Alex Hopmann’s Blog

I posted a couple of weeks back about the spec for a media center box that I’m building. I’ve got most of the parts now and am building the machine soon (still waiting on the case) although initially I’m going to use it as a workstation machine rather than media-center.

While figuring this out I thought it would be interesting to compare what I was purchasing to an equivalent Dell machine. For years I always built my own PCs (before that I bought Macs). Then I realized probably back in 1998 or 1999 that certain Dell configurations were such great deals that it never made sense to built it yourself, just buy the crazy discounted Dell and upgrade whatever parts you needed to.

Starting a bit more than a year ago the Dell machines stopped being the same good deal. It pretty much can be traced to the introduction of the XPS line. The XPS were the “high end” machines, but never had good discounts. Initially the non-XPS machines could still be had at 40% off (some inflated price) but were available in configurations that either started out high-end or could be upgraded. For example one of my machines was initially a 2.4ghz P4 Dell that I upgraded to the 3.6ghz cpu later. Because Dell offered the same model with the 3.6ghz chip, I knew the upgrade was possible. Lately however Dell has gotten rid of anything remotely high end in any model line but the XPS so the choices haven’t been as good if you want anything beyond basic performance.

To quickly review the specs on the machine I just bought
CPU: Intel Q6600- 4x 2.4ghz 1033mhz bus. $290
Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe. $220
Case: Zalman HD-135 Media Case. ~$275
Power Supply: Zalman Ultra-Quiet 500W $119
Memory: 2GB (1GBx2) DDR2 800mhz PC6400 CAS4 ~$99
Video: Gigabyte GF 8600GTS Silentpipe3- $183
TV Tuner: AverMedia MTVPEMCER- $104
DVD Burner: Sony Optiarc 18X DVD+R 8X SATA- $33
Hard Drive: Seagate 750GB $199.
Total is $1522 for a fully functional system.
Add Windows Vista Premium for $115 for a total of $1637.

So today I went shopping on the Dell site. Things had improved quite a bit since the last time I checked- go figure that the pricing changes are a bit harder to anticipate there, but they do show up. There was some strange CPU pricing still- the dual-core 2.66ghz CPU was $100 more than a quad-core 2.4ghz CPU, but I think they just hadn’t fixed things up since the Intel price cuts.

I first tried to compare to the Dell XPS 210. Since my machine will be in a medium-low profile case, this was the most equivalent case that they provided. The bad news is there was no way to get a XPS 210 to an equivalent configuration. They didn’t offer any quad-core CPUs for it (for no particular reason), only offered a 500gb drive maximum and only have crappy video choices. The total still worked out to $1728.

The XPS 410 was a much closer comparison. I managed to spec one out that was just about equivalent. Same CPU, same GPU, same hard-drive. The only deficiencies in the Dell were that the TV Tuner card is less powerful, the power supply is only 375 watts (which is probably fine) and there is one less PCIex1 slot. That configuration worked out to only $1499 which is a pretty good deal- compare it to $1522 or $1637 depending on whether you want to include the price of Windows (which the Dell does include).

The plus side for the Dell is that it includes support. Of course at this price its only the 1-year basic support. Up that to the 3-year premium support and even with the discounts that adds the price is still $1698.

The down-side is that the Dell case is really poor compared to the one I’m getting. Almost $400 of my price is going to the case and power supply, with the goal of a low noise, low-profile (135mm high so it can fit in my cabinet which is only 170mm clearance), high quality case. The Dell cases are OK, but they are nothing special and in any case the XPS 410 is 18.75cm wide so it would not fit where I want it. Its pretty easy to get a decent home-built case for $99 (there are some with power-supplies for as little as $19.99 on NewEgg).

In the end the prices are both in the same ballpark and the trade-off is flexibility vs. having someone else to deal with the problems that might happen. Now, Dell support for laptops has been great, but I’m not so sure how well it would work out if I had a problem with a desktop. Mostly desktop machines are reliable enough that its safe to put aside $200 and if something breaks, you just order a new one. None of the parts except the CPU are much more than $200 and if that broke there are likely going to be better ones available for $200. For me the hassle of following up on a warranty / RMA return is rarely worth the cost of the item so its easier to just buy another one.

