Olympic Scoring System, RC1

Ok, so after much thought and wasted time, here's a shot of the first release candidate of the ultimate Olympic Scoring system for countries.

Medals are weighted, and also countries are given a weight based on population.
For example, if a country has a weighted medal points score of 50 and that country's population is 10% of the population sum of all countries attending, then that country would have a total weighted score of 45. Or 90% of their original weighted points.

This seems fair to us since a country with a huge population has a much larger pool of potential athletes to pick from than a smaller country.

As you can see this works out to be quite fair. While the US gets a larger penalty than a smaller country, their total medal count was proportionately higher too, balancing out the penalty. China on the other hand performs well under it's expected rate for it's size.

Check it out. And any news agencies that want to use this system, it's copyrighted to us, so you'll have to get permission first, credit us, and have us on the air via satellite to comment.

Anyway, here it is, the ultimate ranking of 2006 Winter Olympic competitors.

ThinkPad 770X Revival - **UPDATE**

Ok so I'm going to post some pictures of the update process and give an overview of the process.
I'll do this slowly as I have time and just update this same post and add to it.

---

First, here's the old girl before surgery. give a click for the full size image and check the specs.
A tired old PII 300 and 66MHz Bus. Note that I had already installed the new RAM as I wanted to test it first.

---

Here's the new 500MHz PIII MMC2 module waiting to be installed. This shows the top and bottom of the module and the inset is a blow-up of the processor ID. This indicates a 500MHz non-speedstep II module with 256K full speed ATC (Advanced Transfer Cache).

---

Here's a montage of the disassembly process.
Top left: Keyboard and lid removed.
Top Right: Shield, speakers, modular items removed.
Bottom left: GFX board removed, looking at CPU module, DC<->DC board waiting to come out.
Bottom right: My big paw installing the new module.

Out-geeked!

Ok, so as cool as I thought my Olympic Medal scoring system is, I was out-geeked by my buddy the spreadsheet guru.

So my original idea weights medals to make it worth winning Gold.
His system goes a step further (several steps actually).

First, he takes the original, mildly useful original TV sports system which just adds medals equally and then calculates each country's medal count as a percentage of total medals. Cool. Now the useless system becomes more useful.
He then applied the same idea to my weighted system. Giving a percentage of weighted medal points of total medal points for the games. Now that's cool.

Finally he adds a hybrid score which averages my weighted system scores with the unweighted scores. Whew.

Anyway, I like his idea. Though in my opinion, if you want to talk bragging rights for your country, then I like column L of his spreadsheet. This is the percent of total weighted points. Basically his idea and mine combined, ignoring the original TV sports unweighted scores.

Below is a pic of his Excel spreadsheet that I (of course) imported into OpenOffice and prettied up a bit for web use.

Now, as long as we are taking this scoring thing too far, how about we also weight the scores relative to population of each country? After all, how hard is it to find 30 medal winners from a pool of 300 million as opposed to a pool of say 5 million?
(note: I noticed this 300 million pool didn't stop the US from importing a Canadian Ringer with a special act of congress for their ice dancing medal ;')

Don't forget you can click on any of these pics for the full size, readable original.


The Scooter method applied to the old and Tachyon systems. Note I prefer column L over F or N.

Microsoft Promotes Linux on the Desktop

What's the number one impediment to Linux taking over the desktop?

-Too hard to install?
Nope, this hasn't been true for any good Linux distro in years, in fact it's easier to install SuSE Linux than Windows XP.

-Lack of applications?
Not much of a problem these days, there are thousands of high quality, open source and commercial applicatinos for Linux. And between WINE/Crossover Office and other technologies you can pretty much run anything.

-Hardware support?
About a wash. Windows support is limited to pretty much only spanking new hardware. Linux supports older HW and nearly all mainstream HW. Plus stuff just works with Linux, no downloading drivers, "run this CD First", or other Windows type nonsense.

No, the real answer is games.
The unfortunate problem is that:
A) Game manufacturers are purely short term profit driven, with low margins. They support only the most popular, widespread platforms.
B) Linux developers and hackers are often more interested in other things besides gaming.
(I rarelyplay any games myself. There's just too much other, more interesting stuff to do).

Not being a gamer myself, I always told people "Who cares if Linux supports games? If you really need to play them, buy a console"
However, console's haven't really had the gaming power, and the graphics that a good gaming PC can provide. Heck, the X-Box was nothing but a crappy PC in a big ugly plastic box, with low, TV resolution graphics. After all, the cheapest monitor blows away the resolution, detail, and colour clarity of television. Even at 640x480. So for serious gamers, this wasn't really a solution.

However, thanks to two recent introductions, this has all changed.
The first of course is HDTV. Now that your living room television can give you 54 inches of hi-resolution glory, your monitor looks puny and lifeless.
The second is high-end, HDTV supporting consoles.
Combine the two and PC gaming is on the way out.

Now here comes Microsoft finally selling a decent, high powered, HDTV supporting console in the X-Box 360.

