Author: Dave Farquhar

03/05/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Dual CPU blues. I’ve had my dual Celeron-500 apart for a while, for reasons that escape me, and over the weekend I finally got around to putting it back together. At one time this would have seemed an impressive system–Aureal Vortex 2 audio, TNT2 video, dual 500 MHz CPUs (which I’m actually running at around 510 MHz because I bumped the FSB speed up to 68 MHz, within the tolerance levels of most modern peripherals), and 320 MB RAM. But let me tell you–it’s a lot faster than it sounds. The 733-MHz Pentium IIIs at work used to make me jealous. No longer. I’ll put my dualie 500 up against them any day of the week.

Just out of curiosity, I tried my CPU stress test from last week on it. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get CPU usage up to 100 percent. I’d top out at about 96 percent. I’m not sure if that’s because of the dual CPUs or because I’m running Windows 2000 on it instead of NT4. I’m sure a complex Photoshop filter could max both chips out, but that’s not what I do. I fired up Railroad Tycoon II, and it was unbelievable. CPU usage hovered around 60 percent and it was smooth as silk, even with the more system-intensive scenarios from the Second Century add-on pack.

Unfortunately, the golden age of inexpensive multiprocessing is over, at least for now. Current Celerons won’t do SMP. I understand why–Intel doesn’t want you to buy two cheap CPUs instead of one expensive one. Like I said, I’ll take my dual 500s over a P3-733 any day of the week. A P3-733 costs about $200. My 500s were 40 bucks a pop. So, unfortunately, to get dual processing these days, you have to get a pair of P3s, which will start at about $140 apiece for a P3-667. The least expensive SMP board I know of is the VIA-based Abit VP6, which sells for about $140. So you’re looking at about $450 to get into dual CPUs by the time you get the board, CPUs and fans. That’s not an outrageous deal, but seeing as an Abit BP6 and a pair of Celerons with fans used to set you back about $350, it’s a shame.

If AMD can ever work through the problems they’re having with the AMD 760MP chipset, it’ll help a little but not as much as you may think. The AMD-based boards will be expensive–expect them to start at $200 or possibly even $250– because they use a different bus that requires a lot more pins and a lot more added expense. So while you’ll be able to multiprocess with $60 CPUs again, you’re looking at higher up-front cost. The least expensive dual-Duron rig will only cost about $50 less than the least expensive dual-P3 rig. But the dual-Duron rig stands a decent chance of outrunning the dual-P3, because the clockspeed will be higher, and the CPUs each get their own path to all the relevant buses.

And I’ve reached a new low. Last night I had a craving for a burger. So I did what any self-respecting part-time vegetarian who didn’t know any better would do: I went on a quest to find soyburgers. My friend Jeanne, who says I stole the idea of giving up meat for Lent from her (and maybe subconsciously I did) warned me they won’t taste like meat. And I’m pretty sure my dad–whose idea of four servings of vegetables a day was the pickles and ketchup on two hamburgers, beef of course–was rolling his eyes at me from Upstairs (If God has a sense of humor, which wouldn’t surprise me, He opened the portal so Dad could get a good look at the look on my face after the first bite).

And? Well, I guess soyburgers aren’t too much of an atrocity. Better than McDonald’s? Well, yeah, but then again so’s the cherry-flavored flouride treatment at the dentist’s office. They’re somewhere between beef and imitation bacon bits in both smell and taste. You definitely want to put other stuff on it to distract you–I got some good pickles, some good mustard, and ketchup, and wished I’d gone further. Hmm. Lettuce and tomato, no question. And I’m wondering if alfalfa sprouts would be good on a burger? I’m also wondering where you buy alfalfa sprouts. Oh, and get REALLY good rolls.

I can probably develop a taste for them, but it will definitely be an acquired taste. There was a time, back before I realized I wanted to live past age 27, when I could eat real hamburgers two meals a day for weeks at a time and be perfectly happy–and jokingly wondering why I didn’t eat them for breakfast too. That won’t happen with the soyburgers. I think what’s left of my package of four should get me through Lent.

Oh yeah. They aren’t as good as the real thing and they cost a lot more. What’s up with that? I thought stuff that was lower on the food chain was supposed to be cheaper. I guess that’s only when it’s not being marketed to SUV liberals. (Psst. Marketing tip: SUV liberals like unbleached paperboard. The paperboard that went into my packaging is definitely bleached. And lose the plastic wrap on the burgers. SUV liberals hate that. Good move on putting two burgers per plastic bag though–you’re at least thinking a little. But you gotta go all the way. That’s why they put two “Be Kind to Mother Earth” bumper stickers–printed on unbleached material, of course–on their Ford Excursions.)

I think I’ll be eating a lot of mushroom ravioli for the next few weeks, if I can ever find someplace that sells it again. You’d think in St. Louis, of all places–where there are almost as many good Italian restaurants as there are stop signs–you’d be able to find mushroom ravioli. I guess true blue St. Louisans like beef.

03/04/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

PC building sanity check. I’m getting really tired of reading hardware forums because I keep seeing the same awful advice over and over again. One of the fairly big vendors, I forget who, is offering 128-meg DIMMs from some outfit called Zeus Components for $25, and 256-meg DIMMs for $57. One person who bought this wrote in talking about how it was a no-name PCB with no-name chips on it (a sure bad sign if there ever was one) and how great it is.

Reality check: Why would anyone spend good money on decent components, then cripple them by putting bottom-feeder memory on it? Stability will go down the toilet. Performance won’t be as good as it could be–memory performance is overrated, yes, but so is CPU performance and the same people who cry about how miniscule the gains from using quality memory are often the same ones who waste a weekend by trying to milk an extra 25 MHz out of their CPUs. Getting memory that runs at CAS2 instead of CAS3 makes about as much difference as that extra 25 MHz does, and it won’t burn out your system prematurely either.

