How To Spot A Psychopath

If you were waiting for a new Renaissance of software development and super-networked self-starting educational bootstrapping to spread across the Third World as a result of the OLPC program… well, now could be a good time to find yourself some beer, and then start crying into it.

Parts of what I wrote in One Laptop Per Me are still perfectly applicable. The other parts, in which I just sort of assumed that the OLPC people wouldn’t turn the whole deal into one giant WTF, now seem less well-chosen.

Oh well.

If, on the other hand, you’re a cheap-tech vulture who just wants to suck up an OLPC laptop or three for fifty bucks each, the apparent utter debacle that the OLPC program seems doomed to become can only mean a buggerload of shiny white-and-green mini-laptops will be swamping eBay any time now.

(No, they never did turn out to make different models for poor kids and rich Westerners. So if you buy an eBay OLPC that was stolen by the random dude chosen to take a truckload of laptops to some not-even-served-by-the-Post-Office outpost in Peru, nobody will be able to tell that your laptop was originally meant to be given to a poor little kid. You may still feel guilty about buying it, and I hope you do, but if all this is true, then it seems depressingly clear that no force on earth ever actually would have gotten that computer into the hands of its intended recipient. Some bastard’s going to buy it on eBay. Might as well be you, I suppose.)

The above-linked essay by Ivan Krstic is just one ex-OLPC-employee ranting, so everything in it may be nonsense.

But unless the core claim in that essay - that OLPC is basically completely without a deployment department, so there’s nobody to make sure the half-million laptops they’ve sent out actually get where they’re meant to go and can be made to work when they get there - is fundamentally false, then pretty much the whole OLPC project is, as of now, dead as a stone.

(Oh, and you know that special security system that’s meant to disable stolen XO-1s? it turns out that Ivan Krstic was the main architect for that system, yet does not mention it in his essay. Which suggests that he’s not hopeful that it’ll do anything in particular to actually prevent theft.)

And this isn’t even mentioning the earlier problem, that the constructionist philosophy that the whole OLPC project is built around has never actually been shown to work on any significant scale. Constructionism sounds as if it ought to work, but nobody’s done it yet.

(There’s also some closed-source versus Free Software folderol, which in this case does have a bit more bite than usual, if only because the XO-1 laptop has a “View Source” button that’s supposed to show you the source code for pretty much anything you’re looking at. This makes the concept of a Windows XP XO-1 particularly poignant, but I agree with Krstic that this is hardly the central problem, particularly seeing as the XO-1’s “Sugar” GUI is what the View Source button is meant to affect, and Sugar can unquestionably be made to run on Windows, somewhat like unto Windows 95 on DOS.)

Krstic goes on to describe OLPC as an impending “historical fuckup unparalleled in scale”, which is a great exaggeration. If OLPC turns out to be an utter and unmitigated failure then I suppose it might perhaps just make it into the Top Twenty of information technology fuckups (here, from just the other day…), but I suspect it won’t even be in the top couple of hundred of historical business debacles, let alone certain military fuckups I could name.

And all this doesn’t, of course, mean that the computers-for-the-poor idea is forever doomed. There’s a whole new wave of low-cost mini-laptops, headed by the Asus Eee PC, which was pretty much kicked off by the OLPC XO-1. I think it’s quite likely that these new systems will leak out into the Third World in a year or three, when things like the original seven-inch Eee start to become bargain-basement items.

It is amazing what kids - even very young kids - can do with computers, whether or not those computers arrive covered with spiffy unproven constructivist gift-wrap. And wireless-enabled solid-state low-power-consumption systems suitable for use out in the boondocks will become cheaper and cheaper as the years go by.

And heck, OLPC isn’t targeting only poorer nations; there’s an independent OLPC office here in Australia, for instance.

But you can’t expect even the most enterprising of schoolchildren to pull laptop charging stations out of their fundaments, figure out programming from first principles all by themselves, or go and catch the bad man who drove all of their laptops over the border and swapped ‘em for a truckload of dope and vodka.

Can it really be true that OLPC just ignored these issues?!

(Slashdot discussion of the essay here. Much Free/Non-Free Software heat, not much light. Expect a gun-control thread to start about half-way down the page.)

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are coming out in a few weeks. They’re advertised by a new, and surprisingly amusing, promotional-movie blitz.

