big-iron posts

Ahh, the data center's heart and brain, the server room. Dim, cavernous, off-limits to most of our coworkers, and bathed in the soothing dual ambiences of CPU fans and high-powered air-conditioning, they're the perfect place to take a moment to cool off after a tough call or a sprint across a plague-wracked parking lot. All those boxen, miles of Cat6 just the way we want it, chilled to a component-friendly sixty-something degrees.

Well, so much for that particular workplace fantasy. We've spoken previously about the positive aspects of greener, more energy-efficient computing, but now they've gone too far. Folks have finally noticed that facilities cooling is one of the biggest costs for server rooms and data centers, and the thermostat is being kicked up to save money. Way up.

Apparently, there's some big event of some sort happening in Los Angeles this week. Supposed to be a huge deal in the video game industry, something like that? Lots of news? Anyone know what all the fuss is about?

BI just keeps seeing poorly-lit phone-cam pictures of hotel rooms from Callaham's Twitter feed and snarky IM's from our head honcho about how long the line at Starbucks is.

Why, yes, BI wasn't able to make it to the E3 party (apologies to the fine folks at $Unspecified_Vendor, at whose party we were not able to cause chaos the likes of which would be spoken of in hushed tones for decades to come; maybe next year). Truthfully, we're not actually bitter about it. Given the flood of news that's been coming from this year's edition of the expo, hardware, especially for anyone not using a console and/or prone to waving things around, seems to be pretty much an afterthought.

Well, there was a particularly festive flight sim joystick. Thank you, Logitech.

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.

We were halfway to Betelgeuse when the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters kicked in. We had two bags of--

... but first, we interrupt this column to bring you a Public Service Announcement:


At some point, whether it's because you're doing something warranty-voiding, or just because it's the worst possible time, the specter of data loss is going to rear its inconvenient head, maw dripping with negated bits. Whether this results in an epic cascade of profanity and spontaneous weeping, or just some muttering and the retrieval of some storage media is directly proportional to how recent your last backup was.

Yes, this falls solidly into the realm of Stuff You Think About Moments After It Will Do You Any Good Whatsoever, right up there with taking a headlong plunge into a room of whelp eggs, tasting day-old fugu, or doing that thing with the mayonnaise and the goat.

We spend most of our time in this space discussing the various ways we can make our games run faster, or look better, and rightfully so. However, that leaves out a fairly substantial portion of what brings us atmosphere and immersion in what we're doing (or, in some cases, what we're doing when we ought to be doing something else).

That something is audio. And no matter how good your sound card is, whether it's the motherboard's onboard offering or an add-on audio device, if your speakers suck, your gaming (and music-listening, and movie-watching, and Hulu-surfing) experience is going to suffer.

But first, let's see what everyone's using to turn those little electric impulses into sound waves:

Ardent fans of this column will doubtless have noticed that BI has been a little, shall we say, thin on the ground of late. There are two main reasons for this -- one, BI's biennial sojourn to the other side of the country for a week of testosterone poisoning, and, two, a multi-week stint with a rather demanding guest around the house.

The guest in question, however, wasn't an unemployed former college buddy, a surprise visit from the in-laws, or a couch-surfing second cousin. It was, rather, a sixty pound, gloss-black obelisk -- Alienware's top-of-the-line gaming system, the Area-51 X58, tricked out by them with damn near every bell, whistle, and go-fast toy in their arsenal. And BI had their blessing to, and we quote this with great relish, "Send it back as a smoking pile of slag. But, seriously, watch Iron Man on the Blu-Ray drive first."

We were skeptical. Surely, entrusting someone of BI's questionable restraint with a valuable piece of equipment would carry more stringent usage guidelines than, "Give it back when we ask for it." They were adamant -- this was the third such system released to the wild, and they wanted it to be abused.

Fortunately, the conference call ended before our mad laughter began.

We've had the Mimo UM-710 display in the Big Iron slag pit during the weeks since our initial coverage, and have taken the opportunity to see how it works in the real world.

Starting from the very first impression, the UM-710 comes in a very functional and cleanly-designed box, which is both sturdy and easy to open, and did a fine job of cradling the unit in transit. There are all of four components in it (plus a driver CD and manual): the screen, the stand, the finger-friendly screw that holds them together, and the USB cable. The cable features dual jacks at the PC end, in case a single port isn't able to push sufficient juice to drive the display; on BI's home rig, this wasn't necessary.

Due to the relatively modest length of the USB cable (6'), if your box sits on the floor, you're probably going to need to utilize the USB port(s) on or near the top of your case or jack into the nearest USB hub; the one(s) on your current monitor, if present, would be pretty much ideal for this.

As mentioned in our preview, it's advertised as a three-step, five-minute install, compatible with OSX and both 32 and 64 bit flavors of Windows. BI is pleased to report that this is absolutely true -- affix the screen to the stand in the desired orientation, plug it in, and put the install disk in. The only minor snag we encountered was that the installation window didn't close after it was complete.

Okay, no, not quite, but no collection of hideous headline puns that juicy escapes us. The news from Nvidia's neck of the woods is that the Green Eyeball Gang has gotten a bit cozier with both Dell and Apple this week.

For gamers, this certainly doesn't suck on either front, especially since there's a rather tasty bit in the Dell-centric press release that says, "the Dell Studio XPS 13 eliminates the typical notebook compromise between performance and battery life by offering two GeForce GPUs to give users the option of running one GPU for longer battery life, or combining both for greater performance."

SLI? On MY laptop?

To quote the great Federation philosopher J.L. Picard, "Make it so." (h/t to one of my WoW guildies, from whom that line was shamelessly appropriated). Admittedly, the benchmark figures cited (Futuremark and, the not-precisely-cutting-edge 3Dmark06) are a little bit cherry-picked (they're anything but apples-to-apples). Light snark aside, there's certainly no shortage of interest in having a potent but portable rig, especially if your budget dictates that you're going to have to choose either a desktop, or a desktop replacement.

We all love upgrades -- whether it's just an additional stick of memory, a new sound card, or a whole new rig -- but there's the small matter of what to do with the upgraded-from stuff. At some point, all your tech-averse family members will have systems built out of your cast-off components, and want something a tad more potent than a P3 800. At the same time, your significant other, who has caught onto the fact that fragging you is an excellent way of relieving stress, will demand to be on equal technical footing.

You are, in short, eventually going to be stuck with some dead tech. Or, as a reader of this column, something more akin to a moderately-sized drift of it. The laws of physics being what they are, and lacking a handy TARDIS in most of our spare bedrooms, we will eventually need to do something about it.

There is a tremendous amount of discussion as far as what to do when your PC reaches end-of-life (and, truly, this has hit close to home for BI, as the three-year old Dell at his day job gave him the electronic middle finger, and summarily refused to boot this week, earning much-needed retirement, and subsequent replacement with a shinier, faster, and far less recalcitrant black obelisk).

But what should you do with that dead tech? Googling "old computers never die" yields more than six million results.