Let’s consider all of this, and use numbers to back them up. I just priced a Gigabyte 7ZX-1 motherboard with a 700 MHz Duron CPU. This is the slowest, cheapest Duron that’s still available everywhere. Price, including fan: 165 bucks. The motherboard is respected as a stable board, priced nicely, and includes Creative audio onboard. A decent Enlight midtower case that won’t slice you up and a 300W power supply is $62. A 32-meg Guillemot GeForce256 card–not state of the art, but for mid-range gaming and anything I do, it’s drastic overkill–is $80. So you’ve got a foundation for a system that was absolutely unbelievable just 18 months ago, for 300 bucks.

Considering what you get for $300, I think you can afford to put something other than $25 128-meg DIMMs in them. Save those for some other sucker.

The same vendor had 256-meg CAS2 PC133 Corsair DIMMs for $129. Corsair’s not my first choice and Crucial is offering free shipping right now. A Crucial 256-meg CAS2 PC133 DIMM is $96. The highly regarded Mushkin high-performance DIMMs (latency of 2 all around, so they’re great if your motherboard allows you to adjust all your memory timings but admittedly they’d be overkill on some of the boards I have) are $150.

So we’re at $396 for an awfully nice PC that just lacks storage. CD, DVD, and floppy drives are pretty much commodity items these days. Buy Plextor, or buy whatever’s available at a decent price and doesn’t look like it cost $12 out of the back of a van parked at an abandoned gas station. That leaves hard drives.

Now that memory costs next to nothing, a lot of people think real computers have to have 768 megs of RAM. Really, you get diminishing returns above 128 megs. Two years ago I was ridiculed for suggesting people should get 128 megs of RAM. Now people are routinely buying six times that amount. Trends. (sigh.) Since a 256-meg stick costs around 100 bucks, fine, get 256 so you can run any OS you want and run it fast. But really we need to be thinking about hard drive speed. Sure, a hard drive doesn’t do anything for Quake frame rates, but for everything else it does, and if you’re like me and actually use your computer, you’ll appreciate a fast disk really quickly.

The IBM 75GXP is currently the fastest IDE drive on the market. At $135 for a 30-gig model, it makes absolutely no sense to buy anything else, period. If you need more storage than that, a 45-gig costs about $150, a 60-gig $215, and a 75-gig $275. The sweet spot seems to be 45 gigs.

But if you’re going to run Linux or NT or Windows 2000 and you were ready to buy 768 megs of RAM anyway, why not look at SCSI? An Adaptec controller will run you $200, while a Tekram will start at around $100. You can get a nice 10,000 RPM drive from IBM, Quantum or Seagate for around $235. Now we’re talking a 9-gig drive here, but speed’s more stem out with a $33 LG Electronics CD-ROM and a $14 Panasonic floppy drive. The damage? $844. That’s without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor, but seeing as everyone likes different things there, I always leave those out of base pricing. And of course you still have to buy an OS.

That’s an awful lot of computer for about $850. The components are high enough quality that they should be good for 4-5 years, and I suspect the system won’t be a slouch by then either. The specs will be laughable, but if someone sits down to use it, they’ll have difficulty believing it’s “only” a 700 MHz computer. And if you want to upgrade it down the line, it’ll continue to be worthy of your trouble for a long time to come.

I think I found my new hangout. Well, in about five weeks it’ll be my new hangout. I was going to give up using Windows for Lent–not that I enjoy using Windows, but not using it would be a terrible inconvenience, and the purpose of Lent is to give up something that reminds you of what Jesus gave up. Since Windows is an everyday part of life, it would suffice–I could use a Mac at work, and just run Linux on my PCs at home. But since my job is partly fixing PCs that run Windows, or writing about Windows, I can’t very well do that. So instead I gave up meat. All meat. If it used to be an animal, it’s meat–no using seafood as a loophole.

So, Penny’s BBQ, a little place I stumbled upon yesterday, won’t be my hangout until Lent’s over. I love BBQ–must be because I’m from Kansas City. My favorite R.E.M. song is “The One I Love,” which Michael Stipe wrote after his favorite BBQ joint burned down. Listen to the words really carefully sometime. He’s not talking about his prom date.

I always get sidetracked when I’m talking about BBQ. Penny’s is about 10 minutes from home, depending on how obnoxious St. Louis traffic feels like being. It smelled good outside the place, which is always a good sign. It’s tough to find BBQ in St. Louis, let alone good BBQ. But Penny’s turns out to be comparable to the typical fare you find at every other stoplight in Kansas City, I’ll be a very happy camper. But that’s easier said than done. I’ve never really understood it, because there’s plenty of good BBQ in Chicago and in Kansas City and, frankly, throughout Missouri. If you’re ever driving through Missouri on I-70–my condolences if you are–in a tiny little town about an hour east of Kansas City named Concordia, there’s a BBQ joint called Biffle’s that’s nearly as good as the best places in KC, and it’s easier to get to and not as crowded. I plan my trips to KC so that I end up driving through Concordia around meal time.

The downside to giving up meat is I can’t really write about it, beyond that. Had I given up Windows, chances are a lot of people would have wanted to read about how it was going and what I was finding. Oh well.