Which brings up another point- one of the nice aspects of going the home-built route is that you can pretty much get premium parts all around. Thanks to Dell keeping up the price pressure, its possible to stick with the good reputation name brands and the results can be pretty good- these guys tend to keep their drivers up to date and the failure rates tend to be low. With the Dell you don’t know who is actually making all the bits and pieces, and Dell has to update the drivers which often creates a big lag. Its usually not a big problem since anything causing big reliability problems will get addressed (if its generating support calls for Dell).

Next step- I’ll report some results from my build.

I saw a copy of this on Saturday at Michael’s house. This used to be a favorite of mine as a kid and it was really cool to see kids today still enjoying it. Its also one of those rare cases of someone doing something for a period of time and then saying “thats enough”. Too often the comic pages are the same old thing over and over but Bill Watterson knew when to quit while still at the top of his game.

One quick Amazon complaint. When you create an “image only” link (not like the one above) it generates the URL as a relative URL:
<img border=”0″ src=”21JWCVFEK2L._AA_SL160_.jpg”>
Of course that is relative on your site so it is always busted until you figure out the correct base URL. Its been broken like this for well over a year.

News.com has a great story about the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group facility in Arizona. It looks awesome- hopefully I can find some time later this year (hopefully when its not so hot) to visit.

Wider availability of the new 1TB drives has had the hoped-for result lowering hard-drive prices across the board over the last month. Drives larger than 250GB have decreased a bit more than 10% in one month. The 500GB drives remain the price per GB leader costing about $.18 per GB (as low as $88 for a 500GB drive). Heading up to 750GB doubles the price and increasing to 1TB almost doubles the price again. Still its nice to see the 750GB drives dip well under $200 and the 1TB drives available for as low as $350 instead of their launch price of $400. The Seagate 1TB drives have not really hit the market in a meaningful way so hopefully things will dip even lower once the Hitachi has some competition.

John Cook did a very good write up of the meat of the panel discussion last night.

One of the comments on his post points out that all the journalists said pretty much that the best way to get coverage was to provide one journalist a scoop. From my experience that is close, but its not the whole story.

The key isn’t a scoop, its a unique story. Journalists don’t exist to just write the same thing over and over repeating your message to the word (that’s what bloggers do.. oops). If its a truly huge story (”Microsoft announces next version of Windows”) everyone will print it, just in the off chance that their segment of the audience missed it everywhere else. But for most of us, its only going to work if the journalist feels that they have some special take on it.

So when you work with each journalist, think about what interesting thing you would like them to say. Keep in mind that in the book world, stories have conflict, and while not everything that gets printed in the press has conflict, it sure does make it more interesting. Guy Kawasaki published a list of the nine best story lines for marketing from Lois Kelly. This is a pretty good list, although it doesn’t rank them by how easy of a story they are to spin- David vs. Goliath is one of the most obvious ones and it works for almost any company and is a pretty easy one to believe. Its a good way to get coverage, but its not necessarily the best way to keep the focus on you and the wonderful thing your company does for its customers. Still, its a good one to think about since it tends to come out even if you don’t plan on it.

Of course this all varies quite a bit by the publication. TechCruch tends to favor writing straight profiles of companies. Wired tends to focus on what Kelly calls the “Avalanche About To Roll” of technological/societal change stories (although they do have a good measure of the other types thrown in too). Other publications will focus more on the business aspects.

I thought I’d share a few random thoughts about the Naked Truth event today in Seattle. First of all it was really cool that this event was pulled together with such a heavy-hitting panel of journalists. A big thank you! to the Redfin and Madrona Venture Group folks for pulling this together and sponsoring it. It was a beautiful evening for an outside event and it was a great excuse to get together with a bunch of entrepreneurial folks to chat. I’d also like to mention that I was impressed to see so much of the local VC community show up. It makes a difference when they are present and part of the discussion at events like this.

I felt a little bit disappointed with the panel discussion but in retrospect its probably more about my expectations than the panel itself. With a title like “Naked Truth” and panelists like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch, Fred Vogelsten of Wired (who was involved in the recent “naked” issue), and John Cook who writes for the Seattle PI business section and (to me) more importantly writes the John Cook Ventureblog, I was expecting to dig a bit more into how the Internet as a communication medium has changed the relationship between the press and the industry. It felt like the panel mostly covered some great PR basics (and reading the announcement again thats all that was promised). All of it was really good stuff and it was great to hear this stuff from real journalists.

