Some background for the casual reader: My alma mater, Dartmouth College, recently changed the way its board of trustees would be elected in a way that disenfranchises alumni and I believe to be harmful to the institution. The changes are described here, here and here. I expressed the reasons I opposed these changes here.

When the decision was announced I sent emails to board of trustees expressing my displeasure and one of the members of the Governance Committee (who has said they prefer not to be named on my blog) was kind enough to respond as follows:

I'm sorry you feel that way. 

We thought that increasing the number of alums on the Board, affirming the importance of open elections, maintaining them at such a high rate, and establishing a standing committee on alumni relations would increase alumni influence on the Board.

No doubt the most controversial decision was the one we made to increase charter seats (appointed by the Board) without increasing alumni-elected seats.  We did this because we need to ensure that the Board gets trustees who collectively have the skills and backgrounds to govern the institution as well as acceptable diversity and fund-raising capability.  Adding appointed seats is the most efficient way to get this, since you can't guarantee the outcome of elections.  There are benefits to the workings of smaller boards (20-30 vs. 40-60) that caused us to resist adding alumni-elected seats, especially when the benefits of elections are fully realized with 8 elections every 8 years.

There's more about all of this in the full report, which you can download from dartmouth.edu.

I responded as follows:

Thanks for your reply. A couple of questions:

It is axiomatic that if alumni nominated seats had been increased in parity with charter trustees, Dartmouth could had a board with either 12 alumni nominated trustees and 12 charter trustees or a board with 16 alumni nominated trustees and 16 charter trustees (and of course the entire range of even numbered board sizes between 24 and 32). Given those possibilities, and assuming the truth of the advantages of a smaller board and more slots for charter trustees, that still leaves some fairly :

-- What were the skills lacking on the current board that could not have been filled with 12 charter trustees rather than 24? Were those four extra slots really worth eliminating parity?

-- What is evidence that a board of 32 operates significantly worse that a board of 24? How was it determined that such a disadvantage in operations outweighed keeping parity?

-- Why was it that an intermediate board size that maintained parity would not have struck a balance that was "good enough" to maintain parity and therefore the benefits of an alumni base that remained engaged with the institution because they could actually have an influence on its governance?

Obviously it is potentially difficult to quantify these effects at the margin or to potentially to explain why a slightly different proposal from the one adopted isn't quite as good as the one adopted. But in this case, presumably the board knew that this would be a controversial decision so must have had some pretty strong evidence to justify making the call it did to end parity-- unless the board thought that parity was not really all that important. So one last question: which one is it?

-- Once in the sentence "While parity has existed for a long time and represents an important part of Dartmouth history, it is no different from any other feature of institutional governance at Dartmouth: if the Board determines that circumstances warrant change, then the Board is obligated to consider any changes that it believes would be in the College’s best interest."-- which does not ascribe any value to parity other than perhaps historical value.

-- The last time it appears is in the sentence "Alumni sentiment, particularly in response to the Association of Alumni survey and to ads, was overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining the traditional "parity" between Charter and Alumni Trustees. We weighed this feedback carefully but concluded that eight additional Alumni Trustee seats would not serve Dartmouth's best interests."

Unless I missed it, nowhere is there a discussion of the questions I asked in my email below. There appear two additional passages which seem to address the questions, but only in a circular fashion:

-- "We also believe, however, that if contested elections are to continue, the number and frequency of such elections should not be increased. As discussed in the section on Alumni Trustee seats, we feel the benefits above wane significantly after the first eight seats."

-- But that section appears in pertient part to say only "Furthermore, as discussed later in the report, contested elections have significant drawbacks that outweigh the benefits of incremental alumni-nominated Trustee seats."

To be fair, there is a discussion of the perceived disadvantage of contested elections and the advantage of Alumni trustees as a check on board insularity, so I do not mean to suggest that the report was wholly conclusory, just that it never addresses in anything more than the conclusory fashion of the passages I cite above the questions that I asked, much less provide actual answers to those questions.

But I suppose there are at least two other possibilities: first, that your short email and reference to the report was an obique way of saying that "parity" is not of value; and second is that I have simply missed the detailed discussion of the answers to my question that really are present in the report.

(In respect of your wishes I will not use your name in any public reference to our correspondence.)

If I get a further response, I'll gladly print that as well.

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:

Group Shot (MS photo editing application) - This takes faces from multiple similar photos and puts them together into one, e.g. one with everyone smiling. This installed fine and looks useful. I'll keep it around and installed until I have a need for it and then evaluate it further.

