Methodology applied to strange case

Malaysian Flight 370 has given rise to a lot of speculation and, with the sighting of debris off the cost of Perth Australia,  hopefully the final hours of the flight will become known.  Sadly, yes, but known.  The recovery of the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder will bring the case to rest.

Over the days since its disappearance the speculation of what happened to it has had to cope will large amounts of new material, like Boeing revealing that the flight last hours longer after the disappearance of the aircraft from radar.  That was not directional data, however, and left a wide radius from the last known position of the aircraft to the point its fuel runs out (Source: WSJ).  That last point, over the South China Sea, was after one course change that was not scheduled that happened during the hand-off of Air Traffic Control zones, and Flight 370 did not properly communicate with the new ATC zone.  At that point all verbal communication was lost with the flight, as well as its transponder information, but information from the engines continued to be sent.

That was the jumping off point for speculation which immediately went to terrorism.  If it was terrorism, no group is claiming it, so that leaves an empty hole in the situation.  That was filled by the report of Lithium Ion batteries being transported on the flight, and even when stowed properly, they can cause problems in very rare instances, which includes bringing flights down with on-board fires in the cargo hold.  That defaults to the situation for Flight 370 by Occam's razor which is that the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is the best.

Pilots get trained in a set of skills that start from the beginning, and they are summed up by the process of actually flying an aircraft: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.

Thus flying the aircraft and keeping it aloft takes precedence, not just during normal flight but during emergency situations.  The terse 'All right, good night' response from the pilot at the last communication point for the ATC zone he was leaving may be an indicator of something going wrong on-board that had not been properly identified.  Just after that the first course change to the South China Sea took place, deviating from the prior flight path heading into China.  The protocol of Aviate, which is fly the aircraft, comes first.  And the loss of verbal and transponder information may be an indication of either a system manual reset or the power supply to those systems going out for other causes.  The engine transmission system has its own power supply separate from those systems, and could remain intact and functional.  It would keep on doing so until the aircraft shut down or the engines ran out of fuel.

If a pilot has a bad situation and is keeping the plane flying as a priority, then that pilot is determining if the plane can continue flying.  With an in-flight emergency being handled a pilot can then change the course, again.  That follows Occam's razor.  What does not follow is the pilot then succumbing to the situation right after that.  The question of it being reasonable that a pilot could misjudge his own capability to the point of not realizing how bad the situation had become after, perhaps, 5 to 10 minutes of dealing with it, is startling.  Human error does occur, yes, and cannot be discounted and may even be the case for Flight 370.  If so that is unfortunate.  That last flight change, to wind up in the Indian Ocean means that there was some capacity to not only Aviate but Navigate.

The South China Sea is a region of shipping that is heavily trafficked, what with Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia nearby, and destinations of Japan and China to the east and India and the Middle East to the west.  A pilot having any doubt about his viability as a pilot has a perfectly satisfactory option of ditching in the South China Sea.  It may seem heroic to try and not to succumb to fumes from a smoldering fire, but to Navigate and think you can do that and not know for a certainty means you have had time to address the situation.  While ditching may be a bad option, it is less worse than calculating your ability to Navigate while having a heavily trafficked area to ditch in.  It is not just the pilot's life, but that of everyone on board that is at stake.

There are circumstance where, perhaps, the ability to control engine speed has been taken out by a fire, leaving the jets to continue on without changes.  A crash into the sea is not a good way to ditch an aircraft, true, and if you cannot have that under your control then you have few options left as a pilot as you no longer control the airspeed of the plane.  That is a serious problem when it comes to Aviate.  There are options of what to do next, but they start to fall in the realm of changing angle of attack, changing elevation and trying to stall the engines out.  A bad situation but better than crashing into terrain or water at speed.

Thus, by Occam's razor, we get in-flight emergency and then gross misjudgment of the situation.

Is there another way to explain this scenario?

Of course: The Joker scenario.

Someone on-board planned to use the aircraft to give a wild suicide ride, and then crash the aircraft.  Some people do just want to see the world burn.  This is a viable option and requires little else beyond madness, which is just as likely as an emergency, a veteran pilot making gross misjudgments  and then succumbing to a situation he thought he could handle.  Even though a viable option, it is one that requires the intent of a man or woman gone mad to do it.  Thus it is less likely than the one by Occam's razor.

