The Hard Edge
When Life Gives You Lemons Dept.
One way to guard against the sting and heartache of hardware obsolescence is to pay as little as possible for a PC. This isn't the same as buying a cut-rate clunker and then regretting every minute of it as you upgrade the RAM, swap out the graphics card, and basically buy your way into the now incredibly obsolete PC you tried to avoid buying in the first place. The secret, according to Alice, may be in all those failed dot-coms.
It's no secret the dot-com industry has gone belly-up in a show of corporate fireworks never before seen in modern business. But what isn't being reported is that when these companies crash and burn, their hardware—generally top-shelf stuff financed by clueless VCs—is put up for auction and sold at fire-sale prices.
Case in point: When product-buying advisor Productopia went under in November, it scheduled a two-day auction on Dovebid.com, a site that specializes in business liquidations and physical auctions. The hardware list included everything from servers to office chairs, and the pricing was a buyer's delight. Like many overfinanced dot-coms, Productopia had a fine assortment, and Alice snared a Pentium II desktop with tons of features, including a very nice 18-inch monitor, for $560. The company was located just down the street—no shipping costs—and Alice was able to augment her home office for less than the cost of a Celeron-based system with no memory or monitor.
Pointing Devices
It's not that Bill minded the flock of cherubs that had begun to hang out on the veranda of the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola. All in all they were a nice lot, only took target practice at the hay bales, and brought enough Pepsi to share. Besides, with St. Valentine's Day on the way, they needed a base of operations so they could keep their Internet-enabled cell phones charged, and this was as good a place as any. The only irking thing was the entertainment.
Cherub-tossing was no big deal. Like wise, cherub-in-the-middle was a hoot. Pin-the-tail-on-the-cherub may have been a little borderline, and Bill politely excused himself from Johnny-on-the-cherub even though he was the most requested player. No, the games weren't a big deal. It was the music. Okay, so the little buggers had co-opted Bill's brand-new 400-watt Klipsch speaker system. (Possibly because they'd heard him say it produced the sweetest sound this side of heaven.) Loud music can be nice. Except the only song they played, over and over again, was "All You Need Is Love." It wasn't even the lyrics that drove Bill to attempt an Alice-inspired blowtorch CD sculpture. It was that constant "dah-da-da-da-dah" musical refrain that did him in.
Even though Bill was sure any court would clear him (and just how much jail time could you really get for justifiable cherubcide anyway?), he pushed hard for a compromise and finally won. The settlement allowed every fifth cut to be a song of his choosing, and Bill made it easy by selecting only two songs—"Spirit in the Sky" and "Another Brick in the Wall." (He considered "Alice's Restaurant," but couldn't decide between the original version and the remake 23 years later.)
Bill noticed one small side effect. The cherubs had a natural affinity for Norman Greenbaum's opus, but they went absolutely wild over Pink Floyd. And as cherubs went off on their appointed rounds, Bill noticed the pile of paving bricks he kept by the side of the guyrage growing smaller. So Bill thought it prudent to mention that this year, when you stand facing your heart's love and feel that cherub hovering behind your back, you may want to put aside those thoughts of hearts and flowers and think more along the lines of Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat. (This may be the appropriate attitude to take toward computer manufacturers, as well. No matter how flowery they might make their systems sound, a lot of them just byte.)
Quick Takes From The Edge
Netscape 6.0 takes the lead (for now).To be honest, Alice rejoiced when the Netscape-vs.-Microsoft browser wars cooled. It's not that she was pro-Microsoft, or even pro-Netscape, but all the battling, downloading, and rushed betas made her hard drive sick with code not ready for prime time. Enough was enough.
But just when she thought it was safe to surf again, Netscape unveiled 6.0. Aside from the radical new look called "themes" (stay tuned for an Alice and Bill Theme) that smartly took a page from Windows, and the joy people shared in customizing their desktops with wallpaper and crazy screensavers, Netscape 6.0 does some impressively groundbreaking things.
One, it lets you get unprecedented access to AOL mail the same way you check any other POP3 account. It saves search results as bookmarks and loads a dynamic panel on the left-hand side of the screen that essentially becomes a browser within a browser. View your stock quotes, CNET and ZDNet headlines, and tons of content from other providers without loading the whole page. Nice touch, Netscape. Get ready for a whole new browser war based less on how a Web site is rendered and more on how it's pulled into the desktop.
Transmeta had stellar IPO. Tech stocks go up and down, but Alice and Bill were proud to see Transmeta, the CPU IBM and Compaq dumped just seconds before its IPO, have a stellar first few days regardless. Even if the stock is in the toilet by the time you read this, the fact remains: Somewhere, the love of a good chip still holds true even on Wall Street, and Alice and Bill applaud the technical breath of fresh air.
