In which I shed an infintesimal tear for a failed technology

Reading the latest dead-tree issue of Maximum PC the other day, I learned that BTX is obsolete, keeled over like a dead buffalo. It is an ex-motherboard form factor. It is pushing up daisies.

In Maximum PC's "Doctor" section, they give advice to readers' questions about technical problems. The original problem was fairly complicated, but in passing, the Doctor noted that "Oh, and nobody makes BTX CPU coolers anymore, though you can still find old ones online."

I'm ever so slightly sad about this. See, when I was studying to be a computer technician around 2005, BTX was going to be the great white hope for keeping computer innards cool, at a moment when that was becoming a real problem. Hang on for some heavy technical stuff.

If the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is your computer's brain, the motherboard can be seen as its nervous system. The motherboard connects everything together, so that the brain, the CPU, can talk to and get information from everything else. Okay?

As with most analogies, that's not exactly true. But it will do for non-geeks.

Over the years, motherboards have come in different shapes and sizes. In geek-speak, these shapes are called form factors. The most common form factor today, and the one that's been dominant for a number of years, is the ATX form factor. The ATX first became popular in 1996, which means it's really old now.

Along around the early 2000's, the ATX form factor started to have problems. For one thing, CPUs and other bits and pieces of computer innards were becoming more powerful, and as a result they were getting hotter. A lot hotter. The ATX form factor was never really designed to get rid of that much heat. Computer insides need to be kept cool, or they'll overheat and the delicate electronic components will fry, leaving you with an expensive doorstop instead of a computer. Putting in more fans will help, but fans are what make those whirring noises inside your computer, and putting in more of them means more noises. There are also limits to what fans can do, no matter how many of them you put in.

So, around 2004, Intel put forth a whole new motherboard form factor, the BTX. The BTX was designed to have better air flow, so that it would keep the inside of the computer cooler right from the start.

Trouble was, it went over like a lead balloon. Among other things, the ATX just had too much invested in it. Besides, along with hotter CPUs and graphic cards have finally come better fans and coolers that do their job. Intel canceled the creation of any more BTX products in September of 2006, according to this Wikipedia article.

And thus, BTX joins zeppelins and analog-based computers (along with many more that I don't know about) as one of the failed technologies that, if it had succeeded, might have made the world look a little different. Maybe not nearly as different as the zeppelin, but it saddens me mere ever so slightly anyway, as all failed hopes do.

The death of an old computer and the entrance of a new one

This is what happened to my old computer in December. I built the computer with my own hands in July of 2007, the first computer I ever built myself; it was a small but definite tragedy to see it die.

One morning in December, I started the beast up and heard a horrid racket. It had been having some issues with the top case fan inside -- all or most computers today have internal fans to keep them from overheating. I figured that this was the day I'd finally have to make the trip down to Fry's and buy a replacement fan. I opened up the case to check on things, and discovered that the source of the racket was not the top fan at all, but the CPU fan instead. Uh-oh.

I didn't really know how to get it out, and stupidly didn't check the instructions; one of the pins proved to be stuck anyway. I noticed that the thermal paste had dried, of course. But nothing seemed obviously wrong, so I ended up putting things back together again and restarting the beast. Not only was the fan racket still there, but now the fan refused to move. I tried another restart. This time, the fan ran -- bit it was still whining horribly.

Worse yet, as Windows XP loaded I got two of the longest motherboard warning beeps you ever heard. Motherboards beep when loading, but also beep (in a different way) when there's something wrong. The code depends upon the manufacturer, but any change in the beeping pattern is something to be wary of. Double uh-oh.

While wrestling with it, I managed to lose my balance and fall on the case's side door, which I'd taken off entirely and laid on the floor. I bent it and cracked the clear plastic of the windows that were supposed to show off its insides.

I managed to start up the computer again, and made emergency backups of my data. Then I enlisted the help of a neighbor (since I don't have a car) to help me take the beast to Best Buy's Geek Squad.

Now, I am wary of the Geek Squad, because a few years ago they became notorious for simply wiping people's hard drives, reinstalling Windows and telling them that the computer was "fixed". But my favorite chain, PC Club, is out of business, so it was a case of any port in a storm.

We got there as they were opening, so thankfully I didn't have to wait in line. The Geek Squad man tried to start the beast up, heard the godawful long beeps, and agreed that it was a hardware issue. The old trick of just wiping and reinstalling Windows and telling the customer it was "fixed" wouldn't work -- a point I also established by talking with them enough to make it clear I was knowledgeable and might notice if they tried any shortcuts or runarounds. They said they'd keep it for a day and run diagnostics on it, to the grand tune of $70. I counted my blessings that it didn't cost any more, and left it with them, with the understanding that they would call me the next morning with a report.

