Disruptive technology

What is disruptive technology?  It is technology that brings in a change to our understanding of what is fundamental to a system.  Computers changed how businesses processed information which meant that whole categories of workers were put out of jobs.  Rooms that used to be filled with accountants were downsized.  Similarly rooms full of draftsmen and architects got pared down, as did rooms of engineers to design everything from squeeze bottles to jet aircraft.  Computers disrupted business in ways large and small, and that intruded on our lives and our lives slowly began to change, as well.  Connecting computers to a network and having them internetworked was meant, way back when, to be a way to have computers split processes amongst them as they were few and expensive and idle time was money lost.  Instead the internetworked systems allowed people to contact each other across all the networks in a way that enabled human intelligence to be shared and increased.  E-mail was the first real disruptive technology of networks, and then, later, would come the ability to browse from site to site with information put up in a flat network system with agreed-upon means to display information.  The Internet with World Wide Web came into being and the compelling way it changed lives was through interaction of people to do many things that they could have never done before.  People who would never dream of publishing anything soon had blogs and realized that there was readership available with people desperate for something interesting to read.  Videos also were shared when bandwidth increased, and that also changed our view of each other and the world.  And commerce moved onto a global stage accessible by anyone with a computer connected to a network, and competition became global at a retail level.

Our world changed.

Yet the seasons still come and go, the Earth orbits the sun and the Moon orbits the Earth.  That world did not change as it is Nature and beyond our reach to change, as its laws are required to allow us to be here.

Today we see the last gasp of governments trying to regain control of people in ways large and small, from the Transnational Left and Right we see the disruption of societies as governments and companies try to liquidate what it means to be a citizen of a Nation.  Across much of Europe the attempt to socialize health care has resulted in the horrors of the British system and people left to die of thirst, to the lax attitude of physicians all taking their holiday on the hottest days of the year so that hospitals cannot treat those with heat stroke, to the much admired German system that can't seem to ask its own people if they actually like having to wander from doctor to doctor to get seen on a timely basis and never have continuity of care from a physician that knows them.  These systems have tremendous overhead and lacks big, small and always at the cost of actual health provisioning in a way people prefer.  Bureaucrats run these systems and they are run for the interest of the governments involved, not the people.  Control over personal health is one of the fastest ways a tyrannical system can find and eliminate opposition as it finds out just who has what, and then figure out how to deny opponents actual health services.  With such a whip the political class finds ways to dole out a bit here and there to get re-elected, all in the knowledge that the people are afraid of government as it has taken over the health care system.

This is an antiquated way of doing things, with large lab systems taking lots of time running costly tests at high overhead with may companies and levels of bureaucracy which now must be sustained by the individuals actually using the system.  Put in a few levels of bureaucracy and the actual cost of provisioning health care goes up, timeliness and quality of care goes down.  Computers have not made inroads to anything but forms processing so that forms get ignored on a more timely basis by bureaucrats playing solitaire on their systems instead of just hanging out at the water cooler instead of doing their jobs.  They do that, too.  Computers increase inefficiency as well as efficiency and provide many ways to goof off that could not have been conceived of just 30 years ago.  Health care has resisted disruption from the inside as the insiders have a vested interest in keeping a high overhead, high cost system going: it provides control and makes money for them, and grants those running it much power over others.

Yet automation and miniaturization are coming to the health care system, but this isn't coming from the decaying inside-out.  No this is coming from the outside, from people who don't much care for the inefficient, high overhead and centralized control realms that are the tyrannical features of government controlled health care.  Disruptive technology threatens the apple cart by putting power back in the hands of individuals who are able to walk away from aspects of the system to save money and empower those doing the liberation.  The place to start isn't with the 3D printing of organs... well, that is a pretty good place, actually, but to disrupt the entire system requires hitting at its underpinnings and that is with blood tests.  The things you have to get done to yield some information about what is going on with your body.  I've had so many of them it isn't funny, and if you have ever seen a nurse walk into a room with a full rack of vials to test your blood then you have some understanding of just how important the tests are.  Due to my health I've had up to 35 taken at a single draw, and there are people who have many more than that taken just to try and identify what is going on in their bodies.

From Instapundit I read, today, about a woman who, at age 19, started a company after dropping out of Stanford University and used her tuition money to put into the company (Article at Wired).  She is afraid of needles and thought that there must be a better way to do blood testing.  Now at 30, Elizabeth Holmes' company, Theranos, is featuring a 30 test service at Walgreens in Palo Alto, CA.  The blood sample is a miniscule amount that fits into a half inch collection vial.  Results for their tests are in 4 hours.  The company posts the costs of its tests on its website and they are a fraction of the cost of going to a traditional lab.  Their goal is to run thousands of tests via a single sample, and to have that sample available so that if a doctor wants secondary tests done on it they can be performed without the need for a re-draw.

Do they test for bacteria and viruses? Yes.  Instead of culturing blood, and risking contamination, they do a DNA screening to see if known viruses or bacteria are present and at what levels.  That is days of specialized culturing thrown out the door and the most definitive way to find a pathogen, via its DNA, put in its place. At some point my guess is that they will be able to give you your entire genome so that physicians can quickly see what medical conditions you might be susceptible to via your genetic profile.  The cost of a full genomic work up has been dropping drastically, and making it an everyday test done in hours, not days, would begin to change the course of medicine as diseases can be cross-referenced with genetic background and statistical results derived from it.

Even with Moore's Law slowing due to the fact that physics at the atomic level limits the size of processors, the ability to multiply what a processor does increases computing power per die for production.  Once some of this technology goes off patent, or once competition with alternative and faster ways gets into play, the cost of the tests will go down, the rate to get results will speed up and the size of the sample will decrease.  Give it two cycles of Moore's Law and the microengineering to get a 'lab on a chip' and you will begin to see the first generation of full spectrum blood sampling devices as something that becomes available in nearly every store.  Put in a few more cycles of Moore's Law and that then becomes a device you buy to add to your cellphone.  Cross that with the X-Prize for a non-invasive tricorder and you have Dr. McCoy's minimal test tricorder.

Time for something like this to get off the drawing board?  Less than a decade.

What is the basis for Larry Niven's device in the Known Space stories called an Autodoc (a capsule you rest in that does full medical procedures from a simple blood test and manicure to setting bones and treating cancer, or replacing organs or limbs)?  A full spectrum blood test.  As results are processed faster and cross-indexed with diseases, pathogens, and genetic background plus having a 360 degree body scan to see what is wrong with you, then the basis for the Autodoc appears.  The blood test is key as it is the basis of so much of modern medicine that it isn't funny.  As of today the first piece of the Autodoc is being worked on, although not as an Autodoc but as a way to get small blood samples to yield up information that used to take racks of vials to get.

This sort of technology is no longer a question of 'if' but of 'when' and 'how soon will it get here'.

Our health care system is on the verge of disappearing as we know it, with its high overhead bureaucracy, within 20 years.  Possibly within 10.

