Category: Uncategorized

Long Tail

Wired: The Long Tail:

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail”). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. 

Informality

Paul Graham’s article What the Bubble Got Right got a lot of interest on Slashdot a couple of days ago. While its definitely worth a read, I don’t feel knowledgeable to comment on much of it. One passage, however, caught my eye:

In New York, the Bubble had dramatic consequences: suits went out of fashion. They made one seem old. So in 1998 powerful New York types were suddenly wearing open-necked shirts and khakis and oval wire-rimmed glasses, just like guys in Santa Clara.

The pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked reaction by the clothing industry. But I’m betting on the open-necked shirts. And this is not as frivolous a question as it might seem. Clothes are important, as all nerds can sense, though they may not realize it consciously.

If you’re a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you’d feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn’t it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.

And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one’s ideas. That’s the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as “suits.”

Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.

This is just so right. I’ve lost count of the number of times that people in a business setting just assume that, out of a group of people, the guy in the suit is just somehow more knowledgeable/clueful than anyone else.

What would it be like?

Juan Cole (Professor of History at the University of Michigan) on If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? Quote:

“What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?

“What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?”

Upgrade Woes

A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was really, really important that I spend a lump of money on upgrading my (home) desktop PC. After cautiously running the idea past Debra, who seemed surprisingly indifferent to such an important subject, I headed off to my favorite parts retainer (with Debra and Matthew in tow) in search of a new CPU, motherboard, memory, and PSU.

In the end I went for a 2.4GHz P4 with 1MB cache, a Gigabyte GA-8S655FXL, two 512MB sticks of DDR memory and a generic 400W PSU. This looked like it would be somewhat of an improvement over my existing home-built 850MHz Athlon / Abit setup. After we had a nice lunch at the nearby Eighth Day cafe I decided to prepare the system, removing any hardware drivers relating to the old mobo, but leave swapping the hardware until the following day. As things turned out, I needn’t have bothered – but I still managed to get it completely wrong.

The next day, after removing an absurd amount of dust from the case, PSU, and boards, I got the hardware swapped-over. I should admit here that hardware makes me paranoid: I always use an earthing bracelet and am absurdly careful not to touch anything that might be damaged by static. I also work very slowly, double checking all the time, so it took quite a while. Eventually, though, there was nothing left to do but turn it on and see what happened. I’m always struck at this point by the thought that if it doesn’t work then I have absolutely no idea how to find-out why. Press the button… POST… Into the BIOS settings for a fiddle… Save and Exit? Yes… Windows 2000 starting… Then…

***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

Damn. Powered it down and checked everything. Re-fitted the old board, which booted fine. Three hours flew by while I tried numerous of combinations of memory, chennels, devices, and settings – all with no success. It just didn’t make sense: everything looked fine. Finally, though, after a lot of googling I had the answer. If you’ve grown tired of this tale (and frankly, I have) then you can just skip to the answer is here. Hopefully this will give it a little more Google-juice for anoyone else who has the same problem.

The BSOD was happening because I’d forgotten to uninstall the disk controller driver. Win2K can cope with most hardware changes, but if it can’t access the boot disk then it doesn’t have much option but to give up. In this case, it was expecing to find the old motherboard’s VIA chipset drive controller, and got upset when it couldn’t. The solution was to install the old mobo one more time, install the “Standard Dual-Channel PCI IDE Controller” driver, and then install the new hardware. The system booted fine. Ironically, as I hinted earlier, all the other changes I’d made the previous day would have been handled automatically by the plug-and-play support, so I needn’t have bothered.

So there you go. If you’re upgrading to a new motherboard, always uninstall the drive controller driver. Unless, of course, you really enjoy fitting motherboards.