Heh heh heh. Need a cheap computer for someone? How’s a Tekram Socket 370 microATX board with built-in audio and video sound? Promising? You bet, especially considering its $35 price tag here. Put it in an inexpensive microATX case, drop in a $50 Celeron-533 PPGA (this board only works with Celerons with the old Mendocino core, not a Coppermine) and a $50 Crucial 128-meg DIMM, add your favorite hard drive, and you can have a really nice system for $350 or so. Or if you’ve got parts laying around, you know the drill.

03/03/2001

Dave Farquhar General

Mailbag:

Napster; Pentium 333-II; OS and APP installations

Emergency Repair Disks are your friend. We have no company policy on ERDs. That needs to change. Yes, I know floppies are about as reliable these days as dear departed Royals closer Ricky Bottalico (nicknamed “Blow-ttalico” last year because of what he so frequently did to late-game leads). But an ERD created on a fresh floppy and then put away in a safe place ought to be reasonably reliable, and an unreadable ERD is less maddening than no ERD at all–at least you’re taking precautions, right? Besides, hopefully you’re like me and you grabbed a 386 off the scrap heap and put DOS and the old DOS version of Norton Utilities on it so you have Disktool and Norton Disk Doctor (run in that order) to fix bad floppies, right?

Why are ERDs your friend? Well, on a system at work Friday, NT must have asked the question, “Kernel? What’s a kernel? We don’t need no stinkin’ kernel!” because the NT loader couldn’t find it. So they brought me in. I asked if there was an ERD available, knowing full well what the answer would be. Well, I didn’t predict the puzzled look, but I got the “no” part right. So then I asked what the most similar system in the immediate area was. They looked it up in the database, so I grabbed a disk, went to the system, and ran RDISK.EXE to create an ERD to use. Then I grabbed an NT4 CD and got ready to go to town.

I booted off the CD, then chose the option to repair an installation. It asked for the ERD, which I dutifully provided. It then asked what aspects to check. I de-selected all the registry-related stuff because I didn’t want it mixing registries between the systems. I just wanted it to replace system files, preferably just the missing ones like, um, the kernel.

Luckily for me, the HD’s filesystem was in pretty good shape because it found files immediately and started prompting me to replace them. An awful lot of them. This bothered me but I let it do it. In the end, I had a bootable system that wouldn’t run Internet Explorer. I realized pretty quickly that the two systems had mismatched service packs, and that was the reason for the large number of files, and IE was my ticket to SP6a.

The moral of the story: Had the system had an up-to-date ERD, I could have had it back up and going in about five minutes. Lacking the ERD, I spent five minutes making one, five minutes repairing the installation, and about two hours uninstalling and reinstalling Internet Explorer and the myriad of security updates Microsoft’s released over the course of the past year.

Not that I’m complaining too badly–the user shares cube space with one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, and she turned out to be friendly and interesting as well. But downtime’s not good for the company’s bottom line, and while I’m on the clock, the bottom line’s more important than my social life.

A correction from yesterday. It took several hours for my brain to warm up yesterday I think. At least one person wrote in to ask why I ran Windows Update so close to the beginning, rather than at the end. I have no idea why I wrote it that way. He’s right, you should run Windows Update at the end, in case something you install clobbers an updated file. Slim likelihood but hey, I’ve seen all kinds of weird things and seeing as MS doesn’t know where the OS ends and applications begin, better safe than sorry.

So I went back and changed yesterday’s post to reflect the correction. Far be it from me to add more misinformation to the Information Superhighway-turned-Misinformation Traffic Jam.

Mailbag:

Napster; Pentium 333-II; OS and APP installations

Troubleshooting intermittent PC problems

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , , ,

How to troubleshoot an intermittent PC problem. We’ve got an aging P2-233 at work that likes to bluescreen a lot under NT4–usually once every day or two. No one who looked at it was able to track it down. The first thing I noticed was that it still had the factory installation of NT, from about three years ago. Factory installations are bad news. The first thing you should do with any PC is install a fresh copy of Windows. If all you have are CAB files and no CD, don’t format the drive–just boot to DOS, go into that directory, run Setup, and install to a new directory other than C:Windows. With NT, it’s also possible to install from DOS though the syntax escapes me momentarily.

The first thing I suggested was to run RAM Stress Test, from www.ultra-x.com , over the course of a weekend to eliminate the possibility of bad memory. I followed that by formatting the drive FAT and running SpinRite. After six hours, SpinRite gave the disk a completely clean bill of health.

Knowing the memory and disk were good, I built up the system, installing NT, then installing SP5 128-bit, then installing IE 5.01SP1, then installing Diskeeper Lite, then installing Office 97 and Outlook 98 and WRQ Reflection, then running Windows Update to get all the critical updates and SP6a. I ran Diskeeper after each installation to keep the drive in pristine condition–I find I get better results that way than by installing everything and then running Diskeeper.

The system seemed pretty stable through all that. Then I went to configure networking and got a bluescreen. Cute. I rebooted and all was well and remained well for an hour or two.

How to see if the bluescreen was a fluke?

I devised the following batch file:

:loop
dir /w /s c:
goto loop

Who says command lines are useless and archaic? Definitely not me! I saved the file as stress.bat and ran 10 instances of it. Then I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up Task Manager. CPU usage was at 100%. Good.

The system bluescreened after a couple of hours.

How to track down the problem? Well, I knew the CD-ROM drive was bad. Can a bad CD-ROM cause massive system crashes? I’ve never heard of that, but I won’t write off anything. So I disconnected the CD-ROM drive. I’d already removed all unnecessary software from the equation, and I hadn’t installed any extraneous peripherals either. So with the CD-ROM drive eliminated, I ran 10 instances of the batch file again.

The system didn’t make it through the night.

OK. Memory’s good. Hard drive’s good. Bad CD-ROM drive out of equation. Fresh installation of OS with nothing extra. What next?

