Buying better graphics

So I have a confession to make. I am not a computer gamer. Even after creating the TwitchGuru.com site last year for Tom’s Hardware, and hiring a bunch of freelancers and assigning tons of stories about gaming (the twitch refers to the way many gamers flick their controls to blast away opponents or whatever it is they do), spending more time in front of a screen than I already do doesn’t get me too excited.

A combination of the coming of Windows Vista and more interest in Second Life has motivated me to get smarter about the gaming world. My first step was to try to have a rig that would work well with games. This became A Project, and started to suck me in.

For those of you that build your own PCs from scratch, this isn’t a problem: you buy the parts that you need, and you can get yourself a decent machine that has plenty of graphics horsepower. But I don’t really have the time to start a construction project right now.

So I thought I would just upgrade a relatively recent Dell that I bought earlier this summer. Off we go.

This might be old news for some of you, but bear with me. There are three principle interfaces and two vendor families. First are the interfaces: ordinary PCI, AGP, and the newer PCI-Express. They use three different electrical connections, and rather then get involved in the bus speeds and feeds, you have to make sure that whatever your motherboard has will match the card that you buy.

So I carefully examine my Dell, which usually has the cover off anyway so this doesn’t take any time at all, and I realize that it can’t be easily upgraded, because like most lower-end PCs, all it has is the ordinary PCI slots that take the oldest graphic cards and not very good ones at that. We’ll get back to it in a moment. Let’s talk about the two principle families of graphics adapters, one from ATI (now owned by AMD) and one from nVidia. They are roughly equivalent, but each family has dozens of different products. And they are not labeled for easy parsing: for example, ATI uses the “XT” moniker to refer to higher-end cards, while nVidia uses the label to refer to lower-end cards.

I found a great couple of pages that give you the stats of the ATI family and the stats of the nVidia family.

They are maintained by Gabriel Torres, of Brazil of all places. He does a solid job of showing you what is the makeup of each card. The things to look for (in decreasing order) are the size of the memory interface (128-bit or even better, 256-bit), and how many pixels per clock tick the card processes. Secondary importance is the actual clock speed of the graphics processor – if you can push more bits through per tick, you are ahead of the game, so to speak.

Okay, armed with this information, I first take the path of least resistance – a block away from my house is an Office Depot, and they have in their nice new store a grand total of four graphics cards for sale. Two of them are AGP cards – which don’t fit in my Dell. Two of them are PCI cards, which are so crappy that they aren’t much of an improvement over the integrated graphics that I already have. I return home, go online to Newegg.com, and find an ATI card that is about $100 that seems to offer the most promise. Remember, the old PCI cards aren’t the shiny new ones that ATI and nVidia are currently making, so you aren’t going to get a lot of horsepower here. But at least I will have something that (assuming that I got the right part), will give a bit of a boost to my (now looking a bit aged) Dell.

So now I start thinking about trying to buy a PC with a decent graphics card pre-installed from the major online retailers. And after about an hour surfing around the Web, I have come to the conclusion that it is nearly impossible. Most of the lower-end model PCs come with Intel or otherwise low-end integrated video circuitry, which is how I ended up with the configuration that I have. Forget about buying a laptop with decent graphics, unless you want to pay lots of dough and have to buy an asbestos shield for your legs if you actually intend to use it on your lap.

Dell sells a couple of desktop models, the Dimension E521 and C521, which can be configured with ATI X1300 Pro cards. You will end up paying close to $1000 for these models, by the time you outfit them with enough RAM (I recommend 2 GB these days) and a few other essentials. The X1300 Pro is what I would call the lowest high-end graphics card you should get, meaning that they sell plenty others that can deliver more firepower (and also cost more than the base PC too). But that is the total selection you have from Dell when it comes to buying something with better graphics at a reasonable price-point. They do sell their XPS line with lots of other higher-end options, including graphics card choices, but those start at $2,000 and quickly go up from there to nearly twice that.

