The Cost of AI
(Image by Joshua Sortino at Unsplash)
I’ve been an IT professional for over 40 years. The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for longer, and was well-known enough to become popular (and possibly prophetic) entertainment, from Colossus: The Forbin Project to Skynet and the Matrix.
We’ve been using rough forms of AI for years to go beyond simple scripting in order to automate mundane tasks, using machine learning and inference engines to handle common alerts and respond to them without having to wait on a human to react.
So the concept of AI is nothing new, but both the rapid advancements of the past few years and the capturing of the public imagination have kept AI (in particular, generative AI) heavily in the news, and there’s no end in sight.
As an IT guy, AI fascinates me. I think the possibilities for how it could improve our lives are boundless. On the other hand, as a photographer and writer, I agree with those that find it horribly threatening. The advances made in just the last couple of years allow generative AI platforms to “create” visuals that leap right over the “uncanny valley” into photorealistic images that are not easy to differentiate from
an actual photo.
The huge AI engines have done this by scraping massive amounts of copyrighted material (quite possibly including my own) with no compensation for or even acknowledgement of the actual creators. And those enormous corporations that are doing this are not being held accountable.
That fact does get some airtime, and while I think absolutely nothing will be done about it, at least there is some general understanding that there’s something wrong there. But there is another fact about AI that I don’t see much written about, and I think it’s important. In addition to AI platforms learning from ingesting the work done by writers, artists, researchers, etcetera, every time you use an AI platform, you are teaching it something.
AI platforms require an inordinate amount of compute power. They also require a ridiculous amount of storage — more data, more better. All of that costs a ton of money (and sucks up a huge amount of very costly energy — something else no one wants to talk about). Put simply, they are expensive as hell.
So how can they incorporate AI for free into the platforms like Windows operating systems that we use every day? How can platforms like ChatGPT or Midjourney be free or very inexpensive?
It’s because they are using you, the consumer of those services, to continue to teach the AI engines. Which will make them better and better, very quickly. And they will continue to supplant, well, you. Writers, artists, editors, reporters… that’s just the start.
We already run IT shops with a small fraction of the personnel that it took in the 1980s when I started out as a mainframe support engineer. We call that progress, and I suppose that it is. And as rapidly as computing platforms continue to grow, we still hire a bunch of people. But I can see the end of that workstream coming soon as AI is becoming capable of performing more and more of those functions.
When the AI platforms are capable of making better corporate financial decisions than the finance guys, do we need anyone below the CFO? When the AI can make better technology decisions, do we need anyone other than the CTO, who can just rubber-stamp the AI’s decisions until they decide they don’t need him/her anymore either?
Publicly traded corporations are required by law to maximize stakeholder profits. That often leads to decisions that are not in the best interest of the people that work for those companies. What happens when, in ten or twenty years from now, when there ARE no workers? When major corporations are just shareholders and a handful of rubber-stamping execs? Honestly, that is not that far-fetched.
I’m not suggesting that you avoid AI. It would be hard to do today and it will be impossible tomorrow. But I do think we need to understand what is happening and what is inevitably coming next. There are smart people working on safeguards, but I do fear that they will be well behind the curve in controlling AI growth.
All I’m suggesting is that you be aware that every time you create a Leonardo image and tweak it until you’re happy with it to use in your ad campaign, and every time you use Google Bard to clean up a report for work, you are providing a free service to a major corporation (just like those artists whose work was stolen) and I’d be willing to bet that those services won’t remain free/cheap for long.
I’ve seen some pretty
major inflection points in my six decades here. The democratization of
computing with the introduction of the PC, the widespread availability
of knowledge (and bullshit) with the advent of Internet and the ability
to put ALL of that in your back pocket with the revolution of the smart
phone. I believe AI is the fourth, and probably the most impactful.
We
didn’t really know how ANY of those technologies were going to affect
our lives and we know even less about what AI is going to do to them.
But rest assured that it will change them dramatically and much more
quickly than you can imagine. And what is cheap today will likely not be
cheap tomorrow.
Postscript: I first wrote this back in April. We're now seeing news that Apple may start charging for AI-enabled Siri, and other companies are following suit. It was inevitable, although I think they're jumping the gun, as they don't have enough people hooked on using it yet. But I hate to say I told you so.
Labels: Art, Economics, Photography, Tech, Writing
Family IT Guy - Dell XPS 13 Edition
I'm not one of those guys that complains about being the family IT guy - I've enjoyed helping Jeannette and my folks with upgrades, replacements, troubleshooting etc (and I never forget that I'm a second-generation IT guy - Mom preceded me in the IT support biz). With all of the unsolvable problems I run into as an IT manager, it's nice getting my hands "dirty" and actually solving a problem. I'm usually fairly methodical, doing some research before jumping in.
That wasn't the case when Jeannette told me last week that she was getting messages on her Dell ultrabook saying that her hard drive was about to crash. She had some things she needed to do urgently so I uncharacteristically sprang into action without thinking things through.
1st step was actually reasonable - grab an external hard drive with some space and copy off all of her data. I do occasionally back up her laptop but it had been awhile. That preserved her photos, documents etc but didn't help for her installed software like MS Office and Scrivener.
That done, I rushed out to Best Buy to grab a new SSD. Dumb. If I'd taken five minutes to check, I'd have noted that the XPS doesn't use a full-size SSD - it has an mSATA drive that looks more like a memory stick than a hard drive. I would have also noticed that the laptop has 10 screws requiring an odd-size screwdriver that I didn't own in order to get into the guts.