What will you do when you are given the freedom of having all of that medical knowledge on the cheap about yourself and then able to have a doctor step you through the beginning of understanding just what is in your body and how you can deal with it effectively?  Why would you want 'insurance' when you are in control of your medical life in an absolute way that is at once low cost and easy to do?  The power to control you begins to evaporate with low cost, effective blood testing that breaks the old system at its foundations.  How long will it take to do simple genomic cross-indexing of inherited conditions?  I'm guessing less than a decade, but certainly in that 20 year time horizon.

And what happens when governments try to take this away from stores, doctors and you?

That is an obvious power grab directly against you, the individual, to put a bureaucrat in control of your life and death.  Yet it will be cheap and easy to snub these control monsters.  Will you dare to be free of them?

This is just one disruptive technology.  Others are here and just being perfected.  Still more are coming from the horizon at a high rate of speed.  If you want to know why those wishing to dissolve your personality, your bonds to your country and your fellow citizens, are so desperate it is this: the future is arriving far faster than it can ever be controlled.  Governments are ill suited to coping and understanding what this means.  Individuals, however, are very able to do so as they do not have the burdens of collective stupidity and bureaucracy to hamper them.  And those who will benefit most are the poor, who do not need this controlled for them to get a good price as it already comes with a low price tag.  What happens when the poor are set free of the clutches of those wishing to control them?  Will they quake in fear of freedom or just shake their head at those who seek control and let them know that their day is over?

Change is here, but it isn't the one that the controllers hoped for.  Quite the opposite as this kind of change is their deadly enemy.

Welcome to the future.

I embrace it with open arms while those who seek control yell in fear of it.

Oh, happy day.

It's cell phones vs guns

That from GuamGuy at Twitter and I've been using Twitterfall to keep track of the events in Iran at #iraneclection, Tehran and Mousavi.  I am not a regular Twitter user, needless to say, and only got cellphones a couple of days ago as emergency use supplies.  And I do have some criticism of the technology, but that is not important.

These last five days have been monumental in breaking the way news is reported and does point to the change that technology is bringing on a global basis.  This technology is the use of networking via cell phones and the advent of that system as a complement to standard TCP/IP technology.  To refresh how we get to the point where you get news from other people who are on the spot and seeing it, and not via a 'gatekeeper' we need only step back a decade ago to the period just before rapid cellphone distribution and the first wave of information distribution that is not under the one to many paradigm.

Broadcast media (TV, Cinema, etc.) is 1:Many.  It has a single broadcast point but multiple people can pick it up.  It is also unidirectional from the broadcaster to the receiver.  This technology existed along side newspapers which were an early version of 1:Many, but only to subscribers and those who held public copies of the information.  Newspapers had limited bandwidth and low refresh rate.  Television improved both bandwidth for communication (amount of information that can be delivered per unit time) and refresh rate.  Voice and motion image delivery is a high bandwidth and high refresh rate affair for an event that can be covered.  Unfortunately the infrastructure for broadcast, like newspapers, is expensive and requires a large technical staff, and feed back is limited to those already in studios.  Television surpassed film reels for complex information delivery and made the reception cost cheap by allowing a high cost receiver to constantly receive new information, thus making it a cheap acquisition over time.

That era of news starting with the single penny 'broadsheets' all the way up to the proliferation of cable channels took 500 years to do.  Newspapers made using moveable type supplanted the previous 1:Many form of communication by bards, troubadours and town criers.  Many of those gave stories to papers for pay and invented 'reporters'.  We do not cry about the lack of Monks creating hand illuminated script, the absence of a town crier and only bards still fill an emotional need that no other media has ever supplanted... if you are ever lucky enough to find and listen to one, that is.  So we have come not to miss bards, either.

Newspapers melded over to television, but the two competed on a different basis, with television being faster and glib, as airtime that was empty was wasted time, while newspapers could do longer pieces with more research.  If the reporter ever bothered to do that, and the lack of research was always evident in both media by the method of taking something you know and see how it is reported, then remember that level of sophistication is in ALL of the paper or television media.  They looked to have a dominating stranglehold on information even into the late 1970's when television was beginning to shift reading habits to viewing habits and papers started to get into financial trouble.  Thus television became the dominant factor in 'news' 'reporting'.

A little technology developed in the 1960's to interconnect mainframe computers used a point to point messaging protocol to route messages via a non-proprietary schema.  Anyone who understood how that worked could make adapters for their systems and connect to it and exchange information.  It was developed to share processing time across computers, but found its 'killer application' in e-mail for the scientific and technical communities.  E-mail started as host system only (only the system you are on) but the networking schema allowed for e-mail to be exchanged between systems and a non-proprietary protocol was developed for it.  The Advanced Research Projects Agency had asked for the protocol to be developed not to survive nuclear war, but to share expensive processing time amongst those who owned mainframes and did government work.  The exchange of ideas, though, proved a huge boon to the scientific and technical community and spurred the growth of the internetworking schema outwards to non-government backed institutions.  It is from there we get the modern internetworked computer systems: the internet is a network of networks.

What this internet technology allowed, however, was a messaging system that could be run by institutions that allowed for common posting of thoughts and ideas on topics.  Those text-based message boards of subscriber based feedback is, essentially, what Twitter is today, just spruced up for the modern era just 40 years later.  E-mail and message boards proliferated and allowed the first new form of communication that was not single point broadcast:  Many:Many.

Many to Many systems are a distribution system between all users of the system, and allow feedback and input of those users to each other.  No longer is it One to Many, with only one individual or point being the broadcaster, but Many to Many where all can look at and respond to messages.  When that was all done by technical and scientific groups the level of noise in the system was low: everyone agreed to stay on topics of common interest.  By the 1970's and early 1980's so many universities had this type of system that the non-technical message boards started to proliferate and larger numbers of individuals refused to stay 'on topic'.  Those became known as 'trolls'.  Trolls incited passions and got into heated discussions via these means and those attacks on personal integrity that would ensue were known as 'flame wars'.  By the early 1980's there was no longer a 'clean signal' of information on the message boards and any user soon learned to block posts from certain posters and 'clean up the signal'.

Some message areas became so badly over-run with trolls that download time for messages (which cost you money) soon meant seeking out a few responsible people to start NEW message boards and moderate the commentary.  Strange to say, those would stagnate as the editorial decisions of moderators would, itself, inflame passions... no one likes an editor it appears...and things continued apace.  Technology got cheaper, proliferated into businesses, into the home and use of the internet by the 1980's was growing outside of traditional government and academia circles.  Other messaging systems for telephones from MCI and AT&T appeared and some of those were crossed with internet technology in the early 1990's.  Limited network organizations, like AOL, formed for home users to communicate with other subscribers, but the use of internet communication and adoption would force each of those smaller concerns to open up their network to the internet.

