Month: July 2004

10 Things I Hate About Building PCs

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of smarmy comments from the Mac contingent over this, but I’m currently in the middle of a PC upgrade fiasco, and I need to get it off my chest.

I really like the new City of Heroes game, but unfortunately the PC I use, a homebuilt box, does a lousy job of running the game. The graphics card I have (a Radeon All In One) isn’t quite powerful enough, but due to the age of the motherboard, I can’t upgrade to a better graphics card without also upgrading the motherboard. Which means buying a new case and power supply, because the 4-year-old case won’t hold newer motherboards. And at that point you might as well go to 512MB of memory and upgrade the processor. Now you’re up to $500 worth of new hardware to run a $50 game.

Scott suggested new hard drive(s) as well but I drew the line there. And I decided that since I have so much free time right now, I was going to be the primary builder of the new box. I’m about 4 times as slow as Scott when it comes to hardware installation, but with him working and me not, it seems unfair to make him do it all.

That all leads us to the point of this post, which is a list of the 10 things I most hate about building your own PC:

  1. Despite the huge pile of PC hardware in our office, some of it up to 7 years old, none of it is actually useful
  2. There is no easy way to grab onto PCI cards when you’re trying to take them out of their slots, resulting in cuts on your fingers
  3. Instruction manuals on the one hand omit key pieces of information yet offer pages of useless drivel on the other hand
  4. Power supplies, whose huge masses of cables block critical space inside the PC case, don’t have enough plugs of the kind that you need and too many if the kind that you don’t need
  5. I don’t get why you need 6 different kinds of screws to put one PC together
  6. Operating systems that give a BSOD on boot-up if the CD drive isn’t found suck
  7. Motherboards with secondary IDE controllers that don’t work out of the box or even after you’ve updated the BIOS also suck
  8. Resellers who ship motherboards that have non-functioning secondary IDE controllers suck even more than that
  9. Planned Obsolescence in general, for being the root cause of the entire fiasco
  10. Having to do it all over again when the (hopefully fully functional) new motherboard gets here some time in the next few days

And While We’re On The Subject

Speaking of other bloggers who are better and/or funnier writers than I am, check out this great bit in fafblog:

In the meantime because I was tricked into believin in Joe Wilson, I also believed that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program didnt exist when in fact it must have because Joe Wilson got his job from his wife! Even now I am trembling in fear in the knowledge that somewhere out there Saddam Hussein is sittin on a giant pile of Nigerien yellowcake uranium. “Ho ho ho,” laughs Saddam Hussein as he takes a bite of rich, creamy uranium. “Soon I will grow ten thousand times my current size, spewing radioactive fire breath across Mesopotamia, until as Nuculo-Saddam I shall control the Middle East!” “Oh no Saddam don’t do that!” I say. “It is too late!” he laughs. “And I owe it all to you, Fafnir – to you and all the other hapless peaceniks deceived by the nepotism of Joseph and Valerie Plame-Wilson!”

Friendster: About Face!

This is exactly the kind of action that makes people have no respect for what corporations say: Friendster, which has made much of its ‘no fake profiles’ policy, is now allowing fake profiles as long as they’re sponsored by a paying advertiser.

From its earliest days, many Friendster members introduced fake profiles — known variously as fakesters, or pretendsters — into their networks of friends. Often, members posted profiles of their pets and linked to friends’ pets. But the service quickly demonstrated it didn’t see the humor when it began purging the network of the fakesters.

Yet now, the company sees little irony in cooperating with Anchorman developer DreamWorks in introducing the movie’s characters into the Friendster network. In fact, it says the move is indicative of a larger cross-promotional plan the company has undertaken.

“What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion,” Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. “We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or ‘fan’ profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends.”

The message I get is that Friendster is tone-deaf to how this looks to their customers. Why is it not OK to put up a profile for a (real) pet bird but OK to have a profile of a fake anchorman for a not very funny summer movie? Oh right, money.

It’s been widely reported that all of the ‘social networking’ companies are having an issue trying to figure out how to make them profitable. This is one way of generating income that doesn’t require a full-out pay for content model, and in that sense it’s not a bad idea. But the hypocrisy inherent in the process does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m probably not their target customer anyway. I signed onto Friendster a year or so ago. I was familiar with the “fakesters” on Friendster, even linked as a friend to the Howard Dean profile. As the Wired article mentions, it was a way of establishing community and saying something about myself by my choice of association. But ultimately, I gave up on Friendster and stopped visiting. The site was too static, didn’t really allow for much interaction – in short, I found it boring.

I prefer Orkut, which has user-formed community groups and message boards – much more interactive, much more interesting. It’s not a major part of my online activities, but unlike Friendster, Orkut is interesting enough for me to keep visiting & contributing to the site. Orkut is also invite-only, which helps keep the trolls out.

A Tale of Two Cultures

Two op-eds this weekend decry the decline of reading in America today: Harold Bloom and Andrew Solomon. Kevin Drum takes Bloom to task for writing off the Internet completely. Solomon, to his credit, concedes that the Internet can have some good writing, but also assigns it to the same category as TV watching – non-interactive, alienating.

I actually agree with Bloom and Solomon that Americans should read more. What I take issue with is the sweeping generalization that the Internet is part of the problem. For example, this Solomon quote:

The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for better or worse, the United States is now in such a war. Without books, we cannot succeed in our current struggle against absolutism and terrorism. The retreat from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged democracy, from the principles that we say we want to share with the rest of the world. You are what you read. If you read nothing, then your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and sway.

If Solomon thinks that the ‘virtual life’ is not capable of producing an engaged democracy, then he has not only never checked out any blogs but also slept through the entire Democratic primary season. Interaction and communication are the lifeblood of the Internet. It’s worth noting that long before the Web came along, most of the major functions of the Internet were interactive – email, mailing lists, and Usenet – not to mention IRC, MUDs and MOOs as well.

Of course, by posting this here instead of writing a letter to the editor, I’m well aware that I’m preaching to the choir.

Totally gratuitous side note: Andrew Solomon attended the same high school as I did, although he was a few years ahead of me. The Horace Mann School gave us a heck of an education. I grew to love Shakespeare by having to read several of the plays aloud in various English classes. The first time we did it, in 8th grade, I thought it was a little weird. But by 10th grade it was one of my favorite things to do in class.

Stylistic Reasons

The LA Times (registration required, but Yahoo! reprints it) has a good piece about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, in specific, a section devoted to the differences between two versions of a key report on Iraq’s weapons capabilities used to help justify the US’s attack – the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. Not surprisingly:

The panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.

The changes made a qualified, nuanced document into one which laid out the case for war.

For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:

“Although we have little specific information on Iraq’s CW stockpile,” the classified NIE read, “Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons” of such poisons.

In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase “although we have little specific information” was deleted. Instead, the public report said, “Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents.”

Skipping over several other similar instances of changes made to the document, we get to the kicker: who made the changes and why. And here it gets even more infuriating.

Who made the changes:

During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen