How to Spot a Psychopath

Microsoft's IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 was, arguably, the best mouse a right-handed user could get when I reviewed it - and compared it with Logitech's show-off dual-pickup MouseMan Dual Optical - back in 2001.

And, as you may have heard, it has returned.

The final decision back in '01 came down to what shape you preferred, and left-handers were left out in the cold then, as they still pretty much are now.

But the Explorer 3.0 felt good to little old right-handed me, and it worked well. The two side thumb buttons are in just the right place, and the mouse feels neither too small nor too big. I like a teeny mouse for use with a laptop, when you often have a crummy wrist angle and need to hold the mouse with your fingertips from above to avoid strain injuries. But with an ergonomically correct desk setup, a big, though sculpted, mouse like this works for me. Perhaps I'm getting set in my ways in my old age, but I've kind of settled on the Explorer 3.0.

(I don't want a cordless mouse; yes, they work perfectly well these days, but I prefer a bit less weight and zero battery concerns. I keep my mouse cord organised with a simple weight, which you can readily make yourself; that may have something to do with the disappearance of the WireWeights company. More elaborate cord management contraptions are still on sale!)

Explorer 3s seem to last pretty well, too. My mouse gets a whole lot of use, but I can count on at least three years of service from an Explorer 3.0 before the cable goes flaky or the wheel starts mis-counting.

Microsoft were left behind in the feature-chart race, though. So they retired the 3.0, and created a new and awful version 4.0 of the Explorer.

This whole post is very much the outside scoop for gamers, of course, but the Explorer 4.0's suckage centred around its new and allegedly fantastic "tilt wheel", which you could not only roll up and down and click for the button-3 function, but could also tilt left and right for horizontal scrolling.

The tilt function made the click function hard to use, and they deleted the clicky detents in the wheel rotation that're essential when gamers want to accurately select a weapon.

So people who liked the old 3.0 started paying premiums for new old stock on eBay. Microsoft eventually noticed this, and reintroduced the older model.

Apparently the new Explorer 3 has a faster sensor chip in it, or something, but the change isn't significant enough that Microsoft bothered calling the new-old-mouse the Explorer 3.1. It is, for all practical intents and purposes, the same as the good old 3.0.

Except now, as you can see, it's dark slate-grey, with only slightly cheesy matte silver side buttons.

Here in Australia, m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market sell the new Explorer 3 for $AU69.30 including delivery anywhere in the country. Australian shoppers can click here to order one.

That's really not a bad price at all. Microsoft's fancy-pants Razer-collaboration Habu costs twice as much, and Logitech's flagship corded mouse, the G5, is not a lot cheaper.

Microsoft now seem to be calling the Explorer 4.0 just the "IntelliMouse Explorer", and OEM (no-fancy-box) versions of it can be had in the States for quite a bit less than the price of a new 3.0. At that price it's a perfectly OK desktop mouse, but it's still no good for many games. Aus PC Market have given up selling it.

Interestingly, Microsoft's main list of mice doesn't include the 3.0 at all any more. Look under "gaming products", though, and you can find it, next to the Habu.

The Explorer 4.0 tilt wheel also lives on in some even swoopier products. I'm not itching to try any of them, though.

Viva 2001!

David, from Western Australia, writes:

During my daily trawl across the more interesting places on the net, I encountered this little device, as I’m sure you have.

Naturally, I was interested... until I saw the bloody price. I could build my own happy little 1.5Tb RAID box for the cost of that thing and still have change left over.

But it did bring something to light. Its storage mechanism seems intriguing, for as much I like RAID, I hate sacrificing to the parity god, especially if I’m using 500Gb drives.

Which got me thinking. This Drobo thingummy seems to be an expansion of JBOD with some kind of parity calculator. Now granted, the implementation of this in a shiny box is reason you pay for this thing, however my question as it were is this:

Have you ever encountered a method of implementing this on a PC? I’ve done a bit of hunting and come up with squat, but I do remember you writing about JBOD related things on several occasions, so I turn to you as a font of knowledge, oh mighty Dan.

The Drobo box does indeed look like an interesting little thing, and certainly seems to be a step toward the home mega-storage Nirvana I've written about before. But it has its limitations, chief among which is exactly the same Parity God sacrifice you'd make with a do-it-yourself RAID rig.

If you only read the glossy main Web site, all you'll find is that the manufacturers allege that their storage scheme uses "advanced storage concepts such as virtualization, but it is not a derivative of RAID". Well, who knows what the heck it is, then, but it's clearly doing something analogous to parity RAID, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to yank a drive and upgrade it any time you liked. So, obviously, all of the data on any given disk must be reconstructable from the content of the other disks, and the amount of capacity offered up to the Parity God must be at least as much as the size of the biggest disk.

Drobo aren't really hiding this, though; their knowledge base confirms it. I suppose the thing could theoretically offer more capacity if it did real-time compression, but that'd make it hilariously slow and not gain much for the kinds of files that many Drobos are probably going to end up containing, anyway.

So if you add a 1000Gb drive to a Drobo that already has three 500Gb drives in it (ignoring real-gigabytes versus drive-manufacturer-gigabytes for now), you'll take your aggregate capacity from 1000Gb to 1500Gb. If you've got four 500Gb drives in your Drobo and swap one of them for a larger one, the actual capacity won't increase at all!

So I suppose it's basically working like RAID 4, but with support for dissimilar disks.

As with normal RAID, if you change the drive setup your Drobo may be churning away for hours. And, just like a rebuilding RAID array, a disk loss during this period will poleaxe the entire array. The Drobo does, however, have battery backup to prevent a mere mains interruption from clobbering your data. So you should factor the price of a UPS into your equivalent-PC calculations.

In answer to your actual question, no, I don't know of any remotely user-friendly way of doing this same sort of thing on a PC. FreeNAS could be a thing if you don't want to take the more traditional route of pirating a really expensive version of Windows, but plug-and-go it ain't.

Drobo really are quite straightforward about these capacity issues, though, including the powers-of-two versus powers-of-ten capacity rip-off. The knowledge base makes clear that four "500Gb" drives will only give you 1397 formatted gigabytes.

(It's also a neat hack that the thing reports 2Tb capacity no matter what drives you actually install in it.)

In answer to another of my immediate questions about the thing, it is also apparently possible to swap drives from a dead Drobo into a new one. But there is of course no way to read Drobo disks on anything else. Software RAID (and, in theory, quality hardware RAID controllers) gets around this vendor lock-in problem, but for home users it's not that big a deal, if of course you make backups. Which home users don't.

Oh, and as someone else has noticed, the Drobo site tagline currently says "whose" where it ought to say "who's". That's the kind of attention to detail you love to see from a storage vendor, isn't it?