I called my boss. I figured maybe he’d have an idea, and if not, he and I would contact Micron to see what they had to suggest–three-year warranties and a helpful technical support staff from a manufacturer who understands the needs of a business client are most definitely a good thing.

My boss caught the obvious possibility I missed: heat.

All the fans worked fine, and the CPU had a big heatsink put on at the factory that isn’t going anywhere. Hopefully there was thermal compound in there, but if there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be getting in there to put any in, nor would I be replacing the heatsink with a heatsink/fan combo. So I pulled the P2-333 out of the PC I use–it was the only 66 MHz-bus P2 I had–and put it in the system. I’d forgotten those old P2s weren’t multiplier-locked, so the 333 ended up running at 233. That’s fine. I’ve never had overheating problems with that chip at its rated speed, so at 100 MHz less, I almost certainly wouldn’t run into problems.

With that CPU, the system happily ran 10 instances of my batch file for 30 hours straight without a hiccup. So I had my culprit: That P2-233 was overheating.

Now, ideally a stress test would tax more system memory than this one did and would force some floating-point operations as well. Prime95 is ideal.

If you have time and parts available, you can troubleshoot a recalcitrant PC by running such a real-world stress test, then replacing possible suspect parts (CPU, memory, hard drive, motherboard) one at a time until you isolate the problem.

Napster and the decline of copyright–part 3

Dave Farquhar Copyright, Music , , , , , ,

All of this talk of Napster brings up some questions: What is legitimate use?

Making MP3s from CDs you already own is legal, just like making tapes from CDs you own is legal. It’s difficult to say that downloading MP3s made from CDs you already own would be illegal, as you can just make the MP3s yourself. For some people, this is preferable, as encoding MP3s takes a good deal of time on slower systems. However, one can never be certain of the quality of the MP3s online–the condition of the CD, the quality of the source drive, and the quality of the encoder come into play. Those who aren’t audiophiles probably prefer to just download the MP3s, but the existence of the files understandably makes record companies and artists nervous.

So Napster isn’t just out-and-out theft. (Just almost.)

But some tracks on Napster are legal as well. The right to make and distribute live bootleg recordings has been upheld by courts. And some artists, notably The Grateful Dead and, more recently, Phish and The Dave Matthews Band, have given bootleggers their blessing. Other artists aren’t so keen on being bootlegged, but aside from trying to keep recording devices out of their concerts, there isn’t much they can do about it. Such recordings on Napster are legal, but determining whether such a track is what it claims to be can be difficult. I once downloaded a supposed live version of ‘Til Tuesday’s “Believed You Were Lucky,” only to find it was the studio recording with reverb added–clearly a violation of copyright unless you happen to own the original. Many of the live recordings I’ve downloaded from likes of Joe Jackson, Peter Gabriel, and Social Distortion turned out to be from commercially available live albums, some of which I owned, and some of which I didn’t.

And occasionally an artist will release a recording on Napster for promotional purposes–or to hack off their record label. Veteran alternative supergroup Smashing Pumpkins released an album’s worth of unreleased material on Napster last year and said it was their last album.

But policing content on Napster and other peer-to-peer sharing plans is difficult. It’s not a total impossibility, but file renaming can make it much easier for illegal content to get through. Digital fingerprinting would be harder to circumvent, but that, too, could be done, and implementation is extremely difficult. The difficulty of such measures makes me wonder why Napster came into being–it’s not a good business model. Part of me wonders if Napster’s creators just didn’t care whether they were breaking the law or aiding others in breaking the law. While there are legal uses for Napster, I suspect few people are confining themselves to the legal uses.

There are plenty of people calling for copyright reform, and that’s not unreasonable. Under current law, copyrights can be extended beyond the material’s original audience’s lifetime. Under the original law, copyrights lasted for 26 years, renewable for another 26, for a total of 52 years. So that time frame won’t prevent Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney from making a living. But under that law, the pop songs from 1949 would now be freely distributable, and could be performed without royalties. The beloved early rock’n’roll tunes from the 1950s would come available this decade. For those songs, Napster wouldn’t be an issue.

Content publishers seem to be more worried about current copyright provisions than content creators are. Sci-Fi author Jerry Pournelle has stated numerous times he had no problem with the original law, when he was writing his early works under it.

Reverting back to the old law is probably the best compromise. People wanting to freeload will be able to do so, but they’ll have to wait 52 (or if they’re lucky, 26) years. Those who produce and distribute content will still be able to make a living doing so–the majority of people won’t be willing to wait all those years. Abandoned property won’t be an issue either–once it reaches 26 years of age, if it’s not renewed, it’s fair game.

Unfortunately, the copyright law debate is lost in all the Napster rhetoric. And that, I fear, is possibly the greatest casualty of the battle. But it’s no silver bullet either. It increases the pool of material that’s fair game for free distribution, but it doesn’t solve the problem of outright piracy of recent material.

MP3 has plenty of legitimate uses, for the consumer as a matter of convenience and for copyright holders as a matter of promotion, and the courts have upheld those legitimate uses. MP3 usage tends to be a fall guy for all the record industry’s problems, but the record industry had problems before the MP3 phenomenon became rampant. As Andy Breslau said, there are so many avenues of entertainment available today, it’s perfectly natural that the recording industry’s share of the entertainment pie would shrink, just like TV networks’ share is in decline. If and when Napster is forced to close its doors, the industry’s problems won’t just disappear, and the illegal copying of MP3s will almost certainly continue, though possibly not on such a large scale. There’s very little, if anything, the industry can do to stop MP3 swapping through Usenet newsgroups and IRC chatrooms, which was where the MP3 phenomenon began in the first place.

I expect the use of MP3 for promotional purposes to continue, and services such as MP3.com will take advantage of it legally for years to come. But services like Napster, which provide virtually anything you want with no proof of ownership, are probably running on borrowed time, even though the industry is lying to itself about the true impact these services have.

Napster will be forced to shut down, the record industry will continue to make billions and artists won’t get their fair share, and the record industry will continue to complain their billions aren’t enough and blame MP3s or something else.

Part 1 in a series. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Napster and the decline of copyright–part 2

Dave Farquhar Copyright, Music , , ,

“Am I remiss in wanting to protect the possibility of recouping my losses from all those years ago?  In the wake of Aimee [Mann]’s deserved recognition, why shouldn’t I be able to at the least make back my money selling a `protected’ product?” Breslau asked. “And then, besides, Aimee, Doug Vargas and Michael Evans (the other former Snakes) could start seeing a couple dollars too?”

Napster hurts big record labels a little. But it hurts little record labels like Ambiguous Records, whose big star’s records are still sitting in Breslau’s basement after 19 years, even more. But what about the musicians themselves?

I asked Breslau about the typical musician’s plight. I’d heard Courtney Love’s assertions that she made less money than I make, but at that point Breslau seemed much more real, possibly more candid and, frankly, more interesting.

“Many musicians are poor and struggle their whole lives to stay above water. Those who have regular gigs either in orchestras, as jingle players, teaching, or as sidemen aren’t making what your insurance broker is,” Breslau said. “A great many folks who are involved with music drift in and out of making a living and eventually their day gig becomes the gig. The few, the proud, the multimillionaires represent a tiny, tiny few.  Probably the same percentage that pro hoop players represent as figured against all those who played junior high ball.”

Breslau mentioned a musician he’s working with. He’s 60 years old and has been playing 150 shows a year for the past 10 years, has a worldwide following and critical acclaim. Yet he’s having difficulty finding an apartment and health insurance he can afford, and the rigors of touring are starting to catch up with him.

I asked Breslau what he thought legitimate uses of Napster might be, if there were any. His response surprised me.

He cited Napster as potentially a distribution method, and certainly a marketing and promotional tool. “For some an unspooling, open ended library like Napster can be an incredible tool, a repository of discovery and a font of fun,” Breslau said. “Those who use it the most are students and those who have work-at-home gigs.”

Napster may replace some of the more traditional methods of introduction to new music, but not for him, at least not completely.

“For someone like me who has a demanding job, family and still wants to take advantage of sunshine, the editorial screen and organization that a music store (chain or boutique) or radio provides is still very useful. It guides me to what I’m interested in and when I’m frustrated in that search and still thirst after who knows what, I now have a new tool to seek my heart’s desire through–that’s to the good.

“I do miss great radio though–WFMU here in New York is a last outpost of dedicated eclecticism,” Breslau said. “When I was growing up in suburban Maryland, WGTB, Georgetown U’s station and the old WHFS – a truly great free-form commercial station in the day–were keys to whole other worlds for me.  The role of the `trusted guide’ is perhaps diminishing and I think that’s not a good thing. Plus the art of the segue is now almost completely relegated to clubs. Great segues can illuminate whole new contexts and resonances betwixt and between different songs and musics that you have to hear to get hip to.”

I asked Breslau if he thought Napster, as some claim, was responsible for the decline in record sales cited by large labels. He didn’t seem to buy it.

“I’d say the lion’s share of the change in market share comes from the explosion of entertainment options,” Breslau said. “It’s inevitable in a world of computers, gaming, cable television and myriad other entertainment outlets that the recorded music industry should see its share of the entertainment pie diminish. Competition has totally diffused viewing habits in visual mediums–there’s no reason music should be any different.”

Breslau’s words brought to mind a quote from an interview with U2’s Bono and The Edge I read in 1994 in Details magazine. At that point, MP3 was very much in its infancy, gigabyte hard drives cost $400 and recordable CD drives cost $1,000, a 28.8 kpbs dialup connection was state of the art, and the Internet wasn’t yet a commercial success. It seemed a different world from today, but like today, record sales were down. And The Edge, U2’s lead guitarist, observed, “More people are buying video games today than records.”

And Breslau disagreed with the common idea that today’s music isn’t as good as the music of earlier, more commercially successful days.

“The broader industry is guilty of saturation marketing for fewer and fewer products while releasing all kinds of stuff they never have any intention of supporting. There is lots of good music out there,” Breslau said. “I think its arguable that today’s scene is actually broader and more vital than 5 years ago, but the predominance of mega-hit mentality with little attention spent on building artist’s careers tends to push the obvious and two-dimensional stuff out there to the fore. The idea of a company supporting an artist who comes to maturity in craft and commerce by their third recording is almost quaint at this point.”

Some examples of bands who needed three or four albums to reach maturity: U2, Rush, and Bruce Springsteen–none of whom any record executive would mind having on a label. Impatience is hurting the industry in the long term at least as much as Napster.

And Breslau said it’s too early to judge Napster’s true impact.

“Young people, particularly those in college, are now pouring some of their musical curiosity/energy into downloading and not to listening to radio or scouring live venues or music stores for new gems,” Breslau said. We’re seeing some of this impact today.

“What will be interesting to see is the long term implications of these new habits,” Breslau continued. “College age is when life long musical appreciation and consumption habits get formed.”

I liked the way Breslau concluded one of our conversations. As one who has been hurt by Napster–how many people download Bark Along With the Young Snakes instead of buying it from him?–he still sees a potential for it to be a good thing overall, so long as the law is respected.

