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BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005

Orchid and Onion Awards

By Jerry Pournelle

February 7, 2005

(Orchid and Onion Awards :  Page 1 of 1 )



Column 294 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Orchids, Onions, and the Users' Choice Awards

Chaos Manor Users' Choice Awards are given to systems we particularly recommend because we have found them highly useful. Chaos Manor Orchids are not easily come by; think of the Users' Choice Award as a huge Orchid bouquet.

The annual Orchid and Onion Parade has been a feature of this column for at least twenty years.

The System of the Year, with a Chaos Manor User's Choice Award, goes to the AMD Athlon 64 CPU chip installed on an ASUS A8N-SLI-Deluxe motherboard. Ours uses Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA drives. The ASUS board employs NVIDIA support chips. Install the latest AMD Athlon 64 CPU and NVIDIA SLI video board (or two boards; SLI = Scalable Link Interface, and allows you to use two video boards, each covering events on half the screen, to get really fast video action) and you will have a screaming game machine.

Install a less expensive Athlon 64 chip and scale back on the NVIDIA video board, and you will have an office machine as good as you'll need along with a system that can play games with all but the very best of them. Large Orchids, and the Chaos Manor User's Choice Award to AMD, ASUS, and NVIDIA for producing the system of the year.

A very large Chaos Manor Orchid to Peter Diamandis and his Ansari X-Prize competition. The dramatic flights of SpaceShipOne captivated the nation and got people interested in manned space flight again, perhaps this time for good. More Chaos Manor Orchids to Paul Allen for paying for SpaceShipOne and TheWhiteKnight, and to Burt Rutan for building them. And a big bouquet for the ships.

An Orchid to Google for its Google Desktop search engine, which has actually made it possible to find things on my own hard disk as quickly as I can find them among the billions of items on the Web. And a small but smelly Onion, also to Google, for allowing commercials and commercial links to clutter up its engine so that sometimes the home page for a product is about 5 pages down, buried by comparison prices and hype sites.

 Page 1 of 1 


BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2005
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