Anime Art Blog Cool Geek Life World Rant

June 21, 2003

Geek  Campbell's Condensed Geek

Neverwinter Nights, Bioware's fairly nifty multi-player Dungeons and Dragons game, is now available for Linux!:

CD-Key: You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.
Yay!

And Shadows of Undrentide, the first Neverwinter Nights expansion, is expected to arrive in Australia next week.

Yay!

And there's another new hardcover D&D rulebook out: Ghostwalk:

Ghostwalk contains everything needed to run a stand-alone campaign in and around the city of Manifest, or to integrate it into an existing world, including rules for playing ghost characters and advancing in the new eidolon and eidoloncer classes, several new prestige classes, over 70 new feats and 65 new spells, three complete adventures, four highly detailed encounter sites, and fourteen new monsters and templates.
That makes, what, 24 official 3rd Edition hardcover rulebooks? Not counting unofficial stuff, softcover stuff, D20 stuff...

Posted by Pixy Misa at 12:46 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 20, 2003

Geek  Internet Time

It would seem that Apple accidentally leaked the specs for their new PowerMac G5 systems, due to be officially announced on Monday.

So far, business as usual.

The interesting thing is that within hours of the accident, someone set up a CafePress store selling items that would only appeal to true geeks.

Nice specs, tho'.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 11:53 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 12, 2003

Geek  Hackers, Old Style

Web site of the Day is the MIT Hack Gallery. As they say:

The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!). Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking").
Some favourites:
The Great Droid
Trogdor the Burninator in Post-It Notes
The Elevator in the Basement
The Gnome Infestation
There are many more, with pictures. There's a Best Of page too, which might be a good place to start.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 02:05 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 11, 2003

Geek  ROT F, L

This week's New Scientist notes that the Alpha Five database package (I've heard of Meta 4, but not of Alpha Five) uses the extension .sex for its files:

As a result, the template directory of this program included filenames such as: "Gift entry.sex, Invited guests.sex, Party budget.sex, Classes to instructors.sex, Classes to students.sex, Recipes.sex, People - Activities.sex, Employees.sex" and much more.
The Motorola 6809 microprocessor, as used in the Tandy Color Computer (my first computer!), had a sign extend instruction; the assembly language mnemonic for which was, reasonably enough, SEX. Sign extend extended a signed 8-bit number to a signed 16-bit number. Due to the way twos-complement arithmetic works, this involves filling the leading byte with either zeroes or ones depending on whether the number was positive or negative. Which is probably more than you wanted to know about the subject, so lets get on with story:
DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of "The Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a SEX instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed CBW and CWD (depending on what was being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also missing straight SEX but has logical-or and logical-and instructions ORL and ANL.
That's just one of about a squillion little bits of geek humour to be found in the Jargon File, including the wonderful tales Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and The Story of Mel:
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:

        Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly'' software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software'' sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

If you are a geek, or love a geek, or just want to understand geeks better, you really need to read The Story of Mel. The jargon file describes it thus:
This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together.
And also notes that:
The original submission to the net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it -- it was straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the "free verse" form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow.
Go forth and read, while I scour the net for new irony.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | Geek | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

June 10, 2003

Geek  Useless Motherboard Features

The Useless Motherboard Feature of the Day Award goes to Gigabyte for their GA-7NNXP, GA-8PENXP, and GA-8KNXP. Why's that?, you ask. I'll tell you. The GA-7NNXP has four memory sockets. How many memory modules do you think you can use with it?

Wrong. Guess again. That's right, three.

Similarly, the GA-8KNXP has six memory sockets. How many can you use? Yes, that's right. Four.

The 8KNXP's problem is actually understandable: The chipset supports two channels, and each channel supports four banks of memory. A double sided module - and almost all modules are double-sided - has two banks. Which means you can only use two modules. Unless you happen to have single-sided modules lying around. There's no point in buying single-sided modules, because they have half the capacity of the double-sided ones but cost rather more than half as much.