Hamad Darwish Wallpapers (collection of desktop wallpaper photos) - All 22 are nice 1920x1280 scenic photos suitable for the windows desktop. I put them in the Pictures folder of My Documents (Most of my photos I keep on our server but these seem appropriate for local storage). This makes me wonder why Vista doesn't have a built-in way to cycle through wallpapers.

I notice two IMToo ripping an conversion programs downloaded from when I was searching for ways to store DVDs to replay on Media Center extenders. I decide with my current system functioning and the promise of Encode360, that these commercial demos are not worth trying.

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:

Elderscrolls Arena (free classic RPG) - The first part of the installer indicated it wanted to be installed in a root directory of one of my drives. No thanks.

Encode360 3.0 RC1- (video transcoder to Windows Media format for use with the Xbox 360) - installs itself and soem K-Lite codecs fine. The spacing of some items on the main screen is off (I run at 1600x1200 with large fonts), but it is still usable. I try transcoding four VOB files from a decrytpted DVD I have on our server. The application is unresponsive at first, but after a minute or so, the title bar shows the percentage transcoded and a progress bar appears at the bottom of the window. CPU usage for both cores ranges between 82% and 99%. If this works I'll be impressed as it is pretty easy (and therefore convenient) to use. I try playing another video while it runs, but Encode360 seems to be hogging too much CPU for Windows Media Player to work correctly. I don't see a way to have multiple files output as one, but (i) I may be missing it, and (ii) I suspect that capability exits elsewhere. I'll keep it.

FileZilla (FTP client) - seems like a pretty nice, free application. I'll keep it.

FreeFile (a program to identify what process is using a locked file) - installs fine and is potentially useful. I'll keep it.

Gimp (graphics program) won't install without some third party libraries. I decide these are not worth tracking down. Deleted.

GraphCalc - seems like a decent graphing/calculator application. I keep it.

The main effect of the "format war" between HD DVD Blu-Ray is that I no longer buy any DVDs.

I have no desire to buy a movie in the old DVD format because I will probably ultimately want to get the high definition version and that would be throwing money away on soon to be obsolete media.

I have no desire to buy a movie in HD DVD or Blu-Ray for fear that I will be left with media that will be obsolete. It doesn't help that there is no implementation managed copy (which would let me rip the media to our Media Center Server) yet either!

So I buy nothing and rent movies instead. I suspect I am not alone in this.

After a couple of calls to Xbox Live support, I finally received a clear explanation of how to get Xbox Live Arcade games I had purchased on a predecessor console to work on the new console without having to sign in to Xbox Live (the issue I described here):

• Delete the Xbox Live Arcade account & arcade games from the system
• Reboot the Xbox 360 without the HD/Memory Card that had the deleted Gamertag attached
• Recover the Gamertag
• Re-download the arcade games

I thought this worked for me for the couple of titles I tried last night, but in the cold light of morning, I realized that this had not worked at all. Had it worked it would have raised the question of whether this process could be repeated on multiple Xbox 360s, resulting in Xbox Live Arcade games on each that could be played by anyone. If so, this would seem like it would make casual piracy possible. But (i) this may not be possible, and (ii) Microsoft may have calculated that isn't likely to be a very big issue given that repeating this process multiple times is likely to be flagged by the Xbox Live service.

Interestingly, the MS supervisor I spoke to last evening said that this process had not worked before, which is why they had to credit people with points to repurchase games. It now works for all but a few pieces of downloadable content, although it is not described on the Xbox.com website. He said that for downloads where this process does not work, they will manually sync the DRM of the download with the new console, but that this process takes as long as 30 days.

When I called again today to report the failure of this process, I was told that that the license information would have to be re-keyed to my new console and that process would take 30 days. Annoyingly, Xbox Live Support refused to send any confirmation in writing or electronically of this promise.

Note: updated to reflect the failure of the initially suggested solution.

When you buy an Xbox Live Arcade game for your Xbox 360 it is linked both to (X) your Gamertag (actually the Xbox Live account associated with the Gamertag) and (Y) to the specific Xbox 360 it was purchased on. This means that anyone can play the game on the Xbox it was purchased on whether or not they are logged on to Xbox Live, and whether or not they are playing with the Gamertag that purchased the game. It also means that when you travel to a friend's house and log in with your Gamertag, you can play any of the Xbox Live Arcade Games you have purchased. This is described by a member of the Xbox Development Team here.

This system breaks down, however, when the console on which the games were purchased needs to be replaced. Almost inevitably the broken console will be replaced with different hardware, meaning that you can no longer play Xbox Live Arcade games per scenario Y above. This phenomenon is discussed here (and elsewhere).