“Napster can be many positive things: a way to give your art to the world, a way to build an audience for your art, a test of commercial viability, a great marketing tool–but all of those are affirmative voluntary acts,” Breslau said. “What troubles me is when the technology becomes compulsory, when an individual’s choice and right is overwhelmed by another individual’s desire without regard to the other’s circumstance, goals or intention. If technology is to be liberating and empowering, its radical implications must be grounded in respect for an individual’s right to privacy and liberty, and, yes, that includes the exercise of property rights.”

Part 1 in a series. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Napster and the decline of copyright–part 1

Dave Farquhar General, Music , , , , ,

When Napster’s technology first appeared in 1999, I was like everyone else. I didn’t understand all of its implications. All I saw was a potential venue to find new music.

The cool thing about writing a book and running a Web site is that your questions rarely go unanswered. Just post, and answers tend to find you as people connected to works you admire find you.

Just this thing happened to me, when I mentioned finding a gem on Napster: a complete copy of Bark Along with the Young Snakes, the first commercial recording by one of my heroes, Aimee Mann. I didn’t know where else I would be able to get a copy, so Napster, I concluded, was a good thing, as long as you were willing to let your conscience be your guide. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

People seem to assume that superstars make millions of dollars. Who really gets hurt when we pirate, say, a Matthew Sweet single that’s been running through our minds for the past seven years? He was a pretty big star, so he’s set for life, right? No one really cares… No one gets hurt.

That’s a pretty clear-cut case. It’s illegal, period. Now you can probably justify it in your own mind if it’s just part of a course of action–you hear a song on the radio, or a snippet of it, so you search online to try to find out the title and artist, you find some possible suspects, then you listen to the snippets online at CDNow or another record store. If that doesn’t click, then you hop onto Napster, download the possible suspects, listen, figure it out, and then buy it. If you do that, you’ve technically still broken the law, but not really the spirit of it. You got your music and the artist got the money.

But some things aren’t as clear-cut. Out-of-print stuff, for example, isn’t. If I covet Pale Divine’s Straight to Goodbye from 1990, I face a tough challenge. The album’s been out of print for seven or eight years and never was all that common. It’s fairly easy to find in the band’s hometown of St. Louis, assuming I’m willing to pay $40 for it. But when I pay some record dealer $40 for a used copy, it’s not like the band ever sees a dime of it. As far as the band is concerned, there’s no difference between me buying it and pirating it. As far as the record label is concerned, there’s no difference either, but given the way Atlantic Records treated Pale Divine, no St. Louisan who followed the band in the late 1980s and early 1990s would feel sorry for them.

It was when I cited another obscure record, Bark Along with the Young Snakes, from 1982, as another example, that the story got complicated. Andy Breslau, the producer and owner of the copyright, found me and asked some compelling questions.

While Bark Along with the Young Snakes is hard to find, it’s not really out of print. It’s somewhat sought after, being the first commercial record that Grammy, Oscar and Emmy nominee Aimee Mann sang on. But the story is pretty different from Atlantic Records and Pale Divine. Aimee Mann recorded with Ambiguous Records, which was an effort by Andy Breslau, a bluesman then based in Boston, to capture and preserve and disseminate some of the eclectic music coming out of Boston in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We’re all familiar with classic rock mainstays Boston, and the classic rock/new wave crossovers The Cars, but much of the other music coming out of that city at the time never really made it outside of Boston. Someone needed to take this untapped resource and use it, so why not Breslau?

Breslau was playing in a band called The Blues Astronauts, and he had close ties with a number of bands playing around Boston at the time. Plus he had a desire to learn about production and recording, so all the pieces were there.

So Breslau formed Ambiguous Records, and he recorded and produced three albums: Bark Along with the Young Snakes, by Aimee Mann’s band The Young Snakes, Singing the Children Over by Kath Bloom and Loren Mazzacane, and Darkworld by Dark.

The venture lasted 18 months. Independent record distributors, Breslau found, sometimes had difficulty paying him in a timely matter. The Young Snakes were getting popular, so the logical thing to do was to press more copies. Breslau did just that, but then The Young Snakes broke up, and Aimee Mann and her then-boyfriend Michael Hausmann formed `Til Tuesday. While `Til Tuesday made it big for a while, their success did nothing about the large number of unsold Young Snakes records in Breslau’s basement. And Breslau’s own band broke up. And then?

“I discovered the joys of making records in a different way,” Breslau said. He was working on a fourth record, titled Doing the Sugar, Too by Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson.

“Luther had played with Muddy Waters for a number of years before and had moved to Boston and was playing around town.  It was then astonishing to me that he had no recording prospects at the time,” Breslau said. He took Johnson into the studio, struck a deal with his agent and the owner of a small blues label, and had a revelation.

“The whole process ended up being much more about the music for me,” Breslau said. “At that point continuing the label seemed too financially risky and really not as satisfying as the experience I had doing Luther’s record. For me it turned on this: If I could still produce the records I wanted to and not assume all the risk, end up hassling with distributors, doing all the PR work, sending out the copies to radio and critics etc. etc. etc., I could give up the label. Working with a small label as opposed to being a small label seemed the right direction for me to go.”

“Frankly, independent pop music is a very hard business,” Breslau said. “The world you compete in has at its upper limits multi-million dollar deals, multi-national corporations and huge ambition–some of it valid, a lot of it insufferably pretentious.”

All of this meant Ambiguous Records was history and mostly forgotten.

Then the MP3 phenomenon hit. While popular songs made up the bulk of the music available online, some die-hard fans connected turntables to their PCs, sampled their old records, and turned them into MP3s. In time, these rarities–Bark Along With The Young Snakes among them–showed up online.

