AMD system build

I’ve created a feature which details the building of a PC using an AMD 690G motherboard.

Hitachi 1TB…big boys toys

It’s not often that I’m in awe of computer kit these days, but today Hitachi very kindly sent me once of the their new 7K1000 drives. This baby has 1TB!!!
It’s easy to dismiss stuff like this and just say it’s a bit bigger than the 750GB Western Digital I reviews a while back. True it’s entirely arbitary amount of data, like any other size, but an entire terabyte on a single drive, numbs the mind a little.
Let me put that in a little perspective. The first hard drive I owned was the 30Mb MegaStore for the Atari ST. This drive is a thousand gigabytes or a million megabytes, which is a mere 33,000 times bigger! I’m not sure how many MegaStore’s Atari sold in the UK, but I think I could hold more capacity in one hand in these drives than they pushed in all the MegaStores. Assuming the rate of growth is proportional, which it isn’t, in 2027 we’ll have 20,000 or 40,000TB drives. Or, more HD movies than it’s possible to watch in lifetime. Bring it on!

AMD 690G build crazyness

I’ve spent the day trying to complete a PC build for a friend, which I’ll document more completely at a later point. But this morning the PC had XP on it and was pretty ready to go (or going as in the picture). So why have I just finished mucking about with it???? In a word ’sound’. For a reason that still defies logic I noticed that no sound device had been installed, and then more strangely that the sound device was missing! I assumed, wrongly, that it was an XP driver muck-up, and reinstalled XP using repare mode. That didn’t fix it. So in desperation I threw Vista on it, mainly to find out if it was something wrong with the hardware. It was, because I got no sound in Vista either!
In the end I wondered if the BIOS settings weren’t being shown correctly, and considered pulling the battery out to reset everything. Before doing that I reset to factory defaults and kerrr-pow!…We have sound. Now all I’ve got to do is scrap off Vista and start again with the OS my friend actually wants…
Perhaps I should write an article on how to waste about five hours on something stupid.

iPlayer – it doesn’t get better

I’ve been trying to use iPlayer for a while now, and instead of getting better it’s actually getting worse. Last week was a horrible mess where content appeared, then disappeared, the reappeared and still didn’t work. For example; Doctor Who on the 16th was on the lists but you couldn’t download it, and that was true an entire week later when it was removed after it’s 7 day slot. In 7 days they couldn’t get a single file and put it in the right place! I wouldn’t mind but the amount of material their currently releasing is very small, if given the source data I could output the conversions needed for each day alone with a couple of computers. I presume the BBC has more that two computers…
But there are other issues. I noticed today that they’d listened to their critics a little, and upped the bit rate/resolution of the shows! Hooray! Oh, hang on…the person who converted them didn’t realise they weren’t normal aspect ratio, but widescreen, and so they won’t play correctly in full screen! Doh! And they’ve also started to put links in for shows that are being released tomorrow, but when you click on them nothing happens, so it’s entirely pointless as you can’t order a show to download in advance.
I tried to mention some of these issues on the BBC forum, but it won’t accept my password, and tells me that my birth date is incorrect when I try to change it, something I’m unlikely to get wrong.
I’m sure the BBC will eventually stop making amateurish mistakes with iPlayer, but I’m wondering if anyone will be using it by then.

SCO train hits the buffers

The Linux world woke up to some excellent news today, the sort that makes people actually believe in the American legal system. If you’ve not a techie or being living under a rock then it might seem incredible but SCO (formally the Santa Cruz Operation) has been holding a revolver to the head of the entire Linux world for the past four years, ever since it sued IBM claiming that millions of lines of code in Linux where owned by it.
The claim was utter bunk, but we’re seen SCO attempt to railroad this claim without virtually any evidence that it was true. But despite running a very tight legal ship it’s not IBM that’s really put the mockers on this whole sordid exercise. As part of it’s case SCO claimed it owned UNIX, after a previous deal with Novell. Except Novell said it owned UNIX and not SCO. It’s this other side to the case that’s finally delivered the coup de grass on SCO, as Utah Federal District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball has ruled that Novell owns UNIX, not SCO. That’s a big problem for SCO, because not only does their case against IBM collapse, because they’re suing for using something they don’t own, but they’ve also taken money from the likes of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems for license which is legally now Novell’s. Giving that money up is a difficulty, because the amount they got is greater than the net worth of SCO.
I’m sure when SCO CEO, Darl McBride and friends thought this scheme up it looked great. We hold Linux to ransom, get IBM to pay use off, take our ill-gotten gains and head to the sun! But when the stock market opens on Monday, and the reality of where SCO is really heading dawns of those holding stock, it could really be the end. Personally, I hope so.

If you want to read more I’d head over to the excellent Groklaw , who’ve been providing a blow-by-blow coverage of this case.

UPDATE
SCOX (NASDAQ code for SCO shares) closed at $1.50 on Friday, opened at $0.45 on Monday and on Wednesday is trading at $0.37…
I hear the sound of water going down the plug-hole.