At this point it is possible to say that Occam's razor has resulted in a non-simple explanation that requires some types of problems coming together in a single instance that is unlikely.  If this razor is not cutting to a solution, is there another?

Yes, there is, and anyone examining military history will know it pretty well.  A main attribute for this goes to Napoleon, but it has shown up in various forms from various individuals over time. It is Hanlon's razor:  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

For this instance is stupidity indicated?

Piloting an aircraft and making navigational changes indicates some level of gross competence and skill in these tasks.  These are not stupid acts, but ones with intent behind them.  Their results may be stupid and dumbfounding, yes, but they are done with competence, reason and foresight: they are not acts of a stupid individual.  Deranged, maybe, but not stupid.

When you cross of stupidity with Hanlon's razor you are left with: malice.

With malice you now have a crime of intent.  There is a methodology to examining criminal cases, and while the well known Method, Motive and Opportunity tend to come to mind first, they assume you know who is doing it.  Without who you do not get to MMO.  From that you step back to the 5 W's and 1 H:

Who

What

Where

Why

When

How

For Flight 370 we can definitively say What, Where and When up to the point of the second course change.  In fact that goes all the way back to the first course change, as they are the same thing: the aircraft losing contact and changing course between ATCs.

That leaves us with Who, Why and How.

A smoldering fire from cargo may not be by malice, but fills in each of those: the shipper, the cargo and a rare instance of fire.  Mind you the shipping container was rated for fire containment, but that could have failed.  The flight crew is just trying to deal with the situation in this instance, and are not active participants in the problem save for being unable to deal with it.

Going Joker answers these, also: an experienced or even novice pilot with some ability to fly the aircraft, they were deranged and took it over by some means.  Not pleasant to think about, but can't be discounted.

Terrorism?  This is two pronged as it may or may not involve active flight crew participation.  This broadly includes large scale criminal organizations, terror organizations or hostile governments doing something covertly.

Without participation you get a hostile take-over of the aircraft.  This would mean the debris in the Indian Ocean is from something else if the take-over was successful and the plane went on to a destination unknown.  Now isn't that a frightening prospect?  A large cargo vessel goes down and no one notices it.

Still remaining on the hostile takeover fork, it is possible that the take-over went seriously awry.  That can get the flight to the Indian Ocean.  It can also get it crashing into a mountainside or under triple canopy jungle or in some other waterway.  That could leave the debris from Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean or, again with the horror of finding a ship went down without notice.

On this fork the How is a terror take-over.  The Who would be unknown as would the Why.

With the crew or even just a single member of it, taking the aircraft over, you get the same bifurcation as with the hostile take-over and with the same results, save that How is the member of the crew, Who is the organization behind him/her, and Why is unknown.

There are, perhaps, only a couple of organizations and maybe one government that might try this.  None of them are China since they are the destination of the flight and it would be most easy to redirect a flight to a secure airfield and seize it, and it might be days or even weeks until someone noticed as this is China, after all, a big place with a tight lipped government.  With that said, with so many passengers being Chinese Nationals, any organization attempting to seize the flight would also know that they would get the wrath of China.  Possibly a nuclear tipped wrath, at that.

Who would tempt that?

Criminal organizations can get what they need much more cheaply, and there is little indication of individuals worth kidnapping for any reason.  It is cheaper and easier to kidnap the poor, those remotely located or the unwary for nefarious reasons than it is to take a plane full of people and do... well... what, anyway?  No good reason comes to mind, so while Method and Opportunity can be filled in, Motive or Why gets these types of organizations scratched off the list.

Of the Nations that might try this, possibly only the Magic Kingdom of Mr. Kim might be insane enough to do something like this.  However power hungry and egotistical the ruler is, however, he isn't crazy and not a Joker type.  At least so far as we can puzzle out.  Besides the Motive or Why leaves a gaping hole in the idea of NoKo being behind this.

Terrorists usually don't take an aircraft and do nothing with it, claim no responsibility and generally remain silent about it.  They might buy an aircraft, as bin Laden did in the early '90s in Africa, but hijack one and claim nothing and do nothing with it?  Unless there was something like new bioweapons in with the people or cargo, the rationale even behind the most fantasy based of organizations remains out of the realm of possibility.  The Why part remains unanswered.

Anything left?