The 7NNXP also has two channels. One channel can apparently support four banks of memory, and the other... Well, the 7NNXP (and the five other boards in the same family) is the only Nforce motherboard I've seen with four memory sockets; all the others have three. It would seem that the second channel can only support two banks. If you plug three 512MB double-sided modules into a 7NNXP, you get the expected 1.5GB, but because the memory isn't balanced across the channels, it doesn't work in dual channel mode. If you add a fourth module, you still have 1.5GB of memory - it disables one side on each of the third and fourth modules - and it still doesn't work in dual-channel mode.

Gah. What's the point? Apart from the four people in the world who happen to already have DDR400 single-sided modules that they aren't using, who needs this? And why isn't there a big notice on Gigabyte's site saying "extra memory sockets will not work for most users"?

Grumble. I'm upset mostly because these looked like really nice boards. As it stands, there's nothing really to set them apart from boards from the other manufactures like AOpen, Asus, Abit, Albatron, Asrock... Except that Gigabyte starts with a 'G'.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 02:53 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 06, 2003

Geek  An Outbreak of Sanity

I've commented before on Australia's insanely expensive internet access. At the time I mentioned Comindico, and their unlimited usage plans.

I have a problem with unlimited usage plans. First, the ISP will certainly not have enough bandwidth to allow everyone to run at full speed all the time. Comindico appear to oversell their bandwidth 30 times; in other words, they provision 1.5Mbits of bandwidth to the Internet for every 30 1.5Mbit customers they sign up. That's not unusual, by the way. In fact, many ISPs use higher ratios.

The problem is, by promoting themselves as an all-you-can-eat network, Comindico are likely to attract the big eaters. If everyone is constantly downloading as fast as they can, everyone will get 50 kilobits per second. That's dial-up speed.

And the other problem is that if you give something away for free, people don't value it. Why curb your downloads when they don't cost you anything? It's the tragedy of the commons yet again.

Which is why I was interested to note that three ISPs - Swiftel, Optraweb and CyberLink - have now announced new plans with drastically cheaper - but not free - downloads.

The plans are almost identical, so I suspect there's some sort of resale deal going on. Quick summary:

SpeedIncluded
Downloads
Monthly
Charge
Excess
per MB
Included
Uploads
IP Address
256/642GB$450.6cUnlimitedStatic
512/1286GB$650.6cUnlimitedStatic
512/5126GB$1250.6cUnlimitedStatic
1500/25610GB$1250.6cUnlimitedStatic
256/64Unlimited$75n/aUnlimitedStatic

Yes, that's zero point six cents per megabyte. Compare that to the 14.9 cents charged by my current ISP.

Also nice to see is the 512/512 SDSL plan. At first glance, this has no real advantages for the average user. But when you think about it, ADSL forces us all into the category of consumers: with limited upload rates we're permanent second-class internet citizens. SDSL means that you can run your own web server or file sharing, and give as good as you get. In fact, these plans are perfect for hobbyists or small businesses running their own web sites, as they all include a static IP address and unlimited uploads.

So, am I going to switch? Yes. Probably yes. I'd have to give up my free night-time and weekend downloads. But I think I can cope with that; after all, Buffy's over now; no more to download. And I'm probably going to switch to the 512/512 while I'm at it. Hosting providers, who needs them?

Posted by Pixy Misa at 01:27 AM | Geek | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

June 05, 2003

Geek  Yes, We Have No GA-7NNXP

It's not my fault that Google keeps pointing people to Ambient Irony when they are really looking for reviews of the GA-7NNXP. And I'm not the kind of person who would stoop to using this to boost my reader count. If you are looking for a review of the GA-7NNXP, I still can't help you. But if you live in Australia, Eyo now have stock of the GA-7NNXP ($352) and the GA-7N400V Pro ($280.50). The latter board lacks Gigabit ethernet and 6-phase power, and only supports 333MHz memory and FSB, but it does include dual-channel GeForce4MX graphics.

