How To Spot A Psychopath

A quick update on the subject of the Secret Life of Machines series…

…which, for the information of newcomers, is

1: fantastic,
2: legal, and
3: large.

A couple of years ago, I made a torrent of a high-video-quality version of this excellent science series, which total 3.3 gigabytes.

Of late there have usually only been one or two seeds for the torrent, though, and one of them is me, and my little home DSL account can only upload at a peak speed of about 25 kilobytes per second. So it takes me a couple of days to send the whole bulk of the three series to someone (technically, it’s two six-episode series of The Secret Life of Machines, plus one six-episode series The Secret Life of The Office). And that someone will then usually not bloody seed it.

So if you’ve still got that torrent sitting in your BitTorrent client, I’d be grateful if you force-seeded it for a while.

(A reminder for readers who’re dubious about this, or protection-racketeers from one or another content company who’re champing at the bit to send me a nastygram: Tim Hunkin, the creator and principal presenter of this show, wants people to download it for free. He makes this clear in many places, like for example his pages for the three series of the show. The shows are still copyrighted, but free distribution is expressly permitted.)

As I’ve mentioned before, you can help out with seeding even if you don’t have the torrent in your BitTorrent client any more, provided you still have the files. (Which, by the way, are in the “M4V” iPhone format, are not nasty VHS rips, and are playable on all platforms; use VLC if you have problems.)

To seed if you’ve got the files but not the torrent, just get the torrent started as if you were going to download it again (so your BitTorrent client creates the appropriate download directory and empty files), immediately stop it again, copy the video files from wherever you’ve put them into the new download directory over the top of the new empty files, and then restart or “Force Re-Check” the download (depending on which BitTorrent client you have). Provided the files are the right ones for this iPhone-format version of the series, and have the right names, the download will now be 100% complete and you can force-seed it for a while.

(If you don’t have a BitTorrent client at all but do have the files, perhaps because someone gave them to you on a thumb drive or something, you can also help out. You just need to install a client - µTorrent, for Windows and Mac, is excellent - and then do the starting-stopping-copying-and-then-seeding thing. The default settings for a freshly-installed BitTorrent client may stop it seeding after it’s uploaded 200% of the data size of a torrent, or something; upload ratio checking also goes weird when you do the stop-copy-and-seed thing, too, because you’ll have the whole download but won’t have actually downloaded anything. Just right-click the torrent and select “Force Start” or “Force Seed” or whatever it’s called in your client, to ignore upload limits.)

Here’s a magnet link for the Secret Life of Machines torrent. (You may need to associate your BitTorrent program with magnet:… links to make this work, or manually copy and paste the link into an “Open Torrent…” dialog.)

You can also download the torrent file from isoHunt or The Pirate Bay - it was on Mininova, too, but they decided to go legit the other day and removed pretty much all of their torrents, including legal ones like this.

The BitTorrent community is moving away from .torrent files, just as it’s moving away from trackers - The Pirate Bay have actually shut their trackers down altogether now. If you’ve got the little magnet URI for the download you want - it’s ?xt=urn:btih:D62CLPSEYNRN74FRZDUC5GYVKTOOUKGE for the Secret Life of Machines torrent - then your BitTorrent client can use it to get other people who’re downloading the same thing to send you the data that a .torrent file would have given you. This may take a little longer than downloading a torrent file would have, but it shouldn’t actually fail unless there’s nobody seeding the torrent, in which case you obviously won’t be able to download it anyway.

Once you’ve got the torrent info, the distributed hash table (DHT) system that all modern BitTorrent clients support can go on to give you the rest of the data from other users, without needing a central “tracker” system to keep everything organised.

And then, before you know it, you’re watching Tim stand on the accelerator and the brake at the same time, and Rex brutalising that poor innocent refrigerator.

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Tim Hunkin has done a lot of stuff since The Secret Life of Machines. Here’s…

…some posh bird enjoying the latest in Tim’s long and inimitable line of penny-arcade amusement machines, “Whack A Banker“.

We all know what YouTube comments are like.

