Buying OEM hardware and software, and does this mean the high street model of Dixon/PCWorld is doomed?

I have expressed my frustration with the poor service and the ludicrous prices that one pays on the British high street before. On that occasion I observed that the retail electronics business is even worse than most. Part of this is that electronics is something that a lot of customers do not know very much about, and as a consequence many people are intimidated by salesmen. More of it is that for a variety of reasons it is very difficult to open competing high street stores in the UK, and this leads to rather questionable sales tactics. That subset of the electronics industry known as the computer industry is even worse, at least it is on the high street. The good thing is that the computer revolution itself has also opened alternative channels that are much more competitive.

One favourite tactic is for electronics and computer stores to advertise a product at a genuinely cheap price. However, when you get it out of the box it comes without a cable to connect it to your computer / home entertainment system / telephone socket / refrigerator. The store will have an appropriate cable available, but they will charge you some extraordinary number of pounds for a cable that costs a few pence to make. They make little money if any on the product, but the cable is almost entirely profit. The customer in many cases realises that there is something absurd about the price being charged, but lacks the technical knowledge to buy the right cable somewhere else. And in any event he doesn't know where the "somewhere else" is that he might buy it, as the high street isn't precisely full of alternate retail channels. The answer is that you can buy appropriate things in many weekend and weekday markets, computer fairs, sometimes little shops run by immigrants in downmarket areas of town. And of course you can buy them on the internet, but often the cost of shipping will cancel out the price advantage unless you buy something else at the same time and share the shipping costs. Another option is to go to a large branch of Tesco that sells a lot of goods in addition to food, where a good selection of such items are often found at very reasonable prices. But once again one must understand first what one needs.

(Shipping without a cable is actually more forgivable in high end products where there might be seven different connection options and nobody but you knows which one you are going to use. However, high end products usually ship with the cable for the simplest option. It is low end ones with only one option that most often ship without a cable).

Sometimes things get ridiculous. I have seen standard USB cables that sell for £15, and I have seen standard telephone cables that sell for £8 or more. (Amusingly, in the latter case I also saw a telephone (that in this instance did include a cable) for sale in the same shop for £7).

And it isn't just cables. If you go into Dixons or PC World (a chain of stores that belongs to the Dixons group and devotes itself entirely to computer stuff) then it is pretty normal for prices for large headline products to be vaguely reasonable although still substantially more than you can pay if you know how to shop round (and for prices of sale goods to sometimes be actually good), but for the prices of accessories such as PCI cards, networking hardware, memory and the like to be absolutely outrageous. Such items come in fancy packaging, sometimes look like they are gold plated, and the prices are just ridiculous.

As an example, I have just had to buy a PCI Firewire card for the computer I built recently for my landlady. It was a fairly common problem. She bought a digital video camera (for a good price, but not the latest model), discovered that the only way to connect it to her computer was via Firewire, and discovered that her new computer did not have a Firewire port. When writing this post I initially digressed to explain what the Firewire bus is, why Digital Video cameras often use it instead of USB (although not so much as they used to), why many PCs don't have Firewire as standard, and why the one I built didn't have it. However, this was too much of a digression so I posted it on Michael Jennings Extra). This was no huge problem, of course. I simply ordered a PCI Firewire card (cable included) from one of my favourite online suppliers for £13.99 including postage, opened up the case of the computer and popped the card in one of the PCI slots. No trouble. Quite inexpensive.

However, imagine if my landlady had a computer without a Firewire port. She might well have popped into her local PC World, and explained the problem. What they would have done was steered her over to the section of the shop that sold PCI Firewire cards, picked one off the shelf. This Firewire PCI card came with gold coloured connectors, came in a very fancy looking package, and it cost £29.99. Of course, it did not include a cable. On the next shelf, the salesman would have picked up a similarly packaged Firewire cable with gold coloured connectors, which cost £19.99. So that is £50. And of course, most people are not confident enought to open their PC case and take a bracket off the back of the case, and install a PCI card. So PC World would then have offered to install the card for another £20 or £30 (for five minutes work). So, the upgrade in this case would have cost £70 or £80, about five times what it should have.

It's great if you can get away with that sort of thing.

Hardware and software manufacturers have long gone along with these sorts of practices, and typically they package their products in two different ways to take advantage. There is the "retail" version, which comes in fancy packaging and has connecters that are often gold in colour rather than silver because this looks good, and which costs ridiculous prices. And then there is also the "OEM" (Original Equipment Manufacturer) version, which comes in less fancy packaging (Often just a brown or white box), and is intended to be sold to PC builders and other tech savvy individuals. OEM products always include the necessary cables, screws, etc, because the customers (people who know what they are doing) are people who now how to go somewhere else. For all practical purposes the products are usually the same (although the licence conditions are sometimes different with software), and there are sometimes restrictions requiring you to buy other things at the same time to be eligible for OEM stuff. If you buy stuff on the internet you often get OEM stuff, because people who buy stuff this way know what they are doing and because customers cannot see the packaging anyway. (When "retail" versions are sold on the internet, they are often sold for much the same prices as "OEM" stuff). And if you buy stuff at a computer fair, you once again often get OEM stuff, which is what happens when your customers know what they are doing.

But, in the retail channels, something interesting is afoot. I will keep talking about PC World. In the back of many of the chain's shops, you now find a "component centre" which basically sells OEM stuff. I think the issue was that people like me would walk into a PC World store, and regardless of how quickly they needed it would not pay £50 for a Firewire Card and cable, because the cost was so outrageous. Often though, we would be prepared to pay a little extra for a product right now rather than waiting to receive it over the internet. So, we now have the "component centre" at PC World, sells basically identical stuff to what is sold elsewhere in the shop but without fancy packaging. (The component centre also sells motherboards, cases, power supplies, and other things for PC builders). For instance, they had a Firewire Card with a cable for £19.99. Not as cheap as I would get it at a website or computer fair, but cheap enough that I would probably be prepared to buy it if I needed one in a hurry. (If I was providing service for people's PCs and they needed this installed right now, once again it would be cheap enough for me to do this). A simple Firewire cable was about £5.00, once again quite reasonable, but not the cheapest one could find anywhere.

Presumably, if a not technological savvy person stumbles into PC world, they will be taken to the expensive, fancily packaged stuff. However, rather than turn a technically savvy person away they will now lead him to the component centre.

(I suspect that the component centre is also for such things as smart 15 year olds who want to build their own PCs but whose parents are a little wary about buying at computer fairs and/or over the internet. One can buy a complete set of PC components there for at least no more than the retail cost of an equivalent computer. The prices are still too expensive for a regular PC builder, but they are low enough to not be ridiculous).

Which is smart, if they can keep the two customer bases apart. The danger for their profit model is that their customers who would have bought the expensive stuff will find their way to the component centre instead and will buy the cheaper stuff, and their profit model will collapse. (For this to not happen their customers must remain ignorant). It is a common practice for old businesses to refuse to undercut themselves when new cheaper alternatives come along. Dixons/PCWorld do seem to recognise the threat of cheaper channels, and have responded somewhat.

And if you look at their website, one senses that this is perhaps where the real action is. My suspicion is that PC World have until now been selling very little on their website due to the fact that their prices are too high and people who shop online are more tech savvy and price sensitive than regular customers. For if you go to the website, you now see that this is divided in two the same way the physical store is. As well as a regular website there is a component store website. The sorts of stuff sold in the Component centre in the physical stores are not listed on the main website but are listed on the component centre website. Compare this with this for instance. (That second one is a very good price, actually). For now they have avoided putting the cheap Component store stuff on the main website, partly because in that case customers will type in what they want, see the cheap one and the expensive one, and just buy the cheap one.

Mainly, though, I think they are attempting to avoid having to answer an awkward question, which is "Why are things so much more expensive in your stores than on your website?" Hopefully on those occasions when the sorts of customers who buy the expensive stuff in stores come to a website, they will only see the main website and not notice the cheap stuff at the component website, while the people who genuinely would buy from the component website.

But it isn't going to work. Once you are on the web, everything is transparent. I doubt the separate websites business will last three months. The sites will be combined, and this and the ever growing component centres in stores are going to put real pressure on their business model, even for their physical stores. Which is good.

And the interesting thing is that the web prices seem genuinely competitive in a lot of cases. If Dixons / PCWorld were to make a genuinely aggressive move into the web retailing business that would be interesting. Their brand is well known, and they have a large chain of physical stores that people can take stuff to that doesn't work and/or which they do not know how to install themelves. Using the web for sales and the physical stores for returns and service makes a lot of sense (and not just in this industry). Except that the physical stores are in many instances too big, I fear. They may have to sublet some of the space.

A first time for everything

This evening I spent 45 minutes sitting in a stationary train on the Victoria line of the London Underground. Services had stopped "due to a suspicious unattended package on a train at Euston". This was very irritating (and in high summer the not air conditioned carriages of the London Underground were very uncomfortable) but at leat we were kept informed as to what was going on.

