Blessed by the Potato

I was wondering what exactly I should write about today, deathly afraid that I had run out of ideas after just over 50 posts. Thankfully, Dell has saved me with a piece of spam.

A while ago, my supervisor wanted a new computer for his home, and got me to buy it for him. The deal was, I would buy it on my credit card, and he’d pay me back with a bonus for setting it up and all that jazz. He was fairly stuck on Dell (though I did offer to build one from parts), so I watched the specials for a few weeks, and when one with “free” extra RAM came up, I ordered it.

A few days later, I got an email from Dell saying that there was a problem with my credit card, and asked me to phone a certain representative at a certain number at a certain time. Of course, when I called at that time, I got a voicemail saying she worked completely different hours. After a few days of that, I finally got a hold of her, where she tried to blame the problem on me not putting in the expiry date properly (I did), then maybe a typo in the card number (there wasn’t). I kept trying to tell her that the problem was that I was ordering a computer and having it shipped to my supervisor’s house, which my credit card company’s anti-fraud detection was not liking one bit. If she changed it to ship to my place, it would go through fine. Instead, she said that I probably didn’t have a high enough credit limit to cover the computer, and tried to sell me a financing plan. I got fed up at that point and just cancelled the order.

My supervisor ended up ordering the computer through the hospital on his own credit card, which was a very smart move — the Dell government/healthcare division has its own tech support line, which is based in Canada and generally much more helpful than the standard overseas outsourced one. The package ended up costing less, since he didn’t have to pay for anything he didn’t want (out goes the second DVD-ROM drive, goodbye useless add-on 15″ flat panel), but the computer itself cost very slightly more (at least, if you go by what it would cost to get a 15″ screen seperately).

So today, I got a piece of junkmail from Dell warning that my computer’s warranty will expire at the end of the week and that I should really consider buying an extended warranty.

PROTECT YOUR DELL SYSTEM!

A Dell Warranty is the best way to protect your Dell products. And there’s nothing like the peace of mind that comes from knowing you can rely on Dell for:

• Comprehensive knowledge of your system
• Hassle-free repairs
• 24/7 support

Wow, $79/year for three things that Dell is not known for: you often have to harrangue them to acknowledge a hardware failure and send out a replacement, and then they want you to ship the broken part back, even if it’s just a cooling fan, and very rarely do they know much about your system, even if it’s on the waybill you got when ordering. And as I saw with my credit card issue, support is not always available 24/7 — and that was for sales, which is typically the department that gets the best resources from the company.

Anyway, that reminded me of why when Wayfare wanted a new laptop, we went solidly for a Toshiba.

I finally managed to finish the Dune prequel “The Battle of Corrin”, finally putting that series of 6 books to rest.

My biggest praise for the books is that they were long. 6 books all-together (3 on the lives of the familial patriarchs a generation before the events in the original Dune, and 3 taking place ten thousand years earlier, in the Butlerian Jihad), and each book is hefty in its own right (400-700 pages in paperback form). They’re not a terrible series, but I can’t recommend them very highly.

The writing is overly verbose in a great many places, caused, I think, by the fact that each of them seems to try to tell at least 3 stories at once, flipping between stories every 10 pages or less. To try to keep you from forgetting what’s happening in each subplot, they often repeat details again and again. Unfortunately, the style doesn’t draw you in very much, so whenever the action lags a bit (and that happens often in books that long) you find yourself getting bored and skimming a bit.

I can’t really recommend them to people who aren’t fond of Dune to begin with. On the one hand, they are written in a much different style (Frank Herbert seemed to prefer shorter books with much, much less exposition, so fans would often read a lot into single sentences thrown in; you’ll never have to reach like that in the books by his son). This will make them a little more accessible to the people who didn’t like Dune just because of how it was put on paper; but unfortunately, the stories in these more conventionally-written books aren’t interesting enough in their own rights to read without the original books to beef them up (that is, the prequels don’t really stand on their own).

On the other hand, I can’t really recommend the series to anyone who’s a rabid fan of Dune either, since many details that might be considered holy canon will be… “altered”. This can be upsetting to someone who knows the original books very well. Even if you don’t have every detail of those Dune books etched into your memory to spot the inconsistencies, they’re just not very good sci-fi in the technical details that they throw out. For example, it’s well known that in the Dune universe, a method of folding space for instantaneous travel exists that depends on the ability to forsee the future to dodge collisions (since there is zero time to react as you’re jumping through foldspace). Ships that don’t have foldspace engines travel “conventionally”, but it’s clear from the travel times given that this, too is a form of faster-than-light travel. There just seems to be a great deal of inconsistency with this “conventional” FTL technology.

Another example would require the use of spoilers, so here goes:

*** SPOILER WARNING ***

*** SPOILERS ***

Many of their strategies have very obvious flaws that supposedly brilliant tacticians shouldn’t be using. For example, at once point in the last book (the Battle of Corrin) the human fleet discovers that the thinking machines have stripped the defenses of all their planets to send a single combined fleet on a war-ending attack against the humans. However, the machines did not know about the humans’ foldspace drives, and so a plan is hatched to jump behind machine lines and nuke every one of thier planets while they lie defenseless. This is, however, before they discovered the use of prescient navigators, so using the foldspace engines ran a fairly high risk of hitting something on the way and simply disappearing. They say that the odds of this happening are approximately one in ten, per jump. The humans then divide their fleet into 6 (IIRC) battle groups, each of which has to make several dozen jumps so that every machine world gets hit.

