Last I looked, a "troll" was someone who just sits back and reads without contributing.
Um, no. That would be a "lurker".
A "troll" is someone who writes a deliberatly inflammatory post, and then laughs at anyone who replies. For example, a troll might contribute an article claiming that Miguel should never have created GNOME, but rather helped with KDE; that would almost certainly result in a flood of replies. The troll doesn't have to agree with what he writes; he may not care at all. What he cares about is getting other people to reply.
In other words, a troll is a person who tries to make other people waste their time, and laughs at them when they do.
The groaners might do well to read "They Write the Right Stuff"
On the other hand, you might do well to read What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman. Much of that book discusses the Challenger accident, and what Feynman found out when he studied NASA. The only part of NASA about which he had anything good to say was the group that did the software for the computers on board the Shuttle.
And, if I recall correctly, some PHBs in NASA management wanted to cut the funds the software guys were getting. "They spend all this money running all these tests, and their stuff never has any trouble, so why do we need all these tests?" Straight out of Dilbert.
According to Henry Spencer, who knows about this stuff, it takes a million signatures to launch a Shuttle. You know, a guy takes a to-do list, checks off all items on the list, and signs that it's done? That, times a million. Henry Spencer says that the payroll costs for the Shuttle are so high that the cost of the Shuttle program is nearly constant, whether the Shuttle actually flies or not. You might as well fly it as often as possible, since it costs about the same not to fly it. Just imagine if the commerical airplane companies operated this way! (True, space is harder than air flight. But it isn't enough harder to justify the incredibly labor-intensive ways NASA routinely does things.)
I also find it hard to forgive that NASA managed to destroy the DC-X prototype on its very first NASA flight. It flew over and over, successfully, before it was assigned to NASA; then boom, it was destroyed. Of course they never built another. Whether it was malice or incompetence, either way it does not speak well for NASA.
I'm not so much hostile as sad. I wish NASA were the "Can Do!" organization it was in the 1960's, but it is more of a red-tape bureaucracy these days.
Non-computer games having a tough time now
on
SJGames Layoffs
·
· Score: 4
I know someone who runs a very small games company. He told me that when Magic: The Gathering (the collectable card game) came out, it had a huge negative impact on every other part of the games industry. In his estimation, the total dollars being spent on games didn't change much; it's just that millions of dollars got sucked out of everyone else's pockets and spent on Magic.
I have no way of knowing how true his comments are (and of course he is prejudiced a bit!) but it does seem to me that the games business has fallen on hard times. I remember when Dungeons and Dragons outsold Monopoly to become the top-selling game of the year; I doubt this is true any more!
P.S. Speaking of non-computer games: I saw a special edition of Dungeons and Dragons... on the cover it said: "Diablo II" (fine print) "Non-computer version" On the back it said something like "No computer required. Play Diablo II with your friends!"
Here is another idea: the original Playstation may not be powerful enough for video and animations and stuff, but it ought to be powerful enough to play
Ogg Vorbis
sound data through the TV speakers. And the PSX is more rugged than a PSX2: the PSX2 gets hot enough that it needs a cooling fan, while the PSX just sits there. You should be able to fit many hours of Ogg Vorbis sound data on a CD, and it is easy and cheap to burn CDs, and CDs are pretty rugged. And the PSX is really affordable; $100 retail for a Playstation 1 means it probably costs under $30 to make. And as people buy newer systems, there should be a ton of perfectly good used PSX systems out there.
Hmm. Make a PSX Linux system that can play Flash animations, and include Flash animations with the Ogg Vorbis video, and you might have something pretty cool.
So many of the negative comments are addressed by the article. Could you read the article please? Note that they said there are already TVs there to use. Note that they said that easy-to-use and hard-to-break are good things.
My first reaction was "Why don't we just send books?" Then I read it again. They want to educate illiterate people with video and animations.
Note also that there was a quote saying any of the modern consoles would be good, it's just that the others cost more than the PSX2. (Is $225 really a good estimate for how much it costs to make a PSX2? I had heard that the $300 price was under Sony's cost of goods, but maybe they have cut costs by now.)
