Broadband measurement

It seems dumb to me that the government would waste tax dollars trying to figure out how broadband connected we are based on some arbitrary 200kbps definition of what broadband is. Come on guys, just give us a frigging spreadsheet with the number of people in each bandwidth group <56kbps, <200kbps, <512kbps, <1.2Mbps, < 3Mpbs, < 6Mbps, < 20 Mbps etc. Can it really be so hard? Then everyone else can examine and analyze the data however they want it.

The problem, of course, is such data will reveal a long tail of users with just barely broadband connectivity speeds which is exactly where the lobbyists want them to be. I mean technically you could say anything that isn't dial up modem achievable is broadband, but in this day and age (or dare I say it "this century") shouldn't America, self proclaimed "leader of the free world" be striving for something a bit beyond the bare minimum broadband grade? How about we introduce some new terminology like dialband (0-56kbps), mediumband (57-1.1Mbps), broadband (1.2Mbps-6Mbps), highband (7-20Mbps), phatband (21Mbps-50Mbps) and bad-assband (51Mpbs and up). There that's better.

All we need is Apple

This story just goes to show that the one thing Apple users crave more than iPhone is iPhone with iCarrier. Lets face it guys you know you worship the font of all that is Apple, so just why not get your cellphone service directly from Apple as well as your phone. Apparently that is bound to piss of AT&T which as we all know stands for "Another Troubled Telecom".

Is it time to ditch PDF?

When Yahoo and Adobe "team up" to embed advertising inside PDF documents it must surely be time to ditch PDF as the industry standard for cross platform document distribution. Maybe Adobe haven't yet made embedded advertising standard but if they are following Yahoo's lead with their new UI refresh it is only a matter of time. At which point I'll be only too happy to embrace SVG based documents as the open source standard for all to follow.

Doh! GMA 3100 != X3100

Well thanks to an anonymous poster I just realized that my GA-G33M-S2H mobo has a GMA 3100 not a GMA X3100 - well in fact more to the point that I didn't realize there was any difference between the two, i.e. that they are one in the same. However as the poster pointed out that is not true and the X3100 is a mobile only graphics solution and more importantly much more powerful than the GMA-3100 for 3D. Which is a real bummer because I thought in getting the G33 I was getting the most powerful onboard Intel graphics short of those that come with the G35 which wasn't ready at the time I bought it.

Taking a second look at the capabilities chart on Wikipedia it turns out that even the G965 chipset's graphics solution, the GMA-X3000, has better 3D capabilities than the GMA-3100. The only area in which the GMA-3100 does better than the X3000 or X3100 is peak memory bandwidth. So now my chances of ever doing any decent onboard gaming of the Orange Box kind are pretty slim - I'll have to add on a graphics card which kind of defeats the point of getting onboard graphics in the first place. Like I said, I wasn't really expecting to do a lot of gaming and I was fully expecting inferior performance. But I had hoped for something acceptable - good enough for some light game play and I hadn't bargained on missing out on hardware T&L etc. that would rulle out a whole raft of games that depend it like HL2 and its derivatives. Doh!

It turns out that the GMA 3100 is even inferior to the X3000 in terms of HD video since it lacks some MP2 and VLC-1 features down in the latter. However I don't feel too bad since when I started looking at all the micro-ATX G965 boards I'd previously ignored I found none of them have DVI outputs and that was definitely a must have for my system. Also I had to realize that in selecting the GA-G33M-S2H it was a compromise since my old machine was giving up the ghost and I knew there would be micro-ATX G35 solutions available soon, but not yet. But really, I'm feeling pretty dumb for having missed the GMA 3100 and GMA X3100 distinction, I guess Intel thought every knew "X" stands for "eXtreme".

