Ramen Junkie

PC Hardware

Building a New PC

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I am extremely familiar with the insides and mechanics behind build a PC from scratch.  I’ve put together several machines for both personal use and at (my old) work.  I also have done numerous upgrades to hard drives, RAM, GPUs, etc over the years.  I’ve wired up cases for better cooling and upgraded a PC so much that I rebuilt the original PC with all of it’s original parts.

I’ve never ever bought all the parts at once to put them together as a cohesive whole at the same time.

In the recent move, I’ve gained an office space.  Part of my desire for this office space is that it’s not going to be where the kids hang out to play on the computer.  Unfortunately, I can’t just stick them with one of my extra older PCs, it’ll never work out.  So I’m using the opportunity to build myself a new gaming rig.  Computer components have gotten so ridiculously confusing these days.  The last time I seriously build a PC it was simple.  If the processor speed was higher, it was better.  A 2 GHZ PC was pretty much always going to be better than a 1.8ghz PC.  Unless it’s a Celeron, then it just sucked no matter what.

Now it’s all Cores and i7s, and i3s and Phenom IIs and crazy numbers that are mostly just ePeen related.  Fortunately I am aware than GPU means more to a PC than CPU.  That’s why I started with GPU.  My old machine actually performs much better than I would ever expect considering it’s only Dual core and it’s a stock Dell machine with a new GPU and some RAM.  The key was, I picked out a good GPU when I bought it.

So I did some research on benchmarks and performance and came up with a Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850.  It’s not a top of the line card but it ranks very highly and costs about half as much as the cards ranking similarly.  I’m still being budget conscious with my choices and trying to get the best value I can.

I then did move on to processor.  As I said, modern processors confuse me, so I started off looking into the AMD chip recommended by Amazon to go with the GPU.  It was a place to start more than anything.  I’ve had a lot of AMD CPUs and always liked them.  They used to be the top dog but I was pretty sure Intel had come back to the lead.

Some Google searching suggested that it’s not real great unless it’s overclocked and I’m not really interested in trying to overclock anything.  It’s not that I don’t think I could do it, it’s more than I don’t want to have to buy another $150 processor when I fuck it up.  One thread I found on this chip had several recommendations for the Intel i5 2500 3.3Ghz.  It’s a Quad Core chip.   I did a bit more research and decided to go for this chip.  Mostly my research was into i5 vs i7, but this i5 is supposed to be pretty decent.  Besides, CPU is less important and I’m going to better value with a good punch.

On a side note, I also am hazy on the details but I also know that more cores doesn’t always mean better.  4 cores doesn’t make this a 12 Ghz processor, not every application uses multiple cores.  However I do a fair amount of Photo editing with Photoshop and I do a fair amount of editing with Adobe Premier, BOTH programs I know benefit from using multiple cores.

At this point I threw on a compatible fan nothing fancy, it was cheap and ranked 1st in fans on Amazon so I bought it.  I also threw on a 500W power supply to run it all.  I have a 500W power supply but it’s got some bad bearings in the fans and runs loud.  I could probably fix it but electricity scares me and I am pretty sure power supplies can be dangerous even when un plugged.

all that was left was to tie it together with a motherboard.  I picked up one from the list of recommended ones, it’s listed as Gigabyte Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2133 LGA 1155 Motherboard GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 and is very Blue.

So, because it coordinates, I picked up 8 GB of Blue RAM with flashy cooling fins to go in it.

I didn’t need to get a case, I have a very large and nice case I bought last time I built a machine.  it is absolutely boring as hell in it’s designs but that was what I wanted, something that “wasn’t curvy and swoopy and neon and looked like a Riced up Honda PC”.

I’m not showing this thing off for looks.

I also already have some hard drives.  I have a 1 TB that I’ll probably stick in it out of my current machine.  It keeps disappearing from the OS, but I am 90% sure it’s because that stock Dell Power supply sucks and can’t handle running 3 hard drives and a GPU.

I also don’t need a Monitor.  I ordered a decently large LCD a week ago when I thought I was going to be running a different older machine in the office.

Anyway, I’m pretty stoked.  I also went in for the Amazon Prime trial so everything should be here by Thursday.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Copyright, SOPA, Why You Should Care

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So yesterday was “American Censorship Day”.  This was to… commemorate really REALLY is not the right word, maybe acknowledge or point out that yesterday Congress had a hearing about SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”.  There are plenty of sites out there talking about this better than I probably can explain but the general gist of the bill is that it would give the movie and music industry, the MPAA and the RIAA, the ability to have a website blocked by DNS servers if it contains infringing or protected copyrighted works.

Now, this is all feel good and great on paper.  If it passes we can block sites like the PirateBay or MegaUpload which are often used to distribute infringing materials.  But then, people often use Bittorrent to download infringing materials, it should probably get clocked too.  Then you have folks uploading TV shows and clips to Youtube, it should probably be blocked too, besides, that gives the secondary benefit of removing all of those entertaining cat videos people seem to prefer to watch instead of crappy sitcoms.  There is also that Facebook thing, where people like to post those videos, which infringe on IP, let’s block it too.

