combustables -
I feel compelled to chime in in your support here...
I try to answer as many questions as I can here, both to be of service, and because I learn a lot of things that may be handy to me as I throw together the seven systems currently on my 'to be built' list. I have TRIED to overlook the ignorance, the egregious misspellings, the inability to form a grammatically correct sentence; sometimes I just can’t resist commenting. GOD forbid! The PC Police are always lurking to jump down your throat. I blame it mostly on the educational system, and the media.
Charles Murray (of ‘Bell Curve’ fame [or infamy, depending upon your attitude toward his revelations]) recently wrote a book about our education system, and its systemic failings; some of his points, I feel, are cogent to this matter, and bear repeating:
A. Half the population, BY DEFINITION, is BELOW AVERAGE! “You can lead a horse to water, but you CAN”T teach him calculus!” If you have minimal, or no, math skills; if you never did well in (or avoided completely) science courses – you probably SHOULDN’T be attempting to build a computer… The PC idiots have promoted the idea that everything (and everyone) is equal; that an PET scan (based on particle physics, and incredibly complex computer geometric analysis), Christian Science (based on faith that some possible omnipotent being will take responsibility to heal you), and homeopathic medicine (based on consuming poisonous ‘antidotes’ at dilutions beyond one molecule per MORE than the number of atoms in the WHOLE KNOWN UNIVERSE), are equally valid – are simply a difference of opinion. Well, I’m here to say that your
opinion that your pile of parts SHOULD work together to
somehow ‘become’ a computer will
NOT make it function!
B. More than half the recent products of this educational system have an attention span that does not extend much beyond texting two lines of grammar-free nonsense full of ‘texting contractions’, which also means they have NO frustration tolerance. They’ve never been asked to ‘stretch’ their minds, to tackle something
beyond their immediate grasp. Everything in their path has been so ‘dumbed-down’ that they assume
any endeavor requiring more than an hour is somehow
intrinsically faulty. I spent more than a hundred hours doing ‘due diligence’ research for my upcoming workstation build before ever ordering part one! These kids literally can’t imagine such an undertaking, much less believe that it might be necessary. They don’t ‘get’ the underlying math (
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254636-30-memory-voltage ), and they petulantly
“want what when they want it” – the fastest parts advertised, with no comprehension of what they’re paying for, or getting, or what may be required to make them function. The computer media contribute to this problem. Their articles (to suit their confirmed knowledge about their readership) are too short to contain adequate technical discussion to expose potential problems (which their average reader doesn’t want to have to try to read, anyway…); take a ‘cheer-leader’ approach [see 1 below] to make their advertisers happy; and often present a computer ‘build’ in less than two pages, making it appear as if getting a dozen or two disparate parts to function together was merely a matter of assembly. The
underlying problem here is that, if the parts themselves were technically and electronically ‘dumbed-down’, to the point where anything would work with anything (which is certainly, in most cases, possible – I hardly ever answer a question about getting 667 RAM to work), there would be NO ‘high-performance’ systems – no real
REASON to ‘roll your own’. You certainly can’t
BUY the parts cheaper than Dell, when they order in ten or hundred thousand lots. Such a ‘dumbing-down’ of underlying specifications would eliminate the X48 MCH, PC-9600 RAM, and Q9660 CPUs – and what would remain as the point?
C. The PC police, based on this erroneous assumption of
essential equivalency, will argue that poor grammar, and worse spelling don’t matter. But they
DO! When I read a post full of jumbled ideas and ridden with unbelievable misspellings, I
immediately know that I’m dealing with someone whose jumbled thinking and basic ignorance will become a problem, if not
THE problem. (Try this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/254649-30-ep35c-dsr3-problem ) If you don’t think this is FAIR (by the way – let me point out right here that LIFE is NOT fair), read Noam Chomsky to explore the relationship between command of language, and the ability to accurately manipulate abstract thoughts – they’re one and the same… You may not like those assumptions (and you might do well to give some thought to what a prospective employer will assume about your capabilities when you present him with an incomprehensible application full of misspellings, a bead in your nose, and an offensive tattoo on your wrist), but they are joined in reality by a high degree of statistical correlation; no amount of ‘opinion’, or ‘belief’, or ‘wish’, on your part will alter that correlation!
Sorry if I’ve offended (and I’m quite sure that I have), but every word can be confirmed just by going to New Egg’s ‘Eggspert’ forum and reading the posts!
1 – I used to subscribe to PC Magazine, as they were fairly technical, and basically honest in their reviewing. This was back during the days when the physical retrieval of a data stream from a hard drive was so slow, that there was much to be gained by doing LZW compression in hardware, on the way in and out. One day I received an issue in which they reviewed a drive controller card which they were
never able to make work, although they tried it in several systems, and had access to a level of tech support from the manufacturer ( who, since, I am glad to report, has gone out of business) that no user could ever get – and they wound up giving it an eight or nine rating, out of a possible ten,
BASED ON THE FEATURES LISTED ON THE BOX!!! Needless to say, that very day, I sent them my cancellation notice!
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