Slot Loading Drives

If you even remotely consider yourself a geek, you've more than likely heard this old IT support story before. True story from a Novell NetWare Sysop:

Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"
Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?"
Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?"
Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"
Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."
Tech: "Please excuse me. If I seem a bit stumped, it's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder?
Caller: It came with my computer. I don't know anything about a promotion. It just has '4X' on it."
At this point, the Tech Rep had to mute the caller because he couldn't stand it. He was laughing too hard. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder and snapped it off the drive.

Not that I don't find stupid people funny, because I really, really do, but why do we still use tray loading CD/DVD drives? Slot loading drives have been around for a few years now. Somehow the entire car audio industry decided to skip the whole tray loading step and went straight to slot loading CD players. Maybe it's so our IT staff people can continue to weed out the stupid people by allowing another generation to mistake their CD/DVD drive for a cup holder. Maybe the manufacturer of drive trays is bribing industry leaders to continue to use them. I don't know. What I do know is that slot loading drives seem a whole lot less cumbersome. Slot loading drives, in my experience, tend to be quieter too because the disc never rattles against the drive tray as it spins up or down.

Here's a short video of the results of some guy modifying his Xbox 360 to have a slot loading drive.

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Why didn't they just design it this way in the first place? Why don't they change their current production to do it this way? Why don't they offer replacement slot loading drives? I'm sick of drive trays, both on my PC and my gaming systems. I really wish they would wise up and switch to slot loading drives.

Terminator Time Travel

I guess I should premise this post with the disclaimer that I'm not a time traveler and have no first hand knowledge of how these things work. I'm also not a theoretical physicist who spends their entire life studying these things. But I have taken a few advanced physics courses during the course of getting my college degree and I have read a number of books written by actual theoretical physicists. I would like to think I can discuss this topic with some sense of knowing what I'm talking about and not completely spewing hot air.

The other day a friend of mine and I were talking the merits of time travel in the movies, how it's depicted and which movie does it best. The main movie he concentrated on was the Terminator series (movies + television). After thinking on it for a bit I thought I'd post this today. This is mainly the result of my musings, based on my understanding of string theory and the dimensionality of the universe. Before I really get into it though, here's a short video I found based on a book I read recently that attempts to explain the dimensionality in the universe.

Ok, you're still reading after watching that. Good. Think of our timeline as a single line. Every event in our past is defined. It's happened. There's no changing it. Our future timeline has an infinite number of possibilities. Every event, choice or decision that is made in our future could send us down any number of paths. Every distinct path is its own alternate universe, sharing commonalities with other universes only prior to the events that split them.

In regards to the Terminator series, the more I think about it, the more and more I see that they really didn't have a clue what they were doing in regards to time travel. In the original Terminator movie, John Connor sends a man back in time to 1984 to stop a Terminator from killing his own mother before he is born. The fact that John Connor exists in 2029 is evidence enough that in his particular timeline, his mother didn't die. He was in fact born. As soon as the Terminator goes back in time, that timeline is changed at the point he arrives. From that point in time, that timeline is now a distinct, different universe than the one the Terminator left. Nothing that happens there can ever cause that timeline to coincide with the original timeline, because in that timeline, no Terminator existed in 1984. Also, when Kyle Reese is sent back, he can never end up in the same universe the Terminator ended up in, because his time line he is traveling back in, is one in which the Terminator never existed in 1984.

From the perspective of the original John Connor, a Terminator and Kyle Reese both went back in time and nothing changed. Nothing in his universe is affected because their presence in the past branched the timeline down a different path than the one that was his past. Essentially, this means that time travel for the sake of changing your past, in your universe, is impossible. Yes, you could go back to cause changes, but those changes would only present themselves in an alternate universe separate from the one you left. Also, traveling 'back to the future' from a time in the past you visited, would never return you to the universe you left. Instead, it would return you to a possible future of that timeline you created by your presence in the past.

