Some small repairs

A disturbing, grinding noise started coming from my PC earlier this week.

When I opened it up, I discovered the noise was coming from the fan on my northbridge chipset. My motherboard is an Asus A7V266-E, one of the few motherboards where, in a fit of insanity, Asus used a fan instead of a simple heatsink to cool the VIA chipset. (Maybe it’s because this mobo was made in 2001 – at the twilight of the dot-com era – where insanity was never in particularily short supply.)

It’s insane because a passive heatsink provides adequate cooling for a chipset, makes no noise and suffers no mechanical wear and tear. It’s the more efficient technology by far. A fan, on other hand, eventually strips its bearings, gets bogged down with dust and gunk, and starts making with the grinding before it shortly stops working.

So I did what any decent engineer would do – I stuck my finger in it, flicked the fanblades until it stopped making that infernal racket, closed my case, and went back to my game of Natural Selection.

Sadly, the problem returned on Thursday, and it brought friends. Shortly after booting up, my computer locked up hard. When I rebooted, I got this unhappy message:

Non-System disk or disk error replace the disk and press any key.

The hard drive sounded like it was trying to spin up, wavered a bit, and then shut itself down. :O :O :O

After panicking for a few minutes, I checked the connections and rebooted. This time, the hard drive seemed to be back to its normal self. However, the chipset fan still wasn’t looking too healthy. The moral of the story is, when a northbridge chipset gets a little too hot, parts of your computer start fainting.

I decided to make another pilgrimage to the modding capital of Canada, Bigfoot Computers, to pick up a chipset cooler.

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The pretty blue thing on the left is the Zalman ZM-NB47J Northbridge Heatsink I picked up. Quasimodo on the right there is the backside of the crusty old Asus chipset fan. The white gunk is thermal paste.

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As you can see on the picture on the left, the chipset is the square object with the dried up thermal paste on it. I wiped that stuff off with some isospyrol alcohol, applied a thin film of Arctic Alumina on it and the heatsink and voila, mission accomplished.

That giant metal thing on the far left is the Zalman heatpipe cooler on my Radeon 9800 Pro Ultimate. Now it has another Zalman heatsink to keep it company.

In the D drive: Far Cry. Quite possibly the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen. Too bad the AI and gameplay is so mundane.

Cyberpunk come true

Weekly Read highlights Ray Kurzweil’s 2001 essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns. It’s a lengthy read, but it boils down to this: computational power is growing at an exponential rate while transistors are shrinking at an exponential rate. Socio-political trends such as education, ecommerce and GDP expenditures are also growing exponentially.

In light of these trends, Ray extrapolates that humankind will continue to advance technologically faster and faster; according to his math, for example, he predicts we will:

  1. Achieve one Human Brain capability for $1,000 in 2023.
  2. Achieve one Human Brain capability for one cent in 2037.
  3. Achieve one Human Race capability for $1,000 in 2049.
  4. Achieve one Human Race capability for one cent in 2059.

Quite the aggressive timetable, you might say. Ray believes humanity will reach Vinge’s Singularity – a point where human innovation and intelligence will accelerate to a near-infinite pace!

The seemingly insane part of this is, Ray’s calculations indicate that we will reach this Singularity within our present lifetimes.

By the second half of this next century, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine intelligence. On the one hand, we will have biological brains vastly expanded through distributed nanobot-based implants. On the other hand, we will have fully nonbiological brains that are copies of human brains, albeit also vastly extended.

I am reminded by the current trend in Olympic records. That is, at every Olympics, athletes have become stronger and faster and invariably break existing records. Optimists believe this trend will continue endlessly, and someday humans will run the 100m sprint in less than a second. Others believe that record-breaking will begin to slow down and stop due to some physical limitation the human body (and human health sciences) have yet to reach.

Ray’s hypothesis has merit assuming:

  • The accelerating rate of energy research exceeds that of the rate of resource consumption: In other words, we discover alternative energy sources to consume before we exhaust our current ones.
  • The accelerating rate of intelligence exceeds the rate of weapon research: That is, when we have the capability to create the Bomb to End All Bombs, we’ll have the intelligence not to use it and blow us all up.
  • Financial incentives for innovation increases in a locking step with said innovative breakthroughs. Gotta keep the economy flowing.

Even Ray admits there can’t be infinite growth in a finite universe: he sees this trend continuing “at least until we ‘saturate’ the Universe with the intelligence of our human-machine civilization, but that will not be a limit in this coming century.”

How do we know we won’t hit some inverse Condon curve of innovation down the line, and human achievement will stagnate? I want to believe him, though.

