief in simple measurements, things I can see and calculate in the real world. There are many factors that, in my opinion, are too variable to reasonably take into account - do you calculate the cost of the energy needed to bring firewood to a suburban area? I burn my own wood, which doesn't need transporting, and I regenerate myself, so I ought to get extra points. Note the picture here - this tree toppled during a storm, the other day, and mostly (thankfully) missed my house, but it will provide two or three weeks of heat. Here is a fuel calculator if you want to check whether wood might be an economical alternative for your house.
I bought two Blu-ray optical burners
Depending on the type, one BD data disk takes 25 or 50 gigabytes of data, the latter are the double layer type. Not too long ago, 50GB would have been a good sized hard disk in a laptop, so I figured it wasn't wasted money. The stinker was that I couldn't get the HD-DVD playback to work. The laptop either hung, or the Nero 8 video player crashed, with a spurious Visual Basic error message. Bad coding on the part of Nero.
When I was in New York, at my NYNEX reunion, last month, I committed to put a promotional video made at NYNEX Science & Technology on the web, so my former colleagues could enjoy it, the ones that didn't make it to the reunion. And that meant finding and loading software to convert DVD to - well, something everybody can open in their browser, probably a Flash video or sumtin'. And that meant finding software to do the conversion with - I have half a dozen video processing packages, which I tend to take off my laptops after use, as they clutter up the hard disk, I rarely need them, and they don't cooperate very well.
So that brought me back to the HD-DVD issue, as the Nero software that came with that drive has a couple of nice utilities for video conversion. The other Buffalo drive came with a Cyberlink video suite, excellent for playing back Blu-Ray disks, and writing its data cousin, the BD, but it won't play HD-DVD. Which got me thinking again why Nero 8 was crashing, I saw nothing in the Nero forums, and as it turned out it did exactly the same thing on my new Acer, which comes with the HDMI port as well.
Long story short, that was the problem, the HDMI port. Cyberlink will happily play back Blu-Ray to non-HD displays, but without high resolution and without Dolby 5.1 or DTS 7.1. Nero will not - the Germans have interpreted copy protection rather literally, if their software does not "see" that the output device for both video and audio is an HDMI port with HDCP, fuggedaboutit. So when Nero catches you playing a Blu-Ray movie to an HD display, but you're routing the audio through another port, it will crash, rather than give you an orderly error message! This even though the HDMI and HDCP security stuff are all connected.. Cyberlink does not care, as long as the HDMI screen is there and connected. Same with my Tivo, the display has to be there, but it'll send it anywhere you want. And the Nero folks haven't quite figured out how to handle this, when Nerovision 8 finds an illegal setup, it simply hangs up.
So there. Video converted, and Nero sorted out, all at the same time. Hehe. Right now I've made an MPEG video out of the AVI file I made from the DVD, and now I am converting that to a Flash video, as well. Then it can go on my host server, and they can all watch it. And I am sorry, but you cannot, I have had to password protect the webspace as the video is copyrighted.
This blog is technology-heavy for two reasons: one, it is how I have made my money, lucky enough to get to the United States as the internet boom was about to take off - not dumb luck, to be sure, I had worked on "connected computing" virtually from the day that made it to The Netherlands. By the time I moved to England, in 1979, I had been doing my journalistic work on portable connected computers for a while. My then publisher, VNU, at that point a staid Dutch magazine publisher, was transmitting ready pages to the printer's, which it owned, even though the way we produced magazines was still fully traditional - but by the time the art department finished with the magazine I worked for, it was computerized and turned into roto-gravure electronically before hitting the presses. By the time I got to London, and worked on a project to electronicize Forbes Magazine in Europe and the US, electronic page makeup began to be married to journalistic workstations - at VNU, we had progressed to portable computers (I still have my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, what's more, it still works!) and filing stories (that's me in 1983, in the picture, connecting to the PDP-11 I leased from British Telecom, using an acoustic coupler) using the fledgling Packet Switched Networks that telephone companies had begun to make available.
The second reason is that communications technology has reshaped society in ways nobody had been able to predict - it doesn't matter who says what, Tiger Woods hung himself out to dry by having his car photographed by a neighbour with a cellphone, apparently have his wife go through his own cellphone, and having a voicemail message publicized, while the Salahis hung themselves out to dry via emails that fail to prove what they said. So I am least surprised at how technologically dependent we have become. It is just that we are not making a true effort to "untethering" ourselves - moving everything that was connected by wire over to the now fully available wireless technologies. If the manufacturers and vendors had wanted it to, that could have been America's next big technology and export product, financed in the stimulus package, but it is not - we lost out there just as much as we did in turning electric and hybrid propulsion into a household word. The Chevy Volt is probably nice, but it is 20 (that's right, not five, not ten, but twenty!) years too late. Read here when Toyota first began work, not just on electric propulsion, but on the actual Prius - read it and weep...
First of all, if the camera outputs in a compressed format, like .jpg, or .jpe, you usually have an interpolated image - a 5 megapixel CCD delivers a 10 megapixel image. That's not unlike the difference between a 1080i and a 1080p HDTV - there is a difference, but whether that matters to you depends on whether you are anal or not. Only when the manufacturer specifically mentions access to what is known as the "raw file", can you expect the real number. The Nikon D90, for instance, delivers 12.3 megapixels, and you can verify this because you can have the camera output images in raw format, Nikon's .NEF. Those cameras can output to compressed (JPEG) formats as well, but you should remember that any compressed image format is "lossy", and the advertised resolution is made up using software, smoke and mirrors, and while the image then has the number of megapixels they said it does, the resolution does not. To the left is a picture I took, just now, after clearing an oak tree that had fallen - this was taken with an LG 5 megapixel high end cameraphone, and I processed it down from 2592x1944 to 1024x768 for posting. Click on it, and you can see what you can do with just 5 megapixels. For reference: this picture takes up about 1 megabyte in its original format, goes to 14.4 megabytes when you convert it to an uncompressed TIFF file, and as you see it here it is 234 megabytes in size. The tree weighs maybe 6 or 7 tons... One thing I can tell you is that when I compare this with a 6.1 megapixel Nikon D50 SLR camera, this 5 megapixel phone does not deliver anywhere near 5 megapixels - click here to see a picture shot with the D50, resized and compressed the same way the LG picture was. The Nikon provides incredibly more detail in its pictures, and its raw output files (uncompressed, unprocessed) are about 6 megabytes in size. The LG's picture data says they are compressed 6 times - that fits in with the file size, but the issue for me is that you can't get raw files out of most digital cameras, so the megapixels are so much hogwash.
Then there is the memory issue. Solid state memory is inherently slower, the larger the memory element is, and so a camera with a lot of real pixels will be relatively slow getting ready for its first shot, you can't turn it on and immediately push the button. Cheaper cameras use cheaper memory, of course, and that is always slower.
In that same vein, the CCD needs to "unload" the image into storage memory, typically an SD card, after the picture has been taken, and you therefore cannot take the next picture immediately after taking one. The more expensive SLRs use fast buffer memory to achieve this relatively quickly, and this will allow you to take 10 or 20 or 30 "rapid fire" shots, until the buffer is full, when it needs to write its contents to slower card memory, which can take a while, and you wait.
Similarly, the more pixels, the longer it takes to load a picture into an application on your PC, and the longer it takes to process a picture, make changes to it, adjust the hue, crop it a litttle, and write a processed copy away to disk. If you're an avid photographer, looking through the 300 12.3 megapixel images you took on your last trip can be a time consuming exercise, and that's just opening them up, one by one, I am not even talking about processing here. And those 300 wonderful raw format pictures, you're a perfectionist and want to have your work in as much detail as possible, your 300 holiday snaps will take up 3.7 gigabytes of disk space. Better go out and get a terabyte RAID device, I have two sitting on a network server, because one little disk crash and years of work goes "poof". All I am saying is that the choice of resolution has consequences for the type and speed of PC, your electronic darkroom, you need to use, and the type and size of storage device you use as your electronic shoebox. If the only purposes you use your pictures for is to have prints made, or put them on an internet site for sharing, you really don't need more than 5 or so megapixels - considering that most consumers set their cameras to put more pictures on their memory card, they tend to use a resolution of 1 or 2 megapixels, and the rest of the capacity is totally wasted.
As a frame of reference - a decent slide scanner
Just now, on Bloomberg, Edmunds.com announced projected auto sales for December. Let me give you a warning: that's witchcraft. Nobody can predict, with any level of certainty, how many cars will be sold, what the stock price of Wal-Mart will be on December 31st, and how many people are going to be on the dole that work for companies that we don't even know will be bankrupt in two weeks. If you're a concerned citizen, or an investor like me, but especially if you are a CFO or CEO, don't do this devastatingly stupid stuff. There is nobody who can predict the future. And just because an actor who portrays a district attourney on TV exhorts you to open an account with a brokerage house - don't. If they can't find a real person to speak up for them, stay away from them. They got mush for brains. Don't look for anything that will tell you what will happen in fifteen minutes or fifteen days. It is not possible. Hogwash. Bullshit. I mean, you must have seen those annoying Enzyte and ExtenZe commercials - you must have wondered why they never show any of those magically increased, umm, members.
But back to technology, something I do have a good handle on - come to think of it, the number of times I have had to explain to my staff and my bosses that "Mean Time Between Failures" - MTBF - with respect to equipment means zilch. Nothing. It can't tell you when you need to buy backup gear, it can't tell you what risk factor to allocate to your installation - nuttin'. All it can tell you is how much money and time you need to allocate to dealing with failures, over a time period. But if you buy a disk drive, and your business depends on that disk drive, you shoulda bought three. One to use, one to back up the drive in use to, and one as a spare. Now you're covered, regardless of whatever the MTBF says. Because I know only one MTBF - tonight, at midnight, is when my equipment will fail. And that is what I make sure my clients are ready for. Capice, paysan?
On that score, here is more about the Level One WBR-3800 I told you about below - if you need a WiFi router, this is the one to get. It is a regular router, to begin with - WiFi, one WAN port to connect to your DSL or cable modem, one LAN port so you can hook up your laptop and manage it, otherwise a normal 802.11b/g wireless router. I would have liked it to be 802.11b/g/N, but then again, your internet connection, if you're lucky, runs at maybe 10 megabits per second, and 802.11b is 11 Mbps already, so necessary it is not. But now the fun starts.
This little router is able to act as both a wireless bridge and a wireless Access Point at the same time. This is unusual. What it means is that you can set up your network with one range of IP addresses, use a secondary router to extend your wireless network footprint, and have that router set up in bridge mode, effectively acting as a repeater on the Level One. It can actually handle multiple bridged routers, something I have not tried, but if you get ambitious, or if you want to use this thing to network your schoolhouse, you can. But we're not done.
The WBR-3800 can use a cellular modem as its internet provider, as well! That can be a GPRS modem (or phone!), an EDGE modem, a 3G modem, a 3.5G modem, or one of those EV-DO contraptions Sprint and Verizon provide. I found it can't just handle the modems and cellphones it has in its compatibility list, two phones that are not there it did not have a problem with, either (but one card and one new phone I just got did not work). You either use a PCMCIA 3G data card (they're available all over, I just bought two for $24) or a 3G modem or 3G cellphone that can connect via a USB cable. If you are clever, you use a phone that charges off the USB port, so you won't have to worry about your battery or a separate charger - Motorola's phones do, for instance, Nokia's generally do not.
Now, you can set up the cellular data call parameters (normally available at your mobile phone company's website), and use the router over a cellular connection. But we're not done.
The WBR-3800 is able to use that cellular connection not only as a primary, but it can be set up as a fallback, instead. So you can have your normal fast cable modem connection, say, and if that fails, and you have set up the modem for 3G as well, it will, if programmed properly, automatically switch over to your wireless broadband connection. Expect to take time getting all that to work - I am a wide area network engineer with over 25 years in the business, and it took me the better part of a night to get it all working properly. There isn't anything wrong with the documentation, this type of functionality is simply very involved, and somewhat arcane.
How cool is this? For $131.73, including shipping? Sheesh! Seriously, this kind of gear used to cost thousands, I am not overstating, this is fully redundant network gear. It uses a 5V DC power supply - you can get 5V DC out of a PC, if necessary. And if you want to free yourself of the tethers, your cable internet or your DSL, this thing is a gas, especially if you live in a 3G area. On top of that, you can just pick the whole thing up, take it to your office, your vacation home in the Bahamas, your uncle's house in Hong Kong, and use it there. The cool of cool. Although your uncle might not let you leave with it when you go home again....
So in my last entry I told you my just acquired 3G/WiFi router wouldn't talk to my Motorola V1100, but does use my Nokia 6110 cellphone. Shortly after writing that, I downloaded the firmware update I found at Level One's website - and now the V1100 works too! In fact, it works better than the Nokia did. It has 87% signal strength, where the Nokia didn't get beyond 47%, but even more importantly, it requires no dialing instructions or setup commands. That is surprising - I know that some 3G modems make a direct IP connection with GSM networks, there is a protocol in GSM that permits data-only connections, but I have not seen that in a cellphone.
I should add to that that the D-Link DIR-451
Don't all run out to buy a V1100, either - it is made exclusively for British Vodafone, and as far as I can discern was only sold in the UK, Spain, and in some Asian locales. Vodafone discontinued it, even though it is fully state of the art, Motorola still updates its software. Motorola has a "Phone Tools" application you can buy online, that can sync its phones with Outlook and some other PIMs, and connect your laptop to wireless broadband. UNfortunately, the application costs a whopping $49.99 (a good way to alienate your customers - when I bought it, it was $24.99, which is reasonable - and Nokia's PC Suite is free, to all..). Not only that, here is Motorola's Verizon disclaimer: Verizon customers: all multimedia and Internet connection features are disabled due to carrier request. Please contact your service provider for further information. I am a GSM freak anyway, as I like my phones to work anywhere in the world, but if I needed a reason to not be a Verizon Wireless customer, this would be it. I have been able to tether my handsets since T-Mobile still was Voicestream, without any restrictions. Even if I thought a handheld Macintosh was a good idea - and I don't - I wouldn't want an iPhone, since I can't use it as a digital modem.
I don't know how anyone can accept that a carrier and a vendor decide what you can and cannot do with a cellphone. Think about it - digital cellular networks have been able to provide you with internet connectivity for decades, so what many carriers, especially in the United States, have done, is disable that facility and sell you a separate data device, with an additional subscription, to do what you could do with your handset, if they had not - in collusion between the manufacturer and the carrier - crippled it. I have bought most of my handsets overseas, but even the ones I have gotten here, from T-Mobile, are all capable of data modem functionality. It is probably the most important development in cellular technology - your cellphone is both a voice phone and your own personal broadband modem, that you can use by itself, or connected to your laptop or PC.
The CEOs of the companies that provide our wireless facilities do not, by and large, have the basic understanding that if you charge your customer what you say you will charge them, and make them find out that the stuff they thought they could do with their new device has in fact been deliberately disabled, and they have to spend more money to get this working, they're going to not be happy. Pretending you have a good deal, then basically lying and conniving your way into the customer's bank account, is something that does not do wonders for your company's reputation. The reason I am with T-Mobile (since before I went to work for Verizon) is that they provide me with the service, get me my SIM card, and I can buy equipment anywhere, and make it work. No hassles. You want to try that with Verizon, or Sprint. GSM is based on the SIM card, it is device-independent by design. Making money is something you do by providing good service - if you do it by ripping off your customers it will only work until those customers have an alternative. Ask Enron...
I got my new LG GT505 phone, by the way, an unlocked version of the phone Orange in the UK and France sells its customers. I have it working, GPS included, but not UMA yet, will tell you about it in a few.
This looks like an ordinary WiFi router, but it's not. The Level One WBR-3800 3G Wireless Broadband Router
The purpose behind all this experimentation is that I am putting together a complete telecommunications-security package for the new house a friend of mine is building in the Northern Neck, here in Virginia. I didn't think it was necessary for him to take a cable internet subscription, like he has in his house here - he uses DirecTV satellite TV service, and so has no need for cable. As both he and his wife have mobile phones, I decided to convert him to "all wireless" - no wired phones, no cable or DSL internet, and no cable or Uverse TV.
He has no need for fast Internet, like the 10 megabits per second I have at home, and in most cases - all he does is read and write email - even EDGE, the service before 3G, is fast enough (EDGE and its predecessor GPRS are available on practically all GSM phones, and what is more important, on most GSM wireless networks in the world). For most purposes, like reading email, looking at ordinary webpages, and buying stuff online, an EDGE connection does fine. A 15 megabyte download might take twenty to thirty minutes, so you'd have to plan stuff like updating your Windows.
I had been playing with a different 3G router, the D-Link DIR-451
Still, the Level One router is a lot more sophisticated - especially the ability to use it as an ordinary cable/DSL router, with 3G as an automatic fallback option, is great. But, where you have a fast 3G network, like London, or Singapore, you could have 3G as the primary, with a slow cable connection as a backup. We'll see. Great devices, both of them, as all laptops have WiFi these days, not to have to tether yours to a phone is chocolate ice cream, as far as I am concerned.
A caveat with the broadband speeds is when you have a need to run live HD (1080i) video, say, from Youtube. I can run that without hiccups, at 10 Mbps, on my cable connection. Any speed below that, even if we get 3.5G in the US, like they have in Singapore, Hong Kong and London - that runs at a maximum speed of 7.2 Mbps, and that may occasionally hiccup, especially since 3G internet is "bursty".
Referring back to the Acer in Tuesday's musings, the dizzying speed with which technology evolves is fast becoming supersonic - the only way the industry can think of selling us more stuff is making the old stuff more advanced. Gadgets have a half life of maybe six months now, if you want to see where that will lead the only thing you need to do is look at the American car industry over the past year. Americans were never very good at building and then adopting the latest technologies - we invented a lot, but building and marketing it is quite a different kettle of fish. The iPhone is nice (although I continue to insist it is a handheld Macintosh, not a cellphone), but can you think of anything else we've produced, in recent years, that took over the world? Ford dropped an entire Japanese drivetrain into the Ford Escape, the first hybrid SUV on the market (although I've seen plenty of hybrid Toyota vans in Asia, which makes more sense than sticking a single commuter in a Prius), and I expect that the small fourbanger engine in the Escape is actually from Ford Germany, that's not a product we have the expertise to build.
I am assuming, at any rate, that the Droid isn't confined to Verizon, but will soon be in the hands of Vodafone - it may well end up being a hybrid CDMA/GSM phone, if you look at the chipset. Why else would anyone build such an advanced piece of technology - surely not to put it only on Verizon's obsolete CDMA network... I've just ordered a high end GSM/3G/WiFi/GPS LG phone, another one of those not sold in the United States, the LG GT505, which has everything the Nokia does, but with WiFi added, and includes UMA (the ability to place calls over WiFi) and I'll let you know once I get it how it does. Although many phones are described as "GPS phones" by carriers and manufacturers, most are not. They have a GPs receiver built in, a Federal mandate that allows carriers to pinpoint the location of a cellphone, and you can use that technology to download maps and do directions. That is, I expect, how the LG functions. But the Nokia 6110 is a true GPS unit - the GPS, with maps preloaded on memory cards, can be used without activating the phone, mine came with the Route66 application, and some Asian and African maps (it is the Philippine version). All I had to do was buy U.S. and European maps, and load those using a PC. The nice thing about this approach is that you always have your GPS, you can use it walking, in rental cars, nothing extra to carry. It is still very much state of the art, with 3.5G networking, video conferencing, the works.
