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• My opinion of Best Buy

1. How bad are they?

• unethical practices

Best Buy wants to take away freedom of speech and they don't respect thier customers at all article

and best buy for being so racist article "Earlier this year, Mr. Anderson apologized in writing to students at a Washington, D.C., school after employees at one store barred a group of black students while admitting a group of white students."

• why i manage with my pc

for hardware problems
I know many hardware and vendor review sites so I can always snag something that won't fail me

Those compaints are from before 10.3 came out, which is when the OS X Finder took several leaps forward.

No it didn't.

John Siracusa of Ars Technica has written up a very fine article about the problems with the OS X finder. I'd give my opinions on the matter, but I have to get back to work.

I'm also not interested in MacOS X because I don't use that, and because it's proprietary which is totally not the way forward for our society.

I'm not interested in systems which require me to teach my mom about what an "installer program" is and how to use it, because things which are more complex than they need to be turn off lots of users, which is totally not the way forward for our society.

If I was writing an app installing/running system for Linux, I would be *incredibly* interested in the Mac. It has the easiest "installation" (i.e., none) of any system on the market today. To say you're not interested in it scares me. What's next -- are we getting rid of scrollbars because they started out on a proprietary system, too?

Linux isn't designed to allow appfolders easily. The freedesktop.org specs are oriented around the concept of [...]

The fd.o specs aren't set in stone. If you came to them and said you wanted to make app installation simpler, they'd probably at least listen to you. They seem like nice folks.

The appfolders menu system isn't really designed per se, it's just a convention to put stuff in /Applications

"appfolders" (as you call them) don't have a "menu system", because they don't need one. The whole point of making apps first-class objects is so you can treat them like anything else. I don't have a "menu system" to index (say) the spreadsheets with my tax information, either, yet I seem to open them just fine.

(and a shockingly large number of apps break if they aren't in /Applications).

This is obviously a bug with those particular apps, not a bug with the concept of an "application". I know lots of Mac users who keep apps on the desktop, or even in the disk image they downloaded, and I have yet to see one fail yet, so it's not exactly a doomsday scenario.

Yes I understand how MacOS X linking works, that includes how frameworks work and also the weak linkage Apple use.

If you do, the answer in the FAQ sure doesn't indicate it.

It lumps everything into "static" and "dynamic" and doesn't address Mac-style linking, which is in many ways a best-of-both-worlds solution. It also points to a "why not statically link everything?" FAQ; 2 of the 3 points made there don't apply to Mac-style linking.

So it sound like either (a) you don't understand how Macs do linking, or (b) you're sweeping all of its good attributes under the carpet because they make Autopackage's design deficiencies more apparent. Neither one is helping your credibility.

Just be aware that appfolders tend to evolve into installers eventually. They did on DOS, RISC OS, and of course on MacOS X as well (iTunes comes in an installer and it's not the only one ....)

Um ... wha?

First-class apps are not going anywhere on the Mac. They are, and have always been, the recommended way to package apps. I don't know what planet you're on, but most apps are drag-to-install.

iTunes is a rare exception, as you note, but simply because iTunes upgrades typically need Quicktime (system library) upgrades, and you yourself note that "core software" is a different class than apps. (They could have used an installer for QT, and made iTunes a download, but new QT versions are usually downloaded for iTunes, so that wouldn't help most people.)

It has nothing to do with complexity. You can drag-n-drop MS Office onto your hard disk and run it, without using any installer, and that's arguably much more complex than iTunes. The issue is *core OS software*, which Autopackage dodges, as well.

Actually, most people probably never download iTunes from the webpage. It comes with every Mac (and has for years), and gets upgraded when you do a Software Upgrade. So the difference is merely academic -- something you wished to avoid, IIRC.

To understand the basic complaint about the OS X Finder look at this ArsTechnica article.

Evidently his original tactic as head of the FEC was to implement policies to make campaign finance measures as ineffective and rarely-enforced as possible. Now since being successfully sued by representatives Shays and Meehan and ordered to shape up, he's taking the opposite tack and trying to enforce a too-broad view of the laws in order to make them look more onerous than they actually are.

older, i think DPx versions of X had a fun one. maybe it was rhapsody...

do a ctl+alt+del at the login prompt, or i think anywhere in the finder, and a dialog would pop up informing you that you were not using Windows NT.

