A pair of news and laughter attack

Yesterday at the office one coworker showed me a news, and suddenly I started laughing. It wasn't a simple laughter. It was a laugh attack, the kind that leaves us breathless, like the ones that puts tears on our eyes.

To explain why this happened I need to fill you with some background information. Without it, this isn't funny at all. Some time ago Nvidia purchased the Ageia Physx technology that allows to develop hardware specialized in calculating physics model data. It used that technology to bulti it in their video cards.

While this technology was developed to assist in the processing of game data, soon it became clear that there was another area where it could help a lot. So Nvidia developed a new series of drivers called CUDA, allowing people to use that technology and the massive paralel processing power of modern video cards to process scientific information. This added a lot of power to the distributed computing systems.

The news my coworker showed me yesterday commented that they were developing a technology to use the extra processors of multiple core chips to process graphics.

Think about it. Let it sink in. Why would a processor need to process the graphical data? Because the video card is executing the processor processes. When I thought that, I just couldn't stop myself from laughing.

Of course, that's not the real reason why this technology is being developed. Some talk with my friends and some later thinking showed me at least two other reasons why this could be useful.

One: lower power video cards, as the ones found in office computers and some laptops. In this case, an alternative to this card using one of the cores of multiple core processors some of this machines are equiped with might prove interesting.

Two: even more interesting. Windows XP doesn't have DX10, but if one can emulate DX10 in one of the cores and let the video card use that DX10, it might be that the speed advantage of Windows XP over Vista could help to run DX10 games at a decent speed in a XP box.

Of course, a part of me is still laughing while I write this, and another part insists in making me say that this type of trickery wouldn't be necessary if DX10 were open source technology. In this case one would be able to simply port the packages from one Operating System to another.

Sign of the times: Windows Devolution

A few days ago, something extremely important happened. An Israeli citizen became the first person in the whole world to achieve two things at the same time.

1) Devolution of the money paid for a Windows license included inside the price of a computer, after taking Windows off his computer in favor of Linux.

2) He was not forced to sign a NDA (non disclosure agreement), so he's free to talk about it.

There are several people that already took Windows of their computers, so this development will surely make the request the refund of the license money. This is the main reason why, until now, Microsoft requested those NDAs while refunding money.

It's curious that this can be linked to another news, in which we are informed that Windows has fallen below the 90% figure in the PC market. I want to state something very clearly. A little below 90% is still a good figure, but it isn't quite as good when you had 99% of the market before. Microsoft is loosing share, and that little change in the Ten's figure it's a really significant break point.

We aren't the only ones that think like this. In several sites across the web I've seen us Linux Users being accused of magnifying this kind of news. In truth, we see this news and simply write about them adding our insight into it, we write about what we see with the only point of view we have, ourselves. But we aren't alone.

Until now, in every Wall Street misstep or fall, Microsoft was one of the big companies that fell a lot less that the rest. This meant that investors (people who trust a company and it's way of doing business to the point of translating that trust into invested money) didn't sell because the still trusted in Redmond's capacity of continuing to produce record earnings, even inside a crisis.

But this last fall, Microsoft fell as much as the average of the market, showing to the world that Linux Users aren't alone in thinking that we see something working a little wrong in the giant corporation.

In this comment about reality, from this page of Too Much Information, I want to express the wish that Microsoft doesn't disappear, that they start producing real quality software, and can maintain a reasonable market share. It's just that I'm not opposed to Microsoft making business. I'm opposed to Microsoft making business with me.

A theory about "old" Part III : Games

As you can see, I've kept apart Games from Software. This has not to do with games not being software, because they are. This has to do with my own position about games, which is quite different from the one about software.

I simply LOVE games, I think I'll never stop playing. Perhaps I'll change the type of games I play over time, but I'll never stop playing. That being said, there's something seriously wrong about this activity. Marketing, a powerful force behind all kinds of software, becomes overwhelming when it comes to games. This generates hordes of people wanting to play the latest game that just came out, clearly influenced by the never ending bombing of information we are constantly under. I don't share that position.