The handwriting was already on the wall for newspapers in the early 1980's, and by the 1990's it was apparent to those inside the industry that something was making newspapers obsolete.  Television viewership was reaching a peak and most blamed TV for the ills of newspapers, and no one took the unmoderated, troll-infest, flame-war prone internet seriously, save at the technical conferences I attended in the 1994-99 era.  There the 'New Media' was being talked about by early adopters and the ability to have single owner message systems, where that individual could put up a post and get feedback soon became known as the web-based log.  Web technology is an add-on to TCP/IP and rides on it, using look-up tables for names to translate them into IP addresses to route through TCP/IP networks.  Any single gateway to such a network can host its OWN network of TCP/IP addresses... and by putting a 'user friendly' software interface that was graphical (developed by scientists in Switzerland at CERN for displaying numerical data in visual format across networks) soon became a 'killer application' for the web.  Web-based logs (Blogs) were a start-up phenomena of 1:Bi-directional Many as commentary areas could be opened up for topics started by an author.  Instead of just sending out a personal rant, you could now insult everyone on a single topic at one go!  That said 1:Bi-directional Many had and still has a useful function in starting discussions on topics and while trolls still proliferate, the profusion of topics makes individual trollers either have to slow down (and thus think, which should make them less troll like) or devolve into simple name-callers, foul mouthed spewers of ideology, and generally act in a manner closer to grade school or kindergarten.

Blogs then have more signal to less noise, by and large, due to topicality of discussion and the ability of other bloggers to continue conversations or add ideas on at their own sites.  E-mail was the killer app for the early internet, and web-based browsing became the killer app for the internet of the 1990's, allowing everyone from stores to banks to your lone cat blogger, to put together a relatively simple site to post whatever they wanted.  Television viewership (as a percentage of Americans) was already declining: viewing hours were dropping and more people just weren't watching TV.  This was going on pre-web-based internet, and sped up during the era of 1999-2001.

Message boards still existed, and blogs co-existed and then eclipsed them, yet on some boards the dedicated messaging of small news stories held by large companies had already started.  I have, more than once, found myself on an interface to a message board archive finding obscure articles that are held nowhere else on the net.  The era of copyright, that the music industry was complaining about as their recordings were cheaply being copied, had already come into steep erosion.  In venues outside of traditional channels of information these articles were in clear violation of copyright, but had almost no value that could ever be rendered from them and would be lost without public copying.  The music industry would stagger at this as their business model was made obsolete the moment they published anything in digital format as the home computer was now able to break simple encryption schema or, alternatively, just copy an entire disc at a digital level.  Nothing can stop that.

Today the information coming from Twitter is the updated message boards of the early internet: they are open, generally unmoderated, depend on user input entirely, have trolls, and have the compelling interface of being updated by each and every message from each and every user displayed almost immediately.  This application is restricted compared to those message boards due to length of message that can be sent via cellphones.  Cellphones use a different networking system, but that can interface with the network neutral TCP/IP system at the router level, and some companies may just use TCP/IP and go through local hosting.  This still requires cell phone towers, central distribution points and can still be taken down by regimes.

The cell phones, themselves, are beneficiaries of Moore's Law, however, starting out with the Motorola Startac 'Brick Phone' of the 1980's, then going to smaller and smaller formats thereafter.  As the cost of integration of new features at the silicon level gets cheaper (via Moore's Law) new functions are cheaply added on to handsets while the price continues to decrease over time.  Today handsets are miniature network interface devices allowing voice, still imagery, video, and text to be input and transmitted.  Text messaging, like e-mail, is a 'killer application' that arose because it is cheaper to send digital text than analog to digital voice calls.  Some systems supported this at the magic 'free level' and that made each and every cell phone owner a free ranging reporter.  Individuals are outside the bounds of the older print and television media: people communicate about what interests them and don't give a damn about 'gatekeepers'.

Messaging via text, voice, still imagery and video is a complement to blogs, just as blogs were an early complement to message boards, and this can be seen as returning the favor to blogs to allow for dedicated end-user, live, Many:Many communications to take place.  Watching an active Twitter feed is engrossing because it is ongoing, live and the information is given by those who are actively seeking to promulgate messages.  There are STILL trolls, but they now inflame fewer passions given limited text space, and are easy to ignore.  People with fanatical belief that they are always right on all topics will ALWAYS exist, just they used to be put into attics and were the Aunt/Uncle no one talked about... they now have cell phones.

There is, with modern cell phones, more than one network available, however, and this is not talking about the network provider for phone, but the phone itself.  Today cell phones can have Bluetooth technology, which is a short range capability to move information between Bluetooth devices that have accepted each other's 'handshake'.  These form on-the-fly networks that are created by all devices that share handshakes digitally.  They are relatively low bandwidth, but amble enough for images and video to be moved between individuals on a timely basis.  These networks are 'ad hoc' and not centralized: there are no servers, per se, nor IP look up tables, just a list of devices held by each device, that they have shook hands with.  While these are small networks, they move, adapt and change configuration on a continual basis.  And as it is easy to erase handshakes, they form a set of devices that can easily be repurposed if a sub-network amongst agreed-upon devices is breached, although that takes some time to do.

These are then characterized as 'piconets' or as a Personal Area Network (as opposed to Local Area Network or Wide Area Network technologies which need centralized numbering and addressing systems).  In conception, every device on a piconet can be a server, router and be a network communication device passing information across the trusted network at a LAN/WAN or TCP/IP level... right up to the moment a trusted, connected device to the internet is found, which then allows for ALL stored data to be copied out into the internet.

Although that technology has not been used, to date, in that fashion, it points to the final breaking of authoritarian regimes having control over information.  Indeed, as such regimes border Nations that do NOT have restrictions on comms, LAN and WAN technology can be used to bypass firewalls and communicate with the larger internet world.  Satellite phones add into that, as trusted network devices, but are rare and high cost to use/maintain.  With Moore's Law the ability of piconets to reach outwards, morph, and never be fixed by location or even device, means the next threshold of personal technology to communicate with the world is nearly here.

It will not make obsolete the older, network neutral, systems as they have a great purpose in coordinating all comms via neutral protocols.

What does this mean for older technologies?

For newspapers it is not a death-knell, but a bottomless pothole.  Newspapers and other print media have hidden behind a mask of 'objectivity' while not providing 'objective' coverage of news.  That is 'Just the Facts Ma'am' or 'Joe Friday' news.  The moment you hear a reporter say 'human interest' or 'human side' of the story, you know that is no longer objective reporting.  Whenever a reporter or editorial board does not come clean with their ideological bias in how they operate, they are not being 'objective'.  One can still HAVE bias in reporting, and it is, indeed, insane to think otherwise: you think, are alive and are human, therefore you are biased.  The mask of 'objective' reporting can and indeed must be dropped to survive.  Magazines that have done so still have a committed readership and that indicates a market for biased covering of news and topics so long as the publication is absolutely clear on its position.  Individuals can and do weed out bias to get to news... watching a Twitter feed indicates that, alone.  There is no need for a 'gatekeeper' once the fence is taken down, and the fence is not that high any more and it is gone in some areas.  Those that continue on with the charade of 'objectivity' will step into a bottomless pothole, those that avoid that will not... most are stepping into the pothole.