Windows 7 is new technology too, I suppose - this finds me trying to back up my new li'l Acer to BD disk (that is the Blu-Ray data format). Having installed everything I need on the Acer, which, with its 10.6 inch screen and diminutive size, replaces the Everex SA2053T I was using as my travel-subnotebook, there is some 46 gigabytes of operating system and software installed. That's right, that does not include any data or anything else. This is my base load.
So when using the backup application Microsoft (finally!) includes with the operating system - although, in Win7 Home Premium, it will not write to network devices, whereas Win7 Professional and Ultimate will - I am faced with having to back up to six or more DVDs. Not good, methinks, too risky, and as I have a Blu-Ray external writable drive
So far, the backup is failing at verify stage, I think probably because Win7 does not understand the Blu-Ray write format. I may next have to format a disk using the Nero application that came with the drive (backup uses Windows' own format utility, which probably doesn't officially yet know about Blu-Ray), see if that works better. Seriously, if you know what is good for you it is time to get an external Blu-Ray drive, if your PC or laptop has an HDMI digital video/audio port
I have studiously stayed away from netbooks, apart from the little Everex $299 Linux-model I tried - it lost its wireless network adapter after a couple of hours, and nothing I did could bring it back. I am a great believer in small laptops, but have stuck with my Everex SA2053T because I think even a subnotebook should have a normal processor, and a normal operating system.
It looks to me like Acer, once a messy Asian manufacturer of cheap crap, has figured it out, though. Their Aspire 1410 looks and feels like a netbook, but it is in fact a complete fully functional laptop, with a Celeron dual core processor, and - dig this - 64 bit architecture. Not only that, I actually comes with 64 bit Windows 7, and although Acer says it won't take more than 4 GB of memory, in the form of 2 2 GB modules, mine happily accepts 4 GB modules, and now has 8 GB of memory, all of which available to the 64 bit operating system. It delivers more video memory than Acer says, too - not 796, but a stunning 1695 MB. With that, it sports an HDMI output port for HD video and Dolby 5.1 audio, a hybrid audio port (analog as well as Dolby passthrough optical digital!) and 802.11N wireless networking. The mind boggles, and the thing positively flies. It is a stunning piece of technology - I would state that if it cost $899, but it doesn't - it costs, with 2 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard disk, all of - $399!
Add a $25 wireless keyboard/mouse combo, and a $300 1080p LCD TV as a monitor, and you have the best of all three worlds - netbook, laptop and desktop. Acer has it it'll run for up to 6 hours on a charge, I've not tested that as yet, the battery needs to go through a couple of deep drain cycles before it will be at its max. It comes without internal optical drive, I have it hanging off a Buffalo external Blu-Ray drive, which is just about bigger than the entire Acer is.
The technologies coming out of China (although Acer is Taiwanese, officially) are slowly beginning to significantly outstrip anything anybody else creates. I wrote earlier about the all-electronic Haier small washer/dryer-in-one, running on regular 115VAC, with an evaporative drier that needs no vent, now this PC you can just about stick in your coat pocket - we cannot, now, hope to catch up with their development labs. Like, ever.
Google drives me up the wall. I (this site) dropped out of the search results, I am assuming, when the Freeservers hoster got hacked - or rather, its Wordpress implementation. I moved my domains, as well as all of my hosting, to Network Solutions, and abandoned Wordpress altogether, there are just too many hackers that know how to break Wordpress' security, which is easy, anyway. But I can't get the domain back into Google's search results, which is ridiculous. I've owned this domain since the late '80s, so it should be somewhere. But it is nowhere. And so I can only conclude Google's search engine has a hole in it.
It pays to occasionally Google yourself, by the way. Doing that, I found my name in Wikiname, and from there to something called Spock.com, a people search engine run by Naveen Jain of Intelius "fame". Infospace, its predecessor, used to run White Pages databases for some phone companies, but these people have gone beyond that - I found myself, complete with home town, facial portrait, religion, year of birth, astrological sign, and some ancillary information, out in the public domain, more than enough information for a determined hacker to break my identity. I personally don't think anybody should be publishing this information, especially not if they got their original information from commercial clients. So - if you find yourself on Spock.com, use their removal dialog. They must know they are doing something not quite kosher, because the listing had disappeared two hours after my complaint. That's gotta be a record. Especially the recognizable portrait gave me concerns - no software found that. An Intelius staffer took it from one of my websites, and did so deliberately, picking a shot that provided a full on recognizable face shot. If nothing else, that is a copyright breach. Watch them.
Watching a 1981 James Bond movie on Universal HD, I notice that even though it looks very crisp, it is not quite as sharp as the Late Late Show - Craig, you've got to do something about your makeup, get an HD makeup artist or sumtin' - which leads to the amazing conclusion that TV now has a higher resolution than whatever they used to call it - 70mm TODD-AO, if memory serves me, or whatever they used in the cinema. That means that we've finally reached the point where some digital media have a higher resolution than optical - although a 35mm slide still contains more data than even the highest resolution digital camera, something like 64 megapixels.
I've said goodbye to Stargate Universe, MGM's new science fiction series - though well made, the storyline seems to spend untold hours exploring the various warped (warp drive, get it?) personalities of the main characters, not helped by their ability to mentally traverse back and forth to Earth in the body of another person, and you then have to remember which person they're in, because you get to only see the person undergoing the transference. Watching the third or fourth episode on my Tivo I got so bored with this stuff I erased the recording after fifteen minutes. I don't mind personalities in my sci-fi stories, but this is more or less a lunatic asylum, with everybody needing treatment and counseling, this all justified because they have been stuck together on an alien spaceship completely by chance. I think I'll go back to the BBC's Dr. Who, in reruns on SciFi, too, at least a few interesting accents there from the British Isles.
It is nice when things work. The rebuild I did on my well water plant - see October 26 - works really well - I need to replace one pressure coupling that leaks a little bit - it moved to right behind the pump, and I think it just can't handle the raw pressure. But water delivery is very smooth. I found out what the problem was when I took down the old pressure tank - checking the air pressure, I found water coming out of the nipple, meaning the air bladder had been punctured. The pressure was something like 50 PSI, so it must have resealed, but water does not compress, and so it won't have been working for some time, probably years.
The woodstove is cranking - I did not clean the chimney this year, a visual check in the spring did not show much in the way of creosote deposit, since this is a high efficiency stove, and running that at optimal heat does keep the chimney clean. Once there is a good buildup of hot charcoal on the stove bed the thing - one of the newer technology stoves that preheats combustion air - runs something like eight hours on a full load of wood, which is really amazing. I have to be more diligent and switch to the woodstove from the heat pumps quicker - it saves tons of money, although I have managed to reduce the cost of running the heat pumps a bit by adding a higher efficiency pump, which sits at the rear cold side of the house, and pumps a localized 18,000 BTUs of heat into the family room and the upstairs ducting. Whole floor pumps are nice, but they are controlled by a single thermostat, so are likely to create hot and cold spots, which is not a very efficient way of heating. The cost was not huge - this Soleus window/wall unit, with a 9 EER, only cost me around $600. Don't get confused by the mention of "electric heat" in the ad - once the outside temperature drops below 40° Fahrenheit the coil would freeze, so it switches to (expensive) electric heat. But at that point I have the woodstove cranking, so I can turn it off.
It took me a while, but I have finally gotten to the point I can begin putting some of the stuff I want to sell on Ebay. I decided to do it right and set up a small photography studio - not a stretch, since I had the equipment, strobes, cameras, filters etc. It was a matter of getting a room ready, putting in a backdrop, testing the lighting, and preparing a catalogue, so I can keep track of things - who knows, if I like the online selling, maybe I can do more of that. I've had an Ebay account for yonks, after all, just never did anything with it, and lord knows I have enough accumulated stuff sitting around this huge house.
When I look at cars being advertised with "72 month 0% financing", and incentives to buy humongous SUVs that could easily double as schoolbuses, I can't escape the impression that we have not learned from the past financial collapse. We're still selling things people don't need to people that can't afford them. That's what led to the past recession, the implosion of our economy.
There is no such thing as "0% financing". Borrowing money costs money, so the buyer pays for that. It is nothing but a slogan - one that is designed to be deceptive. I had been hoping that we would begin to tackle deceptive financial practices - remember the "interest only" mortgages, where the mortgage principal actually increased, as it was not paid down? In the European Union rules are being enacted that force lenders to actually prove their claims are true - if your company says they are giving you a 0% loan, your company has to prove that there actually is no interest or finance charge on the original price of the vehicle. Which means that if you buy the car cash, you pay exactly the same $$s as you do when you have the car financed. Because selling things to people who cannot afford them serves only one purpose - shoring up your stock price, as the spreadsheet shows your revenues to include those made on loans that will not be satisfied. Perhaps we should make that illegal - each loan amount (principal and interest!) that is defaulted on much be taken out of the revenue number - regardless of whether that is a third party loan, an asset package that has been sold, or a car paid for through a mortgage refinance. The information is out there - the credit bureaus have all that.
Don't you think?
The 47 inch Vizio LCD TV I bought a couple of weeks ago (see October 20, below) is no more. It began to develop green shimmer in the deep black screen areas, and after I found out from the Tiger Direct website that this is a common problem with this model, I took it back to BJ's, and swapped it for a more expensive Philips 47 inch model, which had been marked down $200, and so came out at the same $799 price. You're reading this right, that's another $200 off the discounted price their website shows - I have found that BJ's often has items marked way down in the store, and this is a good example. BJs tends to make sure of rock bottom prices for brand name merchandise, rather than an extended assortment.
I have to tell you this set is markedly better than the Vizio. For one thing, I like the screen display better than the Vizio's - the LCD is just a little bit "softer" in terms of skin tones and pastels, although it may well be that those of you who have HD to watch ballgames may may prefer the Vizio. I found particularly the scaled up older TV series to come out brilliantly on the Philips. But that isn't where the story ends - the Philips has a number of features that are important to me, features the Vizio does not have.
It is virtually impossible to research all this beforehand - some of it is not exactly documented. Take the HDMI audio, for instance - neither the Vizio nor the Philips have a Dolby decoder built in, not an issue, since I use a standalone Dolby amplifier system, but the Vizio doesn't pass the digital audio signal it receives on its HDMI input out to its digital output port. It only outputs digital audio from its own tuner, and as I use a TiVo HD
The Philips, however, does pass through the HDMI digital audio, which requires some processing inside the box. Brilliant, that, it means I can really use the Philips as an HDMI hub, no more switching back and forth between audio inputs on the Atlona AT-HD41D
Something the Vizio has, and the Philips does not, is PIP, picture-in-picture, so if you're wanting to watch Monk while you're keeping an eye on the Redskins game, better buy the Vizio. On that front, the Vizio has a PC (VGA) input port, as well, which the Philips does not have, so unless your PC has an HDMI-out port, you can't connect it to the Philips. Other than that, the Philips is considerably heavier than the Vizio, which makes it more of a pain to set up (or repackage it to take back to the store, as I had to do, on my own, with the Vizio) and means a greater risk if it gets knocked over - having said that, its stand is twice as large as the Vizio's. It has (compare the pictures here and on October 20) a much wider black bezel than the Vizio does, I personally don't like those black frames, they make the TV a rather prominent huge object in your living room. If you think a TV is furniture, you'll be happy, if you'd like the TV to be onobtrusive when it isn't turned on, not so good. Having said that, I don't know that anything that is more than 50 inches in diameter is ever onobtrusive...
The Philips auto-adjusts the brightness of its display according to the ambient light, a feature I love, since my set gets light from two windows. Note also that I have brightness scaled back on both sets, in my pictures, and that the shot I took of the Philips was taken straight-on with flash. This is impressive, kids. Honest. See how the picture gives the impression you are looking out the window overlooking Fenwick Park? That is what this display really looks like. Awesome.
I am completely blown away by Windows 7. Today I installed its "Professional" version
I run little software on this file server, so simply blew away the C: drive partitions, did a quick temporary XP install, necessary to be able to use the upgrade software, and then began a clean install of Win7. Once it had done its first install run, I changed the default settings to "find new drivers", and I'll be damned if it hadn't found and installed all of the drivers it had not had after the first run. Let me tell you how special this is: the PC I am running on is an older Everex desktop designed for Linux, and on top of that Everex as a company has since bitten the dust, so I have no access to any drivers for Windows, as I never had a Windows install for this machine, and their website went dead when they did.
Now it would have been unusual enough if Windows 7 had found all of the necessary device drivers for motherboard and attached storage devices, but it then went one better on me: not only did it find and recognize all devices, it then went and found the driver for my Sabrent SATARaid disk controller
Vital in this process is that the "7" install can connect to the internet during the install - this goes for a new PC as much as it does for an upgrade. If you do not have the internet hookup ready and connected, the software you want to install handy, license keys at your elbow, don't start.
It looks to me that Microsoft has made a truly impressive effort to have network drivers included for most network cards known to man. You are best off connecting your PC or laptop to an Ethernet router, but I have to tell you that on my Lenovo laptop it found both the regular and the WiFi card, then presented me during the install with a choice of three wireless networks to connect to - I had never seen that happen before, swear to God. Windows 7 does something I had noticed in Vista on some occasions, but "7" does it consistently - it doesn't go out to look for drivers for the adapter, peripheral or other doodah it is installing, it goes into the device, figures out whose chipset it uses, then installs a driver for that. This makes very good sense - there are only a few manufacturers of graphics chipsets, for instance, and most manufacturers of graphics adapters use one of those OEM chipsets. Since Microsoft has working relationships with all of those chipset manufacturers, it has the information as well as the software to "drive" those chipsets. To give you an example, Windows 7 does not care whether you bought your drive array from Fantom or from Cavalier - it recognizes, "knows", there are Western Digital hard disks in the enclosure, and is able to drive those direct. Teehee, problem solved.
So the consequence - I have now installed "7", one Ultimate, one Professional, on two systems, neither of which I had drivers for - is that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to go out and buy a new system "with a free upgrade". Back up your stuff, clean up your existing install, and chances are you'll be running Windows 7 by the end of the afternoon (I tested this earlier with the 7 Beta on a positively ancient HP laptop, and it worked there too)! That was the other eye opener - it normally takes me anywhere from six to ten hours to fully install an operating system, much of the time taken by downloading and installing online upgrades, and online upgrades to the online upgrades - "7" took me exactly two hours and fourty-three minutes to install, including updates, down to and including making the network drives visible to the network, and mounting them on my other systems. That's gotta be a record, kids - for the first time, ever - and I am including Apple's Snow Leopard here! - I did not have to go and look for a single device or adapter driver to get Windows 7 to run properly. It even recognized my Samsung network laser printer across the network, and offered to install its drivers (I chose not to, so can't tell you it worked), which aren't exactly standard.
I have seen a few reviews of "7" that exhort you to be cautious, not to install Windows 7 as an upgrade on older computers that have not been certified by Microsoft, preferably buy a PC or laptop that either is preloaded, or certified and "upgradable", but I can't agree with any of that. I had tried the Windows 7 Beta Microsoft has made available on several CPUs, over the past six or so months, and had the experience that that ran on just about anything I wanted to throw it at, but the production release is even smoother than that, and I can tell you from experience that no previous version of Windows has been that compatible. With Windows XP, it would often take a lot of work and tweaking to get it to run on some machines - Windows Vista was better, but not problem free - I have to say that Vista was pretty smooth about a year after it was first introduced, when I began using it - but Windows 7 is a revelation. Apart from installing very smoothly, "7" seems faster than any previous version of Windows - I noticed this especially on the Everex desktop I am reporting on here, which has an anemic processor and can only handle 2 GB of RAM, and yet runs like a bat out of hell, where on Vista, previously, and even on the Windows 7 final Beta, the thing crawled. As I am only using it as a network file server, mostly for backups, that wasn't an issue, but I can now use it for other things as well, such as controlling my house lighting and alarm system.
What remains is for me to upgrade my little Everex laptop, which I will do with Vista and applications in place, provided Windows 7 will upgrade Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional "in place". Watch this space, but so far, so (very) good.
I've been somewhat incommunicado as I am installing Windows 7, released last week and delivered to me on Monday, on both my laptops, and this is, as always, a bit of an operation. The good news is that this operating system is much easier to install than any previous version of Windows - and I have worked on every single version of Microsoft Windows since the very first, way back when I was working on Wall Street. But I have made my life more difficult by loading a 64 bit version of Windows on my Lenovo laptop, which is 64 bit capable but came only with a very basic 32 bit Home Basic version of Vista, and my other (travel) laptop is an Everex SA2053T, and as Everex has closed shop drivers for this system are no longer available. Thankfully I have the original setup disk for the Everex, but as both versions of Windows I pre-ordered from Amazon are upgrades, both my laptops had to have the original OEM software installed - OEM is whatever the Original Equipment Manufacturer delivered with it.
While I can, according to Microsoft, technically upgrade the Everex without losing data or installed software, I thought I would make that process more foolproof by completely reinstalling the Vista Home Premium that came with it, and as the machine is several years old that meant running online updates on it for hours - Windows 7 Upgrade expects to find a fully patched version of Vista (you can upgrade from XP, but that means a clean new install, all of your software will need reinstalling afterwards, although it will retain your files). The Lenovo was more complicated - 64 bit Win7 won't upgrade 32 bit Vista in place, requiring a complete from-scratch install, although Vista must be installed for the upgrade software to work, and there aren't any device drivers for Windows 7 at Lenovo's website, as of yet.
Before most of that, however, you have to make sure (absolutely do this, kids!) you have a full recoverable backup of your original system load, just in case things go pearshaped and Windows 7 bombs. It is possible (unlikely, but possible) that some of the older software you use doesn't run under Windows 7, and if you absolutely need that software you don't have a choice. Secondarily, and this is more unique to me, 64 bit Windows won't necessarily run all 32 bit Windows software - there are even some 32 bit device drivers that will not work on anything 64 bit. 64 bit operating systems, by the way, on machines that are capable of running them, runs many times faster than 32 bit operating systems. Not only that, but where 32 bit Windows, on an Intel processor, cannot use more than 4 megabytes of RAM memory (and in fact only uses 3.2 megabytes for running programs), a 64 bit operating system can actually address a virtually unlimited amount of memory - in the case of my Lenovo, the largest memory chips it will take are 4 megabytes, so I have 8 usable megabytes of RAM available in the two slots the machine has. That, too, is a major boon for the heavy user - 4 megabytes isn't actually all that much, for today's memory intensive software.
So, for the moment, I can only tell you about the from-scratch install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit (both the Windows Ultimate and Windows Professional upgrades come with 32 and 64 bit DVDs). If you are contemplating an update, check back with the manufacturer of your laptop or PC, it may be 64 bit capable. Having said that, I believe that only those reasonably conversant with Microsoft Windows and its innards (or "Windows internals" as we call it in the trade) should attempt such an upgrade - you will almost certainly run into driver problems, and if you don't know how to resolve those (I am referring to internal drivers here, the drivers necessary to make your computer and its components, such as the graphics chip and the DVD drive, work) you shouldn't try this at all, or be prepared to spend a day or more trying to get it to work, then reinstalling the old operating system. That, in itself, if you have not ever done it before, you should learn first.