My computer is a little bit old, although is still a powerful machine. It was built with one idea in mind: stability. This doesn't mean it doesn't have any power, only that power was not the idea behind it's design. This PC can run between 65 and 70% of PC games (that is, If I install a Windows on it). As 65 is over 50%, I still can play more than half of the games out there, and I don't have the time to play even 10%. Thus, the main limitation is in my free time and not in my PC.

Between 70% and 95%, there are games I can run, but only with low textures and detail, no shadows, lower fps, etc. So I don't think it's a good idea to play them now that I can't fully enjoy them. In the future, when it comes the time to build myself a new computer, I'll be able to run that same games with full details, so there's no rush to play them.

A lot would say, 'you didn't play Doom 3' or Crysis, Oblivion, etc. I really don't care. I still have jewels like Half Life and Half Life II, Portal, Morrowind to play, and I still haven't found the time to do it. If I play a watered down version of Oblivion instead of a full detailed version of Morrowind, I'll be making a big mistake, falling to temptation to have less fun that I could.

So, instead of getting angry about not being able to play the latest games, I prefer to investigate carefully and play forgotten jewels that I find in the oddest corner of a game shop or in the webpage of a game manufacturer which understands the value of good games. For example, I see X3:Reunion in my near future.

Always remember, we play to have fun, not because we are told to play.

Creative minds, a pity they are evil

It's really worrisome to see the way the malware and spam business is evolving, but at the same time it's impressing to see they skills they use to defeat each measure taken against them.

Social engineering is being fabulously applied by this groups, they have distributed content making people think it was completely safe, using ingenous and intelligent ways.

But todas I bumped into a news story that made me laugh at the same time my mind raced behind the implications. There's now a little program for Windows that has a female stripper that undresses if we do what she asks.

She doesn't ask too much, only that we correctly write some quite deformed words that she shows us. If we write the correct word, she strips a little more and shows another scrambled word. This appears quite harmless, but this is just an appearance, under the hood things become more sinister.

The deformed words don't come from an internal list, they don't come from the site of the programmer. The deformed words are taken from thousands of websites that use that sort of control words to stop the spambots. So, every time someone writes one of this words, it's fed unto a spambot that was trying to connect to a site, so that it can pass this security measure and drop it's hated payload.

On one side, I really despise what spammers do, contaminating our lives. On the other hand, I salute them for the sheer creativity they showed to pass the captchas.

A theory about "old" Part I : Hardware

I know a lot of people that are always running behind the latest piece of hardware and trying to play the latest game that just got out. Sincerely, I don't share those positions.

Let's start with Hardware. The latest hardware is always overpriced (it has to do with it being new and powerful, but also because prices tend to fall when something gets mass produced). When they buy it, they obtain the maximum possible performance, but they don't get the best power/price relation. The price of the latest video cards can cover the purchase of 3 great video cards, not so powerful as this one, but with enough power for most things.

Other computer pieces don't have a 3 to 1 relation, but a 2 to 1. That means that the price I pay for the greatest computer I can get right now would buy me two computers that each are capable of outrunning 95% of the other computers out there, or even 4 or 5 capable computers. I think that nobody here misses the point that 4 or 5 capable computers combined have more computing power than one extremely powerful one (of course, that's not counting the new Nvidia Tesla card).

There's of course a hidden cost in buying the latest technology: support and standards. Let's take for example a piece of hardware that got out a pair of years ago, the AGEIA PhysX, a pci board designed to crunch numbers related to physic models. This was planned as a sort of coprocessor to relieve the CPU and the video card from doing a lot of physics calculations, needed for example for the fast implementation of the rag doll concept

It was a concept similar to the first 3d acceleration cards (so similar that the technology is now inside video cards): freeing the processor from the most heavy and common 3d tasks. It wasn't an expensive card, but it lacked game support, with only one game implementing it's API by the time of launch.