(ah! found an ars technica review of DP3: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-dp3/ma cos-x-dp3-4.html

Terry? Do you mean Terri?

Sorry, she died 15 years ago.

If you actually think about it, Rambus got screwed there. They DO have alot of very nice technology. And Infineon now have access to all of it for all eternity, for a measly 47 million dollars! What did Rambus get from the deal? 47 million dollars and.... well, that's just about it. 47 million barely covers their legal-expenses in their case against Infineon!

Ars has a nice commentary on it here

Good run down of one person's opinion, similar to your own. I agree with it and you 100%.

Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.

Take a gander at Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-2 00411.ars/

The Ars System Guide gives 3 levels of systems, all built with resonably good hardware

Ill? Then don't read that an article suggesting that part of the resolution to secuity problems on the Internet is to pry PCs from our cold dead hands.

Or at least read Ars Technica's response to help you feel better.

You mean like what Best Buy is trying to do?

Your analogy is flawed though, I would gladly turn away any patrons to my store whose shoes cost me time/money (if I had a store).

While those wearing IE may not be pretty, they are easy to deal with when you know what you are looking for, for that minority who complain about the other 90% not playing fair, and forcing my developers to spend time catering to them because they think they are better... no, I'd rather cut em loose and be done with em.

I would like to offer, however, that setting up firewalls and running transcode - those two things specifically - has been made really really easy. I find myself using Firestarter - it has a GUI for config and does pretty much everything by itself, including IP-masq - literally anyone can enable Internet sharing and enable a firewall using this tool. Ditto for transcode. Many times in the past did I try to find a shortcut, but I always ended up editing that paragraph-sized command line myself to get something decent - not anymore. There are several tools now, both GUI and command line, that drive transcode to do amazing things hassle free. k3b uses it, for example, though I've never tried it that way...

Its specialised piece of HW that could work with GPUs.

As many others have already pointed out, Intel has had Hyperthreading available in Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs for a couple of years now, which does exactly what the article is talking about.

As many others know, you know exactly nothing about what you are talking about. HT has basically two sets of registers so that during a cache miss which would cuase a bubble the chip switches to the other set so it doesn't sit idle. Suns chip on the other hand actually have multiple corses physically doing work at the same time. In fact were it not for Intel's hideously flawed NetBurst architecture the hideous hack that is HyperThreading would not provide any preformance increase at all (in fact it doesn't as much provide an increase as much as negate a decrease...). For evidence consider how many Pentium Ms have HT on them... Now I may not be fully correct but I didn't volunteer a comment; I only posted to prevent the misinformation of others. You'll find more on ArsTechnica. I'd link to the article but I can't find anything on their redesigned site.

You might be mistaking commercial software with selling software, which indirectly implies that only propriatery software can be sold.
This is of course nonsense. The business model might be sligtly different since the software itself isn't always sold like individual slices of pizza, but a lot of those companies out there are making software which they use to either support their infrastucture and/or sell support for it to their customers. Just because it isn't being shipped in boxes to a store doesn't mean that the software used isn't commercial. And by the way, you contradicted yourself when you said:

Claiming that GPL-style "Free" software can't be commercial is about as accurate as saying that human beings can't have 11 fingers.

and at the end you said:

The standard business model for 99.999% of today's commercial software CANNOT work with the GPL.

Those two lines are obviously contradictory as the former is in accordance with my conclusion (that commercial Free software is widespread and in increasingly heavy use in the industry) while the latter is the exact opposite. I therefore take it that you are in complete agreement with my conclusion since the evidence is so overwhelmingly obvious.

There is also a misconception that software can only be a product from one company but Free software is often developed by many individuals and companies who all see the benefit in spending their resources on it.
Claiming that Free software can't be commercial is about as accurate as saying that most human beings don't have 10 fingers.

Because of Moore's Law, the cost and efficiency of supporting x86 (that is converting from legacy x86 architecture to the native RISC-like architecture of Pentium Pro and newer CPUs) decreases over time. So, um, no.