They didn't. I tried calling them three times, then even the Best Buy sales department, and got no answer. That afternoon, I drove there on my motorcycle there to see if they'd suffered a terrorist attack or what. As it turned out, they thought the motherboard was going bad. The tests had been interrupted by errors several times, but the problem didn't seem to lie anywhere else. Triple uh-oh.

A call to Fry's revealed that they no longer carried that brand of motherboard, period. (No big surprise, as it was at least a year and a half old, which makes it fairly obsolete.)

After a few hours of thought, I made my decision on what to do. Without easy access to the Net, I couldn't even order parts, or research another motherboard. There was only one thing left to do, and I promptly did it. I asked another car-owning neighbor to take me to Best Buy this time, and I bought one of those pre-made abominations, a fairly expensive Dell computer.

The new beast quickly confirmed my prejudices about pre-build computers. It had Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition installed on it, naturally, but I'd already figured I'd have to make the switch to Vista anyway. But it had bigger problems.

-- To start off with, its two hard drives were set up as RAID disks. I won't go into detail about what RAID is here, except to say that it involves making the computer think that two hard drives are actually one BIG hard drive. Why a home computer needs such a setup, I do not know.

-- Worse yet, it has a raid utility that appears to be embedded in the motherboard.

-- The two hard drives had been turned into one massive partition that took up THE ENTIRE RAID PARTITION -- all 1.5 terabytes of it! Disk checking and defragmenting would have taken hours!

Thankfully, I'd long since purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate, full retail (which I'd been trying out on the old machine). So the first order of business was to get the network drivers downloaded so I'd be able to get online when I was finished, and the next was to wipe the hard drives and Do It My Way.

Unfortunately, as soon as I had wiped out the partitions and set up the hard drives the way I wanted them, it turned out that the Windows XP install CD couldn't even look at the shiny modernistic hardware without screaming and dying. What was more horrifying was that the Vista installation DVDs, both the Ultimate and the Home Premium that had come with the beast, now decided that they had no idea how to make a new partition.

Thank gods for Ubuntu Linux, that's all I can say. This sort of mess is why I'm never without a CD of the latest version of Ubuntu. Without it, I would have had no choice but to bring the computer back to Best Buy and ask them to fix whatever I'd screwed up. But that wasn't the end of my troubles. Ubuntu, booted live from the CD, could set up a new partition and even set the bootable flag on it, but Vista still refused to accept the partition as suitable, even when I formatted it in NTFS. Go figure. My best guess is that some issue with properly setting up the master boot record was somehow involved.

Finally, as a last desperate resort, I installed Ubuntu in the partition I wanted to use, made sure it was working and bootable -- and then I tried installing Vista Ultimate over it. Vista finally complied. After that, Vista Home Premium 64-bit had no trouble installing in another partition. The whole thing booted up just fine; I installed the network drivers; I got on the Internet to grab the updates from Microsoft, and all was well.

Has it really been nearly three months?

Apparently so.

-- My home-brew computer died in December, and had to be hastily replaced by a Dell computer.

-- As a result, I am now using Vista.

-- My job search has been suspended until further notice while I try to lose enough weight to qualify for knee-replacement surgery. Oh, joy.

-- I have rebuilt a neighbor's obsolete ailing computer, while gently introducing her to the notion that new computers have become quite affordable.

I'll tackle these things one at a time in the next few posts.

Note for those using Trend Micro's PC-illan antivirus

Like I do.

Last night, I started to have classic Blue Screen of Death crashes in Windows Vista. At first I thought it was World of Warcraft that was somehow crashing me; however, both it AND Trend Micro had just updated themselves, so I wasn't sure which one was the guilty party.

Then, I saw PC-illan pop up a message. It explained that the update it had just done was causing repeated Windows crashes and reboots, so it was discarding the update and reverting to its earlier version. I just wonder how many people started screaming when the problem began, and how fast the reports came in, for Trend Micro to react so quickly.

Unfortunately, the crashes continued. As it was now something like 10:30PM, I finally turned off the computer entirely -- which I do NOT normally do for the night -- and went to bed, in hopes that PC-illan would have a new update and fix itself in the morning.

When I woke up an hour and a half ago, and started up the computer again, I took no chances. I immediately ordered PC-illan to update itself, which it did.

The problem hasn't recurred. The strange thing is that there seems to be no notice of this at all on Trend Micro's website; it's like the incident never happened. Yeah, way to build trust up, Trend Micro.

Is no place sane?

It would appear that Germans are even more hysterical about the terrible dangers of video games than many Americans.