Granted, this is the whole “worst case scenario” mindset and I really doubt Facebook would be blocked.

At least not initially.

Before we get too off track, let’s point out that many people use ThePirateBay and MegaUpload and similar sites to distribute legitimate content.  Even if that’s pushing it, Bittorrent is definitely used for legitimate content.  Download bandwidth is relatively cheap but upload bandwidth is not.  Being able to distribute the file hosting system across hundreds and thousands of hosts with Bittorrent is excellent technology.

Back to the “major players” of Google (with Youtube) and Facebook, yeah, it is probably unlikely they would get blocked.  However, there is a greed mindset that comes in with unchecked power where Youtube could easily be a candidate to be blocked.  As I mentioned, people are increasingly growing interested in independently produced media, be it heavily produced independent films, video bloggers in their bedrooms and offices or even just some guy who filmed his cat for 8 hours and cut together a 30 second string of the best moments.

The movement towards disintermediated user generated content away from the big business models of expensive shows and movies and music is the true “enemy” of the music and record industry.  It’s just not real Politically Correct for the big bad media industry to blame the obvious because there isn’t anything they can really do about it in the end.  The internet revolution for lack of a better term is quickly killing the middleman economy of the past.  I’m not going to get too far off on this tangent though because it would make this even longer than it already is and it’s a topic I’d like to touch on in a separate post.

The point is… the big media giants can use SOPA to essentially close Youtube preventing a lot of independents from even getting exposure in the first place.  The desired and expected outcome would be that everyone comes crawling back to buying albums at $17 each that have 2 almost decent songs on them so they can make money hand over fist ripping off their customers like they did up until 10 years or so ago.

I should point out that I’m using Youtube pretty generically here as it’s interchangeable with pretty much any website centered around user generated content.

Now you might ask, “why would they shut down Youtube, why not just shut down the infringing channel/person?”  This is an excellent point, why can’t they do that?  Doesn’t shutting down a whole website seem a little extreme?  Here’s the punch line for ya, they ALREADY HAVE THIS ABILITY.  It’s called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.  Under the DMCA, if someone starts posting a bunch of episodes of Glee to Youtube, Fox can issue a DMCA takedown notice to Youtube and have those videos removed.  Simple, easy, somewhat effective.  The problem of course is that there is more Youtube content uploaded every minute (maybe it’s second) than there are hours in the day.  Policing all of the content for infringing videos is essentially impossible.  Youtube already has several systems scanners and algorithms in place that scan new uploads as they arrive but they aren’t 100% effective.

They can’t be.  People are clever.  They’ll slow the music down slightly so it doesn’t get caught.  They’ll flip the video of a scene so it doesn’t match.

Which brings up another point.  SOPA will do nothing to stop Internet piracy.  People will find a way if they want to pirate copyrighted materials.  DNS can be blocked but people will just start using the IP address of the websites being blocked.  People will use TOR Networks, people will use proxies that are out of the country (like they do in China which firewalls itself out of the rest of the world).  People will find a way.  PC games started getting ridiculous with their DRM yet there is always a crack available, often before the game is released.  Music on iTunes and other MP3 stores used to have DRM preventing unauthorized play and people figured out how to use the “analogue hole” or just burned them to CD then re-ripped them.  People will find a way.

The people who suffer from all of this tend to be the honest folks.  The guy who didn’t realize he could only authorize iTunes on 5 computers or devices or whatever and now he’s got a new machine and can’t play his songs.  Or the person who wants to play their new PC game on their laptop without having to carry the CD around but the game requires the CD for authorization.  Or worse, the game requires an internet connection to be played at all, which BTW, there are still many people WITHOUT regular internet access who still like to use PCs and play games and use software.

To stop what?  Pirates?  They downloaded an ISO that included a hacked EXE that breaks the encryption or DRM or need for the disc a week before the game was in stores.

The other side of this bill which is quite sinister is the lack of due process involved.  DMCA takedowns are bad enough as they don’t always require proof.  They also get issued against websites which use copyright materials under the Fair Use clause.  Fair use most often involves a copyrighted work being less than a certain length and used for parody or criticism purposes.  Like if a person has a music blog where they review songs, under fair use (I think, I’m not a lawyer) they would be allowed to embed 30 second clips of the tracks into the review.  This takes down entire websites without any due process and barely requires any actual proof of infringement.  Essentially if they say “take it down”, it goes.

The really terrible angle here, as they say, power corrupts and this bill gives too much power to people that don’t deserve it, is, for example, that hypothetical music review blog I mentioned.  Let’s say they are fairly harsh and don’t give too many positive reviews.  We can’t have this negativity floating around getting readers now, negative reviews affect our bottom line.  So the site gets a SOPA notice and disappears.

Criticism out of site, out of mind.

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