Exactly which site boasts the Web’s stupidest commenters is a matter for debate, but YouTube is unquestionably right up there.

You can try to ignore the comments on YouTube; if you’ve got a small enough browser window and don’t page down, you may be able to avoid seeing them altogether. You can also tell YouTube to only display comments rated “excellent (+10 or better)” until it forgets you’re logged in or the cookie’s cleared or whatever. I think that setting leaves a grand total of about eight comments visible on the whole site.

One way or another, though, most of us at least catch a glimpse of YouTube comments, out of the corner of our eyes, from time to time. Sometimes we even look there on purpose, for the same reason people look at other such… things. Every glance corrodes your faith in humanity a little more.

May I, therefore, suggest the Firefox add-on YouTube Comment Snob?

It ain’t perfect, but it’s fighting the good fight.

There are a few Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things. YouTube Comment Cleaner, for instance, and (as I write this) three scripts that replace comments with quotations, including one that hybridises with YouTube Comment Snob, replacing any comments the Snob blocks with quotes from Richard Feynman.

The Comment Snob options…

…remind me of the old Microsoft Word Hidden Settings joke:

By default, Comment Snob doesn’t block comments that include profanity, which of course is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of intelligence.

Except in fucking YouTube comments.

I have just discovered how to remove dents from table-tennis balls.

We don’t have a ping-pong table here, but we do have a lot of ping-pong balls, because we’ve got four cats and ping-pong balls are great cat toys.

When ping-pong balls are everywhere, though, you’ll often tread on one, and dent it. A dented ping-pong ball is of limited utility as a cat toy, and is of course no use at all for actually playing table tennis.

As I was making tea, it occurred to me that just holding a dented ball in tongs and immersing it in very hot water might un-dent it. Even if the heat didn’t soften the ball (which, as it turns out, it will), the expansion of the heated gas inside the ball ought to push the dents right out.

And I’ll be darned if that is not exactly what happens. The ball swells back up to perfect roundness, and once cooled and dried it seems to bounce pretty much as well as a brand new one.

The only time this trick won’t work is if there’s an actual hole in the ball, which can happen if a dent has sharp creases. Then, all you get when you immerse the ball is a trail of bubbles from the hole.

(If you subsequently immerse the punctured ball in cold water, the contracting gas inside will suck the water into the ball. This lets you partially fill a ping-pong ball with liquid through a tiny hole, but you could do that with a syringe anyway. I remember seeing a documentary about controlled burning in forestry; to reliably start fires from the air, they used a machine that took ping-pong balls that’d been pre-filled with potassium permanganate, and then syringed glycerine into them, just before dropping them.)

Interestingly, ping-pong balls also smell distinctly of camphor when you take them out of the hot water. That’s because they’re made of celluloid, which is principally composed of nitrocellulose and camphor. This is why they burn so well:

(Some very, very cheap ping-pong balls are made of plastic instead of celluloid. They’re a bit squishy, bounce about as well as a grape, and often aren’t even evenly thick all over, so they wobble when rolling. Still OK as cat toys, though.)

Sadly, it would appear that I am not the first person to have thought of this repair technique. But I’m still pleased that I thought it up all by myself. (I also invented the differential, at about the age of nine. Unfortunately, someone else had already invented that, too.)

I started watching The Waters of Mars, the most recent Doctor Who special, a few days ago. Then I paused it after 12 minutes and didn’t resume for a few days, because I had other stuff to do and it clearly wasn’t going to be very good.

I know Doctor Who is really fantasy, not sci-fi, and I know it’s now all about heart and emotions and not so much about coherent storylines. That’s fine, if done with some imagination; I actually quite liked the episode Gridlock, for instance, which was a veritable lace doily of plot-holes if you looked at it critically.

And I know Doctor Who is primarily aimed at young viewers, and I also know that kids aren’t very discriminating and will watch any old crap.

But none of that excuses this level of crapness.

(Spoilers, naturally, follow. But I’m spoiling the bad bits, not the good ones, so perhaps you’ll come out ahead.)

