Now, as a web professional, I should be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon faster than a tabloid doing a U-turn over Jade Goody. Every pitch I attend has at least one person practically frothing at the mouth at the thought of getting a Twitter feed into the mix and everyone I know insists on posting every minutiae of their lives on it, yet it leaves me cold - why?
Supporters of Twitter will probably wheel out Stephen Fry as their poster-boy, pointing out the fact that thousands follow his posts (or "tweets" to those who buy into the hype), so anything that makes it easier for him to reach his audience must be good. They miss the fundamental point that, although he is known as an early adopted of technology, Stephen Fry is intelligent, witty, erudite and famous - people want to hear what he says. Dave from accounts is dull, his life is singularly uninteresting to the general public, so why does he need a tool to share every waking second of his life and every banal thought that enters his head with the global populace?
Twitter? The sooner the hype dies and the cool crowd move on, the better, I think. The simple fact is that, like pen and paper, or wax tablets, it doesn't matter what the medium used is, what matters is the content. Twitter may well have some great quotes, or some genuine insights amongst all the dross, but I am afraid that whereas blogs or even Facebook pages offer some level of interaction for the reader, Twitter does not. The whole basis of the system encourages narcissism on an epic scale - I can tweet away to my hearts' content, yet no-one can post back to say I am talking rubbish, or even take an interest and grow the dialogue. The lack of feedback means that the author retains a sense of ego and also a sense of detachment from the reader - this means that there is a false elevation of the importance of the writer's output, purely through lack of negative feedback.
As a marketing tool, Twitter might make some sense - you can leak word of a new product and build "buzz" without the negative aspect of a blog (depending on the product, you can get a militant aspect posting derogatory comments - I've worked on accounts for Fuel companies, so I should know!), the short amount of copy available means that your copywriters offer more "tweets per pound" than they might offer per blog post - so it might be economic good sense, but the truth is that any marketing company should really steer clear of Twitter, as the kind of people who read the output it gives do not take kindly to corporate prescences on what they perceive as their territory - it is viewed with the same level of animosity as unsolicited emails from companies using mailing lists. Also, the lack of feedback functionality means that it is very hard to a) enter a two-way conversation with your prospective customers and, b) very hard to measure the ROI. Basically, it's the latest fad and, like MySpace and Facebook, the digital agencies are just trying to prove that they are ahead of the curve and impress clients by jumping on to the newest bandwagon. I can genuinely say that it makes very good sense to avoid this pitfall at all costs, as the best you can hope for is zero engagement - the worst is that you tarnish the image of the brand you are trying to generate hype for by getting a reputation for encroaching into territory they shouldn't be seen in.
Twitter - leave it to Stephen Fry, as he'll write something funny and interesting. Don't try to advertise mouthwash on it...
As you are probably aware, I have been looking in to getting a top-spec PC to run my various OSes on under Vrtualisation and use of partitioned hard drives. Also, as I am starting to do some more creative and development work it will be nice to get a more future-proof system and something to play Crysis on...
I am veering towards a Core i7 system, purely because I've had issues with AMD systems in the past and, basically, if I'm going to pay £2000+ for a system I want to have something that is top of the line, so that it will be less likely to be obsolete within a year when the next crop of games comes around and Adobe brings out the latest Creative Suite. Having worked with SGI and Apple systems in the past, I want something that looks good on the desk and which screams "creative" to clients, so a beige box is out of the question. I know it sounds stupid, but my studio is all white and I like a system that will stand out on the desk and look good - partly out of vanity (I like my workspace to look good), but also because things like that make a difference in giving confidence to clients. After all, a beowulf cluster of home-built PCs is just as good as a dedicated rack server, but which would you trust your mission-critical data to?
However, whilst I was quite comfortable to build a custom system, the impatient part of me can't wait to collect all the components before I can use the system. So, could I find a pre-built system to suit that I can reasonably afford - that's a big question, as pre-built "gamer" systems tend to fall into two camps: those that are built by small companies to order, but which reflect the off-the-shelf nature of such outfits - they'll work brilliantly, but look like a dog's dinner - or those from the "big name" brands which are usually over-priced, under-perform but at least look like a complete system, rather than a collection of parts. I have memories of a Dell I once used that, once it had a top-flight NVidia card from their configuration list, it ran so hot that the case smelled permanently of burning plastic. So, there is a need to be wary, but in the intervening time there have been a few high points - Alienware, being the notable example.
