Cav's Place

I knew of the talks about this for quite some time, but it appears that now they’re no longer just talks. I still think that it’s a leap in the wrong direction, however, because allowing characters that aren’t in the Latin alphabet in domain names encourages people to use their own native languages on the Internet even more and that certainly isn’t going to help improve international communication. Improved international communication requires one main world language, which should be the language that already has the most non-native speakers, which is quite obviously English.
With that in mind, a step in the right direction would be to very strongly encourage all sites that are not aimed at people who speak English but have more than a strictly local scope to add English translations for their content. Later, that strong encouragement could turn into some slight pressure and then perhaps become even more than that. All of this would obviously only apply to the layout and the content posted by the site’s administrators and not to any user-generated content that the site in question might host. This would be the way to help international communication instead of harming it, giving as many people as possible a chance to access information from as many different sources as possible.

But that article does make a good point when it mentions the people who live in countries that use other alphabets and who struggle to type domain names as they currently are because their keyboards don’t even have those characters. That is indeed a real problem, because people must be able to easily use the Internet before we can get to improving international communication through it. But this problem can have solutions that don’t require such changes, solutions that’d allow people to access domains that are named using Latin characters by typing the name using their own alphabet.
The article does mention that workarounds that do just that exist, but that they don’t work on all computers, which leads me to believe that these workarounds are in the form of applications that people can install to translate the domain names they type into those that their DNS can understand. But what if these applications would be moved away from the users and to the ISPs? After all, if the DNS translates the domain name into the appropriate IP address, it shouldn’t be a problem to add another service to translate a domain name written in some other alphabet into the “real” name, which would still use Latin characters. Sites that wish to be accessible like this could register their “secondary” names somewhere and everything would continue as normal, without affecting either individual users or the Internet as a whole in any way.
Of course, such an additional service would cost a little to maintain and some fees would need to be added in order to pay for it. Those fees could be levied on the domain name holders who wish to register such “secondary” names for their domains, so this tax could double as a deterrent, discouraging people from using other languages in this international space a little while also giving them the possibility to do just that in every way if they still desire it.

Some may say that this is much ado about nothing, mainly because it won’t affect them in any way. However, I think it’s a very real issue because it signifies that this fragmentation of the Internet is being accepted at the highest level. It’s one thing when people create non-local sites that are only in their own language and that language is not English or when ISPs allow their customers to access sites by typing domain names using different alphabets, but quite another when ICANN makes significant changes in order to allow people to even register domain names written entirely with characters from other alphabets. It moves the Internet away from the idea of an international space where we all come together and basically says that our differences are more important than our similarities. Someone commented that “there is a danger that the Internet – a tool for culture, information, sharing and dialog on a non-national level – may become irreversibly fragmented” and I agree. Such fragmentation existed before and always will exist, but having it endorsed at the highest level changes things, and that change is not for the best…

You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about the potential risk of increased illegal activity on sites that have domain names written with characters from other alphabets, especially if they’re hosted on servers from countries where that specific alphabet is not used. Quite a few people seem to be worried about that, apparently mentioning potential terrorist activity more often than not, but I highly doubt that something like this could pose a real problem to any authorities that take their role seriously. This concern seems to be just one more result of the fear that so many people have ended up living in, which is a different issue entirely.
But there is one thing about this idea that is relevant to the matter at hand: It signifies that people would obviously perceive such sites as a separate area of the Internet. That said, one can also assume that those who would primarily use such sites would likely end up perceiving those that use the Latin alphabet as being in a separate area of the Internet as well. And that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about so far, the danger of doing something like this, segregation…

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens; there’s little else to do at this point. Maybe it’ll really end up being much ado about nothing, though I quite firmly doubt that. On the other hand, if it really will result in people focusing on what sets them apart from each other and rejecting those who are different even more, maybe this could at least serve as a solid argument against any further developments in the same direction…

It’s certainly not better than the first one at least. It passed the first test I put it through, but failed the second. Further tests initially marked 48 bad clusters, then only confirmed six of them, though it struggled through all that 48-cluster area. What’s more, it started making worrying noises after those clusters were found, after initially being very quiet. It now clicks a little every few seconds…
Either way, I installed everything over the weekend and just closed the case and put everything that was left lying around back in the box I use for such things a little while ago, so I plan to see how long it’ll last. I don’t think I could have had it replaced yet again just over this anyway, since it’s not failing in any other way yet and I believe there’s a clause that says HDDs that have bad sectors covering less than 0.1% of their surface are not considered defective. Knowing that there are still problems and that another failure is just a matter of time doesn’t do anything to improve my mood though, especially since there also was an odd moment while copying some things back and my DVD drive didn’t actually recover either.