The Waters of Mars reminded me of Robert L. Forward’s excellent (if you like hard sci-fi) Dragon’s Egg (the sequel’s pretty decent, too!). The only purpose of the characters in the first couple of dozen pages of Dragon’s Egg is to set up the story proper, so Forward obviously didn’t see any need to spend more than a lazy half-drunk afternoon writing the first part. (Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote the first part last, just to give the audience a minimal on-ramp to the highway he’d already finished and was impatient to publish.)

So Forward, for instance, details exactly the garments which a young female astronomer puts on before racing off to advance the plot, but because he’s not paying attention he gives her a skirt but forgets to mention any underwear. This is forgotten once you get into the real story, but it’s somewhat startling at the time.

Likewise, in The Waters of Mars, the writers are clearly so eager to get to the, super-heavy-handed but still pretty neat, ending and teaser for the upcoming Christmas special, that they just didn’t care about the preceding story.

Robert Forward’s dodgy beginning bit was very small. In The Waters of Mars, the dodgy beginning bit takes up five-sixths of the show.

I could just about handle Mars gravity being the same as Earth gravity, when it ought to be less than 0.4G, because that’s apparently still too expensive for live-action TV to do properly. And I could barely accept explosion debris cheerfully burning away in Mars’ 95.8%-carbon-dioxide, 0.2%-oxygen, less-than-1%-of-Earth-pressure atmosphere, because, um, maybe this Mars-base was built out of bamboo packed with potassium nitrate.

But the monsters are creatures that can make water (and fusion power!) out of nothing. But they’re desperate to get to Earth, because there’s so much water here. (And they’ve got the same name as the principal villains of all of the Halo games.)

All the writers would have had to do was make the monsters express a great hunger for all of the people there are on Earth for them to infect, or specifically mention how pleased they are with Earth’s ever-shrinking ice-caps that promise a gigantic habitable area for them in their liquid form. But no. One of ‘em stands there, drooling a steady stream of water onto the floor, and just says that it’s impressed by the quantity of water that Earth already has.

And there’s not just one, but two, self-destruct mechanisms activated in this one episode.

I suppose it’s not that surprising that the systems exist - nobody puts a “Blow Up This Vehicle” button on real-world dashboards, but if you live in the land of TV sci-fi you can expect super-virulent body-snatching alien and/or supernatural monsters to pop up about every other week. The only surprising thing is how slow people always seem to be to figure out what’s going on and press that deadly button that’ll save the rest of the world.

(We should probably count ourselves lucky that only one of the self-destructs has a Red Digital Readout. And to be fair, it still isn’t your typical Acme Mechanically-Assisted Plot-Tensioner, a device which has the mystical ability to make the last 60 seconds of the countdown take up five minutes of screen time.)

As regular readers know, I am actively delighted by stupid Doctor Who monsters. But they’re meant to be stupid-looking, not just by-the-numbers Central Casting zombies plodding through a script that exists only to give the Doctor a reason to emote.

I’m quite happy with fatally-plot-holed sci-fi as long as it’s imaginative. When I finish watching some oddball anime and say “what the fuck was that all about?!”, I’m always smiling. And Doctor Who is supposed to be among the most imaginative live-action shows, because it’s got the fewest restraints. It’s not stuck on a particular starship or even a particular planet, it doesn’t take itself very seriously, and after some decades, the audience is accustomed to the fact that the TARDIS seems to independently seek out deadly peril, especially when the Doctor intended to have a little holiday.

This all makes it particularly disappointing when you get a story like this, that’s no better than the 62nd time the holodeck tried to kill everyone on the Enterprise.

You know when you read a review of a game that says that one part of the game, say the battles between spaceships, looks great and is tons of fun, but the rest of the game is kind of boring?

Gratuitous Space Battles is that part of that game, without anything else.

(And before I say anything else, note that there’s a free demo.)

