How To Spot A Psychopath

When I reviewed the Pertelian X2040 external display doohickey, I mentioned that cheap Windows SideShow devices from big manufacturers would completely eat the lunch of little manufacturers like Pertelian.

It would appear (via) that SideShow devices with full colour 320-by-240-ish screens…

…based on electronics modules like this will indeed be available for as little as $US80.

Well, at least according to the Winbond propaganda that led me to the Ricavision site, where you can see their only-renders-as-yet examples of wireless Bluetooth external displays with and without keyboards, not to mention an e-book reader thing that’d presumably be less excitingly priced, since the display is most of the expense for e-books.

If these devices aren’t pie in the sky, then Pertelian, and even Logitech, are definitely going to have to get with that program or be run over.

There’s still some attraction to low-tech LCDs like the Pertelian, and not just because they don’t make you upgrade to Vista in order to use the artificially-limited-to-Vista SideShow technology. I like that I can have the X2040’s simple four-line display sitting there announcing what MP3’s playing at the moment without its backlight on, so the glow doesn’t distract me. You could probably do much the same thing with a colour Sideshow display, though - use a greenscreen colour scheme and wind the brightness down.

I don’t know about you, but I like games in which you’re the bad guy.

Games like Black And White in which you can choose to be bad (I know there are a bunch of excellent computer RPGs that’re better examples) are decent, but games where your character is required to eviscerate at least eight toddlers in the process of preparing his breakfast are better.

The trap for this genre is just doing the Bizarro World thing, where there’s nothing really mechanically different from a conventional you’re-the-hero game, but everything has different wallpaper. Good is bad, clean is dirty, nice is nasty. You can tell a game’s going to do this when it presents you with a gnarled little advisor who, unprompted, expresses his utter disgust for fuzzy puppies and clear babbling brooks.

That is exactly what happens at the start of the demo of Overlord. Your advisor’s a cross between Yoda and the Brain Gremlin, and he has that standard Antimatter Mary Poppins attitude to the world.

This did not fill me with confidence, but the game itself actually looks pretty decent, from what I could tell from the none-too-long demo. Check the demo out, if you’ve got a reasonably current Windows PC and can stomach the one-gigabyte download.

Overlord seems to have a similar overall sense of humour to Fable and the Dungeon Keeper games (Dungeon Keeper is obviously a strong influence on Overlord’s design). And Overlord’s version of third-person action, in which you send your crowd of psychotic Minions to do most tasks, is appealing. See something nice, wave your gauntleted hand at it, watch it get Gremlined to death. Mmmmm.

(The camera went a bit wrong when I was trying to fight the big guy at the end of the demo, but, y’know, I suppose that’s why they’re not going to be selling Overlord until next month. And the game sort of wimps out on the truly-evil side of things, since your Quest is to kill the seven Great Heroes who have over the years themselves become corrupt. But I’m OK with that as long as I get to burn a lot of halflings to death on the way.)

Oh, and for the benefit of those of you in the cheap seats, or who just can’t get enough of slapping chickens to death: You can download the original Dungeon Keeper for free.

[Update: I just downloaded Dungeon Keeper, for old times’ sake… and discovered that the Home Of The Underdogs version of the game appears to be missing the sound files. Although it does still have the below-mentioned excellent level commentary. If you’re not profoundly deaf, though, you might still want to get it from somewhere else.]

Aaah, this takes me back.

Install new version of Windows, discover that now some of the hardware for which you paid good money does not work any more, and will not ever be fixed. Buy new stuff, sucker. Thank you for playing.

Actually, one of the problems listed in the PC Perspective piece is exactly the same as it was back in the Win98-to-Win2000 days. Apparently positional audio won’t work in many games in Vista, ever.

The same thing happened when people with Aureal Vortex-2-chipset sound cards upgraded from Win98. The sound card still worked, but only in stereo mode, and that was the end of it, no matter how hard you tried.

The Vortex 2 had much better sounding positional audio, then, than any alternative. It still sounds good today. But you’ve got to run Win98 to hear it.

(There might have been Win2000 drivers eventually, except that Aureal went bankrupt around the time Win2000 was coming out, after a legal battle with… Creative. Their assets were then bought by… Creative, who had no particular interest in the Vortex chips. And now, the wheel turns…)

To be fair, the parallel’s not really a perfect one. Games that supported the Aureal 3D sound API and also the newer and crappier Creative one could be returned to proper functionality, back in 2000, if you bought a Creative sound card to replace your Vortex 2. Today, games that support both Creative’s now-mature but still-somewhat-crappy API and the newer OpenAL standard should Just Work on your existing Creative card. Regrettably, though, the grand total of commercial games that support OpenAL at all appears to be 77, including some big names but excluding many others. Those others will have 3D sound on Vista only if they’re patched to support OpenAL, which is Not Bloody Likely for nearly all of them, but is I suppose a bit more likely than it was back in 2000.