What they* are also saying is that "hey this product is good, and if you criticize it then this is in beta and it's not finished yet." At least when companies like Apple release unfinished software, they have customers to answer to. If you criticize Google, then how dare you criticize a free service.

* Google fanboys, of course. Google as a public company doesn't say shit.

is here. They talk about altivec on Page 3. IIRC, it's the best designed mass-market SIMD implementation there is out there.

No one has mentioned Peltier cooling yet? It looks like that works on the same principles.

For the rest of us with hot CPUs or want silence... there's the Thermalright SI-97 for Socket A (AMD) boards, and Thermalright XP-90 for sockets 478/775 (Intel) and 754/939 (AMD).

Posted on Engadget Friday.

This is yet another reason to read Engadget, Ars Technica, and other tech news sites. You get the "breaking news" days earlier.

Well, at least with Slashdot, when you do get the news, you get it more than once.

Q. Why did you change over from Linux?

A. This is a loaded question, so we'll be brief. Ars started out on Windows NT back in 1998, but shortly after that we moved to FreeBSD, and then later, Linux. We ran Linux until March of 2004, when we made the move to Windows Servers. Linux and Apache had served us quite well, but when we turned to look at building our new CMS, .NET was simply so attractive for our needs that we felt it warranted the switch. If there are enough requests, we may do an article later documenting our thought process, but for now I'll say that the decision was largely a programming one, with the added benefit of the fact that more of us support Windows in our real lives than Linux.

I read last year that Wal Mart was pushing for lower prices on CDs and that the labels were caving. I just did a google search and found this. "Tensions are not as high now as they were last winter, but making sure Wal-Mart is happy remains one of the music industry's major priorities. That's because if Wal-Mart cut back on music, industry sales would suffer severely -- though Wal-Mart's shareholders would barely bat an eye. While Wal-Mart represents nearly twenty percent of major-label music sales, music represents only about two percent of Wal-Mart's total sales. "If they got out of selling music, it would mean nothing to them," says another label executive. "This keeps me awake at night."
link
Link from Rolling Stone

Sigh!... One more for the trolls... Yes, the G5 (aka 970) and Athlon64 are 64 bit post-risc processors. Yes, they have quite a lot in common. No, they are NOT basically the same.

Ars Technica has run many articles explaining and contrasting the various architechtures. Here's somthing to get you started:

1. G4 vs P4
2. G4 vs Athlon

Sigh!... One more for the trolls... Yes, the G5 (aka 970) and Athlon64 are 64 bit post-risc processors. Yes, they have quite a lot in common. No, they are NOT basically the same.

Ars Technica has run many articles explaining and contrasting the various architechtures. Here's somthing to get you started:

1. G4 vs P4
2. G4 vs Athlon

The Cell is not going to be used in general purpose machines. It has a PowerPC core, but the performance is low compared to a G5. It also has a bunch or SPEs but these are not suitable for general purpose computation either - they lack MMUs for example, and only have access to a small amount of tightly coupled SRAM. The idea is that you split your application into a software pipeline, and implement the stages in different SPEs.

All this stuff doesn't matter for games consoles where you can code all the crucial bits in SPE assembler and the whole machine runs only one application, but it would kill performance on a general purpose OS.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars

How much market share does Dell have? AMD doesn't need Dell. They would like to have Dell, but they don't need Dell. HP/Compaq, is only slightly back, while IBM, Gateway, and the like still account for something. However that isn't the full story either, adding the market share of everyone with more than 5% of the market you come up short of 50%, meaning the little guy (who is a tech and should of heard of AMD) accounts for more total than the big names.

No, AMD, does not need Dell. AMD needs the motherboard and chipset vendors, but they seem to have enough of them.

Reference for those who want numbers

Is the EFF involved, they need to be.

The EFF brought the original suit against the FCC.

Clicky Link

link from Ars Technica

Unfortunately they're fighting it on a technicality - that Congress did not give the FCC explicit power to create the broadcast flag, and thusly they have no authority themselves to create it.

the DMCA is all about copyright, and it was Lexmark's (necessary) argument that their copyright was infringed upon by SCC when they reverse engineered the chip. The court, however, sided with the view that access controls are not typically eligible for copyright protection.