Ignoring the recent acquisition by Dell, Alienware was a reasonably small fish, making high-end gaming and creative machines that had a real boutique feel to them - the brand is strong and the system design is usually first-class. However, they aren't cheap. Recently, too, I have noticed a lot of messages on the net about Alienware suffering a drop in quality (presumably as they become more commodity-focussed under Dell's ownership), whilst their cost is still equivalent to a maxed-out Mac Pro, although the raw performance in gaming terms may well be higher.
In my trawling of the internet, however, I came across a system that might well tick my boxes - I had been looking at a Core i7 system, with 12GB or DDR3, dual ATI 4870X2s, 6TB of storage and a Lian Li Ati branded red Armoursuit case - and it is made, of all people, by Acer.
The predator G7700 runs a Core2Duo, 4GB of RAM, has 1.28GB of Storage and a pair of Geforce 9800GT cards, so why does it appeal? Well, the price, basically. I can pick one up for £1700, then buy RAM, drives, Motherboard, Core i7 920 and Dual ATI 4870X2s and still end up paying out less than I would have for my custom sytsem. The drives are hot-swappable, which is a bonus, as I wanted the huge storage to enable me to strip the system drive, then mirror it, whilst having a separate mirrored storage drive. The out-of-the-box reviews are all surprisingly favourable and, well....just look at it.
This is a truly eye-catching system that, when paired with the matching monitor and a Razer Lachesis keyboard it will certainly turn heads. It's a bit love-it-or-hate-it, but you certainly can't miss it. I personally love it and I will be hopefully picking one up soon!
Well, it's the end of an era at my place. An Englishman's home may well be his castle, but when an Englishman's wife is having a baby, very soon his habit of hoarding old computers comes into view and he needs to clear out the spare room and the heap of machines in his lounge before he is catapulted over his castle's wall via trebuchet (or angry wife). Thus, I'm selling off my old SGI and other hardware to make room for the forthcoming addition to the clan. Fortunately, because my wife is wonderful (and because we have a fairly roomy house), I am still allowed my studio as a retreat, so I can get my fix for wargames, modelling and computer-based tinkering there, as long as I have room for the odds and ends I need for the times I work from home and, more importantly, have space to move.
I'll be sad to see the old workhorses head off to new owners, but I hope that the new owners appreciate them as much as I do and treat them nicely. I have no doubt that this will be the case, though - SGI fans are pretty fanatical about these boxes. On the upside, given that VMWare and Virtualisation are the buzzwords of the minute, I thought what I'd do was build myself a super-high tech PC workstation and then run things like NeXTStep in VMWare so that I can be as nerdy as I like, yet not have to have 15 machines on my desk. The real benefit is that I get to play that most enjoyable of games - Micro Mart shopping!
This is a variant on the age-old Auto Trader fantasy shopping - give yourself an imagined budget and then see what four-wheeled gems you can get for the money whilst passing time in the bathroom with the latest issue of the weekly car sales magazine. The subtle twist here, as you may have guessed, is that you use a copy of Micro Mart (or some other advert-stuffed PC magazine) to build up the ultimate system.
Given that I want to run Vista Ultimate (at least until Windows 7 comes out - the techboards are alive with positive rumblings about this upcoming OS, so I am looking forward to a decent OS), Linux (possibly Ubuntu, or maybe I'll stick with Lycoris as I already have it, or go back to SuSE, which is what I started out with many moons ago), and then maybe Solaris, NeXTStep, etc, under VMWare, I need storage - preferably multiple drives (one Windows, one "other OS", one for Video editing and one for work. Ideally, I'd like the lot to be mirrored, but I might go for four 1TB drives, one partiioned with the various OSes, the other for data, then mirror the pair. Western Digital Caviar with 32mb cache? That'll do nicely...
I'd go for a Core i7 CPU (The 940 mid-range one, not the 960 Extreme, as that's a £1000 near enough, and to be honest, the performance boost won't justify it). I have my eye on an ASRock motherboard designed for creating a Quad SLi system (4 PCIe 16x slots) and a butt-load of DDR3 RAM. So, that'll lead me to a 1796mb Nvidia GTX295 and three GTX260s with 800mb-ish each running in SLi format to allow the use of CUDA technology to create a beast of a GPGPU computer (basically, Nvidia technology allows you to run some OS functions and some things, such as SETI@home, etc, on the GPUs, taking laod off of the CPU) - the aim is to ensure that all my little apps are tailored to use CUDA or Open CL so that the system absolutely screams for rendering, etc. To give an idea, the Nvidia are selling systems based on this tech (but using only 512mb Quadra cards) as deskside supercomputers and the performance is mind-bending. Yes, it costs, £7k-ish, but you'll blow away an SGI that cost £30k+ a year ago or, put it another way, it's capable of the sort of data throughput that makes a Core Duo machine without SLi look like a pocket calculator. Add in 12GB of RAM (Corsair Dominator DDR3 running at 1600MHz, of course).
