The Integrated

Shortly after arriving here on Elmendorf AFB in 2006, I heard about a volcanic eruption that had occurred some years ago, coating the base in ash. I promptly put it out of my mind, and didn’t hear anything about it again…until yesterday, when suddenly I became aware of the Orange alert issued for Mt. Redoubt.

Mt. Redoubt, Alaska

Map of Alaskan Volcanoes

According to geologists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, Redoubt is likely to erupt in the next few days. This has caused a scramble to plan and prepare at work, as well as at home. As it turns out, volcanic ash is a lot nastier than ashes from a fire. It’s made of up tiny, jagged particles of rock and glass, and that makes it a nuisance to clean up. If you just wipe it off dry, you’ll scratch many surfaces. Electronics will be destroyed without carefully dislodging the material using compressed air and vacuuming it up. Driving in ashfall is hazardous to your vehicle. You have to wear a mask and stay indoors as much as possible. In short, we’re looking at a huge mess here, and the only question is how much ashfall we’ll get in Anchorage. This page at the AVO website allows you to watch the projected movement of ash clouds depending on recent conditions and the initial eruption height.

Mt. Redoubt erupts in 1990

The current forecast is that the eruption will be, at most, on the order of the 1989-90 event; if that happens we would see “trace to several millimeters” of ashfall. Not a catastrophe, but a problem nonetheless. In order to be ready for this, I’ve had to unplug my computers at home and cover them in trash bags to keep out the ash, should Redoubt blow during the night or while I’m asleep. The entire installation will be taking similar action for our government systems as well, if and when the eruption occurs—including the server racks and equipment my shop maintains. Our best hope is that the wind will change and blow the ash away from us, perhaps out to sea, but odds are good we’ll have a dusting of glass shards to deal with here soon.

This entry originally appeared on January 27, 2009 (before I installed WordPress).

Netflix, in announcing their latest financial results, revealed that their subscribers who use Instant Play to stream movies via the internet rent fewer DVDs than those who never stream. This is a bit of a surprise to some who thought that physical media would be king for a long time to come. I admit I’ve been highly skeptical of the rate at which streaming feature-length films would be adopted over discs—broadband access in the U.S., even in our most wired cities, is just not fast enough to allow streaming at anything better than DVD quality (if that). But what I’ve come to realize as I myself have shifted towards using Instant Play more and going through fewer discs, is that the question is not whether the quality can match DVD or Blu-ray. The question is, “does it meet a minimum standard of acceptability?” For the average viewer, the answer, I suspect, is “yes.” Of course I love watching a great film on Blu-ray, in crystal-clear quality. That’s going to be the optimal way of experiencing it until the next format comes around¹, and for the films I truly adore I will seek out that experience. Yet, for most films, and especially for films I haven’t seen, Instant Play’s slightly sub-DVD quality meets my minimum standard of acceptability to introduce myself to these films. I didn’t think it would. I scoffed when they introduced the feature. It was foolish of me. I can say, with certainty, that the only thing keeping Instant Play (and its competitors) from being the total death of rental discs is the limited catalog. If they expand it to all the films in their library, I’ll empty my queue and be in film heaven.

¹ Yes, I do expect (in spite of increasing broadband speed and penetration coupled with adoption of streaming services) that there will be at least one physical successor to Blu-ray. At some point there will be a disc or memory card with the capacity and bandwidth for uncompressed 4K video, and there’ll be at least a niche market for it among film and home theater enthusiasts.

This entry originally appeared on January 6, 2009 (before I installed WordPress).

Look, BFG. I like you. You make good nVidia boards, and are one of the few GeForce partners out there with a Step-Up program. But your new adventure in system integration is a bit…preposterous.

Starting configurations run $3000, $5000, and $8000, with the eight-grand box loaded out as follows:

• Core i7 965 Extreme Edition
• MSI Eclipse X58 mobo
• 6GB Patriot DDR3-1600
• 2x GeForce GTX 295
• 1x GeForce GTX 285 (as a dedicated PPU)
• CoolIt contained watercooling system
• 4x WD Velociraptor HDDs
• Blu-ray drive
• Auzentech X-fi Prelude
• 1.2kW PSU
• Integrated iPhone/iPT dock
• Integrated 8″ touchscreen

A few comments about these specs:

1. “Extreme Edition” on an Intel CPU means that out of the box, you’re getting a marginal performance boost over the highest-tier standard processor, in exchange for an astronomical price that’ll give any system builder but Scrooge McDuck severe sticker shock. An EE’s main benefit is its unlocked multiplier, which really only comes into play for overclockers shooting for world record benchmarks. For the consumer ordering a system online from an integrator, it’s a scam to cash in on the ill-informed.
2. Patriot memory blows.
3. SLI scales horribly. This configuration of two dual-GPU cards for quad SLI falls into the above category of tiny performance benefit for gigantic mountains of cash.
4. Prefab, off-the-shelf watercooling units offer meager benefit (if any) over a top-tier heatsink with a good 120mm fan strapped to it. They don’t offer the above-and-beyond cooling performance the average user expects from watercooling, and while they do have the benefit of silence, a 120mm fan is pretty quiet, and I’d say below most people’s noise tolerance threshold. In exchange for these slight advantages, you pay a lot more money. Cash-in bait #2.
5. The integrated iPhone dock is a good idea…if you have an iPhone. I hope (I assume) this is optional. Why not have the choice for a standard iPod dock? There’s still a lot more classic/nano/older-gen iPods floating around out there than iPhones/iPTs.
6. I’ll put down money that at least 85% of Phobos purchasers play with the touchscreen for five minutes when they first get the thing, and never use it again. Especially considering this system is in a standard tower configuration. Memo to BFG: Most people with a tower or midtower put it under the desk.

But the most absurd part of this whole offer is not what’s in the box. It’s the concierge service. From the BFG press release:

“As a result, Phobos is sold with complementary Concierge Service which includes expert in-home installation and a six month follow up maintenance visit.”

Expert in-home installation. For an $8000 gaming PC. Look, if you’re buying an SLI gaming box, and you can’t match a DVI cable to a DVI port and USB cables to USB ports, I don’t know how the hell you’re going to manage to even turn the thing on.

All things considered, this isn’t the right economy to introduce such a product anyway. Anyone in the “gullible, uninformed twit who likes gaming but knows a lot less than he thinks he does about computers and wants maximum e-peen factor” demographic—at least, anyone who still has, you know, a job, and money to splurge on such things—is likely already a customer of Alienware or Falcon Northwest. If you were serious about offering a product for gamers who simply don’t have the time or inclination to build their own box, you could easily create a rock-solid $1000-1500 i7/DDR3 system that’ll handle, at a minimum, the next three to four years’ worth of games. Phobos will also handle the next three to four years’ worth of games. But it’s more about attempting to swindle those gamers.