A small number of other games announced projected support, but it has to be noted that the card wasn't really needed to play any of those games, being capable of emulating most of it by software. This was because standard PCs don't had that card, and as the game developers don't want to release something for just a few, they had to program it for machines without the expansion board.

It would have been nice to get one of that AGEIAs, the nerd inside me agrees, but the lack of support and the lack of standards around it, made it a risky business to buy one of those at that time. The same is happening right now with the Nvidia Tesla, although the niche market of science labs and supercomputer users might provide a nice launching area.


This is happening again and again in the PC industry. Whenever you buy something new and not common, you risk being trapped with something that might loose support quickly. This is why it's a good idea to buy proven technology. It has already been incorporated into some standard, it has already been evaluated, and they are definetely cheaper.

One little final word about going for something just because it's better. BETAMAX and VHS were fighting for the video standard. BETAMAX was superior, but VHS was cheaper. VHS finally became the standard, so betting on something just because it's better isn't always safe, there are always other things to consider.

Remembering the past

Clearly, the past isn't better in every way than the present, but at the same time not everything in the present is better than the past. This is specially true when we talk about computers.

A known fact is that one of the barriers computers had to trascend so that they could reach us in a massive way was the fear they generated in the unexperienced user. Nowdays that barrier has been greatly overriden, but I find myself missing it quite a lot.

Fear of computers comes from ignorance, we fear what we don't know. A hammer is used to hammer things, a screwdriver screws and unscrews, and sometimes opens a paint can, a microwave oven heats. But with computers something different happens. In their case their own nature, their own lack of clearly defined purpose due to their conception as expansible and programmable machines, generates the ignorance that produces fear. If we add an user interfase assumed as easy that really needs training to be used, we find wourselves in front of a machine capable of paralizing people by their mere presence.

Of course, that barrier has been breached and somehow trascended, and that's good and bad at the same time. The tool that's been used to achieve this is marvelous and tricky, it's called marketing. With marketing techniques computers have been lowered to mass comsumer products. They are sold in computer chains, but also in big general purpose stores. There are "new easier to use" interfases for "new easier to use" operating systems (that still require training and readapting periods). Those shiny new interfased are based on the concept of separating the user from the real computer, and at the same time they need access to the bellies of the beast for some chores. There are guarantees that don't let people open their own expansible machines (not even for cleaning the dust). All this is aimed to present computers as easy to use black boxes you don't need to understand at all to use.


In the corporate world this is an advantage, it lets the user use the computer and the systems people deal with backups, data integrity, security handling, etc.

But in our homes is where the idea of transforming a computer in something 100% accesible without knowledge becomes real troublesome. There are lots of home computers without reliable antivirus protection, without a serious firewall, without a daily inspection for spyware, no control of installed programs by each member of the family, no security updates. Lots of users that by their ignorance are unkownligly lending their computers and IPs so that people of devious purposes make massive spam deliveries, hide their own IP for ilegal actions (be it attacks on other systems or ilegal sites hosting).

That machines and that users are chain mail repeaters, and generate lists of hundreds of emails that are used for furthering the spam plague. They also are victims of a level of abstraction so strong that they don't understand at all what's going inside their computers. So they usually end slaves to an operating system just because they don't have any idea that choices are out there. The same ignorance about their own computers is what frustrates them when they find the new game they bought or that program someone at work recommended doesn't work on their machines, or does so at crawling pace.

I'm not looking for every computer user to understand 100% about computers, but it would be good if there's a stop to the deceiving they are subject to when they are sold a computer (a computer sometimes so powerfull that they probably don't need half as much anyway). It would be good if a friend comes around and opens their eyes so that they know there are other possibilities, that without being an expert and without giant efforts they can learn a lot about their computers. If we get them to have some sort of control over their computers, if we get them to know which things they can make on their own and which ones they could use some outside help, all our lives would be a lot easier. And to achieve that we have to reinstall the idea that computers are not impossible to use, but require some time from the user to learn how to enjoy and not suffer them.