Dean's World

The best blogs are easily the equal of the best opinion columnists at the New York Times.

- Jimmy Wales, at Public Media 2008.

My motherboard crapped out on me. $420 later I pretty much have a new PC that's actually faster than the one that died.

My motherboard is about four years old. I bought it when I built my rig. It was socket 939 which, it would appear, no one carries retail any longer. Sure, I could have paid $50 and got one online but, I supposed, it was time to upgrade. I knew that with a new board I'd need a new processor. NO big deal. Now I'm kicking it with an AMD 2.1 GHz dual core. I didn't anticipate having to buy new memory (2GB DDR2 down from my old 4GB DDR). Oh, and a new power supply. Apparently a 20 pin plug into your motherboard isn't as good as a 24 pin. So, now I have a new 550 watt power supply that's not as kewl as my old one because that one was internally lit - I have a window on the side of my tower. All my fans are LED lit as well. I still need to get some neon in there too.

So, motherboard dies, I need to get new motherboard, processor, RAM, and power supply.

The board is SATA but has one IDE chain. It didn't occur to me until I got home and installed it that I needed two (I'm not buying new SATA hard drives). Off to Newegg.com to order a PCI card that'll give me an additional IDE chain. So, no DVD- or CD-ROM support until Thursday. And wouldn't you know it? It appears AGP has gone bye-bye. So, my old video card is useless. Newegg.com again for a new PCI Express video card.

The lesson here?

Never get off the technology train. Ever. Replace one part with something newer and you gotta redo the whole stinking thing.

Everyone.

"We're not out trying to make a big splash on any of this stuff at this point," Nebel said. But he said he's hoping to find out by this spring whether or not Bussard's concept is worth pursuing with a larger demonstration project.

The initial analysis showed that Bussard's data on energy yields were consistent with expectations, Nebel said.

Right now this is only available for Mac users, but it has exciting implications.

What I’d like to be able to do is use photos or fractals or some kind of random visual in conjunction with music – rather like the old 60’s era light shows. Wouldn’t that be cool for a party? 

Or even when you’re by yourself and have your music station running on your cable or satellite.

I walk you through the process of finding one at Haibane.info. The key words are vigilance, and perseverance.

And if you still can't score a Wii, consider a Vii instead.

The ADVANCED TASER M18L includes an optional laser sight to aid in aiming and uses a replaceable cartridge containing compressed nitrogen to deploy two small probes that are attached to the ADVANCED TASER M18/M18L by insulated conductive wires with a maximum length of 15 feet (4.5 meters).

The 911 call came from a Pasadena, Tex., resident, who alerted police to two burglary suspects on a neighbor's property. Before he hung up, two men were dead by his hand.

The men were reportedly shot at a distance of less than 15 feet.

Just like me, my computer is getting old and has started forgetting things. ;>)

I can’t give da ‘puter gingko biloba or brain exercises, so I’m going to be replacing it.

Thing is, in the four or so years since I got this one, the market has changed. Used to be you could go to Dell or Gateway and hook up with a decent system for around $300. Now they start at $600 and don’t even have any software! (Well, not the kind I need, anyway.)

My needs are less simple than they used to be. I’ve recently got an RCA Small Wonder video camera and am making lotsa videos of the grandkids.

I also need Publisher, or something like it. The ‘puter I have right now is the first ever that didn’t have it, and it’s getting old waiting until I get to work to use Publisher. Other than those two things, I don’t do much but word processing and internet stuff.

Last summer when I first started thinking about a new system, I had no need to worry about the cost – I was going to get whatever I wanted. Only I’ve since quit the big bucks job as of Nov 1, and I’m back to economizing again. Guess I shouldn’t have spent so much on Christmas (I did all my shopping in October) but who knew?

Even tho I’ve got an old A+ cert, and probably could, I really don’t want to build my own. I want something plug-n-play, out of the box. This is a desktop model I’m looking for.

I’m open to suggestions!

Wellington, Fla.-based Devil Mountain Software ran several versions of XP and Vista through a test simulating common desktop computing tasks. It found the original Vista performed 50 percent to 100 percent slower than the prevalent XP Service Pack 2, or SP2.

Bussard received nearly $2 million under a U.S. Navy contract in August to continue work on an inertial electrostatic confinement reactor he had developed. The reactor uses magnetic fields to confine electrons, whose negative charge causes protons and Boron 11 atoms to fuse. The fusion sets off a chain of reactions that produces electricity.

Now, before anybody puts in their 2 cents worth, I want you to know I use Windows Defender on automatic daily, and SpyBot less frequently, but certainly not never. I know about online security. I've been online since 1995.

I just sent an e-mail to a friend, and the system sent it to an e-mail addy I'd never seen before.

Weirds me out, it does.

Any suggestions?

One more thing -- yes I do run AVG anti-virus daily.