On the other hand, does the fact that I have experienced this mean that I am now a real Londoner?

Sorry for the lack of blogging

Life seems to be taking up my time, sadly. I finally saw Before Sunset, which I thought was magnificent. (It is simply the most romantic thing I have seen in years). It was shot on a very small budget, and it shows given that the film contains an assortment of continuity errors - particularly quite noticeable changes in the light between shots. This is what happens when you only have a few days to shoot, and the film supposedly takes place in real time. You have to shoot all day long, and noon simply does not look like the evening. I was right about the locations too. As well as being cinematic, I think the Promenade Plantee has another thing going for it if you are filming on a budget. Although it looks like a part and in fact it is a park, because it is long and narrow you only have to use a very physically small area at any time. If you are filming in an actual park, you have to cordon off a relatively large area in order to make sure that people in the background and the like are not getting in the way of the film.

And the film is a little geographically challenged. Jesse and Celine walk (and go by boat, and go by car) through various bits of Paris and appear to have a continuous conversation, but the places they walk to aren't actually close enough to walk through all of them in the time they have. So director Richard Linklatter cheats a little.

A few issues of continuity driven by budget don't matter in the end, though. This film is so character driven that the only things it genuinely needed were Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, director Richard Linklater and a good script, and it got all three. Apparently the first version of the script was not in real time, featured more locations, and had a bigger budget, but they were unable to film that because they couldn't raise the money.

But in the end it didn't matter at all.

Someone good is writing for the Economist

There was once a time when giants bestrode the earth

(Link via slashdot).

Thought for the day

If you are interviewing for a job, there is actually something to be said for being interviewed on one day by all the people you are likely to be working with. It does in many ways beat being called back to the office a number of different times to speak to different people. However, three hours of interviews (involving a total of five interviewers) without a break is pretty brutal just the same. Yes, I am sure many of my readers can describe worse experiences. I have had worse experiences personally. But this was still pretty hard going.

(I think I did well though. I'd rate myself about 50-50 for the job in question).

And Perry de Havilland did manage to ring my mobile in the middle of it in order to ask how my job search was going. No, I didn't take the call. Not a good time to forget to turn your phone off, just the same.

Lots of iPod hype this week.

Including the Newsweek cover story, of course. The iPod mini is now available in Europe, as are the new cheaper 20Gb and 40Gb iPods. It seems to be normal for Apple to update the product once a year, keep the $299, $399, and $499 price points, but improve the models. However, we now have 20Gb at the $299 point, 40Gb at the $399 point, and nothing at the $499 point. This is an interesting coda to Toshiba's announcement a month or so back that it was releasing a 1.8 inch 60Gb hard drive, and that Apple had placed a large order. Steve Jobs was clearly not happy at this sort of pre-announcement of a 60Gb iPod from Toshiba, and conspiracy theorists might conclude that the absence of a 60Gb iPod model now is in a sense payback to Toshiba for not keeping quiet.

Except that I don't actually believe this. I suspect that Toshiba is simply unable to provide the 60Gb drives in large enough quantities for now, and I am sure we will see a 60Gb iPod later in the year: probably just before Christmas.

Another interesting thing is whether we will see an update of the iPod mini before long. This of course uses a 4Gb 1 inch drive from Hitachi/IBM, but Apple has had trouble getting enough drives to satisfy the immense demand for the iPod mini. Interestingly, Seagate now has a 1 inch hard drive, and they are producing a 5Gb version. Presumably Hitachi will not like losing the largest one inch drive crown, and they will announce a bigger drive before too long. At that point, Apple will no doubt announce an iPod mini with a larger capacity. (And let's face it, the 4Gb capacity is the weakness of the iPod mini).

Or of course Apple could source its drives from multiple suppliers. Creative are basing an MP3 player on the Seagate drive, and for now that means they have the highest capacity player of that approximate size. Apple could release a 5Gb iPod mini based on the Seagate drive too, but I doubt they will. 5Gb is not really sufficiently bigger than 4Gb that they can really gain much leverage out of a "new, bigger capacity iPod mini". I suspect they will wait for a bigger drive from Hitachi, although if getting enough drives is the real problem, they might like to have another supplier. I suppose they could sell a 5Gb iPod mini with a dock and accessories that don't come with the 4Gb version as standard, so as to properly distinguish this from the 4Gb version. They did this with the 15Gb and 20Gb full size iPods last year after all.

The Modern World
 
Yesterday evening, I was at a party with the other London based contributors to the Samizdata blog, and it was a very pleasant evening. However, some of the foreign contributors couldn't make it (although Frank McGahon did make it over from Ireland) . Scott Wickstein was in Adelaide, of course, but I was able to do something quite interesting later in the evening, which was to get out my laptop, launch Skype, and get Scott at least into the conversation. My laptop has an internal speaker and an internal microphone, so all that was necessary was to say something vaguely near the laptop and he could hear us. And of course the laptop was running off batteries and was connected to the internet by WiFi, so the laptop was not connected to anything: we were just using it to talk to Scott in Australia.
 
A couple of non-Samizdata people found this impressive. Hell, I found this impressive, but one lady felt the need to come over and participate in the conversation merely because it was an interesting technological advance, I think.
 
Update: There are some photos of the party here. You can just see the back of my head in the top photo. My mother should note that I have been a good boy and had a haircut.

Redirection

I have a brief piece on Microsoft suing spammers over at Samizdata.

Forthcoming movies

This looks like it may be a fun little romantic comedy. From looking at the trailer, the plot appears to be "Once promising British tennis player played by Paul Bettany who never quite made it is being ignored as he plays his last Wimbledon. He meets sexy champion tennis player Kirsten Dunst on the court one day, something happens between them, he gets his drive back, and suddenly starts winning matches. All of England is watching as he makes the final and ....."

Of course, Hollywood cliche requires that in such a movie some obstacle must get in our hero's way and, forced to choose between the game and the girl at the end he realises that his ambitions on the court are nothing compared to true love, and the film ends with the couple running away on a bus oblivious to the tennis tournament. Or something like that.

And in many situations the British would be quite sympathetic to such a story.

However, this is Wimbledon. No Englishman has won it since 1936, and the desperation to see a British winner is reasonably strong at this point, as Tim Henman knows. If a British tennis player were to give up a chance to win the men's single title for a small thing like the love of a woman he would be torn to pieces, or at least mocked for all eternity. It is not possible for this movie to have a happy ending without Bettany's character actually winning Wimbledon, and I hope the film-makers know this.

Of course, such an English victory would take the film from "romantic comedy" territory to "outrageous and ridiculous fantasy" territory, but in comparison that is a small thing.

I love London

When you cross the eastern limit of the City of London, you enter the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. To the south you initially enter Whitechapel (most famous for being the location of Jack the Ripper's Victorian murders), to the north you come to Spitalfields, and Brick Lane in Spitalfields is where I am right now.

Spitalfields is London's first immigrant neighbourhood. In the 17th century it was the destination of Huguenots who fled France (the first mass migration to Britain in quite a few centuries). By the nineteenth century the Huguenots had integrated into Broader English society and Spitalfields was the destination for Jewish emigres from elsewhere in Europe. (Britain's first Bagel shop is a legacy from that period and is just across the road from where I am now).

In the twentieth century that pattern repeated, the Jews integrated into broader British society and moved elsewhere, and Spitalfields then filled up with Bangladeshis, who now dominate the area. Down the road is a building that has been both a church and a synagogue in its time, and which is now a mosque, the only building in Britain (I think) that has performed all three roles.

However, over the last decade, the area has gentrified, as inner city living has become more popular and as London has grown as a financial capital, and young childless people in particular have taken advantage of the proximity to the City of London. Brick Lane has filled with Bangladeshi restaurants catering to non-Bangladeshi customers as much or more than Bangladeshis, and the street has also filled up with bars, cafes, music venues, and it has generally become one of the hippest places in London.

However, it is still principally an immigrant (Bangladeshi) area. Local prosperity has flowed into the area though, and shops catering to young customers of various races have flowed up under the ruins of the Bishopsgate goods yard to the top end of Brick Lane, which until recently was rather run down and was only interesting when there were markets on Sundays. (To me, it feels like the way prosperity grew down the bottom end of King Street in Newtown in Sydney in the 1990s). The local Bangladeshi shopkeepers and the like are doing their best to cater to the hip young crowd as well as locals.