You pick a fighter, frigate or cruiser hull for each of your vessels…

…you kit them out with weapons and shields and engines and so on, you deploy an armada of ships of different sorts (or all of the same sort, if you like), and then you give them all orders. Concentrate all fire, prefer to shoot enemies that’re already wounded, shoot this kind of ship over that kind, protect this ship of ours, protect any ship of ours that’s damaged, stop at this range from the enemy and plink with your long-range missiles rather than charging into beam range, et cetera et cetera.

And then you click the “Fight” button, and sit back and watch.

For the actual battle - which is fought on a 2D battlefield, though ships can go over and under each other - you’re a pure spectator. GSB is like a tower defense game, in that regard. (Many tower-defense games let you build new towers during a battle, though; GSB does not.)

You can speed up and slow down the battle, and you can zoom in and out. From a distance, the action looks like this:

(In this battle, I’m employing the Unsporting Crowd of Torpedo Frigates strategy. I’m also playing at full resolution on my huge monitor, so the full-sized screenshot is 2560 by 1600 pixels and rather a lot of kilobytes.)

Zoom in, and you can see…

…each individual weapon shot, repair drones patching flaming holes in hulls, and fighters weaving around the capital ships. (Full-sized screenshot here.)

When you win a battle you earn “honor” with which to unlock new hulls, equipment and the three whole alien races besides the one you start with, the Federation. (The big Federation ships, rather delightfully, all look like a hybrid of a Starfleet vessel and a Battlestar.)

It’s all a lot of fun, and should become even more fun as the game expands. Cliff Harris, the indie developer of GSB and a few other games, is actively patching bugs and adding stuff, and GSB is also very moddable. Fans have already, according to the ancient tradition of the first few mods for any game, created a few rough-and-ready super-battleships by just adding more module mounting points to existing hulls. Some proper high-quality mods with all-new graphics, like unto the Babylon Project mod for Weird Worlds, should be arriving soon.

So try the free demo and see what you think. The full game takes into account what you’ve done in the demo, by the way, so you won’t have to play the tutorial level again if you don’t want to, and get to keep whatever honor you earned.

(GSB is Windows-only at this point, but because it’s not a very demanding game it generally works fine on other OSes if you play it in an emulator.)

Gratuitous Space Battles is $US22.99 from the developer, or only $US20.69 on Steam.

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Note that there’s a graphical glitch in GSB that affects people who’re using an unusually high horizontal screen resolution (so, one giant monitor, or a row of smaller ones). It…

…turns a column of screen to the right into stripey repeats of the last correctly-drawn column of pixels.

I think this was meant to be fixed in the recent patch, but it doesn’t seem to have been. No problem, though; just go to the options and disable “Gratuitous Shaders”, and with very little eye-candy reduction, the whole screen will draw properly again.

If you had to name one electrical component that just shouts “mad scientist”, the knife switch would be that component.

(I’m not counting the Jacob’s Ladder as a “component”, here.)

Connecting lightning to your not-yet-animated monster, activating your death ray, powering up the time machine; all jobs for a big old two-blade knife switch.

Knife switches have plenty of actual practical uses in the real world. Even small ones can switch very high current, their position is obvious at a glance, and they can put up with a lot of abuse. They’re obviously not a great choice for high-voltage switching, but they’ll usually actually do that very well too - you just have to stay away from the live bits.

(Knife switches made for really high-voltage operation often have special spring-loaded doodads that stay connected as you raise the knife-bar, then snap up very quickly. Their purpose is to break the contact very rapidly, so you don’t pull an arc between the terminals.)

So naturally I had to get one. And not one of the little plastic science-classroom versions with binding posts or spring terminals; I wanted something beefy, as were and still are used to isolate radio gear from the big lightning-attracting antenna outside. A knife switch also makes a dandy automotive battery isolator, but I didn’t want one of those, either.

After a year or two of e-mails from my saved eBay search, I found just the thing.

This handsome object cost me $AU28.11 delivered, which I thought might have been a bit too much, until it arrived. I now realise I got a bargain. This thing’s way cooler than I expected it to be.

All of the terminals and contacts work OK; a couple of the hefty terminal screws were seized and remain tight after cleaning and oiling, but this is a perfectly functional piece of gear.