Television has tried 'interactive TV' and failed, multiple times.  As the ethos of news presentation followed that of newspapers, the remedy for TV news is the same: identify the bias of the editorial board and reporters, and just report the damned news.  Save 'human interest' for 'entertainment' venues outside of news reporting.  Again, the gate has no fence and the gatekeeper is an antiquated figure, like the coachman holding a lantern.  Great for a lawn ornament, but not so hot for your Ford.  Television news also faces the 'bottomless pothole' dilemma in ratings, and very few news organizations are adapting to this new future.  They will go the way of bards, troubadours and Monks hand illuminating manuscripts along with their friends in the print media.

Blogs are adaptive media: bloggers have wide interests in various areas and with various forms of presentation, and the web-based log will only become more personalized to the interest of the presenter.  Because it is a highly representative form of presentation, those that come to them will adapt to those that present information in a way they like.  Bloggers are far more open about bias than their print and TV counterparts, when they have counterparts, which many do NOT as there is no way to do on 1:Many what 1:Many bi-directional with add-ons does.  There is no equivalent to Many:Many unmoderated anywhere in print or TV, due to restrictions of the medium used.  Many:Many can and most likely will serve as the basis for future 'news' as multiple individual witnesses recount information and cross-confirm events.  'Fact checking' for ongoing events goes from months, weeks, days or hours, to hours, minutes and seconds.  That is the derived Feiler Faster Thesis at work, for information uptake and understanding of information.

Twitter has brevity on its side, which forces personal editing and getting to facts quickly.  Noise can be reduced, and will be by individual... and it might be hell for those seeking to be rabble-rousers to know that they are putting out their words but that no one is picking them up any more... so sock puppets will appear and suffer the exact, same thing.  The ability of individuals to censor what they take in is a great Liberty, and learning that you are speaking only to yourself is a great goad to civility.  I am sure that text comms will open up, but here form factor of device means that actually getting a coherent long message out can't be done quickly, like on a laptop or PC: editing yourself takes space and time, and there is little screen space currently available and that is driven by form factor (it must fit in your hand) and NOT technology.  You can only see so much, and the form factor becomes the medium, thus driving messaging type.  Small videos and still images will be primary, text simple and limited until a major form factor change takes place or we replace our visual input system with something else.

To sum up: the Iranian revolt/uprising is now being communicated by multiple means (those helping to get secure gateways up and keep them up have been a godsend to Iran, plus those getting out information on how to anonymously report) is pointing to the true future of news.  It will be self-reported.

And the revolution will be self-organized.

Blogging software

...or why I like some things better than others.

I found out one thing by using a web browser as a blogging/writing platform: it sucks for medium to long posts.  As most of my posts are medium to long to full length novel and beyond, that is a critical factor in software use for me.  After Blogger lost my Xth long post in work, I did go over to using Open Office for my writing (although it used to do a hatchet job on HTML that I don't care to describe), and it is *still* my preferred writing platform for longer posts that don't need scads of hyperlinking or blockquoting of text.  If anyone ever makes a plug-in for it (or the next version supports posting natively) then it will be my platform of choice, hands-down, for long entries and will need a test or two on HTML compatibility with blogger (and the rest of the known universe).

Until then I have been looking at the offerings from a few places, with MicroSoft being the prime one with Windows Live Writer.  It has some big pluses: able to work on multiple blogging platforms, has a relatively easy to use interface, will download your template so you can see how things look immediately, a handy-dandy spell checker and supports the native picture system for uploading pictures (and other non-text media).  The downsides are a few:  does not lend itself to some blogging platform native ways of doing things (like going for a smaller text font size in blogger), does not let you set when it should do incremental saves on work, and while swift for small and medium posts, it is slow as sludge on long posts.  Those formatting annoyances and slowness for my more typical post length size keep it from winning out... those formatting issues are in my template and yet WLW does *not* pick them up.  Dealing with longer posts is something of a heartache for everything but a full-up word processor, it appears.  Also WLW does *not* save to a platform neutral format file, and for portability of work that is a huge minus.

That said, this post is being written on WLW.

The other choice I have been looking at is Zoundry Raven, which is a platform where you can join in to 'making money with this software' by opting in to post links to advertisers, or *not*.  I am not doing so and am looking at it for its one very useful feature: it can be run off of a memory stick of usb microdrive.  That is becoming a bit of an issue as of late as I have had to split time between multiple machines.

Zoundry Raven isn't bad, really, but suffers from some sluggishness as it is compiled to have a number of python scripts in it, which allows for greater cross-compatibility of code, but slower execution of same.  I haven't really put it through its paces for text formatting as of yet, either, although it is doing a good job of that so far.  Like WLW you can use it to see how a post looks 'in-situ' which is a help.  Its pros, so far on a partial test: has a downloadable spell checker (perhaps not as good as WLW), uses a template for immediate checking of post, and is portable.  The cons are numerous:  slow with medium posts, tends to save out frequently to a stick drive (which is not good), does not upload to platform specific multi-media areas (that I'm aware of) preferring a third party like ImageShack, and is mindnumbingly slow on saves for longer pieces.

Portability is a trump card, but, yea and verily, it has some negatives to it.

Basically the best of all worlds would be having Open Office Writer upload to blogging systems directly, and let me take files around on a memory stick and then auto-synch with local hard drives as I move from system to system... or store it on the external drive when I'm not on a home system.

I am about half-way or so on the Pico-ITX system which will be a local file server, and then things will change, yet again.  At the moment I am drilling out a motherboard holder for it and once that is done it is only finding a way to get external connectors for everything.

Of computers old and ancient

There is a very strange feeling one gets updating a piece of old computer equipment: you know it is old, that it works and that no matter what you do to it the thing will remain old. Old but serviceable and still useful as a Internet surfing machine or something for light duty office work. I know that is the case as that is what I used it for!

The machine in question is an old ECS A900i Desknote or 'i-Buddie' system which was mid-range way back when I bought it back in... hmmm.... 2001 I think it was. Early in the year which tends to get lost when looking at 2001. It was actually pretty nice, back in the day, even able to run some 3D first-person games and would stand me in good stead as my travel computer as I ventured out during my R&D days. After far too long running in good condition, it suffered from software bloat and so many updates to the operating system that you can't keep track. It needed a replacement, basically, for what I wanted to do, and it sat on the shelves once I got the refurb Dell Inspiron 1721 of much PITA suffering I have previously written about.

Now with family members who travel a bit and could use a relatively portable machine, I decided to do the end of lifecycle dance with the Desknote and give it the final upgrades it could take. Which, by reading the documentation, seemed to indicate: RAM, hard drive, CD/DVD slot, and CPU. I purchased those, I think from Newegg as it generally has low prices and a good reputation. So checked out the memory type as an old 168 pin SDRAM at 133 or 100 MHz, got a nice brand new Hitachi 160 GB Travelstar, one of the Samsung DVD burners for upgrading notebooks, and a 1.4 GHz Celeron.