HP and Lenovo only sell desktop models with integrated graphics chips, at least of the models that I examined. Gateway had a lot more choices of graphics cards, but you had to first de-select the default option for buying Microsoft Office before you went into configuring the PC – that was annoying. And they only sold PCs with Intel CPUs, which is also annoying, because many gamers prefer the AMD processors. I could get a decent PC for a little bit more than $1300, with a higher-end nVidia GeForce 7900GT, or if I wanted to spend more I could go to the top of the ATI line and pay for a X1900 dual-card solution. Clearly, they get the whole gaming thing over at Gateway.

Are you still with me here? How hard does someone have to look to find what they want to buy? And I haven’t even gotten to my DirectX horror stories either. I’ll save that for another day, because once you get your graphics card, you have to deal with the many splendored thing that is DirectX, and match the right version with what your game and card requires.

Now, some of you might be saying at this point, Strom, you are being silly, because any serious gamer is not going with Dell or Gateway, but going to either built it themselves or buy the ultra-high-end lines line like VoodooPC (now owned by HP) or Alienware (now owned by Dell). These machines start at around $4000, though. There is a long way to go from the $500-$1000 ordinary PCs that most people are buying from the major retailers.
(Read Rob Enderle’s excellent analysis over here at TGDaily.)

Graphics is going to be a big deal in the coming year, as more people with Vista-ready machines realize exactly how unready they will be with their miserable integrated graphics cards. And it is too bad that the retailers can’t do a good job of putting the products together that will make sense for this market. And it is also too bad that there seems to be a hole in the marketplace between the ultra-high end PC (at $3000 and up) and the PCs that most of us will pay for that are about half to a third of that.

Why the boo.com comeback makes sense

My good friend Tristan Louis has some rather insightful things to say about the lessons learned at boo.com, past and present. They were one of the early dot-com flame outs that is being reborn yet again.

Tristan worked there during the early days, and it is instructive to see just how far the world of ecommerce has evolved since that time in terms of multiple currency support, fulfillment services, image handling, avatars and more.

Web 2.0 site makeover strategies

Web 2.0, the long tail, social networking, tagging, AJAX. These days, enterprises who put up plain Jane Web sites aren’t enough to engage and satisfy the more discerning browsing customer. It might be time to do a Web site makeover and give it a bit of zing and pizzazz. But matching the right Web 2.0 developer to what you need isn’t easy.

The problem is that nowadays, just putting up a page of links and a couple of images aren’t engaging enough to attract visitors to your little spot of cyberspace. In this story for Techweb and Information Week, I talk about some of the lessons that others have learned and give some guidance on matching your needs with your developer’s skills.

So you have to move your office?

From an IT manager friend of mine who is involved in moving his offices across town:

• Cutting IT’s space in half, but expecting us to bring all of our “stuff.”
• Figuring out what to let the movers move and what IT will move ourselves.
• Getting access to the loading docks of the old building and the new building
• Getting keys to the new building (one key for 6 people. Great)
• Having no input on furniture selection, and therefore, no place for public printers. Clueless VP says, “Gosh, we didn’t think of that.” Well we did! And you didn’t want our input.
• Developing a solid relationship with the VOIP and cabling vendor to where they say they wished they had someone like me at all of their clients. That was when they were pitching for our business. Now, after they have it, they don’t return my calls.
• Dealing with XO. This is the worst and a story in itself. They host our DNS and they really have a great web based DNS management system. No more emails to “support” with your DNS changes and waiting 48 hours. We had originally signed with Allegance, which was bought by XO. Even though it’s 2 years ago, when you call for support, no one can help you, because you were an Allegance customer and you have to get special help from a special group, which I’m not sure even exists, and they don’t call you back. Probably spent 3 hours on hold over 2 days and have no choice. Remember, we’re moving.
• Going from a carpeted office with a window (albeit onto a courtyard, but nevertheless) to a room outside of the new server room with no carpet and no window.
• And the number one pain-in-neck reason: six extra subway stops.

IM Profits for VARs

VARs should learn from their teenaged children and get on board the Instant messaging (IM) train. IM can solve a lot of problems as enterprise IT managers look for ways to clear out spam-filled email boxes, integrate far-flung project teams, and offer more productive uses of their communications infrastructure. With IM, corporate staff can multitask and carry on multiple conversations, find out if someone is available to answer a quick question, and other tasks that are cumbersome to do with emails and phone calls. VARs that aren’t yet facile with IM should get more involved in this technology and understand the numerous integration opportunities that IM offers.