The Future is a scary place…we’re told

Apparently that’s the overwhelming conclusion of the House of Lords report on the Internet, which they likened to the ‘Wild West’. Putting aside the argument that the notional concept of the Wild West is pure fiction anyway, from the portions that have been reported this document seems to have discovered that the Internet isn’t immune from exactly the same sorts of threats that people encounter every day in ‘reality’. Gosh that’s a revelation! How long exactly did it take them to work that one out?
What worries me the most though isn’t the banal rehash of what’s been true for at least five years, but the assertion that ISPs should somehow be made responsible for what others do with their service. People have been scamming people with letters and phone calls for years, since these mechanisms became widespread in fact. But I’ve never seen the government turn around to Royal Mail or BT and ask them to stump up when some old lady buys shares in a company that doesn’t exist, or hands over her details to a criminal!
This isn’t a new idea though is it, as the whole YouTube and Torrent rows demonstrate. You can’t hold Google responsible for stuff found by their indexing or put by others on YouTube. In the same way that Ford aren’t responsible for letting people drive their cars while drunk. It isn’t Ford’s responsibility to sit outside the pub and stop you driving, and it isn’t the ISPs responsibility to work out which packets of data that are travelling on their network might ultimately upset someone.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see ISPs being more pro-active on killing virus packages and mail zombie data in transit, because I think that’s entirely practical, and it’s something they could actually do. But making them liable is frankly the stupidest thing I’ve heard recently.  As many of them resell services from other providers, like BT, they could share responsibility around, eventually bringing a huge class action against the relatives of Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray and Edison  for their contribution to the creation of this highly dangerous facility.
Clearly based on this thinking Elton John is ready for a peerage, which I respectfully suggest is given to him just minutes before the unelected second house is disbanded and replaced by an elected one with people who have more of a grip on modern technology. But then the other elected house doesn’t seem to have any of those, so maybe that’s asking too much.

XP SATA install without floppy

I know this has been possible for a while, but I’d always worked around it, either by finding a floppy drive or installing to an ATA drive and then cloning it to the SATA when happy with the installation.
But today I decided to grasp the thorn and do it the slick way with a tool called nLite. It worked a dream! I’m so impressed with my own ability to follow simple instructions, I might well turn this into a Micro Mart feature, or alternatively put it here.
The bottom line is that you don’t need a floppy to install XP on SATA! Is this the bitter end for the floppy?

Ety8 – old square ears is back!

I’ve just reviewed these weird things for Micro Mart (be published in a few weeks). They’re Bluetooth headphones.
You can wait then to read what I think of them, but one aspect of them I’m going to share with you. In the promotional pictures they have of this product, you see a man wearing them, with the block part of the device flush against his ear! How?? I’m a big person but my ear canals aren’t nearly wide or deep enough to have the plastic tube on these entirely inside. If they did reach this point, I’d be brain dead! Who thinks of this stuff? Yes, correct, to the person who just shouted out ‘The Cybermen’!

Pipex…all over the show..

Previously I’ve mentioned issues is my Pipex ADSL, which I thought I’d tracked down as faulty wiring.
Well…further investigation revealed that it wasn’t faulty wiring (after I’d rebuilt the entire telephone cabling of the house…and put in a dedicated ADSL link to the Master Socket!). So I went back to Pipex…who gave me their ‘it’s BT…but unless you can prove their is a problem we can’t do anything about it’ routine. In the end I lost it a little with the Pipex representative and told him I didn’t care who took responsibility for my problem, Pipex or BT, but someone was going to or the service stopped then and there!
After another 5 minutes of listening to piped music they agreed to look into it…
That was five days ago, and I’ve heard nothing. But, the line situation does appeared to have improved, somewhat. Now when it disconnects it comes back within 10 minutes, not the 1-5 hours it’s previously done.  But the speed rating is all over the show, currently I’m getting 4544 bps. But so far this week I’ve seen it as low as 2200 and as high as 6.7 Mbps! And that speed was reliable, so I’m confident the line is fine. I’ve since been told by an associate that BT are currently rolling out new equipment to exchanges, which occasionally doesn’t play well with other hardware, which from my perspective sounds about right.
While I’m happy that I’m staying connected more, it’s still not what it once was, and definitely not up to playing an online game on. I’m curious to hear what Pipex have to say when they eventually do come back to me, if they ever do. Failure to do this might be justification for me dropping this contract and sticking my hand in the fire of VirginMedia, and their very tempting 20mbit links.