So off to Amazon (thank you, Amazon Prime!) to order an mSATA drive and a set of screwdrivers that include a Torx T5 head. I should have used that time to take a deep breath and think this through, but instead we went to the beach where I got horribly sunburned, ate way too much Mexican food, had a fantastic time and didn't think much at all about computers.
Back home and I'm starting to flounder around again rather than thinking about this. I've replaced OS drives on workstations and laptops before so the fact that the drive hadn't failed should have made this easy. But my normal methods were failing me with the ultrabook. No optical drive, no additional SATA ports, limited USB ports. I couldn't hook up the external optical drive I have because it requires two USB ports and the only two on the Dell are on opposite sides of the box and the cables on the drive wouldn't reach them both.
Finally, step back, take a deep breath.
1) Clear off a good-sized USB stick, download Clonezilla (open source software), install it on the USB drive and make the drive bootable.
2) Hook up the big external drive I'd used to copy files to as a target for the clone
3) Boot from the USB stick and clone the soon-to-be-dead hard drive to the external drive
4) Remove the bottom cover of the laptop, replace the mSATA drive and close it up (this was actually remarkably straightforward).
5) Boot from the USB key again and clone the new hard drive
6) Boot from the new hard drive - all is well
The only issue I ran into afterwards was that Spybot was acting funky but I don't think that had anything to do with the clone process - I think it just hadn't been updated in awhile, so I blew it away, reinstalled it and it seems to be working fine now.
My lesson from all of this - Don't Rush! Take an hour to do some research and think things through and things will go much faster overall. Regardless, the good news is that J has her laptop back and I feel a sense of relief.
I'm also thinking that in addition to the normal backups that I do, I may start cloning the OS drive on my workstation every couple of months to make sure I can recover programs in addition to data.Labels: Tech
Cord-cutting Update
A little geeky, maybe, but here's the latest status on our cord-cutting adventure.
Our previous setup was Earthlink DSL and Time Warner Cable, with coax directly into the bedroom TV (so we only got the lower tier of channels) and coax in the media room split between a TWC-provided digital receiver for the full slate of channels and a home theater PC I built a few years ago, that I used as a DVR for the lower tier of channels).
With a change in my work situation last May, we decided to do what we'd been discussing for some time and get rid of our TWC service. Living in Chapel Hill, my biggest concern with over-the-air delivery was the distance to the towers servicing the Research Triangle market (most of which are located SE of Raleigh) and to the Triad (most of which I think are down around High Point) - we split the middle and aren't particularly close to either market. Previous purchases of interior digital antenna were definitely unsatisfactory and exterior antenna looked like a huge hassle. However, Jeannette and I independently hit on an antenna that does work for us - the Mohu Leaf.
Our current set-up in the bedroom is simple - TV attached to a Mohu Leaf 50 powered antenna that is in the bedroom bay window facing pretty much East. We get decent reception of some Triangle and some Triad stations - enough that all the major networks are covered from one or the other market (except maybe NBC but who the hell watches NBC?). Plus we get the UNC stations of course. We absolutely get some pixelation and picture freezes from time to time (often weather-dependent) but overall it's a pretty acceptable experience. We also have a Google Chromecast device on the bedroom TV which allows streaming of Netflix, Youtube, HuluPlus and anything in a Chrome browser.
The media room TV setup is a bit more complicated. I mentioned the home-theater PC that I was running cable through (no cablecard, so I was only getting the lower tier of TWC channels through it). That HTPC remains as part of the setup. Adding a second Mohu Leaf 50 however was unsatisfactory. We've never been able to find an antenna position in the media room that brought in more than a couple of channels clearly. So we've added another component - an HDHomeRun Extend, which is basically a router-sized box with Ethernet connectivity and two TV tuners. It sits upstairs in my home office attached via Ethernet to our wireless access point and via coax to the second Mohu Leaf, this one in my office window facing SW. So TV watching in the media room is through Windows Media Center on the HTPC accessing the HD Homerun tuners via the home network. The HD Homerun unit also gives us the capability to watch over-the-air TV on pretty much any of our networked devices (PCs, tablets, etc).
So OTA is taken care of with the two Mohu Leaf antennae and streaming via the HTPC in the media room, the Googlecast unit in the bedroom and subscriptions to HuluPlus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. That certainly doesn't get us everything we used to have with cable, but Sling TV will get us closer when it is available next month. The HTPC gives us DVR capability as well.
With the various subscriptions (including the Sling TV that we'll add when available), we've dropped a $106/month cable bill in favor of about $42/month in subscriptions (we were already paying for Netflix so I'm not counting it). Overall equipment costs for stuff we didn't already have was about $250 for the two Mohu Leaf antennae and the HD Homerun Extend (look around for deals) - depreciate those purchases over a year and you can add another $20/month to the total for year 1. Still substantially below the monthly cable bill.
