Digital Life - Mind Numbing
I plodded the halls of Digital Life this morning but found myself unable to bear it for more than an hour. It wasn't the banners that touted some de-voweled word to indicate a product or even the seeming confusion of the hall itself. I could have withstood the overall loudness of the place that made talking to someone next to you more like yelling at someone on a cellphone.
No, it was the general mind numbing nature of the place that drove me out. Before you get the wrong idea, let me preface this by saying I'm about to reach the age of 55. Obviously, I've outlived my usefulness to society and should be sent to Carousel. Still, I dare express an opinion.
I had only to look around the floor at the faces of my fellow plodders to see their own numb looks. (And the show had only been open for 2 hours when I arrived!) Likewise, watching the vacant stares of hundreds while they peered at a screen and let their fingers react reflexively on game controllers was also mind numbing. It was torn from the pages of science fiction.
About the only to departures from the monotony of zombie-ism were the Intel and Crucial booths. The Intel booth guy tried to defend his company's Core 2 Duo while I quoted benchmark results noting that the C2D Extreme is not really much faster than than the older Pentium 840 Extreme under some conditions (like when you actually want the CPU to do work and not just pass things along).
The Crucial guy openly admitted that, as a matter of practical performance import, Crucial's "SLI compatible" memory was really more a matter of feeling good than doing anything noticeable. To be fair, his words were more to the effect that if you had an SLI graphics setup on a motherboard with an nVidia specific chipset, you could be assured that the memory was working at its peak performance level --whether or not that was specifically better than, for example, its Ballistix memory might be.
My conclusion is that I wasn't at Digital Life. This was Digital Limbo, if not the cliff to Digital Death. Thanks. But I really don't want any of it.
No, it was the general mind numbing nature of the place that drove me out. Before you get the wrong idea, let me preface this by saying I'm about to reach the age of 55. Obviously, I've outlived my usefulness to society and should be sent to Carousel. Still, I dare express an opinion.
I had only to look around the floor at the faces of my fellow plodders to see their own numb looks. (And the show had only been open for 2 hours when I arrived!) Likewise, watching the vacant stares of hundreds while they peered at a screen and let their fingers react reflexively on game controllers was also mind numbing. It was torn from the pages of science fiction.
About the only to departures from the monotony of zombie-ism were the Intel and Crucial booths. The Intel booth guy tried to defend his company's Core 2 Duo while I quoted benchmark results noting that the C2D Extreme is not really much faster than than the older Pentium 840 Extreme under some conditions (like when you actually want the CPU to do work and not just pass things along).
The Crucial guy openly admitted that, as a matter of practical performance import, Crucial's "SLI compatible" memory was really more a matter of feeling good than doing anything noticeable. To be fair, his words were more to the effect that if you had an SLI graphics setup on a motherboard with an nVidia specific chipset, you could be assured that the memory was working at its peak performance level --whether or not that was specifically better than, for example, its Ballistix memory might be.
My conclusion is that I wasn't at Digital Life. This was Digital Limbo, if not the cliff to Digital Death. Thanks. But I really don't want any of it.
posted by Bill at 1:54 PM
4 Comments:
Hey Bill...did you ever writeup your results with the Conroe anywhere else than in "TNL Labs?" Every other review of the chip out there seems to mak it out to be the best thing for the desktop since the hard drive was invented.
Nope... I've been saving it.
For a rainy day?
A poor one, maybe...
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