Which is why I am in a newly opened internet cafe in the top half of Brick Lane. This is clearly trying to cater both for the clientele that wants internet access and the clientele that wants coffee. They seem to be doing okay with the internet access, but on the coffee score they are mixed. I was served by a woman in a hajib, and the coffee is only so-so. (These Bangladeshis haven't quite got Italian by way of Seattle coffee right yet). The internet cafe section is filled with Dell machines with 15 inch TFT screens that look a couple of years old: I suspect that repackaging ex-office PCs and selling them second hand to internet cafes is a nice little business for someone. The seating is not as comfortable as it should be. The cafe breaks one of the cardinal laws of cafes, which is that it doesn't greatly matter whether you have table service or counter service (or whether you want the customers to pay at the beginning of the end) but you should make which arrangement that you are using very clear. (There is a nice selection of newspapers for me to read). There is free wireless, but I am not sure if it is provided in this shop (I doubt it) or if it is coming from somewhere else nearby.

There are other internet / coffee shops nearby, but they are run by white people and not Bangladeshis. Some of the Bangladeshis are trying to move into the trade, which is clearly good. And I am sure they will iron the bugs out soon enough.

More fun with satellite photographs



This one is Sydney, Australia. The city has unusual constraints on its growth, that are much easier to show via a photo like this than any other way.

Firstly, a national park was declared to the south of the city about 150 years ago. Combined with other land that is legally protected from development in a couple of other ways and which is contiguous to it, this makes up the green patch that follows the coast to the south of the city and which sort of juts inland a towards the south of the picture. The section of coastal plane (with the visible lake in the middle it) to the far south of the picture near the coast, is the city of Wollongong, which is where I grew up. (I grew up in the section to the north of it where the coastal plain narrows). The body of water close to the coast just to the north of the green section is Botany Bay, and the river that goes inland from it is the George's River. To the north of that is another body of water, and this is Sydney Harbour itself.

In any event because the national park was declared to the south of Sydney, the city was not permitted to grow south along the coast as would be expected.

To the west of the city of Sydney we find another green section, which is the Blue Mountains. This is extremely rugged country, and the mountains form a natural barrier to the growth of the city to the west. The blue patch towards the south of the mountains is Lake Burragarang, which is an artificial lake that provides Sydney's water supply. A little to the north of that is a light line going through the mountains from west to east. This is the Great Western Highway, which follows a high ridge across the mountains. There are towns along the highway, and my sister (hi Leonie) lives in one of these towns. Just to the north of this you can see a very deep valley the name of which temporarily escapes me. There is another road across the mountains along the next ridge, bits of which are visible in the photograph if you look carefully.

Whereas the edge of Sydney in the south is very clearly defined, to the north the edge is less clear. This is basically because that part of Sydney north of the harbour is also rugged country, even very close to the ocean. One walks through fairly ordinary looking (and upmarket - this is a prestigious area in which to live) suburbs, and at the end of the street one find's oneself standing on the edge of an immense canyon. So Sydney north of the harbour is a mixture of residential suburbs and forest and National Park all mixed in together. As you go further north it is more National Park and less residential suburb. In essence, the parks form a barrier to the growth of the city in the north as well, but in a slightly less clear cut and sudden way than in the south. (In the north, urban areas resume again once an area of national park and rugged country has been passed. This area (around the city of Gosford) is visible at the far north of the photo.

This all makes Sydney a curiously constrained city. It can't spread east because of the ocean. It can't spread north or south close to the ocean due to mainly manmade constraints. It can't spread west because there are mountains. Which means that Sydney's urban sprawl in recent years has been in both the north-westerly and the south-westerly directions, leading to the curious triangular shaped city you see in the photograph.

Why I don't particularly like Microsoft

I have been attempting to install Windows 2000 on the windows partition of my desktop PC. I booted up a copy of Windows XP using the backup disk for my Dell when I built the PC to test that I could get it to work, but that is not legal (and anyway it will stop working after 30 days). As it happens, the Windows 2000 copy I have is perfectly legal for me to use, and Windows 2000 is adequate for my uses. So fine.

However, the intallation crashes half way through the installation process, and gives me a black screen. Now a sensible installation process would stop rather than crash, but not in this case. As it happens, looking at the on screen text and pressing F6 at an appropriate time allows me to determine that the problem is that the installation CD does not contain an appropriate driver for the IDE controller on my motherboard (a Biostar M7VKB) and so cannot see my hard drive. (Somehow though, the BIOS was able to see enough to start the installation process from the CD-ROM drive, and this is being driven by the same IDE controller.

The solution to this problem is to obtain a driver for the IDE controller from my motherboard manufacturer and install this during the installation process. No real problem, except for that the only means of installation of such a driver is via a floppy. And as it happens, I don't have an internal floppy drive.

Why would I? By today's standards floppy drives hold ludicrously small amounts of data, and people who require portable storage use flash drives, CD or DVD burners, or even portable hard drives. (A USB portable hard drive based on Toshiba's new 1.8" minidrive would be fun). Those of us who wish to transfer files too and from our friends or from one computer that we own to another just use networks a lot of the time anyway. Many new computers these days do not include floppy drives.

However, the Windows 2000 installer will not allow a driver to be installed mid-installation by any other method. A sensible strategy would also allow the installation to take place by swapping the CD from which the installation is taking place out and replacing it with a CD containing the driver. This would work in all installations without fail, because the fact that you are making an installation at all implies that you have at least a CD-ROM drive (as indeed I do). (I also tried plugging a USB floppy into my floppy drive and seeing if that would work, but no. Recognising that drive was clearly something that came later in the installation process than installing the IDE driver.

But somehow Microsoft didn't think of that. The fact that essentially every PC had a floppy drive in 1999 was enough for them.
However, no. (And I suppose from a business point of view they would like me to buy a new copy of XP now rather than use an old but still perfectly legal copy of 2000). That in the future that it would both become less likely that people would have floppies and that they would be more likely to have motherboards with controllers that the software on the intallation CD was familiar with also apparently didn't seem to occur with them. (Another idea would have been to get the network software working first and then to

So if I want to install W2K on this PC, I am going to have to install a floppy drive. The regular place that I buy computer parts from online charges about £4.00 for a floppy drive, but wiith shipping it is about £6.00. The local Maplin Electronics store wants £9.50. Not a lot of money, but I am trying to save money here. The trick is probably to find a friend with an old computer they are not using and ask if I can have a floppy drive. Not terribly hard (the world is full of old PCs lying around with perfectly fine floppy drives that are not being used) but it will probably take me a week or two for me to find one.

This sort of muddled thinking and lack of planning for the future is entirely typical of Microsoft. That they have consistently done things in such a half baked way and have still managed to conquer the world anyway rather baffles me. (Well actually I more or less do understand it - it just depresses me).

(Just for comparison, I tried also to install a Windows XP CD (ie without Service Pack 1) on the same system, and the same thing happened - it crashed half way through and careful checking determined that it could not see my IDE controller. Presumably something was updated between the original version of XP and SP1).

Update: The problem ultimately turned out not to be the ATA driver but instead to be an incompatible ACPI interface. This problem was fixed by disabling ACPI in the BIOS. On the other hand, if I had needed to update the driver, that ridiculous floppy only business would have still been the case.

Redirection

I have a piece on some particularly stupid ticket machines used to collect London bus fares over at Transport Blog.

Sunday evening quiz

I am presently using this satellite picture as the wallpaper on my Linux box.



Just as is the case with New York, a great city has been built on an island at the mouth of a river. Also like New York, this is the largest city and the finanancial and commercial capital - but not the political capital - of the country that contains it. Name the city.

(I suspect that this is a very easy question for people who come from the country in question, so I ask any readers from that country to disqualify themselves).

Update: The answer is Mumbai (Bombay), India. As Mark Holland said when giving an answer in the comments, westerners aren't generally familiar with the layout and appearance of cities in that part of the world, great cities that some of them are. The irony I suppose is that there are more movies filmed in Mumbai than in any other city in the world. We just don't see those, either.

I seem to have found an at least temporary quasi-career

Which is that for the moment at least I am in the custom PC building / PC tech support business. If anyone in London would like me to set up a wired or wireless network, or to build them a custom PC (Requests for interesting or unusual form factors, or strange hardware configurations, or high end gaming systems, or other things that one does not find in Dixons are welcomed by me, and indeed considered to be fun), or upgrade an existing one, or to repair a desktop PC that is not working, or even to solve complicated software problems, I can offer competitive rates.

(I can also provide advice and setup services with respect to home entertainment systems, including high and extremely high end ones. These may or may not include a PC of some sort, although I suspect that in future many of them will).

And I'm pretty good.

Redirection

I have a piece over at ubersportingpundit that was intended to be a preview of tomorrow's Natwest Trophy final between the West Indies and New Zealand, and ended up mainly being a serve at the England team (who are not playing in the final).

Redirection

I have a piece on the Azaria Chamberlain case over at Samizdata.

Redirection: I have a long piece on sporting rights on British television (which evolves into a history of British television in general) over at Samizdata.

Uh-huh

Those of my readers who regularly blog for Moveable Type blogs will know that MT has e-mail notification of comments. If someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, you are sent an e-mail informing you of this fact, and containing the comment. Unless a serious argument gets going in the comments section, most comments are received in the 24 hours or so after you make your post. Often you get a trickle of comments after that, but usually only a trickle.