I'd guess that its mostly a problem with the English language, rather than technology knowledge. Here's another better written article http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050220-4632 .html

I think you both are drawing corollaries from Moore's `law', although I think Aaron's is closer. Moore's famous paper was more about cost than count.
"The number of transistors per chip that yields the minimum cost per transistor has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year."(artechnica.com) for full article.

I've been using Macs since I was 10, and although I never learned how to write code, I used to sit at my Mac for hours and study the interface of the OS and various programs. I'd click on the buttons and all the other widgets just to see how the program had been designed to "do things." As a result, I've become somewhat of a UI nut - I think I have a pretty good sense of what makes a good or bad interface when I see one. I can pick out specific details of what parts of a UI don't work well and why they don't work well (as well as parts that do work well), and I become genuinely pleased when I find an app. with a really well-designed UI (I also rant and rave to myself about the bad ones sometimes).

I wish I could name some old apps that would be really good examples for you, but it's been so long I can't remember (plus it's late and I'm tired), so you'll have to just try them out yourself and see what you think. (Oop! One off the top of my head - ClarisWorks. It wasn't perfect, but it was really nice to use in some ways.)

Go buy an old used Mac or two somewhere and load System 7.1 onto one. Play around with it and with various apps until it seems to you that you really have a good feel for the system of logic used by the programmers who designed the UI - why they made things the way that they did. Then load System 7.5.5 onto it. Figure out how it's UI is different from 7.1. What changes do you like? Why are they an improvement? Why do they make the user's experience better? What changes are not so good, and why do they interfere with the user's experience? Then do the same with 7.6.1, 8.1, 8.6, and 9.2.2. As you upgrade the OS, remember to look at new versions of applications and note the changes in the designers' thinking there, too.

Once you've done that, there's an excellent series of articles on ArsTechnica which detail the evolution of Mac OS X, a good portion of which are devoted to the user interface, usually what John Siracusa doesn't like about some of the UI changes in OS X (some of the information on the underlying structure of the OS is really fascinating too). In the above link, scroll down to just above the Table of Contents to find a list of articles reviewing OS X starting from Developer Preview 2 (personally, I'd read them chronologically). This link will take you to his review of OS X 10.3, which contains links to the 10.1 and 10.2 articles in the first paragraph. He brings up some really interesting points about the UI design of OS X, and I tend to agree with much of what he says.

Of course, this is not to say that the classic Mac OS (or OS X) and associated applications are the end-all-be-all of user interface design, but I do think that the classic Mac OS and some of the programs for it had UI designs that were very, very good - certainly worth learning from. The interface for OS X is good in ways, and does have some improvements over the classic Mac OS, but I personally think that there were some aspects of the classic Mac OS UI design mindset that were left behind which were worth saving.

I've also heard over the years about some legendary user interface research done at Apple "in the old days," but I've never really taken the time to look it up or see if it's publicly available. But, if you can manage to get your hands on that, I would think it would be a very valuable resource for mulling over the concept of interface design. I certainly would browse through a copy if I had it.

I hope this helps you in the future, if not on your current project. To do everything I've suggested would take a while, so it probably wouldn't help you on this one. But I think that if you do it, it will help you with any UI project you do for the rest of your life.

I've been using Macs since I was 10, and although I never learned how to write code, I used to sit at my Mac for hours and study the interface of the OS and various programs. I'd click on the buttons and all the other widgets just to see how the program had been designed to "do things." As a result, I've become somewhat of a UI nut - I think I have a pretty good sense of what makes a good or bad interface when I see one. I can pick out specific details of what parts of a UI don't work well and why they don't work well (as well as parts that do work well), and I become genuinely pleased when I find an app. with a really well-designed UI (I also rant and rave to myself about the bad ones sometimes).

I wish I could name some old apps that would be really good examples for you, but it's been so long I can't remember (plus it's late and I'm tired), so you'll have to just try them out yourself and see what you think. (Oop! One off the top of my head - ClarisWorks. It wasn't perfect, but it was really nice to use in some ways.)