Ryan’s complaint about his print server now being a paperweight reminds me of what Win2000 (and every other NT-series Windows version) did to ATA CD changers like this one. They were and are very cool pieces of hardware - six discs in barely more space than a standard single-disc drive! - but they were killed dead by WinNT and later. Win2000 expected you to manually mount and unmount the discs, rather than just switching ‘em automatically like Win98 did. It was much faster to use a single disc drive and carry the rest of your CDs around in a wallet.

Microsoft have a Vista version of their Hardware Compatibility List (”currently only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and above”), and an Upgrade Advisor you can run to see if there’s stuff in your PC that’s explicitly non-Vista-compatible. Anybody who is for some unfathomable reason thinking about getting Vista at this early date (what, you want to be absolutely totally tip-top ready for DirectX 10 games the very day they come out?) should, at least, run the Advisor.

On drilling down into the HCL to see what Creative sound cards are listed, I note that the answer appears to be “none”. There’s a small list of chipsets, not one of which is from Creative. So I suppose you should be grateful that your Creative card makes a noise at all.

The Advisor will also not save you if the insoluble problem that’s waiting for you is that the print server on the other side of your house will never work with Vista. And it won’t say a thing about software, including your non-OpenAL games.

(This post was originally titled “Disk space needed: ¶Å§œ‡ megabytes”, but that HTML entity code brilliance caused it to bork a couple of my RSS feeds.)

I’m rehabilitating a non-savvy friend’s old computer. It’s not nearly as disgusting as I feared it would be, but it still has Stuff Doesn’t Work Disease. Everything you try to do - scan for malware, update virus definitions, et cetera - just… doesn’t work, in one way or another.

I’ll dig through it in due course, but the installation window for the latest version of Spybot sums it up.

(PrevX kinda worked, and kinda didn’t, possibly because of the antique version of Norton Antivirus that I just uninstalled because it can’t be updated…)

(Previously.)

That’ll learn me.

My current main computer has a couple of gigabytes of fancy Corsair “XMS3200″ memory in it. The really fancy kind, with the almost useless dancing LED bar graphs on top.

It would appear that the useful life of one of those two modules, in almost constant use, running within spec at unremarkable temperatures, is about one year.

Ending… now.

There I was, peacefully composing an e-mail, when I was confronted with a blue screen. But a much worse one than usual. This one was dark blue, in big-scanlines text mode, and there was nothing on it. Not a thing.

Just blue, on both monitors.

Restart computer, get long repeated beeps. Which my kung fu tells me means a memory error.

Remove fancy RAM (taking opportunity to Rocket-Air a chinchilla or three worth of dust out). Leave boring RAM. Computer boots again.

(The boring RAM is the Geil stuff from this old review. It hasn’t been used for nearly as many hours as the Corsair modules were, though.)

I’m down to a gig now. A gig, man. Jeez, man, I’m hurting here.

Actually, the silly LED graphs may actually have a function in this situation. Perhaps it’s the module that has one amber LED flickering on power-up that’s died. I’ll do a bit more module-shuffling to identify the dud one - dual channel mode still works with one 512Mb and one 1Gb module (identical modules are not necessary, just recommended).

[I’ve done that now, and so am back up to 1.5 lopsided gigabytes of dual channel RAM, with one 512Mb Geil module plus the one remaining Corsair. With only one Corsair module at a time, the LEDs didn’t do anything different on the bad module.]

M’verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market have an instant swap lifetime super-warranty for Corsair RAM that’s been purchased from… just about exactly when I purchased this RAM, as it happens… but they don’t stock these exact modules any more, so I may be waiting a bit for a replacement. No donations should be needed, however.

[Regrettably, it turns out that you can’t return just one module from one of these Corsair pair-packs for a warranty replacement - it has to be both. I suppose that makes sense for all of the overclocking kids who at least think they need perfectly matched RAM, but I still think it’s kind of stupid to have to return a perfectly good memory module. I wonder if I’ll get something faster back?]

Incidentally, if you find yourself in a similar situation, it’s important to make sure your new module - whether you’re getting it under warranty or not - is good old “standard density” RAM, not the newer off-brand “high density” stuff that’s sneaked into the 1Gb-and-bigger DDR module market, at a considerably lower price.

High density is cheaper, essentially, because it’s crap. It breaks JEDEC specs to save a few bucks, and it won’t work with a long list of motherboards, including pretty much anything made by Asus or Dell.

(Hey! A Dell-incompatibility problem that isn’t their fault! Call the papers!)

UPDATE: I found another couple of 512Mb modules kicking around the place which gave me a decent-enough 2Gb, and so I took ages to get around to sending the RAM in for a warranty replacement. And, technically, it was a couple of months too old to qualify for the warranty here in Australia. But I still got a replacement (and without any do-you-know-who-I-am review-site customer service enhancement, either).

The replacement RAM took a month to arrive, though, presumably because the Australian distributor bounced the RAM back to the States for replacement. Still, I can’t complain.

My replacement RAM is the same as the old stuff - XMS3200-with-LEDs. So the packaging has lots of “Best RAM of 2003!” awards printed on the back of it.

Way to make me feel old, guys.