Even the dirt-poor need information. They need to know how to set up the latrines so they don't contaminate the water supply. They need to know basic public health so they won't give themselves food poisoning all the time. And it might be cool if they could learn how to read; that's one more thing you actually could do on a PSX2.
In a perfect world, you would make a special Africa Computer. It would be mil-spec rugged, have the graphics capability for video and animations, etc. etc. In reality, you would spend a lot developing this, and the game consoles are probably good enough and very inexpensive.
Note that not everyone is illiterate. They will probably also want simple cheap web terminals like the
NIC.
steveha
My favorite by Zelazny
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 3
Lord of Light is my favorite single book by Zelazny. It's brilliant, nearly perfect.
Personally, I call it "science fantasy". There is a lot of magical stuff going on, but a handwaving explanation of machines and psi powers doesn't really convince me to consider it hard science fiction. This isn't a problem, of course, and in fact is a large part of why the book aged gracefully. Describing in detail how the tech works is usually a recipe for looking quaint later. (Remember the Heinlein novel that described the "computer" that used elaborate 3-dimensional cams inside its mechanical guts? One of the characters was wishing he could put in some 4-dimensional cams to make it more powerful... overclocking, kinda sorta.)
The book would have been awesome if it had just been a straightforward telling of that incredibly brilliant plot. But Zelazny had his own style of writing, and his use of language puts the frosting on top. Where other writers use words as bricks and mortar, to build the story, Zelazny also plays around artistically with the words themselves. At times this leads to pages that are poetically beautiful, at other times this means bad puns and outrageous dialog. In this book, the playing with words is not done too little or too much; it works.
A must-read.
steveha
Re:Doorways In The Sand
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 2
Agreed. I like this book.
When I first read it, in high school, I didn't like it! But it has improved with each re-reading, so I think the problem was with me and not with the book.
Heinlein got the word and the concept from real life. Here's a quote from Jerry Pournelle about this:
Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file.
This reminds me of the "Farleyfile", as described in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Double Star. A politician kept a database on all the people he met with, and before each appointment he would look up the person and refresh his memory. When the main character expressed outrage, another character said it was no different than writing down a phone number and address for a friend, except in scale.
If you always walk in to your favorite restaurant, and the hostess knows you and greets you by name, you probably don't have a paranoid feeling of "She knows who I am. This is bad. I need to start randomly changing restaurants so no one ever recognizes me." In fact, if she remembers that you like to sit by the window, and she puts you by the window, you are likely to be happy.
So the casinos are doing this sort of thing, only on a vast scale. I find this interesting, but not too troubling. I'm sure there are possible abuses here, but I'm not sure that the casinos are any worse than Safeway and their stupid "keep track of everything I buy" card.
To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress.
True, but there needs to be at least a segment of the market that actually needs (or at least wants) the better and expensive product. For example, if you were to invent an improved floppy disk drive, at this point you would not be likely to sell many... especially if it is expensive. Current floppy disk drives are adequate for the purposes for which people need them.
Another example: gourmet hamburger restaurants seem to have a hard time. I really enjoy eating at
Fuddruckers
and I don't mind paying extra for the quality... but McDonalds is cheaper and considered adequate by most people, and Fuddruckers has trouble competing.
[The Cube] was at a really strange place in the product line.
Yah. Folks who needed the absolute top performance (including the best expansion capabilities) would buy G4 tower Macs, not the Cube; folks looking for a decent computer that doesn't cost too much would buy an iMac, not the Cube.
another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed.
IMHO, it is a stretch to call that a "major" one. How many people will pay a premium price for a computer because it has an 8" by 8" footprint? (Answer: not enough.)
Adequate and cheaper wins against better but more expensive.
Other Macs, with far better price/performance, outsold the Cube. The Cube has exactly two things going for it:
it looks cool
it is silent
Well, other Macs look cool enough, and are quiet enough, and cost less for what they do.
And, by the way, while you can make money by selling a product that is expensive but really cool -- consider Rolex watches, or Bentley cars -- a few visible cracks in clear plastic just may be enough to disappoint the folks who are motivated to buy such products.
