I like what Olivier Travers has to say: “The cost is so low delivery is basically free on a per-song basis. In the face of changing consumer demand, no matter how hard RIAA members try to stick to their cartel solidarity, the same kind of pricing pressure that is destroying the long distance and international phone call troll tax is going to work in the music business as well.”

Built a shuttle this weekend with a WD Raptor 36 GB 10,000 RPM ESATA Hard Drive Kit - WD360GDRTL as it’s boot drive – a nearly 40% improvement in speed over your standard 7200 rpm drive. Wow it makes a huge difference, I am very happy!

Training XP to use a SATA drive as a boot drive was a little tricky – involving:

• Installing a SATA PCI card – I had a maxtor (promise-based) card that came free with another hard drive so I used that. Installed fine, tho XP has no drivers for it, but the drivers on the CD were certified
• Connecting up the WD drive. This was confusing. The drive end of the SATA cable was a 15 pin power-carrying connector, and the documentation warned many times about NOT connecting the standard 4-pin drive power connector if you were using a 15-pin connector. However, on the PCI card end, the SATA cable was data-only, and it was clearly not delivering power to the drive. I wasted time here until I finally just connected a spare 4-pin drive power connector and everything worked
• Getting confused by XP, which was looking for some Promise SATA driver, but finally just ignoring this error message after reading some forums which said it was harmless
• Running the included WD utilities to copy all my files from my old IDE boot drive over to the SATA drive, and setting the SATA drive to be a boot drive.
• But of course the utility didn’t really set the SATA drive up to be a boot drive, you have to muck around in the BIOS to do that, enabling SCSI boot as SATA masquerades as SCSI at this level of the system

But it all works now and it is great!

We’ve played a lot of games over the holiday. Our grades:

Call Of Duty: A+. Multiplayer incredibly fun, servers easy to connect to, firewalls not a problem. The only real beef is the stupid bunny-hopping behaviour that some players adopt to avoid incoming fire.

Counterstrike: A-. Great multiplayer gameplay. But aged graphics, ridiculously painful downloading required to get up and going, and confusing game lobby behaviour.

Halo for PC. B+. Fun, not a bad way to spend time. But just doesn’t seem to have the same addictiveness of Call of Duty or Counterstrike.

SSX 3. B+. OK we are suckers for snowboarding games. This is a reasonable next version of the SSX line.

XIII. C+. A great idea and a good story line. But incredibly stupid save game behaviour makes the single player missions painful – needless repetition of solved missions is no substitute for real challenge. Oh and the end of level bosses are juvenile, making the game feel like a Mario title.

Hidden and Dangerous 2. C-. A nice looking game, but so realistic that the fun is sapped out of it. Yes I am sure a single shot from that gun would really take me out of commission, but a fun game needs to be a little more forgiving.

Post-Christmas Tips: Graphics Cards – good tips here, basically get all the drivers you are going to need beforehand, and clean off any card-specific goo before you try to update. Painful experience talking here I think.

Tong Family Blog: Reseller RAtings

Kerry’s Call for Energy Independence – i never blog on political issues but this one struck me as just odd. Why all the hoopla over oil? What about electronics independence, or timber, or food, or any other good we happen to import? And do we think more government involvement in the energy market will make it more efficient? And do the numbers even work out, could we realistically and economically ever be energy independent? I just think this is a weird platform plank to pin your hopes on. It may be a good thing to do but it has no emotional resonance with me.

PC Magazine’s Coming Attractions: CMS Velocity Series – building my first sata machine over the holidays, this looks interesting.

BBspot - Reviews: Digital Music Stores

ONLamp.com: The Best of ONLamp 2003 [Dec. 23, 2003]

Joi Ito’s Web: VoIP enables ambient virtual co-presence – needs a better name.

ComputerZen.com – very interesting. I have a tablet PC that is not doing much, i may try this out.

I keep thinking I should set up a Wiki for my use or Ignition’s use, tho I don’t really know why. If I do, I like the look of the Furrygoat Wiki and might start with that.

For a long time I’ve thought that I was unlikely to ever put a PC in my family room next to the TV, because a PC was so unfriendly. And the PC really hasn’t gotten a lot better.

But I read this article – Easy as a TV – and my recent experience adding HDTV, a PVR, a new DVD player, and a media receiver to my family room is starting to warm me up to the idea of a PC in the room.

While a PC is still a pain in the ass to use, the aggregate user interface of my home-theatre receiver, dvd player, pvr, media receiver, game box, etc is WAAAY worse than any PC experience. The inconsistent terminology across devices, modality, crappy remotes, etc – I can’t imagine how regular human beings ever make all this stuff work. I could drop in a PC and wipe out the need for a dvd player, pvr, media receiver, game box, etc. And a nicely done integrated PC could have a much more consistent UI across all these.

I think the real challenge here is for the CE industry to realize that they are on the brink of being wiped out by general purpose computing platforms, and getting their act together quick to simplify the experience for traditional CE equipment. Or the battle will be over.

LinkedIn: Home – OK I am faced with a moral dilemma. Two invitations in the past week to add connections. One from a guy I don’t know that well and who has only a modest number of connections – the benefits in our connection may flow mostly to him. And one from a guy I know perhaps a little better, and who is very well connected – the benefits in our connection may flow more to me. Accept both? Neither? Split the hairs and accept the guy who I know a little better and who has substantially more benefit for my network connectedness? I am very confused about what the criteria should be for accepting connections as I know most people are. A LinkedIn connection is so binary…

inessential.com: Weblog: Comments for “On shipping software” – good summary. One of my first mentors at Booz-Allen summed it up for me – “Your strategy IS what you ship”. Nothing matters if you can’t ship.