He called his rescue racer crew
As often they'd rehearsed
And off to save the boy they flew
But who would get there first?
The GA-7NNXP, of course! With dual-channel DDR-400 memory, it flies through the benchmarks!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 09:16 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Gadget File

Played with a couple of interesting gadgets recently.

On my way home from work yesterday, I noticed that my local Apple dealer had a little stall set up in the shopping mall I pass through. And, nestled between two Powerbooks, there was the new iPod, singing the siren song from the start of Pufnstuf:

Come and play with me, Jimmy
Come and play with me.
And I will take you on a trip
Far across the sea.
My name's not Jimmy, but hey, whatever. My current MP3 player is a Sony Picturebook. This has the advantage of being a full blown PC, so not only does it play music, but also Nethack, the Sims, videos, Microsoft Word... It has the major disadvantage, though, that it runs Windows XP. While XP is at least a real operating system (unlike Windows ME, which just played one on television), it is a big fat mooing cow of an operating system. A nifty gadget like the Picturebook needs a frolicking lamb-like operating system, like OS-9 or AmigaOS. But it's got Windows XP. So while it works, it's not exactly convenient if you just want to put on your headphones and listen to a tune or three.

The first thing that struck me about the iPod is how small it is. Looking at the pictures on Apple's web site don't really give you any guide to the size, so let me tell you: It's small. It's maybe one-tenth the size of my Picturebook, and the Picturebook is one of the smallest and lightest notebooks around.

Second, it looks better in real life than on the web. The finish is very clean; it's clearly a well-designed and well-constructed item.

The flea in the ointment is the controls. Apple make a big fuss about how the new controls are touch-sensitive, with no moving parts to wear out or break down. The down side of having no moving parts, though, is that you get no tactile feedback whatsoever. Is it doing something when I push here? Oh, look, the screen scrolled! How... novel.

Still tempting, though. Still very tempting.

The other gadget was somewhat larger: A dual-processor Athlon MP 2400+, kitted out with a 3Ware RAID controller and 8 Western Digital 200GB drives. Only 1GB of memory, because the supplier was out of stock of the 1GB memory modules. It came with two 512MB modules for the time being.

This is not a slow box. It's destined to house about a terabyte of archival data, and run various searches and reports. I was wondering just how long it would take Linux to format a 1.05 terabyte RAID-5 volume.

The answer is: Rather less time than it takes Windows XP to format a new 80GB drive on my home machine. This was easily the quickest Linux install I've done; I've never seen the progress meter go flickety-flickety quite like that. If you have a terabyte of data that needs a home, and a modest budget, then this sort of system is highly recommended.

From her broom broom in the sky
She watched her plans materialize
She waved her wand
The beautiful boat was gone
The skies grew dark
The sea grew rough
And the boat sailed on and on and on and on and on and on.
Not quite so impressive, though, is Red Hat's disk partitioning utility. For some unfathomable reason, rather than clicking to select the drive that a particular filesystem will live on, you have to click to turn off all the drives that you don't want it to live on. This gets tired quickly when you have eight drives in the system. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdb. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdc. No, I do not... Maybe they've improved things in version 9; I was installing 8.0, since I know that release works with the software I want to run. Red Hat 9 seems to work, but I'm not about to rebuild a terabyte of data due to some minor incompatibility.

No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sde. No, I do not...

With all my filesystems RAIDed, and my old-fogey habits of having separate partitions for separate things - so that when something inevitably runs amok, it doesn't trash everything in one go - with those two put together, I had about 30 partitions to create. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdg...

Oh, and you know how if you have, say, 28GB of free space on a drive, you can allocate it easily to a new partition by double-clicking on it? Don't do that.

Sigh. Reboot. Keyboard-Mouse-English-Custom-No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdb...