The Cube is the only Mac that remotely tempts me. A truly silent box would be a nice thing. If I ever decide to buy a Mac, I'll probably get a used Cube, perhaps on eBay. Apple may not make any more new ones, but there will still be a few around.
The length of the pipelines is not the main reason that the Pentium4 sucks. The main reason is that the chip is broken in several important ways, such that you need to rearrange your code specially in order to mitigate the broken stuff. This is straight out of the
article
you cited (great article, I agree!).
Historically, if you took code for one processor and ran it on a later processor, the later processor would always do a better job of running it than the original. (The major, glaring exception to this was the Pentium Pro, which really sucked unless you optimized the code for it.) This is why Linux distributions such as Debian just optimize for the 386 and call it good -- most of the time, for most of the applications, you won't pick up very much performance by optimizing for a specific chip architecture. (By the way, you should rebuild your kernel with chip-specific optimizations. Your kernel is running all the time, and any savings will add up quickly. Of course, all the CPUs are so fast these days that few of us will really notice any difference even with the kernel.)
But now the Pentium4 has so much wrong with it, that unless you rearrange the code specially, it chokes and underperforms. The Level 1 cache is actually a cache for decoded instructions, which is cool... but it is only 8K, which is insane! Sure, since the instructions were already decoded, the 8K cache is probably worth a bit more than a simple 8K instruction cache, but the Athlon has a 64K instruction cache! The Pentium4 has all these internal execution units, but it can only feed three of them per clock cycle from the cache, so most of them will be idle in any given clock cycle. And while earlier chips introduced cool features that would make code run really fast (bit-shifting was really fast, and there were special instructions like CMOVE) these all run dog-slow on the Pentium4.
So, the Pentium4 runs really hot, and needs special cooling and a special power supply. Right now it needs expensive RDRAM. And it needs special optimizations to allow it to run at full speed. Summary: unless you really need its special features, buy an Athlon.
When does a P4 beat an Athlon? Some specific situations where RDRAM is really appropriate, some specific situations where the SSE features really work (and assuming the code is optimized for it), and that's about it.
Can a future P4 dethrone the Athlon? Maybe. Intel claims that the P4 is slower, clock-for-clock, than the Athlon for a good reason: because the P4 will reach really high clock speeds really fast. Some breathless press release I read said something about a 10 GHz version of the P4 within four years or so. Let's face it, the P4 can stay as broken as it is and still stomp the Athlon if Intel can really get the P4 going twice as fast or more than the Athlon! But I'll believe it when I see it. The current P4 goes into thermal overload and slows to half-speed if you work it really hard, and dissipates 73 Watts at 1.5 GHz; even with a die shrink I'll bet a 10 GHz P4 would melt itself into a puddle.
Because the Athlon gets more work done per clock, and is available at clock speeds nearly as high as the P4, the Athlon is better than the P4 across the board. There are a few narrow situations where the P4 is better than the Athlon, but if you check the price/performance ratio the Athlon still wins.
So I don't expect to see any updates on the Penny Arcade web site for a couple of weeks.
Okay, so I was wrong. He has an update there, which pretty much amounts to an apology.
Your responses were deft and had the weight of punishment, and I feel as though I have been taught a valuable lesson by a bloom of aluminum baseball bats. At the root of it, I misjudged the man.
I don't believe Tycho would write that rant again if he had it to do over. (But probably he would go ahead and do the parody comic again... it was extremely funny!)
That one I got exactly right.
If I had it to do over again, I would have let the strip speak for itself - and then switched quickly to something innocuous, like wool. There is more than a reasonable chance that my news approach will be much softened, at least in the short term.
Looking ahead to the long term, do you see Linux replacing IBM's operating systems? After all, IBM makes money from selling hardware, and development work on operating systems is pretty much overhead.
To put the question a slightly different way, are there any features in IBM operating systems that IBM is not planning to port to Linux?
Actually, I was moved by Tycho's rant to send him email about it. We wound up having an email discussion.