I had purchased all of my Xbox Live Arcade games on Xbox 360 in our media room specifically to take advantage of scenario Y. That Xbox 360 had to be replaced (red ring of death) and now that the replacement console can no longer play Xbox Live Arcade games I purchased on the console unless I am logged in.

I intend to take this up with Microsoft and see which of the many possible outcomes described in the link above they offer, e.g. points to repurchase games or "too bad."

I would think it would be technically feasible just to link the games to my new hardware, but maybe it is not worth the effort. Although with the high failure rate for 360s it may become worth their while.

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:

Blip Blop (a simple platform game) - Installed and ran just fine. I may not ever play it again, but its not worth the effort to uninstall.

Disc Washer (a disk cleanup utility) - I notice my install file is from 2004 so download a new version, which I note is called "Disk Washer" and is a trial version. Upon running the installed application, I notice that all of the option checkboxes run outside of the background, as if their fonts made them bigger than the application was expecting. This combined with the fact that there is no easy function to scan and THEN delete files leads me to uninstall.

I skip a couple of game demo files that I might actually want to spend some time on-- Company of Heroes and Def Con

IGN Download Manager from 2006 - I'm pretty sure this merged with Gamespy and therefore FilePlanet and that I already have installed a more up to date version of this application. So I delete the install executable.

Elecard MPEG 4.0 Beta from 2005 - Too old. Beta. May not be Vista compatible. Three strikes. If I were looking for an MPEG player (e.g. for some random application) I would download a current version. But because Vista's MPEG decoder has served my just fine to date I delete the old install file instead.

DVRMS Toolbox (manipulate DVRMS files recorded using Windows Media Center) - From August 2007. I'm not on my main Media Center PC, but am on a Vista Ultimate PC with a dual TV tuner (albeit not connected) so I install. The install goes fine and I connect my tuner card to the cable feed in my office. Off to test how the tuner card is working...

Colossus (clone of the Avalon Hill Titan game) - The Titan board game consumed a fair number of hours of down time in College so I am willing to go to a little effort to get this installed. That effort will be necessary. I download a recent update of the game, which is written in Java. I then download and install the current Java virtual machine for Windows (which takes forever). Next I unzip the Java program files (which takes forever)-- perhaps because files are being checked for viruses as they are being unzipped? Judging from my Multimeter sidebar gadget, the setup of this game is proving to be one of the most processor and memory intensive tasks my PC has ever performed! But the install was successful and the game looks quite robust. Cool,

Many years ago, I would try almost any beta software or game demo that looked interesting and became available. My interest in personal computing and what my friend referred to a "King Midas" tendancy to collect software, meant that I tried and saved a lot of software.

That is far less true now, but the lure of free applications for me is similar to the lure of free food to others: even though not really a beneficial personal activity the lure of free is too deeply ingrained to ignore.

The result is that over that last couple of years I've built up a directory of application install files that I have downloaded but not actually tried.

Now I'm going to make my way through them and try them. But I am likely to pull the trigger pretty quickly and jettison any application that give me trouble. This may not be fair and these don't represent reviews, but then I'm not a journalist, so with those caveats I'll describe my experiences anyway.

Here were my tries this evening:

Abuse (a game of some sort)-- the install went fine, but no icon to run the game appeared in any of the normal places. A try running the main executable did not do anything, even when run with Administrator privileges. UNINSTALLED.

Anvil Studio (a free music composition application) -- Initial install seemed to go fine. When running the app for the first time it suggests that I upgrade, which I try but the upgrade fails because the application is still running. So I uninstall and try running the install for the latest version. That fails when I try to install to a non-default directory. The failed install also leaves the install file locked. UNINSTALLED.

More soon... I hope this gets better!

There is a great article at Tom's Guide about this very subject (hat tip Digital Media Thoughts). The conclusion:

The real point is that there's not really a winner: the argument to be made is that both formats function just fine. HDMI is nice because it incorporates both audio and video, and that's a very nice extra feature. However, if your cable company's HD converter box only supports component output, that's not a reason to jump to another service provider. Analog technologies date back decades upon decades and are built on a long-standing tradition. And while digital formats are supposed to deliver more fulfilling standards, they're often under-utilized in favor of making cheaper products.

Personally, I have found component to be the most reliable solution in the sense that it is supported by the widest variety of hardware.

My alma mater, Dartmouth College, recently changed the way its board of trustees would be elected in a way that disenfranchises alumni and I believe to be harmful to the institution.

The changes are described here, here and here.

I reprint a comment I made to the Association of Alumni site here:

The action by the board of trustees is bad for Dartmouth.

