November 2010 – Auxiliary Memory

Optimizing a Windows 7 HTPC

This year I built a Windows 7 HTPC and cancelled my Comcast cable. My wife hates living without the Comcast DVR and bitterly complains that the HTPC with Windows Media Center doesn’t offer the same level of functionality as the DVR. She’s right, the Comcast DVR worked almost flawlessly, and it was nearly instantaneous performing all its duties. My Windows 7 machine, with a AMD Athlon X2 240 and 4gb of fast memory, should be nimble enough to handle the job, but it often acts sluggish, or even freezes up. So I went on a quest to improve my HTPC setup.

Optimizing a Home Theater PC (HTPC) means four things:

Ease of use
Functionality
Performance
Features

Pitifully, my more powerful computer comes up short against the Comcast DVR box. Of course this is competing a general purpose operating system, Windows, against dedicated hardware. With hundreds of thousands of people cancelling their cable and satellite TV plans there is a big push for a home brew solution and many are turning to the HTPC concept. Right now HTPCs are a pain in the ass to setup and use, but will that always be the case?

If you haven’t gotten addicted to the DVR way of TV watching, I’d recommend just getting an Internet TV or a Roku box and call it quits. But if you want to record shows then you’ll want to get to know Windows Media Center and Windows 7. There are many other solutions but you need to be a hardcore hacker to love them.

Googling seems to suggest that Windows 7 shouldn’t need any performance tweaking or services pruning if you have a dual processor with 4 gigabytes of memory, which I do. However, I do have a 1.5 terabyte drive and it had gotten almost full with recorded shows. So I deleted about 400 gigabytes of recordings and things picked up quite a bit.

Then I saw a sale at NewEgg for a MSI R5570 ATI graphics card with 1gb of memory. I was using the built-in AMD785G chipset and figured this 5500 level ATI card should be a lot better than their old 4200 level graphics. I bought and installed the card and got these results in the Performance Index:

	4200	5570
Processor	6.3	6.3
Memory	5.9	7.2
Business Graphics	4.4	6.7
Gaming Graphics	5.5	6.7
Hard Drive	5.9	5.9

From these numbers I thought I would see a dramatic improvement in using Windows Media Center, but I didn’t. It was slightly better, and that might have been perceptual, especially because I cleaned out so many files.

However, the new video did make one dazzling change – sound. For some reason the built-in graphics and HDMI cable on the motherboard wouldn’t play sound through the HDMI cable. The new card does, and the sound, after updating all the drivers, sounds dramatically better. And it’s allowed me to simplify my setup.

Before I had a HDMI cable going to the TV for video and a optical S/PDIF cable going to the Pioneer receiver for sound. And on my LG Blu-Ray player I had a HDMI cable going to the TV for video and an another optical cable going to the Pioneer for sound. This tended to confuse the LG at times. If I’d play a CD and then switch to a Blu-Ray it wouldn’t always automatically use the appropriate cable.

Now, for both the HTPC and Blu-Ray, I have one HDMI cable each for both video and sound. I have one S/PDIF optical cable passing sound from the TV to the receiver. Much more elegant wiring. I couldn’t do this before because the motherboard graphics wouldn’t pass sound over the HDMI cable.

And I can keep both the Blu-Ray and HTPC on the same sound source (TV). That’s less confusing for my wife. All she has to do is turn on the receiver without worrying about which channel to use for audio – all devices now play through the TV sound channel. The HTPC now sounds wonderful, getting multichannel sound from the HTPC, but I don’t know why. Why did a new video card help the sound? I’m wondering if the HDMI driver I have now is just way better than the S/PDIF driver???

Also, this new setup means we don’t have to use the receiver if we don’t want to. All sound goes through the TV, which can optionally be boosted by the receiver. My wife hates turning on extra devices and using three remotes. She’s gotten used to controlling the TV with the wireless keyboard which is a big stumbling block to using a HTPC. If we can do everything within Windows Media Center then all we have to do is power up the TV and receiver and tap any key on the wireless keyboard to wake up the computer and then everything can be controlled from it. It’s not as convenient as the DVR remote, but then we get a lot more functionality from using the computer with a 1920×1080 screen. She can browse the web and play Farmville is she wants.

Probably if I keep the number of recorded shows down to a smaller list, performance within Windows Media Center will be better, but using the HTPC doesn’t snap like using the DVR. Plus Windows Media Center doesn’t work like the DVR. The Comcast DVR would always start recording whatever show you tuned to in case you wanted to pause or rewind. Window Media Center doesn’t do that. Now, that feature could be added to a future version of Windows Media Center and that sure would be nice.

However, the NUMBER ONE improvement Windows Media Player could offer is built-in Blu-Ray playback support. All the Blu-Ray software I’ve tried or studied just doesn’t do the job – and it’s just plain inconvenient to leave Windows Media Player once you’ve standardized on it for your HTPC. If Windows Media Center offered Blu-Ray support I could ditch my LG Blu-Ray player and simplify my setup even more.

Hulu should be integrated into Windows Media Player too, like Netflix. However, I prefer the Netflix interface in my LG Blu-Ray player over the one in Windows Media Player. Hell, I prefer the Netflix web interface to the one inside Windows Media Player, but if I’m watching a recorded show and then wanted to watch an episode of TV from Netflix, switching to the LG is extra work. It would be far more elegant to just click on Netflix within Windows Media Center.

I really hope the next version of Windows Media Center is a quantum leap forward. Right now using a HTPC is fine for guys like me who don’t mind goofing around with technology, but it annoys the hell out of my wife, and she’s more of a typical TV user. Windows Media Center needs to be optimized for her.

JWH – 11/29/10

Science Fiction Immortality

Everyone wants to live as long as they can, and that’s true of books too. A writer sells a book to a publisher and they print up a bunch of copies. As long as the book keeps selling they keep printing. Most books never sell out their original print run and go out of print. Some books are popular enough that they stay in print – that’s a sign of a great book.

I’m in an online science fiction book club called Classic Science Fiction. We have just voted on the 24 books we want to read in 2011 and I thought it would be interesting to see how many are in print, and whether or not they have an ebook edition available, or even an audio edition. Real classics should be available in all formats.

As a rule, if a book isn’t easily available, it doesn’t get read by many members in the book club. Some members won’t read the book unless they already own it, can find a cheap copy at a local used bookstore or get it from the library. Used bookstores and libraries are very important for keeping a book alive. I’m hoping ebooks will catch on as a new form of literary life extension.

The prices I used below are from Amazon, and I used the cheapest edition in each category. As can quickly be seen, some books are out of print in all formats, not a good sign. The book title is linked to the Internet Science Fiction Database to reveal it’s publication history. Finally, I decided to see if the book is at my public library. It’s wonderful to think that libraries are Heaven for books, where they never die and will be protected and preserved for all time. Sadly, that’s not true. Modern public libraries routinely purge uncirculated titles.

Title	Print	Ebook	Audio	Library
Midnight at the Well of Souls Jack Chalker				Yes
Monument Lloyd Biggle, Jr	$15.00			Yes
Brain Wave Poul Anderson		$3.99
Rite of Passage Alexei Panshin	$12.74	$4.79		Yes
Restoree Anne McCaffrey	$7.99	$6.29		Yes
The Mote in God’s Eye Niven and Pournelle	$7.99		$17.24	Yes
The Cosmic Puppets Philip K. Dick	$11.07
Earthlight Arthur C. Clarke				Yes
The Man Who Folded Himself David Gerrold	$11.86
Tau Zero Poul Anderson		$3.99		Yes
Galactic Patrol E.E. Smith			$14.17	Yes
Empire Star Samuel R. Delany	$10.20			Yes
Earth David Brin	$7.99	$6.29		Yes
Flashforward Robert J. Sawyer	$7.79	$7.99	$15.73	Yes
Brasyl Ian McDonald	$12.46	$9.99
Beggars in Spain Nancy Kress	$11.16	$9.99	$9.44	Yes
Primary Inversion Catherine Asaro	$13.99	Free	$14.68	Yes
Risen Empire Scott Westerfield	$10.17
Calculating God Robert J. Sawyer	$5.98	$9.99	$18.71	Yes
The Life of Pi Yann Martel	$8.30	$7.78	$19.40	Yes
The Barsoom Project Niven and Barnes	$10.87	$9.99		Yes
Replay Ken Grimwood	$10.97		$18.99
Spin Robert Charles Wilson	$7.99	$7.99	$30.95
On Basilisk Station David Weber	$7.99	Free	$18.71	Yes