I seem to have worked up my second and third and fourth winds all at the same time, doing repairs all over the house, having a big spring, well, fall cleaning, revamping my home theatre setup for the sixth or tenth time, finally setting up my photographic and video studios, all things I bought the gear for at one time or another, and then left them sit, distracted by the next project.
So I am not displeased, at all. Preparing the house for winter, building a huge woodpile, and cut more trees (many dead already) that lie in the woods, seasoning, so I can get out there and maintain my physical exercise regime, over the fall and winter months. The funny thing is, I feel like I am more organized than I've been in a long time - for the period since I stopped working for a living, that is. And since my last overseas trip I am back to normal sleeping hours, as well - I had been sliding towards spending the night doing stuff on the internet, and sleeping into mid-morning, something I hate doing, as that is not the schedule the world keeps.
I've finally built my well water plant the way I wanted it - when I bought the house, the only thing installed was a acid treatment tank, and only later did I find out they had, probably in the distant past, bypassed it. The elderly couple I bought the house from had probably not had a great deal of money - I found out that filling the new tank I had installed with calcite to the prescribed level costs some $300.. the pool was disused to the point that I had to replace the liner, and one heat pump was DOA. But it's all been fixed, and as this house is an ideal family home (no point in buying a small house and then expecting to sell it to a military officer or executive with a family) all the replacement appliances I put in are big and industrial strength.
So the water plant now has as distribution point right behind the pump (no point treating water you're going to use for the lawn or the car), then a GE SmartWater Whole House
Coming back to the 47" LCD television I just bought, I noticed an Energy Star sticker on the TV, and mention of it on the box. Cool, eh? Thing only uses 200 or so watts.
But hold on - a 47" Eco-TV? Does that make sense? Is it crap? Is "Eco" not about energy savings and global non-warming? How does a huuuge 47" TV set fit into that? Think about it - who needs 47 inches, 120 cm, of TV? Should we not slowly factor in that size and power are a function of wastefullness? Take hybrid vehicles: the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid has - hold on to your head - a 6 litre V-8 with 332 horses. Hybrid? We give people tax rebates for buying a freakin' tank? I personally think we need to rethink the CFLs and 50" TVs and hybrid school buses - if it's Eco, it should be Eco all the way, cap it somewhere, 35" TV, hybrids only with 4 cylinder gas engines, CFLs only if they consume 10 watts or less. Something like that, what do you think?
If you'd like your laptop to run a whole lot faster (under Windows Vista, I have not tested this under any other operating system) get a Kingston solid state hard drive. I am not certain exactly how it does it, but installing the Kingston SSDNow V-Series SATA2
Some aspects of Microsoft Windows run significantly better when it is installed on a large hard disk, or a particularly fast one, I knew that, but I had never seen a computer gain significant overall speed as a result of installing a particular type of disk. I'll conjecture the speed gain is related to the way the memory and disk drivers interact - a solid state disk, after all, is memory too, but that's about as far as I can figure. The speed increase is significant - I estimate this laptop now runs twice as fast as when I got it.
One iffy issue is the bad experience I had with the Crucial disk - is this standard for solid state disks? Only time can tell, and I guess I will have to back up on a daily basis, and see if this type of failure is endemic or not, and back up like a crazyman.
For those of you who have followed my exploits with regard to HD television, HDMI interfaces, and Digital Dolby audio - I have always had an interest in home theatre, buying a Dolby capable Digital VHS recorder, the forerunner of the DVR, as far back as 2000 - I have finally caved and bought a full size HD LCD television set. The primary reason was that I was working with HDMI interfaces on computers, and found that the early flat panel TVs I was using, which are fitted with the DVI interface, do not have the HDCP chip, which is the digital watchdog that manages "protected content", and in one case did not have the horizontal frequence output by an HDMI converter.
This really is not a valid reason to go out and spend close to $1,000 on a television set, but I am both anal and a technology buff, so I took a laptop and the HDMI box into BJ's and tested it against the Vizio 47" LCD set they had on offer for $799. Sure enough, what would not work with the three DVI screens I own, which I assume top out at 60Hz, worked fine with the Vizio, which has a maximum horizontal frequency of 120Hz. So, sold, I said to the sales person, who stood there with his eyeballs hanging out" "I didn't know you could do that!". That, of course, left me wondering what he was doing selling advanced television sets.
But it is true - HDMI signals the convergence of video and computer equipment, to the Vizio VO47LFHDTV30A I just bought you can connect anything, from a cable box to a laptop, in any of five different ways (the link points to a refurbished Vizio, I can't find it listed new anywhere). This is, by the way, a good time to buy, well ahead of the holidays. I have a sneaking suspicion that prices will begin going up when we get closer to the holidays, and you won't have any choice but to go out and buy stuff. Not for nothing has Wal-Mart begun to stunt with toy prices already - not that that affects me, I buy gifts all year, when I come across nice things that are relatively cheap, and they go in the closet for birthdays and the holidays.
I don't have a small living room, but this 47" Vizio is huge - not helped by the black bezel, they all seem to have that, and it is butt-ugly. I suppose if you had a TV mounted on the wall on the narrow end of the living room or family room, you could go to 50" or higher (for my overseas readers, 47 inches is 120 centimetres), but I am not seeing how you can get a better image than what I am looking at, unless you live in a castel and are watching across a 4,000 square foot hall. And while I was plenty impressed with the 720p resolution I had before, 1080p is an order of magnitude better. Provided, of course, whatever it is you are watching was actually recorded in HD - most material is not. Even relatively recently digitized movies aren't up to full HD standard - being able to count the hairs on someone's arm was never the goal, in the cinema.
So I am pretty pleased with this $799 "thing" - bear in mind it does not have Dolby audio, but I had that separately, in my existing audio system. It is possible to take the digital audio signal (optical or coaxial) and splice that off from your cable box or (in my case) Tivo to an advanced Dolby decoder/amplifier. I am using an Atlona HDMI switch
Back home, the grindstone awaits - more firewood preparation. While I have enough for this winter, it is good to maintain the momentum, there are plenty of trees down, although I have to figure out a different place to stack, the side of the house I have been using is full. And no sooner am I home or one of the few remaining copper water pipes in the crawlspace springs a leak - until I bought this house with its well water, I never knew that ground water can be acid enough to eat through metal. While I should have replaced all of the copper with plastic, I have used the opportunity to install a new pressure tank, a new acid control tank, and learn to use the chemicals used to condition the water.
I find this stuff fascinating, things I know nothing about, and engineering that is at the core of housing, urban development and home building. I intend to, over time, make this house as self-sufficient as I can, from a solar roof to wood fired hot water and central heating, and perhaps geothermal heating and A/C. I found I can probably get geothermal heat pumps for installation, replacing the air pumps I have, for something like $2,000 apiece - a good investment with regard to the resale value of the house. Not this year, though.
Looks like I'll be plenty busy the rest of the year - I just got an email about a New York lab reunion, I guess I will use the opportunity to spend a few days and see some friends I've been neglecting, while former colleagues seem to be cropping up all over Asia Pacific, so I probably ought to prepare for another trip - friend D. and I talked about this over lunch, earlier in the week, and he seems to be wanting to head in the same direction around the same time - we've made several of these trips together.
Turns out a member of my family has retired to Indonesia, so I will likely use that trip to pay him a visit, it is somebody I don't think I've seen in over fourty years. And there is still the stuff I need to ut on Ebay - at least I've set up my little studio now, strobes, backdrop an' all, so I can do some halfway decent photography.
With nighttime temperature in the fourties, I have fired up the woodstove, so I can do a creosote removal burn with one of those wonderful logs, something best done once the stove, flue and chimney are at operating temperature. Yep, plenty to get on with...
Taking a stroll and some pictures near the Osdorpplein in Amsterdam, I was accosted by the Muslim woman on the left, who asked me if I was taking pictures of them. I told her no, I was taking pictures of the market - which was true, although I wasn't exactly avoiding them either... She was friendly enough, apologized, and we all went our separate ways. Walking back to my sister's apartment, though, I thought how completely nonsensical this was - Western Europe is festooned with security cameras, in the street, in the shops, in public transport, cellphones, everywhere. If, as a Muslim, you're really worried about having your picture taken, moving to a Bedouin village is probably your only option - if you can find one without internet, which I think is probably hard by now.
I generally find Amsterdam much changed - for the first time since I have been visiting my sister in the suburb where she lives, I notice a large group of noisy and aggressive youths on scooters congregating at the park across the street. The Dutch press has had increasing reports of violence among youngsters, but I am seeing this effect with my own eyes now, and this isn't a group comprised of Moroccan immigrant "hangjongeren", as they are called in Dutch. Perhaps this will die down as summer recedes - I am here when the late summer evening is still balmy, the weather has been exceptional.
I find today's Amsterdam somewhat incongruous, anyway - on the one hand I see complaints about the city losing its place in the international lineup of desirable business cities, on the other hand Amsterdam's unwieldly government structure is doing its level best to "socialize" the city as much as it can - leading to ludicrous results. A number of years ago Amsterdam decided to devolve local government - city districts got their own democratically elected local councils, empowered and all. This has led to different parking regulations in different parts of the city, proposals like banning older, more polluting vehicles from the city altogether, and other measures basically designed to ensure quality of life by impairing anything that doesn't revolve around bicycles and walking. The councils are trying to ban patio heaters at sidewalk cafes, and when I accompanied my sister to an operatic rehearsal, parking for two hours in a largely empty street nowhere near a traffic artery, cost me €19, some US$28 - in the evening! What is the problem with the local councils? They are composed mostly of novice politicians, folks with little experience but local affairs and running for office, and with no concept of balancing a revenue with control of the human environment. They are completely oblivious, for instance, that there is no such thing as "local" pollution - Amsterdam is far too small to have a local ecology, its locale is not bounded by natural features, and it has no industry to speak of.
I can tell you, this visit, that I am not surprised that Amsterdam is losing in popularity - let's say I am advising a corporation about where to put its European headquarters, would I recommend they do so in a city with a growing and increasingly aggressive Muslim population, an increasingly violent North African and Caribbean population, local ordinances that make it prohibitively expensive to own and drive a car, and random police blockades (I got caught in one during my last visit here - first time ever, in any city in the world I have ever lived in, or visited) where motorists are pulled out, ID'd, their tax status verified, and pedestrians frisked for weapons involuntarily? Umm, maybe not... To the visitor and observer, these factoids mean that Amsterdam has lost control of its safety and security.
As I am writing this, the Amsterdam daily Het Parool quotes a confidential note from an alderman who reports that "because of the increase in parking fees, parking revenues have plunged, in the first half of 2009" - instead of 136,7 Euros, the city only took 124.1 million Euros, a drop of almost 10%. And what is yet to be determined, is if fewer meter-parked cars means fewer people visit and spend money in Amsterdam. I suspect that is the case - drivers are used to taking the car to wherever they want to go, I do - I rented a car at Schiphol Airport. And with two exceptions, I did everything I wanted to do outside of Amsterdam, including dinner with a friend, and shopping. The big joke in this is that the funds not now available had been earmarked for... further elimination of the motor car from the inner city. Dig this: only a few days ago the government gave a number of Dutch cities permission to use different parking tariffs for "dirty" cars.
I can tell the Amsterdam council fathers what they're achieving: they'll push a large proportion of vehicles and truck traffic out of the city. And with that, the people and business that come with those cars and trucks. If Amsterdam had a decent subway, that wouldn't matter, but all the city has is a few lines that bring commuters into town from the suburbs. Go figure.
I managed to catch the current Star Trek movie, the prequel that was released in May, on the plane over. Very well made, some incongruous stuff that the post-Star Trek generation probably won't worry about, but up to date where production techniques and computer graphics are concerned. I tend to not go to the cinema a lot, preferring instead to wait until movies get to my home screens in some way, one advantage being I can re-run, and re-view, whatever it is I watch. It is a different Star Trek, that's for sure, and if I am to believe the publicity it was the highest grossing Star Trek ever - so, perhaps, the Star Trek franchise has been given a new lease on life? Just the elder Spock encountering his younger self is a gross violation of the laws of science fiction, of course - that invariably leads to changes in the timeline that can't be rolled back - mind you, it happens at the very end of the movie, so perhaps it was for a purpose.
I must say that the LCD screens installed on the Boeing 777 (I have encountered them on other airlines flying the "triple seven") are lousy, and the control units a complete joke. On two airlines, British Airways and twice on Air Canada, I have sat through a reboot of the entertainment system, when some passengers could get no service, when you find out that the entertainment system controls everything that is controlled from the passenger panel - including the overhead lighting and the attendant call buttons. On Air Canada, they couldn't show the safety video - at all.... Interestingly, Air Canada has opted to install a system that includes a 110VAC power point in the seatback, allowing all passengers to run their DVD players, video games and laptops using aircraft power. This is a smart move - nobody I know will upgrade their seat to get to business class, where you can plug in your laptop, but I can see why I would fly Air Canada, rather than United, as having the ability to power your laptop on a fourteen hour flight is a nice perk.
But I digress. I had to renew my Privium Dutch electronic passport - if you travel to Europe on a regular basis, and your nationality is one of those that Privium allows, being able to bypass the immigration line, and being able to use business class checkin, could be a reason to become a member (apart from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport being one of the nicer and better stocked places to shop - high on my list, together with Singapore's Changi Airport). Privium now ties in with Holand Security's Global Entry system, which allows you to enter the US using Global Entry machines, and from the Privium website it appears that even as a visitor, you can sign up for both by becoming a Privium member, then going to the EU/US Flux website. I am not exactly sure how it works, though - I have been a Privium member for years, and as I became a Global Entry member earlier this year I don't have to do the Flux stuff. Check the Privium website, there is a link from there to Homeland Security, if you hate standing in line and talking to often rude immigration officers, like I do, these systems are a godsend.
Because I did not know if I needed to sign up for Flux as well, I called Dulles Airport Immigration, and was surprised when the Officer told me "No, you don't need to, we get the Privium information automatically". I guess that's a bit of a shortcut, but as Privium is run and owned by Schiphol Airport, and not by the Dutch government, they probably can do that. I am not happy about the way the U.S. government is waltzing all over my privacy - I don't know that my visiting my family is any of the government's business, and I don't have to tell them when I am visiting my aunt in Mobile, either, do I? I have a good understanding why they think it is necessary - being "there" on 9/11, and being part of the recovery afterwards - but I am not sure it achieves anything beyond building databases too massive to do anything useful with. I have not seen any evidence of terrorism suspects being apprehended because of all this data collecting capability they are putting in place. More terrorism suspects are being found and apprehended, but that is, I think, a function of governments putting more money and personnel into national and international security. Owell. Best we can do is be vigilant, and try and cooperate as best we can.
Visiting The Netherlands, my home country, this time was more of a catching up with the long lost - one cousin I didn't even know I had until a couple of years ago, and then yesterday I went down to Belgium to see an old friend I hadn't seen in years, although we do stay in touch. I love visiting Belgium because the food is out of this world, the Belgians share their food culture with the French. 6pm the tables are laid because that is dinner time, and the dinner folks stream in. We left a little after 9, nobody worries about how many sittings per table, you want to sit the rest of the evening on a cup of coffee (always espresso) or a pintje (not a pint, but a half pint of the local brew) that's fine too. We caught up, and my only regret is that I couldn't get a shot of a local police patrol car - blue-and-white Smarts, I kid you not.
The relative number of diesel cars on the roads here is huge, every other vehicle is diesel powered. I had never been given a diesel rental before, until this trip, they didn't even ask, nor is it really necessary, as there isn't any discernible difference between a gasoline Renault Clio and one with a diesel engine. The engine is a little more noisy when idling, but that it it, and the diesel definitely has more pulling power than the gas engine. I am averaging (not driving gently, exactly, and spending more than an hour in a traffic jam, on Sunday) an amazing 40 mpg, according to the dashboard dial. That's some 6 mpg over the average standard Obama wants to set for 2012 - which, unless he can force American car distributors to start selling small cheap cars in very large volumes, and make it more attractive for drivers in urban areas to choose small, ain't never gonna happen.
I've noticed in Europe as well as in Asia that vehicle manufacturers are experimenting a lot with new or different modes of transportation. There are hybrid vans in Asia, small (if not tiny) diesels in Europe, Tata is building the Nano, the cheapest car in the world, I could go on. And then I see there is, despite the collapse of the American car industry, nothing being done to innovate. Ford and GM are bringing a very few vehicles from their European operations over - something they could have done years ago, and could have done during the collapse, they could be on the streets now. But still, the expertise is simply not there. A recent article in the New York Times talks about the Ford Transit, and its sales since 2003 - it is unbelievable this article is written by someone who does not know that the Transit has been around for decades - I rented a Transit when I moved from the Netherlands to the UK, in 1979, but it has been in continuous production since.. 1965. And Ford is going to save the day by bringing the Transit to the US now?
It is the same syndrome I see in articles about GSM, 3G and other telecommunications technologies - nobody, proudly spearheaded by David Poque, has the slightest idea of what goes on in the more advanced markets, all of which are outside the US, and they're apparently unable to do the research, despite the internet, they go on and on about the iPhone and Verizon/Sprint/CDMA, completely oblivious to the presence of new and more advanced technologies in the overseas commercial marketplace. Take a look, if you will, at the Vodacom handset lineup for South Africa, not the most affluent nation, mostly phones that will work on any GSM network, anywhere in the world, including a good helping of 3G and 3.5G phones.
"No, doesn't surprise me" said my friends, hearing I dragged a Kärcher pressure washer back from The Netherlands "you're techno-crazy" (follow this link
The recent repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, the launch of Kepler, and other important astronomical developments spawned television programming about the universe, its origins, and the science of observing where you can't go. I find this fascinating, astronomy was a hobby of mine when I was in my teens, and radio astronomy began to yield astonishing results, the first survey of the radio heavens having been completed at Cambridge University in the 1950s.
I was watching a program about Black Holes, which apparently now are deemed to be habitually at the core of galaxies, the other day, when it occurred to me that the fact that looking out into deep space actually provides a view of the history as well as the future of the universe - all at the same time. Let's see, how do I put this into words..
If we stick to the "Big Bang" concept, our universe came into being out of an infinitely small infinitely massive "object", which began to spontaneously expand (you could postulate that this is part of a cycle, after a previous contraction, so not a random event, but let's keep it simple), and is continuing to expand, at an increasing rate. We are able to use telescopes of various kinds to look into the far reaches of space, hundreds of light years away, where the objects we see sent the images we see of them as many years ago as they are light years away. Whichever direction we look in, we can see that everything we see is either moving away from us, or we are moving away from it, depending on the direction of the expansion.
My confusion stems from the fact that, the further away an object appears to be, the older it is, and therefore, the closer it must have been to everything else, and to the core of the universe - IOW, it is no longer where we observe it. The issue here is that we're looking at the past, in whichever direction we look, a past in which the universe appeared much smaller than it is today.