So how does this new arrangement stack up? For broadcast networks, it is mostly better. We're getting uncompressed HD signals (unlike TWC) so the picture is typically better. We do get pixelation and the occasional screen freeze but frankly we did on TWC as well. Most will let you stream the latest handful of episodes for free within a day or two of broadcast as well and I can usually get full HD with fewer glitches than either our old cable or the over-the-air setup. There are a lot of cable shows that are available for streaming but that has been hit-or-miss. No longer having Syfy, we managed to stream all of the last season of Defiance, but for some reason the Syfy website dropped about 5 episodes of Haven all at once so we missed most of the latest season of it. Covert Affairs is just not available for streaming anywhere without either a cable/satellite provider or paying via Amazon or iTunes. On the other hand, I've missed a large number of Doctor Who episodes since the relaunch so we're making our way through the Eccleston season and will soon get started on the Tennant years. Sling TV will get us ESPN, TNT and some other networks back that we've missed, but Jeannette still really misses her Turner Classic Movies (ok, I do too) and I do miss Syfy and USA. But frankly those three channels are probably all I'm missing from a full cable subscription that I would actually watch with any frequency.
I think once we've gotten Sling TV (please before the end of the college basketball season please?), we'll be in good shape to last the two or three years it will take before Google Fiber is available in our neighborhood.
Labels: Tech, TV
Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche
Back in the dark ages (i.e. before the ubiquity of the Interwebs), there was no easy way to electronically share cat photos with funny captions, grumpy cat photos with funny captions, videos of cats doing funny things. And, shockingly, there was no Dilbert (although there were pointy-haired bosses in abundance). So office drones shared bits of teh funny via photocopied bits of cartoons, jokes, etc. No, I'm not kidding you, actual used-to-be-trees paper was used to lighten the oppressive gloom of a 6'x8' cube. (Now that I think about it, maybe the fact that we don't have all that paper pinned to cube walls is what makes corporate facilities convinced that office workers now need much less space than that.)
My favorite of these bits of humor can be found below - it started circulated the IT departments of large corporations during my last year at IBM and I still resonate with the total inside-jokiness of it. It's one of those you-had-to-be-there things, back with we system programmers were maybe not respected but we were damn well feared. The advent of the PC in offices that same year totally destroyed the mystique, so this bit of prose marks the end of an era, one that some of us lament daily.
Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They like twinkies, coke and palate-scorching Szechwan food.
Real Programmers don't write applications programs. They program right down on the bare metal. Applications programming is for the dullards who can't do systems programming.
Real Programmers don't write specs. Users should be grateful for whatever they get: They are lucky to get any programs at all.
Real Programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand and harder to modify.
Real Programmers don't document. Documentation is for simpletons who can't read listings or the object code from the dump.
Real Programmers don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look at how much good it did for them.
Real Programmers don't read manuals. Reliance on a reference manual is the hallmark of the novice and the coward.
Real Programmers don't write in RPG. RPG is for gum-chewing dimwits who maintain ancient payroll programs.
Real Programmers don't write in COBOL. COBOL is for COmmon Business-Oriented Laymen who can't run a business, much less write a real program.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks. They get excited over finite state analysis and nuclear reactor simulation.
Real Programmers don't write in PL/1. PL/1 is for insecure anal-retentives who can't choose between COBOL and FORTRAN.
Real Programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmer writes in BASIC after reaching puberty.
Real Programmers don't write in APL, unless the whole program can be written on one line.
Real Programmers don't write in LISP. Only idiots' programs contain more parenthesis than actual code.
Real Programmers don't write in PASCAL, BLISS, ADA, or any of those other sissy computer science languages. Strong typing is the crutch for people with weak minds.
Real Programmers' programs never work right the first time. But if you throw them on the machine they can be patched into working order in only a few 30-hour debugging sessions.
Real Programmers never work 9 to 5. If any Real Programmers are around at 9:00 am, its because they were up all night.
Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport which requires a change of clothes. Mountain Climbing is acceptable. Real Programmers wear climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room.
Real Programmers disdain structured programming. Structured programming is for compulsive neurotics who were permanently toilet trained. They wear neckties and carefully line up sharp pencils on an otherwise clear desk.
Real Programmers don't like the team programming concept. Unless, of course they are the chief programmer.
Real Programmers never write memos on paper. They send memos via computer mail networks.
Real Programmers have no use for managers. Managers are a necessary evil. They exist only to deal with personnel bozos, bean counters, senior planners, and other mental defectives.
Real Programmers scorn floating point arithmetic. The decimal point was invented for pansy bedwetters who are unable to "think big."
Real Programmers don't drive clapped-out Mavericks. They prefer BMW's, Lincolns, or pick up trucks with floor shifts. Fast motorcycles are highly regarded.
Real Programmers don't believe in schedules.
Planners make up schedules.
Managers "firm up" schedules.
Frightened coders strive to meet schedules.
Real Programmers ignore schedules.
Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches. If the vending machine sells it, they eat it. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche. Labels: Tech, Teh Funny
I Hate Time-Warner Cable - Reason 417
We have an older HD digital set-top box from TWC that does not have an HDMI out interface. This wasn't a problem with our old TV, as it only had two HDMI interfaces available and I was using them for the Blu-ray player and the home theater computer. With the new TV, I've got 4 HDMI ports, so I'd like to swap out the set-top box for a new one with an HDMI interface. Given the limited hours the local TWC office is open, I thought I'd call first to make sure they have one available. Um, yeah, about that...
No phone number is listed on the TWC website for the local office. There's only a toll-free number. So I called it and stumbled through a voice menu that didn't have any options that really matched what I needed. Tech support? Not really, I know what I need and can swap out the box myself. Service upgrade? Not really - same service, just need a box with a different interface.
