It’s the 21st Century, Stupid!

It’s been far too long since I posted anything here and I sincerely hope to do better. But…real life and other things can get in the way if you let them. I rebuilt a computer about six months ago for someone and then the hard drive in it decided to go into a coma about six weeks ago. Given I wasn’t sure why this nice new drive had decided to forget everything it had been fed I did a bit of research and found that this particular case/power supply combination had some bad capacitors in some of the power supplies. Just in case I replaced the power supply and the hard drive, did a clean install of XP and then started trying to recover data without spending a fortune. In the end the most successful recovery software was Partition Find and Mount. It’s free to use if you’re patient but I wasn’t so I paid my $43.95 for the upgrade to Pro.

Before finding this utility at one point I was weak and impatient and after not getting all the data I needed with the first 4 or 5 attempts even took the drive (in an enclosure) and a drive to copy the data to over to the nearby Best Buy. Guess what? Nothing. Not one bit of data. At least they didn’t charge me for their failure. If I wanted to give them a second chance they would have charged me over $500 and would ship the drive to their main shop. No, thanks.

But of course he didn’t mean to. Some people cite The Law of Unintended Consequences like it’s always a bad thing. But it isn’t. Often discoveries derive from the most unexpected backgrounds and the results of one innovation can lead to another and another in the most marvelous ways. Check out the shows Connections, Connections², Connections³ or The Day the Universe Changed all hosted by James Burke. Or maybe you could find the books. What does any of this have to do with Gary Gygax? Just read this piece in the New York Times by Adam Rogers, a senior editor at Wired.

Some people never understood anything about the appeal of D&D. But while I was never heavily into playing I did play a few times and understand the appeal. Consider what happened one time when playing with a friend who was running an “introductory” dungeon for some people who had never played the game or only played once or twice before. I was playing the character of a sorcerer and our group had been tossed into a dungeon. Our first task in this adventure was of course to escape our prison. Being a very low level sorcerer I had very few spells in my arsenal and none of them were very powerful. But I decided to give something a try anyway and cast that old standby, the magic missile, at a bar of our jail. The dungeonmaster rolled the dice to see what would happen, blinked at the results and said in a surprised voice “It worked. The bar has broken apart and you can escape between the remaining ones.”. It was an unexpected action that forced the DM to adapt in an instant to an entirely new set of circumstances and change his plans accordingly and granted the group an unexpected advantage. That sort of thing and the getting together of friends with a common interest is one of the appeals of what Gary Gygax helped create and that he still enjoyed, hosting D&D sessions at his home as recently as January. He wasn’t a saint, more of a curmudgeon in some ways from what I hear, but at a minimum even if you don’t buy some of what Rogers wrote, he co-created a game system that still entertains millions to this day along with its progeny.

Yesterday I was helping someone shop for a laptop and researching two different models. One of them was the Dell XPS M1330. It had two technologies that made for a lighter laptop with excellent performance. One was available at only a moderate price premium and the other really kicked up the price. The first of these was a display that is backlit by LCDs instead of a fluorescent bulb. It works well and provides for a thinner, lighter screen. The other is a SSD, a Solid State Disk. With current technology these drives are outrageously expensive and don’t provide as much storage as current disk technology. In the Dell a 64 GB drive added $900 onto the price when replacing the default 120 GB drive.

What’s interesting is that I just found a small article in PC World about a new storage technology called PMC, for programmable metallization cell. Looking online I found this slightly larger article on Wired. Basically this method of storage uses a new technology called nano-ionics to build a microscopic copper bridge between electrodes on demand. If a bridge exists it represents a one, no bridge represents a zero. The difference in capacity is mind-boggling, with a terabyte of memory in a thumb-drive like the one in my pocket easily doable. One of the researchers involved in the project said that the storage based on this technique should cost one-tenth the price of current flash drive and be one thousand times as energy efficient as current flash memory. So if this technology is applied to the kind of SSD in the M1330 it would be entirely likely that an amazingly fast SSD with storage in terabytes should be cheaper than current notebook hard drives. Very impressive. Imagine the speed of this storage for a media server. Or picture the giant libraries of film that can be stored much more readily in massive on-demand movie libraries. Me, I look forward to a really economical way to quit messing with tapes for backup since I just don’t trust them. And the first products are expected to show up in about 18 months. Tick. Tick. Tick.

