I am running though a collection of application install files I have downloaded with the intention of checking them out. This is the latest installment of the series:

AIV Startup Protector - failed to register an OCX. A quick visit to the AIV website revealed others with similar problems, but no sure fire solition. Deleted.

Company of Heroes Single Player Demo - did not seem to like Vista, giving me a DirectX 9 error after a long install. A quick web search revealed no obvious solution. Deleted.

Iron Grip - looked like an interesting Half Life 2 mod, but I'd rather buy and play Orange Box, so I'm unlikely to have time for this. Deleting without installing.

Lemmings 2 - I never played Lemmings, but had heard it was good. Unfortunately this free download of the DOS game won't run under Vista. I look for and find a freeware version that works under windows and installs fine. Kept.

Live Meeting - I think this was a free beta when I downloaded it. Now it is no longer free and I can't envision paying for it. Deleted before installing.

Mech Warrior 4 Mercenaries - I have liked some of the prior Mech Warrior games (many years ago) but this has not aged well. Deleted.

Digital Media Converter - Not freeware. Generated Vista errors and didn't want to use the Codecs I already had installed. Deleted.

Mobile Photo Enhancer - Tried on a couple of my mobile phone photos. The resulting photos looked no better to me. Deleted.

Music Brainz Tagger. An interesting concept that I am skeptical of. But it installs withou a hitch, so I keep it.

This evening, after unsuccessfully attempting to copy some 6GB files to our SBS 2003 server box, RoboCopy was telling me that 0x00000040 errors were ocurring. Doing a Google search, I found someone had suggested the article in KB325487.

Reading this and other commentary made me think that this really was a network issue, so I followed the advice in the KB article and updated the drivers for the Broadcom NIC in the SBS2003 box. (I had tried installing updated drivers in July when I installed SBS 2003 SP2, but there were no updated drivers since 2003 at that time-- according to Dell!)

So far, this update appears to have solved my problem. I wonder if it will solve some of the other performance issues I have been experiencing with Vista-- perhaps given all the facets of our setup that are tied to that SBS server.

Vista has the windows robust file copy utility RoboCopy built in-- which is handy, because often when I try to transfer a 10GB directory (containing a newly ripped DVD) from my working PC to our server, the copy chokes.

Although RoboCopy doesn't choke the way copying files using Vista's explorer does it is executed from the command line. (There is a GUI front end for RoboCopy as well, but that has its problems too.)

FYI, the command line switches (in addition to the paths of the directory being copies and the directory being copied to) I have found myself using with RoboCopy are /R:3 /V /S /E amd /Z.

Joe's Dartblog passes on a statement to that effect from the College in the middle of a press release on Dartmouth's motion to dismiss the Association of Alumni's lawsuit to enjoin the appointment of additional trustees. The press release states in relevant part "the Board has no plans to appoint Charter Trustees prior to February 2008, making the preliminary injunction requested by the Association unnecessary". Joe's Dartblog has a copy of an affidavit filed by the College with the court as evidence of this proposition. 

In addition to those pointed out by Joe's Dartblog, there are a couple of interesting things about this:

• The presentation of the affidavit makes the press release's use of the phrase "no plans to" a little disingenuous. That would not be sufficient to forestall an injunction were the court otherwise inclined to grant one. Instead, the affidavit states that the Board has authorized the College's General Counsel to "represent to the Superior Court" that the "Board of Trustees will not fill any of the Charter Trustee positions authorized by the Board on September 8, 2007..." [italics added] This is a much more binding commitment on the part of the Board than a mere lack of plans.
• Interestingly, the Board adopted this resolution on October 11, 2007, eight days after the lawsuit by the Association of Alumni was filed, yet this is the first anyone has heard of it.

To know how significant this commitment by the Board is, one would have to more than I about whether the Board had plans to appoint trustees sooner than February 2008.

There are pretty good arguments made by both the College and the Association of Alumni in their filings. As an alumnus, my heart is with the Association of Alumni, but as a practicing attorney who would like to know that a party is not being contractually bound before a variety of formalities my sympathies are with the Board of Trustees. 