And they called it Audrey. Alice is eagerly awaiting her first hands-on look at the latest home-PC trend: the Internet appliance. "Old news," you scoff? Not so. Now Internet appliances are smartly targeted not to the hapless beginner, but the busy household with multiple e-mail addresses and Palm devices, and no way of coordinating all that data on Post-Its and paper. Alice is hoping 3Com's new Audrey will show once and for all that a Web PC in the kitchen—if done right—is not for recipes, but for keeping a busy and wired family in touch. Stay tuned.
Don't you just love it?
The way things have started off this year, it's probably best if you reacquaint yourself with Alice and Bill's Theory of Primal Computing. Simply stated: Nothing a company develops is necessarily done in your interest. You may happen to derive some benefit from it, but the primary purpose of developing (and selling) things is so that you'll buy them, the company will make money, and it will stay in business to make more stuff.
Take Intel, for example. Specifically, take the Pentium 4. Or don't. Your humble pair of processing pundits will tell you quite straightforwardly that the Pentium 4 has all the potential of the Pentium Pro within the retail consumer market. Still, Intel (or, rather, computer sellers—Intel would never try to influence them) has been pushing Pentium 4 systems like the world was on fire and they were fire extinguishers.
Sure, the P4 is a powerful CPU. The problem is, it's not powerful for anything you may have on your desktop right now. It's Intel's way of moving away from the x86 compatibility it's supported for the past 18 years in an attempt to give itself an honest advantage over AMD's product line. But Intel can't do it until the software catches up to the CPU.
So you should blame the software guys, right? Nah. They've had x86 compatibility promises for those same 18 years. They have a lot of time and effort invested in it. It's not their fault Intel has moved the rug—while they were standing on it. That's not to say the P4 appeared in a vacuum. It didn't. But the software makers have no use for it right now, while Intel does.
Also keep in mind that the Pentium II and both versions of the Pentium III are mutated Pentium Pros. They did very well. The Pentium 4 is also scheduled for some mutations in the near future, maybe even by the time you read this. So don't give up on it, but do have enough common sense to realize what's what and when it gets that way.
Mondo Cool
Bill is in love with Elsa, which is quite different from being once in love with Amy. Elsa, for ye who have been living in a cave, makes graphics cards. Its latest is a GeForce2 Ultra-powered card called the Gladiac Ultra 3D, with 64MB of DDR. (Elsa makes good cards, it's just the names it picks for them that sound funny.)
You have to understand, Bill's been tooling along with a TNT2 Ultra card in his 700MHz Athlon (Classic) system and was relatively happy with it. Quake ran, and that was good. But Bill is a geek at heart. He runs the 2D and 3D benchmarks just to see them run, and he'd always yearned to watch them blur by on the screen (and not just because his graphics card or monitor was dying).
So it came to pass that after months of languishing in the doldrums of fast—but not really, really fast—graphics, Bill broke down and got his grubby hands on a Gladiac. (Up-front, anti-cardiac-arrest note: It's a $549 card, estimated retail. Adjust your pacemaker accordingly.) He also got Elsa's 3D Revelator stereo gaming glasses. They're part of the package. (Hey! Bill hasn't had 3D glasses since he saw the 1953 remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum, retitled House of Wax, starring Vincent Price. —Cinephile Alice)
Wow! Quake played better, and Bill could finally get it to run in OpenGL mode with real textures. Best of all, the 2D tests were a real blur, and he could call the very first of the 3D tests "Race" without feeling euphemistic. The only problem is, now that he has a card that runs at a 120Hz refresh rate (and likes to do that for the 3D glasses), Bill is now faced with the prospect of getting a new monitor—preferably something in the 19- to 21-inch range. Of course, that would mean a larger desk for it to sit on. You know how things like this snowball.
Happy Hundred (and Two)
If you haven't wished Alice and Bill a happy 100th "Hard Edge" by sending them an e-mail or even a card, shame on you! Luckily, it's a brand-new year and not too late to start things off fresh by sending Alice and Bill a fine rant or comment of a technical nature. Alice has been pleased by all the mail she's been getting now that she controls the e-mail address, so please keep those kind words and comments coming.
"The Hard Edge"
Computer Shopper
28 E. 28th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10016-7922
hardedge@zdnet.com Ah, February! The month of hearts and flowers, songs and dreamy looks, long sighs and infatuations. It's a month of such excellent moods, one needs to wonder why they made it the shortest month of the year. It must have been devised by a computer manufacturer. We all know any computer we buy becomes obsolete 10 minutes before the freight company drop-kicks it onto our doorsteps. So it is with February, gone just as things are getting started.