A death cult.  AUM once operated in the USSR/Russia and was able to brainwash some KGB/FSB agents before the group dispersed.  Note most went back to Japan, but not all of them did.  AUM had this wonderful idea of liberating people's souls to a better life by killing them now.  In fact that was such a good act in their line of reasoning at the time, that mass-murder was a really great idea.  After being brainwashed with drug, sex and rock'n'roll, the followers had to be convinced that as enlightened individuals they had to save themselves to continue on with the good work.  They might not leave any notes, any causation and generally not want to attract attention to themselves carrying on the good works.  Tends to get people put in jail and deprogrammed, and then put on trial.  So a death cult could fill in Who, Why and How is via the terrorism paths.  Do note that AUM had many competent individuals within its organization and the entire operation ran a chain of computer repair stores in Japan which was their main money-maker for the founder of the cult.  The founder has reformed, of course, but the individuals who were once with it and disappeared when it dispersed, are probably not reformed.

In general the simplest explanation remains the best, and I'm expecting that the debris is from Flight 370.

If it isn't, and its not just something dropped off by a dead circulation spot in the Indian Ocean like the large debris field in the northern Pacific, then things turn nasty.  Perhaps incompetent and nasty.  Or competent and nasty.  And do note that debris is yielded from multiple possible paths, as well.  Only the in-flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder can finally dispel the speculative paths and leave us with what is left.

Evidence is needed to sort this out and remove the suppositional and to fill in the blanks. 

We are going for a ride on the FFT

Mr. Z at his web site posted a lovely graphic of the Hammer and Sickle being raised at the Capitol and I examined that, just a few short days ago, and came up with the following:

What I love is I can give a Leftist back the exact, same thing they have been wanting for years... so often have I heard it and you have too... and yet when a Leftist criticizes Americans coming out to protest taxation, the phrase is so simple and the cognitive dissonance is so profound:

"The people, united, will never be defeated."

Sucks to be on the pointy end of that, I bet.

I was, of course, referencing Tea Parties which the Left is ever so ready to declare racist, hate speech and any number of other slanders. Of course I see them as an organic outgrowth of the basic culture of the Nation without respect to any race, religion or other external artifact. Remember for all those lovely Leftist protests, they need months to get ready, build costumes and so vent their spleen that it can sit and wait for awhile. Regular Americans like to get to the point and make it, already. And repeatedly. Until they get fed up with demonstrating... the Left always wants that but never seems to get it. Now that it is happening under their noses, they ignore it, speak against it and take the position of the ancien regime. Strange that they forget what happens to the ancien regime, but then the Left is lacking in critical historical analysis that goes beyond Marx, so their cozying up to a power structure they have helped decay is really just desserts and all that.

After that comment I left this one, which is a bit more to the point of things:

"The FFT, remember, doesn't say that information moves with breathtaking speed these days. (Everyone knows that!) The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed." - Mickey Kaus

As things change faster, people adapt to it faster, thus the cycle time of events compresses. In the old Eastern Bloc it was 9 years for Poland to get out from under the USSR, 9 months for East Germany, 9 weeks for Hungary, 9 days for Czechoslovakia, and Romania pretty near imploded in no time at all...as we grew accustomed to the idea that Eastern Europe could throw off totalitarian communism, it did so faster and faster.

So if we take a look at how our last revolution went... from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Boston Tea Party 1773: 6 years. Then from Tea Party to Bunker Hill: 2 years. To Revolution from that: 1 year. Then 7 years of fighting, with 5 years of nearly losing it under the Confederation.

So if the first Tea Party of last month is the start, applying the FFT: 6 months to the real turning point, or August. October for conflict. November for Declaration. JUN 2010 victory. NOV 2010 nearly losing it all. Then JAN 2011 a new accord.

I doubt it will happen just like that... but the Feiler Faster Thesis gets us very used to change being compressed and since we are used to that it does get compressed. The American experience dragged on in the old days... we get things done more rapidly now. And then somewhere around 2029-30 we do it all over again, but faster.

Let's just try to keep the body count down this time around... 10% dead and 15% fled from last time and this time that 15% has nowhere to go. Not good.

All spelling errors, error in dates, etc. are in the original and left that way, but highlighting by bolding is mine.

Take the previous US experience and start swapping Years for Months, Months for Weeks and Weeks for Days and you start to get the idea of how the Feiler Faster Thesis (FFT) works. While not explicitly stated, I have a somewhat different working concept of the FFT than does Mr. Kaus or Feiler himself and Mr. Z asked about that and I did respond:

Mr. Z - Feiler Faster Thesis.