Take me by the hand, take me somewhere new

This is interesting: Bell Sympatico and Mobility teamed up to provide coverage to Avril Lavigne’s mall tour. The interesting part is, all photo coverage was provided by Mobility via their flagship camera phones, Samsung A600s. Sympatico posted them all on Buzznet, a moblogging site.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since Bell Canada has always been obsessed with order process approvals and workflow management. In other words, they’re the type of corp that you’d think would least likely make a blog. It’s risky, especially considering the number of comment flames you’ll read on Buzznet. Glad to see there’s a few forward-looking folks in Bell Mobility.

As an aside, this is a good example of how Sympatico.ca is leveraging BCE’s media abilities to provide exclusive video and photo content to Sympatico subscribers. In a crowded Canadian market of cheaper, commoditized reseller ISPs, Sympatico is trying to make itself stand out from the crowd. Let’s see if it works.

Trivia: Avril’s dad works at Bell Canada.

That’s why they call it market *share*

PCWorld cites an IDC study where Microsoft operating system market will drop to 58% by 2007. Neowin members mostly responded derisively to these findings.

Why is change so hard to stomach? The article is may be optimistic, but by no means misinformed. Windows has a strangehold on the PC market right now, but it’s not so in other faster growing fields – game consoles, PDAs, smartphones, Internet appliances, etc. All these devices need operating systems, and they are getting more powerful and versatile every day. There is a growing shift in demand from PCs to these convergent devices.

MS has been trying to gain footholds into these emergent markets via the Xbox, WebTV, SPOT Watch and a bazillion Windows XP branded OSs – Media Centre, TabletPC, PocketPC, Embedded – but are no means the dominant player in any of these markets, even after years of effort. They’re running up against companies that are equally large and powerful and hungry and smart – not to mention the modularity of Linux, which has appeared in everything from TiVo players to Volvo dashboards.

Of course, it’s not wise to discount MS out of hand – they have a lot of smart cookies working there – but it won’t be an easy battle for them.

Many people still cannot take portable convergent devices seriously – sort of how minicomputer users refused to take personal microcomputers seriously when they appeared in the early 1980’s.

Eventually wireless, whether it’s Wi-Fi or 3G or WiMax or its grandchildren – will become so advanced that network access will be ubiquituous and network bandwidth will approach system bus speeds. When that happens, AGP, PCI and USB will be replaced with pure IP, and we’ll never have to fiddle with DVD-Rs and flash memory cards again. A future MP3 player could access your music from your home PC’s file storage as fast as it was on your person. A portable videogame player could outsource its 3D graphics work to your PC’s videocard while remaining inexpensive, small and light.

We have better beer too

“Contrary to the conventional wisdom it appears that Canadians, not Americans are more willing to innovate and take risks, at least in public policy.” So says David Morris in the Alternet article O Canada; Oy Vey United States.

It’s always flattering to get compliments from Americans, but I think there’s a bit of “grass is greener on the other side” effect happening here. It’s true we enjoy certain freedoms that Americans have been denied, especially recently.

Some people think Europe has a one-up on the US these days too. In Robert Kagan’s controversial book, “Of Paradise And Power: American and Europe in the New World Order”, he has a few choice words [via NewsScan]:

“Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace.’

Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”

But it’s not all fun and games; our healthcare may be mostly free, but we also have longer lineups. We still have to rely on company benefits to cover essentials such as eyeglasses and dental checkups.

Then again, we Canadians actually get real sugar in our soft drinks and desserts, instead of corn syrup.

I was born in Canada. I once asked why my parents immigrated here to raise their family. The answer was simple: the United States at the time had a military draft to send soldiers to Vietnam. They simply didn’t feel that a country that believed history was made with the barrel of a gun was a suitable place to raise a child.

Fox News calls Globe & Mail pinheads

Ahhh, we haven’t had a good bashing in a while!

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly calls The Globe and Mail, our most conservative national newspaper, “far-left” and calls Canadians “pinheads”, and some of the more rabid of the Fox viewership herd send the Globe and Mail some interesting hatemail:

“In an nice touch, a man from somewhere-in-the-USA opened by cheerfully calling me “sonny bub” and, after some confusing name-calling that involved the word “intellectual,” he rose to a great rhetorical flourish — he asked if I had served in Vietnam!…My point was that we have a great deal to learn from the Fox News Channel. And I am proved right.”

Some additional comments are available from my DSLRreports thread.