I believe his rant was fueled mostly by his perception (mistaken, IMHO) that Scott McCloud was trying to be some kind of official spokesman for all comics. He wasn't any kind of jerk to me in email, and he seemed a lot less angry about it in our discussion. Note that Scott McCloud says, right at the top of his "Backlash" page, that he has been in direct contact with Tycho and "we're all definitely calming down a lot now."
So there isn't much of a controversy left. I don't believe Tycho would write that rant again if he had it to do over. (But probably he would go ahead and do the parody comic again... it was extremely funny!)
If you check the News on the current Penny Arcade, you will see that Tycho is out of town right now, with limited access to the Net. So I don't expect to see any updates on the Penny Arcade web site for a couple of weeks. (He says there are enough comics queued up to last until he is back, so anything we see in the next couple of weeks was queued in advance.)
Penny Arcade being what it is, I wouldn't be too surprised if they do one where Scott McCloud shows up and feeds Tycho a radioactive scorpion or something.
If a doc has been fast-saved, the version you will get is non-deterministic.
Oh, fast save. Yah, non-deterministic is about right.
Fast save works by just saving a snapshot of the data structures inside Word. Pieces of text might be in any sort of order, and Word needs to walk the "piece table" to sort it all out. The normal save takes the extra moment to sort everything out and write it in sensible order.
This feature may have saved enough time to be worth something back when people were running Word on a 16 MHz 386, but even then I doubt it. (When you scroll around in the document, Word has to walk the piece table to show you the text, on the fly... so it's definitely fast enough for a save operation!) Back when I ran Word on a 486 I didn't notice any difference in speed between normal save and fast save. Alas, the default is for fast save, and people don't realize this.
At a place I used to work, they were indexing their documents, and the indexer did a pretty good job, but it couldn't correctly grok fast-saved documents. You could search for a string and sometimes not find it, depending on where the pieces were broken up! Turning off Fast Save made things work correctly.
OpenOffice is the GPLed version, StarOffice is Sun's rebranded version of the same thing.
Um, no. StarOffice came first.
Sun bought the company that created StarOffice, and then decided that they didn't care about the revenue stream from StarOffice. As long as they didn't care about it, they went ahead and made StarOffice free. I think the management of Sun considered it a poke in the eye for Microsoft, and they probably enjoyed doing it.
Anyway, Sun agreed to open up the source. But there are parts of StarOffice that are under license from other people/companies, so they could only open the source on the parts they own. When they first released OpenOffice it didn't even build. These days it builds, but it isn't stable at all yet.
When OpenOffice is stable, and any missing features have been added back in, and they have split it up into separate apps (I hate the StarOffice desktop!), then I will look at OpenOffice.
And then they can try to re-brand OpenOffice if they want to, but I can't imagine why they would bother. They are giving away StarOffice now; why would they care about re-branding OpenOffice when OpenOffice works?
P.S. The most interesting part of the article, to me, was the part about StarOffice 6 coming out, split up into separate apps. I might be very interested in that. But right now I am mainly interested in AbiWord and Gnumeric.
"Change their work, release source. Change our work, no sweat."
No, they are not quite the same. There is a reason why Scheme wasn't just released under LGPL. My head hurts when I try hard to understand just what the LGPL says; the Scheme license is simpler.
For example, my understanding of the LGPL license is that you have to release source for any part of your application that uses header files from the LGPL stuff, if the header files contain inline functions more than 10 lines long.
(LGPL, section 5.)
Craig Mundie says MS just wants to be very clear that its code may never be given away. Brett Glass says MS is being reasonable, and he prefers the BSD license to the GPL.
What about the Scheme license? That is GPL, with the exception that you can link Scheme in (and include the header files) without any need for your other stuff to be under a free license. In other words, if you make a change to Scheme, you have to release it under the GPL, but you can freely use Scheme even in proprietary stuff.
This would seem to fix Microsoft's worries. But it also makes it impossible to release a slightly incompatible Scheme (if MS really does "embrace and extend" they might be expected to try this). So I'd be interested to know whether MS considers the Scheme license to be a Pac-Man cancer or whatever. I'd even be interested to know what Brett Glass thinks of it.