I found references recently to an extremely useful little tool called CPU-Z from CPUID. It’s small, fast, extremely useful and you don’t even have to install the program. Just tell it to run and it will tell you about your motherboard, memory, cpu and BIOS. The utility itself is free. There’s even an SDK for developers who are interested in incorporating the engine into their own software. There’s also an even more in-depth utility called PC Wizard as well as some other things. If you ever need some of this information or are just curious you ought to check it out.

The basis of this blog is in part the idea that things change and in many cases we’re better off adapting than trying to remain stuck in the past. Or to put it in another way if you base your plans and beliefs on the way things were instead of the way things are, odds are the plans aren’t going to work out very well.

But some things really shouldn’t go away completely and instead should at least exist even if some change is necessary. A new show on PBS, Wired Science, did a segment entitled Dangerous Science about how the ability for youngsters and adult amateurs to do hands on science is almost extinct. There’s no longer any such thing as a real chemistry set, many chemicals and materials that amateur scientists and tinkerers need will set off alarms in Homeland Security and even school labs are hesitant to let their students do real hands-on experiments that some timid administrators apparently feel might get them sued if anything goes wrong. Haven’t these people ever heard of a release form?

But if you’re one of those who occasionally feel the stirrings of a desire to find out things for yourself there does exist at least one resource, United Nuclear. Believe me, you owe it to yourself to at least browse around their site.

CNet news has an article on the Energy Department’s 2007 Solar Decathlon. It’s a really good idea and I’ve seen something of it before when a television special hosted by Tom Friedman went there. Of course the day Friedman and his crew visited it was cloudy and raining.

But there is another contest that I wish would get a lot more exposure and hopefully more ideas that would then be put into use. It is the Affordable Housing Development Competition, sponsored mainly by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. Heck, until I thought to look for one because the thought that a contest such as this would be a good idea I didn’t even know it existed though I thought that surely somebody would be doing something similar.

Just think if we could merge the concepts from the two and begin producing some affordable housing that’s also energy efficient so the energy bills of the people who can’t afford huge bills could be minimized.

Most software companies worry about piracy and intellectual property theft. This is only reasonable. But then the question becomes what do you do about it? How does that decision affect your customers and what are your obligations to them?

This was driven home to a lot of people recently. A company named AppForge made a very useful program that allowed programmers to develop applications for almost every hand held device available. And you could do it in Visual Basic, a language that some hard core computer geeks hate but many programmers find useful for rapidly developing applications. Their program wasn’t cheap and in addition to the cost of the development environment they started charging for every “booster”, the component that you have to install on any device you want to run your programs. To enforce this, each booster had to be activated in a process similar to when you activate your copy of Windows or some other programs. This activation depends on servers maintained by the software company.

Well, in March AppForge went out of business. There was no advance warning and the company made no provisions for its customers. The company’s IP was purchased by Oracle, one of the industry’s big kahunas in databases and other business software and everything else went to a financial services company. No one is running activation servers. Every customer of AppForge’s who needs to install their software on a new device or anyone who needs to reinstall the main software on a PC for any reason is out of luck. Until someone figures a way to crack their activation algorithm it’s not possible.

The company I work for was considering whether we needed to upgrade the version of AppForge we are using though we hadn’t needed to yet. Then one day I went to their web site and was redirected to Oracle. Our old version doesn’t have that pitfall and I have the code that lets ours work. I’ve never been so glad to be running an old version of a piece of software.  Sometime if we still want to develop for Palm OS V.5 or later I’ll have to find something else that will do the job but I do wonder about all of those customers left in a major league lurch and it makes me wonder about the business model that relies on servers like this. I think that lots of people who got burned by AppForge or those who hear this story will hopefully start asking their vendors “What if…”. I know that I will.