In this month’s story for eWeek, I discuss several important trends in the IM space that VARs can capitalize on.

Why Microsoft has lost the API war

This excellent piece by Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) about why Redmond’s APIs are no longer relevant. Well worth the time to read.

The virtual doorbuster

It is that time of year again, time when we pack our families in the car and try to experience that unique American experience of togetherness, where we can all share the common things that made us thankful for being part of such a great nation. A time to celebrate our freedoms as a people. A time of toleration and joy, as we remember others who are less fortunate.

You might think that I am talking about stuffing one’s faces full of turkey products tomorrow. And while Thanksgiving is notable, it is the day after when we really get started in the holiday spirit. Commonly known as Black Friday, this is the first major mall experience of the holiday season and what really brings many Americans together. A time of tolerance, when searching for a parking spot dwarfs the time spend actually in the mall itself. A time when waiting in line in front of a store before it opens at some unholy hour is considered normal, and expected. A time when grown men and women are reduced to comic book versions of themselves, fighting each other over the sighting of a rare toy or other gift item.

But this year the shopping season started early, with the twin delivery of new gaming consoles by Sony and Nintendo last week. There were reports of drive-by violence as would-be shoppers waiting in line late in the evenings, and that was before anyone actually got inside the stores to fight over who got the goods. Regrettable as these incidents were, I find something else that is noteworthy and what has motivated me to write this missive.

It is called the doorbuster, meaning that a retailer puts a popular item up for sale on Friday but at a heavy discount, knowing that once the shopper is inside the store they will buy other stuff that isn’t at a discount and will cover their losses. Typically, there are limited quantities of the doorbuster, meaning that you have to be one of the first shoppers in the store to grab the item. Thus the feeding frenzy begins, and why people are out at the malls at 6 am.

Well, what got me interested is what is called the virtual doorbuster: Amazon offered up the new Nintendo Wii consoles on their site last weekend, but according to the NY Times they were sold out within a matter of seconds. What, they only stocked about, say a dozen of them? What a surprise! And of course, some gamers were pulling all-nighters refreshing their browsers, waiting for the store to begin selling the consoles.

But this is noteworthy, because the demands of a virtual doorbuster item will be tough for Web site operators to program, let alone for the buying public to find anything. The Times article mentions the lack of information that potential buyers had during this promotion – unlike the real doorbuster situation where you can drive by the mall and see the length of the line outside the door and get a feel for whether you will be in the running or not.

Clearly, there is still some programming work to be done here. And a great deal of Web traffic load-balancing too.

What I found impressive about the Sony PS3 midnight madness was how well managed things were – at one SoCal store, the manager had signs saying exactly how many units were available, so you could calculate your chances of getting one pretty accurately. Of course, we are dealing with geeks here, so no surprise.

Last month, when our local baseball team won the World Series (I think they are named after some local bird), they put on a free victory celebration down at the new stadium (named after some local bigwig family). All the tickets were gone within a few minutes, and again you had some minimal feedback that you were in the “waiting room” but no idea of how many people were in the room with you. And no, I didn’t get any tickets. My sister had a similar experience trying to get free circus tickets through her company’s intranet, and she wasn’t successful either. Clearly, this is a going trend.

So are we are now seeing an evolution of ecommerce that will benefit the ultra-twitchy types that can spend all night refreshing their browser screens? Will others attempt the virtual doorbuster with similar results? We’ll see. In the meantime, you can always get in your car on Friday and head for the mall at 6am, at least you will know where you stand.

In line.

The Truth Behind Joey Skaggs

Joey Skaggs is at it again, only this time, he really is selling a load of bs.

Skaggs, for those of you that don’t know, is a professional media hoaxster. I have written about him from time to time as he invents new exploits that continue to fool professional journalists around the world. He has come up with some zingers, gotten on CNN and other network TV and covered by the wire services and major metro newspapers dozens of times.