I can't stand people who sit in classes/meetings/conferences taking notes while typing away noisily on a keyboard.
Well, it depends on the keyboard. Some keyboards make a noisy "clack" and others are very quiet.
A dozen years or so ago, long before Palm, the smallest and lightest laptop-ish thing you could get was a
TRS-80 Model 100.
It had 24 or 32 kilobytes of memory (24KB, not 24MB), a display that was 8 lines of 40 characters each, and a decent keyboard. That keyboard was noisy, but there was a well-known hack: you would pop the key caps off, put a little tiny rubber band around the post for the key, and put the key cap back on. (You could get the tiny rubber bands from any orthodontist.) With a spongy rubber bumper under every key, the keyboard became very quiet for note-taking.
(By the way, I heard that the Model 100 was very popular for news reporters. 24KB is enough to write up a news story, the built-in text editor was adequate, and they could use the optional acoustic coupler with the built-in 300 baud modem to send in the news story from any phone booth.)
I don't think any of the portable Palm keyboards I have seen make a really loud "clack" sound when you type. If you are a gentle typist, you shouldn't make too much noise.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no. That would be a "lurker".
A "troll" is someone who writes a deliberatly inflammatory post, and then laughs at anyone who replies. For example, a troll might contribute an article claiming that Miguel should never have created GNOME, but rather helped with KDE; that would almost certainly result in a flood of replies. The troll doesn't have to agree with what he writes; he may not care at all. What he cares about is getting other people to reply.
In other words, a troll is a person who tries to make other people waste their time, and laughs at them when they do.
steveha
On the other hand, you might do well to read What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman. Much of that book discusses the Challenger accident, and what Feynman found out when he studied NASA. The only part of NASA about which he had anything good to say was the group that did the software for the computers on board the Shuttle.
And, if I recall correctly, some PHBs in NASA management wanted to cut the funds the software guys were getting. "They spend all this money running all these tests, and their stuff never has any trouble, so why do we need all these tests?" Straight out of Dilbert.
According to Henry Spencer, who knows about this stuff, it takes a million signatures to launch a Shuttle. You know, a guy takes a to-do list, checks off all items on the list, and signs that it's done? That, times a million. Henry Spencer says that the payroll costs for the Shuttle are so high that the cost of the Shuttle program is nearly constant, whether the Shuttle actually flies or not. You might as well fly it as often as possible, since it costs about the same not to fly it. Just imagine if the commerical airplane companies operated this way! (True, space is harder than air flight. But it isn't enough harder to justify the incredibly labor-intensive ways NASA routinely does things.)
I also find it hard to forgive that NASA managed to destroy the DC-X prototype on its very first NASA flight. It flew over and over, successfully, before it was assigned to NASA; then boom, it was destroyed. Of course they never built another. Whether it was malice or incompetence, either way it does not speak well for NASA.
I'm not so much hostile as sad. I wish NASA were the "Can Do!" organization it was in the 1960's, but it is more of a red-tape bureaucracy these days.
steveha
Looks like a winner to me!
steveha
I have no way of knowing how true his comments are (and of course he is prejudiced a bit!) but it does seem to me that the games business has fallen on hard times. I remember when Dungeons and Dragons outsold Monopoly to become the top-selling game of the year; I doubt this is true any more!
P.S. Speaking of non-computer games: I saw a special edition of Dungeons and Dragons... on the cover it said: "Diablo II" (fine print) "Non-computer version" On the back it said something like "No computer required. Play Diablo II with your friends!"
The circle is complete.
steveha
steveha
Hmm. Make a PSX Linux system that can play Flash animations, and include Flash animations with the Ogg Vorbis video, and you might have something pretty cool.
steveha
My first reaction was "Why don't we just send books?" Then I read it again. They want to educate illiterate people with video and animations.
Note also that there was a quote saying any of the modern consoles would be good, it's just that the others cost more than the PSX2. (Is $225 really a good estimate for how much it costs to make a PSX2? I had heard that the $300 price was under Sony's cost of goods, but maybe they have cut costs by now.)