JWH – 11/27/10

The Other Side of the Future

If you live long enough you can get to the other side of the future. In the 1960s I consumed massive amounts of science fiction and quite a bit of it was set in years that have already past. I have lived through a lot of futures. 1984 was just another year in life, and so was 1999, 2000, and 2001. One of my favorite novels growing up was The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, which was written in 1956, that I read in 1965, about a man in 1970 taking the cold sleep and waking up in 2001, and who eventually time travels back to 1970. Even in 1965 the year 1970 was so full of futuristic possibilities.

Of course its 2010 now, and that novel is way in the past, from so many perspectives.

I’m in an online science fiction book club called Classic Science Fiction where a bunch of members are like me, who came of age reading science in the 1950s and 1960s. We’re reading the great science fiction stories of our youth from the other side of the future, and it’s a whole different vista than we saw from that distant shore of the past. Now it’s not like we don’t have a lot of future still to outlive, especially when you think we might live another 40-50 years, the amount of time we’re looking back over. But we have lived long enough to live past many speculative fictional years.

Let’s just say that the future is everything I never imagined. I’m sitting here typing on a computer that’s linked to the world wide web while listening to Katy Perry sing “Teenage Dream” over digital streaming, from a library of over 10 million songs that I have access online. Didn’t see that one coming back in 1965 when I was mowing lawns to buy the latest Byrds’ album to play while reading Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit-Will Travel.

The thing is, back in 1965 I thought I knew the future because I was reading so many science fictional roadmaps. I was youthfully confident that by 2001 we’d have a colony on the Moon, and we’d have hundreds of men and women roving all over Mars, and there would be manned spaceships heading out to Titan and Ganymede. Quite a few of us old fart guys and gals at Classic Science Fiction are crying in our beer over that lost future. How could Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov have been so wrong? Of course we’re haven’t reached Clifford Simak’s future of City either, but I still wonder about that one.

In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic background radiation while I was discovering 1940s and 1950s astronomy in musty old books in the Miami Public Library. I never imagined anything like the Hubble Space Telescope, or all the magnificent robotic explorers that have flown across the solar system in our lifetime. And who imagined a future with only eight planets? Isn’t that a step backwards? On the other hand, just rent The Universe from Netflix and watch several seasons. What we’ve learned about cosmology is mind blowing, far beyond the wildest imaginations of legions of science fiction writers.

Back in the sixties our parents told us to clean our dinner plates because it was horrible to let food go to waste when people were starving in China, but now China is about to eat our lunches racing to new far out futures. Did any SF writer see that change coming? Did anyone foresee America retiring from manned exploration of space? Or that maybe the Chinese might do what we once dreamed.

One of the strangest things for me living on the other side of the future are the deaths of Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov. In the book club we’re mostly partial to books from the 1950s and 1960s and we feel science fiction itself has changed. In that old back to the future world, science fiction was about conquering reality, but now it’s either about escaping from reality, or dark stories about how reality is going to conquer us. Science has discovered a universe far vaster and more slower to travel than we ever imagined.