It took me longer to get the partitions set up than it did to format 1.6TB of disk. That's good, I suppose. But I just know that my next dream will involve check boxes that just won't stay turned off. NO DAMMIT! I DO NOT WANT THIS FILESYSTEM ON /DEV/SDC!!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 08:27 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 02, 2003

Geek  Video Cards 'R' Us

For a couple of years it was easy to recommend a video card: just buy whatever Nvidia had in your price range. After a somewhat awkward start with the NV1, Nvidia shot to the lead of the graphics market and stayed there . Competitors like 3DFX went broke trying to catch up. Others abandoned the broader market to try to carve comfortable niches for themselves at the periphery. As the GeForce 2, 3 and 4 rolled out, Nvidia looked unstoppable.

Then something happened. ATI came from behind and started narrowing the gap very quickly indeed. Nvidia needed a new chip to show that they were still the undisputed champions of the graphics world, they needed it to be fast, and the needed it now.

What they got was the GeForce FX: late, expensive, absurdly power hungry, and not all that much faster than the previous model. Meanwhile ATI rolled on, launching new models in all directions: the 9000, the 9200, the 9500, the 9500 Pro, the 9600, the 9700, the 9700 Pro, the 9800... Of course, a 9500 Pro is faster than the 9600. Is a 9700 Pro faster than a 9800? Who knows?

Dan does. At Dansdata he delves deep into the question of which video card, without - and this is important - without bludgeoning you to death with statistics and misleading bar-graphs. (Hardware reviewers should be forced to read Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information before they are allowed anywhere near a keyboard.)

If you're not looking for a new graphics card right now (and if you shelled out for a GeForce4 4600 Ultra last year like me, I can't blame you), then you obviously need either (a) a tiny radio controlled tank, (b) a really nifty collection of nifty magnets, or (c) a kitten. Warning: Purchasing two or more of these simultaneously may prove hazardous to your continued well-being.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 09:41 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 01, 2003

Geek  Neverwinter Update

I've been looking over the white cliffs of... no.

I've been taking closer look at the various hakpacks developed for Neverwinter Nights. At first, I thought that not that much had changed in the last few months. Then I realised that I was looking in the wrong place. Then I found the right place.

Yow. People have been busy.

I like the looks of this swamp. This strange city is cool too. Here's an alternate version of the standard dungeon. These drylands tilesets are a welcome change from the standard greenery. Drow fans will find this castle and this temple rewarding. And I quite liked this nicely decorated castle.

Here's a list of all of the general-purpose tilesets - there's 173 of them - and another list of the tilesets tied to specific adventures. There's 213 of those. The original game came with eight. There are also 58 combination tilesets, getting around the problem of only being able to use one tileset at a time, and 37 all-in-one tilesets. I'm not sure how you can have 37 different all-in-ones, but there you are.

Update: Here's a view of the Elemental Plane of Cheese. And here are some Cheese Elementals. These are Nacho Cheese Elementals:

This is what happens when you over microwave nacho cheese, and it becomes a planar vortex to the plane of cheese. Or there may be other reasons, but oh well. They Burn people to death with their boiling cheesiness!
I'm sure they do! Here's a Ninja Cow. There's also a nattily dressed Cow Wizard, but I seem to have lost it.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:09 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 31, 2003

Geek  Zombie Werespiders Are Go!

Dungeons and Dragons players, start your engines: Shadows of Undrentide, the first expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights, has gone gold. Development is underway on the second expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. No details can be found here.

I have to admit I was disappointed with NWN. The bundled campaign was, frankly, dumb. Compared with the brilliance of recent D&D titles (other than the execrable Pool of Radiance II), NWN was a drab little story of no great interest. Torment, by comparison, was simply amazing; both Baldur's Gate games had strong storylines; and both the Icewind Dale games, while targeted primarily at the hack-'n'-slash crowd, were full of delightful touches. NWN was just blah.

But that didn't worry me too much, since what I really wanted was the NWN tools (the Aurora Toolset) for designing my own adventures, and the NWN engine for playing them. Unfortunately, they have problems too. The toolset I can live with, since it's the end result that matters. The game engine, in and of itself, isn't too bad, though I will always prefer isometric perspective for this sort of game. (Until you get fluid realtime photorealistic rendering working, anyway, and that's some years off yet.)