If you’ve got your font sizes set larger than normal (in this case, because your 17 inch screen has 2304000 pixels), and you accept Microsoft’s strong recommendation that you install IE7 (yes, Firefox is the default browser), the why-you-should-install dialog will not look the way Microsoft intended it to.

It will look like this.

I think the mangulation is in a particularly apposite spot. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought IE had a very look.

Yes, I am pleased to learn of Hitachi’s plan to release probably-functional “one terabyte” hard drives Real Soon Now. They’ll probably work fine, the price is good, it’s like Bigfoot or Jesus. Huzzah.

This is, however, a good time to mention that now that consumer hard drives are nudging the “1Tb barrier”, the capacity rip-off factor is about to become worse by a factor of 1.024. Again.

As I and others have written many times before, storage manufacturers are, almost without exception, in love with specifying their devices as if a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte 1000 kilobytes, a gigabyte 1000 megabytes, and (now) a terabyte 1000 gigabytes.

According to the standard SI prefixes, this is exactly true. There are one thousand grams in a kilogram, after all.

In computer usage, though, those SI prefixes are perverted to refer to powers of two, not ten, despite the so-far-unsuccessful effort of the standards organisations to get everybody to call the computer capacities “kibibyte”, “mebibyte” and so on.

So a real kilobyte, as used by every desktop computer operating system, contains two to the power of ten, 2^10, 1024, bytes. A real megabyte contains 2^20, 1,048,576, bytes. A real gigabyte contains 2^30, 1,073,741,824, bytes. A real terabyte contains 2^40, 1,099,511,627,776, bytes.

As you can see, the difference between the powers of ten and the powers of two - the rip-off factor, in other words - gets worse and worse as capacities rise. Once you get to the terabyte level, the factor is very nearly 1.1.

There can be a further loss of capacity from the space taken up by formatting data - the metaphorical painting of the lines on the parking lot. But that varies with the filesystem you use, and the actual raw capacity you get from a drive with sticker capacity X varies, too.

That capacity is never high enough to cancel out the 1000/1024 rip-off factor, but it often is enough to account for the space taken up by formatting. The “320Gb” Western Digital drives in my current computer do indeed format to 298Gb, exactly what you get if you divide 320 by 1.024 three times. That’s thanks to an extra 67-odd megabytes of space, which cancels out the formatting losses. They’re still nowhere near 320 real formatted gigabytes, though.

So even if the new “one terabyte” drives are similarly generous, you can only expect them to format to 909 - maybe 910 - gigabytes 0.91 real terabytes, which is 931 real gigabytes.

So, OK, maybe not technically ninety gigs down the toilet. Maybe only 69, depending on which way you look at it.

Either way, that’s a lot of $US5000 18 megabyte Winchesters. And there are still plenty of hard drives on the retail shelves that don’t hold as much as this new one will rip you off for.

So, until someone starts selling a “1.1Tb” or larger drive, the true 1Tb barrier for single drives will not be broken.

The mismatch, of course, may be getting worse, but it arguably matters less and less, as the price per megabyte of hard drives continues to fall.

But that doesn’t mean that people in the year 2020, or whenever, won’t feel fleeced when their new “1Pb” drive only formats to a lousy 888 909 terabytes.

Apropos my previous mentions of this sort of thing, I couldn’t resist piling on about this Lifehacker post. It’s headlined by a simply excellent example of a user interface exploding into a Wain mandala of peripheral detail.

(My answer: A mere 15 active extensions, including of course the excellent ClumsyFingers. Plus a few zombies that don’t work with Firefox 2, none of which I’ve found myself actually missing.)

It is, indeed, not at all unreasonable to expect an automated system which knows what you did wrong and how to fix it to fix it for you, rather than to just officiously tell you to try again.

On the other hand, if an automated system that knows how something can be done better, yet also knows that you cannot do it better in your current situation, it should avoid encouraging false hope.

Others have pointed this piece of genius out before, but I think it bears repeating.

The nice people at Prevx, makers of the software which (you may recall) was the only darn thing that saved me from adware purgatory, have a malware database which you can search by filename. This won’t help with crapware that generates genuinely randomly named files, but a lot of crapware doesn’t do that.

I found Prevx by doing a plain old Google search for the name of an unwelcome DLL, but you can also search it more directly:

The jotti.org scanner lets you actually upload a file for analysis by multiple antivirus programs, while the Prevx scanner just works by filename. But neither of them cost anything, and the Prevx database is better than that of any combination of “antivirus” programs I’ve seen.

Full disclosure: Prevx don’t have an affiliate program, but they’ve said they’ll tip me a buck or two if I send them lots of traffic (and, thereby, generate some sales of the full Prevx1 application. Prevx1 has a fully functional trial period, though, so it can get you out of your current jam for free).

They’ve also given me a Prevx1 license for free.

I’ll try not to spend that all in one place.

NOTE: Prevx have now changed their software so that, like various other commercial spyware killers, it finds infections and then refuses to fix them until you pay up. (And my old license key doesn’t even work any more.)