The DVD drive’s problem are DVD-ROMs, which appears to be the most frequent problem Plextor drives have, because it can read CDs and blank or burned DVDs just fine. I didn’t try to use it to write anything now, but I don’t particularly care about that. Anyway, this means that if I wouldn’t have had legally purchased software I wouldn’t even have noticed the issue, but as it is it did cause a significant amount of frustration right now, when I had to reinstall things, because I need to try a lot of times before it’ll work once and “trying” usually means rebooting with the disk in the drive, because it never worked otherwise. Once it manages to read a disk it’ll keep working for as long as that disk’s in the drive and I don’t reboot again, but that’s the only guarantee. Sometimes it kept working even after I switched disks and once it worked through two consecutive reboots, but trying that seems to be quite a risk… But since it’s no longer under warranty and don’t use it enough to justify replacing it just now, I’ll have to deal with it as it is for as long as I can.

Otherwise, after finishing Two Worlds while wating for the first HDD to be replaced, I decided to get back to Neverwinter Nights as soon as I was back to “normal”. That proves to be quite difficult, as the problems Neverwinter Nights has with Windows Vista are very obvious this time around, refusing to start the vast majority of the time. Still, I just saw that, after changing some settings, it’ll run without any problems if I can just get it to start, which just means trying to run it and ending the process forcefully when it hangs until it’ll eventually start. It didn’t do this the first time around, so I don’t know what’s wrong with it now, but it does seem to be what usually happens when you try to run it on Vista, so I guess I was just lucky the first time around…

I’ll leave you with some translated comments posted about this particular HDD model on the sites of two shops from here, just to emphasize that I really made a really bad choice back when I decided to buy it.

“Meanwhile the HDD went sort of crazy… Read errors, files missing and so on.”

“It functions abnormally! Makes strange noises, typical for a hard disk failure, sometimes it’s detected by the SATA controller and sometimes it’s not and even Windows Vista stops showing it as being in the system: Partitions were vanishing and the HDD itself was vanishing from Device Manager. I’m very unhappy with this product!”

“The first one had its transfer speed (to another SATA drive) drop to at most three megabits per second after two months. I was thankful that I managed to save my 300 GB in three days and it was replaced – it also gave partitioning and formatting errors. The second one has writing and reading errors, also after two months.”

“I bought two almost a year ago, one of which I gave to a friend as a gift. They both failed two days apart: They lost the formatting (becoming RAW) and only about 128 GB out of the 500 are still visible. It started with some random boot errors for which I blamed the operating system, though their inconsistency should have made me realize it was a hardware problem. If you have such a HDD, backup now. Statistically, chances are that it’ll fail after less than a year.”

“I haven’t seen another product with so many complaints. Very praised, expensive, you could easily buy a 1 TB drive instead, and from Seagate too. I wasn’t expecting this. I thought it was an accident when the first one failed two days after I bought it, but now I have to look for the warranty a second time.”

“I bought one nearly three months ago and a week ago it went to hell… It’s no longer detected for more than about two minutes, after which the motherboard can’t find it at all. Booting off it is out of the question. A friend of mine got the 750 GB model (also Barracuda ES.2 32 MB buffer, identical) and the same thing happened to him as well, just that in his case it went to hell even sooner. Conclusion: I’d say you should try another model, though not necessarily another manufacturer… I have two other Seagates that I’ve been using for five years and they’re completely problem-free.”

“It died after a year and a half. The motor that spins the disks got stuck… It buzzed and the system no longer saw it, not even in BIOS. I lost everything I had on it.”

“I couldn’t even use it for seven months! The disks are spinning but the motherboard can’t detect it, plus that I hear a buzz every ten seconds…”

“It burned after nine months, taking my data with it.“

I had planned a rant about this topic for quite some time now and I guess this provides a good opportunity for it. Seriously, how can a more or less regular flu be declared a national emergency? Even if this particular virus originates from another species, it’s not noticeably more severe than those that cause the seasonal flu every year, so why all this panic? Did the powers that be really require yet another thing to frighten people into submission with? I thought they had plenty of means to do that already…
The latest numbers I saw showed a mortality rate of about 0.4% in Europe and 1% elsewhere, which is very little in itself. But even those small numbers are actually inflated, because some people won’t go to the hospital for something like this and a few countries have realized that it’s nothing major and stopped reporting all but the most severe cases. So we’re talking about a pretty regular flu virus, which means that it can admittedly spread very quickly and cause the people it infects to feel awful for about a week, but in the tremendous majority of cases it won’t do anything more than that.
Barring the odd case that basically reflects the fact that you can’t account for luck, complications tend to arise only when the infected person is part of a risk group, such as those who are very young or very old or those who have heart or lung problems. But those are at risk when it comes to all sorts of infections, so there’s really nothing special about this flu. I wonder how many people develop complications as a result of common bacterial infections from food and water or some other kind of widespread ailment… I’d like to see some statistics, if anyone has any, because I think the percentage could actually be higher than it is for the swine flu.