The problem is the tiles. When you want to build an area, you are given a choice of tilesets: Forest, City, Sewers, and so on. Once you've made your choice, you're stuck with it: you can only use one tileset for a given area. This wouldn't be so bad if the tilesets had more variety in them. But when your players can open a door and say at once "Oh yes, a #4 castle room, the only searchable location is the desk drawer.", you have a problem.

You can't pick an empty room and fill it with furniture manually, either. You don't have empty rooms - they generally come prefurnished - and even when you do, you just don't have the furniture.

The forests look nice. The water effects are great. The falling leaves, the ambience of the sunlight through the treetops, are wonderfully rendered. So why didn't they take a little time to produce a stream that can bend at something other than a right-angle? A road that can run in a direction other than precisely North-to-South or exactly East-to-West?

As for the indoor settings: why is everything so darn big? I want some nice claustrophobic effects in my tombs. I want my players bumping into each other and tripping over sarcophagi when they're in a desparate battle against the advancing horde of kill-crazed zombie werespiders. What I definitely don't want is a room the size of baseball stadium. Any fool can tell you that zombies are hockey fans, and don't care for baseball at all.

I wish the designers had taken a look at The Sims. Its design tools are nothing amazing; houses in The Sims aren't likely to win any architectural awards. But in terms of flexibility it's miles ahead of what Neverwinter Nights offers.

And so I put NWN to bed about six months ago, and went back to playing Nethack.

Now the first expansion pack is about to hit the shelves, and my interest has resurfaced. Why is that?

Well, for one thing, I like Dungeons and Dragons. I like it lots. I've been playing D&D in its many incarnations for twenty years now, and in that time it has gathered a richness of material that no other game can match. As an example, I went shopping recently and bought seven new hardcover official D&D rule books. That's entirely ignoring the softcovers, the adventures, and the huge amount of semi-official and unofficial material.

For another thing, Bioware seem keen to do the right thing with NWN. Though the tileset model is flawed, they are open about the file formats involved, and the result is a suprising number of fan-created tilesets becoming available for download. Fan-created monsters too, and armour and statues and all sorts of things. They're known as Hakpacks, and here you can see a listing of what's been created just in the past week. Check out this example of an underwater setting. That seaweed looks a bit odd because it's just modified trees: this was originally the forest tileset. And here are some really amazing monsters: myconids (mushroom men), familiar to Icewind Dale fans.

Bioware recognise the value of fan content, and are working to make NWN automatically download hakpacks as needed. The problem is, you see, that if you want to play an adventure that needs a particularly hakpack, and you don't already have that hakpack, the whole thing goes splat in an unpleasant way.

Apart from the tileset problem, and the dire lack of furniture that you can place on your own problem, NWN is amazingly flexible. It includes a full programming language which can change anything in the game (apart from those pesky tiles, of course). Bioware are working to add a database to it. (Hint: Use Berkeley DB; it's free even for commercial use, and it works.)

Maybe I need to wait for Neverwinter Nights II to see a proper fix for the tileset problem, but in the meantime I think I'll buy Shadows of Undrentide, download myself a few hakpacks, and give Neverwinter Nights I another try.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 09:16 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 20, 2003

Geek  Random Acts Of Browser Suckage

There's no question any more: Mozilla is by far a better browser than Internet Explorer. Just two features are enough to blow IE out of the water: popup blocking - I never see a popup - and tabbed browsing. I often have a dozen tabs open. One window, twelve web pages. No clutter, fast, simple. Right-click a link and it opens in another tab while you keep reading the page you're on.

But there's a third and even bigger reason: IE's CSS (cascading stylesheet) support sucks. That's the mildest word I can think of to describe it. What can you say for a browser that implements the right-hand margin backwards, so that your page is guaranteed to extend beyond the width of your window? Or how about a browser that, when you overlay one section of the page on another, makes all your images disappear?