(Note also the boring old site at enemyterritory.com.)

These clips are not, I’m sorry to say, up there with the simply fantastic Team Fortress 2 “Meet The…” series. But they still definitely have their moments.

The above embeddable video thingy (which, if you’re reading this long after I wrote it, has probably disappeared) at the moment only lets you view one of the videos and then makes you click through to stroyent.com. And even the one easily-seen video is only available in crappy-res.

So here is the Gamershell download page for that first video. The file is available on umpteen other download sites too, of course.

And here’s a YouTube version of the first video, in case the above one doesn’t work:

There’s also an officially-uploaded-by Activision version here, but they decided to disable embedding for it, because they’d like fewer people to see it, or something.

OK. Here’s the next clip:

(Official Activision YouTube version here, downloadable version here.)

And finally, here’s the main promo video for the game, which applies to the PC version as much as it does to the console ones:

(Official un-embeddable YouTube version here; GamersHell download version here.)

This main clip is called “Monster Truck Style”, for fairly obvious reasons. But this close-miked presentation now, inescapably, makes me think of the Brawndo commercials (and yes, I know).

ETQW itself is, when you actually play it, only mildly silly. It’s a pretty straightforward team-on-team game, obviously descended from its interesting predecessor. It’s got a good amount of class variation, plus vehicles, to appeal to the Battlefield Whatever crowd.

I’ve never played Team Fortress 2 - sorry, not enough hours in the day. I’m sure people will still be playing it a couple of years from now, so there’s no great rush. Besides, I haven’t quite finished with Tribes 2. But I’m still perfectly ready to believe that TF2 is the current king of the team-on-team genre. A million dorks can’t be wrong.

ETQW, though, has distinctly different teams, rather than the different-only-in-colour teams of TF2. It also has vehicles, and slightly, but significantly, lower hardware requirements. So I’d say it’s well worth picking up the ETQW demo to see if you like it, even if you’re already nursing a TF2 habit.

No, you don’t get “points” for driving drunk in Grand Theft Auto IV (via). Driving drunk in the game isn’t necessary, helpful or even fun, but the more serious problem with this claim is that you don’t get points for anything in GTAIV. Like most modern games, it eschews the concept of overall point-scoring altogether.

Neither does GTAIV have “levels”, for that matter, but I’m sure some child-protector out there is very worried about the “drunk driving level”. Points, levels and the sound track from the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man (which celebrates its twenty-seventh birthday this year!) are still commonplace… but only in the depictions of video games in movies and TV shows.

The problem all of the people who’re worried about GTAIV have, of course, is that they have not read Excerpts from The Alarmist’s Guide to GTAIV (do not miss the second page).

(Both pages NSFW, unless you work somewhere where people have a sense of humour.)

Video games are getting more and more realistic, and some of their creators are using that realism to make more and more confrontingly believable interactive depictions of violence, horror and depravity.

While this is happening, though, actual rates of violence among children in every First World nation I know of continue to slowly fall.

That doesn’t make for much of a headline, of course. Much better to claim that when some kid does buck the trend and shoot up his school, it must have been Wolfenstein 3D and Redneck Rampage that made him do it.

Here in Australia, Atomic: Maximum Power Computing is a foolishly-named but actually-rather-good magazine for which I write.

I do occasional features, and two regular columns. One of those is the “I/O” question-and-answer letters column, which I reprint six months later on Dan’s Data.

Allow me to share with you a secret about that letters column.

Hardly anybody sends in any bloody letters.

This certainly isn’t the result of an actual lack of people with questions to ask. My interminable series of Dan’s Data letters columns is evidence enough of that.

People just don’t send questions in any more.

Seriously - there are, like, two letters a month to io@atomicmpc.com.au, and on average about 1.2 of those letters fall into the HELO WUT IZ DA BEST GFX CRD PLZ??!? category that gets them swiftly despatched to my “Atomic lousy letters” folder.

About 0.6 of the remaining 0.8 letters will describe, often at great and depressing length, some computer problem about which all I can think to say is “yep, your PC is really badly screwed up, all right”.

This falls somewhat short of the high standard my readers have come to expect.

You might wonder, at this point, how it is that the I/O column keeps running in Atomic.