Sunday reading

“Yesterday morning started out with Wade Cunningham in the cafeteria of building 4. He’s the guy who invented the Wiki. He told me he’s learned about 100 computer languages from SmallTalk to Visual Basic to Perl. He likes denigrating himself: ‘I’ll forever be known for writing 1000 lines of Perl code.'”

Robert Scoble, Microsoft tech evangelist

Speaking of the devil, a clever hacker ran a spider against all English Word documents on Microsoft.com and identified some juicy and potentially embarassing bon mots that were deleted but retained by MS Office’s oh-so-helpful revision tracking feature [via BoingBoing].

“Naturally, publishing documents with “collaboration” data is not unheard of in the corporate world, but the fact Microsoft had became a victim of their own technology, and had failed to run their own tools against these publications makes it more entertaining.”

From Amazon.ca: Michael Jackson’s Malt Whiskey Companion. I suspect this page turner is not penned by the jewelled glove wearing, baby dangling popstar we all know and love, but as you can see, there is no accompanying picture, which only adds to the mystery.

A way with words

First stop: David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a book on the the concept of the web as a community, has transmogrified it to a 16-page version for kids, which means even I can understand it. It uses simple, natural language, yet remains engaging and uncondescending.

Second stop: terrible metaphors. They’re as amusing as watching Disk Defragmenter on your 10GB partition.

Last stop:

“I thought perfume was supposed to mix with the delicate natural scent of a woman’s own skin, creating a heady sublimity that gently whispered compliments to the nose’s ear; but no, apparently perfume is meant to be hosed into the air in regular increments as a sort of romantic nerve gas.”

Gizmodo on the SNIF, an electronic perfume dispenser to be worn by women

Putting a bounty on a problem

Continuing on the theme of collaborative problem solving, Fortune’s David Kilpatrick highlights the achievements of InnoCentive. The article is for Fortune subscribers only, but I’ll fill in the blanks.

As most computer geeks know, if you’ve got a question or a problem to solve, the quickest way to an answer is to ask online. innocentivegraphic.gifInnoCentive, spun off by Eli Lilly as a new, cost-effective way of solving generic scientific problems for companies, just formalized this concept. Instead of using their own precious R&D resources, they can use InnoCentive as a go-between to anonymously post problems and cash prizes to to a global community of scientists.

Cash prizes range from $10,000 to $100,000 USD. IP ownership remains with the sponsoring company.

InnoCentive should accelerate innovation even as it lowers costs for companies and ultimately prices for consumers. (One seeker has found that this process delivers six times the ROI of conventional R&D.)…As the offshoring controversy has underscored, these days it matters less where you live than whether you have the talent and knowledge people want. Says Alph Bingham, the Lilly executive who thought up InnoCentive: “There is a whole world of smart people out there.”

It’s a radical way of doing business; it’s something that wouldn’t even be possible without the global reach of the Internet. As the Internet is applied as a bonafide social network capable of creating far-reaching communities on the fly, endeavours such as InnoCentive may soon become the norm.

Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality

Here’s an interesting initiative that popped up on my radar screen lately: Project Avalanche, a quasi-open source co-op. For a $30,000 yearly subscription, corporate members can donate their in-house software (including source code) and gain access to other member companies’ donated software for free.

Update: Ed Sims points out some other alternatives in the emerging collaborative development business.

Who’s in on it
Current subscribers include Best Buy, Medtronic and Cargill. The list is still currently pretty short.

The low-down
“Why were they writing such big checks to their software companies, but getting so little in return? Why were their in-house programming staffs writing the same sorts of custom programs written at thousands of other companies? If Detroit car makers can collaborate on research, why couldn’t U.S. technology users?”

Benefits

  • Increase knowledge reuse
  • Save money (20% to 40% according to their TCO studies)
  • Independence and autonomy from software vendors

If these sound a lot like benefits of open source, you’re right.

IP Ownership
“Members of the Cooperative share intellectual property (IP) and collaborate on projects that generate IP.” Apparently it’s also legally binding.

Do you have to donate software?
Not required. Companies are free to donate whatever they want, if they want. Benefits include:

  • production-harden their IP and software (free testing)
  • encourage further innovation and improvements
  • lower maintenance costs

If these sound a lot like benefits of open source, you’re right again.

What makes this “cooperative source” different from open source?
It’s an open source gated community. Innovation and collaboration will not as great as if these companies released their software under a public license, due to a much smaller set of participants.

Avalanche does claim that cooperative source has the added advantages of “oversight, shared financial risk, increased control, greater safety and security for corporations.” Is this worth $30,000? Avalanche thinks so.

One other big plus is the fact the software library is targeted toward enterprise-level apps – applications that typically are not open source projects.