When I upgraded my graphics card from a GeForce GTX 470 to a GeForce GTX 690 I was thrilled.  I’d designed my computer around making upgrades like that later.  I didn’t have the budget to build the “perfect” machine when I built it, but it was at least a solid platform to improve from.  So the long-overdue graphics upgrade was on my list of things to do from the beginning.

In fact, the old GeForce GTX 470 was even relegated to being a dedicated PhysX (physics) card.

And you’d think that throwing in a monster of a new video card, a dual-processor card at that, would make my silent PC unbearably loud.  After all, the GeForce GTX 690 is hardly designed for silence.  But in fact, quite the opposite has been true.  With ridiculous SLI performance available, even bumping up the quality settings in all of my games, the GeForce GTX 690 is so under-utilized that it hardly ever has to kick the fan speed up to cope with the heat.  Whereas the tiny GeForce GTX 470 had to wind up like a freaking jet engine for some video games.

So the nVidia GeForce GTX 690, I love!

But ever since I upgraded to version 310.90 of nVidia’s display drivers, I’ve had a problem.  Every single time that I turn on my computer, I have to start my computer twice!  From a cold boot the drivers always fail and Windows throws me into a low-resolution driverless mode.  It’s easy to identify as my logon screen is at an extremely low resolution.  Fortunately I can just hit restart from there.  Thereafter, so long as my computer is rebooting, second boot, every boot until I actually turn it off and cold boot again, the drivers detect the card correctly and all is fine.

It never happened with the older versions of the drivers that I had.  It always detected the card correctly the first time, every time.

Only once I “upgraded” to nVidia GeForce display driver 310.90 did this problem occur.

I’ve noticed another bug as well, that may or may not be related.  It detects my monitor on the wrong port.  In the “NVIDIA Control Panel” software on the “Configure Multi-GPU, Surround, PhysX” configuration screen is shown a representation of my two cards.  It even breaks down the GeForce GTX 690 into cards A and B, along side the GeForce GTX 470, for the three cards it technically is.  And each card shows which monitors back-end ports have which monitors plugged into them.  It correctly identifies which the DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, etc. ports are available on which cards.  But it always gets it wrong on which one my monitor is plugged into.  Not just the wrong port, but the wrong card.  I plug it into card A and it shows it as being on card B.  I move it to the one and only DVI port on card B to match its idiocy and it then shows it on card A.  (And not even the right port type on card A.)  It just totally flubs the port my monitor is plugged into.

Now maybe that bug is in no way related.  Or maybe that bug is the reason that I have to reboot my PC.  Don’t know.  Don’t really care.  The point is, starting your computer up twice each and every time gets really darned annoying!  You think people complain about the long boot time of Windows 7 on a hard drive now, try making them double that!  And it’s not automated either.  You have to boot it up and then manually restart it yourself!  You can’t just walk away and wait.

Now, you might ask, why don’t I just uninstall the bad driver and roll back to a prior version?  Oh, right, because the prior version of the drivers had a gaping security hole!  Seriously nVidia?  My choice is to either boot twice each and every time I start up my PC from cold, or to have a well-known security vulnerability on my PC allowing network attacks to escalate their privileges to super-user level access?  That’s a pretty crappy choice there, nVidia!  Get your freaking act together already!

 Windows Vista Employee Timekeeping:

The first bad idea comes to light as a series of lawsuits against employers.  Their bad idea?  Tying in a time-keeping system for logging hourly employee hours into the startup and shutdown of an employee’s Windows Vista PC.  At first glance the idea sounds reasonable enough.  You identify how many hours an employee has worked by how many hours their computer has been on.  Simple and efficient.  Way better than some error-prone clock and paper stub system, right?

Well.

…Err…

Wrong.

Hence the lawsuits.  Now you’d think Microsoft might be to blame in this one, because everyone loves to blame Microsoft and it is Windows Vista.  And in a way Microsoft is to blame… just not legally.  The problem, you see, is that in some cases Windows Vista is taking over 15 minutes to start up or shut down.  And so employees on this computer-driven clock are sitting there for fifteen minutes at startup before being “clocked in” and likewise again at shutdown before being “clocked out”.  In these really bad cases, that’s a half of an hour a day that the employee is not being payed.  At five days a week that’s two and a half hours of unpayed time.  It adds up fast.  Even the employees who suffer less because they have faster PCs are still accumulating hours and hours of unpaid time over the course of their employment.  And obviously, to them, that stinks.