It is a derivative of Moore's Law addressing the doubling of circuits per given space of circuit board every 18 months at the same cost, and Metcalf's Law for network size and node contribution making the entire system value for information equal to the square of the number of nodes that contribute. Put increased processing power per given time plus more nodes in the network and individuals now adapt far faster to new information than ever before. Thus time for change evaluation compresses by nearly an order of magnitude.

Not only are things changing faster, but we are adapting faster and events get compressed because of this.

Our feeling of a world rushing by us is the Feiler Faster Thesis at work, but that is, itself, depending on two other movers that are scale based: Moore's Law and Metcalf's Law. The former was a forward derived concept from Gordon Moore, and has been backwards analyzed by Raymond Kurzweil, and the latter laterally derived nearly at the same time as Mr. Metcalf by James Burke. To those unfamiliar with these gentlemen, Kurzweil and Burke are the more deeply informative of how information grows and effects society over time via sheer growth via exponents (Kurzweil) and connectivity for creating new cultural paradigms (Burke).

Now the modern Left is stuck in a rut: it is expounding on 19th century ideas in the 21st century and has expounded on why they are 'right' for so long that it is expected that they would have had an ideological programmatic backing for their beliefs. Once elected those representing the Left have demonstrated that this is not the case, as seen by the grab-bag of programs, payoffs, and corrupt politicians now parading on a daily basis to decry the mess that they have created and attempt to shift blame to anyone but themselves. By creating an atmosphere of 'This is Bush's Fault' the Left has glossed over the Democratic control of Congress during two sessions during Bush's term, thus leaving him with only a political election cycle congress and a lame duck congress under theoretical Republican control. There was no serious de-regulation during that period of time, and yet the Leftist echo chamber incites that there was... while, in fact, the regulations put in during the Clinton era remained in place and as corrosive today as they were when put in. Those, themselves, derive from the idiotic Community Re-investment Act during the end of the Carter Administration. None of those regulations have been repealed and, indeed, it was Democrats who castigated regulators for trying to bring some fiscal sanity to government backed enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those two are *staffed* by political apparatchiks with their own agendas and both have lobbied Congress... which really ought to violate some law for those agencies utilizing the backing of the federal government's funds.

Our funds.

Taken from the US citizenry by taxation.

The Left has only one solution to any problem: spend like hell and deny that debts will ever come due, claim anyone who is trying to perform fiscally sane oversight is 'racist' or 'interfering' and then try to shift blame for the fallout of those insane schemes on others. Well after having control of Congress for four out of eight years, and complaining about the President and saying how it was all done 'wrong', what are the plans of the entire Left now seen?

Spend like drunken sailors and complain that there isn't enough grog to vomit up.

What the Left hasn't gotten used to is the modern world, although they do form lovely 'real world' echo chambers devoid of contrast and dulled to heartburn anger on a constant basis. Critical thinking, programmatics and addressing actual economic problems instead of false ones (health care, global warming, mortgage defaults, etc.), and when the data shows that previous social programs (social security, health care, poorly backed loans by government mandate, etc.) are bankrupting the system and destroying the wealth of the Nation and its citizenry how does the Left respond?

Spend more.

Surely money is the answer, right?

Yet if money were an answer to anything, it would be education. For all that poor Johnny couldn't read in the late 1950's and the hundreds of billions put into education, poor Johnny is reading at the exact, same rate TODAY as he was back in the '50s. This means that education is not a money influenced system beyond the absolute, bare essentials, and anything else layered on it (sexual education, mandatory skills tests, etc.) have not helped the system one little bit. No matter how much you pay teachers, they are just as effective as their forebearers in little red schoolhouses having to teach multiple generations simultaneously. No, scratch that, they are LESS effective as those teachers could multi-task, deal with a diverse class population and still be effective in a wide spectrum of age groups SIMULTANEOUSLY. And yet the answer to poor reading skills is always more money, as we do not want to address the fact that education is not amenable to mere dollars, yet it assuages our feelings that we are 'doing something', even when it is not doing any good at all.

Now raise your hand if the last 8 years have felt more like, say, 20... ok, good enough.