Blu-Ray or HD-DVD? Well, now you can have a drive that burns Bluray and reads both formats - two of those, please (one for read, one for write - better to save the wear on hardware) and a nice LG 30" flatpanel in black with 4000:1 contrast and 3ms response time. Better add an XiFi Fatality Pro soundcard to get the best out of those movies, too...
Finish off with wireless 300MBit network adapter, modular PSU, Razer Keyboard and mouse...got to love the thin black slab with blue lighting - very Sci-Fi...then a water-colling kit, as this lot will be HOT. Then I just need the case to pack it all in to - I'd love this to be the white or laser-cut alloy version of Isotopes iX case, but I don't think that'd work, so I'll be looking for something in aluminium that looks like a Cray or HAL9000 - I want it to intimidate, yet look refined. Unless I scale back the number of GPUs and go for the Isotope...hmm, interesting.
As the Euromillions peaked at over £85Million this week, I thought I'd take a punt and bought a ticket (of course playing when there's a mere £15Million in the jackpot would just be a waste of money...). Of course, I didn't in, but I did spend an interesting half an hour contemplating what I'd buy if I did. Of course, I'd build my wife and I the house of our dreams - traditional oak framed manor house with Art Deco interior, using reclaimed tiles and bricks, etc, to make the house look well-aged. I'm not saying we've thought about much, but I can even tell you where the door handles come from. So, we have somewhere to live, but what to put in it?
Well, there is the question of cars - we'd need a couple to cover all eventualities. We're good for a saloon as we already have a well-loved and cherished Jaguar that my wife calls Honoria, after the forceful girl in the Wodehouse books - I don't know why, but somehow it makes sense. So, what other four-wheeled delights would there be? A Veyron, perhaps? Perhaps - but what is it for? It's too flabby and large to be a back-road scorcher, but it's got zero luggage room for continent-crushing touring. A DB9 or even a Merc SLR is far better suited to whisking myself and the wife off for a weekend. It's too refined to give that seat-of-the-pants driving experience you'd wat from a sports car...ultimately, it's just about two things - the top speed and the price tag and, much as I think it's a lovely piece of engineering, I think it's just basically a £3Million game of Top Trumps. With this in mind, I think I'd pick up a DB9 or a Bently GT for the touring side of things, a Ferrari 430 Spider for the backroads and a Jag SS100 replica from Suffolk Sportscars for sunny weekends and picnics. Oh, and I'd still have only spend about 1/3 of the cost of a Veyron at most. Add a Jaguar XJ220 to the collection and maybe a green or orange Lambo (Murcielago) or an orange Zonda for my wife (god bless her, she does love the lairy Italian hypercars). Finally, my wife would need a Range Rover for snow/horsebox-pulling/trolling around the farmland. So, we have the cars and the house...and we've still only spent maybe £5Million. £10Million including building stables, buying a horse and associated ephemera for my wife, kitting out a nice gym and building the indoor heated pool...
Ok, let's just say we got a quarter share of the jackpot - a mere £21,250,000. We've spent under half of it and we're already living like royalty, albeit without the claims of racism and detachment from reality...
So, let's up the ante and be generous. Let's buy houses for our families - £1Million to each set of parents and, say £500,000 to my brother-in-law. We've still got £8.75Million to account for...ok, put £2Million in a high interest account and live off the interest (10% flat rate gives an annual income of £200,000 tax-free for life, over an above any earnings). What next? £1Million to charity, I think - £250,000 to Great Ormond Street, £250,000 Macmillan Nurses and £500,000 to Comic Relief should help a few people, at least. Well, with the remaining £5.75 Million, what is there to do?
Well as with all computer geeks, there's the techno-porn list - the ultimate haven of computer hardware. That list, for me, would look a little like this:
NeXTs:
NeXTStation, NeXTStation Color, NeXTStation Turbo, NeXTStation Turbo Color, Next Cube (with accellerator, maximum RAM, 4 GB hdd, CDROM, Two NeXTDimension boards and a second motherboard), all with monitors (3 in the case of the Cube). Add a NeXT color and a NeXT laser printer, too. Hell, the Internet as we know it now was basically created on this hardware. Punches well above its weight as far as being useful with a really slow CPU.