I have a beautiful layout for my new Moveable Type blog, simple and elegant, and IE fucks it up beyond redemption. I could mess around and generate alternate stylesheets for Mozilla/Opera vs. IE, but the whole goddamn point of stylesheets is that you're not supposed to have to do that.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 08:31 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 18, 2003

Geek  Whip That Llama

I forgot to install one little thing after rebuilding my poor PC. This has now been remedied:

Thanks for using Winamp. You are installation number 273,375,923.
Uhhh... That's rather a lot, isn't it?

Mind you, it really does whip the llama's ass.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 01:59 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 17, 2003

Geek  Oo-glay? Eh-mipto!

And if anyone out there knows the origin of the expression "Oo-glay? Eh-mipto!", please contact me. Click where it says "Tell me", on the left. No, your left.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  public static void main, public

public static void main,
public static void main,
public static void main,
and typo was his name-o!

I hate Java. It was completely obvious that Java was a huge pile of dog poo the moment they showed the Java version of "Hello, world!":

class HelloWorld {
public static void main (String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
In Python, the entire program is
print "Hello, World!"
Which is why I program in Python rather than Java.

If you need to interface with Java stuff, you need to take a look at Jython. It's Python, with all the requisite Python goodness, but it is written in, runs on, works with, and compiles to Java. And like all the good things in life that don't cost anything, it's free!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:18 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Sitemeter

Useful Web Thingy of the Day is Sitemeter. It tracks how many people are visiting your site and where they came from. And it's free. Scroll allll the way down to the bottom to see. I put it on the left originally, under the Blogger icon, but it's too big and screwed up my formatting. No matter, it works fine wherever it is.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 04:07 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Shiny Happy Disk Drives

Well, it's happened: Hard disks have broken through the historically significant* $2/GB barrier. The drive in question is a 120GB Maxtor, now retailing for $219. Last week it was $249; two weeks ago it was $269. That's pretty rapid deflation even for a product that's seen price per unit fall by a factor of 5000 since 1990.

So the only question is: How many? The sooner I get rid of the rest of those poxy Deathstars the better.

*I just made that up.

Update: The same supplier has Opteron processors and motherboards. A bit pricy for the home user, but dirt cheap if you need a 64-bit dual-processor server.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 03:05 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 15, 2003

Geek  Three Processors In Search Of A Buyer

Since I rejoined the workforce I've been thinking about upgrading my PCs. I have two main computers (plus a notebook), and they're both over two years old. They're 1.2GHz Athlons; one running WinXP (which is a whole 'nother story in itself) and the other running Linux (Red Hat 8).

Now, my rule of thumb is to upgrade a computer (assuming I have the money) when the replacement is (a) cheaper than the original and (b) at least twice as good. So, I should be looking for a 2.4GHz Athlon, right?

Small problem: there isn't one. There's a confusing gaggle of performance ratings, and if you're trying to work out how fast a particular Athlon might be, you have to know that the XP2400+ has a 266MHz bus and 256KB of level 2 cache, the XP2500+ has a 333MHz bus and 512KB of cache, but runs at a lower clock speed, and the XP2600+ apparently comes in two flavours, with a 256KB cache and either a 266MHz bus and a higher clockspeed or a 333MHz bus and a lower clockspeed. The XP2800+ has historically come in three different flavours, so very much caveat emptor.

Then there's Intel. I'd rather avoid Intel, not because their products are bad, but because they are evil. Not as evil as Microsoft, not nearly as evil as the RIAA, but clearly on the darkish-grey side of the line. But the Celerons are pretty cheap, and run at 2.4GHz, so...

Turns out Celerons pretty much suck. I'm not sure why, exactly; they have the P4 architecture, and the 400MHz Celeron bus is as fast as that found on any Athlon. Presumably part of the problem is the 128KB cache, but they should be good for something. But I benchmarked a 1.7GHz Celeron, and my tests showed that it was no faster, and often significantly slower, than my existing 1.2GHz Athlons. So, no joy there.