What I am trying to say is that everything we observe was far closer together, when we observed it, than it is today, and that a nebula that is to us a billion lightyears away, has to have been traveling (or, at least, its matter has) for much more than a billion years, if we assume its matter has not traveled at the speed of light.
But it gets worse. We "see" only forms of radiation that are traveling towards us. They do this at a particular speed, which we can measure. But the source of the radiation, if our universe is expanding in all directions, had a forward speed, away from us, so the velocity we see is the radiation velocity minus the forward speed of the object. That means lots of paradoxical things - anything that isn't radating on our direction we can see, anything that travels away from us at the speed of light we'll never see, so there is probably a lot out there we cannot observe. So between all of the paradoxes, the universe may have an age of 13.7 billion light years, but a size (diameter) of some 78 billion light years. Which would indicate that any radiation that came our way just after the Big Bang has to travel 78 billion light years to get to the other side of the universe (or is this: to get back to where it came from? You get my drift?), but as it could only have begun traveling 13.7 billion years ago, it'll probably never get there, as the bits at the Big Bang started out at just about the speed of light, and so are traveling forwards faster than they are traveling backwards.
Or something. You see what I mean? I think I have just produced the worst explanation of anything, ever, but there it is. Now I am in Amsterdam and watching Top Gear, which I haven't in ages, so I am distracted - Jeremy Clarkson, in his inimitable verbal gymnastics, may be the most irrelevant car reviewer on the planet, but the program - oops, programme - is amusing.
See ya later..
Arriving at Heathrow Airport on my way to Amsterdam, my data modem soon found not one, but three 3G networks, and I soon realized many of these are running at 3.5G - 7.2 megabits per second. The same is the case in Amsterdam, at my sister's apartment in the suburbs. What that means is that we are falling behind ever more, in the United States, where I hear complaints from iPhone users about the speed, or lack thereof, of AT&T Wireless' 3G network. No such issue here in Europe - reading some newspapers on one of my 3G phones, network performance is as good as I have it at home in the US on a 10 MBPS network from Comcast. This is pretty stunning, and we're all the while being told about the 4G networks coming to us "real soon now". It's a joke - this is wireless cellular networking at full broadband speeds, and it is all over Europe and Asia Pacific. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the carriers do a lot of talking, but not a lot of delivering.
It is rather amazing that we think of 3G as something special, in the US, when in most other parts of the world it has been rolled out and is in competitive use all over. The picture here I took in a small seaside town in the very North of the Netherlands, not in an urban corridor - I can hear you say "of course Heathrow has 3G, being a very large international airport". We are simply way behind in implementing these technologies, to begin with because we have multiple different standards that are incompatible, where elsewhere, they simply have GSM and 3G, the same as all neighbouring countries and those 10,000 miles away. Especially the American press isn't getting the really very simple fact that you can buy a phone in the Philippines (which is where I got this Nokia 6110 Navigator in 2007), run the online update Nokia makes available for all of its markets, and use it just about everywhere with anything up to 3.5G. I use this phone everywhere, all over the world, including the U.S.
And it is 3G roaming I am showing you - I am using my U.S. T-Mobile account. Yes, says Verizon, we're going to 4G - sure they are. It is simply that Vodafone, the British firm that is the largest mobile carrier in the world, is a GSM carrier, and half owner of Verizon wireless, is implementing 4G out of 3.5G on its home and overseas GSM networks, and has somehow helped Verizon understand that they have to agree to use this. Verizon 4G is not an evolution of Verizon EVDO, it is the same 4G the GSM world will be implementing, when 3.5G (which runs at 7,2 megabits per second!) becomes too slow for the market. I remind you that 3.5G has been rolled out, I've been using it in both England and the Netherlands, this trip. I used it in Singapore two years ago. It is out there, on commercial networks.
In The Netherlands and London, it did not really matter what device I used - my Bandluxe C100 Expresscard 3.5G laptop data modem, bought in the U.S., my Nokia 6110 Navigator, bought in the Philippines, or my Motorola V1100 3G handset, bought in the U.S. (but manufactured for a Vodafone subsidiary in South Korea), they all work fine, and both the Nokia and the Motorola allow tethering, at 3G. Tethering is where you can use your phone as a data modem for your laptop or PC, connected to a USB port, or Bluetooth - it is easiest if you use interface software to do this - Nokia's is free at their website, Motorola you need to pay for, $25, if I recall - and all of it works fine, while the 3G speeds approach those of a cable modem (I am comparing with the cable connection at my sister's apartment in Amsterdam).
Much of what you read in the American press - problems with the iPhone, networks that don't work, specialized equipment you need to buy - is complete b***s***. Outside of the US, 3G phones (the GSM variety) are a dime a dozen, and they work, insofar as they are quadband, and have both WCDMA (UMTS)(nothing to do with CDMA) and HSDPA, they'll work anywhere - now including the U.S., Japan and South Korea. Many of these devices can be mail ordered in the United States, too - go to the Tiger Direct website, look for unlocked GSM phones, sort the list by price, and scroll down to where you find "3G" mentioned - today, that starts with the Motorola Razr V3xx, at $114.99 - it'll do the lot, from synchronizing with Outlook, reading pop mail, accessing 3G internet, tether, all you do is stick your AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile or Rogers SIM card in it, and you're away. The Motorolas will even charge from your USB port (which solves the charger conundrum), I have mine sitting here next to my laptop, as you can see in the picture on the left. Sure, if you want a cellphone on steroids, a handheld Macintosh, get an iPhone - at this point in time the clever marketeers at Apple have managed to put that device in the picture in the press, when for each iPhone 500,000 other handheld devices are sold, worldwide, that are much more compatible with international networks, and don't have any limitations on use - I can run Skype on my Nokia Navigator - not that I need to, my other Nokia phone has UMA, which T-Mobile supports, so I can use it to make free calls over WiFi, right here in Amsterdam, at home in Virginia, and at just about every Starbucks and McDonalds in the US.
The secret to all this? In most countries, making your network exclusive, and making your equipment exclusive to your network, is against the law - and guess what? The largest wireless carriers in the world are all foreign, mostly European, Vodafone up front - even though this has been going on for decades, American carriers have not, to this day, discovered that if you standardize on one technology, and make your networks interoperable, you make much more money than if you do what we have done in the U.S., make our networks proprietary. Vodafone (English) and T-Mobile (German) not only own a sizable chunk of the world's cellular networks, they own a large chunk of the American cellular market as well. We used to lead in technologies, and we frittered away our advantage by not looking how "they" did it. How stupid is that?
Before I get to my astronomy hobby horse, I used my recent disk failure as an excuse to do something I had't done before - back up to Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray isn't only a movie medium, you can buy BD disks that will work in the external BD drives that are made for this. I bought two from Buffalo Technologies - one can run the obsolete HD DVD format
I have to tell you years of experience with optical media have taught me one thing: never use them to back up essential data to. They are too iffy, unreliable, flaky, whatever you want to call it. Come back to a CD or DVD you wrote two years ago, and you have a reasonable chance of not being able to retrieve all of your data. I went to the trouble of doing double backups, a good idea at the best of times, but the write speeds of optical drives just eat too much precious time..
One problem is that you are likely to read an optical disk on a different drive, or even a different computer, and it is quite possible that the interface software is made by somebody different, too. So it is a crapshoot - yes, you can read your backup on the same drive, and the same PC, next week, but beyond that... So I set up a storage server, last year, and have been backing up over my network.
Trouble there is that the backups get massive - my Windows 64 laptop has 85 GB of software and data on it, and that is without any long term storage - that is on the server. Backing that up over WiFi takes a long time, and the AISBackup software I use creates ZIP archives, which in itself is a slow-ish process.
So, I decided to try a backup to Blu-Ray Disk - just two BD's should do it, 85 compressed GB will fit on two 25 GB BD's. From what I read, the Blu-Ray Disk is much more reliable than CD or DVD, hardier, in that it has a special coating that makes it difficult to scratch or otherwise damage, etc., and yada-yada. Not cheap - anywhere between between $4 and $10 a disk
So I will let you know. The first problem has occurred already - backing up to the HD-DVD/BD drive, which has only a USB port, the software did not know to let me change the disk when it was full, not in itself a huge problem, but then when I told it to finish and read all file checksums, the laptop treated me instantly to the Blue Screen of Death. So I have now switched to the other Buffalo drive, which can't do HD-DVDs, but has both a USB and an eSATA port. I am using the latter, it is a bit faster than the USB version - so far, so good... For vital functions, USB is not necessarily a good solution, as the vast majority of computer users use USB ports for various different functions, and the USB hub allocates shared bandwidth among all devices. When one of those devices tries to take precedence, strange stuff can happen.
Somewhat startlingly, the Chinese press reports that many of the laid off workers that repaired to their rural origins are once again moving to the industrial belts in the South. My main frustration is that I can't give you the link to the article, because it was published in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading newspaper, which is a subscription journal. Buying newspapers is something I stopped doing a long time ago, I have even ditched the Wall Street Journal, but the SCMP is a goldmine of information about mainland China, information I am sure I could get elsewhere if only I could read Chinese...
Preparing for my overseas trip, I was updating the software and utilities on my little Everex laptop. Everex went belly-up this summer, but the SA2053T I have been using for a couple of years now has been cheap and cheerful, and with its 10.5" screen little larger than a netbook, happily running Windows Vista.
In order to get a few more battery hours out of the thing, I had this summer replaced the 100 GB hard Fujitsu inside with a solid state disk, the 64 GB Crucial CT64GBFAA0. Not expensive, a solid state disk would consume less power, and I'd be able to turn on hibernation by simply shutting the lid, and as the solid state disk has no moving parts, I could put it in my bag without having to wait for it to shut down.
Until 4pm today. I came back from my Neighbourhood Watch school bus escort run, and it was sitting there with a boot screen, and a "Master Disk Failure" error. Not intermittent, it won't boot or even see the disk. I've ordered another solid state disk, from Kingston
So now I have to prep my other laptop, the much larger Lenovo N500, to take with me. What are you complaining about, you'll say, you have another laptop, but I lost a bunch of emails that don't look like they're on my backup, and I need to make some changes to the Lenovo that'll interfere with what it normally does, play Blu-Ray disks. Owell. At least I have something to take with...
The problem was not so much that the disk failed, but that I had not backed it up completely. The little Everex had slowed down talking to the network, recently, and although I had been running backups, they had not completed overnight, and I kinda pushed the problem away - stupid, since this was my very first solid state drive. Well, that's not entirely true, I had had some made, for testing, in Taiwan, back in my lab days, but those were never intended for production - this one, I ran 24/7, as I do with all of my systems.
Now, I am a compulsive backer-upper, but this one caught me, and I lost three months of email - a drag, because I used email to track my life, mostly. I have decades of experience dealing with hard disks, and my experience has been that if you do maintenance on a hard disk, you'll have plenty of warning when it begins to fail. I have not ever, in my extensive career as a systems engineer, seen a disk fail just like that - boom, gone. That's scary - I can tell you now I would, after this experience, never recommend a solid state disk to a customer. Sure, the jury is still out, I may be able to access it using the cloning kit I've just ordered, but even so, this technology may not be ready for the big time, even though there are plenty of netbooks that come with SSD's today. As SSD's use marginally more power than electro-mechanical hard disks as well, I really can't recommend you getting an SSD. Honestly - in all the years I have been doing this work, I've had a few drives fail, but I've never been unable to access the disk at all, and I have always been able to retrieve much or all of the data, after a crash. Will keep you posted as to success, or the lack thereof, in cloning this thing.
One of the significant equipment problems we have to solve is the need to update the devices we use. I noticed it again when talking to a family member recently, who balked when I even mentioned the need to update her GPS device before setting out on a trip to somewhere new. I do that religiously, but then I know too much. The average consumer has no conception that electronic devices are now manufactured all at once, in huge batches, and then they go into storage until they're sold. And that can be three months, or three years later. And by that time, the firmware and the software and the databases have been updated half a dozen times, drivers may have been updated - famously, the included software may update the driver, only to have your Apple or Windows computer insist there is yet another update - in the worst case scenario, your new device may not even work properly until the updates have been downloaded and installed. So - many consumers don't run regular updates, not understanding that the update they did not download may enable just what they wanted to do this time around, like a ZIP code change in a GPS, some landmark that has just been added, any of a number of things.
The problem would be solved if high speed wireless broadband would be built into each device as a matter of course, without any worries about whether that is 3G, Wimax or WiFi, and devices and software would connect and update automatically, as a first order of business, when activated. This would solve not only some of the problems users experience, but save a good deal of money in helpdesk support. I've seen only a few attempts at improving this - Nokia is increasingly building it into its software, but this would need 3G networks, which aren't readily available everywhere. Come to think of it, if hu-mans came with software updates, life might be a lot easier - imagine, dating age kids with E-Harmony already built in...
In many ways, we are only at the beginning of the computer era. That will not truly start until the computer is no longer visible, embedded in everything, from beds and refrigerators to doorknobs. When walls can be viewscreens one moment, solar panels the next, and you can "think at" your built-in PDA - smartphone, I suppose I should say, the PDA is history already.
Speaking of PDAs and smartphone, Motorola's Cliq looks like an interesting device, - I intend to get one as soon as T-Mobile puts them up. If indeed it provides seamless access to Social Networking sites, email, and everything else a non-professional internet user accesses several times a day, this could prove interesting - especially as it is compatible with both 3G and 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, a.k.a. 3.5G. At $100... As far as I can see this thing should even work in Japan, where nothing else you can get here does..
To the left you can see some more firewood gathered, deadwood, in this case - this is indeed a great workout. If I manage to keep this up I should get through the winter with wood to spare - I estimate I have processed about 6 tons of wood altogether (I'll find some way to measure it in cords, once I am done, and then chart usage, once it gets cold enough), and I have another 20 or so lying around, waiting to be cut. Teehee. If you were curious why I needed an SUV, with four wheel drive and low gearing, this is a good example - and to get out of my driveway when it snows, of course. I can get the Camaro out of the garage, then, but that is as far as it goes. I can't even get it back in when there is snow on the ground...
Isn't Steve Jobs cute? Apple sold a massive thirty million iPhones, in the past two years, I hear him say, on Bloomberg. Umm... until you look at what Nokia sold in the second quarter of 2009 - in the middle of a recession, in three months. 105 million phones... lessee... over two years, that would make.. 840 million, that's 280 times Apple's phone sales. Or, to put it differently, 30 million phones is what Nokia sells in 26 days. Mr. Jobs, it is easy to crow when you are preaching to the converted...
Goodyear has a tire that uses less gas... It took how long to figure that out? Lower rolling resistance, I suppose, a technology that was actually developed years ago, for the first hybrid vehicles. Probably don't want them on the Camaro.
Ah, and there is the new Ford Ecoboost engine - a 3.5 litre V-6 with twin turbobochargers and direct fuel injection.. massive 355 horsepower, and a fuel consumption of "only" 22/18 and 19 average mpg. Sheesh. The massive 5.7 litre V-8 in my 2002 Camaro gets (measured by yours truly) 26/18 and 20.43 average mpg. Sheesh and double sheesh. Eco? Really? Where?
Seriously, kids, all of this piecemeal stuff is't going to save the planet. We need a couple of things. First, we've got to stop breeding, I don't know of any country that needs more people. Secondly, all of those that can work from home should stop going to the office - that's hundreds of millions of people. You want to do something useful, give all of these desk jockeys a computer with conferencing software and a broadband connection, and start emptying office buildings. Anything else, watch Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, he's got plenty of ideas for recycling and stuff, he is easy on the eyes, for the ladies and the gay folk, and he is civilized and fun to watch for the rest of us, including the kids. No combover cockroaches or foulmouthed "chefs", wholesome, umm, family entertainment.
For the first time since I moved down here I have the old "workout" feeling I used to have in the gym in White Plains - and all it took was logging, three hours a day, every day. You may know exercise gets addictive, over time, the body starts pumping the chemicals required for physical exertion, and then when that exertion does not happen, you get a kind of withdrawal. I've known that for years, but really haven't targeted workouts since I moved here. Don't know why. Curiously, it took only ten days for the feeling to come back, now I want to cut short my morning admin to get "out there" already.
Took one dead tree down, today, prepped a really big oak, and split the wood of about a third of another downed tree. Now all I need to do is make sure I have enough work for each day, and my condition should improve. Wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough. The only question mark is whether or not I am going to continue doing this when it gets cold. It shouldn't make a difference, with my metabolism cranking, perhaps last year wasn't a good example, as I had a problem with my spine. After some steroid epidurals at the end of the year, it does seem markedly improved, although my physician insists it was just the threat of spinal surgery that did it....
, which is a full featured GPS unit as well as a 3G smartphone - mine I picked up in the Philippines in 2007 (its successor is here
).
Between the complaints about Apple and the complaints about AT&T Wireless, forgotten is that problems with cellular service and cellular equipment are often related to the way we have chosen to implement our cellular systems, in the US: in full competition mode.
Most countries, worldwide, have standardized on GSM networks, and when those began to be implemented, they were implemented under roaming agreements, a method that had been built into the GSM standard in Europe. In short, in most countries, then as now, carriers were required to allow their competitor's customers to roam on their networks, this to ensure that, between them, carriers would be able to provide countrywide service without having to build duplicate networks. The internetworking system was planned from day one, with all networks formally adhering to the GSM standard being connected to a centralized inter-system billing service based in Rome, Italy. IOW - everybody won, carriers got their minutes used and the customers got much larger networks than individual carriers were able to build by themselves.
The consequence, today, is that if you take your AT&T Wireless or T-Mobile GSM phone (tri-band or quad-band) and get on an airplane, you can get off that airplane in Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, Cairo or Chattanooga, TN, and you can turn your phone on and receive and make calls on your own number. My ex-wife can take her Dutch cellphone and send me a text message from Thailand and it'll get to me, wherever I am in the world. And vice versa.
This is how the Europeans implemented cellular telephony. Here in the US, we implemented cellular telephony by allowing carriers to build their own networks, using different incompatible technologies, and we specifically allowed them to exclude other carriers' customers from their networks. The consequence is spotty service in places, bandwidth restrictions (think about it - if you have three GSM networks in Berlin, and your phone can choose between all three, you're less likely to run out of bandwidth, right?), and phones that will only run on one or two networks, instead of all networks. So, today, Americans pay more for their cellular service than the consumers in most other countries, and have worse service. And AT&T and Apple can charge you extra to get an iPhone, because, even after all these years, neither company understands that you eventually make much more money if a device can be used on all networks, as is the case in many overseas markets, where restricting use of the iPhone to one network is against the law - and technically impossible.
Part of the reason I bought this bit of Virginia is that I figured I would have my own exercise yard, more fun than going to the gym, which is what I did for much of my career. But it is only really now that I have got myself organized, and spend two or three hours a day outdoors, harvesting trees and building a good stock of firewood. I do need the exercise, and it is quite an enjoyable activity. It was working up the motivation that took a good long while - funny how you have everything you need, including the trees, and can't get to make a go of it.