Now, as of writing it seems that G35 boards are finally starting to trickle out - one of the first seems to be the Asus P5E-VM HDMI which looks to be a good solution except for the hot running chipset cooler (something I found to be the case with my Gigabyte board too). I know there are simple screw on coolers you can add use to solve that problem, probably a wise idea since micro-ATX cases tend to be toastier than your average desktop case. I'm not ready to throw in the towel and rush out for the Asus - not least because it seems no one is selling in the US yet, and also because I had less that stellar experiences with my previous Asus board which never lived up to its advertised memory bus speeds.

I think I'll wait for more G35 boards and more reviews which probably takes me past Christmas and into next year by which time the new 45nm (non-extreme) lower power quad core chips will be readily available - which is what I wanted all along. Of course by then I'll probably be lusting after a new G45 "Eaglelake" based system with the GMA-X4500 giving three times the performance of the GMA 3100. Is there really any hope for me and hardware happiness? Perhaps I should just go back to buying discrete graphics card solutions.

In the mean time I guess my Orange box will be sitting in the corner collecting dust and turning gray...

Phone systems are just so last century

I have a guest in town and gave him my phone number and he tried to reach me for a ride home from public transport but got screwed by the phone system. It turns out he was dialing our 510 area code numbers from a payphone in San Francisco without a leading 1 for lond distance. Being from rural Canada he wouldn't think that you'd need to dial a long distance number reach someone just 10 miles away - they just don't have that many area codes there, let alone in the boonies whereas I'm pretty sure we have at least a half dozen in the Bay Area (of which 415, 510, 408, 650 are but a few).

But isn't it ridiculous, in this day an age that the phone system would tell him his "number is invalid" just because he dialed it without a 1? I mean come on, if someone dials ten digits couldn't you just guess it is perhaps a long distance? Isn't the 1 implied unless someone adds an International prefix? Clearly not on our nations gloriously antiquated phones, but it has to be said that is LAME - about as lame as a web browser these days that required someone to actually type "http://" in front of every URL. Do you remember those days when radio show hosts would be forced to say out loud "aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-you double-you double-you dot" etc. etc. Fortunately I don't think such browsers really exist any more, and most can figure out if a www prefix is needed and try .com, .net, .org etc suffix if omitted.

Tech bloopers

I rode the ferry home today from San Francisco. As we sat waiting for the boat to leave we got to see the moon rising in the East over the Bay Bridge as the sky went from pink to blue and then to dark as the lights shone out and the moonlight struck a path straight towards as in the calm waters. It was really lovely. Ahhhhh.

But it was sad watching someone with a $1000+ digital SLR camera trying to snap photos of the event and every time their flash goes off. There was no foreground, and there wasn't anything within a half mile or more it could possible have illuminated so I know it was just a mistake. I really wanted to go over and explain to them what to do - aperture to the max, increase the ISO to 400 or 800 (those high end sensors can take it without too much noise) and steady the camera on the boat - it might have been a photo to remember. But I know it would probably have either caused offense (they were just like pro - all fancy like the camera) or I would have left them with a camera in some manual mode they would never get out of again.

Of course you see that same mistake all the time at stadiums with piddly little cameras and their 20ft range flashes going off all over the place like fireflies, but you can forgive an amateur for that. But it's too bad people are lured to these prosumer models because as it proves, all those bells and whistles aren't going to save you from a dumb mistake and you've shelled out far more than the average Joe has for their $200 pocket camera.

No Orange Box for you!

So I finally got my new Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard based system up and stable (its a long story, more of which later) so I thought I'd treat myself and get The Orange Box. I know that my new system isn't a gaming rig - with on-board graphics it was never intended to be, and due to mobo limitations that I just decided to live with, using a graphics card will never be a good solution. However the Intel GMA X31003100 graphics are supposed to be reasonably good - I should at least be able to play Valve's Portal and Team Fortress, both of which look like a lot of fun.

But woe is me - after installing it and hesitantly firing up Portal for the first time it crashes as soon as I try to enter the first portal - I get "hl2.exe has encountered a problem". I fire up Team Fortress and get the same thing. I try TF one more time with a different online map (its all online) and managed to play for a couple of minutes - then poof, hl2.exe terminated unexpectedly all over again. Since it was late at night I decided to give up and investigate in the morning.