SGIs:
Crimson Reality Engine, Tezro - quad CPU, Onyx 2 Infinite Reality deskside, O2 with 1600sw monitor (or should I say, another O2). I like Irix and part of me really wants to run some 3D work on the Infinite Reality hardware...the Crimson would just be there for the love of it and the Tezro and O2 would be used for Maya and Video work, etc.
Apple:
PowerMac Quad G5 - max out the RAM and storage, add a top-flight GFX card and a 24" display. It's fast enough for Flash, Photoshop and the like, more than quick enough for Final Cut and Combustion and still runs my old Classic games and apps, so I wouldn't want a maximum spec MacPro. Oh, what the hell, throw in a IIfx and a Classic for giggles, too - they can keep my iMac company.
PC:
The temptation here is to go for a single all-in-one wonder PC, but we're not exactly stretched for budget, so I think I'd go for a Tesla-based GPU machine (the Nvidia Personal Supercomputer, for example), dual booting both XP Pro64 and Linux 64 (running OpenStep/GnuStep on Ubuntu seems the best bet) - this would probably default to linux, running as a cluster/render box for the SGI machines and as a really fast server and SETI@Home, etc, box on the Unix side of things. When booted to Windows, it'd be used for transcoding DVDs, etc, at about a million miles per hour.
On the leisure side of computing (not that video editing, coding and writing tech docs is not my idea of fun), I think I'd like something truly funky - something I could game on, watch movies on and do some creative tinkering on and which is relatively future-proof. Ideally, it should be easy on the eye, as this would be in my office/den for home-working, not in the "tech bunker" with all the other stuff. Enter Alienware and their ALX series of "luxury" gaming PCs. I'd probably go for one of their green cases, as it's different and suits the case design (although the black looks good), I'd also be tempted by one of Panoram's lovely multiscreen displays, as I'd have the graphics output to power this bad-boy. In fact, I might also be tempted to use one on the Tesla machine, because this screen is so nice.
I've become very weary of laptops lately - I have a lovely old Pismo but I need a new battery for it and that will cost probably more than I paid for the machine. i have a white MacBook for work and I really don't get on with it - the sharp edge to the wrist-rest area, the awful keyboard, the constant dropping of wireless signal and the crashing of Safari and Firefox on a regular basis under OS X 10.5 - it's also got less 3d capable graphics than my 10 year old Pismo. The Vaio is nice enough, but is now my wife's machine, despite my upgrading her desktop PC, as she likes it to shop online, browse Youtube, etc, whilst on the sofa. The Dualcore CPU and 256mb GeForce card are rather wasted now she's stopped playing Medieval Total War, but I'm not one to complain. I don't like the new MacBook, I'm not exactly bowled over by the specs/price of the new MacBook Pro (let's face it, they are basically high-end PC notebooks nowadays), so I could see myself coming round to Alienware again, but the machines aren't as funky as they used to be, as they dropped the rounded "alien face" case in green in favour of a more "tech" orientated all-black system that looks like a Toshiba with lights...it's smart, but not cool, I guess. Still, anything that allows me to use SLi graphics in my lap is fine with me...
So, whilst it staggers me to even think it, I'd not be buying an Apple for either of my three highest-spec machines. Which, as an Apple/NeXT die-hard, is rather worrying to me - how is it that the MacPro is under-powered, or the new MacBook so uninspiring?
I think the reason is basically that, in standard trim, these machines are great - they are great for designers, or for the office/studio, where they offer more than enough grunt, combined with ease of use and stability. The problem comes in that the hardware is not cutting-edge - there's no 2GB NVidia 295GTX your MacPro, despite it running 8 Cores and 16GB of RAM, so you end up with weak graphics ability for the cost. Even if you stuff the Mac full of cards, you'd still only get 4 512mb 180GTX cards, which is less than impressive when you consider the machine would be settnig you back £7k or more...
So once we've wired the house up for high speed wireless and internet and have installed a UPS array in the basement to ensure we don't lose power, what's the point of all this? Well, the Alienware is unashamedly for play-time - it's an ultimate gaming rig to allow games like Crysis or Empire Total War to run at huge detail and with zero frame-rate drop. It's the toy I've always promised myself and never bought...oh, and I love the idea of being able to watch a DVD on one screen, surf the net on another and be messing around in photoshop on a third with no slowdown. Basically, anything that makes me feel like Cypher from the Matrix is fine with me!
