The Beasts – in the Philippines

Quality electronics are awfully expensive in the Philippines. You can buy cheap gadgets anywhere but if you want something really sophisticated, then your wallet is crying bitter tears.

If it comes to computers, I always found them between 50 to 100% more expensive than in the USA or Europe. What I saw in shops and Internet cafes had been rather junk.

But Filipinos are known to be very creative. Last week in August I went to the SM mall in Cagayan de Oro and what I saw made me cry – of pleasure.

Lots of people were assembled in the center of the shopping mall. Hammered by metallic beats they fixed their eyes on screens.

I wrote “screens” in plural form, because most of the beasts had two or three screens attached. On above photo you unfortunately cannot see the face of the “beast-operator”. he wears shutter goggles and the three screens are a bit blurry to your eyes because they display 3-D moving scenes.

Behind the screens are the beasts. One cannot call them PCs anymore (PC for Personal computer). In their bellies they hide overclocked multi-processor motherboards, triple graphics processor and RAID-5 disk storage. With these inner organs they get so hot that they need turbo water-cooling.

The lights are show! The bubbling water tank is show. But the rest is brute power. I witness!

Not only young men enjoy this brute force engines. I saw several young women riveted to their 1, 2 or even 3 screens.

When talking to these young people I learned that there are ways to get the top level components of these beasts at world-market prices. No, not here in the Philippines. But  ( you thought I will tell the secret?)