When Life Gives You Lemons Dept.
One way to guard against the sting and heartache of hardware obsolescence is to pay as little as possible for a PC. This isn't the same as buying a cut-rate clunker and then regretting every minute of it as you upgrade the RAM, swap out the graphics card, and basically buy your way into the now incredibly obsolete PC you tried to avoid buying in the first place. The secret, according to Alice, may be in all those failed dot-coms.
It's no secret the dot-com industry has gone belly-up in a show of corporate fireworks never before seen in modern business. But what isn't being reported is that when these companies crash and burn, their hardware—generally top-shelf stuff financed by clueless VCs—is put up for auction and sold at fire-sale prices.
Case in point: When product-buying advisor Productopia went under in November, it scheduled a two-day auction on Dovebid.com, a site that specializes in business liquidations and physical auctions. The hardware list included everything from servers to office chairs, and the pricing was a buyer's delight. Like many overfinanced dot-coms, Productopia had a fine assortment, and Alice snared a Pentium II desktop with tons of features, including a very nice 18-inch monitor, for $560. The company was located just down the street—no shipping costs—and Alice was able to augment her home office for less than the cost of a Celeron-based system with no memory or monitor.
Pointing Devices
It's not that Bill minded the flock of cherubs that had begun to hang out on the veranda of the Basement of Doom and Pepsi-Cola. All in all they were a nice lot, only took target practice at the hay bales, and brought enough Pepsi to share. Besides, with St. Valentine's Day on the way, they needed a base of operations so they could keep their Internet-enabled cell phones charged, and this was as good a place as any. The only irking thing was the entertainment.
Cherub-tossing was no big deal. Like wise, cherub-in-the-middle was a hoot. Pin-the-tail-on-the-cherub may have been a little borderline, and Bill politely excused himself from Johnny-on-the-cherub even though he was the most requested player. No, the games weren't a big deal. It was the music. Okay, so the little buggers had co-opted Bill's brand-new 400-watt Klipsch speaker system. (Possibly because they'd heard him say it produced the sweetest sound this side of heaven.) Loud music can be nice. Except the only song they played, over and over again, was "All You Need Is Love." It wasn't even the lyrics that drove Bill to attempt an Alice-inspired blowtorch CD sculpture. It was that constant "dah-da-da-da-dah" musical refrain that did him in.
Even though Bill was sure any court would clear him (and just how much jail time could you really get for justifiable cherubcide anyway?), he pushed hard for a compromise and finally won. The settlement allowed every fifth cut to be a song of his choosing, and Bill made it easy by selecting only two songs—"Spirit in the Sky" and "Another Brick in the Wall." (He considered "Alice's Restaurant," but couldn't decide between the original version and the remake 23 years later.)
Bill noticed one small side effect. The cherubs had a natural affinity for Norman Greenbaum's opus, but they went absolutely wild over Pink Floyd. And as cherubs went off on their appointed rounds, Bill noticed the pile of paving bricks he kept by the side of the guyrage growing smaller. So Bill thought it prudent to mention that this year, when you stand facing your heart's love and feel that cherub hovering behind your back, you may want to put aside those thoughts of hearts and flowers and think more along the lines of Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat. (This may be the appropriate attitude to take toward computer manufacturers, as well. No matter how flowery they might make their systems sound, a lot of them just byte.)
Quick Takes From The Edge
Netscape 6.0 takes the lead (for now).To be honest, Alice rejoiced when the Netscape-vs.-Microsoft browser wars cooled. It's not that she was pro-Microsoft, or even pro-Netscape, but all the battling, downloading, and rushed betas made her hard drive sick with code not ready for prime time. Enough was enough.
But just when she thought it was safe to surf again, Netscape unveiled 6.0. Aside from the radical new look called "themes" (stay tuned for an Alice and Bill Theme) that smartly took a page from Windows, and the joy people shared in customizing their desktops with wallpaper and crazy screensavers, Netscape 6.0 does some impressively groundbreaking things.
One, it lets you get unprecedented access to AOL mail the same way you check any other POP3 account. It saves search results as bookmarks and loads a dynamic panel on the left-hand side of the screen that essentially becomes a browser within a browser. View your stock quotes, CNET and ZDNet headlines, and tons of content from other providers without loading the whole page. Nice touch, Netscape. Get ready for a whole new browser war based less on how a Web site is rendered and more on how it's pulled into the desktop.