The Bakelite-slab base is only about 14 centimetres square (5.5 inches), but the whole assembly weighs about 1.86 kilos (4.1 pounds). And it’s surprisingly complicated.

Your standard two-blade knife switch is simple enough. It’s either a dual-pole, single-throw, or a dual-pole, dual-throw (if you don’t know what this means, check out the Wikipedia article on switches).

This thing, in comparison, is a freakin’ logic puzzle.

It’s got six terminals, and two separately hinged - but electrically connected - blades. The worn (and now lightly polished!) wooden handle is in two parts, too, one for each blade. But the two handle parts form a rebate joint.

This makes it possible to have both blades down, both blades up, or only the left blade up. But, because of the rebate joint, you can’t have the right blade up and not the left.

Let’s number the terminals clockwise from the one at the bottom right of this picture. So the one to its left is terminal 2, terminal 3 is the one on the back connected to the bases of the blades, and so on to number 6, which is partly obscured by the wooden handle in the above picture. Pay attention, there will be a test.

With both blades up, terminals 1, 2 and 6 are connected to nothing, and terminals 3, 4 and 5 are connected to each other.

With the right blade down and the left blade up, terminals 1, 2, 4 and 5 are disconnected, while 3 is connected to 6.

With both blades down, terminals 1, 3 and 6 are connected to each other, and terminals 2 and 4 are connected to each other; only terminal 5 is no longer connected to anything.

(If you can’t quite see how that is the case, note that the middle section of the left blade, the lower one in the above picture, has a copper sleeve around it that’s insulated from the blade itself. When that blade’s down, the sleeve connects terminal 2 to terminal 4, but not to the blade itself.)

Oh, and terminals 1 and 6 are connected to the blade contacts via a couple of bits of might-perhaps-be-fuse-wire-but-probably-isn’t. So you could easily connect either or both of them to some other part of the assembly, if you wanted.

(Does anybody know of a piece of software that’ll take a description like this - “in state A, these parts are connected, in state B, the situation changes to this”, et cetera - and will then draw you a diagram? I started drawing it out by hand in a flowcharting/circuit-diagram program, but then realised I had no idea how to draw these crazy ganged switches.)

The baseplate bears a little oval plaque that says:

VICTORIAN RAILWAYS
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING BRANCH
WORKSHOP SPENCER ST.

(It just occurred to me that the switch could easily have been used for switching railway signals of some sort. The rebated handle interlock could be for something like preventing green lights for both directions on one line.)

I actually will use this switch as a switch, from time to time. But when it’s not in use, I think I’ll hang it on the wall somewhere.

Most people have seen stupid “copy protection” on Web pages, where some message about copyright or something pops up when you click the right mouse button. This is supposed to stop you from wickedly making another copy of some portion of the data that has already been stored on your own hard drive when your Web browser asked the server for the page, and the server cheerfully sent it.

(See also, people who make Web sites and then demand that you not link to them.)

Via The Daily WTF’s most recent instalment of Error’d, though, comes what may be the Greatest BS Right-Click Warning Ever:

Every listing from this seller has this. Just scroll down to the main product description and click your wicked pirate terrorist right mouse button somewhere on it, and you will immediately receive your very own copy of this fascinating alert box.

Right-click over and over! Send dozens of “reports”! Wheeee!

In case you’re new to all this, and wondering: No, nothing’s actually being “recorded” or “reported”. The alert is created by a little snippet of JavaScript that tells the browser to do something when you release the second mouse button. In this case, the code pops up the alert with the stupid message.

It works in the same way as this, which also pops up an alert when you click on it. (It’s also not unlike the system used for “security” by the subjects of another Daily WTF story.)

Unless you’ve got JavaScript disabled, that is, in which case it won’t do anything at all.

If you throw caution to the wind and view the source of any of this eBay seller’s item pages - using that advanced hacker tool, your browser’s “View” menu, or perhaps just by right-clicking somewhere else on the page but the main product description - you’ll see that the high-powered enterprise-computing code that creates this very serious warning is part of a rather long single line.

