sony

A nice Labor Day.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday was nice. I got up late, then bummed around all day. I did a couple of loads of laundry, and I put a different hard drive in my Duron-750. Then I ignored my e-mail, ignored the site for the most part, and installed Wintendo (er, Windows Me) and Baseball Mogul. Around 6 I went out and bought a CD changer. My old 25-disc Pioneer died around Christmas time and I never got around to replacing it until now.
I knew I didn’t want another Pioneer. I’ve taken that Pioneer apart to fix it before, and I wasn’t impressed with the workmanship at all. And current Pioneer models are made in China. So much for those. I looked at a Technics and a couple of Sonys. Finally, swallowing hard, I dropped $250 on a 300-disc Sony model (made in Malaysia). I still suspect it’ll be dead within five years, but maybe it’ll surprise me.

I am impressed with the sound quality. It sounds much better than my Pioneer ever did. It’s really sad when you can tell a difference in sound quality between two CD players, but I guess that just goes to show how many corners Pioneer cut on that model. Next time I go CD player shopping, I’m going to bring a disc or two along to listen to in the store so I can hear the difference.

Anyhoo, I played two seasons of Baseball Mogul and guided Boston to two world championships and a boatload of money. But something happened that made me mad. I noticed over in the AL Central, Tony Muser’s Losers, a.k.a. the Kansas City Royals, were above .500, with essentially the same team that’s looking to lose 100 games this season. Well, there was no Donnie Sadler, Muser’s secret weapon, currently batting about .137 (which also seems to be about Tony Muser’s IQ, seeing as he keeps playing the guy). So the Royals minus Muser and Sadler were a .500 club. That’s nice to know.

Then, for 2002, Kansas City went and got the biggest free-agent bat they could afford. They also didn’t trade superstar right fielder Jermaine Dye, and they re-signed shortstop Rey Sanchez. And what happened? Well, the first round of the playoffs was a Boston-Kansas City affair, that’s what. I’d used the previous year’s windfall to buy myself an All-Star team, so I rolled over Kansas City in four games. I felt kind of bad about that, but it was partly because of my record against KC’s rivals that year that they made it that far, so not too bad.

It’s all I can do to keep from e-mailing Royals GM Allaird Baird and asking him why, if Tony Muser insists on playing Donnie Sadler every day, he doesn’t consider letting the pitcher bat and have the DH hit for Sadler instead.

And shocking news. HP is buying Compaq. I didn’t believe it either. Compaq’s recent problems, after all, were partly due to its purchase of Digital Equipment Corp. and its inability to digest the huge company. The only benefit I see to this is HP getting Compaq’s service division and eliminating a competitor–Compaq’s acquisition of DEC made more sense than this does.

03/14/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Just a note about yesterday. The missing backslashes in Tony Brewer’s mail were my fault, not his. Manilla uses the backslash as a control character, so unless I double up on them Manilla munches them and you get run-together strings like c:windowscommandattrib.exe.

And a memory tip. I read in The Register yesterday that at least one industry expert expects memory prices are about to climb. With brand-name PC133 128s going for $40, if you’re in the market, go get it.

My sources have been wrong every time I’ve said memory prices looked like they’d level off, so I almost hesitate to say anything, but I’d hate to see prices quadruple next month without me saying something.

Then again, if brand-name PC133s are going for $20 next month I’ll feel equally foolish, so I guess I can’t win, can I?

Speaking of prices, I don’t have any new sources of $35 motherboards this week, but I can probably find one if someone wants…

Given the title of this site, I wish I had some great tidbit to pass on, but I spent half the day playing with ramdisks and the other half trying to figure out why someone’s laptop couldn’t see the router even though the router was seeing the laptop. Not very inspiring.

So enough about computers. Let’s talk about music, seeing as Napster has some ultimatum by today. I think today’s the day the hammer falls if they aren’t filtering out certain titles. This should be interesting, seeing as Sony didn’t provide them with filenames to filter like the court ordered, and there are at least two efforts under way to encrypt/decrypt filenames real-time. Ironically, record companies’ efforts to defeat that effort are supposedly forbidden by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

One of my favorite bands of all time is coming back. I’ve been hearing rumblings off and on about a new album from Depeche Mode for several years, but they actually look to release a new album in a couple of months.