To set myself a target I checked the weight and volume of the wood I am shifting, see the load in the picture to the right, after all, when working out you have bike miles, or reps, or weight, and wasn't too displeased. As it turned out I cut, moved, split and stacked 1200 lbs of oak - that's just what is on the cart - before I ran out of steam, and I am trying to do that five or more days a week. There is, in principle, no reason why I cannot do this all year, summer and winter, I have an arctic boiler suit that is plenty warm even in freezing temperatures, and I have plenty of trees. Apart from clearing deadwood I am taking some live trees down to give nearby trees some more breathing space, this especially for trees that are relatively close to the house. While I have cut back the treeline considerably, I really do need to drop some of the really tall trees, that can still hit the house when they blow over - that is typically what happens in the storm season, it is the tallest trees that come down.
I don't know that I am significantly impacting the carbon conversion rate of my piece of Virginia - one tree I took down two years ago has regrown to a height of about 30 feet already, but this time with multiple stems, rather than two. The soil is very fertile here, I recall having to take down trees that grew in front of my satellite dish, from one season to the next. It is curious how it is now OK to take trees and use them as fuel - not in the fashionable fireplace manner, I can actually heat my entire house this way, in deep dark winter, when heat pumps get inefficient to use.
If you are surprised I bang on about wood and stoves and stuff, having spent just about my entire life in the cityscape, these factors are new to me, and as an engineer I find them fascinating. I had not been confronted by a situation where I could get my hands on a completely self contained "living machine" - the only external feed into the house is electrical, and even that I can technically provide myself.
I encountered this Beetle a few days ago in the Giant parking lot, and thought I'd share it with you. Large numbers of American VW drivers are women, and I don't think anybody knows why, but this is a very good example of how a VW Beetle seems to have inspired a young woman. I probably should have stuck around to find out what kind of creature owned this thing, but I had other stuff to do.
If you read my recent "space" musings, you'll know I like to step away from the "logical" stuff, from accepted practice. I am writing this, for instance, while Wired Science is running a report on attempts to mimic the human brain. "Why?", I ask. Why would you want to try and create an artificial form of the biological brain? I state "biological", because it is a biological organ, that grew and evolved in an organic, biological environment. It developed senses, it changed the instruments, such as the skin and eyes, that help the brain gather input, it changed in a continuous interaction with the environment through the body. It could not have evolved without the body, and so you cannot, in my opinion, create some kind of artificial brain unless you have some process for this brain to evolve by itself, for which it would need to have a fixed interactive environment. We humans aren't particularly good at doing that type of research, since we tend to rebuild whatever we are building every time some new or improved technology comes around.
That's not how evolution works. Evolution is based on building blocks, materials, organics, that evolve only slowly, and can grow into purposeful structures only because they use standardized building blocks. These materials change only slowly, and alter their functionality, rather than develop new tricks. And so the evolutionary path may not be the best for us to use to create "intelligence", wshatever that is. Prototyping by speeding up natural processes doesn't really work, because the pace at which evolution takes place is itself a function of that evolution.
It's a bit like politics, where a politician is looking for results that can be demonstrated before the next election. Planning a development to have results a decade from now is simply not something a politician will do, because a lack of speedy results will impair the politician's ability to get re-elected - and finish the project. Or, to put it to you differently - all parts of a whole are instrumental in making that whole. The human brain was engineered specifically for survival and procreation, for the creation of shortcuts to goals. Attempting to create an artificial brain, therefore, can only lead to the same result, and that isn't "problem solving" - it is making problems go away. Hence theft, fraud, murder, corruption, war. These are the things that come natural to us. Creating artificial intelligence, then, requires that you first specify the goal, and that has to be very well defined. If you don't know where you are going there isn't any way to figure out whether you need a train, boat or plane...
I was miffed to find out that it costs a lot of money to use British Airways frequent flyer miles - for my flight from Dulles to Amsterdam, they wanted 60,000 miles, as well as $310 for "charges". Mind you, booking a regular flight would have cost $837, so there is savings. American Airlines does not charge me half as much to get a frequent flyer ticket, but I am saving their miles for my upcoming Asia/Australia trip, so did not have much of a choice here. At least I get to eat a proper British Breakfast at Garfunkel's at Heathrow Airport, always enjoy that a whole lot.
The pic to the right is the largest mushroom, fungus, I have ever seen - easily a foot across. Right outside the house, too, at the edge of the woods. I am getting so used to my slice of nature, didn't even notice it at first... But I suppose I am looking down a bit more while I am harvesting some trees for the winter - last weekend I accientally weedwhacked a copperhead, a poisonous snake, who then played dead for a while, and when that did not make me go away, attacked me. He lives underneath my concrete porch, I knew that much, but as I have had a run-in with him before, I may have to kill him. He isn't ever going to think of me as his friendly landlord now.
I never realized this, but the animals that live on my property to an extent recognize me, and no longer treat me as a predator, as I don't own a dog, and don't shoot at them. Deer will happily continue to graze fifty yards from where I am using a chainsaw, passing turtles look at me as if to say "what's it to you", rather than withdraw into their shell.... So I am pretty sure the next time this copperhead sees me he is not going to hesitate.. Their bite isn't lethal, but destructive and disabling, and I understand that the anti-venom is $10,000 a pop, not including the cost of the helicopter needed to get it there fast - not kidding.
I am not updating this as often as I'd like. It isn't so much that I have nothing to tell you about, but my writing time (these days, usually in the mornings) seriously conflicts with my outdoor time. I try to spend as much time as I can working outdoors, on my five acre property, which I sort of bought as my personal exercise yard. From regular maintenance to creating the winter woodpile, it is all excellent exercise, and the woodpile especially saves me a ton of money in heating, over the winter. Considered Eco-friendly now (imagine that!), wood in a modern woodstove burns reasonably clean, and my trees capture more carbon dioxide than my stove creates (viewed on an annual basis, to be completely fair, I only heat in winter, of course).
So there is the conflict - although I used to be a night writer, that creative wave has somehow shifted to the morning, over the past few years, why, I do not know.
I was going to write about "Defying Gravity", an ABC science fiction series I discovered the other day, but I don't think I will. It is, I suppose, copied on "ER" and like series, except its one hour format is crammed so full of personal traumas and operational disasters and completely unstable personalities, there is no normal action, just one thing going wrong after another, interspersed with more things going wrong in the past. Crammed. Fuggedaboutit.
So - NCIS
I've booked my mini vacation to the Netherlands, see the family, that sort of thing. Spent the night shopping for my sister - usually, she saves her gadget and photographic wish list for when I come over, so I can pick the items she wants up here, where they are often cheaper than in Europe, in many cases because of the exchange rate, of course. Exception, this time, is the portable GPS she was looking for, one she can take on bicycle trips. Amazon Germany sells a Blaupunkt unit that runs on a rechargeable battery, has all the bells and whistles, and comes with maps of all of Europe, for only €117.45, or US$169. Buying her a portable GPS here would be a little cheaper, but as that comes with the North American map base, adding the Europe map would make it more expensive. Blaupunkt is a well known quality brand in Europe, so she should be safe there - in the US Blaupunkt is best known for the stereos that come with some German cars. Nice design, too.
On thing I discovered while shopping is that Nikon's Nikkor 18-55mm
Comment of the week: "Crap. School.". The son of friends of mine, on his Facebook page.
I don't know if you've noticed the avalanche of science types working on space exploration, the past year or so? It seems that wherever you turn, we're either going to discover life on other planets, or revisiting the moon. I wonder about both.. or rather, about the futility of these exploits.
We know enough about the origins of life, and the composition of the universe, that we can say with a statistical degree of certainty that there is life on other worlds - somewhere. It follows then, to me at least, that if we just go on exploring the universe, we'll eventually come across this life - assuming, of course, it isn't based on something we can't recognize (although it might then recognize us). It is complete anathema to me what the purpose would be of going out and looking for it, when we don't know where to look - especially since we are unable to go and land anywhere other than the moon and Mars, and both places we've been already. We lack the technology to land anywhere else, and we've not exactly been working on developing it.
Which brings me to the moon, and the announced intention of the United States to put men (as in, hu-mans, to stay with the Ferengi) on the moon again, by 2020. And on Mars by the middle of the century. I cannot help but wonder why? Sure, we could learn to construct bases for human habitation on these planets, but what would we gain by doing so? There isn't anything on the moon, or on Mars, worth having, and as we have the ability to put automated explorers pretty much when and where we want, why not use that capability?
If I were to look at it from a commercial point of view, we've developed two important capabilities. We are able to build a human habitat that can be put into space and be used for longer term occupation (all we lack at this time is a plumber to fix the space john), and we have the robotic technology to put roving explorers on other planets. We don't actually need anything else, as what is interesting, scientifically, is out in the Milky Way, out in space. Planning long term missions using a traveling habitat, pretty much like the ISS, is much more interesting - aim it at nearby solar systems, put fertile astronauts on it, and plan for a 150 year or 200 year mission, where the returning crew will be the offspring of the original crew. You don't need "spaceships", a space station with adequate on board repair-and-build facilities, and a good complement of landers, can be launched into space and become a very large, self sustaining, traveling space habitat. We have the ability and the technology to do this, and we are able to communicate remotely with the mission throughout. Put some extra dollars in, and we can create a superdrive based on a micro-black-hole that will let us approach lightspeed.
This would be fascinating, it would be new and discovery and pushing our boundaries. Similarly, we can continue to develop the landers and rovers and robots that will enable us to explore other planets, and perhaps begin to mine them using automation - even build habitats for future astronauts to visit, although I personally think we should get used to the idea that the human masters would be in space, and in orbit, running the robots by remote control, and making them more and more autonomous, something we have been working on for a long time. We honestly, just ask the Japanese, can do better with our robots than have them build cars nobody needs.
Think about it. It is more logical, we have the technology, and the eventual benefit is far greater... If we do assume there is life out there, these schemes are far more likely to help us discover it, statistically, than sending more Air Force majors with scoops and evidence bags to the moon.
I am getting itchy for travel, although I had promised myself I would stay put and work on my house this summer. It isn't like I need to go anywhere to find the sun, plenty of that right here, but there are plenty of friends I'd like to go see - everywhere, from New York to Australia. So I may take a drive up to my old stomping ground, Westchester County, NY, soonish, just to grab some lunch with former colleagues, see what is going on. The big travel will wait for next year, when I would like to find a teaching postion in Asia Pacific, and start spending part of the year out there. Hopefully, by then, buddy D. will have time to come out with me, we travel well together. If you're hoping to find out from this blog whether or not I am at home, so you can raid the place - a major problem with blogs - fuggedaboutit. For one thing, I prewrite my blog, and so by the time you read the pieces I wrote while traveling, I am back home. Secondly, this is rural redneck Virginia - everybody here has a shotgun or sidearm, and they're not afraid to use it. Lastly, my alarm and detection systems are not dependent on having mains power or a landline telephone, and I know you are on the property way before you get to the house... One advantage of having lived in some of the biggest cities on Earth is that I am more paranoid than most, and I have the equipment to protect myself.
Investment wise, I am seeing improvement across the board. Improvement, to be sure, by comparison with what went on in the markets I track in 2008. I lost a huge amount of money, something that certainly has me worried, but if I can just stop the rot, for now, I can figure out what to do next. Something I absolutely need to make a start with is selling a bunch of the stuff that I don't really need - from family heirlooms that have been sitting in boxes since I brought them back from Europe, to technology I have replaced and don't really need to hang on to, like the Nikon D50 (I have two) I replaced with a D90, in pristine state, but I do not need three SLR cameras.
One surplus laptop I sold already, set it up for a friend whose only laptop was his company provided computer, it was time he got his own, the time that you could use company equipment for personal use is long gone. For one thing, if you surf to a website and in so doing infect your employer's network with a virus, and it turns out you were doing some online shopping, or worse, you're likely to lose your job. What with a decent laptop available for $400 to $500
While Bitlocker is intended to be used on computers that have a security chip installed, it works fine without that, too, although the security isn't quite as foolproof. On both Lenovos I have installed it on (I've had it running for six or so weeks) it runs flawlessly. Bitlocker requires you to put an encryption key on a USB device, which must be present in a port in order for you to be able to boot. It can then be removed. If you install on a machine without the security chip a small portion of your harddrive becomes an unencrypted boot device, this is where the software finds the driver that enables the operating system to read the encrypted drive - there is no file encryption here, the entire hard drive is encrypted.
I have found that the encryption/decryption process slows down the computer somewhat (logically), but there isn't a major impact on fuctioning. I notices some hiccups when playing back Blu-ray disks, which in my case taxes the laptop, as it needs to send high resolution video out the HDMI port, and Digital Dolby out a USB port, but that really is the only performance difference I have noticed. I have to be cautious here - some of the software I have been trying to run on this laptop has had problems, but I think that is more likely caused by my running 64 bit Windows Vista, rather than Bitlocker. I notice problems related to short timeouts (64 bit Windows Vista is very fast, especially with 8 Gb of RAM installed) and port handling, and I do think that some of the software out there just gets confused running in a 64 bit environment. As far as encryption is concerned, I've not seen any file corruption, spurious crashes, and the like.
So my friend was very right when he asked for encryption. Never having to worry about your private life being compromised when your laptop gets stolen or misplaced is wonderful. If you want to do it completely, setting a hard disk access password (most laptops allow that) in combination with Bitlocker will make it impossible for all but the hardiest hacker to get at your data - and the hacker would have to spend so much time (s)he could probably make $10,000 dollars just working... Bitlocker kicks in anytime the computer gets booted, even from hibernation or sleep, so you're very safe with this.
Not a huge amount of stuff to report - if you've been following this, I had been working on getting Blu-ray on my home theatre, and had hoped to be able to tell you about the obsolete HD DVD format, but the online outfit I ordered films from, inetvideo.com, messed up - they listed a product they don't have in stock. They found this out days after confirming my order, having charged my credit card before shipping, so they are probably an unreliable vendor. If you run into this - the site says "in stock", but it is not - stay away from the vendor. Today's stock-and-cart software is interlinked, the cart knows exactly how much stock there is of a certain product, and if it sells you something stating it is in stock, and it is not, that is deliberate. Not only that: it is simply fraud on the part of the merchant, prohibited by law. Not surprisingly, in this case and the next one I describe, these merchants charge your credit card when you place your order, whereas most (and that is the agreed and approved method) don't charge your card until they ship. Doesn't matter how good the deal is - websites that use fraud aren't going to be around, in the future, so for that reason alone it is better not to buy from them.
Much like hardwareandtools.com, which bills itself as "the internet's largest hardware store". I know now why they say that - they list products they don't have. I found this out ordering a siding wash chemical, which their website said was in stock - except, after they charged my credit card (they're supposed to do this when they ship, not before) I emailed with them about the product designation - the picture said it was one compound, the text said it was another, and by this time I knew the product I wanted was no longer being sold by the manufacturer, W.M. Barr.
They then mailed me to say they would check when it got to them "from another warehouse" - IOW, they had no stock, and they don't have another warehouse. They were simply ordering this themselves, after charging me. That's illegal. So I pointed this out to them, and canceled the order, and called my credit card company to get the money credited. They then shipped, completely ignoring my order cancellation, and I refused delivery. So - if you want to go to the internet's largest hardware store, try northerntools.com, they have a huge product assortment, you can see whether or not something is in stock, or acehardware.com, which is very reliable as well. In the end, I went to Home Depot and found the siding wash
My main job, this week and next, is to work on my supply of firewood - I am in the happy circumstance that I own acres of woods, and with the big woodstove that was in my house when I bought it I can save a lot of money, over the winter. The woodstove is able to heat the entire house, there is actually ducting between downstairs and upstairs to convey heat from the stove to the second floor, the only problem being that it produces so much heat it overheats the place when the outside temperature is above freezing. But even below 20 degrees Fahrenheit (-7° C) the stove has no problem at all, although at that point you're going through about a tree every two weeks. What I mean by "tree" you can see in the pictures, not being an expert, I find it really scary to take these things down.
I do that myself - that is why I moved down here, to have more exercise, and do things I never got to do as a city slicker. For the past few years, I've been cutting back the treeline around the house, since the trees have grown since the house was built, and some of these trees will easily cut the house in two if they come down during a storm. This is when you learn that the slightest gust of wind when you are sawing the tree will make it fall wherever it wants, rather than you want it to go - not only that, it is easy to misjudge the path, and several people kill themselves this way every year - the latest famous example, couple of years back, is the baseball player who took down a tree on his property, then realized his dog was in the path of the falling tree. Trying to rescue the dog, he ended up underneath the tree, dead.
Otherwise, all you need to be really careful about is the health of the tree - ants and other insects are capable of hollowing a tree out, and when you saw into a hollowed out tree, it can go places you did not expect. That is the first thing I did, the first two seasons here, take down all of the dead and diseased trees near the house and the driveway, I only have one tree to go, a neighbour noticed that, the other day, and pointed it out to me.
To give you the numbers, I expect this tree weighs some 30 tons, 60.000 lbs or 30,000 kilograms, and is probably some 115 feet (35 metres) tall. You take down the tallest trees, because, as I discovered, those come down first during a storm - at the same time, the taller the tree, the more damage it will do when it falls in the wrong direction. For that reason, I always get one of my neighbours over when I do this, someone who has experience, just to supervise what I am doing. When you leave the surrounding trees standing, they will now take up the space you just cleared, and grow faster, using the nutrients the felled tree no longer needs. Woods have a maximum growth capacity - when they reach a certain density they become stable, as there is only so much nutrient and light for a given surface area, so all I am really doing is redistributing the growth pattern, I am, for my personal use, using less than mother nature grows - you don't want to do this with half an acre, of course.
If there is anything that scares me, it is that there are people in this country that actually believe the Administration would implement a health plan that would withdraw care from dying patients. I mean, think about it, the first time this were to happen, under government guidelines, there would be a small avalanche of large lawsuits. And the vast majority of these commentators have absolutely no idea what a "socialized" form of care would look like. I do, having spent half my life in European countries with government administered health care. And America, being what it is, will end up with a kind of hybrid health plan - what flies in Europe wouldn't work here, that's clear. I can only repeat what I have been saying since I arrived in this country - without a health plan, and with an existing permanent condition: How a country that bills itself as the "richest nation on Earth" can justify leaving a sizable proportion of its population without any care at all (except for emergency care) is beyond me.
You simply can't call yourself a civilization when more than 40 million of your fellow countryfolk have no health care, and you aren't doing anything about it. And this is what I hear in these town halls: no change, we're fine. I guess all of the people that have to decide, at the beginning of the month, how much food they can afford, or whether or not Dad can get his blood pressure medication, aren't going to the town halls. Because: Dad not getting his blood pressure medication is a death sentence. And that's the case TODAY, Sarah Palin. Today. In your own state, and most other states. There seem to be a lot of very noisy people who have never driven through downtown Newark, NJ., or Overtown, Miami. Places the news cameras don't go. Areas the likes of which do not exist in the places with socialized health care that I come from. That's right - do not exist. As in, if you take care of your entire population ghetto's are unlikely to happen. As in, you get what you pay for.