Go buy an old used Mac or two somewhere and load System 7.1 onto one. Play around with it and with various apps until it seems to you that you really have a good feel for the system of logic used by the programmers who designed the UI - why they made things the way that they did. Then load System 7.5.5 onto it. Figure out how it's UI is different from 7.1. What changes do you like? Why are they an improvement? Why do they make the user's experience better? What changes are not so good, and why do they interfere with the user's experience? Then do the same with 7.6.1, 8.1, 8.6, and 9.2.2. As you upgrade the OS, remember to look at new versions of applications and note the changes in the designers' thinking there, too.

Once you've done that, there's an excellent series of articles on ArsTechnica which detail the evolution of Mac OS X, a good portion of which are devoted to the user interface, usually what John Siracusa doesn't like about some of the UI changes in OS X (some of the information on the underlying structure of the OS is really fascinating too). In the above link, scroll down to just above the Table of Contents to find a list of articles reviewing OS X starting from Developer Preview 2 (personally, I'd read them chronologically). This link will take you to his review of OS X 10.3, which contains links to the 10.1 and 10.2 articles in the first paragraph. He brings up some really interesting points about the UI design of OS X, and I tend to agree with much of what he says.

Of course, this is not to say that the classic Mac OS (or OS X) and associated applications are the end-all-be-all of user interface design, but I do think that the classic Mac OS and some of the programs for it had UI designs that were very, very good - certainly worth learning from. The interface for OS X is good in ways, and does have some improvements over the classic Mac OS, but I personally think that there were some aspects of the classic Mac OS UI design mindset that were left behind which were worth saving.

I've also heard over the years about some legendary user interface research done at Apple "in the old days," but I've never really taken the time to look it up or see if it's publicly available. But, if you can manage to get your hands on that, I would think it would be a very valuable resource for mulling over the concept of interface design. I certainly would browse through a copy if I had it.

I hope this helps you in the future, if not on your current project. To do everything I've suggested would take a while, so it probably wouldn't help you on this one. But I think that if you do it, it will help you with any UI project you do for the rest of your life.

He tried to sell subscribers' social security numbers. He's pretty dangerous. If you claim not, you're a moron, plain and simple.

Here he tries to sell materials from an ongoing federal investigation that he accessed through the break-in
Here he tries to sell social security numbers and other identifying information so others can steal those identities.

"Quartz uses the PDF drawing model for imaging"

"Quartz - Adobe Imaging Model (PDF)"

Quartz - "Display PDF"

"Quartz is Mac OS X's new 2D graphics system based on Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)."

But perhaps the best source would be Apple itself:
"Based on version 1.4 of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specification the same standard that drives the professional publishing industry Quartz is the name for Panthers revolutionary composited windowing system. Take one glance at the Panther screen and youll see crisp graphics, anti-aliased text, liquid transparency, and photo-realistic drop shadows. The technology behind this unparalleled graphic rendering quality is Quartz.

Uncompromised beauty
Even when you print or save to a PDF file, the Quartz engine makes sure the quality of your image is never compromised. Your PDF file or your printed document retains its transparency and 3-dimensional elements so that it looks just as its supposed to look.

From PostScript to PDF
Using industry-leading PostScript-to-PDF conversion technology, Panther translates Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) and PostScript data to high-quality PDF. Because this technology is integrated into Quartz, any Panther application can benefit from it by drawing images on screen from high-resolution PostScript/EPS data instead of low-resolution bitmap. And this also means that you can print PostScript-quality documents on all printers, even on non-PostScript devices by always using hi-res data Panther makes sure your documents always look their best, no matter what printer you use."

Another one from Apple:
"Quartz is a powerful graphics system which forms the foundation of the imaging model for Mac OS X . Quartz offers a sophisticated two-dimensional drawing engine and an advanced windowing environment. Quartz's feature-rich drawing engine leverages the Portable Document Format (PDF) drawing model and offers Mac OS X applications professional-strength drawing functionality. Quartz's windowing services provide low-level functionality like window buffering, event handling/dispatch as well as dynamically creating the translucency and drop shadow effects found in the Aqua user interface."