It’s hard to imagine that Mode’s last great album, 1990’s Violator, came out 11 years ago. Songs of Faith and Devotion, their 1993 effort, was overshadowed by the efforts of that year’s up-and-coming alternative rock bands, and the band’s troubles didn’t end there. First keyboardist Alan Wilder left the group, then lead singer Dave Gahan, battling heroin addiction, attempted suicide. After Gahan spent time in rehab, the band released 1997’s Ultra, which was just totally ignored. I’d love to be proven wrong on this, but I suspect this newest effort will be ignored too.

My grandparents’ generation swooned to Frank Sinatra. My parents swooned to Elvis Presley. My generation swooned to The Cure and Depeche Mode. (I’m trying to figure out if this should frighten me.) I guess I should find out what the youth of today swoon to, but I’ve got a feeling after I find out, I’ll understand it about as much as my parents understood The Cure and Mode. And that’s why I don’t think this album will go too far. Mode’s audience doesn’t buy that many records anymore, and to the demographic who does buy records these days, Mode will sound like a relic of a bygone day.

The quality of the album is hard to gauge from the 30-second snippets on their site, but the content isn’t. Mode specializes in two types of songs: spiritual alienation songs and make-out songs. And somehow they usually manage to sound depressed in both types of song. What can I say? They’re talented. People don’t call ’em “Depressed Mode” for nothing.

But I’ve gotten off track. Exciter looks to be a make-out album, with one obligatory song of spiritual alienation (“Breathe,” which is a bit surprising because that sounds like a make-out title if I ever heard one). As for the sound, the synthesizers are much more prominent this time around than they were on the last two albums. They sound like Depeche Mode again, rather than sounding like Depeche Mode following whatever’s trendy that year.

And at the risk of going off track again, do girls take it as an insult when someone dedicates a Depeche Mode song to one of them? They probably should. “Enjoy the Silence” sounds like a love song, and on one level it is, but the lyrics are really just a long-winded, disguised way of saying, “Shut up.”

“Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm…”

Or maybe I’m the only one who pays that much attention to lyrics. Probably.

And speaking of albums that’ve been long overdue… I checked in on Peter Gabriel’s Up over the weekend. Supposedly that’ll be released this summer. Gabriel announced Up in 1998, days before R.E.M. announced their next record, which was also titled Up. As I recall, R.E.M. actually apologized for that. That turned out to be totally unnecessary, seeing as it’s now two and a half years later, R.E.M.’s Up is mostly forgotten (a shame because it was good), and Gabriel’s album of the same name still hasn’t been released.

Let’s see… After four self-titled albums, Gabriel got caught in a rut of two-letter names for his studio albums: 1986’s So, 1992’s Us, and then whenever’s Up. Who’s to say his follow-up, which at this rate would probably come out in about 2013, will be titled It? Fits the pattern, and it’d be a fitting title for a final effort.

Monitor buying tips

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

Monitor time. Looks like I’m in the market for a new monitor now. I was talking about monitors the other day with a Web developer, who observed that when you buy a good monitor, it tends to stick around forever–the CPU just changes. He’s right.

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The AT’s coming out of retirement

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , ,

Scary thoughts. UPS dropped off a pair of Soyo AT socket 370 motherboards while I was at work yesterday. So I’ll be picking those up from the apartment office after it opens this morning. That only means one thing. My PC/AT is about to come out of retirement.

Let’s think about that for a minute. When this ancient thing was built, Ronald Reagan was just starting his second term. The Soviet Union still existed, and the Evil Empire loomed large. The most popular game console wasn’t the Sony Playstation–it was the Atari 2600. Some popular rock’n’roll bands of the day: The Police and Duran Duran. U2 was on the map and rock critics knew them, but to the majority of people, the name conjured up images of a spyplane if it meant anything at all. The minivan as we know it today was just coming onto the market.

Dell Computer Corp. existed only as an operation out of a dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin, and it was known as PCs Limited. Gateway 2000 didn’t yet exist. The #2 maker of IBM-compatible PCs was Tandy.

Popular movies included Romancing the Stone, The Terminator, and Sixteen Candles.