Nostalgia seems to be the order of the day for us old folks at Classic Science Fiction. We read and reread the good old days of science fiction. Political and scientific realities make us dream of simpler days of rocket ships and ray guns. Do we return to the classics of science fiction like opium addicted dreamers giving up on reality? Do we cherish the dreams of youth more than reality on the other side of the future?

JWH – 11/15/10

The Metaphors of Magic

The concept of magic has been around since the dawn of mankind. Modern people associate the belief in magic with superstition, so the belief in real magic is waning. However, the belief in fantasy magic is growing. People love stories where magic is real. Fictional magic can take many forms because the rules and intent of magic within a story has literary purpose.

I am listening to A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, and beautifully read by Josephine Bailey. It is the first book of a trilogy about four girls in Victorian England that get seduced by the power of magic. One metaphor for magic used in this book is addiction. The girls have hangovers after using magic. They are drawn to magic because of their unhappy lives and magic makes them feel good. They are warned about the dangers of magic, but they become addicted, knowing that magic killed the two girls that are their spiritual guides. In A Great and Terrible Beauty magic is seen as a kind of high, or escape of from the real world.

The metaphor for magic in the Harry Potter books is different. J. K. Rowling treats magic as if it was a science, to be studied in school, with textbooks, journals, and learned societies. Magic has rules and limitations, and mastery of it takes work, skill and talent. This is probably the most popular metaphor for magic. Readers love everyday stories of practical magic.

Older books, especial from medieval times and earlier, see magic as a metaphor for good and evil, directly related to God and Satan, or gods and goddesses. There is white magic and black magic, and human users get their magical power through association. As humans self importance grew, and the power of the gods declined, the nature of magic was moved into hidden aspects of reality. It was the secret knowledge of adepts. Stories like The Lord of the Rings comes out of this heritage.

Nowadays magic doesn’t have to have a philosophical justification. Every writer who creates a new series of books about vampires decides the rules for how they live in their literary creation. Magic is a tool that shapes fictional form, which can go from sexual magic (True Blood) to comedy magic (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to satire magic (Saturday Night Live) to alternate history science fiction magic (“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang).

The sad thing is sometimes people really do want to believe in magic. They want their fictional fun to be reality. All religions believe in magic of some sorts. Miracles are the metaphor for religious magic. But people also want to believe in concepts like luck, Karma and voodoo too. Thus magic is a metaphor for altering reality. That’s where it gets really dangerous. New Age believers are convinced in the power of mind over matter. That’s an especially dangerous belief.

That’s why you must ask yourself: Do I believe in real magic or just fictional magic? Fictional magic is just a plot device to create fun stories, and sometimes its also used as a moral metaphor, like in A Great and Terrible Beauty. But if you think anything other than the laws of science rule reality then you have something to worry about. And I don’t mean worrying about being delusional, which you probably are. No I mean, you have to worry about knowing the rules of your magic.

For example, if you believe in angels, you have to also believe in devils. If you believe magic can help you then you also have to believe it can hurt you. If you can hex someone, they can hex you. If you believe in ghosts, then you are never alone. It gets creepier and creepier. That’s why I love the magic metaphor in Ted Chiang’s gorgeous story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” where he uses a fantasy time machine to teach the lessons of the Koran. All magic has laws, even if magic might be real. All magic has philosophy, even if its untrue. The best magic is fiction that teaches us lessons about living in the world of reality.

So, whenever you encounter magic ask yourself: What does this magic imply.

JWH – 11/14/10

Richocracy

Who rules America? We all like to think we do, since we believe we live in a democracy. But what if that’s not true? If you watch the new documentary film Inside Job by Charles H. Ferguson you might think the rich rule us, and they’re doing a bad good job because of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. Greed triumphs over wisdom. Richocracy is a form of oligarchy, where the extreme tiny minority of the very rich have the power of ruling. The insight of Inside Job is these people reign whether the Republicans or Democrats are in control.