Which I was surprised to turn on my computer this afternoon to discover that I had received four comments in half an hour on this Samizdata quote of the day I posted last week. One doesn't normally get many comments on quote postings anyway. My first thought was that the comments were spam, which is the usual explanation when once gets lots of comments all at once on old postings. But no, these were normal comments from people who had read the post. What would explain it?

Oh. This would explain it.

Brief movie notes

I went to see Mean Girls. This doesn't come from the famous John Hughes school of High School movie (which evolved via the Scream movies into Dawson's Creek)but comes more from the slightly messy, class and pecking order conscious scool of teen movie invented by Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and which then evolved through Heckerling's own Clueless (although Crowe's Say Anything... is genre wise a John Hughes movie, oddly enough, although it is a sublime John Hughes movie), through things like Never Been Kissed but which really came into its own on television via my My So Called Life, Freaks and Geeks and ultimately Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is far, far greater than anything on this list.

This film is smart, well acted, and the screenplay has a willingness to go unexpected places and give the characters shades of grey (although not to the extent that Buffy did, although you can only go so far in 90 minutes. It has the feel of being written by a writer who saw all those earlier films and TV series while growing up, and was influenced by them and felt the need to add to a genre she loved. And the film is full of scenes that (visually as much as anything) owe an obvious debt to all the above material. But this film does things with them which don't make this use look wrong somehow.

And the story is told by a possibly slightly unreliable narrator, which is a nice touch. We have had a few films over the last few years which have played with narrative structure to the extent that the whole film was about the narrative tricks - Memento and The Usual Suspects are the most extreme examples of this. People who had never seen anything like it perfore found it exciting but I found it rather tiresome. Which doesn't mean that playing with narrative structure is necessarily a bad thing. If it is subservient to the story and characters and the writer and director know what they are doing with it, it is a good thing. (Alternately, if you have the skill of Quentin Tarantino you can play with narrative structure all you like and everything will still work). And this film does this - not in a big way but just a little.

And despite this not coming from the John Hughes line of high school movies, Lindsay Lohan clearly is the heir to Molly Ringwald. She has that appealling, nice but not too nice, pretty but not too pretty quality of attainability that works for teen starts but doesn't always help them evolve into adult stars. (At least it didn't with Ringwald). Maybe it will in Lohan's case. We will see.

Apology

I appear to be having a few problems with blogger at the moment. There appears to be a substantial delay before new posts and changes to old posts are actually visible on the website. Therefore please bear with me if I do not appear to be posting new stuff and/or stuff which obviously neads correcting remains current on the blog. I am working on it.

Redirection: I have a piece on how the names of the various divisions and leagues in English football are getting even sillier.

I've noticed this too

In this hugely entertaining piece in which he laments the decline of pubs as venues for the men of Middle England to enjoy themselves, Digby Anderson does indeed identify one of the key problems of English pubs today.

Yes, there are indeed far too many people consuming silly drinks out of pink bottles. Beer (either real ale or imported from Belgium, Germany or the Czech republic), fine wine, and single malt whisky are acceptable alcoholic drinks. Everything else is for wimps. Silly drinks in pink bottles are beneath contempt.

Wednesday evening song lyrics (even though it is Thursday and I haven't done any song lyrics for three weeks).

It felt like spring time on this February morning
In the courtyard birds were singing your praise
I'm still recalling things you said to make me feel
Alright I carried them with me today now

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy

I wonder why
I feel so high though I am not above the sorrow
Heavy hearted 'till you call my name
And it sounds like church bells or the whistle of a train
On a summer evening I'll run to meet you barefoot
Barely breathing

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy (oh darling)

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy

It's not too near for me
Like a flower I need the rain
Though it's not clear to me
Every season has its change
And I will see you
When the sun comes out again

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy (oh oh...)

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy

I wonder why (hmmm)
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again (oooh)
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again (hmmm)
(comes out comes out oooh)
And I will wake up happy
So I pray

-- As I Lay Me Down, from Sophie B Hawkins' 1994 Album Whaler.

Don't do it Cecile

Take it from me, you really don't want to pretend to be an adult Canadian.

A development.

Something I have seen in a few music shops lately is combined packages consisting of the DVD of a movie and the soundtrack CD in one box (and for one price).

This is quite an interesting development. Traditionally, music companies have fleeced people who like to buy soundtrack CDs even more than they have fleeced people who like to buy other CDs. Soundtracks were seen as a specialist taste, and we were (and to some extent are) still being charged as much as £15 for soundtracks, while the cost of most other CDs plunged downwards through the £10 mark some time ago and is still dropping.

The logic behind this is impeccable. Obviously the people most likely to buy a CD soundtrack are the same people who are most likely to buy the DVD of the same movie. And the DVD market has been growing so fast that it makes sense for the rapidly declining music industry to attempt to bolster its own revenues by latching on to this. But they can only be making a couple of pounds per CD, which is a bit of a come down.

And of course, one reason some people like soundtracks is that many of them are a sort of mix tape: an opportunity for the film-makers to devise a set of songs that naturally fit, possibly for unexpected reasons. For a time, they were about the only kind of officially sanctioned mix tape in existence. These days of course they are not: producing your own mix CDs or your own playlist on your MP3 player has been a growth industry for the last few years, and programs like iTunes have made it easier than ever. And now you can of course buy lots of other people's playlists through the iTunes Music Store and similar.

I have no idea whether these appeal to film soundtrack afficonados, bus I suspect that they might.

Redirection: I have a piece on Wimbledon (mainly about Tim Henman and Roger Federer) over at ubersportingpundit.

Leben Sie transparent...



Whenever things look bad, one can reassure oneself by acknowledging that things were once much worse.

(Link via Blognor Regis).

Redirection

I have a piece on England's loss to Australia in rugby on Saturday, a discussion about how England's recent performanes compare with other World Cup winners in various sports, and thoughts about what this means.

Redirection: I have a brief piece on Greece's European Championship victory over France over at ubersportingpundit.

Update: I also have a piece on the schedule for next year's Australia v England cricket series, also at ubersportingpundit.

Overreach

As happens these days, my laptop computer has been getting steadily clogged up with programs generating popup ads, spyware, and all kinds of other crap over the six months that I have had it. (I have been fortunate enough or well enough defended that I have avoided getting any worms and viruses). I have largely just put up with this. However, a week or two ago, one of the programs that has been showing me popup ads decided to start showing occasional pictures that were essentially hard core pornography, in the hope that I would click on the link and buy more hard core pornography.

This was enough for me, and I have gone through a thorough spyware and irritate-ware removal process, something I should have done a while back. Spybot Search and Destroy informed me that there were over 120 separate pieces of anti-social software of one kind or another installed on my system. Ugh.

Well, they are now gone.

Although I have not myself had a worm or virus infection, several people I know have, and I have been helping out in cleaning these up. One friend of mine received an infection from a variant of the Gabot worm, and this managed to mess things up pretty thoroughly before we managed to kill it.

Update: That wretched porn came back. Either the both Spybot S&D and Ad-aware both missed it, or I visited the site that was responsible for installing it in the first place again and it got reinstalled. (And no, I didn't attempt to rip the new Beastie Boys CD). Now running the software again, but I am very pissed off. I might be about to abandon Internet Explorer and start using Firefox exclusively, too.

Doing a little hacking

Okay, I am in the process of installing Wine on my Linux box. This is a reverse engineered implementation of the Windows APIs that runs under Linux and other Unix like systems that run on x386 processors, and theoretically allows them to run Windows applications. Ideally I would like to use it to run iTunes under Linux. There isn't really anything else in terms of Windows applications that I feel I have to have. Firefox is a substantially better browser than is Internet Explorer, and while I haven't used it in a big way, OpenOffice seems adequate for most of my purposes. And while there is an open source jukebox program that was part of the SuSE Linux distribution, I really do want iTunes.

Redirection

I have a quote of the day over at Samizdata.

Non updated websites

A reader has gently chided me and asked whether I am a "slow reader", due to the fact that (he claims) I have had the same three books listed in the "What I'm reading" section in the sidebar on the left for the entire time he has been reading the blog.

That is not entirely true. Over the 18 months or so the list has been there, quite a lot of books have appeared and then vanished. These are some of the books that I have actually read in that time. (I do read a substantial number of books). However, there is something of a problem. When I started the list I had eight to ten books sitting on a table next to my bed, and these were the ones I put on the initial list. I had at least started all of them - in some cases just having read a page or two. Since then, most of the books on the original list have vanished as I have read them, but the remaining three have stubbornly refused to be read. Mostly this is just that I haven't got round to reading them, but they haven't really grabbed me either. "Gangs of New York" seems quite good, and I will no doubt get to it at some point. "Tea From an Empty Cup" is by Pat Cadigan, and Cadigan writes intense and dense books that require a lot of concentration. To be properly appreciated her books need to be read within one sitting or within a couple of days at the most, and I haven't really managed to sit down for such a sitting. "The Seduction of Place" is the one really problematical one. It's a book about architecture containing lots of interesting information about how certain cities got the way they are, but it is rather tiresomely ideological, and ideology in urban development and urban design usually leads to bad places. (It is also a rather rare thing - a book I read because it had a really good title - summarising the buzz I get out of seeing and visiting new places - something I practically find necessary for survival).