U.S. airlines that were still in business: TWA, Eastern, and Pan Am. The most troubled airline at the time was Branniff Airways, which was in a long bankruptcy proceeding (it would later make a comeback, then die again).

Anyway… I pulled the PC/AT case out of storage, dug out some drive rails, found some Phillips screws that fit it (IBM insisted on using old-style slotted screws for some insane reason–I hate those), and I even dug out a vintage YE Data 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy drive like IBM used. Then, noticing the 17 years’ worth of accumulated grime, I gave the case a bath. Now it looks two years old instead of 17. Actually, it looks pretty darn good. They don’t build ’em like that anymore. Of course, for what that case would cost to build today, an OEM can probably build an entire PC.

I’ve also accumulated other components: a junky Trident-based AGP video card is also about to come out of retirement, as is my old Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum card with SCSI interface. That CD-ROM drive died long ago, but I’ve got an NEC 2-speed SCSI drive that looks great in the case. (This system’s all about retro looks; if I need speed, I’ll use a CD-ROM drive off my network.) To accomodate that, I’ve got a D-Link 10/100 PCI NIC.

Just one thing’s holding up this project: Computer Surplus Outlet just shipped my Celeron processors. I ordered the boards and chips the same day. That’s annoying.

Selecting a mass storage medium

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

Thursday, 5/4/00
CD-RW vs. Zip vs. Superdisk. Mail from India.

I am writing from New Delhi, India.

I read your comments on the site concerning ‘super floppies’. I would be very grateful if you could help me in this matter.

I have been thinking for some time about whether to buy a CDR drive or a ZIP drive. Recently my computer was hit by the CIH virus. Some of my data was lost.

I am a graphic designer as well. Consequently I need to transfer heavy files of an average of 10-15 MB to the printers or to show to my clients. I have been using file splitting softwares of late — but now I feel the need of alternative means of carrying the data for them.

Also some people say that CDRW cannot be read by some CD ROMs. I primarily need the drives for data back-up and transferring 10-15 MB files b/w printers, clients and my office.

Should I be buying an HP CDR or an Iomega 250 MB zip drive ?

I would be extremely helpful, if you could help me in my decision.

Thanking you,

Anshuman Bhargava.

First off, I’m sorry to hear about CIH getting you. We really need to find other ways to amuse 15-year-olds.

You are correct that some CD-ROM drives won’t read CD-RW discs. It’s a sure bet that any drive more than about three years old (pre-1997) won’t. Drives made since 1997 are supposed to be able to read them, but that doesn’t always happen. But with CD-R discs selling for peanuts, at least in the United States, that’s not too much of a concern. I’m usually willing to spend 75 cents on a CD-R I only use once. (I try to think of it as wasting 75 cents, rather than wasting 600 megs when I use a CD-R to transport a 20-meg file. Somehow that seems less wasteful.)

I had a conversation at work about Zips vs. Superdisk vs. CD-R/CD-RW the other day. I have a Zip drive, and I use it exclusively for installing Windows on computers I can’t easily connect a CD-ROM drive to. That’s it. I don’t trust it with any data I value. I’ve just seen too many of them fail. I know graphic designers swear by Zips when they aren’t swearing at them, but I’ve seen too many disks and drives fail. The Superdisk looks good, and Imation is on more solid financial ground than Iomega so I’m much more confident that Imation will be around in 5 years than I am about Iomega, but the LS-120 superdisk is much less common, and its capacity is lower.

If I were in your position, I’d get a CD-RW drive (I like Yamaha and Plextor, though I’ve also used HP, Sony and Philips drives) along with a spindle of CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Once you have a good idea which of your clients can handle CD-RWs and which ones have to use CD-Rs, you’ll be in good shape.

From an archival standpoint, CD-Rs make me a lot less nervous than either Zip or LS-120, because they’re optical rather than magnetic. I have plenty of 15-year-old floppy disks still floating around, but I’m not very confident many of them are still readable. Longevity varies greatly depending on the quality of the media, but you should be able to expect a couple of decades at least from quality CD-R (Kodak, Taiyo Yuden, and Mitsui discs are the safest; Kodak is the easiest of the three to find), plus they’re cheap, plus they can’t be damaged by viruses or user error. I periodically burn everything that matters to me to CD.

I hope this helps.