I came down with a serious problem during this time span and when my mind went fuzzy in 2004 and started to re-gel back in 2006 it *still* felt like that to me, and I had spent a couple of years 'out of the loop'. And politics had gone loopy. That feeling of time compression is the FFT at work: you adjust so much faster to so much more that it all feels much, much longer. The reason that feels that way is that you are far more productive and can do so much more in that same space of time that, even living the same life span as your parents (you will live longer, save for a societal collapse) you are packing in far more in the way of living than they did by experience. And when you get an additional 14% of your life devoted in your 'declining years' when you are far more physically fit than any forebearer of yours EVER you gain a different perspective on life. Europeans may have shorter working time spans, but you feel as if your life is far more exciting, interesting and jam packed full of living that you now feel you live a better life even without lots of free time.

In politics this means that 8 years of protests, whining, complaining, finger pointing, name calling, etc. now feels closer to twice that time-span if not three times it. Any political movement that does not devote time to putting down programmatics and, instead, reverts to infantile name calling and finger pointing and saying how bad those in power are will get and are getting a rude awakening when handed the actual reigns of power. They aren't ready for them. By expending all that vitriol to create no better social concept, and just attack what is, when those on the Left get to power they have only one answer to ANYTHING: spend more. Promise the heaven, the earth, good health care, lower taxes, more sunshine, less rain, always a rainbow in every kitchen, but if you don't spend any time building up the necessary mechanisms to CREATE anything, these are all destructive no matter how well intentioned and you get the feeling that most of these are not well intentioned at all.

As unfair as it may seem, the FFT is where the power is holding: in change and perception of it. A man like Barack Obama does not have the deep family ties of a JFK nor the political acumen to do enough wheeling and dealing to even land a cushy Senatorial spot for one of the Kennedy clan in NY. He does not have any political clout, beyond trying to incite his backers to being a mob, and yet THEIR expectation is based on the FFT. Two months in feels like two years ALREADY and the time compression of events is increasing, not decreasing. Even while others have pointed out that this is all a 'scheme' by the Left to break America, it takes nothing more than a man without any idea of what government is or having any skills of internal political diplomacy to get you here. The one with the skeletons in closets that are known? That is the Clintonites: they know how to use those, and those bits of knowledge are not open to Barack Obama. Wouldn't help him as he does not have the backstabbing skill of the Clintonites to actually use 'dirty little secrets'. They know they are looking out for #1 who is not the President, no matter how many Clintonites are around President Obama, they cannot use the firepower of the Clintons as that takes skill, cunning and deceptive capability beyond Obama's reach.

What happens when an absolute political neophyte gets into power during times of trouble?

Ever read any histories of the 30 Years War? Take any young Prince suddenly thrust into power and finding his religious beliefs opposite that of his father's (those damned radicals, always wanting to be 'progressive') and you will get an idea of the bloodshed that comes with it. For all that this is the modern era, President Obama is utilizing a set of ideas for the socialist conception of the international (Communist) and national (Fascist) sort, trending more towards the latter as Nationalism is always easier to sell than internationalism. The impulse to nationalize financial institutions and banks, health care, and enforce public service to the State are all National Socialism, or Fascism. When government controls private financial and social affairs to the benefit of the Nation that is Fascism. Socialism is the liquidation of those artifacts to be controlled by a central controlling authority that presses for some internationalist brotherhood, but always seems quite able to impoverish everyone first to make them all equal and then spend its time killing the dissenters. Communists ruled all the major industrial institutions in the USSR and did a worse job than our Congress is doing with AIG. Hard to imagine, but that is the case.

By championing 'civil rights' for so many years, the expectation of the Left was that it would actually remove the worst artifacts of government, not increase them or add on newer, even worse ones that will bankrupt us all faster. And as the complaints went on for a seeming eternity, when the Left has demonstrated that it not only didn't mean what it said but meant just the opposite, and didn't even bother to figure out what it was they were protesting or wanted, the FFT now makes it seem like they have been in power for the entire time they have been complaining plus two months.

That is almost an experiential lifetime in the modern age.

Yet the prescription by the Left for 19th century idealistic socialism via 20th century conceptual frameworks that are clearly Fascistic and often Communistic, puts them at odds with a world that is changing far faster than Marx had ever imagined possible as HE thought socialism was 'right around the corner'. At least the Right had gotten up to the Dinosaur age, and couldn't figure out that big old rock coming down from the sky. The Left is in the late Permian and absolutely unready for the Permo-Triassic event about to hit them... and yet they had nearly a lifetime, by subjective experience standards, to prepare for this.