“At a gut level, the experience of finding work you had a hand in `Napstered’ does feel as though someone is taking something without asking whether or not you want to give it away,” Breslau said.

Part 1 in a series. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

02/26/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Printer shopping. My sister, Di, was in town this weekend, with her printer: a hand-me-down Panasonic KX-P4410 I bought my freshman year of college, which would make it 7-8 years old. It started jamming every time you print not too long ago, and now it doesn’t even respond at all. Looking at it, I couldn’t tell if the printer’s problem was the drum unit or the toner cartridge; a new drum unit costs nearly as much as Panasonic’s current closest equivalent printer today costs. Put a drum and a toner cartridge in it, and you’ve paid as much as you would for a new printer. So while I hate for a possibly good printer to go to waste, it’s just not worth it to spend that much on what was at the time Panasonic’s entry-level laser-class printer.

Panasonic printers aren’t so easy to find these days, so we ended up getting an HP LaserJet 1100. We found one for $285 with a $30 rebate, which isn’t bad for a printer that normally sells for $425 on the street. It’s a low-end printer, but it’s HP, so it’ll last a long time. And at 8 pages per minute, it’s got plenty of speed for what Di does–she’s not going to be printing book manuscripts with this. Driver support isn’t the best from HP these days, but it’ll work with an HP LaserJet 4 PCL5 driver, which means any new OS should support that printer even if HP is slow in supplying official drivers. I’m not in love with HP’s driver policies these days but they still make good iron, and I can keep it working for years to come.

Napster. With Napster on the ropes, the time seems to be right for this. I wrote a piece a month or two ago, without really knowing what I’d do with it. With Napster’s days numbered, it seems pretty obvious: post it now because there is no market for such a piece. It’s long so I think I’ll split it up. What is it? It’s an industry insider’s perspective on Napster. How much of an insider? Well, my interviewee is a musician, producer, and at one time owned an indie record label. His views will be a bit surprising. I’m guessing this’ll be a three-parter by the time I split it up.

02/25/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

A milestone. Yesterday I was at Borders, looking for a book on playing bass guitar. It’s time for me to get serious with that. Computers are boring, writing is boring, so what’s left? Everyone assumes I play an instrument, and, well, I don’t really. I own a keyboard and a bass but I don’t play them.

I didn’t find what I was looking for. But on my way out the door, I spied a computer for looking up book titles. Hmm. On a whim, I did an author search on my name. Up pops my book, on shelf K0020. Really? So I go look. Sure enough, there’s a copy. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen my book anywhere but on my own shelf or at a friend’s house, let alone in an honest-to-goodness bookstore. Extremely cool.

I drove down the street to Barnes & Noble. On the way back to the music books, I passed the computer section. So I stopped at the Windows shelf, looked, and, surprisingly, there was a copy of Optimizing Windows sitting there too. Coolness.

So I went back to the music books in a good mood. And there I found three books on learning bass. I bought them, along with a pocket-sized book of piano and guitar chords since the only thing keeping me from playing keyboards is not knowing what keys to play. Knowing basic chords won’t make me good, but as long as I can plink out the songs I like, I’ll be happy. And the addition of guitar chords will be useful if I ever make good on my threats to get a six-string.

And it’s easier to talk about problems than to do something about them. I’m just gonna drop the gun talk. I don’t find the discussion interesting. If it were on someone else’s site, I wouldn’t bother reading it. It’s all so high on passions and low on original thought, and frankly I expect something to change on the abortion front before something happens on the gun front (and the chances of that are extremely low as well–lower than the chances of my Kansas City Royals winning the World Series on a $43 million payroll). So why am I posting it here? So half a dozen U.S.ers can write in and tell me how right I am and a Canadian and a Brit can write in, dismissing outright any parallel I try to draw as fallacy of distraction, and/or complaining about U.S. culture? To what end?

One good question was raised in all this: Who’s gonna teach kids morals? Well, the parents should for one. But that’s not really enough–even Hillary Clinton (or her ghostwriter) knows that. Others should as well. We can talk about the problems all we want, but that doesn’t do a lick of good. It just gets us all hacked off. So screw it. I’m not gonna waste my time or my keystroke quota (and there is a quota–if my wrists start feeling funny, I quit writing, period). I’m gonna do something about it, and I hope others will join me.

I’m gonna go be a mentor. We’ve got a seminary student at church who takes youth ministry seriously, and he sees it as more than just winning souls. It’s relationship building–lifting weights together, going to movies, being there to talk to… If he’s interested in it and one or more kids is interested in it, it’s fair game. Jesus’ name might come up, and it might not. He’s got his head on straight. What’s this have to do with ministry? Well, you think Jesus spent all his time talking about Law and Gospel? He most certainly didn’t! More than anything else, Jesus was interested in being a brother to people who didn’t have one, or whose brother was a loser. And that’s the model our sem student tries to follow.

And this poor guy’s got 20 kids flocking to him. When he came a few months ago it was 2. Probably next month it’ll be 40. He can’t handle it all. So I’m gonna ask if I can join him.

And if it means I have less time to post here, so what? At least I’m making a difference. Better to do something about our problems than to waste electrons talking about them.

Let’s get back to the basics. If your problem involves a slow computer, let’s talk. I can definitely help you solve that one, and chances are there are a couple dozen people wondering the same thing. If your problem involves something else I may know about (and if you’ve been reading a while or you look on the Top 50 list over there, you can get a pretty good idea what I know about), let’s talk.

