Classic DF – 2001 Digis Awards

The 2001 Digis Awards™ – digitalflood.com’s Best of The Internet Awards
The Digis Award™ (pronounced Did-geeze) is the hardware/software compliment to our Fluddies Award™. While the Fluddies™ go to web site or products for the Net, the Digis™ focus on the hardware/software that we feel deserves recognition for its contributions to technology. As always you may not agree, but that’s life and it’s tough like that. So there 😛
Hardware Category :
Best Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Dell/Alienware — For the second year in a row Dell snags this award. However, this year we felt that Alienware deserved a nod too. Both have committed their companies to producing the top PCs on the market. Both have excellent reliability, construction, and technical support. More important is the overall quality of the components. Top parts are easy to order. I would still suggest strongly that Dell discontinues using the Aztech MDx series of modems as they are pieces of junk. Other then that little SNAFU I would easily recommend either to a friend/relative.

Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Tiger Direct Systems — Can you say “garbage”? I knew you could. It’s funny that garbage and Tiger aren’t closer in the dictionary. They sure mean the same thing. Every Tiger Direct System comes with 16-bit wave table sound. That’s sort of like a pretend sound card. Worse yet, you get a whopping 4MB of video RAM. Nice. If you figure out which modem you have in the PC you’re luckier than most people. You’d have better luck buying a box and painting the word computer on it.

Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell — Yes, two years running my nonlinear DV editing system/AV nonlinear system of choice is a Dell. Why? High end video card meets high end sound card meets lots of good stuff. Every component for every price range is suited for its role. From simple office applications to high end work stations you can’t beat the price or the components.

Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq — Two years running Compaq has snagged this award. Why? Simply put, I have never seen a company pride itself on unreliable components. Yes, their bottom end machines come with PC Tel HSP modems. Yes, they are the worst modems on the market. Yes, the video RAM is completely shared and lacks the power for any 3D application out there. It’s kind of sad. Compaq recently put together a real good PC (Presario 5900Z), but for most consumers it’s too late. They have already found aforementioned greener pastures to buy in.

Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD (Thunderbird Athlon) — I know the Intel Pentium 4 is the fastest processor on the market, but can you get one? Maybe. Besides with twenty-some-odd step caching you really don’t see any true application performance beyond what you would expect. So that is why I chose the AMD Thunderbird as the better CPU. It offers real world performance, as well as, gaming performance that can’t be beat. What can I say? I’m biased.

Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs (Live 5.1! Platinum) — Creative Labs (mostly through buy outs) has conquered the sound card market. With the advent of their Live! 5.1 sound cards this year Creative has put itself in an excellent position to conquer not just gaming, but also DVD playback. This certainly would only further their excellent chip set and sound creation capabilities as they continue to expand their markets. One question: Where’s my professional musician workstation sound card? You guys need to go there!

Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: ATI (Radeon) — If you told me a year ago I would name ATI as the best video card maker I would have laughed at you. A year ago they sucked bad. Their cards were archiac pieces of silicon. However, with the Radeon we finally saw a real video card that could not only touch, but possibly burn the mighty nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra chip set. The Radeon rules when it comes to large polygon fills. It has a wonderful graphics rendering engine and offers the very fast DDR SDRAM for memory (64MB of it!). Smoking.

Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics (Performance Pro Internal PCI) — We are about a half year into US Robotics being a self owned entity again. So far, so good. They have recently started production of a V.92 standard modem. We’ll see how that goes. For now though, the US Robotics Performance Pro owns the roost. It is hardware controlled and therefore very fast. Unless your line levels are horrid (read: sounds like underwater) you should be able to get a connection to your ISP.

Best Hard Drive Manufacturer/Series: IBM (Deskstar 75GXP) — With 75GB of storage space and one of the fatest access times around you can’t go wrong with a Deskstar. The spindle runs at 7,500RPM and works wonders in RAID 0 (striped=speed) configurations. You simply can’t get a faster large drive, but it will cost you a good penny. Performance like this isn’t cheap.