It keeps running because

1: People like reading it, and

2: I get tons of questions sent to me @ dansdata.com.

So I just skim the most “Atomic-y” of those letters off the top - yes if it’s someone asking about using mercury as CPU coolant, no if it’s someone asking about cheesecake - and use them to bulk out the I/O column.

I still e-mail my reply to the questioner as well as include it in the Atomic column, of course. So it’s not as if a question from some guy in California falls silently into a magazine in Australia which he will never read.

Since the only misrepresentation involved in this is that it gives the impression that people who sent questions to one e-mail address actually sent them to another, I don’t feel very guilty about it. Many of the people whose letters are repurposed probably do not actually read the magazine in which their letters and my answers will then be printed, but that’s no big deal. Certainly not by the standards of letters columns in general.

The dirty secret of the letters pages of local - and not-so-local - newspapers the world over is that it’s perfectly normal for them, like me, to not get enough interesting letters to fill the space.

Since they, unlike me, have no other source of material, they then just make stuff up.

Completely.

Sometimes there’s something juicier, like one of the newspaper bosses forcing his partisan letter in under an assumed name or something.

But usually they just have a few beers and then make up something entertaining to fill the empty space.

I have never been driven to doing anything like that for the Atomic column. But one problem does remain.

The best I/O letter each month wins a prize. For ages now, it’s been a shiny new Logitech G5 mouse.

But only “genuine” letters to the I/O address, from people who help to pay for the whole enterprise by buying the darn magazine, are eligible for the prize.

And, worse yet, I’ve a personal rule that if you’ve already won the prize once, you can’t win it again for a very carefully calibrated period of time most elegantly describable as “however long it takes for me to forget your name”.

Since so very few decent letters are coming from actual readers of the magazine, the I/O prize is at this moment very easy to win. Just send a good question to io@atomicmpc.com.au, and you’ll be in the running.

“Aha”, I now hear many devious people saying who live on the other side of the planet from Australia and have no interest at all in buying Atomic. “I shall send a letter, and win the prize, and nobody will know I’m not really a reader!”

Well, no, nobody will. But you won’t know you’ve won, either, because (a) I won’t tell you (I suggest a winner to the Atomic editorial team, but it’s not up to me to actually definitely decide who gets the prize, and my Dan’s Data column reprints won’t tell you either), and (b) the Atomic prize-sending department tends to be a bit on the slack side. They often only actually send out the prize when the lucky winner reads the mag, lets out a happy cry and then sends an e-mail with his or her address in it.

(This means that some poor sucker has probably failed to buy that month’s magazine, or something, and missed out entirely.)

If you go to all of the trouble of setting up a devious scheme involving an Australian friend who subscribes to the magazine and will tell you if you win and, I don’t know, on-ship your mouse to you so nobody gets suspicious about some guy in Anchorage who isn’t on the subscriber list winning the prize, then I say you deserve your plunder as much as any Australian.

Actual Antipodeans who actually read Atomic, though, should bear in mind that asking me things at io@atomicmpc.com.au rather than dan@dansdata.com may be unexpectedly profitable.

I started writing a whole big thing about a Flexiglow “Series Connect” power supply, but there’s not a lot of point to that since I don’t think it’s possible to buy one new any more.

The 500W Series Connect had been sitting on my to-review pile since late 2005. The nice people at Anyware who sent the PSU to me might have been annoyed about that. But it’s now clear to me that they should instead count their blessings that I didn’t get around to looking at it until now.

This power supply turns out to have armour on all of its cables that’s so thick that the main motherboard power lead feels like a garden hose under full mains water pressure.

If your computer layout happens to match where this PSU’s ludicrous cables want to go, it’ll work - though you may find it impossible to put the side back on the computer case.

For almost any other computer, it’s likely to be physically impossible to plug this PSU in, even if you only need a few of its leads.

I managed to get the main motherboard connector to plug in as long as the PSU itself was six inches in position and ninety degrees in orientation from where it was meant to be. Any attempt to move the PSU closer to its proper mounting location threatened to wrench the motherboard socket right off the board.

I then tried just cutting the useless armour off the leads. I’ve got a pipe cutter that made short work of the outer rubber layer. Under that, though, there’s braided shielding, which of course frays all over the place and stabs your fingers and is difficult to cut without cutting the conductors under it and it’s all a horrible schemozzle.