I saw this statistic at MajorNelson.com:

According to the world-wide authority in entertainment reviews, Metacritic, Xbox 360 has 80 titles with a Metacritic review score of 80 or higher compared to just 31 for PS3 and 11 for Wii.

It seems to me that this is the most important statistic for gamers considering buying a console. Not just what the number is for each console at the time of purchase, but what the number will be at various points over the life of the console.

Number of units sold, attach rates and the like should mean little to gamers beyond their effect on the number of good games that are and will be available to play.

Last week two member's of Dartmouth's Governance Committee came to explain the changes in governance to alumni in Chicago. After having attended the meeting and reflected on what was said by the committee members (Christine Bucklin and Michael Chu) I have few thoughts:

• First pure reporting, alumni sentiment was strong in opposition to the governance changes. The ration of those in favor of the changes to those opposed was no more than 1:5.
• It was pretty clear (as I suspected from my prior correspondence with a member of the committee) that almost no value was ascribed by the committee to the value of parity (between alumni trustee and charter trustees) per se.
• Given the last point it is understandable how people of good (as these two seemed to be) could make the recommendations they did. Their presence was a tangible reminder of the time commitments that all members of the board make to Dartmouth.
• The committee was too quick to let itself off the hook for the vocal opposition the changes have produced. They said many times that they realized that they would be criticized no matter what they did and that knowledge liberated them to ignore the voices of critics. Perhaps, but why not listen to the substance of their arguments?
• The committee members claimed that contested elections of petition trustees had harmed student and faculty recruiting. Perhaps, but only anecdotal evidence of this was presented and those anecdotes ignored any possible helpful effects on recruiting.
• The meeting had a somewhat surreal quality in that opinions are generally solicited before a decision is made, not after. Obviously, not so here.

I think any real sense the value of participatory democracy to the voters was genuinely lost on the committee. Does anyone doubt that a system in which the current U.S. Congress selected 2/3 of the members of the next Congress and the voters selected only a third would be superior to the current system? Had I thought of it at the meeting I would have posed the question, but I think I know the response: these are completely different institutions.

I think most people would be hard pressed, however, to see how that makes any meaningful difference in the answer.

The EngadgetHD podcast has discussed the possibility of a la carte pricing for cable channels rather than having to buy access to an entire group of channels to get a few that you might actually watch.

Most people seem to believe they would save money if they were able to buy fewer channels, but that seems unlikely. Rather, cable companies would charge more for individual channels to make the average users bill about the same.

Thomas Hazlett wrote a paper in 2006 on this very subject, arguing that cable companies really throw in unwatched channels for free because of the very low marginal cost of providing access to additional channels. This is then nub of the explanation:

I purchased the above Xbox Live Arcade title last night and spent hours mesmerized playing the game. I haven't had that experience with a game in a very long time. I checked out the game on Metacritc this evening and found myself agreeing with both the positive and the negative reviews.

There is an excellent piece by Meir Kohn, an economics professor at Dartmouth about the recent changes in its governance.

It is gratifying (although perhaps not surprising upon reflection) to read that Prof. Kohn's views are of a piece with some of those I have expressed here (and some that never found their way into this blog) because the finance course I took from Prof. Kohn about 20 years was in retrospect one of the best of my Dartmouth experiences: it was a class of around 20 students; taught by someone who did a great job of communicating the concepts involved; and introduced me to corporate finance concepts that have relevance not just in the world of corporate transactions, but in daily life as well.

Apropos of discussions of changes to the composition of Dartmouth College's Board of Trustees, an article in the National Law Journal came across my desk this morning. The majority was about trends toward transparency in the governance of nonprofit organizations. Interestingly many of the things boards are doing to avoid potential public criticism and implement better governance practices struck me as the opposite of what the Dartmouth Board of Trustees has done-- for example, having a smaller board and increasing transparency.