Slashdot Mirror
Couple Bonding Through PC Building
mikemuch writes "When his lovely girlfriend Glenda needed a new PC, Jason Cross, who spends much of the week assembling PCs with the latest gear to test for ExtremeTech, decided he would let her build it herself. She gave him her list of needs, he came up with a part list, and then watched as she did all the screwdriver wielding herself. Despite a DOA hard drive and some mis-connected wires, everyone was smiling when it was all finished. (Slide show here.)"
Person puts computer together while boyfriend watches. Why is this on the front page of slashdot?
Waffles rock.
When his lovely girlfriend Glenda needed a new PC, Jason Cross, who spends much of the week assembling PCs with the latest gear to test for ExtremeTech, decided he would let her build it herself.
This article doesn't read so much as "hey guys, it's possible for a girl to put together a PC", so much as it reads "Hey guys, look at my girlfriend. No, really, I have one. Let me show you her."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Geek has girlfriend. Film at 11.
Look, I'm sure this was fun, and all, but seriously... When did "Stuff that matters" become "Some guy's holiday snaps."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
But, when the nice priest tries to "girlfriend" your ass, it's OK to call him a bad man.
This is the sort of thing that should have been introduced in schools ages ago. Especially with the number of outdated computers they've gotten rid of. These would be perfect fodder for hardware classes.
And it really doesn't take more than a couple hours for all the kids to get a hands on experience with it.
Look at his girl! Come on. This fake as can be. Notice the well exposed photos too. Is her Boyfriend an expert at photography too?
HOT CHICK was a dead give away. FAKE.
She's using a power-screwdriver on a computer????
For crying out loud, it's a computer case, not a swingset and not furniture... The point of the screw is to hold things in place, not to fix them so fast that they are going to be resistant to coming out.
I was taught that you _ALWAYS_ hand-tighten screws on a computer case, and even then only just to the point that it just stops turning freely, because that way you won't accidentally strip the threads.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
he made her install Vista. Shame to build such a nice box, and put the worst possible OS on it.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I'm a girl. I build and rip apart computers all the time. And every time I do, MY girlfriend is always bugging me to let her get in there with the screwdriver! Maybe I should write up a story and take some pictures: "The lesbian geek couple mess with computer innards!" Oooohhh.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Krishnamurti
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Go to the Firehose and bury inconsequential stories.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
It appears to be the first story tagged under "relationships" and the second tagged as "romance." Next up look for "recipes", "ab crunches" and "what he REALLY wants in bed!"
Having seen this screen shot I had to ask, what is a Windows Experience Index? It seems this machine has a score of 5.6. Great, what's that out of Microsoft? 10? That's pretty crappy. Maybe it's out of six?
So I googled for a bit and eventually found this page. Which says "The base scores currently range from 1 to 5.9." WTF? So it's out of 4.9 and you just add 1 for fun, is that it? I wonder if it's a linear scale or what.. maybe it's logarithmic.
If this is how broken the business rules of their software are, I can only imagine how broken the implementation must be.
Microsoft, you're a disgrace.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Heavy Internet surfing (multiple windows)
Store and play plenty of music
Store and manage big digital art files, including many-layered Photoshop files
Operate quietly
Play the latest games without turning details way down Dropping $400 on a GPU when gaming is at the bottom of her list then skimping on $100 of memory when she's trying to run large PSDs on Vista screams of a gamer who once again ignored what he was being asked to get in favor of what he thought was cool.
2GB of ram will just about get Vista running with a little left over for smaller PSDs. The size PSDs she's talking about will be thrashing the hard drive to run. Doubling that ram up to 4GB, what's generally regarded as the sweet spot for Vista anyway, and dropping to a $300 graphics card would serve her far better for her main needs and let her still run pretty much any modern game with pretty decent quality settings.
But, hey, he gets to reassure himself it's a sweet gaming rig with that quad core processor and the 8800. Just a shame that was lowest on her list of requirements and likely added after a few rounds of, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to play games? I know they're not your main focus. But surely you'd like the option, right?"
Even ignoring that she plays Civ IV and Oblivion (both of which will run just fine on much cheaper hardware), he commits a cardinal sin amongst gamers too: He bought what he figured would be great for running a game in the future (Spore), not what was needed for her level of gaming now. Spore won't be out until sometime next year and probably late spring at the earliest from what they're saying. That $100 off the GPU now wouldn't cost her much right now, would get her the memory that would really aid her, and she'll likely want to upgrade to whatever the latest and greatest GPU is in a year's time for Spore anyway. At that point, it'll be pretty much guaranteed that $300 on nVidia's 9xxx series will beat $400 on the 8xxx series now and have whatever fun and exciting new features the 9xxx series has that nVidia worked with Maxis to get in to Spore.