As entertained DailyWTF commenters have observed, that line is, in the case of the listing I looked at anyway, a magnificent 40,076 characters in length.

Some text editors will choke on lines longer than 32,768 characters, you know.

So that’s even more security, right there!

When I finally got around to making myself some thermite, which like all right-thinking people I’ve been meaning to do since about the age of 10, the thing that surprised me was how bright it is. The combustion temperature of standard aluminium/iron-oxide thermite is about the same as the operating temperature of a light-bulb filament, and that’s how bright the whole burning mass shines.

Here’s a nice video of the process of thermite welding, which has for more than a hundred years been used to join train tracks together.

There are lots of other thermite welding videos on GooTube, though not all of them let you see the aftermath, when they remove the crucible, knock the mould sectors away and shape the still-glowing weld.

People who do this trick frequently clearly get rather blasé about it after a while, and hang around close to the crucible, or even do stuff like lighting cigarettes off the top of it. I don’t think that is actually a very good idea, unless you are absolutely 100% bet-your-eyes-on-it certain that there’s nothing on, or even under, the crucible that may unexpectedly flash to vapour when heated to these extreme temperatures.

Classically it’s water, or even damp stone, that causes thermite to “explode”, but many other substances will too. As I’ve mentioned before, many metals will boil at thermite temperatures, and there are all sorts of other usually-considered-inert substances that also don’t play well with thermite.

Like, for instance, asbestos. The molten iron from a thermite reaction may have cooled enough to not even melt an asbestos mat, but if you put a chunk of asbestos in with the thermite, it will definitely melt and quite possibly boil.

(This ought, at least, to render the asbestos harmless. Asbestos is basically just silica in an unusual shape, so if you melt it and then allow it to cool, you get a lump of non-toxic glass.)

A guy who glories in the name “Spaz” has been producing neat Supreme Commander videos for some time now. He did one for each faction in the game - prominently featuring the nifty extra units of the BlackOps Unleashed Unit Pack mod - and then promised a great big battle at the end, to be released in January this year.

That didn’t happen, so I assumed he’d given up on the project. But whaddayaknow, here’s the last one!

If you’ve liked my previous SupCom Eye Candy posts, you’ll know to not even sully your brain with the YouTube versions, but go directly to the full AVI downloads. Here’s one for the last instalment, and this forum post has umpteen links.

The HD downloads total 294Mb for the first four videos, and 356Mb for the last one all by itself.

Oh, Sky Cake Windows. You really are a new toy every day, aren’t you?

Readers with unusually long memories may remember that I shamelessly begged for money to buy a new computer. Against all reason, you actually gave me enough to make that possible, just before the end of the last financial year. Said new computer, replete with overclocked Core i7 920 CPU and 6Gb of RAM, has been happily buzzing away next to my desk ever since.

I’m not actually using the new computer yet, though, because I will not permit myself to start screwing around playing Fallout and GTA and such on it until I have actually finished writing big review about it, like unto the piece I wrote about the Athlon X2 box in 2006, and the other piece I wrote about the Pentium 4 box that preceded it in 2003.

But every time I get back to working on that big review, the PC bang-per-buck goalposts have shifted again. There is, for example, not really much reason for most people to get an LGA 1366 Core i7 machine any more, now that functionally-no-slower, yet cheaper, LGA 1156 CPUs are available. And don’t even start me on the graphics-card scene.

So this has turned into the longest PC-to-PC migration project in history, with the new machine being languidly updated with data and applications. It’s on all day, but only actually running a BitTorrent and distributed.net client. (I think you can spot the moment in my stats when the new box came on line. Feel free to mess up the numbers by ascribing your own distributed.net work to dan@dansdata.com, too.)

So anyway, the new computer’s running Windows Vista SP2 (the 64-bit version, so I’ll be able to use all of the 6Gb of memory), and it behaved itself perfectly for weeks on end. As you’d expect it to, of course; Vista was something of an adventure in frustration when it was freshly birthed, all shiny and glistening, but the two service packs have burned away the more impudent of its tentacles.