Some time ago I read an article detailing how did the Hong Kong authorities respond to this flu and I think that’d be a good example to follow for the rest of the world. Remember that Hong Kong was hit hard by SARS, so if what I read in that article is the actual truth then they’re worthy of even more praise for being among the first to realize that this flu is not a threat and get back to more important matters.
The article was saying that the expected panic was noticed at first, people remembering SARS and not wanting to take any chances, which resulted in those who appeared to have flu symptoms even being arrested on sight in order to keep them away from the general public and therefore prevent the virus from spreading. But they soon recovered their wits and started analyzing the facts objectively, which resulted in a drastic change in their response to such cases. A rough quote (from memory) would be something along the lines of “if at first you could be arrested on the street for coughing, presently if you go to a doctor and complain of flu symptoms you’re simply told to go back home, wait it out and try not to cough in anyone’s face on the way”.
The fact is that many of those who are infected by this virus could fully recover even without a specific treatment and the vast majority of those who do end up needing some specific treatment will never be in any serious danger either. Under these circumstances, the “go back home and wait it out” approach certainly seems to be the one authorities and doctors everywhere should choose, or at least that’s how I see it…

I wonder where did this start from… Do so many people truly scare so easily or is it just the authorities and pharmaceutical companies that try to make it appear so? It’d be very easy to blame only the powers that be and go into various conspiracy theories, but I’m trying to be objective and see all the facts. The truth is that many “regular people” do scare easily and react impulsively, so they could certainly share the blame for this situation. On the other hand, the authorities and (perhaps even more so) the pharmaceutical companies have certainly made the most of it, so at least some of those conspiracy theories are justified and could even prove to be quite accurate. We can’t really know exactly what’s going on right now so, while I say that anyone who claims that the swine flu is a serious threat is at the very least misguided, I view those who claim that it’s all just one big conspiracy pretty much the same way. A clear head and a balanced attitude are always crucial, yet they’re so very hard to find in this society of ours…

But a good thing could eventually come out of this, if people would only get that message. Such diseases spread from person to person without requiring direct contact, so traveling is a risk. I remember a National Geographic article that said that a localized outbreak of bird flu, which does currently look like a particularly dangerous kind of flu, would spread all around the world in no more than six months due to how often and how far people currently travel.
Of course, my main concern is the major negative impact that traveling has on the environment, but it doesn’t appear that many people would be willing to stay home just to reduce the harm done to the planet. However, they could think again if they’d know that trips can prove to be a significant health risk for themselves and others, even if the World Health Organization shies away from recommending travel restrictions. Either way, the fact that a disease that appeared all the way on the other side of the world could make its way to you so quickly simply because some people keep going wherever they want without caring about the consequences is quite troubling, even if the disease in question won’t prove to be a serious problem in any way.

I hoped I’d be back to “normal” yesterday, after finally getting a replacement for that failed HDD on Wednesday. It didn’t work out, because the “new” drive was dead on arrival… I just put it in, turned the computer on, heard four rather ugly sounds and saw the system hang while trying to detect it, eventually displaying the model number followed by that same “drive verify failed” message that I was getting after the first one would lock up. Tried putting it on dad’s computer as well and that one wouldn’t even bother with it, spending a couple of seconds trying to detect it and then just moving on. So they kept it for 15 days just so they could replace one that was dying when it was trying to read from a certain area with one that was quite thoroughly dead. They were much quicker the second time around though, replacing it after just one day with a third one, which so far is working.
Considering all the bad reviews I have read about this particular model and since the first failed after a year and a half and the second was dead on arrival, I certainly won’t start installing Windows on it before making sure it passes all the tests and I plan to keep backing up regularly and thoroughly from now on. I also advise everyone to stay away from model number ST3500320NS (Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 500-GB) from Seagate… I made a bad choice when I decided to buy this and now I guess I have to live with it, so I can only hope that this one will be better than the first one (since it’s obviously better than the second one already). I did notice that the first one’s firmware version was SN04 and, despite the fact that no updates for it were listed when I checked, this one has SN06, so that could help too…

