October 27th

NVidia Mucks Up Again

I keep wondering why NVidia seems to make so many mistakes, ever since they killed and bought 3dfx.  Did they buy a bunch of gremlins? The latest horror story for GeForce 6800 owners is that the cards don't have a functioning hardware video processing unit for encoding and decoding DVDs. They have one, it just doesn't work, and NVidia must have known this before shipping the first few batches of 6800 cards.

Now if these were $120 budget cards, there would be no problem. But these are top of the line $500+ cards, so it does matter. Especially because the 6600 and lower cards DO have a functioning video processor.

NVidia mucked up again, and decided to pawn the shoddy stuff off on unsuspecting consumers. This debacle is sure to bite them in the ass, and send flocks of freaked out fans to the ATI camp, where they can buy an equally expensive X800GT card.

I typically play my DVDs on my home entertainment system with a big TV and great Dolby sound, so I never even tried playing one on my GeForce 6800 Ultra from MSI. I popped in a DVD and tried it, and to my surprise there were no problems at all. CPU usage was very high, indicating that the CPU was doing all the work, but on my system with an Athlon 3200+ and 1GB of fast memory, the video was smooth as silk. But clearly, the video processor was just sitting there and watching the movie, it wasn't doing any work.

Newer GeForce 6800 cards are supposed to be fixed, and it's my guess that the recent delay in getting more cards to market may have been as they ramped production of a new chip stepping with a fixed VPU. Chances are, if you didn't rush out and buy the first couple of batches of 6800 cards, you'll be fine. But if you did get one of the crappy units, you should write to complain and try to get it exchanged for a fixed one.

Update: An order we placed at a major distributor 2 months ago for Asus V9999 cards (GF 6800 Ultra) had an ETA of today listed for the last few weeks. But today, that ETA just changed to DECEMBER 1st 2004.  This sounds like a mega-disaster for NVidia. They obviously can't get functioning chips to market.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 25th

DRM = Don't Record Me

Charlie Demerjian at the Inquirer has a long and loud rant about Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the world of entertainment. I used to write often about the insidious world of entertainment, where rich executives sit around big tables trying to figure out how to screw customers out of more money, without infuriating them. The money part is more important than the not infuriating them part, as you might imagine.

While Charlie got a good primal scream out of the way, he didn't shed much light on the subject other than to ask the now rhetorical question, "what good is DRM for the consumer"? We all knew the unpleasant answer to that question before it was asked. This is all about the Recording Industry and the Motion Picture Associations of America (RIAA and MPAA), and their headlong rush to treat entertainment in the same way that Bill Gates treats Windows source code. What they haven't figured out yet is that the ability of consumers to record things eventually ends up benefiting the industry, rather than hurting it. But their paranoia about all consumers being hungry, insatiable pirates won't go away overnight. In fact it will probably grow to become an obsession as technology allows them to put ever tighter controls on how content can or can't be copied.

This all brings me back to where I was, ranting back in 2001 when the DRM ball got rolling. As long as there are countries like China, where DRM = $ flashing in the eyes of consumer electronics makers, we will probably have DRM free devices. As long as there is a market for DRM-disabled recording devices, China and other countries will produce and sell them. It started back in 2001 when a little known  Chinese company called Apex put out a cheapo $200 DVD recorder, and then "leaked" the secret code to unlock the "secret menu". There you could change or shut off region codes, and Macromedia copy protection. Immediately, they started selling like hot cakes, and went up to $400 apiece on ebay.

The lesson of the story is that capitalism works both ways.  It makes lots of money for the entertainment industry, which then tries to fight tooth and nail against consumers fair use rights to make copies. But then capitalism rears it's double-edged sword of a head in China, and folks there realize there's gold in them thar DRM-disabled recorders.

Then, when those recorders start to sell like hot cakes in the US, other electronics manufacturers will want to jump on the gray market gravy train before it leaves the station. I suppose that's where Orin Hatch's INDUCE Act comes into play. If that piece of corporate skullduggery gets passed, they'll be able to sue 3 year old girls for singing Britney Spears' latest hit. Orin is one heck of a guy.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 24th

What's the Deal with Dual-Core CPUs?

