My favorite chip maker bought my favorite graphics card company. In AMD has to buy ATI to survive, The Inquirer explains the strategic context of AMD’s acquisition of ATI and argues it’s all for the best:
The net effect is good for ATI, good for AMD, and good for everyone else, including all the current AMD partners. For all the analysts, deep breaths, think of your happy place. This is not bad, not bad at all, in fact it is very good. Breathe.
No, it’s not the punchline to a joke. It’s real: Dell laptop explodes at Japanese conference.
As the article, illustrated with photos of a brightly burning laptop, helpfully points out, “It is only a matter of time until such an incident breaks out on a plane.” And it even more helpfully concludes, “In light of the evidence, however, we’d suggest you avoid actually using a laptop on your lap.”
My home PC — not even two years old yet! — has decided to die. Either that it wants to kill me.
First the power supply fan started making a grinding noise. Blowing out a pile of dust didn’t fix it, so I got a new power supply. That seemed to go in unusually well. I should have known that the Fates were marking me for trouble.
While installing the power supply I stuck in the replacement for the backup disk which had gone bad a few months ago. Then I fired up the hardware RAID to mirror the main disk. It wouldn’t. I tried a lot, lot, lot of things, finally finding a software product that told me the old disk didn’t want sector 1 read. That is potentially very bad – sector 1, if I recall, is where the disk keeps its partition info. The first step in a solution, if solution there be, was to run CHKDSK /r (scanning for bad sectors).
So I ran CHKDSK /r. Took a while. Found a bad cluster in one old file, otherwise was no excitement.
Rebooted. And now my display is all funny. The text is corrupted even during the bootup process. Once I get into Windows XP, there are funny lines everywhere. Not good.
So turn it all off, unplug, reseat the ATI 9800 AIW video card, check wires, change the oil (no, wait, that was last month when I was fixing the generator, different story). Fire it up again.
Now there are blocks of rainbow along the bottom half of the display when I boot up. And, once in Windows, the entire display is corrupted with a sort of moire vertical line pattern at every resolution except 1024 in which only the right half of the display is corrupted.
I’ve checked the monitor and the cord and they display perfectly off a different computer.
So I think my AGP video card is fried. And even though it’s probably inside the warranty period, I bought a modded one with a silent Zalman heatpipe and fan, and I would imagine that this just might void the warranty.
I will call ATI help soon, but they’ve never been any use in the past (“reinstall the latest drivers” “but I did that twice before calling” “reinstall the latest drivers”). So now I have to find a reasonably fast AGP video card that doesn’t make too much of a racket.
And then I can go back to worrying that my disk is about to crash.
The classroom applications of this device are simply too horrible to contemplate.
Disaster struck late last night, just after I finished reviewing my slides for my second presentation at FC06 (I got roped in as a substitute for Stephan Brands in the panel on Identity Management; would that I were a real substitute for one of the word’s top crypographers!).
I’d started preparing my talk at home, and had six pages of notes that I was gradually turning into slides. After I finished the last slide while sitting propped up in the hotel bed, I got out of the bed. In the process I slipped, and while flailing around my arm caught the neck strap (laniard) that is attached to my USB drive. The force wrenched it out of its slot on the side of my laptop, ripping it into two parts: the memory part came apart from the metal tongue, which remained in the usb slot of the laptop, complete with dangling bits of metal strip that had formerly joined the RAM to the tongue. I got the metal out of the laptop, but that was it for my data.
Humpty dumpty was not going to be put back together again. And what backups I have are on my desktop in Miami, not on my laptop. (I do hope I have a recent backupl of my calendar, or I’m going to miss some meeting or deadline…)
So, starting around 11pm, I had to reconstruct an hour’s talk from memory and redo about thirty slides. The resulting version had, I’d guess, about 85% of the content of the original and only a few of the cute pictures. And of course I was pretty tired when I gave the talk in the morning. The audience was kind, but the subject is fairly depressing and I think we had more fun yesterday.
On the bright side it didn’t actually rain yesterday, and the sky looks OK now, although it seems a little hot and sunny out right now to go walking anywhere, and we’re a ways from the beach.
Two neat things I’ve learned from Ed Bott recently:
OpenWide was written to avoid a few [more] minor annoyances with Windows. This program allows you to specify the position and size of Windows’ Open and Save dialog boxes, and also to specify where the initial focus should be and which view will be the default.
So far it works flawlessly and fixes one the most frustrating features of Windows.
Thanks Ed!
Jotwell Blenderlaw