I did check out everything that was easily check-outable, and as the stuff arrived I made sure it was, indeed, what I wanted and fit... save for that CPU, that is buried inside the unit. Still, the other stuff could go in waiting for that, and the memory worked out easily, as did the DVD drive save for lacking the cute faceplate, but this is a machine of function, not good looks. I did realize I had to move the old retaining pieces off of the old CD/DVD combo drive, but I have two sets of jeweler's tools which includes, at this point, two sets of philip heads, one set of flat head, sub-1/4" open wrenches, sub-1/4" allen wrenches (the savior of system builders of the old school!), plus regular interchangeable screwdrivers with magnetic heads and an assortment of left over tools purpose used to get into cases (like those case screws which really need a bit of leverage to get them started when taking them out).

As an old DIY builder, I kept all my tools as they are just far too handy to let go. Plus lots of replacement screws and such I accumulated over the years. Had to do that as I still had computers and enough skill to actually not want to send out to a repair shop for something I can still DIY. The fun, it appears, was about to begin.

By the time the Celeron had rolled around, system makers had been using a Zero Insertion Force socket system for placing CPUs. So, I thought, as the maker had put everything else into an easy-to-upgrade position, I would have thought that the CPU was likewise situated. Such was not the case, however, and I then proceeded to find every single screw I could take out of the back cover (after disconnecting said system, of course) and even find the last evil screw sitting under a sticker under the hard drive. That last took awhile to find. Slowly ease that plastic back cover off... and two hours later I do have it off all in one piece, which is a minor miracle of sorts... I am confronted by a sheet metal covering the electronics.

Which is kept on by two screws and gently inserting the small tabs into various parts of the assembly. With that off I was confronted by a cute little heatsink and fan unit, monopiece, which then came off, got cleaned and used canned air to blow the dust off of it. And do I see the much expected ZIF socket?

Oh, woe is you who believe that in the effort to shave a few bucks off of a computer that the manufacturer will actually put in a 30 cent part to make life easy.

I gently eased the circuit board up, shined the handy-dandy flashlight in and confirmed that the CPU was, indeed, soldered straight on the board.

Much imprecation was heard throughout the land!

Curses to cheap system builders!

Twits! Ninnies! Feebleminded idiots!

And so on, as I slowly put the thing back together. For the first time in I don't know how long I can remember I have had a zero screws lost ratio on that project and I carefully put each and every screw back in its proper place. The system still booted, too!

With a blank, brand new hard drive I wanted to put in the best end of lifecycle operating system which, for that machine, is Windows 2000. Remember, this is going to non-technically astute folks, so it *must* work without a single change to anything done via command line, scripts or such like. I did consider Ubuntu, and generally like its features, but not for non-technical family.

Previously I have introduced Nlite as a good way... no splendid way... to update a WinNT based operating system, with Vlite now its companion for things Vista-ish. It does, indeed, work with Win2K and I did the basic upgrade to latest Service Pack on it. That said there are a buttload of updates since then and I had to scout around a bit to get an auto-downloader for those. Likewise I wanted a handy 'use anywhere' Win2K disk, so a bit of work found a nice place with just about every 2K/XP driver known to mankind except, of course, those for the iBuddie which are neither modern nor nice. Those I found at the manufacturer's site. Finally the Nlite user community has a dedicated individual or two who put together Addons to install with your operating system during the install. Those were much, much appreciated and will have to send a donation their way for that as putting in all sorts of goodies like Open Office, Opera, K-media megapack, VLC VideoLan, and such is all to the good. All of that got slip-streamed, only awaiting installing of MS dotNet, its service packs and then MSIE 6.0. Plus service packs, hot fixes, security updates, malicious software removal tools... and on and on...

Worked, too! Unattended install so I could wander around the house and take care of other things and come back to a system ready for the post-install updates. That went smoothly and the system is now ready for family use.

Good job!

Now as I have a brand new 1.4 GHz Celeron I am going to do another end of lifecycle build with it, and strip out most of the junk in the dead-board SuperMicro 750A case. That will go as a back-up computer for family members. After that there is just one case and I am internally debating what to do with that... it has a fully functioning system, but a back-up game machine would be handy for another family member and it is not suitable 'as-is'.

That is what has been taking up my time: updating my old computer DIY skills, hitting the marketplace on-line, and slowly doing the update and out-cycle dance. At the end of it I will treat myself to a new flat screen monitor once the two ancient LGE 19" ones go to family members.

I am, basically, killing time to the election. I am dissatisfied with the two-party system, the 'third parties' which I have major philosophical disagreements with per-party (just like the two mainstream parties!), the candidates who are no better than Carter... actually worse in some ways due to the micromanagerial style of them or simple lack of being good at it (hey! who the hell vetted candidates who don't know economics, have organized crime contacts and both want more government?). Scratch that last: there are NO good micromanagers on the face of the planet.

At least the antiquated technology works within its parameters.

The antiquated two party system does not.

Microprocessors? Yes!

Micromanagers? No!

The US operating system is more or less ok.

The poor software needs to be stripped down to the core of the OS.

It is looking like re-install time to me starting with bare OS and a few good service packs.

The rest of the software needs to go.

Customer service follies

Ah, Dell!

The deal is that the reason, and sole reason I buy from Dell, ever, is integrated hardware.  My first Dell Dimension XPS desktop back in... when did that line start... 1996?  1995?... somewhere in there... well, I bought Dell for the integration factor, not for the lovely excess software.  And in no time at all I was quickly stripping things out, doing the DIY bit on system creation and after that left Dell behind for long years.  But when it comes to laptops/notebooks, you are getting out of the easy DIY territory.  Thus, after that initial, one-time buy, I decided to give Dell a try out...

Here is how I approached it:

Hardware - Could I get a decent deal if I stripped all the software off and started with a clean install (and yes that is difficult to do with Dell, but not impossible).

That was it, my only deciding factor was hardware integration.  Dell does that fairly well.

Thus my first Inspiron 1721 suddenly going non-bootable due to a driver update via Win Vista was disconcerting.  The second time I advanced my software replacement schedule by a number of months.  I found all the basic WinXP x64 drivers, did the nLite tango and soon had a *useful* and *stable* notebook computer.  With an OS I can stand, once I take the hedge-trimmers to it.  That system replaced my truly ancient Desknote that was slowly running out of disk space and was finding some software that had everyday use that was choking it.  Software bloat killed it, in other words.  Still trying to figure out what it can be used for, and will hang on to it for awhile yet, as it still has emergency, 'if you have nothing else left', utility to it.

Looking at the home computing situation to replace the absolutely ancient system I had thrown together for my lady way back in... 2002?  2003?... around then, based on an Asus board if memory serves... it is going through hardware death of its drives.  The floppy kicked the bucket a year or so ago and the CD just announced 'I have gone to meet my maker... which is Samsung', I started to realize I was heading into the long-term MTBF of the hard drives.  The boot drive dates back to 1999 or so, and while it still works the overall cruft is starting to get to Win2K.