Even the dirt-poor need information. They need to know how to set up the latrines so they don't contaminate the water supply. They need to know basic public health so they won't give themselves food poisoning all the time. And it might be cool if they could learn how to read; that's one more thing you actually could do on a PSX2.
In a perfect world, you would make a special Africa Computer. It would be mil-spec rugged, have the graphics capability for video and animations, etc. etc. In reality, you would spend a lot developing this, and the game consoles are probably good enough and very inexpensive.
Note that not everyone is illiterate. They will probably also want simple cheap web terminals like the NIC.
steveha
Personally, I call it "science fantasy". There is a lot of magical stuff going on, but a handwaving explanation of machines and psi powers doesn't really convince me to consider it hard science fiction. This isn't a problem, of course, and in fact is a large part of why the book aged gracefully. Describing in detail how the tech works is usually a recipe for looking quaint later. (Remember the Heinlein novel that described the "computer" that used elaborate 3-dimensional cams inside its mechanical guts? One of the characters was wishing he could put in some 4-dimensional cams to make it more powerful... overclocking, kinda sorta.)
The book would have been awesome if it had just been a straightforward telling of that incredibly brilliant plot. But Zelazny had his own style of writing, and his use of language puts the frosting on top. Where other writers use words as bricks and mortar, to build the story, Zelazny also plays around artistically with the words themselves. At times this leads to pages that are poetically beautiful, at other times this means bad puns and outrageous dialog. In this book, the playing with words is not done too little or too much; it works.
A must-read.
steveha
When I first read it, in high school, I didn't like it! But it has improved with each re-reading, so I think the problem was with me and not with the book.
steveha
Heinlein got the word and the concept from real life. Here's a quote from Jerry Pournelle about this:
I got the quote here.
steveha
If you always walk in to your favorite restaurant, and the hostess knows you and greets you by name, you probably don't have a paranoid feeling of "She knows who I am. This is bad. I need to start randomly changing restaurants so no one ever recognizes me." In fact, if she remembers that you like to sit by the window, and she puts you by the window, you are likely to be happy.
So the casinos are doing this sort of thing, only on a vast scale. I find this interesting, but not too troubling. I'm sure there are possible abuses here, but I'm not sure that the casinos are any worse than Safeway and their stupid "keep track of everything I buy" card.
steveha
Maybe so, but then so is Murphy's Law.
To me it seems "better and expensive" is what actually drives most progress.
True, but there needs to be at least a segment of the market that actually needs (or at least wants) the better and expensive product. For example, if you were to invent an improved floppy disk drive, at this point you would not be likely to sell many... especially if it is expensive. Current floppy disk drives are adequate for the purposes for which people need them.
Another example: gourmet hamburger restaurants seem to have a hard time. I really enjoy eating at Fuddruckers and I don't mind paying extra for the quality... but McDonalds is cheaper and considered adequate by most people, and Fuddruckers has trouble competing.
[The Cube] was at a really strange place in the product line.
Yah. Folks who needed the absolute top performance (including the best expansion capabilities) would buy G4 tower Macs, not the Cube; folks looking for a decent computer that doesn't cost too much would buy an iMac, not the Cube.
another major one is that it takes up very little space at 8" cubed.
IMHO, it is a stretch to call that a "major" one. How many people will pay a premium price for a computer because it has an 8" by 8" footprint? (Answer: not enough.)
steveha
Other Macs, with far better price/performance, outsold the Cube. The Cube has exactly two things going for it:
it looks cool
it is silent
Well, other Macs look cool enough, and are quiet enough, and cost less for what they do.
And, by the way, while you can make money by selling a product that is expensive but really cool -- consider Rolex watches, or Bentley cars -- a few visible cracks in clear plastic just may be enough to disappoint the folks who are motivated to buy such products.
The Cube is the only Mac that remotely tempts me. A truly silent box would be a nice thing. If I ever decide to buy a Mac, I'll probably get a used Cube, perhaps on eBay. Apple may not make any more new ones, but there will still be a few around.
steveha
If nothing else, it should give some competition to the latest Star Trek spin-off Enterprise, which bows next season
The first time I read that, I thought it said "Enterprise, which blows next season"...