But then, just the other day, the Vista box decided to stop moving data over its gigabit-Ethernet link to my old computer, the one I’m still using, at the tens of megabytes per second to which I’d become accustomed.

Instead, it’s decided to send data at, oh, maybe half a megabyte per second. 1.5Mb/s, tops. Often quite a lot less.

That screen grab is of a transfer from the Vista machine to the XP machine, initiated and screenshotted at the Vista end. But speeds are the same if I start a transfer from the XP end.

It sped up to about 200 kilobytes per second after a few minutes. Sometimes, at random moments, it actually managed to sustain a whole couple of megabytes per second for a while. Whoopee.

Copying between all the other devices on the network works exactly as fast as it always did. The Vista box copies files between its own drives very quickly. The laptops get full bandwidth from their wireless adapters, the Vista box copies to the little Thecus N299 at its usual roughly 8Mb/s, and copying from the XP box to anything else on the network is also fine. And, get this, copying from the XP box to the Vista box is fine, too. Full gigabit speed. So this is a one-way problem.

And it’s specific to the (Realtek) network adapter on the Vista box’s Asus P6T motherboard. When I unplugged the Ethernet cable and plugged a USB wireless adapter into the Vista machine, I got full wireless bandwidth from Vista, via the access point and its own Ethernet hookup, to my XP PC. I presume a PCI Ethernet card or USB Ethernet adapter would work fine, too - though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the slow-transfer disease spread to the new adapter in due course.

I’ve plugged the Ethernet cable back into the Vista machine’s built-in adapter for simplicity, now. Since the BitTorrent client is on the Vista box, this means that if I download something big on the Vista machine and want to move it to the XP one, I can either start it copying long before I want it, or plug a thumb drive into the Vista box, copy the file (at a perfectly normal speed) onto that, then plug the thumb drive into the XP machine.

This problem - or something very like it - was all the rage among Vista’s early adopters back in 2007. I think the 2007 version of the problem usually had to with a well-meaning feature in Vista which is supposed to reserve network bandwidth for streaming multimedia content, so if you’re watching an HD movie or something over a (suitably speedy) network from a Vista computer, you’ll never have any frame-dropping or glitches when seeking, because any other file transfers from that computer will be heavily throttled even when they don’t need to be.

This feature apparently often went haywire, especially in the original version of Vista. It either decided to operate all the time whether you were playing video or not, or it operated when the local user of the Vista computer was just playing music, or something, while someone else tried to get a file from his computer over the network. I think there was some kind of Copy Control Crap involvement here, too, but don’t quote me.

This was meant to be fixed in SP1, and by all accounts a lot of it was. Vista Service Pack 2 has been out for some time now, and that’s what my new computer is running. And as I said, for weeks on end, everything worked fine. I could play even HD movies from the Vista box over the network, A-OK.

Because this problem has such a long history, it’s somewhat challenging to dig up information about fixing it on Vista SP2, as opposed to SP1 or the original extra-special Oh Dear God Why Did I Buy Vista v1.0 Edition. An inexpertly-crafted search string will thus turn up tons of people complaining about it back in 2007. The water is further muddied by different versions of the problem, in which copies from Vista to, say, Windows Server 2003 work OK, but copying stuff the other way is very slow and may even time out and die entirely. I don’t think my problem is related to those ones, but who frickin’ knows.

I have tried many things to fix this problem.

[UPDATE: In the original version of this post I forgot to mention that yes, I’m using a full-permissions administrator account, and yes, Vista’s firewall is turned off.]

First up, I tried using a different copying program (like the aforementioned TeraCopy, or Vista’s own Robocopy). No good.

I tried opening a DOS prompt (with admin permissions) and typing the voodoo chant "netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable". No good.

I tried Microsoft’s automatic “Fix It” doodad for changing this same setting. No good.

I noticed that the Vista PC’s hard-drive light is locked on for a couple of solid minutes after startup, even if I close all apps that could be expected to hit the drive. I don’t remember whether it did this before the transfer problem. Perhaps it’s SuperFetch-related. While I was fiddling with this, I completely disabled Windows Search. No good. Didn’t even prevent the drive-flogging on startup.