A dollar doesn't go as far as it used to and now it will soon go almost nowhere at all.

And then time will really start to compress as those who are capable are put out of work and the FFT starts working for THEM. And as these are the builders and creators, engineers, mid-level managers, project managers, accountants, construction workers, small business owners and their employees, they will not depend on 'being nice' to get things done nor on government to 'take care of them', just seek common ground and cooperation to get the will of society instated in its proper place over government. This storm has taken generations to build.

We can already see it coming, feel how it will devastate us, and the time to do something grows short... weeks and months which will feel like months and years.

I suggest the Left let the 19th century go and adapt to the 21st.

The Left and Right are the late comers to the party, and their garments are moldy and in tatters when they are not gone entirely.

What comes next will be unpleasant for all concerned.

No matter who loses, the FFT wins.

The drive is there... you just can't use it

This is one of those rare technology posts that involves my recent experiences with what happens when something that has operated, heretofore, well on a computer system decides to not do so. In this case I will be blaming Microsoft as the culprit, but that is pretty much standards for a Windows based system.

To forestall every lover of every other Operating System on the planet Earth, and some others as yet less well recognized, let me say the following:

1) My active Unix life is two decades in the past, saw little use in my time on the job, and is pretty much gone. LINUX, requiring a level of Unix guruship that comes from having that knowledge, plus machine language capability, plus all sorts of other things is *not* an option. For some activities I have, indeed, tried the *nix areas and in a few desktop apps that I enjoy there is no LINUX counterpart. Nor does WINE, resting on LINUX, offer me what I need as that, too, requires a level of *nix guruship. Free requires a time investment I cannot afford and, so, is not 'free' for me.

2) Apple, now resting on BSD which is also a Unix formulation requires the above. Yes, the company has done much to make it graphical, hide the ugliness of the command line and all the rest of that. I also remember Steve Jobs putting forth in the 1980's that a 'command line would never be a part of a Macintosh product'. With the shift of platform to Unix the command line has magically reappeared... if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there, now, would it? Plus, even with all the cross-compatibility (say, why does the Mac need to be cross-compatible? wasn't it supposed to be the 'be-all, end-all' of user interfaces?) that headache is not one I will put up with as it requires having *multiple* OS capabilities available simultaneously so that I can use those apps not available via the Apple OS nameplated product du jour. Not gonna happen.

3) Other OS platforms - I have tried a few others, like Be, and it has gone to a virtual graveyard doing the open source development concept for awhile. There have been a smattering of others, just to try things out, but that was when I was healthy some years back. The lack of native apps and ease of understanding for use was not there.

4) The MotherShip - The worst set of operating systems to grace this planet has come out of Redmond. Their only saving grace is that they are 'just good enough' to get the work going at a decent price point. Also, they did this thing known as: give developer tools away for FREE when IBM, Apple and a number of other companies required payment for such. I am sure that at some time MS will redo its own conception of a *nix based OS, CF it enough to the average Joe/Jane can use it, hide some of the obvious blemishes and ingrain a number of others for 'backwards compatibility'. Then the hue and cry will go up, the threats of torches appear, and folks will just buy it because it, more or less, just works. If your OS of choice has been unable to crack into the backwards-compatibility upgrade cycle and steal that market from MS: don't complain to me, ok?

I have enough problems with this stuff, as-is, without *your* advocacy.

There, that should really tee-off a wide section of the tech population which, thankfully, will never read it.

My problem started with an 'upgrade' (don't they all?). In this case a piece of what I consider to be 'critical desktop apps for which the open source community is trying to replicate but can't figure out ease of use' had a pay-for upgrade which I paid for. Nice little box, that protected a smaller box, which, itself, protected the DVD case and 16 page manual, of which a few pages were -blank-. That says it all for software distribution these days, really.

Take out the DVD, put it in the drive, close the drive, and...

Hmmmmm.... well I did use the powertoy to turn off the 'automagic start' so, pull up the drive list and, say, where did the DVD drive go to? Uh-oh....

I have been here before with: modems, network interface cards, graphic cards (those are so *fun* to troubleshoot), RAM, hard drives, etc. I used to build my own systems when I had energy and this, being the last of my hand-built rigs, I ensured that with the last of my energy and mental capacity a couple of years ago that I troubleshot the thing to a 'fare-thee-well'. It would work, dammit!, because I was in bad straights and might not be well enough to ever troubleshoot the damned thing *again*.