Finally, there's the P4. The shiny new 800MHz bus version is out. That huge bandwidth increase seems to offer only trivial performance increases, though, on the order of 3 to 5 per cent. On the other hand, they all have hyperthreading enabled, so it's sort of like getting a dual-processor system for free. On the other other hand, most of the time I'm only running one thing anyway.

So, what I've decided to do is blow all my money on beer and skittles. Or, since I don't drink beer or play skittles, keep it.

Except for the iPod. Still gotta getta iPod.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 12:49 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 14, 2003

Geek  Learning from Pain Experience

Windows XP is reinstalled. SP1 is reinstalled. Mozilla is back, complete with the mandatory Orbit 3+1 theme. Orbit makes Mozilla look so much snazzier, it's like a whole new snazzier version of Mozilla. All my email, bookmarks, address books and such are where they should be.

More importantly, my incomplete Kazaa downloads are restored in all their glorious incompleteness and busy crawling their way towards completion again.

Hooray!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 03:19 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Format Format Format

Watch that Maxtor format.
Format format format
Hard drive!

Posted by Pixy Misa at 12:36 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 13, 2003

Geek  Death Of A Deskstar

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

There's no more hated sound in all the world.

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

My file transfers all seem to have stalled.

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

I have a new 80 gig Maxtor; I'll do what I must.

Scrik scrik scrik scrik

Another IBM Deskstar has bitten the dust.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 08:52 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 28, 2003

Geek  Whuffie Again

The other problem with Whuffie, of course, (and Doctorow does touch on this in the book and in the interview) is that it is controlled by positive feedback.

And we all know how well that works.

For those who don't, consider your favourite economic boom-and-bust - from the tulip craze to the Great Depression to the dot.com bubble. Or lynx and hare populations in the Arctic. Or consider a nuclear explosion, which is a great example of positive feedback. If you're lucky, positive feedback will give rise to boom-and-bust cycles. If you're unlucky, you'll get a boom-and-splat.

Not a good way to run, well, anything, really. Unless you want to make a very large bang.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 08:27 PM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Whuffie

To be fair to Mr. Doctorow, he does point out in this interview that his society would not function as described; and that it would need:

some kind of antitrust law or garbage collector that periodically comes along and randomizes Whuffie

Whuffie is the measure of respect in the society of Down and Out; more than that, it's that society's equivalent of cash - as much as it has any equivalent.

Of course, unless you've brainwashed 100% of the population, the anti-trust laws or garbage collectors will need to be backed up by the men with the you-know-whats.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 10:31 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Geek  Down And Out

Oh, yes.

As always, by the light of day it's neither as original nor as interesting as it was at 4 A.M. But here goes:

When you are designing your Utopia, remember this: People will be people, and to make things work, somewhere there will have to be men with guns. And it does not necessarily make things better for them to be hidden from view.

What brought this on? Last night I was reading Cory Doctorow's new book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's not a bad book, and you can download it for free, which is always a plus.

But the society described in the book simply wouldn't work - unless there are, somewhere behind the scenes, men with guns.

Read it anyway.

Posted by Pixy Misa at 09:56 AM | Geek | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Blogroll
Instapundit
Tim Blair
IMAO
The Bleat
USS Clueless
Little Green Footballs
International Squirrel Conspiracy
Blogs of the Day
Tiger: Raggin' & Rantin'
Collinization
Geographica
Rob's Still in Japan
Professor Bunyip
Eject! Eject! Eject!
Suburban Blight
Practical Penumbra
Friday Fishwrap
Time For Your Meds!
Gweilo Diaries
Flooded Lizard Kingdom
The Puppy Pile
Mean Mr. Mustard
Amateur Hour
Motley Cow
Category Archives
Anime and Cartoons
Art, Books, Films, Music
Blogs And Blogging
Cool Stuff
Geek Stuff
My Life, Such As It Is
The World
Rants
Cute Kitties
Sitemeter