So today I was blown-away to realize that Microsoft is spending millions promoting the solution to the final impediment to Linux on the desktop.

So head on down to your local computer store, buy an inexpensive PC, load SuSE Linux on it, and with the money you save on the hardware* and on the software** you can buy an X-Box 360 (or even better, wait for the sure to be superior Playstation III) and still have change left over.

Thanks Microsoft for supporting the move to quality, inexpensive, Linux operating systems on the desktop.

---

*(it can be cheaper now that you don't need it to support gaming and windows bloat)
**($59 for SuSE with 2500 applications, versus hundreds just for Windows XP, and Office and a few other apps)

Olympic Medal ranking of countries...

I've been watching the Olympics and I'm a little bit perplexed at how all the news agencies have used seemingly random criteria or at least something stupid like total medal count to decide the order to list countries in the medal standings.

I created my own simple, and I would think obvious, scoring system.
Each medal receives a value and the countries are ranked by total score.

Here's the simple point system:
Gold medal = 3 points
Silver medal = 2 points
Bronze medal = 1 points

So if a country has the following medals:

Lower Slobovia:
4 gold, 1 silver, 2 Bronze

Then their overall points are determined as follows:
(4x3)+(1x2)+(2x1)=16

I've created a spreadsheet to calculate this and input all the countries with at least 2 medals.

It looks like this as of Friday February 21st. ***UPDATED***



If anyone wants this spreadsheet, let me know. It's pretty simplistic.

ThinkPad 770x revival

So I've wanted a new laptop for a while now, but I haven't gotten one for two main reasons. First I haven't had the money to buy a decent one. Second, I can't really find a laptop worthy of replacing my current model. I did however recently setup a ThinkPad T42 for a friend and I'm thinking that the T series will be my next laptop. But that still leaves problem one. Money. I did find a good T series for $750, so that's my savings goal. In the meantime, I'm still holding on to my old ThinkPad 770X.

I'm pretty picky about my laptops. I want a specific set of features. I don't play games on my computers so a lot of the consumer oriented laptops are not anything I want.

What I don't like about most current laptops:
- cheaply made, too much plastic.
- everything integrated, not modular or upradeable.
- Stinking dragpad pointers. These things are worthless. And to prove it, look at everyone who has one. They almost ALL use an external mouse.
- horrible mushy, short throw, odd layout keyboards.
- crappy screens. Why on earth are laptops shipping with such low resolution screens? What good is 1280x768 or 1280x800? it's worthless for browsing and wordprocessing etc.


What I want/demand:
- USB 2.0
- PC-CARD slots
- Sturdy case
- good keyboard
- Trackpoint, the best laptop mouse controller period. **
- good, hires display. 1280x1024 minimum.
- Modular and upgradeable
- firewire
- CD/DVD burner combo
- dual monitor support
- ATI Radeon or nVidia graphics
- cool running AMD or Intel processor. I'll trade a little speed for heat any day. laptops these days run too hot. You can't even actually put them on your lap or they'll almost burn you. And heat is bad for components anyway. Heat equals short life. In this regard I think AMD's latest mobile CPU might have the advantage. I'd even try a Transmeta CPU.
- modular networking with standard, Linux supported chipsets. Ideally I'd like to see bottom panels with 2 or 3 mini-PCI slots. One for WiFi, with a good, built in antenna in the screen lid frame. One for Ethernet. 10/100 is fine for now, I mean who needs gigabit on their laptop anyway? What would you hook it to?
- Built in long range Bluetooth.
- IrDA with a transceiver on the top of the lid frame pointing toward the rear and one on the right or left side.
- removeable HD in a caddy.

I'm sure there's more I can't think of right now.

Now, back to reality. My current laptop is one I bought back when I was a CEO and had money to burn on toys. At that time I bought a new laptop every year and I always got the best. {Sigh} Those were the days. Anyway, the last laptop I bought before leaving the rat-race was an IBM ThinkPad 770x 9549-7AO. I love it. I've used it steadily since I bought it '99. That alone is a testament to how well built and, for the time, high-end the 770X was that I can still be using it 7 years later.
Granted, I'm not a typical user. I don't play huge 3D games and I don't go in for a lot of the CPU wasting addons and crap that people do to their systems. I work on software, browse, type, edit, word process, compile, etc.
For 95% of what I do, the system was enough as it came. The real problem has been the steady bloat of OS's and applications. Programmers get lazier, and RAD tools get crappier, and the baseline system gets bigger so programmers don't have to be as efficient. So slowly this bloat has crept up on me and finally my trusty old ThinkPad had become too slow to use through no fault of it's own.
Recently I decided to do something about it.
I did a lot of research and a lot of cross referencing and came up with a plan to upgrade the old girl.
Here's the original specs, FYI:

ThinkPad 770X 9549-7AO
Intel 440BX chipset
Pentium II 300 with 512k L2
128MB PC-66 SDRAM (64MB SODIMM on motherboard, 64MB SODIMM on trapdoor slot)
Trident Cyber 9397DVD graphics chipset, 64bit AGP graphics with hardware video acceleration and 3D acceleration.
8MB SGRAM video memory
13.7" active matrix hires LCD screen, 1280x1024 resolution
8.1GB IDE hard drive in modular HD bay (uses caddy)
real 3 button TrackPoint mouse pointer
long throw, keyboard with full size keys
UltraBay II for CD, DVD, Zip, Superdisk, HD or battery
DVD ROM Ultrabay II drive
Lithium Ion battery
56k V.90 MWave DSP modem
Crystal 4236 audio with 3D surround
IBM DEVA card (DVD Enhanced Video Accelerator) provides hardware MPEG acceleration for DVD playback. Also provides video capture with composite and S-Video input. Video output with composite and S-Video output, and Digital SPDIF surround sound output.

That's the basics, you can see more specs on IBM/Lenovo's website.

Now, for the upgrades, I decided on an advanced, technically difficult, but slightly conservative plan. Here's the items I upgraded and how:

--Component-----------------------------Replaced with
- MMC2 PII 300MHz processor module------MMC2 PIII 500MHZ module
- 256MB PC66 SODIMM RAM-----------------384MB PC100 SODIMM SDRAM (128MB x3)
- 8.1 GB 12.7mm 2.5" HD-----------------40GB 9mm 2.5" HD (actually several caddies
  --------------------------------------for different HD's and multiple OS's)

------------------------Additional Upgrades or addons------------------------
- D-Link DWL G650 802.11g PC-Card WiFI Atheros chipset supports 54/108 Mbps
- SMC 2532W-B PCMCIA high power 802.11b WiFi, prism2.5 chipset, 200mw output, removeable antenna with external antenna connector. (war drive special ;')
- Hawking 6db antenna
- D-Link DUB-C2 PC-CARD 2 port USB 2.0 adapter
- 3COM PC-CARD 10/100 Ethernet
- Data one USB 2.0 steel external 5.25" HD enclosure
- HP dvd530i DVD +/- R/W Dual layer DVD/CD RW
- Crossfire Smartdisk 160 GB external USB 2.0 / Firewire HD
- IBM PC Camera USB
- D-Link DBT-120 Bluetooth dongle
- iomega external USB Zip drive
- Canon BJC-50 portable colour printer with scanner attachment
- other stuff.

The system runs multiple OS's on multiple HD's. The main two are:

- SuSE Linux 10.0 Professional, Not only the best Linux, but the best all around desktop OS available.

- Windows 2000 SP4 *

*I run 2000 and not XP because I don't like XP. It provides no discernable advantage over 2000 and lots of disadvantages. Like crippled user levels, annoying wizards, resource wasting eye-candy, really annoying PnP habits, etc. Plus it's slower than 2000 and wastes more resources.

I'm planning to detail some of this upgrade here later in case anyone is interested. I really have to thank the ThinkPad forum users (they don't know me, I just lurk there and read their helpful posts) and of course the original ThinkPad upgrade genius, Sharedoc at Wim's BIOS site.
Thanks all.

Anyway, all this was a lot of work, but really inexpensive, at least compared to a new laptop. The PIII 500MHz MMC2 module and 256MB of the PC100 RAM only cost me $50!
$10 for the CPU and $20 each for the 128MB SODIMM's. I scavenged the other 128MB SODIMM and one of the 40GB HD's from a dead laptop.
I got the other HD for $50 about 2 years ago.

The results were amazing. It's like a whole new computer, and I suppose for all intents and purposes, it is. Boot times are much quicker. The system and UI are much snappier and more responsive. Applications are smoother and faster. Multimedia is more functional, playback is smoother.

In fact I'm so happy with the system now that I may not replace it for a couple more years. If anything I'll give a go at trying another, faster CPU. Probably a PIII 750 speedstep. Though right now, I'm fine with the 500.
The reason I didn't do this in the first place is that the 500MHz is the fastest non-speedstep II CPU you can get. Using a speedstep processor on a non-speedstep supporting motherboard is a problem and requires more hardware hacking than I wanted to try all in one shot. You have to modify the module itself. Thought I'd do the non-speedstep first and work out all the bugs and issues involved in that before I took the big leap.
But for now, the old girl is a pleasure to use. peppy, responsive, and comfortable. Great keyboard, beautiful, hires screen, and the awesome Trackpoint II pointer.
All she need's now is a new battery for those rare mobile moments.

Remember, if you are going to replace something anyway, try hacking it first. You might just save some money, have some fun, and learn something.

Later,
Tachyon

**NOTE to laptop manufacturers. License the Tackpoint technology.
Don't whine and tell me about studies and customer surveys etc. The Trackpoint is the best controller there is. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't acutually used one for more than 5 minutes.
My company's first time ThinkPad customers used to complain about the TrackPoint and ask for a mouse. I used to make them a deal. Use the TrackPoint for 2 weeks and if you still want a mouse after that, I'll give you one for free. I only ever gave out one mouse.