Anand has an article on dual core processors from Intel and AMD, slated for release in the 2nd half of 2005. I won't even bother talking about Intel's weird approach to the whole thing, you can read about that in Anand's article. At least AMD's approach makes sense, where they will release server versions first, and then desktop versions later. Intel is going to try it the other way round.

This dual-core CPU thing all sounds very cool, and the AMD 64-bit dual-core CPUs will drop into socket 940 and socket 939 motherboards without a problem. Even better, Microsoft has said it will NOT consider a dual core system to be a dual processor system. Microsoft licenses Windows based on the number of processors, not on the number of CPU chips that you are running. Theoretically, they could have made a stink about dual core CPUs, but they have said they won't.

Finally, most people bought Windows XP Pro (rather than the Home version), which has native support for dual processor systems. So if you have a socket 939/940 motherboard with an Opteron or Athlon64 and Windows XP Pro, you will be able to drop in a dual-core AMD chip when they come out. Great! Right?

Well, there are some limitations and considerations here. The biggest problem is that Windows requires a fresh install to detect the dual core CPU. That means everyone who does this will face the biggest problem a Windows user faces, reinstalling everything from scratch. Basically, it doesn't matter if you can just drop in a new CPU if the OS will not recognize the other half of the chip. It takes me about half an hour to replace a motherboard and processor, but it can take up to a week to fully install all of my drivers, applications, games and settings after a fresh install of Windows. So saving the half an hour to replace the motherboard is worthless.  Anyway, by the time the second half of 2005 rolls around, I'll be wanting a new system to go with the new dual core CPU. Finally, it makes sense that there isn't much reason to do any of this until Windows 64-bit edition comes out. What good is a dual-core 64-bit system running on a 32-bit OS? 

Bottom line? By the time the dual-core CPUs are out, Windows XP-64 should be out, and newer, better motherboards with better PCI-express support will be available, and everything will be in place to buy an entire new system, rather than retrofitting your old one. The last kicker is that most applications and games won't be able to use the power of dual-core CPUs until the software is written to take advantage of them.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 19th

Official! Half Life 2 on November 16th.

Vivendi has stamped HL2 code with a gold sticker, and said it has gone to manufacture. This probably means that Vivendi and Valve reached an agreement for Vivendi to receive royalty payments for each STEAM download, to make up for them losing profit on all those ATI download vouchers. Vivendi even declared HL2 the best PC game ever, so they must be happy with the arrangement they made with Valve.

The wait on the gold date is over, now the wait for the release date begins. The biggest question I have is will Valve let STEAM users to get the game a day or two early?  November 16th is a Tuesday, so maybe releasing the game to STEAM users on the previous Friday or Saturday would be a nice consolation prize to make up for all that waiting.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 17th

Blame Windows64 Delay on Wintel

As far as anyone can tell, Microsoft could have had a decent version of Windows XP-64 out by now. But of course, because Intel has messed up just about everything they are doing now, Microsoft has to just sit on its hands and wait for Intel to play catch up to AMD. Intel has to go back to the drawing board, and copy the AMD-64 architecture even more, by adding an onboard memory controller. Hope AMD has that patented so Intel will need to pay, but I doubt it.

This is just one more reason why I don't like Intel, or their hegemony over the IT industry. Intel is too big, too bloated and too run by 'marketeers' to make good design and engineering decisions. The Pentium 4 design was driven more by marketing designs than by engineering, and the end result was that all Intel could do to try and beat a chip running 50% slower was to add two megabytes of L2 cache (and it still didn't beat AMD's FX line of chips). Now Intel says its going back to the drawing board, and it will be hard for AMD to keep up, but the fact of the matter is, it's all hot air until they get silicon to the factory.

And until they do, Microsoft isn't about to release Windows 64 with AMD having such an advantage.

Makes you kind of want to hate Intel, doesn't it?