So I tried service upgrade anyway and got a nice young woman on the phone. I explained what it was that I wanted. "So you want digital service?" No, I have digital service - I just want to swap my cable box out for one that has an HDMI interface. "Ok, you can do that at the local storefront." Yes, but I'd like to talk to them and make sure that they have one available before I disconnect my box and carry it over there during their limited hours of operation. But they don't seem to have a freaking phone! "I'm sorry, sir, they operate as a walk-in service. I can pull up your account and go over your service with you." Jeez, lady, I'm perfectly capable of pulling up my account online - I can read you the goddamn MAC address of the box that I have at home off of your website that I managed to log into all by myself but you can't tell me the freaking telephone number of the local office?
Un-fucking-believable. If it weren't for Carolina basketball I'd drop that shit in a heartbeat.
Labels: Tech, TV
Buying Music (beware - long and somewhat geeky)
I don't buy nearly as much music as I did in college and the few years right after. It's not that I think there's not good music out there - I just can't spend nearly as high a percentage of my life thinking about it, trying things out, reading about it, etc. as I did then. Most of the music I bought from 1979-1986 was influenced either by WXYC or by what I heard in local clubs but as XYC moved towards an even more eclectic (and, to me, less interesting) mix and the frequency of my visits to clubs dropped dramatically (particularly after I didn't own one anymore), I lost a lot of input. I did start picking up the newstand edition of CMJ in the mid- to late-90s for their CD samplers and occasionally did the same with other music mags, but those have mostly gone away as well.
In addition to figuring out the best way to find new stuff that I like, I'm trying to figure out the best way to acquire music. My primary places to listen are in the car (32GB USB key with mostly rock/pop/Americana), on the back porch (32GB MP3 player with mostly jazz mixed with bluegrass, trad, exotica and some rock instrumentals hooked up to one of those Brookstone outside speakers) or while running/working out (4GB Sansa Clip with uptempo stuff, much from the 80s). I've also got (almost) all my CDs ripped to a workstation in my home office, all of which is accessible from the home theater PC downstairs in the family room (HTPC is networked using Powerline as wireless was a bit too slow) and I've ripped a good number of my LPs.
For the most part until recently I've continued to purchase CDs - I grew up on albums so I'm conditioned to purchase a group of songs as a package rather than individual tracks (sure I had some 45s but very few after I turned, oh, 12 or so). I can rip CDs at whatever bit rate I want and other than that brief flurry of DRM nonsense, I can store them in multiple places and play them on a wide variety of devices. But I'm finally to the point that none of those devices is a CD player, so why bother with those extra steps?
So in the past few weeks I've decided to do some experimenting. As a control, I did what I've done the past few years and ordered two CDs from Amazon - Jack White's solo disc "Blunderbuss" and the new dB's album. Then, since after purchasing a Google tablet I had a $25 credit in my Google Wallet, I bought the new The Old Ceremony release as well as an older one I didn't have via Google Play. At the same time, I bought "The Yes Album" (I've never owned a copy in any format), The Black Keys' "El Camino" (h/t to Jeannette for that one!) and Greg Humphreys' "People You May Know" from Amazon as mp3s.
The CDs arrived in about a week - free shipping but hey, a week. I use Audiograbber with LAME underneath as a ripper - unfortunately the dB's disk wasn't in the CDDB yet, so while it ripped just fine, I had to hand-enter the track names. I then usually use MP3Tag to fix the tags the way I like them. Overall, more hassle than it should have been due to the dB's release not being entered in the CDDB yet.
The Google Play experience was interesting - found both TOC releases I was looking for and purchase to the Google Play cloud was pretty seamless. Downloading to my PC was less so. After selecting the tracks for "Fairytales and Other Forms of Suicide" I was told that I either needed to download the Google Music Manager or I'd only be able to download the tracks twice from the Web. I wasn't particularly interested in downloading yet another piece of crap software, so I went ahead and downloaded directly - the mp3 files came as one zip file that I had to then extract to where I wanted it. Not a big deal but probably more complex than it needed to be.
I'd bought a few individual tracks from Amazon before but I don't recall buying complete releases as mp3 "albums" before. Again, purchase was no problem and the tracks from the three releases were dumped to the Amazon cloud. And again, downloading was not as straightforward as it should have been. I could either grab each file individually or download Amazon's music management software. I wasn't happy with either choice but I decided to go ahead and pull down the crapware, which loaded the tracks where it wanted to (I don't think it asked me where *I* wanted them) and also automatically loaded them into Windows Media Player, which I detest almost as much as iTunes and do not use. So I had to go find them and then move them to where I wanted them.
In the case of both Google Play and Amazon, I had to do a little bit of cleanup of the files, primarily using A.F.5 Renamer to add the band name to the beginning each file name (I prefer "artist name - track number - track title") but in neither case was there much to do - cover art and appropriate tagging was already there.
All-in-all, Google Play was probably the best experience. The mp3s were advertised correctly as being 320kbps (Amazon didn't specify and varied by release - from variable to 192 to 256). I have a Google Nexus 7 tablet and a Motorola Razr Maxx phone, both of which come with Google Play so I don't have to do anything extra to listen to Google Play tunes on those devices (I know Amazon has an Android app available - haven't tried it yet). There was an extra step involved in both the Amazon and Google process, but I was able to download the Google Play purchases without installing vendor-specific crapware. As an added benefit, the free download on Google Play last night was The Dunwells' "I Could Be A King" which is a pretty damn fine tune!
You'll note that I didn't include buying locally as an option. Since Schoolkids closed a couple of years ago, those options are pretty limited. While there are a couple of small record shops (my, that's sounding quaint these days) left, their selection isn't great and they're not places I'm likely to walk by when they're open very often. As much as it pains me, I think I've moved on.