"Really," I thought, "it's a bit early to be that harsh... we haven't even seen Enterprise yet!"
steveha
Historically, if you took code for one processor and ran it on a later processor, the later processor would always do a better job of running it than the original. (The major, glaring exception to this was the Pentium Pro, which really sucked unless you optimized the code for it.) This is why Linux distributions such as Debian just optimize for the 386 and call it good -- most of the time, for most of the applications, you won't pick up very much performance by optimizing for a specific chip architecture. (By the way, you should rebuild your kernel with chip-specific optimizations. Your kernel is running all the time, and any savings will add up quickly. Of course, all the CPUs are so fast these days that few of us will really notice any difference even with the kernel.)
But now the Pentium4 has so much wrong with it, that unless you rearrange the code specially, it chokes and underperforms. The Level 1 cache is actually a cache for decoded instructions, which is cool... but it is only 8K, which is insane! Sure, since the instructions were already decoded, the 8K cache is probably worth a bit more than a simple 8K instruction cache, but the Athlon has a 64K instruction cache! The Pentium4 has all these internal execution units, but it can only feed three of them per clock cycle from the cache, so most of them will be idle in any given clock cycle. And while earlier chips introduced cool features that would make code run really fast (bit-shifting was really fast, and there were special instructions like CMOVE) these all run dog-slow on the Pentium4.
So, the Pentium4 runs really hot, and needs special cooling and a special power supply. Right now it needs expensive RDRAM. And it needs special optimizations to allow it to run at full speed. Summary: unless you really need its special features, buy an Athlon.
When does a P4 beat an Athlon? Some specific situations where RDRAM is really appropriate, some specific situations where the SSE features really work (and assuming the code is optimized for it), and that's about it.
Can a future P4 dethrone the Athlon? Maybe. Intel claims that the P4 is slower, clock-for-clock, than the Athlon for a good reason: because the P4 will reach really high clock speeds really fast. Some breathless press release I read said something about a 10 GHz version of the P4 within four years or so. Let's face it, the P4 can stay as broken as it is and still stomp the Athlon if Intel can really get the P4 going twice as fast or more than the Athlon! But I'll believe it when I see it. The current P4 goes into thermal overload and slows to half-speed if you work it really hard, and dissipates 73 Watts at 1.5 GHz; even with a die shrink I'll bet a 10 GHz P4 would melt itself into a puddle.
Because the Athlon gets more work done per clock, and is available at clock speeds nearly as high as the P4, the Athlon is better than the P4 across the board. There are a few narrow situations where the P4 is better than the Athlon, but if you check the price/performance ratio the Athlon still wins.
steveha
Okay, so I was wrong. He has an update there, which pretty much amounts to an apology.
I don't believe Tycho would write that rant again if he had it to do over. (But probably he would go ahead and do the parody comic again... it was extremely funny!)
That one I got exactly right.
Read the whole thing here.
steveha
To put the question a slightly different way, are there any features in IBM operating systems that IBM is not planning to port to Linux?
steveha
I believe his rant was fueled mostly by his perception (mistaken, IMHO) that Scott McCloud was trying to be some kind of official spokesman for all comics. He wasn't any kind of jerk to me in email, and he seemed a lot less angry about it in our discussion. Note that Scott McCloud says, right at the top of his "Backlash" page, that he has been in direct contact with Tycho and "we're all definitely calming down a lot now."
So there isn't much of a controversy left. I don't believe Tycho would write that rant again if he had it to do over. (But probably he would go ahead and do the parody comic again... it was extremely funny!)
If you check the News on the current Penny Arcade, you will see that Tycho is out of town right now, with limited access to the Net. So I don't expect to see any updates on the Penny Arcade web site for a couple of weeks. (He says there are enough comics queued up to last until he is back, so anything we see in the next couple of weeks was queued in advance.)
Penny Arcade being what it is, I wouldn't be too surprised if they do one where Scott McCloud shows up and feeds Tycho a radioactive scorpion or something.
steveha
Interesting. I wonder why Sun wants to re-brand OpenOffice back to StarOffice. Just building the corporate brand?