We do not see the real ruling rich in Inside Job, but their representatives, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, the CEOs of the leading financial institutions, and their philosophical spin-doctors, the economists that teach in academia and consult in Washington. Many of these men stay in power regardless of which political party is in the Whitehouse or Congress. They rule by economic theory that justifies getting more wealth for the richocracy.

It’s all very obvious when you think about it. Money is power, the people with the most money have the most power. With very large amounts of money and power its possible to change both the laws of the land, and the rules of business. Furthermore the richocracy hire the top Ivy League economists to justify their wild money making schemes.

To me, the most damning evidence revealed in Inside Job is how the richocracy made the credit rating agencies a total sham. Wall Street created investment systems that insiders knew were worthless but got them rated AAA so gullible banks, investors, retirement systems, local, state and foreign governments, would buy. These investors of little people’s money used these corrupt credit ratings in their decision making, and thus trillions were stolen.

Would we have had this financial crisis if we had honest credit ratings? I don’t think so. Most people who invest money have very little knowledge of how their money is put to work. They have to trust the institutions that hold their savings. Those institutions use the credit rating systems like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s to understand risk. An AAA rating is suppose to be as secure as U.S. government bonds. How do you feel about your retirement money being invested in schemes rated AAA (prime) but should have been rated CCC (extremely speculative).

But that’s the point of this film, greed corrupts everything. People ignore risk when they think they can make a quick buck. The solution to that is regulation. Capitalism without rules is chaos. The richocracy fights all regulation with every fiber of their souls. That’s how they use the Republican party. Regulation slows down wild speculation, but it’s the bubbles of wild speculation that create wild piles of wealth. But in recent decades most new forms of speculation have been no more rational then Ponzi schemes. The richocracy love the Ponzi scheme because it’s a quick way to take away a lot of money from the suckers and give it to the very few, the richocracy.

As Inside Job points out, in the old days investment firms invested their own money and they were very careful how it was used. Over recent decades investment firms started investing ever larger growing pools of money that didn’t directly belong to the money managers, so it became ever more easy to bet on riskier schemes. Governmental financial regulations are designed to keep investing money within the bounds of reality. Which means no Ponzi schemes. And all systems for quick riches ultimately come down to a Ponzi game.

Now the real question to ask: What can us little people do about this? The people with all the money have all the power, but the legal system is suppose to be based on democracy. Democracy is corrupted by lobbying. The more money you have, the more lobbyists you can buy. For the little people to gain power they either have to find ways to get their own lobbyists, or force a political change to the lobbying system. But the inherent nature of the richocracy really precludes the second option from happening.

The ultra rich is often called the top 1% of America, but that would be over 3,107,044 people. My guess is the richocracy is actually much smaller than that, maybe only the top .1%, or a little over 300,000 people. Those other almost three million people are hardcore richocracy wannabes. So we can think of it as us (99%) versus them (1%). You’d think the little guys would have the power, but they don’t, because all the wealth is with the 1 per-centers.

But that’s an illusion too. Us little guys have a lot of wealth too, but we let the richocracy manage it for us. Of course, we’re just as greedy as they are. We want 10% returns on our retirement investments and take risky chances with our 401k money. It would be possible to lobby with our money but we don’t control how its invested.

We don’t make the laws of the land, the laws of business, nor the theories behind government and finance. We think we have power with our votes, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. As Inside Job shows, people voted for Obama because they wanted change in the financial systems but he failed to deliver. Obama hired the same richocracy representatives that were used by the Republicans, and regulation was once again avoided.

Essentially us little people have no power and all we can do is sit by and hope the richocracy doesn’t drive the country into absolute ruin. We can hope the richocracy can learn from their own madness but Inside Job also points out that all the people that caused the recent crisis walked away rich. The richocracy is evidently waiting for the economy to settle down so they can start up the next bubble. They know how to get fabulously wealthy from financial bubbles. The trouble is if you look back at the history of these bubbles, they are getting larger each time, and the country and us little people are suffering more with each new cycle. How many more can we survive?

JWH – 11/14/10