Coolest Innovation: TDK BURN-Proof — The VeloCD would be a cool CD-RW burner on its own. Couple the technology called BURN-Proof (it elminates something called buffer underrun errors that occur when you multi-task) and now you have a super kick ass CD-RW. BURN-Proof has had few competitors (Sanyo makes something similar), but TDK gets props for being the first. Thanks to BURN-Proof you can burn MP3s while playing Quake III. Thank you TDK!

Stupidest Innovation: The AMR Standard — I can picture it now: A bunch employees of a computer technology development company are standing around and one of the software programmers says, “Gee, I wonder if we can make software modems perform worse and cost less?”. The engineer to his left says, “Yeah! We could not only emulate all the modem functions in software to drag down system resources, but we could also halve the pin bandwidth and use an on board sound card to interpret the data!” The marketing guy says, “Sounds ineffective, cheap, and prone to errors. I’ll get right on the ad copy!”. Yes, AMR (stands for Audio Modem Riser) is a daughter board that hooks up to your motherboard in a small PCI-like slot. The slot has a DSP (digital signal processor) which interprets the modem’s data. It actually is a glorified sound card and it isn’t really that great of a sound card (think 16-bit sound “yuck”). Recently the AMR Standards Commission unveiled its next generation standard ACR (Audio Communications Riser) and it’s just repackaged crap. You’re be better off screaming out your window to your ISP.

Software Category :
Best Operating System/Shell: Microsoft Windows 2000 (Service Pack 1) — I know what you’re thinking. Service Pack 1 isn’t an OS! Well, I wouldn’t argue with you. However, considering that the only major OS leap was a new Linux Kernel (and it does rock indeed) there is only one other OS that came out this year that is on mainstream PCs right now: Windows Me! It sucks. Oh, boy does it suck. So, as far as I’m concerned Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 is definitely the most stable mainstream OS out this past year. In fact, it even boots faster. The crashes are far and between (for Windows anyhow). As long as you stay away from those other nasty Microsoft products with all those evil security holes you’ll be pretty secure. Not bad for a Microsoft product.

Best Office Software Package: Microsoft Office 2000 — I hate to have to admit it, but Microsoft Office 2000 with all the Service Packs is great. I’ve seen business of all sizes use the various programs to stay in constant contact with to-do lists, task management, internal e-mail, and document sharing that significantly improves productivity. I held off at first last year and chose Sun Star Office 5.1 over the initial Office 2000 release due to bug concerns, but with the latest Service Packs the programs seem stable. Coupled with the fact that Star Office has yet to offer comparable features to Office 2000 or a better integrated Windows desktop pushed the nomination away from Sun this year. Let’s hope Sun figures all this out before it’s too late.

Best Graphics & Art Creation/Manipulation Software: Adobe Photoshop 6 — Adobe Photoshop 6 is simply the best version of Photoshop ever. Every feature that you know and love from previous iterations is present. All the excellent plug-in utilities still work wonders on your art pieces. Whether you are an amateur photographer or a professional designer, Photoshop has something to make your pieces ready for the web, printing, color separations, or even to animate short graphics (via Adobe Image Ready). Maximum PC dubbed Photoshop “The Fireworks killer”. I wouldn’t argue with that. It truly is the best at what it does.

Best Web Creation Software: Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 — I started using Dreamweaver two years ago. I fell in love with the simple interface, the vast expandability, and the robust HTML support. Dreamweaver 4 has managed to improve upon perfection somehow. Everything a serious web developer needs is available upfront. Sure, raw HTML coding may be “smoother”, but if you need to revamp an entire web site and only have under an hour to do so you quickly would see why WYSIWYG and site wide management is needed. Plus you don’t get all the extra garbage code you find in other WYSIWYG editors. I can’t rave enough about Dreamweaver so I’ll shut up while I’m ahead.

Best Sound Editing/Tracking Software: Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5 — When you take an already powerful sound editor and incorporate both audio, as well as, video multi-tracking into a product. Then you put into that great product features for future codecs. You have probably have the most powerful sound editor out right now. That is exactly what Sound Forge 5 brings to the table. If you need to manipulate sound or record professionally look no further. I’m literally blown away by all the features available. Putting it into a musician’s perspective: It’s the equivalent of finding that perfect guitar that you can’t help, but play all day.