At that point I was looking at two options.

First - The SuperMicro SC750-A  case is still one of the best cases I have run across, and it housed that system and my non-functioning back-up which had suffered the cosmic-ray death of one of the paired memory sticks.... until I swapped pairs and realized it was the motherboard that had suffered that death.  So I have *two* of the heaviest, roomiest cases sitting here and almost no energy to do any DIY stuff.  I could try to do it with a couple of reputable suppliers from my old days that are still going, and do the down and dirty of 'they test and I install' deal.  Possible, but that would eat my time and energy for anything else.

Second - Shift strategy, go light and modern, junk the cases and, possibly, the old CRT monitors, and do the 'notebook as desktop' deal for my lady and have a reputable screwdriver shop do me a custom back-up.

Astonishingly, the costs were the same.  Moore's Law and all that.

So a same day order: one to Dell for a second Inspiron 1721 and one to my reputable dealer from days gone by for a nice downsized system.

Amazingly, since the Inspiron was pre-made sitting in a warehouse, they arrived within a day of each other.

Thus the Inspiron, by arriving first, got the going over while I did the background software installs on the other system.  And, when it came time to update the firmware in the DVD drive of the Inspiron... Lo!  the drive doth not work as advertised. 

The courageous hero puts off contacting Dell trying to find *any* solution beyond that. 

The only thing worse than the catacombs of the MotherShip Knowledge Base is Dell Tech Support.

So on the screwdriver shop deal, I swapped out the cheapie DVD to allow them to install the OS there, and swapped in a real one pre-bought elsewhere.  Also a wireless network card.  The system runs *perfectly* as ordered.  Good work!

That shop is MWave and I have been dealing with them, off and on for various things, for some years now.  You just choose all the components, throw in the full construct, set-up, test, update for $45 and in a few days you have a well constructed system to your specs.  I went with the maker of my main system case, SilverStone Tek and their cute Evolution case.  Since my last construction for my main system was from MSI, I went with them and their K9AGM3-FIH board.  Went with a retail AMD processor but had the folks at MWave take off the mediocre heatsink/fan of retail box deals and had them put on a decent heatsink/fan combo which they recommended a better one from Thermaltake instead of the Zalman one I had chosen.

That left me, however, with contacting Dell Tech Support which I did through online chat at Dell.  And I was given the webpage to actually unseat and reseat the drive and that should do it!  They would phone me back in an hour....

Riiiight....

A day later, after trying 6 times to actually get the DVD drive to *budge* and *no* phone call, I got a bit peeved.

Today, nearly two days later, I was sending lovely messages to Tech and Customer Support.

A couple of hours later and, yes, a phone call from Dell which the nice Tech Support person had me describe the situation, which I had done on each and every message sent to them from two days ago, and finally did the DirectConnect ch-cha to let the remote Dell Tech Support person see that things were as I said they were.  And then promptly forgot that sending me a replacement drive when the current one was stuck in the system was a non-starter.  That took 3-4 times of repeating to finally get the message through.

Drive does not come out to be reseated.  Drive stuck.  Cannot replace drive with everything I have hear unless I start popping the case open and having fun with things.  Drive is fragile and did not want to bend or break it while it sat stuck in the system.

Stuff like that.

That finally got through and a nice little ship-back box will arrive in a couple of days to let it be shipped back.  Take out the power adapter, battery and hard drive because those things head towards sticky-finger land at the factory.

Thank you, to MWave!

And once Dell delivers a *working* system, and I thoroughly check it all out, then Win Vista takes a hike and I put a reliable OS on the thing.

 

Moral of the story: buy from Dell for hardware and make sure it works.

Find someone trustworthy for making *real* systems if you don't need hand-holding on every little thing that can go wrong on a computer.

 

I was thinking of putting an ITX system together... but that will await time and energy for a *small* build.

Just what have I been up to?

For those that may pass by, that question may arise, as my posting rate has gone downwards. I had predicted such, but for other reasons. Namely - moving. That got put off due to the health concerns of a loved one and that has kept me in the environs of NoVA that I do not adore, climate-wise. Along with those concerns comes having to get a bit more done around here, due to the problems of said loved one. Ahhhh... if only I were healthy, I wouldn't be blogging!

After that comes the lovely task of 'digital equipment refresh'. What is that, you may wonder? Well, due to the pace of change for computer equipment, the good things put in 3 or more years ago start to show their age as software and time start to take their toll. Beyond defragmenting hard-drives and such nice things, also updating of drivers may point to a BIOS needing upgraded which then ensues that overhead. When that is done you find that the system sub-components may have garnered some system overhead... which slows things down. And then there are the add-ons, 'neat things to try out', software updates (in which the software itself runs just a bit slower to be more 'secure'), and all the various little things that begin to encrust an operating system. This stuff is known as 'cruft' and after 3 years you either need to scrub it all down to the bare essentials and start over... which entails ensuring that re-installed software can, actually, re-install properly.... or... yes, starting over with a new system and moving data files over.

Another family member needed a new system for basic gaming, word processing, and such, plus net surfing, so I started out a few weeks back on that. In doing so I got refreshed on the current state of the art technology, which I had let slide since 2004. Before 2004 the entire PC industry had shifted from 'business' support to 'gaming support' for platforms with 'multimedia' growing up around *that*. Any system that could reliably handle games, would also have enough power to run any business application for the desktop AND have multimedia horsepower to spare. Gaming drove the PC industry on innovation, and still does to a large extent. The minimal necessary computing platform for all desktop business applications (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, desktop database work) was basically met in or around 2000 by the PC industry. By 2003 the force of innovation and change moved from those apps to games, and that would then meld with things like HDTV and wanting to watch hours of video driven by a computer, and that got added into gaming specs.

So, distracted from the rest of the world by computing happened with that system buy (which someone *else* gets to troubleshoot!), but that brought to my attention another problem that had been getting to me for the last couple of years: my sluggish Desknote. The Desknote concept is: there are a class of travelers who need a light, portable, all-in-one PC that is not a laptop or notebook. By eliminating 'on the run' usage and targeting 'in your hotel room' and presentation use, the Desknote came in handy for mobile computing with fixed point use. I got one of those to supplement my working life and it transformed into my 'kitchen table computer' for tracking my needs while my health severely deteriorated. By shifting my tracking of insulin use and such to a spreadsheet, with formulas used to balance blood glucase, carbohydrate intake and insulin use, even during the worse of my catalepsy, I had a good and solid way to maintain my health in that area. Without that, I would probably not be here as my ability to track much of anything during those dark days was minimal.

Realizing the good that the device did me, its ability to actually do simple things like switch between tasks, was becoming a problem. Additionally some applications that used to run on that older computing platform had met their end-of-lifecycle-support for it. As I still face moving in the near future, I needed something reliable, capable and able to stay more or less 'as-is' once it got put down. After looking at scads of options, I was faced with either a more expensive system from a Build-To-Order dealer or something like a refurbished Dell.