You know, searching through every search engine and reading every website contradicts what you're posting and confirms the website I linked to.

Is Arstechnica wrong? Quartz: "Display PDF"

A quick Google turns up this:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/ma cos-x-gui-4.html

Major tech site vs. your word. I've gotta go with ars technica on this one.

This will probably use Microsoft Sender ID which is incompatible with open source. This would be a really big problem. Fortunately even AOL rejected it. Meanwhile Yahoo has developed DomainKeys, which are compatible with open source.

Not that there's anything wrong with stealing ideas, right?

OK. For those of you who are not familiar with Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, he Knows his stuff about CPU architecture and provides a great service to hobbyists and programmers (such as myself, as I do scientific computing).

OK so if you want to understand pipelines and why longer ones are not always better?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pipelin ing-1.ars

No? Well how about caching?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/caching .ars

And then there is the Opteron/Athlon64 goodness
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/amd-ham mer-1.ars

Historical view of the Pentium Architecture?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars

For more great articles from him (and others)
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/

Also dont forget about MIT open courseware to fill in the gaps...
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-823Computer-System-Architect ureSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm

And how can you not have love for
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138810&cid=116 17250

Keep up the good work!

OK. For those of you who are not familiar with Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, he Knows his stuff about CPU architecture and provides a great service to hobbyists and programmers (such as myself, as I do scientific computing).

OK so if you want to understand pipelines and why longer ones are not always better?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pipelin ing-1.ars

No? Well how about caching?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/caching .ars

And then there is the Opteron/Athlon64 goodness
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/amd-ham mer-1.ars

Historical view of the Pentium Architecture?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars

For more great articles from him (and others)
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/

Also dont forget about MIT open courseware to fill in the gaps...
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-823Computer-System-Architect ureSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm

And how can you not have love for
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138810&cid=116 17250

Keep up the good work!

OK. For those of you who are not familiar with Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, he Knows his stuff about CPU architecture and provides a great service to hobbyists and programmers (such as myself, as I do scientific computing).

OK so if you want to understand pipelines and why longer ones are not always better?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pipelin ing-1.ars

No? Well how about caching?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/caching .ars

And then there is the Opteron/Athlon64 goodness
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/amd-ham mer-1.ars

Historical view of the Pentium Architecture?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars

For more great articles from him (and others)
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/

Also dont forget about MIT open courseware to fill in the gaps...
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-823Computer-System-Architect ureSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm

And how can you not have love for
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138810&cid=116 17250

Keep up the good work!

OK. For those of you who are not familiar with Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, he Knows his stuff about CPU architecture and provides a great service to hobbyists and programmers (such as myself, as I do scientific computing).

OK so if you want to understand pipelines and why longer ones are not always better?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pipelin ing-1.ars

No? Well how about caching?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/caching .ars

And then there is the Opteron/Athlon64 goodness
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/amd-ham mer-1.ars

Historical view of the Pentium Architecture?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars

For more great articles from him (and others)
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/

Also dont forget about MIT open courseware to fill in the gaps...
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-823Computer-System-Architect ureSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm

And how can you not have love for
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138810&cid=116 17250

Keep up the good work!

OK. For those of you who are not familiar with Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, he Knows his stuff about CPU architecture and provides a great service to hobbyists and programmers (such as myself, as I do scientific computing).

OK so if you want to understand pipelines and why longer ones are not always better?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pipelin ing-1.ars

No? Well how about caching?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/caching .ars

And then there is the Opteron/Athlon64 goodness
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/amd-ham mer-1.ars

Historical view of the Pentium Architecture?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium -1.ars

For more great articles from him (and others)
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/

Also dont forget about MIT open courseware to fill in the gaps...
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-823Computer-System-Architect ureSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm

And how can you not have love for
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138810&cid=116 17250

Keep up the good work!

This is a bigger, hotter, less stable chip with an exotic and hard to write-for architecture.

We should reserve judgment on the "hard to write-for" until we actually have details. This alleged sample code doesn't look too bad.

If you're going to rip the links out of one of my Ars news posts and submit them to slashdot (in the same order in which I linked them, no less), then at least credit your source.