Every culture creates a mythology or mythology unique unto itself. Some are a little more unique and/or derivative than others, but it always happens. With Americans, I would argue that we have created, via Hollywood, at least two instantly recognizable mythologies:

1) The "old west" 2) Pirates of the Caribbean

One might also add the tales of the American Revolution, many of which are apocryphal or probably false (like George Washington and the cherry tree), and also the entire concept of the super-hero (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc.).

Anyway, without getting too in-depth on any of that I note that yesterday was "Talk Like A Pirate Day," a humorous "holiday" we've "observed" here on Dean's World for years now. Now the truth of the matter is that real pirates, modern or historical, is a wicked, disgusting career somewhere between street gang hood and mafioso or terrorist. It's not particularly funny either--murdering, raping, robbing, and pillaging people for fun and profit on the high seas is no more funny or admirable than murdering, raping, robbing, and pillaging people for fun and profit in other contexts.

Still, most mythology is based on something. For example, the "old west" in the United States is based on a very brief period of American history, lasting no more than 20-30 years, in the late 1800s in the Western states. Not unlike the legends of, say, Robin Hood or King Arthur, figures who probably didn't exist in reality but even if they did exist far greater in human imagination than in actual history.

A similar Hollywood/historical fiction is the idea of the "pirate." Having little resemblance to real pirates (who are, by definition, murdering, raping, stealing thugs), the "pirate" is a Hollywood movie/mythology that endures. Like "the old West" (which also existed, but for a very brief period), there was a "Golden Age of Piracy" in the Caribbean, wherein various governments basically gave a blind eye or even actively encouraged piracy on the high seas. For example, there actually was a dread Pirate Roberts, although his reality was somewhat at odds with the beloved "The Princess Bride" movie.

Mythology is almost always bullcrap, but that doesn't take away from my enjoyment of it. No, there was no Man of Steel. No, there was no Treasure Island. No, the Old West was nothing more than a brief period of perhaps 20, 30 years], mostly of ruffianshp and barbarism. If there was a real King Arthur (doubtful) he likely wore animal skins and ruled in a manner reminiscent of modern street gang rules. Such is the nature of history and legend.

Still, the legend of the romantic and perversely admirable pirate endures in the American lexicon. I can recognize and enjoy this even while recognizing that it's as full of crap as the average John Wayne movie. Still, there was a reality that underlay much of the mythology. See the history of The Golden Age of Piracy" for a bit more info." My own take is that modern-day terrorism should be viewed and treated much like piracy in the days of yore: pirates and terrorists are the acknowledged and proud enemies of civilization and cutthroats and murderers by definition, people who are at war with civilization by definition, and should be treated accordingly.

Last night I moved my son into his apartment- he'll be attending Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH and found an opportunity to live cheaply off-campus, so he jumped at it. As we unloaded the van and he and his roommate unpacked I reached for my cell phone to call home and let my wife know I would be later than I'd thought...

NO SERVICE.

I asked them about it and they both flipped open their phones...

NO SERVICE.

And so we finished and I headed home, trying not to giggle too hard at the thought of these two teenagers, children of the age of total connectivity, sitting in their new apartment up in the hills of Northern New Hampshire with no phone, no cable TV, no Internet, and a 30 minute drive to any place they might be able to avail themselves of such things.

The Cable and Internet won't be connected until next weekend. I figure he'll be home by tomorrow morning.

from his climate policy speech at the NYU Law School on Sep. 18, 2006.

Many believe that a responsible approach to sharply reducing global warming pollution would involve a significant increase in the use of nuclear power plants as a substitute for coal-fired generators. While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity. The main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger role in the world's energy future is not the problem of waste disposal or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to terrorist attack. Let's assume for the moment that all three of these problems can be solved. That still leaves two serious issues that are more difficult constraints. The first is economics; the current generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and only come in one size -- extra large. In a time of great uncertainty over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in electricity demand -- and that uncertainty causes them to strongly prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000 megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon. Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in both Iran and North Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs. Moreover, proposals to separate the ownership of reactors from the ownership of the fuel supply process have met with stiff resistance from developing countries who want reactors. As a result of all these problems, I believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role.

discuss.

So, When I press the power button on my current computer, I get a repeating long beep. And nothing else. This doesn't conform to any of the beep codes I know, or can look up. I figure it means that either my memory, motherboard, or CPU have died...

Since my current setup is about 4 years old, I decided to get all new everything. I'm going from: AMD 3200XP with 1gig of DDR 333 RAM To: Intel Core 2 Duo (E6300 2X1.86GHz) with 2 gigs of DDR2 667RAM (with this motherboard)

My questions are: 1) How much more does my new system rock over my old system? That's not bragging, that's a real question.

2) Will my Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s connectors support my old ATA100 hard drive? What about my DVD drives-- the ones that are on the same circuit as my hard drive?