On a very different note, the other day I was looking at available Blu-Ray drives. Attentive readers will know I own one already, but, like DVD's, Blu-Ray disks are regionalized, and drives will play only one region's disks. For me, this is an issue, because I like to get movies and TV programs from Europe, occasionally. The excellent German film "Das Boot" I absolutely wanted to have in the original German version, I've got some other German movies on DVD, there are a few Dutch classics, including "Max Havelaar", a film I worked on, that I wanted in my collection... And recently, I noticed some BBC series I used to watch, but since I switched from DirecTV to Comcast cable I no longer get BBC America. So I ordered the latest Torchwood series
With DVDs, this isn't much of an issue. I bought an all-region player in India, for only $40, and then I found a Philips DVR/DVD writer in Singapore, for which a no-region hack was available. Muy cool, because now I can master PAL (Europe) DVDs as well, to send to friends and family in Europe. But I have not found a region hack for Blu-ray drives, so had little option but to look for a second Blu-ray drive.
As luck would have it, there is an essentially obsolete Blu-ray external drive out there - obsolete, because the Buffalo Technology
BRHC-6316U2
I don't know how well a USB port, inherently slow, will work with Blu-ray, which sends massive amounts of data down the wire, but as I am expecting the Blu-ray/HD DVD drive tomorrow, I will soon find out - I do have a high speed USB port driver from Buffalo. Would be cool if it worked - and I discovered something else: there are massive amounts of movies on HD-DVD still available, as discount prices, like here! So I may well stock up on some I always wanted to have, since I'll have a drive for them.
You must have seen those lists of "most significant new products" and "products of the century" that like to include things like the iPhone and the WiFi router. They generally pay less attention to services, and even if they do, they usually miss the most significant. ne such is really mundane = shipping. In the United States, shipping, by catalog services, has been around for a very long time, dating back to 1888, when the Sears mail order catalogue was first published. But the internet gave new impetus to catalogue buying, when dialup connections gave way to ISDN and broadband, and customers were able to see pictures of products while browsing online catalogues. The best known proponent here is Amazon.com, now a $20 billion company, that in the internet era is what Sears was to the paper catalogue world.
Competing in the online world came to a short list of identifiable advantages. The website had to be fast, it had to collect usable marketing data from browsing visitors, it had to have a solid payment processing agent, and it had to provide real time inventory - you have to be able to see if a product is in stock. These issues went through lots of iterations - collecting data made websites slow, inventory was hard to gauge as multiple customers would buy the same item at the same time, so what had seemed available was't, and payment agents (credit card processors) took on too many customers, couldn't handle the data flow, and their pipelines got hacked and customer data stolen.
What went almost unnoticed is a service that was never considered of primary importance - shipping the purchases to the customer. Yet that was the last remaining piece of the puzzle - after all of the above website and administrative issues had been resolved through technological solutions, the only remaining area of competition was shipping - as cheap as possible, and as fast as possible.
I came to this because of two examples - one a Blu-ray disk I just bought from Amazon in the UK, another a Blu-ray drive I purchased from Newegg.com in California. The disk shipped from the UK, via the (Royal, of course) mail on Friday, August 7 - the drive shipped UPS from Edison, NJ on Sunday, August 9 (at 7:20pm, if you want the gory detail). The disk got here on Tuesday August 11, after four days - note there is a weekend in between shipping and delivery - the drive was delivered on Wednesday, August 12, after 3 (week)days. The cost? Amazon UK charged £3.08 postage, that's US$5.07, while Newegg shipped for free.
We think this is normal now, but if you just think back five years, it wasn't unusual for you to order something, and have to wait three weeks to get it, and pay $20 in shipping charges. And that's all gone. If you make the customer wait, today, if you don't let them know when you ship, if you charge them a fortune for "shipping and handling", you're out of business (unless you really truly have something people can't buy anywhere else).
If anybody needed confirmation that Indonesia is a democracy, we've just had the living proof - the siege of the house where terrorist Noordin M. Top was holed up, and the subsequent assault that killed him, were shown in Indonesia on live television, and streamed worldwide, I've just watched it live, the screen capture you see comes from TV One in Jakarta, the "Breaking News" flag is theirs. Indonesian security forces never liked doing their business under the eye of the camera, but I suppose they had been told Indonesia's economic prosperity, hardly affected by the recession, was sustaining significant damage, due to the recent hotel bombings. The mere fact that Top was located, smack in the middle of the main island of Java, is itself proof that Islam has turned the corner, in Indonesia, the extremism that was to some extent tolerated has done itself in. I have had significant concerns which way the country would go, since my last visit, and this day goes a long way to allay my fears.
It is more of a war now than it was. With the death of Mr. Top, and that of Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan, there can today be little doubt that anyone who aspires to be the head of a religious terrorist organization will be dealt with as an infidel.
I drove behind a car today that still had an election bumper sticker. It said: "Vote Obama 2008" and above that in smaller characters "If you want to help Al-Quaida". If indeed two senior terrorist leaders were killed this week, and an assassination attempt on Indonsia's president prevented, And a succession fight has broken out among Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, our Prez is not doing so badly. That isn't something the far right wing is going to accept, but what they are missing is that it isn't us that should be out there fighting the Islamic extremists, it is their own compatriots. And now that we are making nice to them, that is clearly happening - it looks like the Predator that attacked Mehsud did so in a cooperative venture between the US and the Pakistan military, while something has changed in Indonesia too. Never before have I seen an attack by Indonesian forces (which are very well trained and armed, and among the more ferocious) televised live on two local Jakarta TV stations, one of which streamed it all live to the world.
If you want a comparison - I doubt that President Bush, in all his international travels, ever spent a night abroad anywhere other than in Air Force One. He did not have a basic understanding what it takes to gain other's trust - the USA isn't a very trusted entity at the best of times, overseas, and so the Prez has that extra hurdle to take. Bush either didn't care or didn't know, Obama, who has traveled, has lived abroad, understands well what foreign soil feels like, and what you must do to connect with those whose support you need. I can't prove it, but I have a very secure feeling that what I saw on television, coming out of Jakarta, was a remote part of the world saying loudly "look, we are working with you, we have common cause". That will have put the Islamic extremists on notice - their safe havens, in Pakistan, in Indonesia, are shrinking, they're heading for lawless Somalia, and I for one am delighted that is so.
Because soon, they'll all be in that part of the world, and then we (that is, their neighbours with US and EU assistance) can just go in and mop them up. There isn't anywhere else for them to go, you see, they've outlived their welcome everywhere. So after we're done with Afghanistan, and the Pakistani have finally taken possession of their tribal areas (something they've never wanted to do), we can all go and clean up Somalia. Only this time we'll finish it. Maybe the Somali pirates want to help. Because if they're just going to let Al-Quaida waltz into their country, we'll have to clean it up, and we can't distinguish between an Al-Quaida terrorist with a gun and a headscarf, and a pirate with a gun and a headscarf. They all look the same to me.
You don't think so? What do you think Secretary Clinton is doing all over Africa, this week - talking about the weather?
I had to share with you this clip - Captain Kirk reading Sarah Palin's Tweets - or should she be dubbed Governor "Twit" Palin now? I'll leave it to you to decide - I just hope nobody ever has the bright idea to hire her for anything, we have lots of dim people in D.C., but they do normally finish their tours. Adding somebody who is inadequately educated as well as a quitter would be too much upheaval, don't you think?
Heat is nothing if not tiring, and today was hot. I had just spent a day cleaning up and fixing my 2002 Z28 Camaro, which needed a new battery. That was not a sinecure, as the positive connection bolt had corroded into the old battery, and as the mount is integral to the wiring harness, I had to get it out of the old battery somehow. Between a friend's help, lots of tools, a largely stripped bolt head, a night and some WD-40, it eventually came out, and I was able to replace it with the same model battery. I'd like to try and keep this car stock, at least until I decide whether or not I am going to hang on to it forever. Somebody ought to tell AC Delco that sealed batteries shouldn't be able to leak acid, don't you think?
I use the Camaro mostly to go into town, "town" being Washington, D.C., apart from the pleasure of blowing past people who think they have fast cars on I-95, the Camaro is a lot cheaper to drive than my Dodge Durango. The Durango averages 14 miles per gallon, admittedly in local driving, the Camaro gets 21mpg, mostly on the highway.. I calculate car cost differently, though, equating it to the actual dollar cost, with all of the vehicle expenses included, except for insurance, the (2003) Durango costs me $6.06 per day, while the Camaro does its thing for $2.75 per day. Factor in insurance, and the ratios change - Durango: $0.63/mile, $8.87/day, while the Camaro weighs in at $0.51/mile, and $5.85/day. All I am saying is that what you need to be concerned with, isn't mileage - it is cost. And factor in the loan you got - in the case of these two vehicles, they are free and clear, so what you see above is the real cost, averaged over a year.
Anyway, I took the T-tops off the Camaro, and went into town, first to the dentist, to get my new crown installed, then to my new rheumatologist's office to drop off some X-rays. While in town, radiology departments send reports and scans over to the doctors electronically, that hasn't yet reached the outer suburbs, so all the doctor gets is the written report. And this doctor, much to my delight, is able to read both X-ray films and MRI disks, so I make sure she has the films as well as the report. In the past few years, all hospitals seem to have replaced all of their old film technology with digital cassettes, which meant they did not have to replace their X-ray equipment.
I am beginning to enjoy NCIS - I had never watched it, but recently discovered most of NCIS takes place in my home area, Washington and Northern Virginia - one episode was filmed, I discovered from watching it, off Route 17, maybe ten miles from my home. And the chicks are worth ogling - at least not your average blonde TV babes. And then there is David McCallum, of course, if you're old enough to remember "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.".
British Airways, in financial dire straits, has announced it will discontinue meal service on flights under two hours. Or rather, if you want a meal, you'll have to pay for it. Supposedly, this will save some £22 million.
Or will it? I am certain nobody has calculated how many fliers will now choose competing airlines that do provide free meals. You see, British Airways does not have those short haul routes to itself, there are other airlines plying the same stretches of air. And they have not discontinued meal service. And then there is the other factor - preparation of the meals, galley loading, stuff. If you want to save money, sell only beverages and snacks, take out your expensive meal galleys, which consume energy and space and require labour to load, unload and clean, and put in snack galleys - which will let you put some more seats in, as well. This is how the budget airlines fly. So - this is a half-assed attempt that won't save half of what they say. If you're close to £400 million in the hole, just over the past year, you probably have to come up with something better than nickel-and-diming the traveler. Especially since BA will continue to serve breakfast - there'd be riots if they didn't...
Take a look at the picture here - that's the cooling fan of a Lenovo laptop, after about a year's worth of use, pretty much running non stop. Nothing unusual, this is the standard amount of crud the fan collects in a normal environment. Note the brass pipe at the top of the fan - that's the heat exchanger for the microprocessor underneath the four screws to the right. Click on the picture if you'd like to see it larger, and note how that, too, has collected dirt.
I took this picture as I was cleaning this laptop, before selling it to a friend. You see, laptops are wonderful, but they do get hot, and they need their cooling even more than desktops do. As I have mentioned before, the reason why you don't see laptops with those very fast processors in the stores is simply that those processors develop way too much heat (because they consume copious power) to put in a small casing. And this picture is worse if we're talking about your teen IM'ing with her friends, lying on her bed, or you putting down your laptop on the fabric of your couch. Then, the fan will suck in more dust, and due to the obstruction of the cooling slots, run really hot. If your laptop suffers intermittent mysterious failures, ten to one its cooling is clogged - I've had an Averatec laptop shut down simply from sitting in the sun, on the passenger seat of a rental car.
So - if you have some of those handy instrument screwdrivers (do make sure you have the right tools, they're cheap) remove the cover on the bottom of your laptop, now and again, and vacuum the fan and its surrounding area. I personally use compressed air, but then I know a lot about what is in a laptop, and can see whether that is safe or not. Important is that you look through the louvres that are attached to that bit of brass at the top, the heat exchanger, that is where most of the crud collects, and then your processor can no longer get rid of its heat. As you can see, once a year will do it, unless you've used the laptop in especially dusty circumstances, or sitting on fabric. Make sure the thing is off before you clean it, and remove the battery.
Similarly, open your desktop computer once a year, and vacuum it out. Pay particular attention to both sides of the power supply, which has its own fan, which is the one that sucks the hot air out of the casing, where the other fan(s) blow it in. PCs as well as laptops monitor the speed of their fans, and will slow down when the fans run slow, and the processor temperature, which is equally monitored, rises. You must have seen those commercials for registry cleaners that promise they'll speed up your computer, right? Well, those don't work - a slow computer is usually caused by one of three factors:
It won't have anything to do with the registry, and in fact, anything that messes with your registry can completely disable your computer. Trust me. Just clean the darn thing, and if you think you have a virus, buy Norton or McAfee, and follow the instructions. Remember that if you have a virus, you're giving it to others, too, and that's just a bit antisocial, it really is. Full hard disk? If you have a 40 Gb hard disk, and it's got 500 Mb of space left, Windows (or even Leopard) will get really unhappy, and begin slowing down. Operating systems need room on the disk to put temporary files in, and if that room is not there, they'll endlessly write back and forth to the disk, bogging down the entire system. Defragment your disk periodically, Vista and Windows 7 can be set up to do this automatically, and if there is too much "stuff" on your disk, buy an external drive, $100, and copy things you don't need "on call" there. Simple.
Take note of what Google's Vic Gundotra says in this Fortune video... Pay particular attention to his comments about app stores.
What is the issue? There is a limited amount of application you can download to, and run on, a smartphone. It's been the same with the PC - there is only so much you can install and run, only so much you can do. I have, for the longest time, positioned the iPhone as a "handheld Macintosh" - it isn't a cellphone. I have a plethora of cellphones, but absolutely no interest in things like editing a video on a phone. I do that on a laptop - actually on a laptop that has a powerful graphics card, so I have HD quality video with stereo or digital Dolby sound, depending on which camera I use, stuff that I can even use for broadcast. A phone is a lifeline to me, in my work - it is a communications device, I need to use it to talk, send messages, check (but not answer!) my email, and check my stock positions. But that's it, I don't want anything else on that phone that will impact its battery life. It needs to be able to be used for 24 hours at a stretch, to be able to be charged reasonably well in half an hour, from my laptop, etc. I don't need it to last a week on standby - the fallacy of that is that I need to know when I must charge the phone,not how far I can stretch it - and have it die and lose that one trade that would have netted me $12,000... I sleep, the phone charges, it must still have enough juice left for me to check my mail when I get off the plane after a 14 hour flight, make calls, get to my hotel, unpack and then give it a quick charge to last the rest of the day.
This is about practicality, not about fancy crap. I do not need 3G everywhere - I must have GPRS/EDGE though, wherever I am, I must be able to access the sites that are important to me. I made a $24K profit by being able to sell Vonage stock on my cellphone from a hotel lounge in the Philippines - that is what is important, not the pics of the grandkids. And that applies to ordinary consumers - you need to be able to access your bank account, when you are on vacation, because you can no longer do things the old fashioned way. You have to be able to check that the duty free store in Bangkok hasn't just begun to raid your bank account back home.
You may have followed the sagas of Sarah Palin, and the "birthers", those who continue to insist that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and that somehow his Hawaii birth certificate is part of some elaborate left wing conspiracy.
What worries me is the craziness of it all, I have no other word for it. There is a real discussion about Mrs. Palin's running for president, in 2012. Pardon? Here is a woman who has run for elected office, been given a mandate by a majority of her voters, she walks - WALKS - halfway through her term, and you think she'll make a fine president? Have Republicans gone cuckoo? You want to put her in the White House, and then a couple years later hear how she has decided to become a hairdresser in Fort Lauderdale? You actually believe Barack Obama, an illegal alien from Africa, can become a United States senator? How is Lou Dobbs, once a respected journalist, suddenly giving credence to conspiracy theorists? Rush Limbaugh is an edge-crazy addict, but we knew that. The fact that so many listen to him, and take him seriously, most certainly is worrying, considering the complete lack of respect he has for the office of the President of the United States, and for the Constitution.
It is hard for me to fathom where the swing to craziness originated. Is it because the right wing's trophy president turned out to be such a disaster? Is it because a black man won the election, is it pure unadulterated racism? You want a woman from Alaska who doesn't read the Wall Street Journal, and thinks Twitter is a communications tool, to run the country? With another baby over her shoulder? Although - she'll need help lifting Rush...
I've done my bit for King and Country - from assisting my former employer in gaining a foothold in overseas telecommunications markets, to being a member of the post-911 network recovery teams, in both New York and D.C., and I've often wondered, through the Bush years, if it would get bad enough for me to decide I didn't want to live here any more. I was incredulous when George Bush was returned to office, when we already knew the premise on which he invaded Iraq was complete fiction (I know this from sources other than the press). But I can tell you that if I see the crazies that are all over the wires get anywhere near the White House, the next election, I am so out of here.. apart from anything else, an America that is even more marginalized, internationally, than it is today, will become completely isolated. That may be good news for Mr. Limbaugh, but then he thinks that the world ends at Vero Beach... I know better.
An unexpected side effect of having HD television (in my case, using a TiVo HD DVR
I have had Dolby 5.1 capable equipment for many years, every since satellite TV providers began providing movies with Dolby sound tracks, but it is really only now coming into its own, when I can tune into Palladia HD and have Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks and cohorts blast away in 5.1 in a live concert. Woof.
This is stuff that I stopped listening to years ago, and that has taken on a completely new life. Part of that is definitely due to my living on five acres of wooded land, where I can crank my 1,200 watt Kenwood multichannel amplifier up sky high - I have actually just revamped two speaker boxes, which I had retired with damaged woofers, now replaced by 15 inch 2,000 watt subwoofers, which I found going cheap in my local auto parts store. Umm, yes, well, they have a car audio corner, and 15 inch subwoofers tend to not sell very fast, so I got these two Lanzar VW154 Vibes
Whoa - and then some! I just cranked up the amplifier, way past the -9db where it used to cut out, all the way to -5db, its top, and it keeps on going. Those Lanzars were a good buy, tell ya, plus the SDATs (which have seven speakers each) now run the back channels. Mmmmmm. Keep it coming, Stevie...
I mentioned to you here I had ordered a digital watch/cellphone/stuff device, something from China that failed to take off, at over $300, and when that got to me it was DOA - just got its replacement today, and this one works. It is a really cool toy, but the manual is so sparse, and written in complete pidgin English, so unless you have a good understanding of how a GSM phone sticks together and works, and you're willing to spend the time to figure this thing out, don't bother. But if you do, this is an absolutely great toy, at $100 - oops, I guess I got the last one, they don't have them any more. Owell. I'll shoot some video with it and post it on Youtube, hang tight, people. The miniaturization of an entire cellphone in a good sized wristwatch is pretty amazing - by entire, I mean it has everything a regular cellphone does, down to digital modem functionality and an micro-SD memory card. I have not tested the modem function yet, but I did install the modem driver on one of my laptops - one thing I have to give the developers is that every functionality on this cell/watch uses drivers already built into Windows Vista, no need for software or downloads. Kewl. Click on the pic - that is not a simulated image, the thing is actually on and connected to the T-Mobile network, and has GPRS. It is one of those things - it arrives with an empty battery, and won't do anything until it charges for a few hours, including everything the manual says it is supposed to be doing when you plug it into your PC to charge.
