I think the oddest idea was the treadmill cum mouse. There was a girl exerting not a little effort while turning what appeared to be bike handles and running around quake 2. The saleslady said that you could even use it to browse the web. I guess the treadmill would also act as the mouse wheel.
But what was baffling was that they weren't promoting it as any kind of exercise equipment; the fellow I talked to even discouraged it, saying that it wasn't built the same way as one in the gym.
The *real* kicker, though, was when I asked how you would move side to side. I figured the handlebars would move on a rail, but the guy insisted, with a certain amount of misplaced pride, that it would be a button on the handlebars, and then using the treadmill to do the actual movement.
I'm a very meek, little person, so it has to be a dumb enough idea for me to tell someone, to their face, that is the most stupid idea I'd ever heard of. Good to know the future is filled with as many useless gadgets as the present.
My 3yro daughter loves playing with the computer. She's actually pretty good at hunting and pecking words out on the querty keyboard, knows how to use a mouse, knows when and where to click on things, etc.
She also digs video games...this is where Nintendo is a real winner with us, because Zelda/Wind Waker was just her speed; she loves just sailing the boat on the water, watching the world go by...
But the point of all this is that we do all this during the early morning hours, or at night. During the day I make it a big point to 'enjoy the day' by being outside, and she really likes it, and most importantly, doesn't miss the computer/games one bit. She talks about things she did in Zelda or Mario64 (we hooked up the N64 for a retro experience and she loves it), but she works it into the play she's doing outside, never wanting to go back in and play it.
So I say it's possible to have a balance, so long as it's understood that there's a good time to do one, and not the other. On a particular rainy day we stayed in and played, but I made it understood that we're doing this because we couldn't go outside.
Sun would love you to buy their great Sparc-based machines that run Solaris well, totally supported hardware, all kinds of bells-n-whistles, etc.
But you don't want to run Sparc? Okay, here's Solaris for the x86. Sure you can run it on any machine, but we only support the following hardware and anything else falls under the "deal with it or fix it yourself" variety.
I can imagine Apple taking a similar tack: We sell the hardware, but we're not necessarily goign to make it hard to run on a run-of-the-mill PC, so long as you understand that your milage may vary.
I would think this would be an even bigger win than the Sun example above because it's not two different chips, so you can "trade up" from your PC to Apple hardware without recompiling anything, or having to buy a separate processor version.
Seriously though, a film-noir-ish "On the Waterfront" kind of game would be pretty cool... how come nobody has come up with a good 30s/40s/50s setting for a game, even a FPS?
....but I may be the only person who reads/. and has never played or "gotten" FF. I have no issues with the games, but I never quite understood the story or even the concept, unlike, for example, Zelda, which is basically the same characters in different stories. I got the impression that each story was different and had its own characters and situations (a la Silent Hill) but shared a common theme.
So at the risk of being flamebait, I ask: What is the gist of FF that is so compelling that the games are greeted with the same amount of fervor as a Zelda title on Nintendo, or a Halo title on Xbox (trying to be platform agnostic so I'm not accused of being a fanboy).
Though I haven't played any of the games, I did see the movie, and it really raised more questions that I still haven't been able to answer.
Would it not be possible to throw the lawyers at google, saying that by looking at our excel/word/outlook files, you're effectively breaking the law, because it requires some reverse engineering? Suddenly it's illegal to look at these files, except microsoft can, and so suddenly they're in the search/index business with the only legal office search tool in town.
Please tell me this isn't possible or likely. Oh, wait, what am I saying...this is microsoft we're talking about.
...And completely wrong about the outcome. Google has one product: data. They are more akin to something like Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw than Microsoft, I think. The thing that makes Google so much cooler is that they also provide good tools to help your data in different ways, like desktop search. Even gmail is just "data"...that you use it to send and receive data is really of no consequence to them, and it's added convience (and value) to you.
Add to it that they sell appliances that can sift and find info on your network, and you've got a winning business strategy for taming the data beast, which as we all know, is growing faster than anything else.
Microsoft is freaked because they're part of the problem, and not the solution: it's their Excel/Word/Outlook files that are being searched (as well as every other type of file supported), and they "just-don't-think-that's-right(tm)", because they can't do it themselves and also. To add to the list of sins committed against microsoft by google, they treat all data pretty much equally...a pdf, word document, html file is just the repository of the data being searched. "How dare you, google, equate our big fat word docs with a simple html page or *gasp* pdfs!"
Re:Introducing a joke you will get sick of quickly
on
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
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· Score: 0
For old timers, the joke that gets old quickly is:
Either everybody's got a babelfish stuck in their ear, or the folks in that galaxy have the inborn ability to understand a seemingly million different sounding languages (though yes, sometimes requiring an interpreter), a totally different alphabet (see the control panels of the shuttle at the beginning of Episode 6), but yet use Arabic numbers for describing distances.
I agree with you; IBM also rallied against the ISA bus when they realized it was out of their control with Micro Channel, which was technically better than ISA, but they wanted a fee for other companies to use it.
I'm guessing the parent was talking about NuBus and ADP, which is correct, they were not standard, but on the other hand, were technically superior (NuBus allowed for multiple video cards to run without any configuration, ADP allowed for device chaining while PS/2 ports are still single-device-only).
Today it's all about the standards, but back then there really weren't any that you'd *want* to standardize on. I would argue that NuBus needed to exist for the PCI designed to look at, same with ADP and USB.
If you search Google you'll see that Issac Asimov put forward his take on the matter.
Re:Wasn't there a free "network" in SF in the 60's
on
What The Dormouse Said
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sorry I can't point to the chapter, but I remember reading about this in "The Dream Machine", which is also a very very good story of computers and how they were influenced by J.C.R. Licklidder.
Basically Licklidder had the notion of computers being more interactive than they were (the punch card era), and was in charge of ARPA at the right time and gave a whole lot of money to colleges/research groups/practically anybody who had the same notion. I'm sure he's mentioned in this book (Dormouse) because I believe he funded Englebart.
I definitely plan on reading this book, but I would say that "The Dream Machine" belongs on the shelf because as well.
I have a dual g5 that has been rock solid since day 1, so I've never reinstalled panther. I can't really wipe-n-install because I've got several user accounts for my family/friends that would need to be put somewhere before wiping, plus reinstalling programs, etc. That would suck.
So should I upgrade straight, or use archive-n-install? I get the gist of what archive-n-install does, but is it a real "new" installation with all your programs/accounts preserved?
What about software developers? Yu Suzuki seems to be in no hurry to even confirm or deny Shenmue 3's existance, and Rare has done what since the Ghoulies?
As for platform familarity, I cry BS. Shenmue 2 was the triumph of putting a lot of bitmaps on a disc, and seeing as all Rare games look basically the same, the reason why we haven't seen Banjoe Threeie is what exactly?
I know I'm over simplifying things (especially Shenmue 2 which I thought was awesome), but we're not talking about developers trying to push the graphics envelope here. And franky, that's not what I'm looking for...I just want fun games, and Shenmue and Banjo-Kazooie (not so much Twoie) were a lot of fun.
I can imagine Suzuki being tied up doing... uh...Virtual Fighter?, but that doesn't explain Rare, now that they're just another microsoft division. Maybe they have big plans for the next xbox, but I'll believe it when I see it.
I mentioned that Longhorn would show a "preview" as the document icon to a family member who is less than computer savvy and she thought it was the greatest idea ever. She really did say "that's why windows is great..they're always improving the way things work." When I told her the mac had this for ages, she shrugged and said 'I never used a mac.'
People like my sister-in-law are the perfect audience for microsoft...she doesn't know anything different from windows at all, thinks that everything they do was their own original creation, and after cleaning her machine of netsky and some random spyware programs, shrugs again and asks if she lost anything. Doesn't care, isn't curious, does what she's told. The worst thing is that she's totally comfortable with this state of affairs because she figures that's the way things are, that's the way it'll be.
Google and Tivo are two examples of companies using custom Linux kernels to deliver specific applications. Both are wrapped in boxes that you can just plug in and turn on and they get to work. Having not to pay a license fee to Microsoft presumably drives down the cost to the point where you're just paying for the end product, without the OS being of concern.
So why don't we see more of this from the likes of Oracle et al, who could be shipping if not custom boxes, custom distros complete with the database, app server, whatever, ready to go. Put disc in machine, x minutes later you have a database server with a kernel tweaked specifically for that task.
Thus it takes windows out of the equation in terms of ease of use...we've one-upped them because instead of making for a simple installation of windows (oh, and patches patches patches) and then your app, it's like putting a disc into a game console and you just start using it.
I had a thought to something along these lines, but what I wanted was to put the unit in the rain and let the rain falling through the beam makes the noise. With a lot of work, I suppose you could even do different notes by extending the length of the beam, giving more opportunities for the rain to hit it.
I agree...that will be the first thing uninstalled from my machine...Nikon View still opens when a card is put in the reader even though I explicitly told it not to autolaunch, and then has the gall to say that iPhoto is currently running, and I should quit that.
Even for nefs that iPhoto can't handle (D1x, etc.) I'd still use Photo Mechanic over Nikon View any day.
But explains why I'm all for cooler rooms, and not water cooled machines.
I worked in an office building on the floor right above one of the largest mainframes in the world. The machine was water cooled from the same set of pipes that supplied water to the bathrooms on that side of the building. For reasons not explained very well to me, there could not be a bathroom on that side of the floor because water pressure would be too low, on account of the computer using it all.
Now:
Guess what side I worked on.
Guess when I discovered my stomach didn't handle extremely spicy food.
Guess where the bathroom was on my floor.
Guess what happened on the way to get to it.
So improving cooling technology to prevent that "situation" from occuring again is a good thing to me (I suppose I should just not eat spicy food, but where's the fun in that?)
Without getting into a big discussion of database design, referential integrety, etc., this is the sort of thing I've always used triggers for: updating a row writes another record to another table indicating that it was inserted/updated/deleted.
I wrote a couple of trading-ish systems that used this when a person placed a trade. Came in very handy when a user called to say that he had lost some major $$$ because we screwed up his order, only to show him in the log that he had in fact placed his order at this time, and then tried to cancel it not a minute later, but a full two hours later, long after the close.
Yes it can be done in a procedure, write to another table, etc., but what I've always liked about triggers is that they're automatic, somewhat hidden, and easy to forget...
Actually, I believe it came from "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. The main character in the story, Tom West, uses the phrase to describe how fast their new machine, the Eclipse, will run when compared to a VAX.
I hope there are no OO purists armed with mod points reading this, but VB is actually pretty decent, at the end of the day, for things like rapid development, interface prototyping, etc. All things being equal, VB is *easy*, and sometimes you just want easy. Yes, you can be easy in any language, but to the non-programmer, VB was the ultimate double-click and get started tool. Learn a few concepts about forms and controls, and you're pretty much set (who here knows VB and hasn't seen an app where every single line of code was crammed into the form, narray a module in sight).
VB allowed me to write my first app: a little one-screen program that calculated exposure times for pinhole cameras (in VB3). Knew zilch about programming at the time, but I was able to slap it together and it worked. The code was absolutely horrible and for such a simple thing, it had bugs simply because I didn't know what I was doing. When I gave it out to a few people (just the.EXE and vbrun300.dll) they came back with suggestions/bugs and before I knew it, I moved "up and out" and became a professional C++/Oracle developer. Not everyone who works with VB becomes a programmer with a capital P, but some do, and some are simply happy to have scratched that particular itch and glad it came off so easily.
VB6, honestly, is the only tool I can think of that retains that ease of use with a very forgiving nature ("don't worry about declaring your variables...we'll trust you") to allow the uninitiated a chance to come up with something that may be only for him or her, or becomes the next killer app. If I were starting today, looking for something to write my little pinhole calc app, what would I use? VS.net? I wouldn't know what project to start with. Java? Sure, what IDE? Python/Ruby/Perl? All good, but if I only have Windowz, and am not a programmer, I may not know they exist. I knew VB existed because quickbasic was already on the machine, and the high school student working at Software etc. knew to point me at the VB box when I said "well, I know qbasic, but I'm looking for something to run under this Windows thing..."
That is my only justification for really liking VB, even after all these years; sometimes you just want the functionality and don't care how it looks and it needs to be done fast (and hopefully with a minimal runtime if it's going to moved to another machine). MS is free to put the.net framework on every copy of windows forever, but try to wrap your head around the classes and concepts if you're not already familar with them. VB dispensed with all of that and was just what it was.
Things that cannot be paralleled benefit from the high clock speeds, that's well known. Povray, as it's written, cannot be made faster on a >1 processor box because it cannot take advantage of the multiple processors to speed anything up.
Did you read the article? Basically he says that extra cache gives everybody breathing room, but for the foreseeable future it's better to invest in making maximum use out of what will be the norm...multiple processors (cores), and multiple threads is the way to do it, as all modern operating systems have some provision for kernel level threads.
The future is multithreaded; single threaded apps will simply plateau at some point.
To wit: What games are you playing that are dependent on clock speed, but don't use multiple threads now? Every modern game engine is multithreaded...maybe if you're talking about the original Quake, but then given the mhz difference between then and now, I'd think Quake would be screaming.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the oddest idea was the treadmill cum mouse. There was a girl exerting not a little effort while turning what appeared to be bike handles and running around quake 2. The saleslady said that you could even use it to browse the web. I guess the treadmill would also act as the mouse wheel.
But what was baffling was that they weren't promoting it as any kind of exercise equipment; the fellow I talked to even discouraged it, saying that it wasn't built the same way as one in the gym.
The *real* kicker, though, was when I asked how you would move side to side. I figured the handlebars would move on a rail, but the guy insisted, with a certain amount of misplaced pride, that it would be a button on the handlebars, and then using the treadmill to do the actual movement.
I'm a very meek, little person, so it has to be a dumb enough idea for me to tell someone, to their face, that is the most stupid idea I'd ever heard of. Good to know the future is filled with as many useless gadgets as the present.
My 3yro daughter loves playing with the computer. She's actually pretty good at hunting and pecking words out on the querty keyboard, knows how to use a mouse, knows when and where to click on things, etc.
She also digs video games...this is where Nintendo is a real winner with us, because Zelda/Wind Waker was just her speed; she loves just sailing the boat on the water, watching the world go by...
But the point of all this is that we do all this during the early morning hours, or at night. During the day I make it a big point to 'enjoy the day' by being outside, and she really likes it, and most importantly, doesn't miss the computer/games one bit. She talks about things she did in Zelda or Mario64 (we hooked up the N64 for a retro experience and she loves it), but she works it into the play she's doing outside, never wanting to go back in and play it.
So I say it's possible to have a balance, so long as it's understood that there's a good time to do one, and not the other. On a particular rainy day we stayed in and played, but I made it understood that we're doing this because we couldn't go outside.
Sun would love you to buy their great Sparc-based machines that run Solaris well, totally supported hardware, all kinds of bells-n-whistles, etc.
But you don't want to run Sparc? Okay, here's Solaris for the x86. Sure you can run it on any machine, but we only support the following hardware and anything else falls under the "deal with it or fix it yourself" variety.
I can imagine Apple taking a similar tack: We sell the hardware, but we're not necessarily goign to make it hard to run on a run-of-the-mill PC, so long as you understand that your milage may vary.
I would think this would be an even bigger win than the Sun example above because it's not two different chips, so you can "trade up" from your PC to Apple hardware without recompiling anything, or having to buy a separate processor version.
...set the game 40 years in the past.
... how come nobody has come up with a good 30s/40s/50s setting for a game, even a FPS?
Seriously though, a film-noir-ish "On the Waterfront" kind of game would be pretty cool
....but I may be the only person who reads /. and has never played or "gotten" FF. I have no issues with the games, but I never quite understood the story or even the concept, unlike, for example, Zelda, which is basically the same characters in different stories. I got the impression that each story was different and had its own characters and situations (a la Silent Hill) but shared a common theme.
So at the risk of being flamebait, I ask: What is the gist of FF that is so compelling that the games are greeted with the same amount of fervor as a Zelda title on Nintendo, or a Halo title on Xbox (trying to be platform agnostic so I'm not accused of being a fanboy).
Though I haven't played any of the games, I did see the movie, and it really raised more questions that I still haven't been able to answer.
Would it not be possible to throw the lawyers at google, saying that by looking at our excel/word/outlook files, you're effectively breaking the law, because it requires some reverse engineering? Suddenly it's illegal to look at these files, except microsoft can, and so suddenly they're in the search/index business with the only legal office search tool in town.
Please tell me this isn't possible or likely. Oh, wait, what am I saying...this is microsoft we're talking about.
...And completely wrong about the outcome. Google has one product: data. They are more akin to something like Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw than Microsoft, I think. The thing that makes Google so much cooler is that they also provide good tools to help your data in different ways, like desktop search. Even gmail is just "data"...that you use it to send and receive data is really of no consequence to them, and it's added convience (and value) to you.
Add to it that they sell appliances that can sift and find info on your network, and you've got a winning business strategy for taming the data beast, which as we all know, is growing faster than anything else.
Microsoft is freaked because they're part of the problem, and not the solution: it's their Excel/Word/Outlook files that are being searched (as well as every other type of file supported), and they "just-don't-think-that's-right(tm)", because they can't do it themselves and also. To add to the list of sins committed against microsoft by google, they treat all data pretty much equally...a pdf, word document, html file is just the repository of the data being searched.
"How dare you, google, equate our big fat word docs with a simple html page or *gasp* pdfs!"
For old timers, the joke that gets old quickly is:
"Yes, but can it run my JCL decks?"
Either everybody's got a babelfish stuck in their ear, or the folks in that galaxy have the inborn ability to understand a seemingly million different sounding languages (though yes, sometimes requiring an interpreter), a totally different alphabet (see the control panels of the shuttle at the beginning of Episode 6), but yet use Arabic numbers for describing distances.
I agree with you; IBM also rallied against the ISA bus when they realized it was out of their control with Micro Channel, which was technically better than ISA, but they wanted a fee for other companies to use it.
I'm guessing the parent was talking about NuBus and ADP, which is correct, they were not standard, but on the other hand, were technically superior (NuBus allowed for multiple video cards to run without any configuration, ADP allowed for device chaining while PS/2 ports are still single-device-only).
Today it's all about the standards, but back then there really weren't any that you'd *want* to standardize on. I would argue that NuBus needed to exist for the PCI designed to look at, same with ADP and USB.
If you search Google you'll see that Issac Asimov put forward his take on the matter.
Sorry I can't point to the chapter, but I remember reading about this in "The Dream Machine", which is also a very very good story of computers and how they were influenced by J.C.R. Licklidder.
Basically Licklidder had the notion of computers being more interactive than they were (the punch card era), and was in charge of ARPA at the right time and gave a whole lot of money to colleges/research groups/practically anybody who had the same notion. I'm sure he's mentioned in this book (Dormouse) because I believe he funded Englebart.
I definitely plan on reading this book, but I would say that "The Dream Machine" belongs on the shelf because as well.
I have a dual g5 that has been rock solid since day 1, so I've never reinstalled panther. I can't really wipe-n-install because I've got several user accounts for my family/friends that would need to be put somewhere before wiping, plus reinstalling programs, etc. That would suck.
So should I upgrade straight, or use archive-n-install? I get the gist of what archive-n-install does, but is it a real "new" installation with all your programs/accounts preserved?
What about software developers? Yu Suzuki seems to be in no hurry to even confirm or deny Shenmue 3's existance, and Rare has done what since the Ghoulies?
... uh...Virtual Fighter?, but that doesn't explain Rare, now that they're just another microsoft division. Maybe they have big plans for the next xbox, but I'll believe it when I see it.
As for platform familarity, I cry BS. Shenmue 2 was the triumph of putting a lot of bitmaps on a disc, and seeing as all Rare games look basically the same, the reason why we haven't seen Banjoe Threeie is what exactly?
I know I'm over simplifying things (especially Shenmue 2 which I thought was awesome), but we're not talking about developers trying to push the graphics envelope here. And franky, that's not what I'm looking for...I just want fun games, and Shenmue and Banjo-Kazooie (not so much Twoie) were a lot of fun.
I can imagine Suzuki being tied up doing
I mentioned that Longhorn would show a "preview" as the document icon to a family member who is less than computer savvy and she thought it was the greatest idea ever. She really did say "that's why windows is great..they're always improving the way things work." When I told her the mac had this for ages, she shrugged and said 'I never used a mac.'
People like my sister-in-law are the perfect audience for microsoft...she doesn't know anything different from windows at all, thinks that everything they do was their own original creation, and after cleaning her machine of netsky and some random spyware programs, shrugs again and asks if she lost anything. Doesn't care, isn't curious, does what she's told. The worst thing is that she's totally comfortable with this state of affairs because she figures that's the way things are, that's the way it'll be.
Aaarrrgghh!!
...in the form of my Aztec strategic bombers pummeling your cities in Rise of Nations.
Google and Tivo are two examples of companies using custom Linux kernels to deliver specific applications. Both are wrapped in boxes that you can just plug in and turn on and they get to work. Having not to pay a license fee to Microsoft presumably drives down the cost to the point where you're just paying for the end product, without the OS being of concern.
So why don't we see more of this from the likes of Oracle et al, who could be shipping if not custom boxes, custom distros complete with the database, app server, whatever, ready to go. Put disc in machine, x minutes later you have a database server with a kernel tweaked specifically for that task.
Thus it takes windows out of the equation in terms of ease of use...we've one-upped them because instead of making for a simple installation of windows (oh, and patches patches patches) and then your app, it's like putting a disc into a game console and you just start using it.
I had a thought to something along these lines, but what I wanted was to put the unit in the rain and let the rain falling through the beam makes the noise. With a lot of work, I suppose you could even do different notes by extending the length of the beam, giving more opportunities for the rain to hit it.
One more thing on the list...
I agree...that will be the first thing uninstalled from my machine...Nikon View still opens when a card is put in the reader even though I explicitly told it not to autolaunch, and then has the gall to say that iPhoto is currently running, and I should quit that.
Even for nefs that iPhoto can't handle (D1x, etc.) I'd still use Photo Mechanic over Nikon View any day.
But explains why I'm all for cooler rooms, and not water cooled machines.
I worked in an office building on the floor right above one of the largest mainframes in the world. The machine was water cooled from the same set of pipes that supplied water to the bathrooms on that side of the building. For reasons not explained very well to me, there could not be a bathroom on that side of the floor because water pressure would be too low, on account of the computer using it all.
Now:
Guess what side I worked on.
Guess when I discovered my stomach didn't handle extremely spicy food.
Guess where the bathroom was on my floor.
Guess what happened on the way to get to it.
So improving cooling technology to prevent that "situation" from occuring again is a good thing to me (I suppose I should just not eat spicy food, but where's the fun in that?)
What, no one has noticed and/or mentioned the Xbox2 now shipping! image to the left of the fundue set?
Interestingly enough...clicking doesn't do anything...
Kind of a cool pic though, even if it is all dreamed up by someone at ThinkGeek.
Without getting into a big discussion of database design, referential integrety, etc., this is the sort of thing I've always used triggers for: updating a row writes another record to another table indicating that it was inserted/updated/deleted.
I wrote a couple of trading-ish systems that used this when a person placed a trade. Came in very handy when a user called to say that he had lost some major $$$ because we screwed up his order, only to show him in the log that he had in fact placed his order at this time, and then tried to cancel it not a minute later, but a full two hours later, long after the close.
Yes it can be done in a procedure, write to another table, etc., but what I've always liked about triggers is that they're automatic, somewhat hidden, and easy to forget...
Actually, I believe it came from "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. The main character in the story, Tom West, uses the phrase to describe how fast their new machine, the Eclipse, will run when compared to a VAX.
I hope there are no OO purists armed with mod points reading this, but VB is actually pretty decent, at the end of the day, for things like rapid development, interface prototyping, etc. All things being equal, VB is *easy*, and sometimes you just want easy. Yes, you can be easy in any language, but to the non-programmer, VB was the ultimate double-click and get started tool. Learn a few concepts about forms and controls, and you're pretty much set (who here knows VB and hasn't seen an app where every single line of code was crammed into the form, narray a module in sight).
.EXE and vbrun300.dll) they came back with suggestions/bugs and before I knew it, I moved "up and out" and became a professional C++/Oracle developer. Not everyone who works with VB becomes a programmer with a capital P, but some do, and some are simply happy to have scratched that particular itch and glad it came off so easily.
.net framework on every copy of windows forever, but try to wrap your head around the classes and concepts if you're not already familar with them. VB dispensed with all of that and was just what it was.
VB allowed me to write my first app: a little one-screen program that calculated exposure times for pinhole cameras (in VB3). Knew zilch about programming at the time, but I was able to slap it together and it worked. The code was absolutely horrible and for such a simple thing, it had bugs simply because I didn't know what I was doing. When I gave it out to a few people (just the
VB6, honestly, is the only tool I can think of that retains that ease of use with a very forgiving nature ("don't worry about declaring your variables...we'll trust you") to allow the uninitiated a chance to come up with something that may be only for him or her, or becomes the next killer app. If I were starting today, looking for something to write my little pinhole calc app, what would I use? VS.net? I wouldn't know what project to start with. Java? Sure, what IDE? Python/Ruby/Perl? All good, but if I only have Windowz, and am not a programmer, I may not know they exist. I knew VB existed because quickbasic was already on the machine, and the high school student working at Software etc. knew to point me at the VB box when I said "well, I know qbasic, but I'm looking for something to run under this Windows thing..."
That is my only justification for really liking VB, even after all these years; sometimes you just want the functionality and don't care how it looks and it needs to be done fast (and hopefully with a minimal runtime if it's going to moved to another machine). MS is free to put the
Things that cannot be paralleled benefit from the high clock speeds, that's well known. Povray, as it's written, cannot be made faster on a >1 processor box because it cannot take advantage of the multiple processors to speed anything up.
Did you read the article? Basically he says that extra cache gives everybody breathing room, but for the foreseeable future it's better to invest in making maximum use out of what will be the norm...multiple processors (cores), and multiple threads is the way to do it, as all modern operating systems have some provision for kernel level threads.
The future is multithreaded; single threaded apps will simply plateau at some point.
To wit: What games are you playing that are dependent on clock speed, but don't use multiple threads now? Every modern game engine is multithreaded...maybe if you're talking about the original Quake, but then given the mhz difference between then and now, I'd think Quake would be screaming.