It just passed the first, and likely most thorough, test, so it looks hopeful, but I still think I’ll spend tonight running tests on it and making sure I have the latest versions of all drivers and programs that I plan to install, then install Windows and everything else on it tomorrow if all goes well. And I sure hope it’ll all go well, because computer problems really get my morale down and make me worry even more than I usually do. Being somewhat excited about finally getting out of this temporary situation and then finding myself back to square one on Wednesday evening triggered a really bad moment…
Still, either way it goes, I won’t be writing anything more about it this week, because I have no more “slots” left for personal posts, but a “report” will most likely be here on Monday, after I’ll somehow manage to write a post about something non-personal this weekend… If things go well, my computer should be completely back to normal by then. If not, I’ll certainly know it all too well much sooner than that…

Sent that HDD to the shop last Monday and it seems that what I heard about their warranty services is quite true. The contract states that they must inform the client of the cause of the malfunction and the method chosen to solve the problem (repair, replace or refund) at most ten days after receiving the defective product, yet they only said they decided to replace it on Friday, which is 12 days after receiving the product, or at least 11 days if you don’t count that Monday. Still no information about exactly what happened to it though. Either way, they said they were waiting for a HDD to replace it with and it should come next week, which means Wednesday at the earliest for me because dad is on a trip until then and he won’t be able to go and pick it up in case they somehow get their hands on one earlier.
Meanwhile, I tried using dad’s old computer, the one that apparently died some months ago and was set aside somewhere because dad was thinking to take it to work and replace the ancient one he has in his office. That’s because I took it apart back then, after ordering the parts for a new computer for him, found dust under the CPU, cleaned it, put it back together, tried to start it again and noticed that it worked, so I thought it might have been just the dust after all. But now it’s obvious that it wasn’t just the dust, because it couldn’t give me more than nine more days. Worked reasonably enough until Tuesday night, but then it crashed once again, just like before. I took it apart again, looked for any new “developments”, put it back together, pressed the button and noticed that it somehow did come back to life. But that was apparently the last of it; it had nothing left to give me on Wednesday. I don’t know whether the main culprit is the CPU or the motherboard or both, and have some suspicions about the power supply on top of that, but at least now we know it’s useless. I guess the RAM and the CD drive could be given away to someone who still has need of something so old, but everything else is pretty much dead and buried.
So I then moved on to what I should have done from the beginning but initially decided not to because I was hoping I’d have a HDD again within a few days and it’d be more trouble than it’d be worth. I put the HDD from that old computer, which is actually the one I got after I sent the last one that failed to be replaced, in 2007, on my own, more or less dangling somewhere under the DVD drive since this computer’s only IDE cable won’t give me any other options. Then I tried installing Vista on it, only to notice that my DVD drive wasn’t working. I took dad’s drive to do the job, then started wondering what could be wrong with mine, since it never caused any problems before, and decided that it could simply be dust gathered inside because it hadn’t been used in a year and a half. Then also noticed that the button located above my mouse’s wheel, which I set as the middle button, ended up being quite stuck after being unused while I was using dad’s old computer, since I didn’t bother installing the proper driver on it.
Either way, I installed Vista well enough, using a DVD drive placed on some boxes next to the computer and a HDD dangling inside it, because my DVD drive seems to be quite stuck inside my case so I couldn’t remove it in order to replace it with dad’s and taking the IDE cable out of the computer would have required removing the video card, which I didn’t feel like doing. Then I also installed the drivers, service packs, updates and important programs, which means I now have the proper kits downloaded as well, making it easier to do this all over again next week. In fact, aside from having a somewhat slower HDD which is also placed somewhat improperly (in the sense that it’s not fixed in place, because otherwise it’s sitting quite straight), I’m pretty much back to “normal”. My DVD drive started working well again as well, after I just kept the tray open a little and blew air inside as hard as I could a few times, so I guess it really was just dust. My mouse still seems to have some small issues, so now I’m wondering if it’s something new or I just didn’t notice it before, but the major problem was solved after about 20-25 clicks.
So now I wait for next week and hope that the new HDD won’t be as faulty as the old one. Then again, considering what I see written about this particular model, I should first hope that it won’t be faulty from day one and then be careful with the backup… Needless to say, I’m quite worried. I’m also wondering what kind of HDD I should plan to get for my next computer, because they seem to fail quite often in recent years and a HDD failure can be worse than the failure of any other component, seeing as you can’t exactly send the potential lost data to be replaced as well…

At least I’m alone for a few days, since they both left. As long as nothing goes wrong, it’s certainly less bad like this, but I still don’t feel like doing much of anything. Little point in doing anything when you can’t have any of the things that truly matter to you, plus that having problems with my computer, which is the only material possession that’s important to me in itself, certainly does nothing to improve my mood… But I’ll see what I’ll manage to do these days, because it’ll certainly be worse once they’ll be back.