Of course the great thing about “the Internet as a communication medium which has changed the relationship between the press and the industry” is that we can continue the conversation beyond the event itself and I can post my thoughts at more length on here.

One question from the audience was something along the lines of “should you try to get your story told in the WSJ or just aim for the local press”. On one level the answer to that is fairly easy. If your story is newsworthy enough to make the WSJ, you would be a fool not to get that coverage. They have huge reach, and the credibility of being mentioned in the WSJ can be critical. That is pretty powerful.

Yet, let me make a counter argument. If you go to the “Naked Truth” page, there is an interesting distinction between the 5 reporters. 4 of the 5 have their names linked to their blogs (ok, Fred’s is a bit stale and Tricia shares a blog with 4 other reporters as far as I can tell). But Rebecca Buckman’s link is to her name on Technorati. Follow it and you find lots of mentions of her (and for right now of this event) but nothing BY her.

Now, the WSJ isn’t completely an old-media dinosaur. They have a huge web-site and can proudly say that they are one of the few in the world that have managed to run a profitable content-subscription business on the web (it is rumored that the NY Times is about to give up on their Times Select subscription). But the subscription site puts all their stuff behind a closed door. How often will anyone ever link to it? It has power on its own since it comes with the strength built up over decades of the WSJ, but it doesn’t exist as part of the web.

Compare that to John Cook’s blog. Frankly, for a long time the business sections in local newspapers (IE- not the NY Times or WSJ) have been in a rough spot. Most business professionals read one (or both) of the two “national” papers, and it seemed like too often local business coverage was trending towards the equivalent of “human interest” pieces. Not that there is anything wrong about those, just they aren’t going to be considered important.

I found out about John Cook, not from his newspaper writing, but from his blog. Blogs of course have that interesting characteristics that they all link to each other, and I started seeing links to John’s blog and pretty soon I subscribed to it. Because of the lightweight mechanism and frequent updates I’m sure he gets to cover a bunch more than he would be able to write in the newspaper. For me, I get this much better picture of the scope of venture activity in the Seattle area. It puts him and the whole PI business section on the map, and that’s the map that covers the whole Internet, not just Seattle.

I don’t mean to overstate the case and suggest that mention by John is more valuable for a company than a mention in the WSJ. Just that its not so clear cut anymore- the same thing that has put the power to publish in the hands of non-journalists also is a powerful tool for the pros. And its worth saying that I think there continues to be an important role for professional journalists- I’m not at all in the camp that seems to be saying that somehow a bunch of random people typing away can do just as well as someone with real training and experience at finding out the real story.

I’d also point out that there is a business dilemma here. Professional journalists deserve to be paid for their work. Especially given blog readers which don’t show your sites ads, its much harder to get paid for writing on a non-subscription blog. I’m a proponent of the right to charge for software that has value and this content should be regarded in a similar way. Yet the right to charge for software isn’t always the same as the practical ability to charge for software. As an entrepreneur you are faced with the unpleasant reality that pretty much any consumer facing web-site is going to have to be mostly free and you need to figure out how to monetize it some other way. The usual technique is to follow the lead of the 1st National Change Bank.

The other topic that was mentioned, but I would love to explore more is ethics. Arrington did mention this a bit, both in poking at the WSJ’s potential massive conflicts if they get bought by Murdoch as expected and also being straight up about his goal of making a buck for himself. It feels like one of those situations where both the traditional journalists and the new-style ones are struggling with what is appropriate in this new medium. Bloggers run with different rules than the traditional journalists have, but I’d have to assume that the professionals feel some pressure to adapt to compete for that hot story. At the same time they feel the pressure of the corporate consolidation of their industry and the pressures that inevitably flow to the editors.

Finally I’d like to mention a foundational question that doesn’t get asked enough. Why does a start-up want to talk to the press? Getting lots of PR seems like a given for most people (”there is no such thing as bad press”) but without thinking about your motivation a bit it is hard to focus to get the right kind of coverage that meets your goals.