Some would suggest that I should remove the books from the list if I have gone so long without finishing them, but that would be an admission of defeat somehow: an acknowledgement that I never will read them. And I think somehow that I should read them. The longer they stay up the more I feel so.

The trouble with this though is that the list then doesn't summarise my taste in books very well. Stuff I find hard going stays up, and stuff that I enjoy and read in one sitting stays up for a much shorter time, if it even gets up at all. (Also, there is a feeling that if I put a book on the list I have an obligation to then read it quickly, and that is perhaps not fun). In recent months I have been reading books, but I have not updated the list.

So the overall rule is the more I enjoy a book the shorter the time it spends on the list. Oops.

Perhaps it is the way the list is structured: I update the blogger template. This takes longer than just making a blog post, and doesn't keep a proper historical record.
Or perhaps I have just grown lazy.

But I am not going to delete the feature for now. I think I will try to update the list properly, and I may make a rule that all books stay up for at least a week, even if I have already finished reading them by the time I put them up. In fact I think I shall put up some more books that I am either reading or I have just read right now.

Or I could switch to actually writing reviews of the books I read. But that sounds like work.

But the three books are staying up until I have actually read them.

Redirection

I have a 6000 word essay that is basically a history of the Australian airline industry for the last 50 years over at Transport Blog.

Gmail

Google are now giving me another set of invites within a few hours every time I use up the previous set. Presumably the exchange tradeable value of a gmail account is now crashing.

Developments in the English language

I am working on my laptop computer. It is sitting on my desk. When I use it, it usually is sitting on a desk somewhere. Laps are only used very occasionally. Sometimes when I am using it in bed I sit it on my chest, but I don't think anyone has ever invented the word "chesttop". "Notebook" computer is a reasonably okay word, denoting the shape but not how it is used, but laptop is still dominant.

On the other hand, the ATX midi-tower seems to have won the war to become the standard form factor for desktop PCs. However, this normally sits on the floor beside the desk, so it is more a floortop computer than a desktop computer. Of course, the "entertainment" PC: something connected to a flat screen and sound system, used to watch television and DVDs and to listen to music and based on a small form facter flex-ATX or mini-ITX motherboard, and which possibly fits in an entertainment cabinet - is clearly on the rise. Whether this is a new type of "desktop" computer that also doesn't sit on a desk, or whether this will be considered to be a third common class of PC, after desktops and laptops remains to be seen. (In fact, if I were to get into the PC making business full time, I think it would be wise to concentrate on this type of machine. The big consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers don't seem to have figured this all out yet, and only a portion of the home brew PC makers have figured it out either. There is I think quite a bit of demand in this market, and there is much less competition than there is for building midi-ATX towers).

So there we have it. Laptops sit on desks. Desktops sit on floors.

An ambition

Someday, I too want to be inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame.

(And of course the lack of R. Daneel Olivaw amongst the inductees is a scandal. But I digress).

The modern world, and bad things about Dell

Yesterday evening, I was lying in bed. My laptop was plugged into a power outlet, but there were no other wires connecting it to the outside world. (I could have course have been running it off batteries). I had a hands free headset plugged into the laptop, and I was having a conversation with somebody in Adelaide. I was simultaneously operating my brother's computer (in Cessnock north of Sydney) remotely, to remove some of the foibles of Outlook Express Service pack 1 which were annoying him. At the same time the person in Adelaide who I was having the voice conversation was having an instant messaging session with somebody in South Carolina (or was it North Carolina?) who was giving him some cooking instructions for the dinner he was simultaneously making.

As a down point for Dell, their present model desktops have front headphone sockets and front USB ports, but no front microphone sockets. Given that more and more people are using things like Skype for over the internet audio communications, this is becoming more of a design issue. It's not so bad if you connect a microphone permanently to your computer, but if you use a wired hands free headset then you have to reach around the back to plug it in. This is a nuisance. (Of course the other option is to install Bluetooth and to get a wireless hands free headset).

Good things about Dell

When I purchased my laptop computer about six months ago, I ordered it from Dell's UK website. I decided that I wanted a good sized hard drive (by laptop standards anyway) and I therefore clicked on the "60GB" option. There was also an 80GB option, but the standard option was less than that - I think there were 30GB and 40GB options as well. (80GB is still the maximum for my model, although there are hard to find 100GB drives on some other models). I do not recall if the speed of the drive was specified on the online order form, but if it was I did not pay attemtion. Most laptop drives are 5400rpm (or sometimes 4500rpm) and I guess I just assumed that it would be one of these (and to be truthful I didn't think of the issue at all).

In any event, when I recently took the drive out of the computer so that I could put the drive from my old laptop in to test if it still worked, I noticed that the drive was a Hitachi 7K60. This runs at 7200rpm and is generally considered to be the best laptop drive available in terms of performance. Dell supplied me with a really top notch component there, for which I thank them.

They didn't draw my attention to this in any way though. Perhaps they have a mixture of suppliers and not everybody got a drive this good. Or perhaps they wanted people to pay extra for an 80GB drive, and didn't want to draw attention to the fact that the 80GB drives they were offering were actually lower performance than the 60GB drives. (There are no 2.5" 80GV drives that I know of that run faster than 5400rpm).

And why do hard drive speeds always seem to come in multiples of 900rpm. (This is the same as saying multiples of 15Hz, which is perhaps a slightly rounder number).

Update: Of course, many of them actually come at 4200rpm, which is not a multiple of 900. Me stupid.

Technological advance:

When you go into a middle of the road consumer electronics store (like Harvey Norman in Australia or Dixons in England) it is striking how much of the television section is now devoted to plasma screens, and LCD displays. These have the advantages of being flat panel displays. We have been promised for decades that televisions that you can hang on a wall like a picture are just around the corner, and they are indeed finally here. A low end 42 inch plasma screen costs a little more than a 40 inch CRT set (be it rear projecton or with a conventional screen) but the difference is sufficiently small that people are buying them in droves. (A high end plasma costs substantially more, and if you are after a 60 inch screen, then plasma is really your only option). People are also now buying smaller plasma screens: 32 inch for instance (although there are technical reasons why you cannot make plasma screens much smaller than this). I think the driving factor might be that plasma screens are cool when you see them in public places: in pubs, in airports and railway stations, and in an assortment of other places.

You also see lots of plasma screens in the electrical section of pretentious but actually slightly declasse places like Harvey Nichols where the staff wear black, look cool, and are totally unable to answer a remotely technical question, and where the customers wouldn't be deal buying an "old fashionded" television darling.

And in these places, you will seldom see the plasma screens showing anything other than the five Pixar animated movies (the two Toy Story movies, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo) Dreamworks' Shrek or Fox's Ice Age, all computer animated.

However, if you go into a high end home cinema store you will see some but not many plasma screens, a few front and rear projectors, and lots of conventional CRT televisions, mostly from Sony, Phillips, and Panasonic. In such shops the demonstrations are typically live action: showing such things as watersports and beautiful women walking with spectacular scenery in the background.

The reason for this is of course simple: plasma screens deliver really crap pictures. They are very bright, so they are good in locations where people are viewing from lots of angles, where there is lots of ambient light and people are being constanty distracted, but from the point of view of sitting and watching a movie they are not great at all. Their colours are a bit dubious when it comes to showing subtle variations, and their contrast ratios and response times are nowhere near as good as can be achieved with CRTs. Old fashioned CRT televisions provide pictures that at their best are stunningly beautiful, and serious home cinema buffs know this and buy them. Plasmas are simply left in the dust by something like this. The reason that the demonstrations you see in shops are almost always computer animated movies is that these do not show up the weaknesses of plasma displays in the way live action with lots of subtle contrasts and people faces might. (CRTs are much better at showing beautiful women walking past spectacular scenery for instance).

LCD displays are getting better. At their best they certainly provide stunning pictures. (This is nice for instance). They don't score as well as plasmas in terms of viewing angles and brightness, and they traditionally have slow response times (although things are improving), but in terms of finesse they are clearly better. (Big ones are expensive for now though). Fairly soon they will be better than plasma for all but applications that require a really bright display. (For one thing they are a lot lighter and less fragile) Plasma will disappear after a short period of being a key technology, I suspect).

However, many of us are waiting for newer technologies that have none of the weaknesses of either plasma or LCD. This is quite promising, but for now I will be sticking with CRTs. That Panasonic I linked to earlier is quite an impressive object of technolust, actually.