The way things go, the jump process causes them to lose approximately one ship per jump. It’s obvious by the end, when they’re fighting with something like <30% of their initial strength, that it doesn’t take very many ships to put down a machine planet that has already sent its defenders to join the attack fleet. So I wondered (and I’m sure you are to) why they didn’t divide their fleet up into smaller groups that would require fewer jumps, yet would still obviously be strong enough to tackle a defenseless world on their own. Then they could have finished the machines off faster, and losing fewer ships to random jump malfunctions.

The series also suffers from a problem common to many galactic empire scenarios: the worlds in their universe tend to only have a single city (sometimes 2 or 3, but hardly ever more). This allows factions to control planets (which are generally large bodies capable of supporting billions of people) with a minor number of military forces. I think the worst offender in this regard was probably Battletech, where a single star of mechs (sometimes, when I was upset at my wingmen, just my one giant mech) would control an entire planet.

Also, continuing with the spoilers… the machines used “cymeks” at certain points during the war. These were combat machines with disembodied human brains controlling them. However, at the very end of the war, humanity traps the machines within a shield that scrambled the artificial intelligence neural nets (but not human brains). Trapped in this way, the machine forces were rendered impotent while the humans took 20 years to rebuild their forces to come finish the job. In all that time, the machines never found a way to break through the shielding to get at the humans. I find it odd that it never occured to them to either create some new cymeks (admittedly, they had some problems controlling the original cymeks, but they were in a fairly desperate situation), or to create radio-controlled battleships. They couldn’t be as sophisticated as the ones with AIs loaded into them, and the radio control would introduce some minor lag… but early on the machine forces vastly outnumbered the humans, and the only thing holding them back was the shield. It makes no sense that they wouldn’t have at least considered those two options for getting around that. (They did end up sending simple, mindless automatons out to try to wreak havoc).

So despite spending so much time on my MSc thesis — and suffering so much because of it — I’ve actually put some thought into what I might want to do for my PhD thesis. And I think I know what it is that demands my attention. It’s a grand question that has plagued the world for too long now, causing needless suffering and loss of life. The matter is a little outside my area of expertise, perhaps you could even describe it as a humanities subject, rather than science, but I still think I’m qualified to study it. Two factions, seemingly at each others’ throats since time immortal, who just can’t seem to find common ground for peace.

I’m speaking of course, of the epic battle between Pirates and Ninjas. What is it about Pirates that Ninjas just can’t leave them alone? Why must they fight incessantly? Could not a graduate student, with enough free time and caffeine find some common ground for peace between these great people to flourish? And what of the people who don’t easily fit into either camp? Those parrot-loving, verbal ticking (Yarr!) people who have a penchant for black pyjamas? Or the more flamboyant one-eyed ninjas, trained to be deadly weapons stalking the night, but who also enjoy a liesurely saturday afternoon cruise? Can we not bring them all together to have peace in our time?

I intend to start at the beginning, and research the source of the great pirate-ninja feud. Such things often turn out to be caused by a minor, often accidental, slight by one group, that is then escalated out of all proportion by stubborn hotheads on both sides. Then, after these wars rage for the long enough, simple momentum keeps them fighting, though no one knows why. The middle chapter of the thesis will focus on the modern pirates and ninjas, contrasting them both with their historical versions, and also with each other, as a basis for finding some common ground. The final phase of the research will be more hands-on, as I attempt to apply what I’ve learned to the real world, by bringing together various groups of pirates and ninjas and acting as an arbitrator. We shall see if my skills will be enough to bring about a truce in our time.

Yarr.

Han Solo, dastardly space pirate, rugged mercenary, and admittedly mediocre smuggler lost a cargo of contraband spice for Jabba the Hutt, notorious gangster and glutton. Our lovable rogue then had a bounty put on his head so large that every mercenary in the galaxy was looking for him. Having no rich relations to speak of, he couldn’t easily come up with the cash to pay Jabba back. Fortunately, he got a sweet milk run contract at the last minute: a pair of rich(?) upstanding-types wanted a fast ride to Alderaan, and were paying handsomly. Before they could leave, though, the bounty hunter Greedo found Han in Mos Eisley, and sat him down for a little chat. It was clear that Greedo wasn’t going to leave until Han went with him to Jabba so Greedo could get paid, or until Han paid Greedo to bugger off.

So, Han deftly drew his blaster out beneath the table, and shot Greedo in cold blood. Or did he? Long after the Emperor was killed and the second Death Star destroyed, the law caught up to Han Solo, and put him on trial. Fortunately, we’ve found footage of The Trial of Han Solo.

Even George Lucas appears as a witness; however a twist of fate puts him on trial. We get to see once and for all that the perversions of his once beloved accidental masterpieces mean that he truly is totally batshit fucking loco.