Thus starts my trials and tribulations of tracking down LG Electronics Super Multi DVD drive GSA-4120B! In theory search engines are your friend in this, and I did, indeed, find all the old sites that had answers to my initial troubleshooting of the thing back when I was putting it together. But... for this? Try again, a few times, and get pointed to hacked drivers that did not work and, in general, spending two days trying to find the actual drivers to the thing which, it turns out, are already on-board from MicroSoft.

Not good!

Then it is entry through the dark doors of MicroSoft's website and into the dungeons of the knowledgebase where, held prisoner, rank upon rank, file upon file, row upon row, are the tortured answers to every damned piece of asinine 'fixing' MS has ever done with their software.

And the interface sucks, too.

But such would not stop the intrepid adventurer, trying to wrest the secrets of how to fix the fabled LG GSA-4120B so that it would WORK PROPERLY WITH THE MS DRIVERS on his system. Ah the hours spent and even the fun of answering a questionnaire about how bad the site is so that MS can ignore it. Those things are expected.

A day of fruitless searching and despondancy hits: the answer is not apparent.

With heavy *sigh* the adventurer notices that MS has put out 'security updates' du jour and downloads same, and does some general updating of drivers for the trackball, graphics card and whatnot as he will be spending time frustrated otherwise, it might as well be productive frustration. For ONCE all of that installs well and easily and, wanting to check out a piece of software upgrading useless to his system, the hardy adventurer finds a knowledge base interface geared for his operating system which was NOT ON THE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE BASE SITE! With a thrust the virtual doorway opens to give way to more and darker dusty catacombs where the ranks of the particular prisoners holding answers has swollen so that more sub-basements were being built so far off you could not even identify where....

Another day of searching and no luck.

Back to the search engine and finding the Original Equipment Manufacturer of the LG DVD is Matshita, aka. Matsushita, aka. Panasonic. Now *that* is a name I know, although not love or adore, either, but that is another story to tell. The search engine reveals more of the same, but points out some of the things overlooked on the initial go-through: the adventurer had not spent enough time diagnosing the problem.

Cursing himself for a fool he heads off to do a further investigation, goes back to the specialized dusty catacombs and... de nada.

Life well, and truly, sucks.

The adventurer admits defeat and goes to his tech outlet of choice to order an *external* DVD drive with multi-function capacity so he, at least, can have that available for every other system in the house. Despondant, he heads off to do other things, has a poor night's rest and wakes up earlier than is wise and decides to do one last look at the problem and search into the Event Viewer. Scrolling back he sees something a bit anomolous... one driver function is complaining. The driver can't load, due to that... odd... the little library doing the complaining is not obvious in any way, shape or form.

Hmmmm....

With a search engine look at the driver name and something generic like *problem* the snippet line on the second line seems to directly address this. It is from an obscure camera messageboard. Deciding 'why the hell not, I'm not really awake', the author of the message describes the EXACT SAME PROBLEM with the DVD drive that is the EXACT SAME DRIVE! He points to a horrifically obscure Knowledge Base article in the catacombs of MicroSoft and gives direct linkage to it (thanks be praised!). In that tiny cell, in the midst of the hundreds of thousands of prisoner knowledge base articles this one EXACTLY describes the problem and the SOLUTION to it!

Using this trinket of knowledge, a tiny grain of diamond dust in catacombs littered with precious gems, gold, platinum but all of it kept under better obscurity than Fort Knox, the adventurer treads carefully into his Registry on his system, goes to the indicated hardware controls on the current set-up of his OS, finds the indicated key for the CD/DVD drive, and removes the Upper and Lower Filters.

With a Reboot to the system it does, indeed, find the DVD drive and properly adds it to the system and it is, indeed, fully functional.

The cause?

A freaking *update* to the Operating System a few weeks ago which sweetly ADJUSTED THE FILTER SETTINGS BY ADDING THEM.

Thusly the blame is given fully to MicroSoft on this battle and I will still need the external drive for use with other systems because one of them, at least, has a dodgy CD-ROM drive and another has no write capability for CDs or DVDs... no make that two that have no such capability.

Here ends the story of troubleshooting the LG Electronics GSA-4120B Super Multi drive OEM'd from Panasonic with drivers from MicroSoft.

There is no need to curse the Darkness so long as MicroSoft exists.

It makes a much better target for said cursing.