I haven't done any experimenting yet with how large a catalog Google has to draw from, but for the time being it appears that it will be my music source of choice.
Very interested in feedback from others on this!
Labels: Music, Tech
Why I Hate Apple
The search and seizure at the home of the Gizmodo reporter that broke the lost iPhone prototype story and the Jobsian control over all content are just the two most recent examples of why I hate Apple. For years, the necessity of paying a lot more money for underperforming hardware and a limited application suite to get the Mac OS was enough to keep me away from Apple, but it didn't make me hate them. The early iPod with their requirements for using Apple proprietary software and the iStore were annoying and kept me away as there were perfectly good, less expensive mp3 players out there without that baggage. It was really during the DRM debates that dislike of Apple turned into active hatred - the Jobsian flip-flopping and disengenuousness on the subject while continuing to create the most controlled computing/entertainment environment in the world. Sorry, but Macland just feels more and more like some combination of Oceania and the tightly controlled simulated reality of The Matrix and no, the irony of the first half of that equation is hardly lost on me. Apple's real strong suit in the beginning was as a tool for creative people - it truly did have a superior environment for music development, video editing and graphic design. But it's success of the last decade had been entirely around consumption - iPod/iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iEtc - and with the control they exert on what can be consumed via their devices and the lock-in that they engender. I've got nothing against consumption, but I have no interest in being told what I can't consume.Admittedly, the final and possibly largest factor is the Cult of Mac. I have a number of dear friends (some of you probably reading this) that have succumbed. If you don't have an Apple logo tat, you've at least thought seriously about it. In addition to having gone through a succession of iPods and MacBooks, you probably had your iPad within the first week it was available, despite already having an iPhone and a MacBook Air. If you've read this far, you're likely not going to try to argue with me - instead you'll sadly shake your head because I "just don't get it" (but if I'd just try a MacBook for a week, I'd never use anything else). I'm a big enough person to admit the siren call of "It just works" can be pretty seductive after an hour of trying to install a bit of software in the Windows world (much less a Linux box) but I will persevere.Although I'm thinking about buying an iPad for Jeannette...Labels: Tech
Windows Home Server project - The Build
Man, I just love an anti-climax! I went ahead and assembled the rest of the parts (picked up the hard drives, a DVD drive and a couple of odds and ends from CompUSA at Northgate Saturday) and set aside Sunday afternoon for the build. If you're interested in specs, they're what I outlined two posts ago except that I decided not to waste a SATA slot on the old 250GB drive, I dropped the $35 on a new DVD drive rather than taking one out of an old system and I went with a stick of Mushkin 2GB DDR2 rather than 2 1GB DIMMs.
When I say anti-climax, I mean that the most difficult part of the build was getting the damn extra 120mm case fan screwed into the front of the case, since the HDD enclosure isn't removable. Everything else was easy-peasy - I managed to not even cut myself. And frankly the extra fan was probably not necessary (and is a bit noisy) but I liked the idea of another fan to move air off the hard drives. After I got the case fan installed, it went like this:
01) Finish prepping the case (screw in the mobo standoffs, install the power supply, snap in the rear I/O port template02) Install the CPU and the stock cooler onto the mobo (this is a heck of a lot easier than the older sockets)
03) Screw in the motherboard and add the RAM
04) Install the hard drives (I used the bottom two 3.5" slots - the tool-less enclosure is nice but it's a little difficult to get to the clip on the other side)
05) Install the optical drive
06) Add the SATA cables (no more wide IDE ribbons - yay!!)
07) Connect the case wires (USB connectors, switch wires, etc)
08) Attach the power leads to the mobo, fans, HDDs, optical drives etc)
09) Plug in the keyboard, mouse, DVI and power cables and then hit power
Everything posted okay right off the bat - no errors (big yay for that!). BIOS settings were pretty much okay - I think I set the time and date and tweaked the boot order, but that was it. With the way Windows Home Server addresses the hard drives, I did not do any RAIDing of the drives - I'm not even sure you CAN do that and still have WHS work properly.
Slapped in the WHS install disk and let it go. There's not a lot of interaction necessary (but quite a number of reboots). It's interesting to see that a number of screens still refer to Windows Server 2003 (the kernel at the heart of WHS). Once the install completed and the last reboot was done, I attempted to get onto the network and found that the on-board Ethernet port was not configured correctly. I tried using the utility disk that came with the motherboard but as it didn't recognize the operating system, it wouldn't run Setup. I finally just opened the disk in Explorer and found the appropriate drivers. Once I ran them, I was able to get onto the network just fine and run Windows Update. That took a LONG time to pull everything down and install it, so that was pretty much it for Sunday (it was time for a couple of pints at Top of the Hill and the second half of the Jets-Chargers game by then). More on configuration in another post.
Labels: Tech
Windows Home Server project - Phase 2
Short post tonight - ordered the OS, memory and CPU from Newegg.com (see previous post for specs). That'll give me enough to go ahead and get started (I'll yank a hard drive out of a system I'm retiring for now). Should get everything in time to start to work next weekend and at least have a system I can start testing until I get the final hard drives.
There's a good article in Maximum PC on Windows Home Server and some of the features, capabilities, plug-ins, etc.