Now, as a DIY builder of PCs, I had experienced a Dell *once* back in the late 1990's and that entailed: removing every bit of Dell software put on the poor thing so that it could operate well. I looked at a neat and clean list from the BTO shop and the list from Dell...spec to spec equivalent (although pluses and minuses) both sides, but a refurbished Dell looked good and so I purchased that. An Inspiron 1721, with extra hard drive and a few options I didn't want but had no choice on with a refurb unit. I thought I knew what I was getting into....

The plus side is excellent: good, integrated set-up for updating drivers, BIOS (Wow! the world *has* changed as that used to be a boot to floppy with updates and pray that it worked sort of deal before things way back pre-2004), software... excellent work. Kudos for Dell on that, and for keeping up with the industry to do that.

The negative of that: the software is damned intrusive, constantly pestering, eats up processing time and deserves to be shot. I do *not* want to pay for an upgrade to ANYTHING, nor do I want my problems tracked or my location, or a myriad of other things to give me a 'Dell Experience'. After getting everything up-to-date, the good went out with the bad, and I un-installed the stuff. It still sits on their 'emergency recovery disk area' which I will look at ways to reclaim once it is out of warranty.

The ugly: McAfee Anti-Virus. Seven or so years ago I could recommend it, as it was relatively efficient compared to its competitors. Back around 2004-05 I could not recommend it as it became a resource pig and I sent it squealing from my main system and put in Avast!, as seen in my sidebar. Free for personal use, always hitting in the top 5 of AV systems and often #1 or 2, it is a proven winner. It has relatively low overhead compared to McAfee, and the slow-down of McAfee on my system took what should have been, at most, an hour's work to remove the unwanted Dell software to something like 2 days. Getting rid of IT took another hour. Banished and gone, save the recovery area, and I now know what to get rid of *first* if some strange disaster strikes to wipe out my OS.

The truly awful: Windows Vista. As a refurb I couldn't get a nice, old copy of XP on it and, as previously put forth by me, I will not be switching Operating System bases anytime soon. When Windows 2000 came out, I spent time turning off a few bells and whistles to make it a nice WinNT upgrade. When WinXP came out, I saw that the amount of pre-loaded cruft on the OS was large and installed that on exactly *one* computer and then removed the cruft, disabled the bells and whistles, and got it down to something closer to Win2K which I wanted to be more like WinNT. Windows Vista is the Phyllis Diller of Operating Systems: no matter how much lipstick you put on it, it will never be beautiful. Getting those things found, disabled, turned off, muted, or sidetracked to never open has taken more than two days.

A note to the computer industry: the Personal Computer should meet personal needs. No matter how *nice* a special effect is, it eats up processor time, and I say to thee NAY! If Microsoft wanted to *really* impress me, it would allow the individual to select an absolutely stripped down GUI with the ability to add on a function here or there. Let me decide on the level of glitz as your idea of glitz and mine are absolutely different things. Whatever you do, do *not* have them all enabled as a standard distribution setting: they eat up enough processor time to make a decent and capable system (if not speedy) no better than its compatriot that I am replacing with a technology benchmark that was middling in 2003... running Win2K.

Ditto that to Dell - if I want obtrusive hand-holding, let me decide on the service package, ok? And on the pre-installed junk so that at first-time start-up I can be given a choice of installing stuff or *not*. As you already dictate a section of memory for it to 'recover' a system, just leave it there if I don't want it.

After that getting software installed (almost all of it FREE!) was just time net downloading, installing and running. Transfer a few files to a little key disk and shut the Desknote down and put the Inspiron up only took a bit to figure out wireless networking...

That I am addressing *next* as the ancient Linksys wireless router has always (and I do mean always) keeping a decent signal in my townhome. I get a better ability to hold a signal from the guy next door on the other side of his place. The ancient Linksys, bought way back when 802.11g was new (and I have updated its firmware) has never been satisfactory and becomes less so over time. After years of buying Linksys (now part of Cisco), I will give their competitor a try and see how a brand new D-Link gaming wireless router works out.

As sidelights other equipment has come in for home needs for ease of access to sitting in the bathtub and to dehumidify the main floor on the house. Plus minor computer problems I have addressed previously.

A new thing to go after the remains of my treatment for the skin infection I had, I started to use Defense Soap. Normally I'm not so hot on 'all natural' deals, but for anti-fungal needs I had enough of the high end and wanted to try a different method. So far, so good! Along most of the area where the small amounts of intractable fungal infection have not left, they are going away. Plus I got the travel kit from the Defense Soap folks and will be using their products for the next few months and, at this rate, my guess is that it will do better than all the high priced skin stuff I have used for the last year or so. The only downside: you are left smelling like an aggressive herb salad. Also it is slightly soporific but I have been dealing with *that* since 2004.

Through all of that I was able to put up that piece on the Red Mafia, which you would not want to hear me bitch about the time *that* took, and a few other posts and scattered commentary. Yes I am rolling up another couple of posts... but they are still in the 'research and input' stage.

I have been massively impressed by the US Armed Forces in Iraq, and they are bringing about the fastest change-over in a COIN operation on record. The folks in Iraq will have Iran, Syria and various Islamic terror groups to deal with for the forseeable future...but that is their National problem, not ours. If the can get the violence down to levels seen in Turkey, then that will be something that no naysayer could ever have predicted and which will be the start of a massive shift in the Middle East. Getting rid of al Qaeda and JaM (supported by Iran) in Iraq does not end their threats on a global basis... but it takes a lot of wind from their sails and makes them vulnerable on that same, global scale. We are still left with all other forms of illegitimate warfare that are getting more vitriolic and deadly over time, however, and ignoring *those* will get us in the exact, same sort of situation we were in on 9/10.

We must learn that in this new era, we must honor victory, not celebrate it as a final end save to major conflicts. The support of civilization and Nation States is the good in this fight and those to come down the pipeline for the next few decades, at least. It, like piracy, will always be with mankind so long as we are human. If we forget that, we will get killed by it.

The drive is there... you just can't use it

This is one of those rare technology posts that involves my recent experiences with what happens when something that has operated, heretofore, well on a computer system decides to not do so. In this case I will be blaming Microsoft as the culprit, but that is pretty much standards for a Windows based system.

To forestall every lover of every other Operating System on the planet Earth, and some others as yet less well recognized, let me say the following:

1) My active Unix life is two decades in the past, saw little use in my time on the job, and is pretty much gone. LINUX, requiring a level of Unix guruship that comes from having that knowledge, plus machine language capability, plus all sorts of other things is *not* an option. For some activities I have, indeed, tried the *nix areas and in a few desktop apps that I enjoy there is no LINUX counterpart. Nor does WINE, resting on LINUX, offer me what I need as that, too, requires a level of *nix guruship. Free requires a time investment I cannot afford and, so, is not 'free' for me.