The role of Alumni in electing representatives to the board was an almost unique feature of Dartmouth that differentiated it from other colleges. That has been dramtically changed so as to substantially decrease that role of Alumni. Instead of having having an equal number of trustees chosen by Alumni and the other institutional players, the institutional players will now choose a sizable majority of the trustees.

Inevitably, this will make Dartmouth reflect less of the ideas of Alumni and more of the ideas of the administration and faculty. This leaves the institution in danger of putting the interest of its employees above the interest of its customers-- current and future students.

How are the interests current and future students best reflected in the Dartmouth's governance? The market for higher education obviously will serve as a governor on what the institution does. But that check is imperfect because Dartmouth has a multi-billion dollar endowment that insulates from such market pressures. Alumni are an imperfect proxy for the interests of students because perhaps they too heavily represent old fashioned ideas, but they are at least fairly disinterested. Current faculty and administrators have an interest in the success of the institution, but often what is best for these groups is not best for the institution.

With no perfect proxy, the system of having alumni select half the trustees and institutional interests select half the trustees was pretty good way to arrive at governance that is in the best interest of the institution and its students. Moving away from such a system skews the board's makeup in a ways that is bad for Dartmouth.

For many years before the rise of the internet it was difficult to organize support for alumni elected trustee candidates other than those that were nominated by the Alumi Council. That has changed recently and has reflected a diversity of viewpoints between the Alumni Council and the actual alumni as four straight petition candidates have been elected.

There have been many allusions to how divisive these elections have been, but I have not observed that. Where is the evidence that contested elections harm the institution? Why is vigorous debate bad? I personally found such debate encouraging as a sign that that people were actually engaged in thinking about Dartmouth. Elections in communist countries were remarkably free of rancor, but that was not so great.

The new governance changes promote a false sense of comity at the expense of having a mix of trustees  that does a poorer job of representing the interests of current and future students.

Based on an alert from the Drobo, I update to Drobo Dashboard 1.02 this evening and the Drobo disappeared from Windows Explorer, and I could not remotely log onto SBS 2003.

A little investigation revealed the problem: a second session was still logged onto the SBS2003 box to which the Drobo was attached. This was presumably still using the old version of the Dashboard, preventing the update from completing. Logging that user off allowed the Drobo to be recognized again.

I ran the update again with only one user logged on and it completed, seemingly without a hitch.

Update 1: Ok. maybe not without a hitch.

When I went to look at the network shares on the Drobo they appeared empty. So I retried to shut down the SBS box and restart it, figuring that maybe a some type of cache that populates the Network node in explorer needs to be cleared and refilled. This results in an interminably long boot for SBS while it waits for the Drobo to do a fair amount of disk thrashing (reconfiguration?). So I restart SBS without the Drobo attached. It boots in about five minutes. I then attach the Drobo which begins signs of activity and the USB activity light stays on, only the Drobo hasn't yet been recognized by the Drobo dashboard.

15 minutes later the Drobo disk activity continues and the USB activity light stays lit, but the Drobo dashboard still inidicates that the Drobo has not been recognized. I'll let this run and see what the status is tomorrow morning.

Whether or not this all turns out ok as I let this run overnight, this is not the way a simple update should go down-- especially as there was nothing in the release notes that indicated there would be a complete loss of availability for an extended period of time following the update.

Update 2: 40 minutes after connection, the Drobo was finally recognized by SBS. But the shared files and folders were no longer shared, so I had to recreate the network shares and unset the Read Only bit on many files and directories. Avoiding this BS is one of the reasons I purchased the Drobo in the first place. I certainly hope this does not happen with any future updates!

A nice post by Mark Cuban about what he considers the most important quality in elected officials: the ability to do nothing.

The continuing need for optical discs accounts for a significant amount of annoyance in using and setting up a networked home.

Music, which can be legally ripped, stored on the network, replayed in any location, transferred to mobile devices and even played from many other Internet connected devices.

Not so with both standard and high definition DVDs or games for consoles. DVDs can be ripped and stored on the network, but the fact that this appears to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act means that support for playback of ripped DVDs requires extraordinary measures. Replaying ripped DVDs via Media Center Center Extenders requires converting movies to MPEG2 files with the loss of DVD special features in the process (see this post). Replaying ripped DVDs on networked PCs is also hit or miss as evidenced by J River Media Center's less than perfect support for this. Transferring to mobile devices and internet playback require even more technical contortions. If ripping DVDs was legal, does anyone doubt that the support would be better.

The same is even more true of games for game consoles, which require bringing the games disc with you if your want to play on a different box. Having access to your saved games requires bringing along a memory card as well.

None of this is intolerable, of course. But it would certainly be nice if games and video were freed from the bonds on physical media the way music has been.