Best Internet Software: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 SP1 — With the advent of Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 the browser finally gets stable and out renders Netscape 6, as well as, its predecessor Netscape Communicator 4.76. The browser wars are over and Internet Explorer has clearly won. Not that everyone is happy about that.

Best Software Innovation: Linux Kernel 2.4.2 — Linux is not only free, but it works (a novel idea). It networks easily. It is secure. It is resource friendly. What else do you want? Well, what ever you want the new Linux Kernel 2.42 has it. Boosting support for upcoming technologies and keeping Linux competitive with Microsoft’s OSs was the main reason for the new kernel. However, Linus Torvalds (the inventor and ring master of Linux) stresses this was not simply a catch up effort. Linux has placed itself in the forefront with a kernel capable of handling high end applications and evolving PC platforms. With several improvements and bug fixes; the new Linux Kernel stands as a strong heart to a robust body. The update was a long time a coming, but obviously worth the wait. Microsoft watch out– Linux is back and better than ever.

Worst Software Innovation: Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 — When Microsoft sought to conquer the broadband media market they tried to go big. An application that could play MP3s and streaming video. An application that could integrate with your OS. An application that could crash randomly and lock up your system for no reason. Well, maybe the latter wasn’t the original intention, but that is exactly what happens. The Media Player manages to hog resources like no other program. It takes forever to load. Unless your PC is high end you can forget about it. Sure, the Windows Media Format is smaller than MP3, but who cares? Who wants to save 10Kb per minute? It doesn’t matter! It’s just another attempt for Microsoft to conquer the market. This time they failed miserably. Microsoft: Stick to flaky OSs and leave flaky media players to the pros.

Worst Software: Microsoft Windows Me! — Windows 98 Second Edition worked. That obviously was a bad thing since with Windows Me! (Me! being short for Millennium) they managed to break everything again. Sure, dial-up networking is now in the control panel. So is the “secret” task bar options. Big freaking deal! The rest of the OS doesn’t work! Everything you install crashes. No drivers from Windows 98 work in Windows Me! And don’t even get me started on the networking issues. Everything you knew and loved about Windows has been changed for no reason what so ever. I’d ask why one more time, but I’m probably wasting my breath. For a simple “upgrade” from Windows 98 it sure changes everything. In the end, that is definitely a bad thing.

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Classic DF – 2000 Digis Awards

Hardware Category :
Best Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Dell™ — The latest Dell™ machines throughout last year and this year have taken exceptional strides. With reliable components, software, and excellent construction you can not find a better complete machine… but don’t think it won’t cost you for the top of the line PC. The lower priced PCs are nothing to laugh at however and also make excellent buys over other low end price competitors. Dell™ did for awhile use Aztec™ software modems, which were absolutely horrible, but fixed the situation by no longer using that vendor’s products in its machines or replacing the modem in existing machines. Good job.

Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: E-machines™ — They ripped off the IMac™ all in one design. They didn’t have the guts to put the quality parts inside though. E-machines™ are unreliable, low quality, and poorly constructed. The parts are no name components with even less performance. Their high end machines are jokes. E-machines™ make better paper weights then home computers.

Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell™ — Surprised? Us neither. The top of the line Dell™ workstations feature powerful Xenon Pentium III™ processors. They have Ultra ATA hard disks. Incredible graphics and sound cards. What more could you want? Okay, they are also nicely built and tested. Good deal (and pricey too). Their servers are fast, built with expandability, and are highly scalable. Very cool (and pricey once again).

Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq™ — Before E-machines™ attempted to put together its first garbage PC Compaq™ was turning out inferior products by the ton. Now setting its sights on low cost hungry MIS departments they are trying to produce work stations and servers. More of glorified graphing calculators than workstations; the machines are definitely not meant for high end 3D work and more for office program users. Compaq™ is notorious for using HSP modems, which are the absolute worst modems on the market (HSPs are software modems and therefore suck). Compaq’s™ servers aren’t much better and offer extra features such as hardware failures, slow access rates, and poor uptime.

Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD™ — AMD™ a year ago had a horrible reputation. No one would buy their product. With the release of the Atholon™ processor that totally changed. The Atholon™ processor is ground breaking. While Intel’s™ Coppermine Core Pentium III™ is faster it was because of AMD™ that Intel™ had to up the bar for performance. The Atholon™ as a chip is more then good enough for gaming and normal number crunching. Some reports have complained about its server capabilities, but that isn’t the market AMD™ is after. The market, home users, will find the Atholon™ an exceptional value with excellent features.

Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs ™ — With the creation of Sound Blaster Live!™ 3D audio positioning took a step forward. The Sound Blaster MP3+™ and Gamer+™ both use Creative Labs’™ proprietary sound fonts technology via its EMU10K1 processor to provide realistic reverb and positioning. Aureal A3D™, their competitor, is good, but sound fonts for gaming especially shows superior realism and the MP3+™ comes with the most complete MP3 software package of any sound card. That is what puts this pick over the top for us.

Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: nVidia™ — nVidia™ created the TNT™ Chipset and completely changed the graphics card market forever. Removing 3DFX Voodoo™ from the top spot in under a year nVidia™ then released TNT2™ finally putting Direct3D/Open GL graphics engines on the gaming map. When GeForce 256™ was released it utterly decimated the competition. Using a GNU (graphic processor) instead of the computer CPU to render graphics GeForce™ can render more triangles, pixels, and rotations per second then any other card/chipset. GeForce 256™ literally blows other chipsets away performance wise and is worth the high price for its surperior performance.

Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics ™ — 3Com™ used to own US Robotics™ and therefore had the best modems available for V.90/X2™. Plus X2™ is much more stable then V.90. Throughput rates are excellent and so is the error control/checking. However, when 3Com™ decided to unload US Robotics™ earlier this year every PC user shuddered. Will US Robotics™ maintain its hold on the modem market? We’ll see.

Best Hard Drive Manufacturer: Maxtor™ — Maxtor’s™ Ultra ATA hard drives are fast. Running at 7,200 RPMs with sub-9ms seek times the DiamondMax™ Series is an excellent storage choice. If bigger is better you can’t get much bigger then a 30GB hard drive. Maxtor™ hard drives have excellent reliability and a good warranty. All in all it DiamondMax™ is a great buy.

Coolest Innovation: Intellimouse™ — Microsoft™ really came through with its Intellimouse Explorer™ that uses a digital laser to track the mouse movements instead of a ball like a conventional mouse. It is very accurate and great for art, 3D, CAD, etc… Very cool idea that works well in both concept and design.

Stupidest Innovation: Diamond™ — When Diamond™ decided it didn’t want to be its own company and was bought out by S3™ no one thought there would be a problem. Then S3™ decided it would produce no new products without its proprietary chipsets. That wasn’t so bad. S3 Savage™ is an okay chipset, but the problem was then they pulled all driver support on their legacy products. Well, consumers started complaining and as cited in MaximumPC™ Diamond™ will once again start making drivers for its legacy TNT2/TNT™ and A3D™ chipset products. Too late though since consumers have already moved onto better products produced by Diamonds’™ competitors.

Software:
Best Operating System/Shell: Windows2000™ — Microsoft™ has not always been the most loved company. Windows98™ was a let down until the second edition was released, but stability was still questionable. With Windows2000™ Microsoft™ has hopefully fixed those issues. Windows2000™ is highly stable with a crash protected kernel, self repairing code, multiprocessor support, better file system, less crashes/reboots, Internet integration, and remote/server controls. If I was a home user I wouldn’t run out and buy it, but it is perfect for servers/workstations doing commercial work where up time is important.

Best Office Software Package: Star Office ™ — Sun™ did a good thing when they released their Star Office™ for free. For the first time a powerful and complete work solution package was available for under $10 on a CD. Star Office™ has an excellent word processor, spread sheet, web page authoring tool, web browser, and desktop interface. Highly recommended for business/home users who just can’t afford over priced software.

