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Sunday, Oct 18, 2015 - 22:35 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Softly Does It

A first happy discovery was that Gadgets had been re-implemented in Rainmeter, which allowed monitoring of most of the vital stats of the system from the desktop. The water-cooling seemed to be working well, given that CPU core temperatures were around ambient when idle, and hovering in the low forties under maximum load, which happens when archiving files with 7-zip (which so happens to be a common benchmark nowadays) [N.B. To get GPU stats, HWiNFO has to be installed too, but that isn't much trouble]


At equilibrium


I remember having maintained a clean install pack that was lost with one of the older drives, but on second thought, this practice is probably outmoded given how quickly (and insistently) new software versions are released these days.

As it was, I resolved to spend a slow Saturday afternoon ripping all my physical CDs and DVDs of yore, and was pleasantly surprised that almost all of them were readable, including my vintage Klik & Play disc, near two decades old and the first application I remember buying persuading my parents to buy (and a whole lot of fun); first game was probably FIFA 97, the series apparently still Electronics Arts' main cash cow responsible for 45% of their revenue.

[Mildly interesting (or not) random trivia: The ISO of Windows 95 comes in at 616MB, to 640MB for 98 and just 558MB for XP; this went up to 3.2GB for Windows 7, and a full 4.0GB for Windows 10. The trend seems reversed for The Green Book though, with ISO size falling from 392MB to 362MB and then 326MB, for the 02/03, 05/06 and 08/09 editions respectively.]


It was *so* cutting edge back then!
[Hey, Mechwarrior II blew my little mind... and remember Grand Prix 2?
The realism is uncanny now (see DirectX 12 offerings)...
but a bit of the magic's missing]


Well, I also realised that I hadn't really gone into many of the games that I had (not sure if good or bad), which mostly dated from before 2005 anyhow. It makes one feel old: Alpha Centauri? Baldur's Gate 2 (series seems dead)? Championship Manager 02/03? Mechwarrior 4... came out in 2000?! Fifteen years ago?! Ah, and Half-Life 3 may be coming, yeah...

I'm not overly pleased to have to admit it, but the reinstall made me appreciate digital distribution platforms such as Steam and Battle.net. I thought I had misplaced my Diablo III disc (which I found later), but no sweat - simply log in, and download it, patched right up-to-date, in a jiffy! While I was gratified to see my three Level 60 characters right where I left them, they're probably gonna stay like that for awhile more.

This led me to snag Heroes of the Storm - Blizzard's attempt at reclaiming Dota from, well, Warcraft - in passing, and although they were brave enough to depart from being yet another clone (all heroes level at the same rate, imagine that), it wasn't too compelling from the descriptions.

But back to the migration. Given the all-too frequent drive failures, I made it a point to employ Storage Spaces (i.e. software RAID), and two-way mirrored my 4TB drives, onto which I placed my most irreplaceable data. As far as I could tell, most everything transferred properly, particularly the Visual Studio projects, and FIFA 10 even ran natively, saving me from having to set it up in a VMWare environment as with Windows 8... but editing the game files with Creation Master 10 then became bugged. Oh well.

And on Windows 10 itself, Microsoft have recognized that trying to force the Metro UI on the desktop might, well, be unnecessarily jarring, so they have that going for them. The Start menu has reverted to the staple that has worked since Windows 95, with Metro stapled to the side, because they couldn't give it up just like that. The white titlebars did grow on me after awhile - although I managed to re-enable the classic blue Chrome look among various other colour themes, they didn't quite match up to minimalist white in the end.

The one area where the new system hasn't been doing too well at, is recognizing external drives. Having brought one home from work, it refused to register, which led me to fear another death on my hands... only to find that it could be read by my lab computer. Just to make sure, I tried it at home again to no avail, which got me to question whether the same happened to my other two "dead" drives. Here's hoping...

...which, I'm guessing again, was partly due to experiments battering the drives with literally millions of writes, and which I was wondering if anyone else had a better solution than "get a solid state drive". It seems not.