(Good old lsass.exe was totting up I/O reads and writes at a great rate. I’m unconvinced that it had much to do with the startup disk-flogging, though, since it kept on reading and writing after the drive light had returned to normal occasional flashing.)

I’ve got Nero installed on the Vista machine; that installs some pointless services that can also hit the disk, so I killed them along with indexing. I also disabled Nero’s system-startup tasks using MSConfig. No good.

I power-cycled the cheap and cheerful gigabit switch. No good.

I usually have a VNC view of the new computer’s desktop open. I closed that. No good.

(VNC itself is subject to the slow-transfer problem; it updates very noticeably slower now, and of course becomes even more painful if I ignore the new limited bandwidth and force it to a high-bandwidth connection mode, like the “LAN” setting in the UltraVNC viewer.)

I ventured into the registry, and tried setting NetworkThrottlingIndex to FFFFFFFF. Then rebooted. No good.

In a moment of mad optimism, I tried telling Vista to “diagnose and repair” the network connection. It told me I needed to “turn on TCP performance improving settings”, so I did. No good.

I turned off Quality of Service for the XP machine’s network adapter. No good.

I turned off the same QoS Packet Scheduler and a couple of Link-Layer Topology Discovery doodads on the Vista box’s network-adapter properties. No good.

I tried mapping a drive. No good.

I went on a rampage through Task Manager, killing every task that wasn’t obviously necessary for Vista’s continued operation. AnyDVD, audiodg, Daemon Tools, GoogleCrashHandler, jusched, nTuneService, PunkBuster, UpdateCenterService, Real Temp, PresentationFontCache, nvSCPAPISvr, MSASCui, two copies of nvvsvc.exe, Vuze and the VNC server all bit the dust.

No good.

But then there was SLsvc.exe, a Copy Control Crap process if ever I saw one. I killed it, and… No good.

I fiddled with “Remote Differential Compression“. Windows said “Please wait while the features are configured. This might take several minutes”, and for once it was not joking. It sat there for quite a while. But then it finished! No good!

I read through this page looking for things I hadn’t yet tried. The only new one I found was disabling “Windows Meeting Space”. So I did that. No good.

I said, “hang on a minute - why not just connect the XP and Vista boxes with a FireWire cable? That’s fast!”

So I did. And although the XP machine was perfectly willing, it didn’t work at all, because Microsoft has removed FireWire networking from Windows, as of Vista.

I noticed that Windows Update had a new driver for the motherboard’s network adapter, which I hadn’t installed with the other updates. So I installed that. No good.

I tried disabling “Large Send Offload” in the Vista machine’s network-adapter properties. I even disabled the IPv6 one as well as the two IPv4 ones. No good.

While I was there, I tried disabling the IPv4 and IPv6 versions of TCP and UDP Checksum Offload, and an IPv4 Checksum Offload too. Each of them can be enabled for receiving, transmitting, both, or neither; I fully disabled all of ‘em. No good.

I went to Device Manager and uninstalled the network adapter - and selected the “Delete driver software” option - then rebooted so it’d be redetected. No good.

Then I smote my forehead mightily, and tried a new Ethernet cable. I would actually have been slightly irritated if that had worked. It didn’t. Actually, it made XP-box-to-Vista-box copies slow, just like Vista-box-to-XP-box ones. Both cables have all four pairs connected - well, unless there’s a break in the middle somewhere. I cannot escape the feeling that this is trying to tell me something, but I’m too tired to figure out what it is.

I haven’t yet tried starting the Vista box in Safe Mode with Networking, as this page suggests. I haven’t tried connecting the two computers with a crossover cable, either. I also haven’t yet tried just officially declaring the migration to be complete and starting to use the new box as my main computer.

But dammit, I want to fix this. I’ve gone too far to turn back now.

Perhaps there’s something obvious that I’m missing, here. If any of the three people who’ve managed to read to the end of this post have any suggestions, I’m all ears.