"Well, the wiring is back on the truck" said the electrician, with an undertone of insecurity. "I've never built a house without phone wiring" he added. "I've never even heard of it - well, maybe up in the city, but here...". He had just watched me crank up a 3G router
The same electrician was complaining bitterly that he couldn't find a way to stop paying Verizon sixty-plus dollars a month for a landline he doesn't really need, but I had to tell him that if he has to have the ability to send and receive faxes, there wasn't any way to do that using cellphones. That is to say, cellular voicemail is capable of acting as faxmail, receiving and storing fax transmissions, but then you still need a landline with a fax machine to send the fax to and print it out.
So why does anybody still need a fax machine? In the case of this electrical contractor, he periodically needs to fax a signed purchase order to vendors that do not know him, since he is a small timer in a small town in rural Virginia. I suppose there are two reasons for this - one is "the way we've always done it", one of my Indonesian suppliers always insists on me faxing a copy of my credit card to them whenever I change or update the card. The second reason is that rural contractors have little "websavvy" - they don't go to the internet to find suppliers, and don't establish a credit card relationship with them, and so have to establish credit with each supplier. I had almost forgotten there are still folks who have little faith in credit cards and internet transactions. For them, it is only the next generation that will "get it right".
On another note, I did receive the wristwatch/cellphone
In the relatively new shopping center closest to my home, some kind of construction had been going on for quite a while, to which I paid no more attention than that I drove around the work trucks. But today, as I sat in my truck checking my stocks on my cellphone, I noticed that a new gas station was being readied. It had big red letters on the side, that spelled "Giant", and I figured the display wasn't quite finished yet. With that, I turned around and went into my local Giant supermarket, itself open only for a year or so, larger than any of the other Giants in the area, and simply the closest supermarket to my house. If you consider I used to have to drive fifteen miles to the nearest supermarket, this Giant was a gas saver, and due to its size, has a very good assortment. I buy things I can buy in bulk at BJ's, which is a few miles further down Route 3, but there's lots of stuff I don't need in bulk, and BJ only stocks volume goods, so I shop at Giant a fair bit. (For the Dutch among you, Giant is owned by Royal Ahold, so I shop at Albert Heijn, in a manner of speaking).
Not until I checked out did I get an explanation of what was going on. The gas station out front is actually a Giant gas station, like other supermarkets and big box stores like Wal-Mart, Giant is going to pull more shoppers in by giving their customers gas discounts. And the bagger at the self checkout stopped what she was doing, took the cash register receipt from my hand, and proceeded to explain, using a highlighter, what all these bonus points on my receipt mean, and how I can go about cashing them in. I found it mildly amusing - other than the gas discount points, I am not about to register at the Giant website for additional discounts, as I am completely allergic to letting anybody have my personal information. For my frequent shopper card I use an old telephone number in another town, and anything else I simply don't sign up for, none of these folks' business, as far as I am concerned.
I do make some exceptions, though. Amazon has all my data, but then I have this affiliate deal with them that will hopefully net me some money, and without my information, they can't pay me. And Paypal has my data, my corporate data, that is, as I do use Paypal to pay things with, and to get reimbursed by some folks. It is quite convenient, and can handle foreign currencies, which can come in handy.
But other than that, I buy cheap stuff, as much as I can, often discounted articles are more expensive than "store brand" goods, and if I have to sign up for discount schemes I am outta there.
Tomorrow I am off to D's house again, down in Lottsburg, on the Chesapeake Bay, to make sure I can give him the wireless internet and voice service I promised him. There is no longer a real need to have wired anything, from TV and phone to internet, and I am testing to see if I have a good enough 2G or 3G signal, down there, to hook him up via cellular service.
You know about Aircards and similar devices to connect a laptop to cellular broadband, but it is less well known that there are WiFi routers that you can use with these cards as well, effectively sharing the connection between the folks that you give access to the router. This works remarkably well - I bought a D-Link DIR-451
The reason I began hootin' and hollerin' about 64 bit Windows is directly related to the operating speed of laptop computers. It was quite by accident - I bought a discounted Sony Vaio PC (desktop) and discovered that came with 64 bit Windows, then tried to up its memory to 8 gigabytes, which its BIOS won't handle, then stuck the 8 gig of RAM in a Lenovo laptop I had, then discovered the Lenovo actually had a 64 bit architecture, and yada yada yada.
Laptop computers have been restricted in their operating speed by only one factor: heat. The reason you can't buy a laptop with a 3.2 GHz processor is that it would be brilliantly fast, but the fans would make enough noise that you'd think you were in an Airbus 319 during takeoff, and you couldn't have it in your lap unless you were really fond of fried thigh. So what I surmise manufacturers have figured out is that if you upgrade laptop designs to 64 bit, and put 64 bit Windows on them, they will run much faster than what went before
I can tell you this from experience, now that I've "64'd" this cheap Lenovo, which sports only a single core 2.0 GHz Celeron processor, nothing fancy, but which runs, I estimate, three to four times as fast as its 32 bit cousins with fancy new dual core processors. Part of the confusion is that you will likely think that 64 bits is two times 32 bits, but it is not. 32 bits comes to about 4 gigabytes of memory, 64 bits comes to a number so large I don't even want to try and compare it. It is an equation, not a duplication. And scouring the internet for laptops, I suddenly notice quite a few 64 bit machines out there - Sony VAIO
So do we need the speed? Actually, the answer is that we don't, but we will. Some of the more graphical elements of webpages do require processing power, but if you look at the laptops available today, you will find that many have a decent graphics co-processor, and can allocate a good amount of memory to that processor. It used to be 128 or 256 megabytes, I am now seeing numbers like 1,768 and 2,100 megabytes available just for the graphics. So that "offloads" some of the webpage requirements from the main processor, but that still gets taxed by all of the processing done in Java - unbeknownst to the consumer, webpages run lots of little programs, for many reasons - scrolling, tracking your surfing, following your mouse around, etc. The main reason some websites load slowly is that they load lots of information from other websites, like graphical advertising with video, and many other things that all have to be found, loaded, and executed.
On a completely different note, I know that many immigrant families have made arrangements to have 230 or 240 VAC power, the power that is standard in large parts of the world, in their home. I do too - rather than bring a 240 VAC feed up from the basement (basic power is delivered to an American home as a double 120 VAC circuit, and most washing machines, dishwashers, well pumps, water heaters and whole house air conditioners run on 240 VAC) I have an electronic contraption that combines the power from two 120 VAC circuits, and delivers stabilized clean 240 VC power to whatever I want to run on it. It is made by a company by the name of Quick 220 Systems, works well, and is perfectly safe, due to an ingenious electronic safety monitor built into the system. If you don't connect it correctly, it simply won't work. If you can put up with loose cables, it is very useful to run American 230 VAC products - I have a heavy duty 230 VAC 18,000 BTU window air conditioner running on one.
Now most electronic equipment, these days, can run on anything from 100 VAC to 240 VAC, and 50 as well as 60 Hz power. But I do get the occasional relative over from Europe, who doesn't discover until they're here that we have different power as well as different sockets, and that their alarm clock, shaver cord, hairdryer and iPod charger won't work here. So I was really pleased to find European APC uninterruptible power supplies
I read an article, recently, can't remember where, that listed the ten most significant technological development of the past century, that is, the period from 1900 to 2000. The problem with these assessments is that they mostly look at the user interface, the user functionality of devices and services, rather than the underlying capabilities.
Let's take the discussions about Microsoft's Bing search engine as an example. I've not looked at it, because I do not believe that Microsoft has the server- and network capacity to handle the number of queries Google handles. Searchengineland.com estimates that Google ended 2008 with something like 9 billion searches per month for the United States alone - I can tell you from experience that the type and reliability of search results are only relevant when they are offset against the speed and volume of searches. Bing can be much more fancy, and even more accurate, than Google is, but if users were to massively swing to Bing, that system would slow to a crawl. If they don't massively swing to Bing, advertising and targeted result revenues won't cover the cost of the Bing network, and it'll go away. Yes, once upon a time Google could have had competition, but today, building a competing search engine would cost many billions of dollars, many more billions than even Microsoft would be able to throw at it even if it could borrow that much dough.
So - it isn't just the concept of the internet search engine that is a major technological achievement, it is the worldwide infrastructure behind it, that should win the prize. Designing and managing the processors, the servers and the storage network Google uses is the feat of the century - I would have my doubts that even the NSA has the capacity and capability Google does. For one thing, Google has, effectively, billions of testers, where the NSA does not, that organization looks for the proverbial needle in the haystack, and will generally never know what it missed.
The cellphone is another very good example. You can look at technologically advanced contraptions, like the iPhone, but that is not where the innovation lies. The true innovation lies in the simple, cheap mobile phone, the phone that today is affordable for the average peasant (if there is such a person) in a third world country. Here is an excellent example, the base Nokia phone sold in India, for all of US$26, 1,300 rupees, probably a month's wages for a menial worker. The cellphone has done something quite unbelievable - it has connected peasants, menial workers, in third world countries to the world at large. I've sent a text message to a limo driver in Chennai, India, from London, to let him know that my plane was delayed. That's much more impressive than rich Western teenagers using smartphones - they have never lacked communication capabilities, access to publications, TV, etc. But virtually every worker I encountered in Chennai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Jakarta, now has a mobile phone - mostly cheap phones built in vast numbers, mostly by Nokia. In Beijing, a teenage female student who showed me around a museum berated me for buying a Chinese PDA - "You should have bought a Nokia, everybody else here does, Chinese phones are crap" she said. And she did not mean smartphones, but the affordable cellphones lower income folks can afford, and kids (like her) get. It is very nice for Dad to have an iPhone, but if there aren't any cheaper Apple phones for the rest of the family, Apple really has not understood how the cellphone market really works. Because the family wants phones that can talk to each other, exchange information, have compatible applications - all impossible between the iPhone and the rest of the universe.
On the phone front, I came across the watch you see in the Amazon box to the right today, and could not stop myself from ordering one. I'd seen it, last year, I think, but it was expensive, and to my mind, a toy - it is a quadband GSM phone, camera, watch, and MP3 player, all in one, on the wrist, tada. I guess more people thought it was a toy, it's now down to a hundred buck$, which I happen to think is a decent price for a functioning toy. I'll come back on this in a week or two, tell you all about whether and how it works, if you're inclined to get one too.
Along the same lines, it is not WiFi that makes the cut with me, it is GPRS/EDGE, a basic internet phone for $65, on GSM networks, being built out to 3G - the 3G example an affordable unlocked phone that will take any SIM card, be it AT&T's, T-Mobile's, or any other GSM carrier anywhere in the world, as this phone is "quadband". Here again, this technology is making the internet available to millions of people who can afford to buy a mobile phone with PDA capabilities, but can't afford a computer, and even for those who can buy a simple laptop, and can use their GSM phone to connect that to the internet. We do not sufficiently understand that those fine folk that build our televisions need to have their own access to technology to understand the world we live in, and for many millions, that is the cellphone with data capabilities.
In other fields there is less obvious advancement. Transportation is a clear example of where we can't get our heads straight. Europe and Japan have adopted high speed trains, which, at least in Europe, don't seem to have done a thing in terms of getting some of the airplanes out of the sky. The Jumbo Jet, Boeing's 747, turns out to have done more for moving holiday makers across the globe, than it has for business and commuter travel - much of the long distance transport is done using smaller planes, many twin engined, since those were certified for trans-oceanic travel.
One very interesting aspect of the new communications technologies is that, for the first time in human history, teenagers and adolescents are leading the way in technology adoption. Instant messaging, text messaging on cellphones, and social networking all gained their popularity because young people adopted them, and adapted them to their needs. Facebook and Twitter are probably the best examples of this trend, where adults only became late adopters once the systems had grown and become increasingly popular. More about this in a couple of days.. but as I was writing this, Morgan Stanley in London published a research note prepared in house, on the subject of teenage media consumption, written by... a 15 year old intern. Read it, it truly opens up the teenage world, where I must emphasize that these are the adults, the consumers, the movers-and-shakers of the future. Throughout my career, I have consistently listened to my interns, watched the kids, because only that way can you predict which way the market is going to go.
Having spent much of the week cooped up in the house doing computer stuff, I am dying to get outside, and work on the outdoorsy things that were the reason for me to buy this house, on its lovely five wooded acres. Apart from the maintenance, I need to work on my woodpile, one neigbour has offered me some of his wood, as it is sitting around his property cluttering the place up, and I have identified a couple of good sized trees I can bring down. It is very curious how I, from being a polluter, excuding carbon monoxide and wood ash into the atmosphere, unwittingly have become an eco-person, providing my own heating using renewable resources, all that thanks to Al Gore and his band of eco-freaks. I do estimate that I "outgrow" my fuel consumption, an interesting equation, how many acres of woods do you have to have before the annual use of wood is really sustainable? I know that this entire region was clearcut, during the civil war, to feed the iron smelters that fed the war machine's unquenchable thirst for cannon, rifles and ammunition, and that it has since grown back, although over the past decade homebuilding for the population expansion has caused the loss of a significant amount of woodlands. The recession has all but put a stop to that, and I am really wondering if the Federal Government shouldn't set up a scheme whereby landowners get a tax break for each acre they leave to nature's air cleaners - trees and shrubbery.
Around here, most homeowners use a wood stove
I've delivered my surplus Lenovo 3000 N100
I get to this security issue by simply looking at the literally dozens of WiFi networks I see when I access the wireless selector on my own laptop, while at my friend's house. From the network names you can see when you do that it is easy to see how many kids have their own networks, and those are the ones most likely to hack around in their neighbourhood, and see whose networks they can access. From the "women" on dating sites who get you to email them, so they can harvest your IP address, to the lonely kids who have nothing better to do than hack into your home network and turn your PCs into botnet zombies, your information, passwords, and your online bank account are at continuous risk. Where in the past there was a lively trade in email addresses so you could get spammed, today the trade is in IP addresses, so your computers can be accessed and used for illicit purposes.
So if you put the HTML version line at the top of your HTML document, like you're supposed to do, Windows Notepad and Windows Write immediately lose all of the line breaks that keep your document legible to you as you write it. Line breaks which are ignored by browsers, although it is, in the interest of space spacings, probably not a bad idea to not have them in the file, it helps the document load faster. See what happens when you try to be fancy? Or is it Microsoft's programmers that are doing the fancy?
Now I have to get back to preparing my friend's laptop, including some security enhancements to his home network, heading Dulles way in the morning. In the meantime, Infocus have sent me a refurbished TV projector, as my Infocus IN24 had given up the ghost, and turned out to be irrepairable. I'd have liked to buy an HD projector, but those are still well over $1,000, and that I can't afford right now. Thankfully, Infocus had a refurbished IN24+
After making some changes to the operating systems of the two laptops I employ in everyday use - well, changes... While I made no major changes to the little Everex I travel with, work on the Lenovo laptop was a bit more substantial - that now runs Windows Ultimate in 64 bit mode, and I have yesterday added Bitlocker (part of Windows Vista Ultimate) to the fray, which encrypts the hard disk contents, and requires a security code on a thumb drive to boot (I picked the Sandisk device you see on the right, as it is sturdy, and neatly fits on a keyring). But neither explains why I lose the formatting in the HTML pages I write, formatting I need so I can figure out what's what - I write HTML, the world wide web page makeup language, by hand, rather than using a tool, which I possess in abundance. I kinda like having control of the way my pages look, and I enjoy understanding how HTML formatting works.
So when the on-screen formatting went south, I couldn't update these pages... and I still cannot, right now I am writing this paragraph online in Network Solutions' File Manager, which works, but I like working offline... besides, now that this cheap-and-cheerful Lenovo
I promise you I will catch up in the next couple of days, there are a few things I have to finish before the weekend, when I need to deliver a reconfigured laptop to a friend, and had promised to have his resume online as well. So back to that, and many thanks for your patience..
For the past few years, I have bought probably 60 to 70% of my gadgets at the Amazon.com
I suppose Amazon has become to the online world what Wal-Mart is to the big box store - they stay on top, simply by combining tight pricing with a huge, available, product assortment. I say "simply", but in both cases this required a far sighted world view, and an uncompromising dedication. Wal-Marts stores in Beijing blew me away, their formula works, wherever they take it (except in Germany, and I understand why), and the fact that I got a German standard DVD of "Das Boot"
Since I review and discuss lots of the technology products I buy anyway, it is a small miracle I did not sign up for Amazon's Associates Program. I just never thought of it, especially since I don't like these programs, generally, as most are restrictive in where you can take them, and how you post their stuff.
But it seems that the Amazon program isn't too restrictive, they simply give you HTML to place, no complicated formatting like Google does. They do put sneaky "no show" links into their HTML, something I generally do not approve of, but I guess I will see how that works, what it nets me - this is about money, after all. One thing it will do is make me write more extensive reviews, there is little point in my posting links to products, and not tell you exactly why they're great.
Ethically, I won't review anything I haven't bought, and have not spent time familiarizing myself with. I've done product reviews in the past, when I worked as an editor in The Netherlands and the UK, but I find when I read others' reviews that they don't get to the essence of the products they review, since they don't use them on an everyday basis. So I will tell you about the Nikon D50
Something else I have never done, and won't start now, is write negative reviews. If I don't like a product, I won't write about it. I am not the Consumer Association, but I can tell you about what I buy, why I bought it, how I use it, how happy it makes me, and what you need to watch out for. Hopefully, this may help drive traffic to my site, and perhaps will net me a buck or two, when y'all rush to Amazon to buy the gear I recommend. There is plenty of it....
No, I am not making fun of the locals, or of "southern speak". This is really how some of my blue collar neighbours speak English, and I love them for it. They are wonderful, supportive, helpful folk, especially once they figure out you don't look down on them, and after all the years I spent in and amongst what Virgin Airlines calls the "Upper Class" it is very refreshing to spend time amongst real people, who cope with their world in unique and very different ways. I love it here, even if they do all watch Fox.
It has been a bit of a messy week. A water pipe sprung a leak, somewhere in the wall upstairs, and I couldn't figure out where the leak was until neighbour D. came over and helped me rip some cabinets off the kitchen wall, and make a large hole in the ceiling, so we eventually figured out the defective water pipe was behind a vanity in the master bathroom. We ended up cutting the water pipe in the ceiling, I did not feel like ripping the vanity off just yet. The beams, soaked, are drying now, and then I have to figure out what to do for repairs in the kitchen.
Then I've been pressure washing the aluminium siding, or rather, one of the kids down the street is doing the work, and I supervise. But then yesterday, suddenly a fuse blew in the garage, and then I discovered one of my outside heat pumps is not getting power, even though it does not sit on the same circuit. I have enough A/C, the upstairs unit is fine, and I have some heat pumps on wheels, it is just annoying that everything seems to break, this month.
It isn't like I am not busy, I have finally decided to rework my Facebook page, as it looks like dozens of friends, former colleagues, some from way back, ex-girlfriends, and half my family are on Facebook. I absolutely refuse to maintain pages on half a dozen systems, that is ridiculous in terms of the amount of time it takes, between this website and Facebook it is a fair amount of work. Just setting permissions, so that Facebook doesn't use my information as though it were free, took hours, their system is so complicated.