Labels: Tech
Windows Home Server project - Phase I
Those of you reading me on Facebook will have seen that I've been thinking of putting together a Windows Home Server to back up the various and sundry computers in the house as well as to act as a streaming server (and probably a print server). Windows Home Server has never gotten a lot of press, but it seems to me to have a lot of features that a NAS box doesn't offer and less complexity than trying to do this with Fedora or SUSE. I took a look at my existing boxes to see what I could salvage/repurpose, but the cases and mobos that I've already got didn't have support for the number of drives that I want to eventually be able to use. So I put together a wishlist on NewEgg.com to keep track of what I need to gather up (I've decided to do this basically out of pocket change, so I'm having to assemble it a bit at a time) and the total, including the OS and about 3 TB of storage is going to run about $650. I picked up the following bits at the CompUSA store at Northgate Mall today:
- Coolermaster Elite RC-330 case $50
- Coolermaster Elite 460W power supply $40
- ASUS AM3 socket mobo (full ATX, on-board NVidia graphics) $100
Left to acquire over the next couple of weeks:
- AMD Athlon II X2 250 (3.0 GHz dual-core) $70
- 2 sticks of 1GB DDR2 RAM $50
- Primary OS drive - 250GB SATA from old system Free
- 2 Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5 TB drives $220
- DVD/CD writer from old system Free
- Windows Home Server OS $100
I've got plenty of spare keyboards and meeses around, so that ought to do it. WHS can be run headless, but I've got a monitor I can use for it. I'll keep you guys posted as I continue to collect parts and start the build. One of the nice things about Windows Home Server is that you can add more hard drives and it just absorbs them into the big honking virtual drive, so I can slap a third 1.5TB in later and it should just immediately become addressable.
Labels: Tech
New Toy - HTPC
Spent a good bit of Sunday afternoon hooking up a new home theater PC - so far, so good. Specs are as follows:- HP Pavilion Slimline s3750t PC- Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)- Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo processor E7500 [2.93GHz]- 4GB DDR2-800MHz SDRAM [2x2048]- 640GB 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive- 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4350 & TV Tuner [DVI, HDMI, VGA adapter]- Blu-ray player & Lightscribe SuperMulti DVD burner- Wireless-G LAN card- 15-in-1 memory card reader, 2 USB, headphone port- Integrated 5.1 channel sound with front audio ports- HP wireless keyboard and HP wireless optical mouseAn 802.11N card would of course have been preferable but it wasn't an option with this build. The first steps after initial boot were to install Avast! A/V, ZoneAlarm firewall, Irfanview, Winamp, Deepburner and MediaMonkey. Since we're not planning to use this box for general web-surfing, I may not bother with FireFox or another browser but I will want to go ahead and upgrade to IE8 soon. The wireless access point is upstairs in my home office and so far I seem to be getting adequate throughput for Hulu, although Youtube is stopping to buffer a bit. The Iron Man Blu-Ray is working fine with the software provided from H-P but I fully expect to run into disks that won't play so any suggestions on the best Blu-Ray player software would be most appreciated. I've got my MP3 collection on the workstation in the office upstairs shared out to the new box with high-def audio out to the home theater receiver, so we have tuneage. And I've tested out both analog and digital stations from a straight coax cable TV feed from the wall and that looks good as well - haven't tried recording or any other DVR functions yet. I also haven't checked to see what I can get (if anything) coming through the digital cable box - I'll keep you posted as I continue to set things up. There are a bunch of little things I haven't done yet, like setting up the remote control, rewiring other parts of the HT set-up as I've swapped around a couple of other components, etc. The goal is to make this as complete a system as possible while making it relatively straightforward to use.So my checklist to date is:o Blu-Ray player - check (need to try more disks)o Music Jukebox - checko Internet streaming TV - check (loves me some Hulu!!)o DVR - in progress (tried recording "Big Bang Theory" and "How I Met Your Mother" tonight)
Labels: Movies, Music, Tech, TV
Vista Revisited
I've written from time to time here about my struggles with Vista on both JennySlash's laptop and the desktop I bought for Mom and I managed to purge Vista from our house this summer, opting for Windows XP as well as an Ubuntu-based desktop to play around with.
That changed in early October when I was able to get what was essentially a free laptop. I got a Dell XPS that naturally came with Vista (with SP1) along with a Blu-Ray player, 4GB RAM and a kick-ass video card. I have to admit that I've had none of the hangs, interruptions, slowdowns, etc. that everyone else has reported. Of course the interface is still wonky and I still don't see any reason in the world that they moved some of the controls around the way they did (there was a logical progression from Win95 to Win98 to WinXP that got blown away with Vista). But on the whole, I've had no real problems with Vista this time. Now, I have no doubt that this is due to a) having SP1 from the get-go and b) having 4GB of RAM and a video card that doesn't steal memory from the mobo. I'd like to complain (you know me - I REALLY would) but I really haven't had anything to bitch about. Yet.
To be on the safe side, I've repurposed the Ubuntu box as a Vista test box so I can install stuff on it before putting it on the laptop. Ubuntu worked fine for the most part, with the exception of flash-based websites causing the box to crash, regardless of what browser I was using. That's a more than minor annoyance - I found a number of purported fixes for it but none seemed to do the trick. I've got a partition set aside to install Linux but I might try Fedora for a couple of months next.
Labels: Tech
It Just Works
I mentioned a few months ago that I had bought a cheap refurbed Gateway desktop to use for playing around with Linux distros. I had briefly loaded a few different ones and had settled on the then-latest Fedora, but then became engrossed in getting JennySlash's laptop, her desktop and a new computer for Dad in shape for them to use. In the meantime, Ubuntu 8.04 came out and I picked up one of the Linux mags with a DVD with both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. So while I was frantically working last weekend to get ready for the Meadowmont art/craft show in a few weeks, I rather absent-mindedly threw the DVD in on the 64 bit side and let it loose.