The upshot is I spend the entire morning tweaking, rebooting, crashing, tweaking, rebooting, etc. etc.... Doh!

The worst part of it is I can't find anyone else who is having the same problem - the best I can find are hints that Intel graphics may not have the Texture and Lighting (T&L) support that these games need - but as best I can tell the 4864 build (Version 14.31.1.64.4864) of Intel graphics drivers for the G33 chipset should provide them and they have been out since September.

I tried all the Valve suggestions - removing anti-virus software, disabling audio hardware, down-clocking memory, disabling sound in the game, running in a window, tweaking some game parameters, downgrading Direct X use to 8.1, verifying game cache consistency, etc. etc. The only thing I can think of left is to uninstall and reinstall which I may end up doing if I get bored one day.

Hopefully there will be better Intel drivers along soon - but at the moment I feel pretty helpless because I have a feeling Valve will blame the hardware and drivers, Gigabyte will blame Intel and Intel will not even listen to me. If I could just get some verification from another person using similar setup I'd be happy to wait it out - its been a year since I first heard about Portal and I'm sure I can wait another 6 months if necessary.

In the mean time I'm downloading the latest America's Army which I haven't played in a long time, and if that runs okay then I'll get Unreal Tournament 3 when it comes out later this year (soon I hope).

Oh, one other thing to try I suppose - I may install a PCI-Express graphics card and see if it makes any difference. That should rule out any non-graphics related software, my memory and a bad install.

For the record my system is a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard with the Intel G33 chipset, ICH9 (non-raid) Northbridge, Intel E6750 1333Mhz FSB CPU, 2x1G of Crucial Ballistics PC6400 memory run at 800Mhz clock and 4-4-4-12 timings and 2.2V memory bus voltage (although I've tried SPD timings of 5-5-5-18 with no joy either). Graphics are the onboard Intel GMA X31003100 running the latest Windows XP (32 bit) drivers build 4864. I've run memtest86 extensively and I'm now running Microsoft's Memory Diagnostic tool as well. The symptom is very consistent in Portal - start a game in the test room and as soon as the first portal opens and you step through it - Boom - that pesky "hl2.exe has encountered a problem" shows up. There are no other errors in the event log other than the unexpected termination - which is just a fault at some apparently random address.

UPDATED 11/27/07: Changed GMA X3100 to GMA 3100 because that is all the G33 chipset has (see my subsequent post Doh! GMA 3100 != X3100). Thanks to Anonymous commenter for pointing out this error.

XP Mysteries Part 2

Tell me why, after all these years, is it so damned hard to move an XP installation from one motherboard to another? With Linux I just pull out the hard drive, install it in the new machine and perhaps reconfigure the graphics. With XP I have to dig out my XP CD, do a "Repair" install, re-enter product keys, and then reinstall every XP patch since that CD was cut - and hope with crossed fingers that everything still works. Last time I tried it it took several days of post "repair" repair for obscure system problems (and I mean really obscure) that showed up.

This kind of nightmare is exactly why people are always reinstalling Windows from scratch which maybe isn't such a bad thing after all given the amount of Windows rot that creeps into any system not maintained with an iron fist.

Google buy Sprint?

There are apparently rumours abound that Google might buy Sprint. Just tell me it aint so - if someone at Google is really considering that they need their head seeing too. Seriously, the one thing that Google doesn't need is a customer support nightmare and Sprint is just that. Never mind that Googl e just doesn't do customer support, the point is that Sprint doesn't do customer support either. Add to the equation that Google is a global company and Sprint is a CDMA retarded US company and you have a problem. If Google should be buying any US carrier (and I'd put my money on no way!) then I'd say they should be buying T-Mobile. The also-ran GSM based carrier in the US with strong connections to Europe they are the ones Google should be buying.