Press can give you two things- the first is distribution. In the old days distribution was cutting the deal with Egghead so your boxes showed up in every store and some people might buy them. Today getting mentioned to millions of people is more valuable since for many businesses they can reach you from any web-browser if only they have heard of you and have some reason to type the name of your site.

The second thing they give you is credibility. If someone randomly visits one of my sites, the chances are pretty high that they will head somewhere else without even a single click, and are overall fairly low that they will trust me enough to sign up for an account. On the other hand if Wired just wrote a glowing article about some great new service and someone is going to check it out, they are much more likely to check it out carefully and sign up for that account.

Talking to the industry press is more about developing business contacts and financing than attracting customers to your site. Of course, these two points still apply.

I’ve been playing with Sharpcast a bit the last few days and even signed up for their premium service. The key hook there is that they offer to “backup” full-resolution copies of your images on their servers. The current offer has no quota associated with it which makes the $6/month very attractive. Uploading photos in one photo is really easy but it takes a bunch more work to upload a bunch of different folders. Still, as long as the unlimited photos thing holds out, it seems like a very nice service.

I’ve been playing with various ideas in this space and the Sharpcast guys have overall done a very good job. Nice client to web-site integration. Fairly good upload, although it will consume all available bandwidth if it can (be careful running it on a work network since you don’t want to bring everyone’s network to a grinding halt).

All the same there are some pretty key missing features. Its still early so I hope they will add these soon. I really miss being able to assign star-ratings to photos and to filter by the star ratings. For example I like to have available all the photos of a given event but usually just share out / use a slide show the 4-5 star ones. The client is also able to show composite albums/slideshows with sub-folders but the web-site can’t.

AnandTech published one of the two reviews I’ve been looking for today, comparing the video decode performance between the AMD/ATI and the NVidia GPUs. They key findings are that both of the one step under the top cards are the best for media scenarios- the AMD Radeon 2600HD and the NVidia 8600GTS. Comparing the two head to head the NVidia card has better video quality, especially “noise reduction”, although its unclear how much noise reduction you really want for any properly mastered HD content. The Radeon has better support for VC-1 decoding which is not supported in hardware n the NVidia card, but VC-1 (designed by Microsoft I think) is much less CPU intensive to decode in the first place- on a low-end P4 machine it was still only taking 30% CPU so the quad-core Q6600 I’m planning on getting should handle even multiple simultaneous streams of it with no problem.

The missing review is still the stability one. For a media-box, running for weeks without crashing or needing a reboot and without hangs or missed recordings is a key criteria. Maybe I shouldn’t be hoping for that driver stability review from the web-sites that tend to publish tons of over-clocking results, but its not like anyone else has really researched this yet either. I’m pretty convinced that there will be some big differences between NVidia and AMD on this stuff…

Rich writes about Dim Sum in Seattle. Overall I’ve found this one of the very frustrating parts of living in Seattle because I love Dim Sum and the overall quality doesn’t seem nearly up to Vancouver or San Francisco. In general I find his observations to be good, although I’d also recommend a new discovery- the appropriately named “Dim Sum House” on 4860 Beacon (not in the middle of any of the usual restaurant clusters). I haven’t found any especially interesting or new Dim Sum here, but the stuff I’ve had (I’ve been 3 times in the last few weeks) has been fresh (order from the menu, no carts going around with stale stuff), and just simply good. Its no Hakkasan but I can’t head to London (or even Vancouver or San Francisco) every day for lunch. Not to mention that my favorite place in Vancouver, Sun Sui Wah has been disappointing the last couple of visits.

The other application I should mention is Media Center with several XBox 360s remoted. Each remote XBox creates a whole new login for Windows with another set of the the Media Center apps + most of the basic system stuff. With the XP 2005 version its only about an extra 100mb for this extra stuff and the base system (for me) is only about 900mb on a non-memory constrained system, so 2gb should be plenty. Of course so far my experience with Vista is that it needs about twice as much memory for everything and I don’t see why this would be an exception- maybe its one of those better safe than sorry things to just get the 2×2gb memory instead of the 2×1gb ones since its only about twice as much ($210 vs about $100).