BBC Click – the Gates Interview

It’s become a ritual thing for me these days, watching ‘Click’. It reminds me of my childhood, when I peeked from behind the sofa at the monstrous creations the BBC costume department could fashion for a couple of quid on Dr. Who. Although entirely horrified, I had to watch. And for me, a technical person, Click is exactly that. It’s also something of a journalistic litmus, where I can check that in the past week my output hasn’t dumbed down to Click’s level, or became as mired in mediocrity.
To show what a glutton for punishment I can be, I downloaded the latest instalment using BBC’s iPlayer Beta, which managed to crash IE 6 twice before it would allow me to select the show to download. It took a while after selection to arrive, so I had plenty of time to get comfy and arm myself with a cushion for the worst excesses.
And it wasn’t long before I reached for that cushion. This episode is practically a wall-to-wall advert for Microsoft, who I’ve noticed have become big chums with the BBC recently. The opening story is about a Microsoft project in the US to completely take over school and run it as an IT project. In it we where informed that due to the cashless cafeteria system the individual calorific content of each child could be monitored! Hey, why stop there why not just chip the kids?
But better was to come when the later half of the show was taken up with a Bill Gates interview. So given that this is one of the most powerful men in the world, and that Microsoft is the most influential companies you’d expect a least a few interesting questions. But alas, this was a PR junket for how Microsoft wants to be seen as nice to kids across the world, and make a better future for everyone. Then seemingly at random the interviewer threw in a question about Moore’s Law, which Gates brushed off as stupid, which is strangely where he and I would actually agree. And, after a few more ‘you’re so disgustingly rich, it must be cool’ questions they where done! Well actually they talked for longer, which is available online…I rushed to watch that, hoping at least one challenging question might surface. Sadly the extended version doesn’t. Where was the questions about Vista, and how it’s not making the inroads they expected? About Open Source, and how Microsoft is positioning itself? About the EU and being fined? About how we in the UK get to bay 70% more for the same software as the Americans? About the millions Microsoft spends lobbying the American political system, and who they’ll back for the next President?
And, a zillion other things many people who like to hear Bill talk about.
So once again the BBC let a genuine chance to actually get a real story go west, while the Microsoft PR machine called the shots and presented it’s promotional material. ‘Click’ I guess, is the sound made when you switch something off…if I could only do that!

BBC iPlayer – not impressed so far

Like an idiot I signed up for the BBC iPlayer Beta, and today they sent me an email inviting me to take part. So far I can’t say I’m overly impressed. Given the build up that the BBC has given this service, the reality appears to be a complete mess. First when you try to use it you find that the BBC is joined, Dubya style, to the hip with Microsoft. And as a result insists that your using Windows XP, Media Player and Internet explorer. I have all those things but I still got a red cross because I had the audacity to use Firefox to go the the iPlayer website. Then after putting my iPlayer account and password in at least four different time I was told that they where ‘experiencing  technical difficulties’, before I eventually got the download install files. After I’d done that I was asked for my name and password again, except these weren’t the first ones but some new BBC account ones, so I had to register again. After that exercise I select a show, one of the BBC’s output in the last 7 days, and watched while it downloaded at a snails pace. 10 minutes later it’s done 22mb of 350Mb  total, by the time this arrives the presenters might have retired or died.
If they can’t allow more than 7 days to watch something, or do it in a manner that doesn’t require the patience of Job to get working, I can’t see there is much future in this. It needs to be much slicker, faster and less reliant on being a fan of Microsoft. But then you’d think they’d know that.

Satellite Pro or is that Slow?

It’s one of the few decent days weather we’ve had this summer, so I’m sat out in the back garden. So I can work I’ve brought out with me a Celeron M powered Toshiba Satellite Pro. I’ve used systems like this one before and they can be quite snappy, but this one is like sludge working to rule! The reason being that the people who set it up put 512MB’s of RAM in it, which would have been fine for Windows XP, except they put Vista Business Basic on it. Doh! As the video sub-system takes some memory, you’re actually quite heavily in deficit before your opened any applications. I’ve turned off all the visual junk, installed Firefox, and now I can use WordPress without huge drive swapping delays. I may have to go and spend on some extra RAM for this if it’s to do much more than slow me down.

Linksys R.I.P.

It’s been reported, first by Uberpulse that Cisco has decided to kill the Linksys brand. I have mixed feeling about this. While they always made an effort to get their equipment around to Journalists for review, every one of their boxes I’ve used is now dead, usually because of the power block failing. Nice while they lasted…might be a good epitaph.

A printed Blog…surely not!

For those that would like more information about how ‘Unleashed’ came about, I’ve talked briefly about creating this blog on pages 58 and 59 of this weeks Micro Mart magazine (issue 963), available at most good newsagents in the UK.
Welcome to anyone who’s come along here after reading it! You’ll find the blog a bit different from what I normally write in Micro Mart, but all in my typically reserved style. Enjoy!

Thunderflies are go!

I’ve just had a bizarre conversation with long time friend of mine Gary Allen about Thunderflies (also referred to as Thrips from the order Thysanoptera), and the trouble they can cause. It’s annoying enough to have them craw on your skin in the summer, but Gary’s having issues with them go into the space between the matrix and the backlight on his TFT. At first he assumed that the two dead pixels that moved where the result of PSS, or Post Stella Shock. But it turns out that this tiny little beetles just love to scurry around inside thin-film-transistor displays!
The trouble is getting them out, before they die and become a permanent visual fixture. His idea, for which I take no responsibility was to train Ninja Thunderflies to go in and kick out the blighters. My idea, which isn’t much better, was to use a powerful microscope to paint lipstick on a Thunderfly and use them as a romantic lure, in the manner of those Bugs Bunny cartoon’s where he does the same.
As neither of these plans seems like a sure-fire way to extradite the little blighter’s, we’re open to ideas about how to solve this problem. So tell us if you have any ideas.
This link shows it’s just not us with this issue.