Essentially then, time travel is pointless as a method of changing the present by traveling to the past because you will never affect the current timeline you're in. From the perspective of being the time traveler yourself, you can use time travel to move into a new alternate universe and improve (or degrade) your situation. But from the perspective of staying in your original universe and sending someone else back in time to change things for you, it's totally pointless. Nothing would ever change. In regard to television and movies depicting time travel (or dimension travel, if you will), the only show I think that even came close to grasping this concept was the show Sliders, where the main character built a device to travel between these infinite parallel universes, neither forward nor backwards in time though. I guess that's why I actually enjoyed watching that show.

Top 20 Horde

As you most likely read previously, my friends and I made the Top 100 on the Horde leaderboards in Gears of War 2. We really should have been satisfied with that, but no, we decided to go for more. Tonight we just finished our attempt at playing through on hardcore difficulty. Unfortunately we didn't make it all the way through all 50 waves. We died on wave #48. Our final score though moved us up to #15-19 on the leaderboards.


If we had managed to finish out all 50 waves we probably could have taken the top spot. Maybe we'll attempt it again in the future, but it'll probably be a long wait. The hardcore play through took us just over eight hours, with a few short breaks, by the time we failed wave #48. It'd probably take an additional hour or so to make it through wave 50.

Gears of War 2 - Horde Top 100

If you read my previous review of Gears of War 2 or you've played the game, you've heard of Horde mode. Basically, you get wave after wave of enemies to fight off while trying to survive. The first few waves may seem easy enough, but that can be deceiving. After about wave 30 the challenge really kicks in. So long as your whole team doesn't die you can continue on, attempting to add to your high scores.

A few weeks ago a few of my friends and I attempted to go for a high score in Horde mode. We did pretty good I thought, breaking the top 200 then on the map Jacinto. The high scores are publicly available on the Official Gears of War 2 website, listed according to what map the game was played on.


Tonight some other friends and I attempted the same thing. The challenge tonight came in that we went into the game with only 4 of the possible 5 teammates you can bring in, so we started off with a self induced handicap. Four hours later we broke into the Top 100 scores, landing at #98. All in all, it was a fun filled night of gaming with friends, playing a game we all enjoy. Maybe in a few weeks we'll try for the overall high score on Jacinto, this time on hardcore difficulty (we did it tonight on just normal difficulty).

Tips for Horde on Jacinto:

• Hold a grenade spawn tower
• First priority is ALWAYS the shields--before ammo or weapon pickups, always pickup a shield, you'll need all 5 of them.
• Never kill a mauler on the stairs unless you have 5 shields already, as the shields glitch and fall through the map.
• Place 2 shields backwards on the stairs next to the sandbags. Place 2 other shields boxing in the area where you land after jumping over the sandbags going up the stairs. Place the last shield at the top of the stairs in the gap farthest from the grenade spawn.
• Always use weapons that have auto ammo refills each round (lancer/hammerburst/shotgun) and use a boltok pistol as it spawns right in front of the stairs, making ammo runs quick and easy at the end of a wave. Other weapons are pretty useless after the first few waves as enemy health is too high.
• Only shoot grinders when they're weapons are overheated. Sure, it may be slow, but in later waves grinders will one hit kill you without ever downing you.
• Kill wretches last. They make it easy for you and your teammates to grab ammo while the wretch chases you around.
• Wait for close range kills (bottom of stairs) instead of wasting ammo on long range kills.
  
• When grabbing ammo at the end of a round, have everyone plant their 2 grenades, preferably far from your defended stairs and spread out enough that one won't set off another.
  

Free Tech Support

Anyone else who reads this and considers themselves a geek is probably in the same boat as me. The more I do with computers and tech stuff, the more my family & friends view me as a free tech support guy. It started out when I was in school with my parents asking me simple stuff about setting up their email and such. That wasn't so bad. Gradually it spread to where my extended family was calling me about the simple stuff as well. As soon as my neighbors learned I was a CS student I became the first person they'd call whenever they had a computer question or problem. It went up a step when a year or so ago I helped my brother wire his apartment for ethernet so he could play his Xbox 360 in a different room from his computer. Apparently I am the only person who can use a crimp tool.