3) I've heard that Intel is significantly cooler than AMD, is this true? Does anyone know if this motherboard has a built in thermal gauge?

Anything else I should be thinking of? Thanks in advance!

I've never heard of the guy but this is utterly fascinating.

I've got an irritating problem- I moved 3500years.com to a new host, and now all the old posts have question marks (???) where there were quotation marks, apostrophes and ellipsis's.

I'm running MT 3.17 and I tried adjusting the character encoding in the mt config file, but no luck. What I've finally done is export my entries, paste it into notepad, then I used find/replace to swap curly quotes and apostrophes with straight ones and ellipsis's with three periods.

Now... do I have to delete all posts and comments, then re-import the adjusted file? Am I missing something? Anyone? Bueller?

And before anyone suggests it- I'm not interested in upgrading to a newer version.

For a bracing look at the real flaws of the space shuttle from day one, I've never found anything better than this:

Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty.

It was first published in 1980, before the first shuttle launch, and it's hard to find anything about it that didn't turn out to be completely correct. If anything, it underestimated what a boondoggle the space shuttle has been.

The space shuttle has proven much less economical, much less reliable, and much more dangerous than any of the launch systems it replaced. And has proven to be incapable of most of the things it was supposed to be able to do.

It may be hard to admit all that while being impressed with watching it take off and land, but that's the hard truth.

We need to scrap these obsolete death traps. We can have much better, for much cheaper. It only requires the will.

Dave Adds: For something truly revolutionary, check out Tom Ligon's ISDC presentation on how a Polywell fusion drive could allow us to start colonizing the solar system in our lifetimes. A permanent moonbase for $12B, a Mars base for $15B!

I know, I know. You see "food" and "buzz" together, and you think perhaps all the alcohol didn't cook off. But it actually refers to a new site, foodbuzz.com. It has a lot of potential as a place to find both recipes and restaurants. If there is a place you want to tell the world about, or are looking for a place that someone else has like, give it a try...

FoodBuzz

(full disclosure: a good friend of mine designed the site. Having said that, I've used the site myself to find a couple good places to eat)

The great question of our times: HD-DVD or Blu-Ray? I think the writing is on the wall. It's HD-DVD by a mile, no question.

I don't know how well it actually prints, copies, faxes, or scans. I do know that it never misses an opportunity to intrude itself on my consciousness. Also: it installed 3 programs that launch every time my computer boots up...

Lexmark: you will never hear me say a kind word about you from now on. Your foul software has earned my unremitting enmity. I will take every chance I have from now on to badmouth your products...

I feel better now...

It’s a common thread in the comments section of many a political and cultural-issues website: blogging is useless. It affects nothing, changes nothing, has no impact on the greater issues of our time. When anonymous cyber-commentators fail to appreciate the fact that if blogging is useless, commenting on blogs is less than useless, irony is certainly dead—however, that’s not my point. I want to talk about what I call ‘the Conversation’.

The term first occurred to me when we started getting television out of Iraq again. Most if not all of the Iraqi satellite channels went offline during the first year of the war. Then, in the autumn of 2004, we started getting a signal: a simple computerized list of displaced Iraqis seeking their relatives that would scroll down the screen as Iraqi folk-songs played in the background. Though we didn’t know who these people were, though a highly censored episode of Friends was playing on one of the culturally schizophrenic channels out of the Gulf, it seemed all of Cairo was glued to this timid little channel beamed from Baghdad. It was a sign; the olive branch retrieved from a flooded world, the simple message that the entire Arab world had been waiting for: ‘We’re still here’. People watched that scrolling list of names and wept.

And then, there were pixels: Deus ex machina, God from the machine. One little signal out of Baghdad had done more to reassure people that normalcy might again be possible than a year of press releases. I realized that what was truly crucial to the digital age was not information but conversation: a vast, real-time, evolving dinner table discussion about the state of the world. It was made up, by and large, of the voices of ordinary people with ordinary concerns, not grand theories. Bloggers, though often crude, formed an essential part of that conversation. Sure, blogging probably doesn’t change very many minds about very much. It probably hasn’t swung very many votes. But what it has done and continues to do is erode individual prejudices. The blogger effect is the butterfly effect: on the information superhighway, one person encounters another person of wildly different politics and disposition, and because the anonymity of the internet provokes a candor you don’t get anywhere else, comes to respect him. They don’t agree. They’ll never agree. But what they will do is make an effort to understand each other.

Those who run down the blogging phenomenon and new media in general misunderstand the nature of change: they expect it to come all at once, in a wave, as a sudden overturning. But more often than not, sustainable change happens one person at a time. There will be no revolution that reconciles East and West, no great détente that resolves Left and Right. Differences will never be eliminated, but they can be understood. In this capacity, the Conversation is not only far from useless, it is essential.