Best Graphics & Art Creation/Manipulation Software: Photoshop 5 ™ — Adobe Photoshop 5™ is a powerful solution to create graphics for the Internet or publishing. The graphics are rendered and outputted smoothly. The filters are powerful and easily expanded with cool effects plug-in packages that install easily. With a good mouse, steady hand, and some patience you can really output some great art. As always the product is great for photo manipulation. All the graphics on this site incidentally were created in Photoshop 5™.

Best Web Creation Software: Dreamweaver 2 ™ — Macromedia Dreamweaver™ has always been my WYSIWYG web creation tool of choice. It is easily expandable through other products (Flash™, Director™, or other Macromedia™ Products) and also thanks to its scripting features. This web page is made in Dreamweaver™ and everytime we go back to redesign we find something new in the product that we like, it grows with you as you learn to be a better web page designer.

Best Sound Editing/Tracking Software: Acid Pro 2™ — Back in the days of early sound production if you wanted quality sound editing you’d have to pay thousands. Forget that now. With Acid Pro™ you can have a multi-tracking and sound editing (via Sound Forge XP 2™ included in the package) to create music. Acid™ has multiple outputs, effects, and can basically do everything you want with your music. Got to love it… and yes all of DigitalFl00d’s music is done in its lower price ($99) little brother Acid Music™ and that too is a great value.

Best Internet Software: Internet Explorer 5™ — Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.02™ is stable and renders quickly. Its support for HTML 4 and DHTML is excellent. It renders what you tell it to in your design. It has Java, VBscript, and Active X (that may be its only downfall). Unfortunately early versions of Internet Explorer 5.5™ don’t look stable, but our hopes are the next version will be as good as the current one once the Beta version is finalized.

Best Software Innovation: Direct X 7™ — Microsoft™ decided to support hardware acceleration about two years ago with Direct X™. At first people laughed, but now they are choking on it. Direct X™ allows video devices (OpenGL and TNT™) or sound devices (A3D or Sound Fonts) to write from the hardware and control output. What that means is better graphics and sound if you have good hardware. Also this allows programmers to author software that can be generically dropped into a program via Direct X plug-ins™. The world will never be the same.

Worst Software Innovation: Host Signal Processing/Software Emulation Hardware — When Rockwell/Conexant™, PCTel™, Lucent™, Ambient/Cirrus™, and Telepath™ decided that software emulation would be a great way to cut costs they weren’t wrong. By taking a modem (traditionally made up of tons of chips, ROM, RAM, and resistors) and replacing those parts with software that would “pretend” to be hardware they did cut costs. In fact by simply making a modem with a circuit that transferred analog data to a digital PCI port you can then use software to interpret that data. The idea looked great on the drawing board. That was four years ago. Since then a ton of modem makers are relying on the aforementioned chip makers to provide them with PCI controllerless cards that dare sport the word 56K modem. The software is buggy, unreliable, and takes up to three times the resources of conventional hardware modem. To make things worse the completely unreliable V.90 standard doesn’t have good error control to begin with. With the majority of users residing in rural/suburban communities there is no reliable since current phone line standards aren’t high enough to allow anyone can get a true 56K connection. The most common connect speed is 24K and the throughput is usually even lower. To make the situation worse now major vendors such as Compaq™, Gateway™, and even at one point Dell™ have cut costs by using cheap modems then blaming the Internet Service Providers for their defective software modems. So what can you do? Well, software modems are useful for something… they make great coasters!

Worst Software: AOL 5™/Netzip™ — Microsoft™ gets slammed for writing software that takes over your PC, but forget about Internet Explorer™ or antitrust. America Online released version 5 of its Internet access software knowing that once you said “yes” to the install it would render all other browsers and connections to the Internet useless. A lawsuit has since ensued, but no claims or even apologizes have come out officially from AOL™. Right up there with that fiasco is Netzip™ whose product also once installed will deny web pages and file transfers by placing garbage key values in your registry. Both companies deserve to have a nice big steaming bag of shit sent to them for there service contributions to crappy products.

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