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

Half Life 2 Still at Least a Month Away

If the "pre-order" information at various game stores is correct (which it probably isn't), HL2 will debut on November 16th (yes... 2004). Of course this may not be taking into account the legal battle between Valve and Vivendi, over the distribution rights and the STEAM download service. My guess is that if Valve agrees to pay a fee to Vivendi for each STEAM download license, then Vivendi will agree to let the game out the door.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 16th

Google Releases Free PC File Search Tool 

Google is offering a beta version of a new free application they have been working on that lets you search your hard drives for files, emails, instant messages, web history, etc. as though you were searching for web sites with their web search engine. The small application is called Google Desktop, and you can download the beta version for free here. Currently, the program seems geared toward finding Microsoft product files, like email in Outlook or Outlook Express, and files from Microsoft Office, but then again, this is only a beta test of the program.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 15th

More Windows Patches

Six more security patches have been issued for Windows. I noticed that you can't update Windows XP unless you have automatic updates turned on. I'm wondering what they were thinking, considering that if I don't have auto updates on, I obviously want to install the patches manually. So if I want to install them manually, what do I have to do? Turn on automatic updates!

Weird.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 11th

DDR3 Memory Shortage Hits Video Card Makers

According to a report at The Inquirer, ATI and NVidia are having trouble getting their high-end cards to market due to a high-speed memory shortage. The card were "released" months ago, but you can hardly find them anywhere. We've only seen one so far! The ETA at distributors for cards like the Asus GeForce 9999 Deluxe has been pushed back at least 3 times. They are saying that they will ship today, but they've said that before only to push the ship date back yet again.

So those of you who have been trying to get a GeForce 6800 Ultra, or an ATI Radeon X800XT platinum edition, now you know why they aren't available.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 9th

STEAM Registration of Half Life 2 Open

STEAM registration of Half-Life 2 for ATI Radeon owners is now available. If you have an HL2 coupon that came with your Radeon video card way back when, you can enter the number on it to register your STEAM-downloaded copy. The copy remains locked for the time being.

If you are using STEAM, but don't have a Radeon coupon, you can also pre-purchase the game now using STEAM. Then when the game is released, everyone's registered game gets unlocked.

I tried the STEAM registration on my system by clicking on the "pre-purchase" button, and then on "register a product I own", and it properly registered my copy of HL2 with the number on my Radeon coupon.

                                             Dr. John

October 4th

NForce4 PCI-e Chipset This Week?

The transition from AGP motherboards and graphics cards to PCI-express versions has been slow and... well, slow.  But perhaps that is a good thing, because in times not long past, new platforms had been rushed to market much to everyone's dismay. Perhaps the good ol' quality control lamps are burning late into the night as the engineers make sure the things actually work as advertised. 

The conversion from a parallel AGP interface to a serial PCI interface is not a simple one, and it involves changing the motherboard chipset, the PCI-e sockets, and the graphics card slot connector and circuitry. Let's just hope it's worth the wait in terms of performance and scalability.

With the introduction of the NForce4 chipset, one solid link in the chain will be ready for PCI-e systems.  But a quick check of availability of PCI-e graphics cards shows the selection to be very limited. ATI is supposed to enter the motherboard chipset fray soon with their own, first generation PCI-e chipset.  I greatly welcome the competition, but expect ATI will have a bit of a rough start. Motherboard chipsets involve very different engineering than a 3D graphics chip, so it is very likely that ATI's first stab at a motherboard chipset will be rough around the edges.

I expect that NForce4 motherboards will not be available until November or December, and that is probably about the time frame for the introduction of high-end PCI-e graphics cards. Lots of folks are holding off buying a new system now, because they will be obsolete in a few months when PCI-e really hits the store shelves.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

October 2nd

Microsoft Gets FAT Butt Kicked in Patent Office

Microsoft lost its patent of the File Allocation Table used in many hard drives and other storage devices. Even though most new computers with Windows use the newer NTFS file system, whose patent by Microsoft is not under dispute, many computers still use the FAT method for storing and retrieving data.

Microsoft has been charging companies royalties for using FAT on flash memory cards, memory sticks and the like. But now that dubious revenue stream is in jeopardy because the Patent Office, spurred on by public interest groups such as The Public Patent Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has rejected the patent with a "prior art" ruling. That means that FAT and FAT-like systems had been in use in many ways before Microsoft patented it, and therefore the patent can be declared invalid because it wasn't anything new.

The decision by the Patent Office is not final, and Microsoft will get a chance to appeal, but if FAT was prior art, it wasn't patentable. Let's hope this is the beginning of the end for stupid patents that should have never been granted in the first place.

Discuss here.

                                             Dr. John

Copyright 2004, KickAss Gear