I find it funny how people seem to think I can solve problems with just a simple telephone call. I had an uncle call me because his computer was stuck constantly restarting and not loading the operating system. Somehow he thought I could just tell him to hit some magic key (right next to the Any key) to fix the problem. And it's not like I can just drive over to his house to fix the problem. He lives far enough away it'd cost me roughly $50 in gas to drive there and back. It would be cheaper for him to take his PC into a tech support shop and pay the $30-$40/hour they charge.

Now, I don't mind helping people with simple stuff or giving advice when I'm visiting or actually there in front of their computer. Doing support over the phone when they aren't able to converse on the same tech vocabulary level is very frustrating. With my family, I'll get calls while I'm driving down the road and have no frame of reference to what they're doing, and sometimes they're not even able to articulate what the problem is exactly.

I really think people should have to go through some sort of introductory course on how to use a computer before they actually get one. I think the biggest problem when it comes to computer problems, bugs, viruses, etc is user education level. A computer takes time and effort to keep in good working order, just as does an automobile. People think it's important to take care of their cars - get it washed, change the oil, etc, but they seem to think a computer will just take care of itself. Then they wonder why their computer runs so slow and is plagued with problems just a few months after getting it. Then again, you could always go overboard, as a friend of mine does, in that he reformats and reinstalls his entire operating system every few months just to be sure nothing is on there he doesn't want.

We're all in this together

Mere

As it turns out, one of my friends actually went and got famous. My friend Kyle plays bass guitar for a band Mere. Recently they were selected to be part of the official Team USA Olympic Soundtrack. So, just to reassure everyone that I'm not, as Kyle puts it, "a communist who hates Team USA" I've included the support pic on my blog for the time being.

Cognitive Surplus

This is a great video of a presentation given at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. Clay Shirky gives a great explanation (plausible) as to the reasons behind the explosion of user created content on the web and the immersion everyone is experiencing with social networking sites. Enjoy.

The Machines Are Alive

I swear the more processors and memory we put into our computers, the more likely the are to come to life, if they haven't already. Processing power has grown so fast that most PC's can handle workloads that weren't even imaginable ten years ago. Just the other day I had my computer at home ripping a DVD, converting videos to another format, uploading a data backup file, recording live TV, using VoIP, streaming video my Xbox 360, and playing a video game -- all at the same time, without even so much as a hiccup.

With all this new computing power at our fingertips, I'm amazing our computers haven't started talking back to us yet. Then again, that's likely a software issue. But I am willing to say that I've seen some technology start to take on personal attitudes, if only at a base level. Where I work, the developers all share a common network enabled printer. It gets used fairly regularly by all of us. After a few weeks we've all started to notice that our printer seems to have something against one of the developers, and against him only. In the year or so that I've been there, I've yet to have a problem with that printer. Every time I use it, it works flawlessly. The same goes for almost all the developers, except this one guy. For him, the printer likes to give a 'Paper Jam' error message on a large percentage of his printouts. When you check the printer, there is no paper jam. You just open one of the trays and close it again and all is fine.

The last few weeks we've tracked how often this happens. For all the other developers we get that error about one in fifty. For the unfortunate guy, he gets it about four in five printouts. It doesn't matter what time of day, how many pages, what tray he prints from, or from what PC he initializes his printouts, it always seems to give that bogus error message for him and him alone. Every time it happens we can all hear his verbal frustrations and almost on cue, the entire development team bursts out laughing. If the printer doesn't learn it's place, it may find itself in the same position that unfortunate printer did in the movie Office Space.

In news of the stupid...

Have you ever seen the commercials for Lifelock, an identity theft prevention service? They're the ones where Lifelock spokesman and CEO Todd Davis starts off the commercial by stating his real social security number and then tells you how secure he knows his identity is secure because of Lifelock. Well, in what had to have been expected by most of the intelligent world, news broke today that Mr. Todd Davis' identity has been stolen. Can't say I didn't see that one coming...

New Gamerpic

Some may have noticed my new gamerpic. Those that know me know that I am neither a Pepsi nor a Coke man. I stick with the good stuff. One of these days I'll make the pilgrimage to Dublin, Texas to taste the real good stuff.