Update: This post contained a broken link to the Apple 23" cinema display. It is now fixed.

Anyone else want a gmail account?

I have another six to give away.

Update: (17/6/04) Subsequent to this, Google have given me another five, of which I still have three remaining. This is an interesting way of handling a rollout on Google's part.

Redirection

I have a piece on a sign pointing in the wrong direction over at City Comforts.

Redirection

I have a piece on watching the England football team lose to France in a pub in Dorking over at ubersportingpundit.

Ooh

Alice is in Texas. Seems a good place from which to defend humankind to me. Hi Alice.

One thing leads to another.

Okay, so you agree to build a custom made computer for someone else. You do actually order good quality equipment and components, but you want the resulting computer to look like a quality effort too, so you order a nice case rather than a cheap plastic one. As it happens, the online store from where you are buying most of the components has one for sale with a clear side, so that you can see the innards of the computer. Upon ordering this, you find that you are at a "suggested accessories" page at the online shop. The accessories are not expensive, so you order a couple. And when the parts all come, you put them together.

And that is how I managed to build a computer with one clear side, two glowing case fans, and an internal multicoloured fluorescent light.

Actually it's kind of cool. And it's a nice computer. I rather wish I had built it for me.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics. (Yes, I know it is Thursday).

I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeard somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead of everyone
We'd walk behind while you would run
I look up at your house
And I can almost hear you shout down to me
Where I always used to be
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
Back on the train
I ask why did I come again?
Can I confess I've been haning around your old address?
The years have proved to offer nothing since you moved
You're long gone
But I can't move on
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you
I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeard somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
The deserts miss the rain - like the deserts miss the rain
The deserts miss the rain
like the deserts miss the rain

-- Everything But the Girl, from their 1994 Album Amplified Heart, although it was actually a later remix of the song by Todd Terry that turned it into a hit.

More computers

Well, I am now blogging from the new PC I am building for my landlady. As this one has been built from new parts rather than recycled ones, it is rather more up to date than the PC I recently built for myself. This one has an Athlon XP 3000+, 160GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, DVD+/-RW, ATI Radeon 9200 128MB graphics, on board sound (but 5.1 sound with digital outs if needed), a nice set of 2.1 speakers, 802.11b wireless (for freeloading off my internet connection), a much cooler case than mine, and a few other things that I am not remembering right now. Unlike the computer I recently built for myself, this one has more legacy stuff like a floppy and a modem. This makes sense. If I need things like this, I can rush out and install them myself, but less technical people can't always do so. (Actually if I ever need a floppy, I have a USB floppy in the bottom of a box somewhere).

The computer is more or less assembled, although it is still sitting on top of my bed with its case open. Various things like case fans and internal lights need to be installed, but the hard work is done.

Redirection

I have a piece on the mystery of Selhurst railway station over at Transport Blog.

Houston, we have an operating system

Okay, I'm now blogging from SuSE Linux. The installation took a lot longer than a Windows installation, but once I got it started, it really wasn't especially painful. Using the KDE desktop environment now, which at least has a prettier default background than Windows XP.

The Linux installation process

Okay, I first attempted a network install of Debian. It took a while to find the image of a Boot CD that contained the right driver for my network card, but eventually I did.

I attempted to install Linux on my former laptop 2.5 inch hard disk, but halfway through the creation of new partitions, it kept telling me that it was unable to write to the disk, and then the disk vanished from the computer. Curious.

I then attempted to install Windows XP on the same disk, just to test if the problem was with the disk. Again, the process stopped halfway through, after which I the computer was unable to see the hard disk.

My thought at that point was that the 2.5 inch hard disk was faulty, but just as one last test of it, I installed it in my laptop and attempted to install XP on it while it was on the laptop. This worked fine, so presumably there is nothing wrong with the hard disk, and something wrong with the connection. I tried swapping my devices around between the two IDE ports on my motherboard, but no cigar. The 2.5 inch disk still wouldn't work. I can only conclude that the IDE cable I bought the other day is faulty. (I should have got one of those adaptors instead of a cable, even if the first shop didn't have one). A brief attempt to find the receipt for the cable so that I can either get another one or get my £5 back failed.

Okay, time to attempt to install linux on the main hard drive instead of the little one. For some unexplainable reason, I at this point decided to stop trying to install Debian and attempt to install SUSE instead. After an assortment of messing around with FTP sites and addresses, and eventually figuring out that ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1 and ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current do not in fact point to the same place, even though the documentation suggests that they do, the Linux installation is now going well, and I suspect I will have a running Linux box within a couple of hours. (Touch wood).

On the other hand, the piece of advice given on the Debian download site, which was "Use CD-RW and not CD-R" has turned out to be excellent advice, because I burned half a dozen different CD images before ending up with what I wanted, and using up six CD-Rs would indeed have been wasteful.

Redirection

I have a piece on a run-in I had today with George Galloway's European election campaign over at Samizdata.

I'm installing Linux

My computer has been trying to talk to my router and the screen has been telling me:

"Please Wait. Trying to get network configuration using DHCP/BOOTP... This may take a few minutes, be patient"

for, well, a few minutes. Perhaps I have the wrong driver for my ethernet card. I am not sure I am feeling especially patient though.

Redirection

I have a quote of the day from Nancy Reagan over at Samizdata.

Redirection:

I have a piece on Brian Lara's century in the West Indies v Bangladesh test over at ubersportingpundit.

Memories of Green

It seems that this is going to be the definitive image of me for some time. Oh well.

Fiddling with desktop computers

My old laptop was retired because of a really weird problem, which was that the computer would only start in exceptional circumstances. Most of the time when you pressed the power button it would whir for a moment and nothing more would occur, other than that a fan would keep spinning. (After a couple of hours the fan would then stop spinning). Sometimes if you left that fan to spin for a couple of hours and then tried to boot the machine again, the computer would then boot.

But usually it would not. And the time between successful boots steadily got greater, until the computer became essentially useless. And when it was working I would dread software crashes (which were not all that uncommon, given that it was using Windows ME) or anything else requiring me to reboot, because I never knew if the computer would come back up again.

But some parts of the computer were still okay. Just for the fun of it I recently removed the hard drive and installed it in my newer Dell laptop. Somewhat to my surprise, the Dell laptop proceeded to boot perfectly fine in Windows ME, which was what was on the hard disk. (It did complain a lot about the presence of hardware it did not recognise and wanted me to give it permission to search the universe for compatible drivers, however).

So, nothing wrong with the hard drive. One can't easily have two hard drives in most laptops, but now that I have a desktop computer as well, it is pretty easy to install the old hard drive in the desktop box. Although the actual IDE/ATA interface is the same, 2.5 inch drives use a different (44 pin) connector to the (40 pin) one used by standard 3.5 inch drives. (The 2.5 inch drive also incorporates the power - hence the extra pins - and the pins are smaller and closer together). Therefore I had to get an adaptor of some kind. I have seen adaptors that plug into the back of the hard drive and give the hard drive the larger connector, which can then plug into a standard size IDE ribbon cable, but I couldn't find any of those. However, the shop I went to did have an IDE cable with a large connector on one end and a small one on the other, which worked fine.

So I now have a computer with a 164GB main drive, a CD-ROM drive and a 5GB secondary drive. If I put it that way, it sounds completely pointless. However there are advantages in this. One is that I can now access all the files on the hard drive of my old laptop whenever I want. (There is something to be said for simply copying the entire contents of the little drive onto the big one, but I needed to mount the little drive to be able to do that). Another is that I can now boot the desktop machine in Windows ME from the second drive. (Is that a bug or a feature?) The third is that I actually have two hard drives. I could for instance install linux on the little drive, and that way I would have a dual boot system without having to mess around with partitioning the main hard drive.

And when I say little drive, I do mean it. 2.5 inch drives are much thinner, and they really do only take up a tiny fraction of the volume of 3.5 inch drives. I have never seen a 1.8 inch drive, but we are talking tiny. (As for a one inch drive, imagine a Compact Flash card).

Update: What is annoying is that the cable I bought yesterday only has two data connectors: one (40 pin) for plugging into the main board and another (44 pin) for plugging into a 2.5 inch drive. This means that if I use this cable, I can only attach one device (the 2.5 drive) into that IDE port. IDE ports are capable of connecting two devices (a master and a slave) and normal IDE cables have three 40 pin connectors, to allow two devices to be connected to the board via one cable. I now have my main hard drive and my CD-ROM connected to one IDE port and the 2.5 inch hard drive to the other. If I want to add another IDE device (eg a DVD+/-RW drive) I can't unless I get a different adaptor or cable. (Also, I would really prefer the main hard drive to and the CD-ROM drive to both be masters connected to different IDE ports, which is more efficient. But for now, that's how it is).