Enough of that. How ’bout dem Cubs? Er, wait, let’s talk about the White Sox. Now that Alex Rodriguez makes $25.2 million a year to play baseball, Frank Thomas is dissatisfied with his $9.9 million a year and wants a comparable raise before he’ll report to camp. The White Sox, meanwhile, rather than caving in to his demands, are saying fine, we’ll use Harold Baines in Thomas’ role as DH and part-time 1B.

This is good. A contract is a contract, and when Thomas signed through 2006, he should have realized markets will change. Players sign long-term contracts just in case they turn into .236 hitters–that way, they’ve still got a really nice paying job. Teams negotiate long-term contracts in hopes of getting a bit of a discount in exchange for putting up with the risk of a star turning into a .236-hitting overweight former slugger.

Besides, Frank Thomas isn’t worth Alex Rodriguez-type money. Sure, Thomas is a good hitter. He hits lots of home runs, and he hits for high average and draws a lot of walks. Rodriguez hits lots of homers, hits for high average, draws a good share of walks, but he’s a more complete player. Thomas refuses to play in the field most of the time, and when he does, he plays first base, a non-demanding position where he’s just average at his very best. Rodriguez plays shortstop, one of the toughest positions to play–and he’s considered one of the best at his position. Rodriguez has better speed. And over the past three years, Rodriguez has been the more consistent player. Thomas had a good year last year. But the year before last, he only hit 15 homers. The year before that, he hit 29 homers but only batted .265.

So he’s a one-dimensional player whose consistency hasn’t been stellar. Now in 1994, 1996, and 1997 he looked like something, putting up monster years where he hit more than 35 homers and batted around .350. But with his current attitude, he’s not likely to do that again this year.

Harold Baines is a one-dimensional player who hit .312 with 25 homers in 1999, the last season he played regularly (he was a part-time player last year). Over the course of his 21-year career, he’s averaged .291 with 22 homers. He’s a slight downgrade from Thomas, but he makes a fraction what Thomas makes.

Rodriguez isn’t worth $25.2 million a year. No question about that. But even if Rodriguez were worth that kind of money, Thomas still isn’t in his league. You could almost say Thomas fits between Rodriguez and Baines in the pecking order. And as far as salary goes, Thomas is between the two of them as well–and Harold Baines still makes far more in a year than you or I ever will. He’ll make more this year than a lot of us will see in our lifetime.

The White Sox are right. And even with them in the same division as my Royals, I wish them luck with Harold Baines in Thomas’ place.

Optimizing BIOSes and optimizing DOS

Dave Farquhar DOS, Retro Computing , , , , , , ,

Optimizing the BIOS. Dustin Cook sent in a link to Adrian’s Rojak Pot, at www.adriansrojakpot.com , which includes a BIOS tweaking guide. It’s an absolute must-read. I have a few minor quibbles with a couple of the things he says, particularly about shadowing and caching your ROMs with Windows 9x. He says you shouldn’t do it. He’s right. He says you shouldn’t do it because Microsoft says not to do it with Windows NT, and Windows 9x “shares the same Win32 architecture.” It does and it doesn’t, but that’s flawed logic. Shadowing ROMs isn’t always a bad thing; on some systems that eats up some usable memory and on others it doesn’t, depending on the chipset and BIOS it uses. But it’s pointless because Windows doesn’t use the BIOS for anything, unless you’re in safe mode. Caching ROMs makes very little sense; there’s only so much caching bandwidth to go around so you should spend it on caching memory that’s actually being used for something productive. So who cares about architecture, you shouldn’t cache and shadow your ROMs because Windows will ignore it one way or the other, so those facilities are better spent elsewhere. The same thing is true of Linux.

Still, in spite of this minor flaw I found in a couple of different spots, this is an invaluable guide. Perfect BIOS settings won’t make a Pentium-90 run like a Pentium III, but poor BIOS settings certainly can make a Pentium III run more like a 386DX-40. Chances are your BIOS settings aren’t that bad, but they can probably use some improvement. So if you want the best possible performance from your modern PC, visit Adrian’s. If you want to optimize your 386 or 486 or low-end Pentium, visit the site I mentioned yesterday.

Actually, it wouldn’t be a half-bad idea to take the downloadable versions of both guides, print them, and stick them in a binder for future reference. You’ll never know when you might want to take them with you.

Optimizing DOS again. An awful lot of system speed is psychological. I’d say maybe 75% of it is pure psychology. It doesn’t matter so much whether the system really is fast, just as long as it feels fast. I mentioned yesterday keyboard and screen accelerators. Keyboard accelerators are great for people like me who spend a lot of time in long text files, because you can scroll through them so much faster. A keyboard accelerator makes a big difference in how an old DOS system feels, and it can improve the responsiveness of some DOS games. (Now I got your attention I’m sure.)

Screen accelerators are a bit more of a stretch. Screen accelerators intercept the BIOS calls that write to the screen and replace them with faster, more efficient code. I’d estimate the speedup is anywhere from 10 to 50 percent, depending on how inefficient the PC’s BIOS is and whether it’s shadowing the BIOS into RAM. They don’t speed up graphics at all, just text mode, and then, only those programs that are using the BIOS–some programs already have their own high-speed text routines they use instead. Software compatibility is potentially an issue, but PC power users have been using these things since at least 1985, if not longer, so most of the compatibility issues have long since been fixed.

They only take a couple of kilobytes of memory, and they provide enough of a boost for programs that use the BIOS that they’re more than worth it. With keyboard and screen accelerators loaded in autoexec.bat, that old DEC 386SX/20 feels an awful lot faster. If I had a copy of a DOS version of Microsoft Word, I could use it for writing and it wouldn’t cramp my style much.