Polandballs Of The Month

They go to... Sweden, for much democracy (hey, it's the thought that counts), and finding out when peace will finally dawn in the Middle East [More diversion: Back to the Future day's a-arriving, and it seems they got quite a lot correct]. Not forgetting little old us, who seem to have an outsized influence on the sub (must be the creativity officially kicking in); Singlish power lah, Melayu kawan!

Honourable mention goes to Germany, who have been enduring some rather testing times - with the ongoing refugee influx of nearly a million in three months threatening to overwhelm even lingering post-war guilt, they really didn't need the Volkswagen scandal to come to light, nor the digging into their winning bid for the 2006 World Cup. Like, aren't those Teutons the epitome of squeaky-clean straight-lacedness? Well, world is complicated.


Especially with miscommunications


It's not looking great on the humanitarian end with Hungary the latest to shut their borders, increasingly leaving Turkey with the people and the bill, to the tune of 2.2 million and US$7.6 billion of each, while downing drones (unmanned, thankfully) at their Syrian border. On that, however, technology may have a ready solution... if the lawyers don't get there first, as they are with "fantasy sports". I still remember when that term involved eighteen points or summat for a Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink hat-trick back in high school, but times have moved on. There's always asteroids instead...

Nearer home, the haze situation has improved, or maybe I'm just getting used to it. And, uh, China. Heard of credit companies potentially assessing creditworthiness by lurking your Facebook account? Well, it has been reported that Alibaba and Tencent will be doing their national duty by computing a political compliance credit score (or, "patriotic history"), with an example prize being... access to Singapore travel permits. So it looks like they're transitioning from doling out cold hard cash to keying in redeemable credit vouchers, but money is tight everywhere, yeah.


Dollars For Your Marks

The latest PSLE math question to enrage parents involves eight coins. When I first heard of that, my first thought was that balance puzzles could perhaps be a tad advanced, but it turned out that the question was, "what is the likely weight of eight one dollar coins?"

I do suppose that this could be unfair in its own way, since this certainly didn't come out in textbooks (and moreover takes a bit of searching to get the answer to). Personally, I thought the 600g and 6kg options were obviously wrong, while 6g and 60g were trickier (if technically distinguishable). At least this wasn't for too much of the total score, and nobody's picked up on the glaring social justice warrior angle yet. But! Singapore has officially got no-one below the poverty line anyway, so...

The latest hot topic running through The State's Times forum happens to be on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which kicked off after Dr. Tu Youyou won (half of) this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, which has proven effective against malaria. This quickly led to forum contributors hailing the win as a "boost to TCM", which escalated to calls for usage subsidies and grants for research.

Myself, I'd not dismiss the efficacy of TCM out of hand, but as a relevant professor appeared to hint, the question is whether TCM diagnoses and treatments can hold up in clinical trials. This general view has been aired by a couple of (assumed medical) doctors, with another writer cautioning against blanket subsidies. And, in completely unrelated news, Australia is allowing special herbal medicine, so there you go.

[N.B. Bonus trivia: it was once fairly widely believed that humans breathe through their skin, at least as late as 1964, when it was a plot point in Goldfinger. While this probably belongs in the "fan death" category of theories, it appears that air pollutants can enter via skin - full bodysuit required?]

Another thing that the Aussies (or at least the Queensland portion) are doing is to make programming and robotics compulsory, which recall had been mooted here last year. Now, I'm all for it, just as long as the students understand what they're in for in typical engineering jobs. As one of my former profs noted on engineering salaries being unattractive despite everybody and his mother shouting about a shortage - "The market is broken. Instead of salaries reflecting it, what happens is that things break down and people just complain. Think MRT. People are now used to mediocrity."

Speaking of which, the local crowdfunded Buccaneer 3D printer has fallen through, a couple of years after the team made a big bang on Kickstarter and raised some S$1.5 million (which, come to think of it, isn't that much). Well, hardware startups were always hard mode. They're banking on creating a whole new printer, to which I've got to say - best of luck.


[More useless trivia: it's Shunsui Kyōraku's theme]




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