Do PC power leads need braided shielding? Of course they don’t. PC components expect to get a bit of RF noise on their DC input. It’s possible that some marginal (or heavily overclocked) components will work slightly more reliably with slightly less noisy input, or that some cruddy sound card will be a little less noisy that way, but there’s a reason why the ATX12V PSU standard does not require shielding for DC wires.

The standard does, however, prohibit PSUs from sending more than a certain amount of noise down their DC wires, because that noise can easily out-shout - by orders of magnitude - the amount of noise the wires can possibly pick up from the air.

Shielding the wires, in that case, simply ensures that the PSUs own noise remains uncorrupted by noise from elsewhere.

I still needed a PSU to replace a dead one in a home-server box, though, so I made a shortlist of power supplies with enough plugs to support the forest of drives inside the server, then stuck a pin into the list and ordered a Corsair TX750W.

Apparently this PSU actually can deliver 750 watts of power, which is (a) way more than this server will ever need, and (b) quite unusual in the consumer PSU market. “Generic” PSUs usually underperform their stated capacity by a truly shameful margin, and you shouldn’t expect even a brand-name “750W” PSU to be able to deliver more than a constant 600W or so. Some do, but many don’t.

(The TX PSUs are made for Corsair by Channel Well Technology, who make similarly high-spec PSUs for other companies, like Thermaltake.)

This PSU also has far more connectors than the server will need - but it’s got enough drive connectors, which is all I really care about. And it wasn’t much more expensive than a much less capable PSU. And under-loaded PSUs generally live for a very long time, and are likely to be more efficient. So what the heck.

I’m already glad I bought the Corsair, because it gave me such a laugh when I opened the box.

Within the box, and within the foam anti-shock packaging, but outside the final clear-plastic-bag level of packaging, this PSU comes in a fuzzy drawstring bag.

It’s a very cheap fuzzy drawstring bag; thin, with fuzzy pseudo-suede on the outside only, and redolent of the various outgassings of the fresh electronic components that’ve lived within it since the PSU was bagged up at the factory. It’s not nearly in the same class as your traditional Crown Royal dice bag.

But it is, nonetheless, within the definition of the term, a fuzzy drawstring bag.

For a computer power supply.

So, like, if you feel the need to unscrew just the PSU from your computer and carry it around with you, you won’t have to tuck it uncomfortably under your arm or carry it by the ATX cable like a big square dead rat or something.

No, man. Not you. Not the Corsair TX owner.

You can bag that sucker up, man!

And then, if any punk on the street should allege that your rig be insufficiently pimped, you can say to him “Yo, I gots my P-to-the-S-U right here in a bag, bitch! What you got? Well? You got a motherboard hangin’ round yo’ neck that I ain’t noticed? Huh?”

(And yes, I’m pretty sure there’s a factory worker out there who can’t believe he’s making these things. Previously.)

Here in Australia, you can buy your own TX750W from m’verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market for a mere $AU211.20 including delivery anywhere in the country. And you might as well; it looks to me, and to people who bothered to actually test it, as if it’d be a perfectly good piece of hardware for the money, even if you didn’t get a fuzzy drawstring bag into the bargain.

Australian shoppers can click here to order one.

I just received, complained about and deleted an unsolicited commercial e-mail promoting “The Highland Hypnotist, Scott Burke”.

I needn’t post it here, because you can read the whole thing for yourself on prlog.org, one of those sites where people can upload press releases about whatever they like.

It’s pretty standard woo-woo claptrap. Mysterious Scottish wizard Has The Power to Cure What Ails Ye, et cetera. Except for the headline.

Which is, just in case you’ve not yet read the prlog.org page: “Highland Hypnotist Uses His Powers To Avenge Bad Health….or Your Money Back!“

Avenge bad health?

So, what, he finds the guy who made you sick and beats the hell out of him?

I suppose that could account for the money-back guarantee - “OK, you’ve still got diabetes, but you didn’t see the part when I totally avenged the dickens out of it!”.

(Actually, money-back guarantees like this are de rigueur for quacks of all colours. Some of them just never return anybody’s money, of course, but most rely on the low number of warranty claims that’re likely to turn up when your audience is self-selected for gullibility and you’re treating variable illnesses with indistinct end-points.)