New developments

Toshiba have just announced a 60GB two platter version of their 1.8 inch hard drive, most famously found in the full size Apple iPod. Presumably there will also be a 30GB one platter version. Apple are also expected to announce a fourth generation iPod in a few months, which will have a colour screen on which you can display digital photographs, a more sophisticated operating system and a few other features. It will be interesting to see what the iPod evolves into. I doubt that that many people will use 60GB of storage, but there are lots of other features you could add while you keep the same form factor. Maybe the full size iPod is going to evolve into a PDA, or maybe Apple will find a clever way to make it a mobile phone as well, or various other thoughts. (Apple has been adding more features to subsequent models anyway). I think the trick is to keep the form factor, keep the music interface the same, and provide other functions as add ons that are easy to use but which do not affect the core functionality. Before long there will be higher capacity versions of either the 1 Hitachi drive used in the iPod mini or of Toshiba's 0.8 inch drive. Once we can get an iPod mini with a capacity of 15GB or so (as a guess, this will be two generations of product down the line - another 18 months or so) the iPod mini is likely to satisfy most people who just want a music player, so the thing that sells the full size version (if anything does) is going to be other applications. And this 60GB disk is something that is helping Apple go that way.

And of course one great thing about the iPod is that it is really pushing development of those small hard drives. If you decide you are going to build a laptop based on the full powered Pentium M CPU, a 14 inch screen, and a 2.5 inch hard drive (which is what most laptops are), you end up with a machine weighing five pounds or a little more and which looks like this. Most laptops are approximately thus (with another family based on 15.4 inch widescreens instead). The maximum specification of such laptops at present is a 2.0GHz Pentium M, and a 100GB hard drive, as this is as fast as Pentium Ms come and as big as 2.5 inch hard drives come. Having built such a computer it is hard to miniaturise, as it requires a fair bit of power (and consequently a fairly big battery) to run. If you want to build a smaller and lighter laptop you have to use a smaller and lighter battery, so you need to choose smaller or less powerful components.

As it happens, Intel has also released lower power variants of the Pentium M. Actually the chip comes in three varieties: there are the standard versions, the low voltage versions and the Ultra Low Voltage versions. I haven't noticed the low voltage versions so much, but the Japanese manufacturers have been doing all sorts of interesting things with the Ultra Low Voltage version. Readers of this blog will know I am sadly much enamoured with the Sony Vaio TR series. This is a laptop based around the ULV Pentium M, Toshiba's 1.8 inch hard drive, and a 10.6 inch WXGA screen that Sony has sourced from somewhere. The good thing about this machine is that it is just about the smallest and lightest laptop you can get that includes an optical drive. (Fujitsu has a very similar machine that is available only in Japan). The first version of this laptop included a 0.9GHz Pentium M, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and a 30GB hard drive. The most recent version includes a 1.1GHz Pentium M, a DVD-RW drive, and a 40GB hard drive. I suspect that Sony will release another new version as soon as it can source a reasonable number of the 60GB Toshiba drives, at which point the TR series will have a 1.1GHz CPU and a 60GB hard drive. That's a little behind a typical larger laptop in terms of processor power, but otherwise it really isn't bad.

I want one.

Frustration

I had a couple of interviews today, for a really good job. I thought I did really well on the first one, but on the second I did less well. I didn't do a terribly great job of answering some questions on differential equations I should have done a better job of answering. (This was stuff I knew well a decade ago, but on which I was rusty, and I didn't start thinking clearly until the end - and of course the answer to one of the questions popped into my mind fifteen minutes after the end of the interview). What I managed to avoid doing was panic and start talking really fast as I have been known to do in the past. (The worst thing you can do in such circumstances is show fear, and at least I didn't do that). Still, I don't think I will get any further with this job. (Of course, I don't yet know).

Damn. I think I really got close.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics

I came across a cache of old photos
And invitations to teenage parties
"Dress in white" one said, with quotations
From someone's wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties
When you're young you find inspiration
In anyone who's ever gone
And opened up a closing door
She said: "We were never feeling bored

'Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end

When I went I left from the station
With a haversack and some trepidation
Someone said: "If you're not careful
You'll have nothing left and nothing to care for
In the nineteen-seventies"
But I sat back and looking forward
My shoes were high and I had spots
I'd bolted through a closing door
I would never find myself feeling bored

'Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
You'd be sitting somewhere here with me

'Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

And we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never being boring
We were never being bored
'Cause we were never being boring
We were never being bored

Being Boring, from the Pet Shop Boys' 1990 album Behaviour

Update: I will confess that this is one of my favourite songs. However, my feelings for it are clearly mild compared to those of some people. For when I was googling for the lyrics, I found that someone else had created a 150 page website devoted purely to this one song.

The multicultural world

This evening I had another interview for a job with a bulge bracket American bank. (The financial markets are hiring - this is good). Of course, in this globalised world, it is remarkable how much you have in common with the people you encounter. The interviewer knew someone who had been studying for a Ph.D. in the same department at me in Cambridge at the same time. And as he was Indian, we had much in common. No doubt I could have talked cricket with him for hours.

The joys of copyright

Over in the comments section of Cathy Seipp's blog (where Cathy's daughter Cecile Dubois was guest blogging), I this afternoon found myself having a conversation with Tim Minear (who wrote many episodes of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel) about the forthcoming DVDs of the recent television series Wonderfalls, which despite great reviews was cancelled after only a few episodes early this year. Apparently one obstacle to getting the DVDs out is some of the songs used in the television series: the producers do not have the rights to for the music as it applies to a DVD release, and obtaining it would be too expensive, so the music has to be removed from the television episodes and it has to be replaced with less expensive music.

Tim says that this is quite a common situation. Given the way in which music copyrights work, I can believe this. In particular recorded music is subject to two copyrights, one belonging to the composer and the other to the performer. The copyright of the performer (ie the record company) is much more restrictive than that of the composer (ie the publishing company), which means that the performer can charge whatever he wants to allow use of the song, and can prevent its use if he doesn't want to. The copyright of the composer is subject to compulsory license, however, which means that the composer cannot stop use of the song, and cannot choose how much to charge for it - this is set by the copyright laws. This is why you will sometimes hear a new version of a familiar song on a movie soundtrack - it means that the producers were unable to obtain rights to the music they wanted to use and therefore had someone else record a new version of the same song, which nobody can stop them doing but which can be much cheaper). And in many instances the copyright law that applies to the broadcast of music is not the same as that that applies to selling recordings of music.

Which reminds me of another, older, example of this. It applies to the radio rather than television, for which the rules are different again, so it's not quite the same kind of thing, although it's close.

Shortly after Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series was broadcast in the UK in 1978, the producers wanted to put the series out as an LP record. (The CD player existed in labs in Eindhoven at that point, but was not yet a consumer product). This was offered to BBC records, who in one of many acts of legendary cluelessness passed, but another record company picked it up.

Copyright law contains various provisions for the broadcast of music on the radio. In some instances it falls under fair use, and in other instances compulsory licences apply. In any event, it was relatively easy to use quite famous music for the radio series, but it was legally much harder if you were going to put it on a record. Resources were limited in terms of paying for the rights to use music on the record, and it thus wasn't possible to release recordings of the original radio series including the original music. Also, the original series had 29-30 minute episodes, and you can only fit 22-23 minutes on one side of an LP record. So the radio series was remixed with different music, cut in length, and substantially rerecorded for its release on LP. There are many mutually contradictory versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the LP records are one of the more obscure ones. They weren't especially obscure at the time - in fact they sold very well - but they are something of a collector's item now due to the fact that records are now an obsolete medium. The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was later released on CD, but this time actually by the BBC. This time round there was a lot more money, and it was possible to obtain the rights to all the music of the original radio series (and there is no difficulty fitting two 30 minute episodes on a CD, given that CDs fit a maximum of 74 minutes of recording). So the CDs were (and are) of the original radio series, not the remixed and rerecorded LP record version.

Most people would agree that this is for the best: the radio series was the original and in some ways definitive version after all. This is possibly true, but in a way it is also a shame that the LP versions have faded into obscurity (although they are something of a collector's item). For they are actually very good. The radio programs were a bit rushed, but for the LP versions there was time to fix a few things that had not been got right the first time. And in one or two places this shows. So if you are a serious Hitchhiker's collector (I'm not) you probably do need a set of the LPs.

And it really seems necessary to find a set of the LPs to listen to this version. Because although it is easy to find MP3s of the original radio series (ie ripped versions of the CDs) it is not for the LP versions. As programs that originally went out on vinyl records and which have never been released in digital format, they are a little hard for people to rip.

Update: A little further reading informs me that episode three of Hitchhikers released on CD does contain a brief cut due to the the difficulty of obtaining the rights to Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd and Rock and Roll Music by the Beatles. (I doubt that obtaining the rights to Also Sprach Zarathustra would be difficult, although this is also mentioned in the article).