In 2004 the Bavarian authorities sent in the state troopers. Ostensibly it was as a response to a claim made by a former employee that we had illegal software installed on our machines. Their remit, however, appeared to be a lot wider. When the small tech team appeared to inspect our computers, they were accompanied by over one hundred flak-jacketed riot police, all armed with Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns.

How about that? Maybe Jack Thompson should move to Bavaria.

Some years ago, a German teenager (now commonly known as "Angry German Kid") mocked this hysteria with this video:



Sad thing is, most people don't know or perceive that it's acting. Or want to. But yes, folks, like many viral videos, it's staged.

Oh, and as for this stuff about games turning our children into drooling homicidal maniacs? The hard fact is that video games were introduced to the general public in the 1980s, and the rate of violent crime in the US reached its lowest level ever in 2005. And crime rates among juveniles declined in keeping with this trend.

Of course, if you still want to believe that video games turn children into murderers, by all means do so. This is America, and you have the right to believe there are fluffy lavender unicorns flying around over your head if you like. But please don't expect me to support laws based on such willful insanity.

An Internet horror story dissected

It's been making the news rounds: a 19-year-old announced that he was going to commit suicide, then broadcast it live over a webcam, and people joked, egged him on, and didn't call the police. The father, of course, thinks the website operator and the people who watched are to blame, and says this proves that the Internet needs better regulation.

Some facts:

-- The man announced his intentions on a website for bodybuilders (none of the articles I've found have specified the URL), and his webcam was shown on a webcam site, Justin.tv -- kind of like a YouTube for webcams only. Needless to say, a bodybuilder website and Justin.tv do not constitute the entire Internet. Yes, the Net can be a cold, hard, heartless, sociopathic place, but so can meatspace -- as Kitty Genovese could tell you today, if she weren't dead long before there was an Internet. There's even more of a diffusion of responsibility in cyberspace.

-- Also, in point of fact, "[a]lthough some viewers contacted the Web site to notify police, authorities did not reach his house in time." I have to admit, in these circumstances, if I saw someone apparently killing himself on live webcam, I wouldn't be sure who to call. The police? Possibly, but what if he gave no hint of where he was? "Well, Officer, I'm not sure, but he's speaking American English so he's probably somewhere in a house somewhere in the U.S. . . ." The FBI, perhaps. Then they'd have the job of tracking down where the webcast was coming from. The website operators? They bear no responsibility for the literally thousands of webcasts that probably pour in every day, nor could they. They can react when informed of something inappropriate, but probably not instantly. Which brings me to:

-- Just how was the website operator supposed to prevent this? Keep in mind that an operation such as Justin.tv probably has many different operators, and they are NOT watching every single webcast as it plays -- any more than the people in a bookstore can read every single book they sell and determine whether it's appropriate or not. Get real. Checking the website, I'd probably use the Help Channel and tell them someone is killing themselves live on webcamera . . . but of course, the person at the other end may not be in a position to check where that webcast is coming from, either. Help might not come until it's too late.

-- I can perfectly understand the father's desperate wish to "do something" to "regulate the Internet". But what law, exactly, would help? I've already explained the problems involved in making websites responsible for watchdogging user-provided real-time content. Sure, the viewers who joked about it or did nothing were reprehensible. But "good-Samaritan" laws have proven almost impossible to enforce and are often declared unconstitutional in the courts. Unfortunately.

-- Ultimately, it was Abraham Biggs Jr. who killed himself -- sad as that may be, mentally ill as he might have been. Not the Internet. It's hard to say now how he could have been stopped, or why he chose to broadcast his suicide live; we can say it was a cry for help, a plea for attention, but the one person who could shed the most light on his real reasons is now dead. In case anyone reading this feels an urge to do likewise -- in fact, anyone who is considering killing themself -- I urge them to read this article which originally was in Readers' Digest a great many years ago. It's a much shorter version of the original, but it should get the idea across to you what the consequences of suicide or attempted suicide can be.

Cool if useless Windows XP trick #1

Here's a neat trick for Windows XP.

Unlike Vista, Windows XP can't play a video file as desktop wallpaper. But you can fake it with VLC Media Player. Here's how:

1.) First, download and install the beast if you don't have it already.

2.) Open the video file of your choice in it. (If no picture opens up, then VLC can't play that particular video file, so find another.)

3.) Click on "Video", and then on "Wallpaper". VLC will start playing the movie on your desktop background.

4.) Minimize VLC. (If you don't know how already, just click on the first of the three square boxes on the upper right, the one that has what looks like a dash or underline symbol in it.)

You should now have the movie playing as a sort of animated desktop wallpaper. The sound, if any, will be playing as well. Isn't that neat? This works beautifully with movies such as Discover Channel's Sunrise Earth series of DVDs.