After taking all defaults and answering about 3 questions, I had a fully functioning Linux system in about 30 unattended minutes. Holy Crap!!
After I brought it up for the first time, it recognized that there were a bunch of updates it needed, so I told it to go ahead and again left it alone while it downloaded and installed a couple hundred updates, fixes, patches, etc. No problems importing the Firefox bookmarks from my Windows XP laptop. I decided I might want to download the occasional mp3 from Usenet, so did a quick search online for recommendations, hit the add/delete button and installed the Pan newsreader from the repository, gave it the news provider address and it just worked. Decided I might want to do block renaming of photo files or the aforementioned mp3s, did a quick search online for recommendations, hit the add/delete button and installed Pyrenamer. It just worked. I opened up the latest version of GIMP (which of course was preinstalled) and it looks like they've dramatically improved the user interface, but I'll admit that I haven't tried to use it yet.
So far, no driver or compatability problems with sound, video, keyboard, mouse, nothing. It just works.
I've got a lot more to check out - need to go to some favorite websites (I Can Has Cheezburger works just fine!), try burning a CD or DVD, try playing both CDs and DVDs, try ripping CDs, etc. I also haven't set up the email client yet - checking my email via web interfaces so far. But I'm already blown away. Keep your over-priced, proprietary Crapple MacBook - I'm liking Ubuntu!
Labels: Tech
Better Luck
Spent a good chunk of the day yesterday setting up a dual-boot on JennySlash's laptop but this time with some reasonable success. It was still not effortless, but at least I ended up ahead, unlike last time. The first stumbling block was trying to repartition the hard drive, only to find that Dell had so many hidden partitions that I couldn't add another one. After some research, I found that one of them was for storing files used by Dell's media player hotkeys, which I figured J would never use, so I shrank the Vista partition and blew away the media partition. Then since I'd left the Vista implementation in an iffy state, I did a "factory restore" of it back to the way it came out of the box so that we'll have a known state if/when she ever decides to run Vista.
The installation of XP Home went okay, without any real problems. Of course most of the hardware didn't work but I found a number of sources of information on what drivers I'd need. Dell's support site is not helpful about XP drivers for a system it only sells with Vista, but others had found that the drivers for the Latitude D531 would work for her Inspiron and in fact they were right.
The next step was to install SP3. The initial attempt using Windows Update hung after awhile, so I killed it and downloaded the installer, which worked fine. I then went back to update for a few more fixes (unchecking the upgrade to IE 7 since there are some incompatabilities between it and Blackboard) and things were looking pretty good.
Finally downloaded anti-virus from Alwil, firewall from ZoneAlarm and anti-spyware from Spybot and spend the rest of the night configuring them. Today J gets to play around with it and figure out what I haven't done yet, but hopefully the random hangs and overheating she had with Vista will be a thing of the past.
Labels: Tech
A Slightly More Philisophical View
I appreciate the comments on the previous post and in fairness, I should point out that I've made my living the last 10 years managing the folks that support Windows servers and/or Windows desktops at a number of different companies and there are certainly good things to be said about Microsoft from a business support standpoint. My issues are really all around personal use/personal support and I've even defended Microsoft for personal use in the past.
I'll admit that I've thought a couple of times about trying a Mac for family members that are either not technically inclined or not interested in the overhead Windows PC ownership sometimes entails, but I can't bring myself to do it. There's no one that is more proprietary than Apple (making Steve Jobs' shouting at the RIAA about how DRM was a mistake quite laughable) and the only reason they aren't more vulnerable to malware attacks is their relatively small marketshare. Every new iBook they sell makes them more likely to be targeted.
No, I actually bought one of the Gateway refurbs as a test bed to ween myself off of reliance on Microsoft by playing around with Linux distros until I find one that is an acceptable combination of user-friendly, easy to maintain and stable. I just haven't had the time yet to do that evaluation, although I did some preliminary looking late last year and was pretty impressed with Fedora. The problem is that there are some programs that I can't live without that I have so far found no adequate Linux substitute for (MSMoney, TurboTax), others that I'd rather not do without (some games like PGA Tour Golf and Dungeon Siege, Photoshop Elements) and others that I just haven't had time to investigate substitutes for (management software for Creative MP3 players, Canon cameras, etc.). If all I was doing was web-surfing, email and Office stuff, there'd be no question that I'd dump Windows for Linux. And before any of you start pointing out substitutes for some of the programs I mentioned above, the GIMP is way too user-unfriendly, various open source MSMoney clones lack functionality and others I just haven't had time to evaluate. However, I love me some OpenOffice, Filezilla, Thunderbird, Firefox, etc. so there is hope.
Bottom line is that I expect I'll be using some version of Microsoft operating system for the foreseeable future for at least some systems, so it's in my (and everybody else's) best interest for them to get this right. In the meantime, while many Linux distros are shooting for a more user-friendly computing experience, MS seems to be heading in the other direction, so some flavor of Linux is becoming much more reasonable as a general user platform.