2) Apple, now resting on BSD which is also a Unix formulation requires the above. Yes, the company has done much to make it graphical, hide the ugliness of the command line and all the rest of that. I also remember Steve Jobs putting forth in the 1980's that a 'command line would never be a part of a Macintosh product'. With the shift of platform to Unix the command line has magically reappeared... if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there, now, would it? Plus, even with all the cross-compatibility (say, why does the Mac need to be cross-compatible? wasn't it supposed to be the 'be-all, end-all' of user interfaces?) that headache is not one I will put up with as it requires having *multiple* OS capabilities available simultaneously so that I can use those apps not available via the Apple OS nameplated product du jour. Not gonna happen.

3) Other OS platforms - I have tried a few others, like Be, and it has gone to a virtual graveyard doing the open source development concept for awhile. There have been a smattering of others, just to try things out, but that was when I was healthy some years back. The lack of native apps and ease of understanding for use was not there.

4) The MotherShip - The worst set of operating systems to grace this planet has come out of Redmond. Their only saving grace is that they are 'just good enough' to get the work going at a decent price point. Also, they did this thing known as: give developer tools away for FREE when IBM, Apple and a number of other companies required payment for such. I am sure that at some time MS will redo its own conception of a *nix based OS, CF it enough to the average Joe/Jane can use it, hide some of the obvious blemishes and ingrain a number of others for 'backwards compatibility'. Then the hue and cry will go up, the threats of torches appear, and folks will just buy it because it, more or less, just works. If your OS of choice has been unable to crack into the backwards-compatibility upgrade cycle and steal that market from MS: don't complain to me, ok?

I have enough problems with this stuff, as-is, without *your* advocacy.

There, that should really tee-off a wide section of the tech population which, thankfully, will never read it.

My problem started with an 'upgrade' (don't they all?). In this case a piece of what I consider to be 'critical desktop apps for which the open source community is trying to replicate but can't figure out ease of use' had a pay-for upgrade which I paid for. Nice little box, that protected a smaller box, which, itself, protected the DVD case and 16 page manual, of which a few pages were -blank-. That says it all for software distribution these days, really.

Take out the DVD, put it in the drive, close the drive, and...

Hmmmmm.... well I did use the powertoy to turn off the 'automagic start' so, pull up the drive list and, say, where did the DVD drive go to? Uh-oh....

I have been here before with: modems, network interface cards, graphic cards (those are so *fun* to troubleshoot), RAM, hard drives, etc. I used to build my own systems when I had energy and this, being the last of my hand-built rigs, I ensured that with the last of my energy and mental capacity a couple of years ago that I troubleshot the thing to a 'fare-thee-well'. It would work, dammit!, because I was in bad straights and might not be well enough to ever troubleshoot the damned thing *again*.

Thus starts my trials and tribulations of tracking down LG Electronics Super Multi DVD drive GSA-4120B! In theory search engines are your friend in this, and I did, indeed, find all the old sites that had answers to my initial troubleshooting of the thing back when I was putting it together. But... for this? Try again, a few times, and get pointed to hacked drivers that did not work and, in general, spending two days trying to find the actual drivers to the thing which, it turns out, are already on-board from MicroSoft.

Not good!

Then it is entry through the dark doors of MicroSoft's website and into the dungeons of the knowledgebase where, held prisoner, rank upon rank, file upon file, row upon row, are the tortured answers to every damned piece of asinine 'fixing' MS has ever done with their software.

And the interface sucks, too.

But such would not stop the intrepid adventurer, trying to wrest the secrets of how to fix the fabled LG GSA-4120B so that it would WORK PROPERLY WITH THE MS DRIVERS on his system. Ah the hours spent and even the fun of answering a questionnaire about how bad the site is so that MS can ignore it. Those things are expected.

A day of fruitless searching and despondancy hits: the answer is not apparent.

With heavy *sigh* the adventurer notices that MS has put out 'security updates' du jour and downloads same, and does some general updating of drivers for the trackball, graphics card and whatnot as he will be spending time frustrated otherwise, it might as well be productive frustration. For ONCE all of that installs well and easily and, wanting to check out a piece of software upgrading useless to his system, the hardy adventurer finds a knowledge base interface geared for his operating system which was NOT ON THE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE BASE SITE! With a thrust the virtual doorway opens to give way to more and darker dusty catacombs where the ranks of the particular prisoners holding answers has swollen so that more sub-basements were being built so far off you could not even identify where....

Another day of searching and no luck.

Back to the search engine and finding the Original Equipment Manufacturer of the LG DVD is Matshita, aka. Matsushita, aka. Panasonic. Now *that* is a name I know, although not love or adore, either, but that is another story to tell. The search engine reveals more of the same, but points out some of the things overlooked on the initial go-through: the adventurer had not spent enough time diagnosing the problem.

Cursing himself for a fool he heads off to do a further investigation, goes back to the specialized dusty catacombs and... de nada.

Life well, and truly, sucks.

The adventurer admits defeat and goes to his tech outlet of choice to order an *external* DVD drive with multi-function capacity so he, at least, can have that available for every other system in the house. Despondant, he heads off to do other things, has a poor night's rest and wakes up earlier than is wise and decides to do one last look at the problem and search into the Event Viewer. Scrolling back he sees something a bit anomolous... one driver function is complaining. The driver can't load, due to that... odd... the little library doing the complaining is not obvious in any way, shape or form.

Hmmmm....

With a search engine look at the driver name and something generic like *problem* the snippet line on the second line seems to directly address this. It is from an obscure camera messageboard. Deciding 'why the hell not, I'm not really awake', the author of the message describes the EXACT SAME PROBLEM with the DVD drive that is the EXACT SAME DRIVE! He points to a horrifically obscure Knowledge Base article in the catacombs of MicroSoft and gives direct linkage to it (thanks be praised!). In that tiny cell, in the midst of the hundreds of thousands of prisoner knowledge base articles this one EXACTLY describes the problem and the SOLUTION to it!

Using this trinket of knowledge, a tiny grain of diamond dust in catacombs littered with precious gems, gold, platinum but all of it kept under better obscurity than Fort Knox, the adventurer treads carefully into his Registry on his system, goes to the indicated hardware controls on the current set-up of his OS, finds the indicated key for the CD/DVD drive, and removes the Upper and Lower Filters.

With a Reboot to the system it does, indeed, find the DVD drive and properly adds it to the system and it is, indeed, fully functional.

The cause?

A freaking *update* to the Operating System a few weeks ago which sweetly ADJUSTED THE FILTER SETTINGS BY ADDING THEM.

Thusly the blame is given fully to MicroSoft on this battle and I will still need the external drive for use with other systems because one of them, at least, has a dodgy CD-ROM drive and another has no write capability for CDs or DVDs... no make that two that have no such capability.

Here ends the story of troubleshooting the LG Electronics GSA-4120B Super Multi drive OEM'd from Panasonic with drivers from MicroSoft.

There is no need to curse the Darkness so long as MicroSoft exists.

It makes a much better target for said cursing.