More breakfast blogging

Nominally Italian pancetta and parmesan sausages this week once again from the Sainsbury's luxury sausage line. Unsurprisingly they are less garlicky and more cheesy than the Tolouse sausages I had last week. (I would attempt to make some comment about how that describes the differences between Italy and France, but France is plenty cheesy too. The pancetta and parmesan sizzled a little more in the pan, perhaps mainly because of the cheese. In any event, they were quite delicious, even more so than the Tolouse sausages I think.

My new computer

Over the last six months, I have on two occasions hit problems due to the fact that my laptop computer has died. The first time the machine was a complete writeoff, and I had to simply buy a new one. The second time my new laptop had problems with its screen, and I was without it for several weeks while it was being repaired by Dell. For me, being without a computer is disastrous, as most of the things I do in my life require one to really function. I decided I needed a second computer to act as a backup in such situations. I had never built a computer out of a motherboard and other parts before, and I decided that it would be fun to try. And as it happens, a great many computer people have old computer parts lying around, and by asking nicely you can get most of the parts for a new computer for free.

In particular, I discovered that the best kinds of friends to have are hard core gamers - people who must have the latest and greatest computer at all times, and who are likely to throw out or give away computer hardware that seems perfectly good and reasonably up to date to the rest of us.

In the end, I managed to get people to give me almost an entire computer. As far as hardware is concerned, I only ended up paying for a new toolkit (which doesn't really count and which I needed anyway and which in any event only cost me £7.49), a set of screws, a new keyboard, and a new hard drive. (My mother gave me a keyboard when I was in Australia, but I left it out as I was carrying a bit too much luggage. I could undoubtedly have scrounged one off someone else, but when I saw that Maplin Electonics were selling brand new keyboards for £4.68, it simply didn't seem worth bothering). As far as hard drives are concerned, I discovered that second hand ones are harder to come by than most other components (as hard drives fail more often than virtually any other component, and there is thus more demand for them than for anything else) and also because hard drives are the part of the computer that is more subject to Moore's law than any other. Three or four year old hard drives only tend to be 5-10 gigabytes, and this isn't really enough for people with large music collections. (Mine is presently 14GB, which is medium sized but too much for a 10GB hard drive). On top of that, I might well do something like install a TV card and turn this computer into a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) at some point, in which case lots of hard drive space will be useful.

So although it might have been possible to scrounge a small second hand hard drive from someone (or I could have got an adaptor and used the 5Gb hard drive from my old laptop) I didn't think it was worth it. And once you have made the decision to buy a new hard drive, it turns out that 160GB costs less than double the cost of 40GB. So, the new computer has a 160GB hard drive. (I am told that the drive has a capacity of 164,686,520,320 bytes out of which I am presently using 3,781,287,936, so I have mere 160,905,232,384 bytes of space remaining).

Everything else was given to me by people who weren't using it. And I have been able to convert this



into this

.

In any event I now have a computer with an AMD Athlon 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, a 160GB 7200rpm hard drive, a 128Mb NVIDIA GeoForce4 Ti 4200 Graphics card (although this is being slowed down a little by the fact that the motherboard only has a 4X AGP slot, and the graphics card supports 8X), 10/100 Ethernet, on board sound, and a CD-ROM drive. There's no modem and no floppy, not because I would have had any trouble getting them but because I don't need them right now. (On the other hand if someone wants to give me a modem for free, I might take it, because it is useful to have one on board in case the DSL fails. That said, I do have one in the laptop, so to be in a bad way I would have to lose both the DSL and the laptop would have to have a separate problem, which isn't that likely).

And the computer is in an enormous case. Gamers like those I believe. I might install some front USB ports in one of the bays at some point, and an internal card reader might be nice, too.

Just using it now, to me the new box feels like a nice computer. The least state of the art thing about it is probably the CPU. I think the 1.0GHz Athlon precedes AMD's use of the "Athlon 1700+" notation, but I according to benchmarks a 1.0GHz Athlon is likely to run at about 2/3 of the speed of the 1.4GHz Pentium M in my laptop, and about 10% slower than a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. So the CPU is not state of the art, but is more than acceptable for most uses. And with 512MB of RAM, it isn't going to have to do much swapping. The one thing that is lacking is a DVD drive of any kind or a CD writer. I don't expect I am going to want to watch DVDs on this computer anyway (I have a standalone DVD player on the other side of the room) whereas a DVD player on a laptop is really useful for watching DVDs in places where one doesn't otherwise have a player) but it somehow feels incomplete. Perhaps I should have bought another of those $A25 DVD-ROM drives in Australia when I had the chance.

In actual fact I will add a DVD+/-RW drive when I have a little more money. At that point I will have a really nice computer, I think, and it really has cost not much at all.

Redirection

I have one of my long pieces about Hollywood over at Samizdata.

How to cheer oneself up in stressful times

Roast Duck with plum sauce. Mmmmmm. Duck.

I love ducks. They are such cute birds. I love the way they sort of glide across the water, and it looks so elegant, but you watch them go underneath you when you are standing in a bridge and you then see this circular paddling motion with their back legs. (Not that birds have front legs of course). Also, they are delicious.

Redirection

I have a piece on Porto's victory in the European Champions League over at ubersportingpundit.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics

Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for seeing me
And for not leaving me
Thank you for staying with me
Thanks for not hurting me
You are gentle with me
Thanks for silence with me

Thank you for holding me
And saying "I could be"
Thank you for saying "Baby"
Thank you for holding me

Thank you for helping me
Thank you, thank you for helping me

Thank you for breaking my heart
Thank you for tearing me apart
Now I've a strong, strong heart
Thank you for breaking my heart

Thank you for Hearing Me, from Sinead O'Connor's 1999 album Universal Mother.

(I've been listening to O'Connor's Best of album, and I am stunned by just how wonderful it is. O'Connor became famous briefly more than a decade back for her heartbreaking cover version of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U, but then didn't become the huge star that she should have become, possibly because of her overwhelming urge to repeatedly denounce the Pope, and other fairly bizarre behaviour. But she really can sing like an angel).

The multicultural world

This evening I had a telephone interview for a job with a bulge bracket American bank. Although the job would likely be in London, the person interviewing me was in New York. And of course, in this globalised world, it is remarkable how different from you the people you encounter are. Whereas I was from New South Wales and studied at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge, he was from Victoria and had studied at the University of Melbourne and MIT. I mean, what an extraordinary lack of cultural reference points we had. We wouldn't even use mean the same thing when we used the word "football"

Yowee

Shrek 2 grossed $104.3 million (including estimates and projections - for several reasons I am not going into here I expect the final number to be higher) over the weekend in North America. That's the second largest three day gross of any film ever (after Spiderman two years ago, which managed $114.8). After two lacklustre and very expensive films (Van Helsing and Troy) over the last two weeks and after ordinary looking grosses for Shrek 2 on Wednesday and Thursday, it looked like the summer wasn't going so well and that perhaps the "DVDs are cannibalising theatrical grosses" theory was getting more evidence. However, this is enormous. If the ludicrous "Global warming causes the ice caps to melt, the Gulf Stream to stop, and an ice age to occur, and all by next Wednesday" film The Day After Tomorrow turns out to be the fun guilty pleasure I expect next weekend, and the third Harry Potter film the week after is as good as advance word says it is, it may be that in two weeks time everybody has forgotten the box office decline theory and Hollywood is talking about a record summer, and by a big margin. For what it is worth, it probably will be a record summer (at least in nominal terms) but I do not expect the margin to be all that great. Summers have a history of petering out when the Olympic Games are on - this was not such an issue in 2000 because the games were held late due to being in the southern hemisphere, but it was a very big issue in 1992 and 1996. I expect that this will happen this year too, although if the Greeks completely screw up, and the games are cancelled, that would be great for Hollywood. (Things may slow down in Europe due to the European football championship, too, so it may not be as big a box office summer internationally as in the US).

I have a longer article on all this in preparation for Samizdata.

Update: As I predicted (I rock), with the Sunday estimates the gross has been revised upwards to $106.7m. (What "estimates" means in this case is that we have Sunday numbers based on most theatres having reported in - including virtually all large theatres. The previous number included "projections" for Sunday - that is numbers based on what it was believed the Sunday gross would be given the Friday and Saturday grosses). Blimey this is a big hit, particularly given that it cost less than half as much (and perhaps a lot less than half as much) as either Van Helsing or Troy to make, and that family films make substantially more money on VHS and DVD than any other genre. We are talking something like a billion dollar profit on a hundred million dollar investment here.

Further Update: The final number is $108.0m, so we really aren't all that far behind Spiderman. That of course ended up with a total gross of just over $400m.

Splendid

Well, it seems that after immense effort, the holy grail of the blue rose has just about been perfected. What I want to know is whether Gallium Nitride was used anywhere in its development.

Redirection

I have a piece on the ongoing cricket test between England and New Zealand, with reference to a peculiar incident involving a cricket ball and a pint of beer, over at ubersportingpundit.