Thanks for the info.
steveha
Oh, fast save. Yah, non-deterministic is about right.
Fast save works by just saving a snapshot of the data structures inside Word. Pieces of text might be in any sort of order, and Word needs to walk the "piece table" to sort it all out. The normal save takes the extra moment to sort everything out and write it in sensible order.
This feature may have saved enough time to be worth something back when people were running Word on a 16 MHz 386, but even then I doubt it. (When you scroll around in the document, Word has to walk the piece table to show you the text, on the fly... so it's definitely fast enough for a save operation!) Back when I ran Word on a 486 I didn't notice any difference in speed between normal save and fast save. Alas, the default is for fast save, and people don't realize this.
At a place I used to work, they were indexing their documents, and the indexer did a pretty good job, but it couldn't correctly grok fast-saved documents. You could search for a string and sometimes not find it, depending on where the pieces were broken up! Turning off Fast Save made things work correctly.
steveha
Um, no. StarOffice came first.
Sun bought the company that created StarOffice, and then decided that they didn't care about the revenue stream from StarOffice. As long as they didn't care about it, they went ahead and made StarOffice free. I think the management of Sun considered it a poke in the eye for Microsoft, and they probably enjoyed doing it.
Anyway, Sun agreed to open up the source. But there are parts of StarOffice that are under license from other people/companies, so they could only open the source on the parts they own. When they first released OpenOffice it didn't even build. These days it builds, but it isn't stable at all yet.
When OpenOffice is stable, and any missing features have been added back in, and they have split it up into separate apps (I hate the StarOffice desktop!), then I will look at OpenOffice.
And then they can try to re-brand OpenOffice if they want to, but I can't imagine why they would bother. They are giving away StarOffice now; why would they care about re-branding OpenOffice when OpenOffice works?
P.S. The most interesting part of the article, to me, was the part about StarOffice 6 coming out, split up into separate apps. I might be very interested in that. But right now I am mainly interested in AbiWord and Gnumeric.
steveha
I'm a "he", by the way. :-)
steveha
No, they are not quite the same. There is a reason why Scheme wasn't just released under LGPL. My head hurts when I try hard to understand just what the LGPL says; the Scheme license is simpler.
For example, my understanding of the LGPL license is that you have to release source for any part of your application that uses header files from the LGPL stuff, if the header files contain inline functions more than 10 lines long. (LGPL, section 5.)
steveha
What about the Scheme license? That is GPL, with the exception that you can link Scheme in (and include the header files) without any need for your other stuff to be under a free license. In other words, if you make a change to Scheme, you have to release it under the GPL, but you can freely use Scheme even in proprietary stuff.
This would seem to fix Microsoft's worries. But it also makes it impossible to release a slightly incompatible Scheme (if MS really does "embrace and extend" they might be expected to try this). So I'd be interested to know whether MS considers the Scheme license to be a Pac-Man cancer or whatever. I'd even be interested to know what Brett Glass thinks of it.
steveha
Well, it depends on the keyboard. Some keyboards make a noisy "clack" and others are very quiet.
A dozen years or so ago, long before Palm, the smallest and lightest laptop-ish thing you could get was a TRS-80 Model 100. It had 24 or 32 kilobytes of memory (24KB, not 24MB), a display that was 8 lines of 40 characters each, and a decent keyboard. That keyboard was noisy, but there was a well-known hack: you would pop the key caps off, put a little tiny rubber band around the post for the key, and put the key cap back on. (You could get the tiny rubber bands from any orthodontist.) With a spongy rubber bumper under every key, the keyboard became very quiet for note-taking.
(By the way, I heard that the Model 100 was very popular for news reporters. 24KB is enough to write up a news story, the built-in text editor was adequate, and they could use the optional acoustic coupler with the built-in 300 baud modem to send in the news story from any phone booth.)
I don't think any of the portable Palm keyboards I have seen make a really loud "clack" sound when you type. If you are a gentle typist, you shouldn't make too much noise.
steveha