Transmeta had stellar IPO. Tech stocks go up and down, but Alice and Bill were proud to see Transmeta, the CPU IBM and Compaq dumped just seconds before its IPO, have a stellar first few days regardless. Even if the stock is in the toilet by the time you read this, the fact remains: Somewhere, the love of a good chip still holds true even on Wall Street, and Alice and Bill applaud the technical breath of fresh air.
And they called it Audrey. Alice is eagerly awaiting her first hands-on look at the latest home-PC trend: the Internet appliance. "Old news," you scoff? Not so. Now Internet appliances are smartly targeted not to the hapless beginner, but the busy household with multiple e-mail addresses and Palm devices, and no way of coordinating all that data on Post-Its and paper. Alice is hoping 3Com's new Audrey will show once and for all that a Web PC in the kitchen—if done right—is not for recipes, but for keeping a busy and wired family in touch. Stay tuned.
Don't you just love it?
The way things have started off this year, it's probably best if you reacquaint yourself with Alice and Bill's Theory of Primal Computing. Simply stated: Nothing a company develops is necessarily done in your interest. You may happen to derive some benefit from it, but the primary purpose of developing (and selling) things is so that you'll buy them, the company will make money, and it will stay in business to make more stuff.
Take Intel, for example. Specifically, take the Pentium 4. Or don't. Your humble pair of processing pundits will tell you quite straightforwardly that the Pentium 4 has all the potential of the Pentium Pro within the retail consumer market. Still, Intel (or, rather, computer sellers—Intel would never try to influence them) has been pushing Pentium 4 systems like the world was on fire and they were fire extinguishers.
Sure, the P4 is a powerful CPU. The problem is, it's not powerful for anything you may have on your desktop right now. It's Intel's way of moving away from the x86 compatibility it's supported for the past 18 years in an attempt to give itself an honest advantage over AMD's product line. But Intel can't do it until the software catches up to the CPU.
So you should blame the software guys, right? Nah. They've had x86 compatibility promises for those same 18 years. They have a lot of time and effort invested in it. It's not their fault Intel has moved the rug—while they were standing on it. That's not to say the P4 appeared in a vacuum. It didn't. But the software makers have no use for it right now, while Intel does.
Also keep in mind that the Pentium II and both versions of the Pentium III are mutated Pentium Pros. They did very well. The Pentium 4 is also scheduled for some mutations in the near future, maybe even by the time you read this. So don't give up on it, but do have enough common sense to realize what's what and when it gets that way.
Mondo Cool
Bill is in love with Elsa, which is quite different from being once in love with Amy. Elsa, for ye who have been living in a cave, makes graphics cards. Its latest is a GeForce2 Ultra-powered card called the Gladiac Ultra 3D, with 64MB of DDR. (Elsa makes good cards, it's just the names it picks for them that sound funny.)
You have to understand, Bill's been tooling along with a TNT2 Ultra card in his 700MHz Athlon (Classic) system and was relatively happy with it. Quake ran, and that was good. But Bill is a geek at heart. He runs the 2D and 3D benchmarks just to see them run, and he'd always yearned to watch them blur by on the screen (and not just because his graphics card or monitor was dying).
So it came to pass that after months of languishing in the doldrums of fast—but not really, really fast—graphics, Bill broke down and got his grubby hands on a Gladiac. (Up-front, anti-cardiac-arrest note: It's a $549 card, estimated retail. Adjust your pacemaker accordingly.) He also got Elsa's 3D Revelator stereo gaming glasses. They're part of the package. (Hey! Bill hasn't had 3D glasses since he saw the 1953 remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum, retitled House of Wax, starring Vincent Price. —Cinephile Alice)
Wow! Quake played better, and Bill could finally get it to run in OpenGL mode with real textures. Best of all, the 2D tests were a real blur, and he could call the very first of the 3D tests "Race" without feeling euphemistic. The only problem is, now that he has a card that runs at a 120Hz refresh rate (and likes to do that for the 3D glasses), Bill is now faced with the prospect of getting a new monitor—preferably something in the 19- to 21-inch range. Of course, that would mean a larger desk for it to sit on. You know how things like this snowball.
Happy Hundred (and Two)
If you haven't wished Alice and Bill a happy 100th "Hard Edge" by sending them an e-mail or even a card, shame on you! Luckily, it's a brand-new year and not too late to start things off fresh by sending Alice and Bill a fine rant or comment of a technical nature. Alice has been pleased by all the mail she's been getting now that she controls the e-mail address, so please keep those kind words and comments coming.
"The Hard Edge"
Computer Shopper
28 E. 28th St., 10th Fl.
New York, NY 10016-7922
hardedge@zdnet.com