Children, grow up and admit that OSS isn't perfect
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'll begin by saying that I mostly use Linux, and I use OpenOffice even on Windows when I can help it. One reason is that I don't want to give money to Microsoft, but there are other reasons as well, including my belief that Free Software is the key to the advancement of IT in the future.
But this situation is pure hillarity. OSS fans have their list of reasons why Linux (or some Linux app) is better than Windows (or some Windows app). Two reasons near the top are that Windows is slower and more bloated. These reasons are sited often and are part of the OSS mantra.
So I find it incredibly ironic that now that the shoe is on the other foot, the tables are turned, etc., that these very same people are dismissing "bloated" and "slow" as unimportant.
No, you idiots. "Bloated" and "slow" are ALWAYS bad, even when they apply to an OSS application. That means there's something wrong with OpenOffice.org, and if you have half a brain in your head, you have to accept that it's broken for that reason. That doesn't mean you should stop using it or feel disillusioned. And defending your beliefs in the face of this embarrassment just makes you look stupid and inconsistent. HAVE SOME FREAKING STANDARDS, and have them ALL THE TIME, not just when they make your favorite thing look better. It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.
The proper solution is to automatically notice that I'm using defaults and figure out when replacing the file is correct. Or if I've made changes, figure out how to port them from one version to the next (like Ubuntu does with pre/post-install scripts), and only as a last resort should it ask me to manually look at the files.
In my case, I would never have to look at a config file again if they did it right.
dispatch-conf is not something mentioned in standard documentation. And when you update packages, it tells you to run etc-update. As long as it's telling you to run etc-update, my comment isn't outdated.
There are gobs of things I've never gotten to work with Gentoo, like Hotplug. There are other things that break regularly, like audio, which will go away mysteriously and not work again until I reboot.
My biggest problem with Gentoo isn't a tech support one. It's a big giant bug called "etc-update" that bombards me with over 100 "changes" to config files I've never heard of every time I upgrade a bunch of things.
I've paid my dues. I've compiled kernels and admin'ed my own box. I think, rather than try to fix this annoying thing called Gentoo, I'm going to just switch to Ubuntu.
Yes, it's flamebait. But seriously, there are certain things about Gentoo that I don't want to give up, but there are other problems that remain that have never been fixed that are driving me away. To each his own, I guess.
Load of bull, Linux is based on specs, Star Gate
on
Linus Says No to 'Specs'
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· Score: 3, Insightful
We wrote the Open Graphics Project spec not based on purely abstract theory but based on the experiences and needs of the community. Purely for the sake of survival, I made it clear that there should be nothing in the design which could not be justified by common needs. Based on that, we developed a SPEC.
Maybe Linus is having a language-barrier problem, but a spec is just a description of something, albeit somewhat formalized. That means you could write a spec retroactively. We could write a spec for the Linux kernel as it is right now. If we were to do that, would Linus abandon Linux? It wouldn't be THAT hard to make it accurate.
Frankly, I can't write anything without SOME sort of spec. Often, those specs are contained completely within my brain, but I nevertheless must develop a coherent concept of what it is I'm going to build and what its pieces are. When I write a document, I often start out with some sort of outline. And when I write code, I have to decompose it into functions.
If a spec is any coherent description of something you make, then Linus uses specs all the time, and he's just blowing smoke out his ass.
He's complaining about specs because they're usually done badly. JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING IS USUALLY DONE BADLY. Should we say that all operating systems are bad just because Windows sucks? Should we say all cars are bad just because the Ford Taurus is designed to last only 5 years? Should we do away with TV just because of shows like "Two guys, a girl, and a pizza shop" or "Survivor"?
Linus is forgetting that Linux is based on specs, Honda makes reliable cars, and Star Gate SG1 is on on SOME channel just about all day.
Seriously. If a flight attendant notifies the cockpit of a highjack attempt, the cockpit and cabin become atmospherically isolated, and NO2 or something is released into the air in the cabin, putting everyone to sleep. The plane lands, and people in HASMAT suits come in and secure the cabin. You could also have air martials with the ability to afix a mask on being alerted so they could tie up offenders on the way down.
One of the caveats is that some people's health conditions don't take well to anesthetics. If the gas's effects are relatively mild, though, they should be okay, and this gives the air martials time to tie up the perps before the stuff wears off.
GNOME, KDE, and a number of other desktop environments support X11 sessions. Using this standard, an application can save its state when you log out and then restore it when you log back on. Most X11 apps support it to some extent or other. But Mozilla is the oddball in that it doesn't support it. Their bugzilla has an entry for this, which they've been ignoring for YEARS.
I guess Mozilla isn't as interested in being standards-compliant as they claim.
I specialize in computer demolition. I have always been a pyro and I have always had a fascination with blowing things up. With computer security becoming an issue, and some lessons learned from the arrests, I have turned my talents towards something more constructively destructive.
For $200, I will use shaped charges and implode and obliterate your computer. I also sometimes opt to run computers over with one of my various broken-down cars.
[Disclaimer: This is a joke (attempt). While like to watch explosions on TV from time to time, I've never blown anything up myself, and I've never been arrested. And it's my cousin who owns all the broken-down cars.]
Well, Lindows had to change its name to Linspire, because it was too much like Windows. Well, now Freespire is too much like Linspire. So how about we call it Freedows?
You seem to have a twisted view of what is "open".
First, consider the graphics cards we have now, such as ATI and nVidia. Those are what we call "not open at all". You cannot get specs, or open source drivers for the latest stuff. This is what you have.
There are a few low-end manufacturers that do publish specs. But you still don't get anything the least bit interesting about internal workings. Those are what we call "open spec".
The design for OGP is what we call "open architecture". At first, what you get are complete specs, plus detailed descriptions of the internal workings of the GPU. Then, when the $2 million or $3 million espense for the ASIC is paid off, you get the whole design of everything under GPL. Is that open enough for you?
The first OGP product is a "development platform", which is under LGPL from the start, with lots of code published already.
If this guy was really interested in Linux desktop graphics, he would have at least made a passing mention of the Open Graphics Project ( http://opengraphics.org/ ).
Note that I use OOo almost exclusively. I use Linux mostly, and I don't want to spend the money for MSOffice for my one Windows machine. But I use OOo for the same reason so many others use MSOffice: I am a captive audience. If I want to use a word processor and not spend money on both MSOffice and Crossover Office, OOo is what I have to use.
When I started using Excel back in, what, 1992, I used it to make a LOT of presentations. They were financial with lots of numbers and computations that the customer would like to tweak, so Excel was appropriate. Nevertheless, despite being for a spreasheet, I was required to make the documents look VERY ATTRACTIVE. (Not to say that my lowly artistic skill accomplished the goal, but the boss thought I did okay.) I would do things like color-code cells, add borders, fiddle with fonts, etc. And one FREQUENT thing I would do was ctrl-click to select a disjoint set of cells and then apply formats to all of them at once.
OOo cannot do this.
This very basic feature that I and the people I learned from have been using for a VERY LONG TIME is something that OOo cannot do. When I first started using OOo at version 1.0.0, I immediately noticed this oversight and reported it in their bug database. The bug report disappeared. I've since posted it a couple more times, and this bug report seems to consistently disappear.
Sure, it's possible that that (a) I'm a niche user who is unusual in his need for this feature, and (b) I don't know how to use their bug database to retrieve old bug reports. But the fact of the matter is, they have consistently left out this feature. I don't know if they've added it to 2.0, but I doubt it.
Why does such a relatively small oversight bother me so much? Because I need it, and I cannot imagine that it could be THAT hard to fix. (But I wouldn't know, because the size of the OOo source is a bit overwhelming for me.)
Now, THIS is something I have experience with. When I called to cancel my Verizon Wireless account, I listed the problems I'd had with their service:
(1) When I got service, the saleslady got it all messed up, resulting in a huge overcharge. I had to go through 6 separate calls to customer service before I found someone who would (a) not hang up on me and do something I had not authorized and (b) actually do something to fix the problem. (2) I wanted to add more minutes to my plan, so I called customer service. Unknown to me, they extended my contract a year from the date I got new minutes. They never mailed me anything or in any way told me that they were extending my contract. Yet they insisted that they had told me and sent me a letter. (3) When I thought my first contract was up, I decided to get upgraded phones. When we signed up, we were told that we'd get $100 credit on TWO phones. Come to find out that that was a lie and we were going to get it for only one phone. I threatened to change providers, and the lady told me to go ahead. She must have known what would happen next. (4) When I canceled my service (the first time), I got a $350 "early termination" bill from Verizon. When I call customer service, NOW they tell me that they'd secretly extended my contract. (5) The only option I had at the time was to switch back. That turned out to be nightmare of lies. Every other person would give me a different story. At first they told me that I could rejoin where I left off. Others would tell me that I would have to rejoin with a minimum of one year. It took me DAYS to get that straightened out.
I had like 2 or 3 months left, and I counted the days. When it finally came time to cancel, the lady I talked to really didn't have any room to argue that Verizon wouldn't do this sort of crap again. I told them that if they were willing to give me two free phones, I would consider it, but she didn't have the authority for that. Ok. BYE.
Oh, and later, I'll have to tell you how Citibank credit card would automatically renew (and charge me for) credit shield 3 months after I would cancel it and tell them NEVER to renew it. I finally told them that (a) I wanted the charges removed, and (b) a certified letter stating that they would never renew it again. They told me they would look into it and reversed some late charges I'd incurred earlier that year (which was kinda nice), but that $30 didn't make up for the $80 they charged me for credit shield. When I finally got a letter of refusal, I called on a weekend to cancel. The sales people who would try to talk me out of canceling were probably not at work, so my account was canceled immediately.
Given Intel's anticompetitive, predatory behavior against AMD, it's hard to tell how much of Intel's market share is due to having a competitive product and how much is due to them shutting AMD out of the market.
Intel's original idea was to find a way to more aggressively pipeline their CPU design, allowing for higher clock rates. Increasing the number of pipeline stages allows you to reduce the number of transistors between stages, reducing propagation delay and increasing maximum clock rate.
In a vaccuum, this makes sense. If the instruction reorderer and/or compiler are smart enough, you can keep that pipeline full and take advantage of that higher clock rate. Indeed, there have been examples of carefully-crafted code that ran very well on this architecture.
Unfortunately, real software is quite different from the ideal sort of thing that runs well on the P4. Too many hazzards (branches and instruction dependencies) limited how full you could keep the pipeline. The CPU would execute instructions out of order, but there's only so smart you can make it. And not all branch hazzards can be fixed by a branch predictor.
Intel's hyperpipelined design was a relative failure. Sure, they could clock it 50% faster than an AMD, but that's what it took to make up for the increased pipeline stalls. Performance-wise, it was a wash. In other respects, it was a loss, because the processors required more power, more expensive cooling, and more expensive fabrication.
After a while, Intel came up with a way to make use of that wasted bandwidth. Why not fill those pipeline bubbles with another, independent execution stream? HyperThreading was born. Not altogether a bad idea. In many cases, it allowed up to 30% better over-all performance for multi-threaded apps, and giving you another CPU core (virtual or not) is always a good way to reduce latency.
In a last-ditch attempt to try to break the MHz barrier, Intel came out with the Northwood core. They lengthened the pipeline from an excessive 20 stages to an absurd 31 stages (not including the x86-to-RISC translator before the trace cache). To make up for the additional hazzards, Intel had to develop even more aggressive branch prediction and use larger reorder buffers. Unfortunately, this too turned out to be a performance wash, with an associated increase in power requirements.
At the same time, notebook computers started to overtake desktops in popularity. Low-power became MUCH more important than high-performance. The P4 really could not compete in this space, so Intel hired an Israeli team to develop a whole new architecture. To make a long story short, they basically reverted back to the P3 architecture (a relatively short pipeline), but added on all of the P4's advancements in reordering an branch prediction.
Think about that. Intel had made some mistakes, but they were GOOD mistakes. In order to work around the deficiencies in their P4 design, they had to develop some very impressive and advanced ways of keeping that pipeline full. Of course, any pipeline is going to have hazzards, so imagine applying that technology to a much shorter pipeline. The result was impressive. While the slower clock speed of Banias/Centrino was noticable under SOME circumstances (as it is with AMD processors), the majority of the time, the performance was excellent, even at a lower clock rate and lower power requirement.
The development of the P4 was a technical failure, but it was also a valuable phase in Intel's life. These lessons learned are going to be the basis for Intel's future success in efficient CPUs. Finally, I think Intel will be able to compete with AMD, even WITHOUT dubious deals with resellers designed to lock AMD out of the market.
Mind you, the language barrier might have something to do with it, but even the English trailer makes it look much more tragic than comedic. I expected to be laughing. Instead, it all just seemed so sad to me. I guess I don't get it.
It's amazing how uninformed so many slashdot posts on this are. Or maybe it's not amazing. If I interpret this correctly, the fee is $5000 per million revenue on a product that uses the trademark. If I don't sell $1million, I don't pay $5000. Furthermore, this has absolutely no effect on Free Software. As long as you comply with the GPL license, you can rename the Linux kernel and do whatever you want with it.
Linux is a very important identity for the software industry, and I'm glad someone out there is doing something to protect it from being vandalized and abused.
The one mistake these researchers are implicitly making is that they assume Yahoo and Google are both using the same search algorithm.
Perhaps Google is just better at matching query strings to results, because it finds more relevant results. Or perhaps Yahoo is better because it excludes more irrelevant results.
Either way, this says nothing about the size of the database. In information theory, there are these terms, "precision" and "recall". I forget exactly what they mean, but they have something to do with how many results you get that are correct compared to how many results you get and something to do with how many correct results you get compared to how many correct results exist in the whole index. Something like that. Anyhow, surely, Yahoo and Google will differ, and THAT is what we're measuring here.
With rubberized corners for cushoning the fall, springs that hold the MB and HD in place to prevent shock-damage, water-proof keyboard and display, lexan on the display to take shocks, and, of course, a Lojack for when it gets lost.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll begin by saying that I mostly use Linux, and I use OpenOffice even on Windows when I can help it. One reason is that I don't want to give money to Microsoft, but there are other reasons as well, including my belief that Free Software is the key to the advancement of IT in the future.
But this situation is pure hillarity. OSS fans have their list of reasons why Linux (or some Linux app) is better than Windows (or some Windows app). Two reasons near the top are that Windows is slower and more bloated. These reasons are sited often and are part of the OSS mantra.
So I find it incredibly ironic that now that the shoe is on the other foot, the tables are turned, etc., that these very same people are dismissing "bloated" and "slow" as unimportant.
No, you idiots. "Bloated" and "slow" are ALWAYS bad, even when they apply to an OSS application. That means there's something wrong with OpenOffice.org, and if you have half a brain in your head, you have to accept that it's broken for that reason. That doesn't mean you should stop using it or feel disillusioned. And defending your beliefs in the face of this embarrassment just makes you look stupid and inconsistent. HAVE SOME FREAKING STANDARDS, and have them ALL THE TIME, not just when they make your favorite thing look better. It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.
The proper solution is to automatically notice that I'm using defaults and figure out when replacing the file is correct. Or if I've made changes, figure out how to port them from one version to the next (like Ubuntu does with pre/post-install scripts), and only as a last resort should it ask me to manually look at the files.
In my case, I would never have to look at a config file again if they did it right.
dispatch-conf is not something mentioned in standard documentation. And when you update packages, it tells you to run etc-update. As long as it's telling you to run etc-update, my comment isn't outdated.
There are gobs of things I've never gotten to work with Gentoo, like Hotplug. There are other things that break regularly, like audio, which will go away mysteriously and not work again until I reboot.
My biggest problem with Gentoo isn't a tech support one. It's a big giant bug called "etc-update" that bombards me with over 100 "changes" to config files I've never heard of every time I upgrade a bunch of things.
I've paid my dues. I've compiled kernels and admin'ed my own box. I think, rather than try to fix this annoying thing called Gentoo, I'm going to just switch to Ubuntu.
Yes, it's flamebait. But seriously, there are certain things about Gentoo that I don't want to give up, but there are other problems that remain that have never been fixed that are driving me away. To each his own, I guess.
We wrote the Open Graphics Project spec not based on purely abstract theory but based on the experiences and needs of the community. Purely for the sake of survival, I made it clear that there should be nothing in the design which could not be justified by common needs. Based on that, we developed a SPEC.
Maybe Linus is having a language-barrier problem, but a spec is just a description of something, albeit somewhat formalized. That means you could write a spec retroactively. We could write a spec for the Linux kernel as it is right now. If we were to do that, would Linus abandon Linux? It wouldn't be THAT hard to make it accurate.
Frankly, I can't write anything without SOME sort of spec. Often, those specs are contained completely within my brain, but I nevertheless must develop a coherent concept of what it is I'm going to build and what its pieces are. When I write a document, I often start out with some sort of outline. And when I write code, I have to decompose it into functions.
If a spec is any coherent description of something you make, then Linus uses specs all the time, and he's just blowing smoke out his ass.
He's complaining about specs because they're usually done badly. JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING IS USUALLY DONE BADLY. Should we say that all operating systems are bad just because Windows sucks? Should we say all cars are bad just because the Ford Taurus is designed to last only 5 years? Should we do away with TV just because of shows like "Two guys, a girl, and a pizza shop" or "Survivor"?
Linus is forgetting that Linux is based on specs, Honda makes reliable cars, and Star Gate SG1 is on on SOME channel just about all day.
Is there anything that sets in quickly but also wears off quickly?
Seriously. If a flight attendant notifies the cockpit of a highjack attempt, the cockpit and cabin become atmospherically isolated, and NO2 or something is released into the air in the cabin, putting everyone to sleep. The plane lands, and people in HASMAT suits come in and secure the cabin. You could also have air martials with the ability to afix a mask on being alerted so they could tie up offenders on the way down.
One of the caveats is that some people's health conditions don't take well to anesthetics. If the gas's effects are relatively mild, though, they should be okay, and this gives the air martials time to tie up the perps before the stuff wears off.
GNOME, KDE, and a number of other desktop environments support X11 sessions. Using this standard, an application can save its state when you log out and then restore it when you log back on. Most X11 apps support it to some extent or other. But Mozilla is the oddball in that it doesn't support it. Their bugzilla has an entry for this, which they've been ignoring for YEARS.
I guess Mozilla isn't as interested in being standards-compliant as they claim.
I specialize in computer demolition. I have always been a pyro and I have always had a fascination with blowing things up. With computer security becoming an issue, and some lessons learned from the arrests, I have turned my talents towards something more constructively destructive.
For $200, I will use shaped charges and implode and obliterate your computer. I also sometimes opt to run computers over with one of my various broken-down cars.
[Disclaimer: This is a joke (attempt). While like to watch explosions on TV from time to time, I've never blown anything up myself, and I've never been arrested. And it's my cousin who owns all the broken-down cars.]
... on *NIX where file permissions are set properly so that user apps cannot overwrite system files.
How the hell are they going to solve THAT problem?
Well, Lindows had to change its name to Linspire, because it was too much like Windows. Well, now Freespire is too much like Linspire. So how about we call it Freedows?
Mind you, Frito-Lay might raise an eyebrow.
You seem to have a twisted view of what is "open".
First, consider the graphics cards we have now, such as ATI and nVidia. Those are what we call "not open at all". You cannot get specs, or open source drivers for the latest stuff. This is what you have.
There are a few low-end manufacturers that do publish specs. But you still don't get anything the least bit interesting about internal workings. Those are what we call "open spec".
The design for OGP is what we call "open architecture". At first, what you get are complete specs, plus detailed descriptions of the internal workings of the GPU. Then, when the $2 million or $3 million espense for the ASIC is paid off, you get the whole design of everything under GPL. Is that open enough for you?
The first OGP product is a "development platform", which is under LGPL from the start, with lots of code published already.
Is that open enough for you?
If this guy was really interested in Linux desktop graphics, he would have at least made a passing mention of the Open Graphics Project ( http://opengraphics.org/ ).
Unfortunately, borders are one of the more common things I like to apply to disjoint selections.
Note that I use OOo almost exclusively. I use Linux mostly, and I don't want to spend the money for MSOffice for my one Windows machine. But I use OOo for the same reason so many others use MSOffice: I am a captive audience. If I want to use a word processor and not spend money on both MSOffice and Crossover Office, OOo is what I have to use.
When I started using Excel back in, what, 1992, I used it to make a LOT of presentations. They were financial with lots of numbers and computations that the customer would like to tweak, so Excel was appropriate. Nevertheless, despite being for a spreasheet, I was required to make the documents look VERY ATTRACTIVE. (Not to say that my lowly artistic skill accomplished the goal, but the boss thought I did okay.) I would do things like color-code cells, add borders, fiddle with fonts, etc. And one FREQUENT thing I would do was ctrl-click to select a disjoint set of cells and then apply formats to all of them at once.
OOo cannot do this.
This very basic feature that I and the people I learned from have been using for a VERY LONG TIME is something that OOo cannot do. When I first started using OOo at version 1.0.0, I immediately noticed this oversight and reported it in their bug database. The bug report disappeared. I've since posted it a couple more times, and this bug report seems to consistently disappear.
Sure, it's possible that that (a) I'm a niche user who is unusual in his need for this feature, and (b) I don't know how to use their bug database to retrieve old bug reports. But the fact of the matter is, they have consistently left out this feature. I don't know if they've added it to 2.0, but I doubt it.
Why does such a relatively small oversight bother me so much? Because I need it, and I cannot imagine that it could be THAT hard to fix. (But I wouldn't know, because the size of the OOo source is a bit overwhelming for me.)
I've been trying and trying to download these episodes, but all the mirrors are down, and the trackers are down for the torrents.
Now, THIS is something I have experience with. When I called to cancel my Verizon Wireless account, I listed the problems I'd had with their service:
(1) When I got service, the saleslady got it all messed up, resulting in a huge overcharge. I had to go through 6 separate calls to customer service before I found someone who would (a) not hang up on me and do something I had not authorized and (b) actually do something to fix the problem.
(2) I wanted to add more minutes to my plan, so I called customer service. Unknown to me, they extended my contract a year from the date I got new minutes. They never mailed me anything or in any way told me that they were extending my contract. Yet they insisted that they had told me and sent me a letter.
(3) When I thought my first contract was up, I decided to get upgraded phones. When we signed up, we were told that we'd get $100 credit on TWO phones. Come to find out that that was a lie and we were going to get it for only one phone. I threatened to change providers, and the lady told me to go ahead. She must have known what would happen next.
(4) When I canceled my service (the first time), I got a $350 "early termination" bill from Verizon. When I call customer service, NOW they tell me that they'd secretly extended my contract.
(5) The only option I had at the time was to switch back. That turned out to be nightmare of lies. Every other person would give me a different story. At first they told me that I could rejoin where I left off. Others would tell me that I would have to rejoin with a minimum of one year. It took me DAYS to get that straightened out.
I had like 2 or 3 months left, and I counted the days. When it finally came time to cancel, the lady I talked to really didn't have any room to argue that Verizon wouldn't do this sort of crap again. I told them that if they were willing to give me two free phones, I would consider it, but she didn't have the authority for that. Ok. BYE.
Oh, and later, I'll have to tell you how Citibank credit card would automatically renew (and charge me for) credit shield 3 months after I would cancel it and tell them NEVER to renew it. I finally told them that (a) I wanted the charges removed, and (b) a certified letter stating that they would never renew it again. They told me they would look into it and reversed some late charges I'd incurred earlier that year (which was kinda nice), but that $30 didn't make up for the $80 they charged me for credit shield. When I finally got a letter of refusal, I called on a weekend to cancel. The sales people who would try to talk me out of canceling were probably not at work, so my account was canceled immediately.
Given Intel's anticompetitive, predatory behavior against AMD, it's hard to tell how much of Intel's market share is due to having a competitive product and how much is due to them shutting AMD out of the market.
Intel's original idea was to find a way to more aggressively pipeline their CPU design, allowing for higher clock rates. Increasing the number of pipeline stages allows you to reduce the number of transistors between stages, reducing propagation delay and increasing maximum clock rate.
In a vaccuum, this makes sense. If the instruction reorderer and/or compiler are smart enough, you can keep that pipeline full and take advantage of that higher clock rate. Indeed, there have been examples of carefully-crafted code that ran very well on this architecture.
Unfortunately, real software is quite different from the ideal sort of thing that runs well on the P4. Too many hazzards (branches and instruction dependencies) limited how full you could keep the pipeline. The CPU would execute instructions out of order, but there's only so smart you can make it. And not all branch hazzards can be fixed by a branch predictor.
Intel's hyperpipelined design was a relative failure. Sure, they could clock it 50% faster than an AMD, but that's what it took to make up for the increased pipeline stalls. Performance-wise, it was a wash. In other respects, it was a loss, because the processors required more power, more expensive cooling, and more expensive fabrication.
After a while, Intel came up with a way to make use of that wasted bandwidth. Why not fill those pipeline bubbles with another, independent execution stream? HyperThreading was born. Not altogether a bad idea. In many cases, it allowed up to 30% better over-all performance for multi-threaded apps, and giving you another CPU core (virtual or not) is always a good way to reduce latency.
In a last-ditch attempt to try to break the MHz barrier, Intel came out with the Northwood core. They lengthened the pipeline from an excessive 20 stages to an absurd 31 stages (not including the x86-to-RISC translator before the trace cache). To make up for the additional hazzards, Intel had to develop even more aggressive branch prediction and use larger reorder buffers. Unfortunately, this too turned out to be a performance wash, with an associated increase in power requirements.
At the same time, notebook computers started to overtake desktops in popularity. Low-power became MUCH more important than high-performance. The P4 really could not compete in this space, so Intel hired an Israeli team to develop a whole new architecture. To make a long story short, they basically reverted back to the P3 architecture (a relatively short pipeline), but added on all of the P4's advancements in reordering an branch prediction.
Think about that. Intel had made some mistakes, but they were GOOD mistakes. In order to work around the deficiencies in their P4 design, they had to develop some very impressive and advanced ways of keeping that pipeline full. Of course, any pipeline is going to have hazzards, so imagine applying that technology to a much shorter pipeline. The result was impressive. While the slower clock speed of Banias/Centrino was noticable under SOME circumstances (as it is with AMD processors), the majority of the time, the performance was excellent, even at a lower clock rate and lower power requirement.
The development of the P4 was a technical failure, but it was also a valuable phase in Intel's life. These lessons learned are going to be the basis for Intel's future success in efficient CPUs. Finally, I think Intel will be able to compete with AMD, even WITHOUT dubious deals with resellers designed to lock AMD out of the market.
Mind you, the language barrier might have something to do with it, but even the English trailer makes it look much more tragic than comedic. I expected to be laughing. Instead, it all just seemed so sad to me. I guess I don't get it.
The special effects are incredible, though.
Only when those copyrights are legitimate.
It's amazing how uninformed so many slashdot posts on this are. Or maybe it's not amazing. If I interpret this correctly, the fee is $5000 per million revenue on a product that uses the trademark. If I don't sell $1million, I don't pay $5000. Furthermore, this has absolutely no effect on Free Software. As long as you comply with the GPL license, you can rename the Linux kernel and do whatever you want with it.
Linux is a very important identity for the software industry, and I'm glad someone out there is doing something to protect it from being vandalized and abused.
The one mistake these researchers are implicitly making is that they assume Yahoo and Google are both using the same search algorithm.
Perhaps Google is just better at matching query strings to results, because it finds more relevant results. Or perhaps Yahoo is better because it excludes more irrelevant results.
Either way, this says nothing about the size of the database. In information theory, there are these terms, "precision" and "recall". I forget exactly what they mean, but they have something to do with how many results you get that are correct compared to how many results you get and something to do with how many correct results you get compared to how many correct results exist in the whole index. Something like that. Anyhow, surely, Yahoo and Google will differ, and THAT is what we're measuring here.
With rubberized corners for cushoning the fall, springs that hold the MB and HD in place to prevent shock-damage, water-proof keyboard and display, lexan on the display to take shocks, and, of course, a Lojack for when it gets lost.
This thing'll be as expensive as a car.
Sounds like an expensive thing to keep replacing over and over and over again, every time your kid damages it beyond repair or loses it.
Ah, but you HAVE to, because it's vital to their education.