Labels: Tech
Steve Ballmer Owes Me Money
...or at least my Sunday back. For the most part we've avoided Vista but I did buy a Dell laptop for J last year that came with Vista Home Premium and it has certainly had more than its share of problems. Some of them are no doubt familiarity, which makes one ask why Microsoft thought it prudent to take a lot of the management controls and user controls that we've all become accustomed to with XP and essentially hide them. Much worse are the constant cases of the laptop locking up and other problems - the known issues with Vista make it difficult to tell what's a Vista problem and what is potentially a hardware problem.
Sunday was the topper though, as I tried to install SP1 on the laptop to see if it would alleviate some of these problems. While SP1 has been out for two months, it has not been presented to everyone yet via Windows Update, so I downloaded the almost half a gigabyte executable and, after backing up J's files, gave it a go. Halfway through it blew up with an error message so I rebooted to reset things and to start my debug. Then things got interesting. Well, if by interesting I mean frustrating as hell.
When the system started back up, I was presented with a message that the laptop could be running an unauthorized copy of Vista. My choices were to check it out or close. Knowing that this was clearly due to the failed SP1 installation, I hit "Close" which instead of letting me bypass the notice, shut the machine down. Wonderful.
So I started the laptop back up, got the message again, and hit the button to check it out, which opens a browser to the Microsoft "Genuine" page and, after the 8 Microsoft security messages I had to respond to for the ActiveX control from THEIR website to load, it told me that there was a problem with our installation of Vista and gave some suggestions for things to try, all of which required access to the "Start" button which at this point I did not have since Windows had never completed its initialization. So back to shutting down - laptop is currently unusable.
Next step was to bring the laptop up in Safe mode and try to do a System Restore. Took a few tries to figure out the right key to hit at startup to stop Windows initialization but finally got there and restored back to the earliest restore point, which had been 2pm Sunday. This took awhile but allowed me to boot the laptop all the way up into Vista and to find that the frickin System Restore hadn't considered the "Download" folder to contain personal files, so I lost the damn executable.
Downloaded the exe again, this time from MY laptop, and burned it to CD. I had also installed an outstanding patch before trying to load SP1 and thought maybe it had caused a problem, but now with the system restored it was no longer there, so I tried installing SP1 again. No luck. And once again I couldn't boot due to the Windows Genuine Advantage message. Reboot, Safe Mode, System Restore.
In the meantime, from some of the reading I'd done I thought there might be some previous optional patches that I had not installed that might be needed for SP1, so I went back in to Windows Update and decided to install all of the optional patches that were presented. Each of these steps is taking a considerable amount of time of course, so by this time it is well into the evening after I've taken a break to take J to evening services at her church and I've slammed down a couple of Bass ales at my "church" while watching LeBron James and Paul Pierce duke it out. I've been doing other things at the same time, but this is really getting annoying and I've gotten no closer to getting SP1 installed.
So, patches are on, I reboot and before I've even tried to reinstall SP1, I've got a Windows Genuine Advantage violation again. Unbelievable. Reboot, Safe Mode, System Restore. It's 1am and I'm no closer to having SP1 installed than I was at 2pm.
So now I'm exploring other options - blow Vista away and install XP, set up a dual-boot with Vista AND XP or even install a user-friendly Linux distro with OpenOffice since the primary uses of the laptop are web, email and document editing.
As far as Vista goes, I've bought three machines in the last 9 months that were preloaded with Vista. One was the Dell laptop - lots of problems. The second was a refurbed Gateway desktop for me - I immediately blew Vista away and started playing with various Linux distros but I've since reinstalled Vista to try to do some troubleshooting for JennySlash and for the third system I bought, a similarly-configured Gateway refurb that I gave to Mom for her birthday. She had no end of trouble with it and finally gave it back hoping I could get my money back for it. Not a good track record. As J said last night, what do people that DON'T have an IT professional in the family do?!
Labels: Stuff, Tech
Not Just a Tasty Dessert!
I haven't had much time to try Linux distros the last few years, contenting myself with running Windows as an OS while trying as much as possible to use open source and/or free apps like OpenOffice and Audiograbber and MediaMonkey. But I picked up a copy of LinuxWorld last week with a copy of the latest version of the Sabayon distribution on a DVD and decided to see just how easy it really is. The Sabayon developers are specifically going for ease of use and out-of-the-box functionality and let me say that I think they've succeeded admirably.
I popped the disk in my old hand-built PC that I used to use for audio and photo editing. It's about 5 years old and I hadn't used it for anything much in quite a few months. It's running on an old 1.33 GHz AMD chip with half a gig of RAM and two IDE hard drives totaling about 140GB of space. It also has a first generation Sound Blaster Audigy soundcard.
The CD is a Live distribution, so I was able to boot into Sabayon without overwriting Windows. It came up with no problems, even though I've got a USB KVM switch sharing the 19" LCD and the USB keyboard and mouse with my current photo-editing PC. As all seemed well and as I'd already cleared off anything I wanted to save, I hit the icon to install to the hard drive. I answered a few easy questions, let it choose how to partition the drives, and then let it do its thing. It did take a little while to install, but much less time than Windows XP and with many fewer questions. The first reboot from the hard drive was also a little slow but subsequent boots have been pretty fast.
Let me say that I am amazed at the hardware recognition. It recognized my soundcard and the USB mouse and kybd and everything else I've tried. The only issue I've run into so far is that it doesn't want to let me increase the screensize beyond 1152x864 but I'm sure I can find a way to resolve that.
Sabayon comes with a pretty comprehensive set of apps - I really haven't had a chance to try much yet but I'll keep you posted with how well this goes.
Labels: Tech