And then friend D. is talking about possibly retiring, and we're talking about heading back to Asia. I was at the Oriental supermarket yesterday, and standing in an aisle, amid the Indonesian soups and Vietnamese herbs and woks and sauces, I almost shuddered with the strong desire to head back to Asia. It isn't that I am not happy where I am, I love this place, my woods, the turtles, the deer, and the sun and the heat, but I guess it is just a craving. And it is strong. I have promised D. I will talk, get on the horn, to colleges in Asia Pacific, so we could head out there and spend part of the year teaching, winters over there and summers over here...
Then I am putting together one of my laptops for him, I have too many, this one is barely a year old, and got replaced by one with an HDMI port, able to play Blu-ray to an HD TV set (using an external Buffalo Blu-ray Writer
So curious is as curious gets, and I decided to try to turn the newer laptop into a 64 bit machine, with an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate
Not only that - you'd think you can buy a 64 bit upgrade, and take your PC from 32 bit Windows Vista Business to 64 bit Windows Vista Ultimate, right? Hah! Fuhgedaboudit! What you have to do is scrounge up an old copy of Windows XP, install that on the machine, and then you can run an "upgrade". And getting an old copy of XP installing on a new Lenovo is fraught with pitfalls - for one thing, it won't talk to SATA drives, I spent something like 4 hours experimenting with different drives, and different install packages, until I (first light shone through the trees already) had that brainwave, put the C: drive in IDE mode in the BIOS, and suddenly my old HP version of Windows XP Home rolled right onto the disk. Then I switched back to SATA mode, and 64 bit Win Ultimate installed like a dream. Then, it took another six hours to find and install all of the drivers for things like the graphics chipset, the modem, the flash memory slot, the HD audio (which Intel kindly locks in with the HD video chipset through HDMI) and then program the drive controllers back to performance mode, Ultimate reset every single interface in the laptop to "safe and slow" - something Windows installs have always done, making sure that you can't use your fancy new PC at its rated speed, because God forbid it overclocks the operating system...
But hey, it works - my $500 Lenovo 3000 N500 now runs at 64 bits, and has 8 GB of usable RAM, another 4 GB of Readyboost flash memory, and 14 GB of virtual memory. It freakin' flies, people! Now the waiting is for Windows 7, I've ordered three copies, so come October I can do this all over again...
The turtle, above? Living, as I do, more or less in the woods, there is plenty of wildlife that occupies the same acreage I do. What I have noticed (as you can see) is that the animals have gotten used to me, these past few years, and no longer exhibit the fear response you'd expect. That goes for the deer, the turtles, the squirrels, even the wasps, which nest all around the house, the most they ever do, when I am working outside, is fly up to me, check me out, and then go back to whatever it is wasps do. Quite interesting - unlike most of my neighbours, I don't have a dog, or dogs, and as a consequence I get plenty of deer grazing, and squirrels foraging, looking at me with that doleful "leave me alone" stare. By rights, the turtle should have withdrawn into its shell, I took these pictures at maybe two yards from it, but as you can see, it wasn't going to stop crossing the lawn for nothing....
The neat thing is, we don't have to do any more Crusades. They do them in-house now.
Usually, summer sets off irresistible urges to travel in me, but I have so much to do at home that I am, for now, quite content postponing my globetrotting for a while. "Foyle's War" is re-running on WETA, the sounds of British recreations of the WWII era are soothing, as I sit here waiting for the eggs to boil. I do realize, though, that that England no longer exists, as indeed does the one I went to live in, in 1979. The London Transport double decker bus up to Norwood Hill, and the Luncheon Vouchers that bought cucumber sandwiches, all quite novel to the newly minted Dutch emigrant I was. Ah, nostalgia.. the images of bus and the shops are burned into my mind, though, I suppose those were the days that the discovery of how different things were a mere hours' flight from home turned me into the globetrotter I became.
I am still in the throes of setting up my new file server - see below - after customizing the evaluation copy of Windows 7 I am using (fingers crossed that Microsoft will allow the final version to update this beta..), I have got the machine running like clockwork, although it took a bit of doing to get the AIS Backup software running on it. I eventually got it running smoothly in Windows 7's compatibility mode, for Windows XP Service Pack 2 in this case, it fails under all other modes I've tried. In order to ensure that it is fully reliable, I am running a full restore, followed by a full backup, this involving close to 1.2 terabytes of data, in 1.1 million (!) files. It looks like the entire process will take four days - necessary because I need to test not only the server's reliability, but that of the drives as well. While I had tested most of the drives I am using, the 2(!) terabyte Fantom G-force Raid Array
As the test file transfers involve using the drive on a USB port, which isn't terribly fast, the testing takes a long time. The primary network drives sit on a duplicated 3 GB/sec eSATA interface, which is plenty fast, while the "backup of the backup" doesn't really need to be fast, just reliable, and actually running on a slower bus will put less strain on the array, and on the server ports. Six of one...
Over the past week, I have almost exclusively worked on my systems and my network. As you may have read below, May 19, I bought a discounted Sony Vaio desktop, then blew that up, and so a repair person turned up to replace the motherboard (free of charge!). That makes me a Sony convert - more about that later.
Then I took the latest test version of Windows 7 Ultimate
Last but not least, I have taken a good look at how you can have your address book and calendar and portably, easily, exchange and update them between cellphone and PC. You see, all of these dandy iPhones are very nice, but taking their data, bringing that to a different phone, synchronizing it across multiple phones, and having your calendar and schedule on multiple PCs, isn't something you can do in what we call a "device independent" manner. Which I happen to think is much more important than moving your fingers across a touch screen in fashionable ways. For me, it needs to be cheap, easy, and I have to be able to give my kids or my girlfriend or whatever the same information I use - preferably without my password- and login file, or the email addresses of my sex friends. Right?
I can be brief about the Sony VAIO VGC-JS230J/S desktop
To my right, as I write this at my dining table, the Everex PC is restoring my main systems backup and file server, until now running on an old Dell PC. I built a 1.5 terabyte Seagate FreeAgent Pro
Long story short, the Cavalry is going into retirement, and is being replaced by a new terabyte Fantom G-force Raid Array
You gotta read this.
I don't know if you have noticed, but this eco-stuff is fast becoming a religion, where simple calculations and logical thinking no longer matter. I do not, per se, mind that people have different ideas about what's best for mankind and its future, but some of the thinking is simply crazy
One person I know reuses cola bottles - the big plastic two litre ones. She stores larg amounts of herbal tea in them, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that this leaches chemicals out of the plastic, over time, which she then ingests. This is very likely to impair her immune system.
Another acquaintance got behind the wheel of my SUV, and declared she hates SUVs. Not mine (of course) but the ones that soccer moms use. Apparently, she is concerned with the environment, and that relieves her of the responsibility of thinking.
This is beginning to be one of my major hobby horses - it is being hammered into us that we're going to reduce our carbon output by driving small and/or hybrid vehicles, and using CFL bulbs. This is, in fact, complete hogwash. The environment is not materially affected by soccer moms or gas guzzlers. What causes our carbon output is a combination of people commuting to work, and goods transportation by trucks. Hundreds of millions of people get into their cars, every day, and drive to their offices to sit behind a computer with a telephone at their elbow. This isn't something they need to go anywhere for - between teleconferencing, email, IM and camchatting, most office workers can do from home what they do in the office. And long distance goods transportation can be done by trains, with only localized delivery and distribution done by trucks.
These two simple measures would take a large percentage of cars and trucks off the road, which means much less fuel is burned, and our road building and maintenance budgets can be significantly scaled back. It seems so simple it is stupid, but think about it - and steer clear of the effects it would have on the oil industry and car and truck manufacturers. All I am saying is that unless we take an analytic look at the problem, and come up with organized and enforced solutions, we're going to have more of the same. At the present time most vehicle manufacturers are putting hybrid vehicles on the market, leading to more cars being produced and sold - but the underlying issue, those cars getting on the road and being driven in our congested commutes, isn't being addressed. That is where the majority of pollution takes place, and the majority of our wasting fuel.
Soccer moms and one way bottles aren't the problem. Standards of hygiene have risen, in the Western world, because we have all manner of disposable articles, from sanitary napkins to the plastic bottles that water comes in, in Third World countries. We cannot simply roll these things back, because we would negatively affect hygienic standards and living expectations. Airplane travel, specifically for tourists, is an issue we could have another look at - if you can fly to Egypt to visit the pyramids, there is no reason why you can't take a cruise ship to Egypt, instead. I have spent many years doing my work from remote locations, all over the world, with a laptop and a cellphone. There is no reason why a manager can't work while on that cruise ship traveling to their vacation destination, just to think out loud. Lots of inventive solutions are in existence, today, as fully mature technologies, things we can start using tomorrow - think of it, the space shuttle crew can work from orbit, or from the ISS, and so can we.
On a different note, I've owned a small refractor telescope, the Meade ETX-80, for a while now, not so much because I want to gaze at the stars, but because Meade sells an SLR adapter for it, and I was curious how well this would work, with a digital camera. Nikon has software that will let you access the sensor element directly from a PC, so from an experimentation perspective the ETX-80 with one of my Nikon D bodies is a very nice combination to have.
As an interlude, the reason for me to have SLR cameras is that I spent part of my career as a professional photographer, both in the studio and as a photojournalist, and from the day I started, back in the 1970s, I have always worked with Nikon SLR cameras (beginning with the F2) and lenses. To the right is a shot taken in my yard using the Nikon D90, with the Meade telescope and a 2x converter in between the camera and the telescope. Not at all bad, considering the price.
One of the big advantages of using a notebook or laptop computer is that you can set it up so it will "power down gracefully" - shutting down all applications, closing files, and shutting down the operating system, all by itself - when the battery runs low, for instance when you have a power failure, or have simply gotten distracted and left the machine on. Many consumers suffer damaged files and even damaged hard disks when their power fails - but what isn't so well known, they can do the same thing with their desktop computer you can with a laptop. The purpose here is not that you can finish your work, but that you can send your machine into hybernation without losing or damaging any data.
All you need to do is get what is known as an "Uninterruptible Power Supply", or UPS, which is generally available beginning at around $40. If you buy one that is fully compatible with Microsoft Windows - all those made by APC are, and I have recently discovered newer Belkin UPS devices are, too - you don't need to install any software, plug it in, connect the USB driver connector to your PC, and Windows will install a "Human Interface Device" driver that works directly with your power settings (if they're not on your task bar, find them in the Control Panel).
Your PC will, once all this is running, behave (set up properly) just like a laptop would - when the power fails, it will close files and programs, and shut down. If you are at your keyboard, you can finish what you were doing, and either shut down manually, or let the automation take care of it.
These devices aren't much more expensive than the surge suppressors many consumers think they should use (mostly unnecessary today), and they contain not only the UPS, but have built-in surge suppression as well, in many cases for the power, phone lines, and for cable or satellite TV and internet connections. The batteries will last something like four to five years, and in most cases you can replace the battery (which is generally of the lead-acid variety) yourself, from a third party supplier. At my house, all electronics run on UPS's during a power failure, which, when I am in, bridges the gap between the power fail event, and the time I have my emergency generator running and connected.
I am going to have to wait telling you more about the Vaio desktop I bought (see my May 19 rant), as I blew it up. I connected my airplane power supply to it, to see if that delivers enough power to run this thing, this is a power supply that runs off the 24 VDC an airplane seat connector delivers, as well as off a 12 VDC car jack, and even though I connected it following instructions it delivered -20 VDC, rather than + 20VDC. So it is waiting for the repair guy. What I did discover, though, is that Sony provides in-home warranty service. I guess that is why the Vaios are generally more expensive than other brands, which you have to take or send in to get fixed. I got an immediate callback from their service provider, after I opened the trouble ticket with Sony, and an hour later the local technician called to tell me when he expected to receive the new motherboard, and he'd call me to set up an appointment the second he had it. This is the level of service IBM delivered, when they still had a PC division, and I am pleasantly surprised to see Sony does this too. If you cannot have a system go down on you for any length of time, it seems Sony is a good choice. I'd say that especially with kids in college, they cannot by and large study and work without their laptop, this makes Sony an excellent choice.
I am procrastinating bigtime. I keep on buying stuff I really do not need, keep promising myself that I will put on Ebay what it replaces (anybody for a Nikon D50 in pristine state? A Lenovo 3000?), and then don't get around to doing it. This despite my having a long established Ebay account, all I need to do is take some pictures and start the auction.
This is one of those strange periods - for months, not a sniff on any of the internet dating sites I have a stake out on, and then - bingo! - four on the same day. Maybe I should try polygamy. Mind you, in the Commonwealth of Virginia even cohabitation is officially against the law, so my guess is that living with more than one woman would be even more of a problem. I don't know that this law is actually ever used any more, but it is the reason that my medical plan, for instance, can't accept domestic partners, only spouses. I imagine the legislature does not want to get into changing the law, because that would open the door to same sex partners, and this is one of the most conservative states in the nation.
I shall not let it bother me. Other than that, I have mostly been busy with technology - I really ought to make an effort to find myself a teaching position somewhere - my vast storehouse of expertise and knowledge is going to waste, right now I am doing a few research projects whose results really aren't going to go anywhere, other than here in this blog.
If you are tempted to take a look at Windows 7, which is now in a kinda final pre-release state, I suggest you do. The last beta version, a few months ago, wasn't recognized as "windows" by many applications and drivers, but with this latest version that does not seem to be a problem. Prerequisite is that you are prepared to buy an official upgrade, when that becomes available, or that you have an unused PC or laptop sitting around you can experiment with. I do.
I have installed Windows 7 on an auld HP Compaq NX9008 Notebook PC, a somewhat oversized laptop with a 2.6 GHZ Celeron - quite a fast processor, but it generates so much heat the fans (3!) whine continuously, and you could use the thing for a hairdryer, if you wanted to. I bought this in early 2005, expanded it to 1 GB of memory and a 100 GB hard disk, and stopped using it altogether a couple of years ago, after it had sat in my garage for a while, managing my main UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).
I tend to like testing operating systems on older computers, and on computers that don't have the latest greatest whatever. Of course a new operating system will run on a PC with the latest greatest whatever, but the thing is, that does not prove anything. You will recall the issues with peripheral drivers for Windows Vista - I don't understand why people are still bitching about Vista, I have it running on every PC I have, save for one I use as a file server, and it really runs well and is vastly superior over Windows XP Pro. Sure, you have to tweak it - turn off Defender, Aero, User Account Control, Index/Search, and a bunch of other crap the Microsoft wizards think will benefit the consumer - they have absolutely no clue how the average person uses their computer. None - I swear, I can prove it, too. I am the guy who gets to fix the PCs at the neighbour's, mostly elderly folk who just want to mail with the kids and look stuff up, now and then.
If you don't like the tweaking, you will like Windows 7 even less than Vista - the Microsoft nerds have actually managed to put even more crap into "7" that is even harder to defeat. Much of this stuff takes lots of memory and CPU cycles, and as 32 bit Windows, which is what most folks use, can only address a maximum of 4 gigabytes of memory, and many computers reserve some or a good chunk of that for graphics use. The net result is that if you leave everything the way Microsoft wants you to run most of your memory will be used by your operating system, instead of your software. This is asinine, because once your PC runs out of memory it starts "swapping" (putting bits of temporarily used code on the hard disk, fetching them again as needed), and whatever you were doing slows down to a crawl. Because the ordinary user does not know a thing about memory management, they will declare they have a virus (they don't know a name for anything else that can go wrong with a computer) and all hell breaks loose. Not that there can't be a virus..
My over the road neighbours were having problems with their PC, so I had them bring it over and looked at it - it didn't have one, two, or even three viruses on it - it had seventeen!! See, the only thing we need from Microsoft is built in virus protection, and that is the one thing Microsoft does not provide. How stupid is that? The Sony Vaio desktop PC I found discounted at my local BJ's, the other day, was even worse - it came with a "free" trial package of Microsoft Live OneCare, a security and maintenance package for Windows completely tied into all the other stuff Microsoft attempts to force you to install, like Live Mail, Live Chat, and new browsers that link all that together. These packages are hacker's paradise, as they are all tied in with each other and your internet, IP address, email address, and everything else, and once the hackers discover a flaw all of your personal information is open to them.
So I don't use any of it - I don't even use the standard chat engines, Yahoo, MSN, and AIM, as they all tie in with your browser, and pass on your email address and your IP address. I use Skype, which is better, and doesn't do any of that crap. Add the AVG Free virus package, and you're home dry.
Back to the latest Windows 7 beta, though, and my NX9008 notebook computer - it installed flawlessly, recognized every single device in the system, including the USB dongle plugged into a USB port, and came right up. It could not find drivers for two devices, the built-in modem and the built-in Ethernet port, but as I don't need either I did not worry about those. I know I have in the past managed to get the XP drivers for these devices working with Windows Vista, so I guess I could probably tweak "7" as well, but as I said, I don't need them. More importantly, it did recognize the older WiFi dongle, and once I had told the operating system which router to use, it recognized every single system, server and device on my network. Not only that, Windows 7, on that Celeron based system, runs at least as fast as Windows XP ever did, and that is impressive, considering Vista on that notebook was slow as molasses, although it did run. Windows 7 bases its loadable drivers not on the devices it sees, but on the chipset and/or processor inside the devices - it got the Zonet WiFi dongle going because it was able to "see" and recognize the processor inside the dongle.
More about all this magic in my next posting, folks, I promise, and I'll bend your ear about the Sony Vaio VGC-JS110J, a stunning looking PC with all of its innards built into the high resolution 20 inch screen (the link points to its replacement, the VGC-JS230J/S, which has a faster processor and a larger hard disk, not that mine is stingy). I would have never bought this ca. $1000 computer if there had not been a showroom model sitting at BJ's on Route 3, I noticed it marked down to $800 - 4 MB of RAM, 64 bit Windows Vista, 802.11n networking, a 320 MB 7200 RPM hard disk - and told myself I did not need it, and tore myself away, only to find it marked down again, to 629 baksheesh, the next day. I did the same thing I do when a gorgeous blonde makes eye contact with me from up close - I went weak at the knees, stuttered a bit, and pulled out my Platinum Visa. More about this later, when I receive the 8 MB of RAM the 64 bit OS will handle - hehe.
Previous blog entries, back to August 2008, are here.
On September 11, 2001, at 8am, I was in the air between New York City and Washington, D.C., my regular commute for a number of years, on my way to a doctor's appointment - little did I know I would spend the next eight months working on the recovery of our networks and services, in Manhattan and Arlington. "9/11" became a determining factor in my life - I had offices in Manhattan and Arlington, VA, some of my customers, as well as my dentist, were in the Pentagon, and in the World Trade Center, where I would get my morning coffee and breakfast, when downtown. I make a point, now, of visiting, and communicating with, my friends and relatives as often as I can; and I finally left the cityscape, and now live in the country. I've written up some of my experiences of that day, and its aftermath, here. You can find a list of all killed and missing victims of the 9/11 attacks, some of whom I knew and worked with, at the Washington Post. An attempt at a listing of all casualties of the War on Terror can be found here.
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