Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 11:31:34 07/31/01
Go up one level in this thread
On July 31, 2001 at 13:16:04, Frank Schneider wrote: >Hi, > >if all programmers agreed to use single-machines (maybe except Ferret) >the change in rules would be without effect. > >Frank I am not a prima donna either. I didn't really want to go to this event, but I decided to go after talking it over with my wife. If the event had been a single-processor event, I would have gotten a new office machine to replace my P3/550 and taken it. It wouldn't have been the fastest machine there, since my budget for an office machine is not huge, but it would have been credible. I would not have felt particularly bad about this. The best single-processor machine is not that great. A sensible machine would have a good chance of doing alright against anything the commercials could bring. But the rules were posted, and here come the Chessbase washing machines. I don't like this at all, but the rules are the rules, and I have to decide whether I want to spend a thousand bucks on a plane ticket and take a week away from my family (I won't miss my family that much, but my wife will go insane looking after four kids herself, and that is the bad part of me leaving for a week) and then be non-competitive. I decided that I would like to be competitive if I am going to have to endure this crap again, so I called several computer shops in my area and had them build me a machine which I am hoping will be done in time. This is the only way I can have a *realistic* chance of not looking like a complete idiot when playing against machines that require a hand-truck or worse to move. Everyone who is SMP and can get an SMP machine should bring the best one they can get if they want a chance to make the best of this bad situation. I don't see what good deliberately crippling one's self will do. I don't know if there is anything that anyone can do about this: 1) A boycott makes the event less rich, gives a title to Chessbase for free, and perhaps makes sponsors even more wary about supporting this thing. It's also just a whiney and non-productive thing to do. Someone boycotts every damned year, and it's gotten boring. 2) Using a cheesy machine on purpose is just a waste of your own time. 3) Loud bitching (my normal mode of action) makes sponsors wonder what in the hell kind of idiot lunatics they are sponsoring, so perhaps they won't pay up next time, as well as doing *absolutely no good*. I've been trying to get very simple things changed for *years*, and nothing *ever* happens. The rules for when you can change your time are stupid, and I point this out every time, but every year someone just does copy/paste on the previous year's rules. If something as trivial as that won't change, how will anything else change? 4) Throwing out the ICCA leaders won't do any good, because they are the only ones who are keeping this together in *any* state. It takes a lot of work to put something like this together, and the number of people who will do anything is almost zero. We have enough trouble getting people to moderate this stupid group, much less organize events and wear suits and go talk to sponsors and so on. All we get by going down that road is a situation wherein the only events we get are amateur tournaments that nobody pays attention to and commercial publicity stunts. So everything is just dicked. At the risk of identifying myself as being completely in la-la land, maybe these people will finally figure out that it's a good idea to listen to the programmers. Maybe they'll finally figure out that the internet is a two-way communication medium and start using it as something other than a place to announce faits accompli. That's probably a stupid thing to hope, but we'll see. I'm afraid that at the rate things are going we're going to end up with an ICCA that can't even maintain the journal, much less a sensible yearly event. bruce
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