It's cool to share building their PC with your girlfriend/wife/mother/friend/anyone who wouldn't normally build one, giving them a real sense of ownership and achievement with their new PC. But fooling yourself in to believing they need what you think is cool, rather than actually listening to their needs, is a great way to undo a lot of that when they realize they got you something cool rather than built what was right for them.
And, yes, this comes from a guy who sat there while his wife tapped on dozens of keyboards because she figured I'd make sure it simply worked and so the most important thing to her was the keyboard felt right. To me, that was crazy. To her, it was what mattered. So, crazy or not, I listened and made sure she got what felt perfect to her.
This is just another way of saying: "Hey, World! Here on Slashdot, we consider women far inferior to men when it comes to technology. We can't imagine girls interested in computers, so we will make it a headline whenever a girl tries something techy."
Come on!
Insert `fortune -o` here
Friends don't let friends install Vista.
Her name is Glenda, so she runs Plan 9 (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/glenda.html)
I'm usually not one that compares slashdot with the digg, but seeing TFA I have to wonder whether this might have something to do with the firehose being recently opened to the everyone? As we know from all sorts of media, be it TV (24h "news" networks), digg, youtube etc. the most popular story isn't necessarily the most informative story (unfortunately quite the contrary).
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
From the article:
Fine, she likes Vista. But why Vista Ultimate? According to Microsoft's own comparison chart, ultimate just gives additional backup, encryption, remote desktop, and fax & scan capabilities... none of which are apparently needed from her list of needs.
Building a computer is the best inter-gender activity this guy came up with? He is a true geek.
"MOV HerStuff, YourPlace"
More like
MOV DX,AH
(yes, I know I lost 8 bits)
I reserve the write to mangle english.
And you wonder why IT is so short on females. It's because of the condescending ... ooooh, look, they can even build computers ... attitudes. Try working around that atmosphere for a few weeks and you'll either quit or be arrested for going postal.
The only hard part about building a computer - for females - is having some guy who thinks that his dick is an essential tool for building anything try to take over. It's no harder than, say, sewing up something with 17 pattern pieces. The instructions on recent mobos are easy to follow ... easier than the care tags on some clothing.
I think this is a great idea. If everyone who owned a PC was required to assemble it, we might have a more tech-savvy computer user base. Obviously this wouldn't work for large businesses, but for home?
There's a huge amount of learning that goes on when just assembling a PC for the first time, let alone picking parts. The first thing to go is the "Where's the hard drive again? That big box under my desk?" type of questions. The next thing that goes is the "I can't do it! You click the mouse for me and make it work" mentality. Computers are not rockets (anymore). They're commodity parts thrown together in a case, running (for most systems sold today anyway) a crappy OS that most ppl find "ok". And assembling the system by hand would give most people the vocabulary to talk intelligently about their systems.
Not to mention the social (gasp!) aspect of putting a computer together. You can learn a lot from someone just having them help you - and that help makes a bond. Maybe we geeks could benefit socially as a group if we all had manditory "help the neighbor assemble his/her computer" day.
As a girl, I'd have to say "so what" about this posting. I built my own Hack-intosh from spare parts and I'm in the process of doing it again for a friend. I'm the network administrator for a hospital. Shock! Horror! She knows how to build computers. Please, can everyone just get over it. It makes my blood boil when I see a tech story on girls being able to do to same tech work as men. Guys can claim hard physical labor, but women are very suited for tech work. Tests show we're better at logic problems, our hands are normally slimmer, so we can reach into small places, and women are statistically better team players.
While I can appreciate Glenda's (the girlfriend) desire to experience this, I pity the pain she'll feel over the next two years and I hope she blames her boyfriend. Whenever something goes wrong, she'll question herself of whether or not she did something wrong. When she calls him to fix it, he'll likely push it off as "This is your computer; you built it." When it can no longer handle new applications or games since 2GB is the realistic minimum for Vista, she'll wonder why her boyfriend let her install it when she could have been appreciating the speed of this system on Linux or XP.
Good learning experience. Here are the lessons:
Congratulations to Glenda for completing this task. Now you'll know better to take the easier, same-price route the next time.
...but I will not be lured into the naive and stupidly romantic gesture of telling everyone this will be "forever".
Relationships are not easy. I think it's precisely the fact that I'm determined to stay married that will enable me to do so. If I said "I'm not making any promises," that would create insecurity for both of us ("Did I make him mad? Does he want to leave?"), thereby making it more likely that we'd fight and give up.
Genuine commitment is a self-fulfilling prophecy - and so is the lack thereof.
So buying from ExtremeTech is supposed to get me laid or something?