Skaggs is a character, no doubt. His hoaxes aren’t hastily constructed – some of them take years of preparation and dozens of volunteers who act out various roles. Laying the trap takes time too as he builds up a phony history that he uses later to confuse his reporters. I’ve known him for about 15 years and some of his media pranks are priceless. He set up a computerized jurisprudence system called the Solomon Project that found OJ guilty, a bordello for dogs, a portable confessional booth that was attached to a bicycle that he rode around one of the Democratic conventions, a miracle drug made from roaches, a company buying unwanted dogs to use them as food, and more. Every one of his setups is seemingly genuine, which is how the media fall for them and report them as real. Only after his clips come in does he reveal the wizard behind the curtain and come clean that it all was phony.

His latest project is a bit more tangible, and luckily for his potential journalist marks, something that they can cover without having to worry about looking too foolish later on. It is an analog watch with a sound chip that moos. As in a cow. Or more appropriately, a bull. He calls it his “Universal bs detector watch.” When you are in the presence of someone who is telling you a tall tale, or some other unlikely truthiness, you press the button and the watch flashes and emits the moo, along with another sound that you might recognize. It is actually a fairly attractive watch, although somewhat bigger than I’d like for my taste. You can order one online here.

Of course, given Skaggs’ nature, one might doubt that placing an order will actually get the goods, but Skaggs assures me that he isn’t a criminal and will gladly ship watches as promised.

He sent me a DVD of two of his legit appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and an A&E special hosted by one of my all time favorite people, James Randi, (who devotes himself to debunking various myths and pseudo-science quacks).

Skaggs has appeared before in his many “disguises” (some are so awful that you wonder what the reporters were thinking when you see them), but these two appearances he was playing himself, and telling the reporter why he does what he does, and how he gets away with his hoaxes so often. Watching these should be part of any j-school curriculum.

What impressed me from watching these old clips was how hard it is to get the media to admit their mistakes and issue a retraction after Skaggs comes clean. Many of you know that I write for the New York Times. And when I have had a minor factual error in my article. I was impressed with how quickly my editor got those posted, and how the Times treats these corrections on their Web pages afterwards – the notation is at the top of the page, and the correction runs at the bottom of the article.

But Skaggs’ events are more than minor factual errors. He is the centerpiece of their reporting, and it is amazing how little reporters investigate, in some cases ignore, the clues that he liberally sprinkles around for anyone to pick up. This is Skaggs’ genius, and why he continually gets his hoaxes on the air and in print.

Most of the news media don’t cover Skaggs when they realize that they have been had – in some cases, they merely remove the piece from their archives, as if they never ran it. This isn’t right.

One of the challenges of the Web is how easy it is to rewrite history, or present something that is factual when it is a bold-faced lie. How many of us believe what we read on Wikipedia, or when we Google something, and take it as the gospel truth? At least on Wikipedia, you can view the prior revisions of a particular article if you are really interested.

Skaggs shows us that we have to be more skeptical and dig deeper to get at the facts. But he also shows us that trusting the Internet for our main source of information comes at a risk that this information isn’t properly vetted. It is something we all need reminding from time to time. And speaking of time, I have this great watch that moos that can remind me that occasionally, things aren’t as they always seem.

The Time is Now to Encrypt Your Hard Drive

One of the worst things that can happen to a road warrior on a business trip is to have your laptop stolen. It happened to me a few years ago, right out of the trunk of my car outside a suburban shopping mall. Someone saw me load the car up with a few packages, and they not only took my laptop but — the bummer of it all — all of my purchases that I had made at the mall.

In my inaugural column for PGP Corporation’s Web storefront, I talk about ways that you can protect yourself from this situation. I’ll be writing a regular series for them on security and encryption topics, and hope you check it out.

Questions to ask for picking the right endpoint health tool

Keeping your remote laptops healthy is not an easy task these days. Infections are everywhere, and once these PCs leave the shelter of your enterprise network, they can easily get filled with malware, rootkits, and viruses.

To help stem this tide, various endpoint security vendors have created solutions that take the form of appliances to assess laptop and other endpoint health. The hard part is in understanding how they differentiate their wares and what are the consequences for how they interact with your network infrastructure.

In this story for SearchNetworking.com called “NAC underneath the covers”, I put together a brief guide of questions you need to ask your vendor, and understand where these solutions fit into your overall networking and security infrastructures.