Clearly the idea of using the computer for timekeeping is in need of some adjustment.

US Army USB Sticks:

So you’re a soldier in the Army.  You don’t always have access to a nice handy network for delivering files.  So you have your handy-dandy military issued USB stick.  It’s a simple solution to data mobility.  Which is great.  Until some schmuck brings in a virus.  Uh oh!

Yeah.

The Agent-BTZ worm, a modification of the SillyFDC worm, has been thrashing the US Army so badly that until they get it nailed down, no one is allowed to use any portable media solution.  No USB sticks!

Once the infection is removed, military issued portable media will be allowed once more.  But all of those naughty naughty soldiers and civilian contractors will have to stop using their own personal devices.

It actually comes as a surprise that the US Army didn’t see this coming.  Or maybe they did but they had no solution.  It seems like Windows autorun feature would be the first hurdle to tackle.  In a high-security environment, it’s kind of bad to just automatically run executable code when you stick a device into a PC on a highly secured network.  Next would be a good idea to do the opposite: Run a security program to scan any device for viruses automatically when it’s plugged into such a computer.  (Or even on any CD/DVD/Blu Ray/etc.)  And then of course, obviously, control the use of non-issued media. There are always rules about such things, but never complete enforcement.

Because keyloggers and remote executables on highly sensitive military servers is “A Bad Thing”.

Apple MacBook DisplayPort:

So you bought a shiny new Apple MacBook, and you’re all happy.  You hook up your old monitor to it (or one you bought on discount, et cetera) using a DisplayPort to DVI or VGA connector and sit down to watch this great video you bought from iTunes to celebrate your new purchase.

Only to have your new computer tell you that you can’t play your protected content on your unprotected screen.

Doh!

Yeah.

Because Apple’s DisplayPort is basically an HDMI port, using a built in copy-protection system like HDMI’s High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).  Only, because it’s Apple, they made it proprietary and call it DisplayPort Content Protection (DPCP).  It’s basically the same thing.  Before it will play, the media player asks if the media displayer (the monitor or TV) can decode the encrypted signal it’s about to send to it.  If it can’t do so, it doesn’t play.  This keeps pirates from grabbing an unencrypted video mid-stream and recording it.

There’s just one problem.  Apple’s DisplayPort is basically new and basically unused, because it’s proprietary.  So there aren’t many monitors or TVs out there that support it, and certainly buying a new one is expensive.  And Apple, the micro-managing control monster that they are, don’t give you unprotected VGA or DVI ports on MacBooks.  So you can’t connect your monitor or TV up to your MacBook in a way that skips this annoying layer of DPCP copy protection.  You have to do it through the protected DisplayPort in some way.  Meaning, basically, you’re screwed.  So you either have to buy a brand new Apple monitor, or settle for watching the video on your little laptop screen.  (Is there even a TV that will support it?)

You see, this is where PCs have that awkward advantage.  Because PC manufacturers really don’t care.  They’re not there to control your ever move.  In fact, they’re quite “open”.  So even though your PC might have a similar (though much more widely used standard) HDCP copy protection over an HDMI cable connection, it will also have a DVI or VGA port (or even component, s-video, or composite video cable option) where it will let you connect up to any old TV or monitor and play your protected videos.

I don’t think Apple really appreciated the number of MacBook owners that would, you know, actually use iTunes?  Or Apple just didn’t appreciate the number of people that actually wanted to watch their videos on a screen larger than a laptop?

Hmm…

Either way, Apple is not exactly impressing customers with this.

And so long as Apple continues to ship notebooks with only a DisplayPort (no DVI or VGA port) Apple customers will continue to have this problem.

At least until some inspired hack builds a DisplayPort to DVI converter that uses the converter to respond back to the MacBook that all is secure instead of letting the monitor/TV do that.  But that would probably be illegal as it’d circumvent security measures.