I get tired of hearing about the "fight" between C, C++, and Java (and now C#), as if those are the only three programming languages in existence. Even putting aside so-called scripting languages like Perl and Python (which are more than scripting languages these days), you have dozens of good, solid options. I have no idea why the view of programming languages is so bloody narrow).
You don't have to deal with everybodyisroot. Remote administration is easier and you have no such thing as a screwed up registry within a couple weeks.
In all the years I've used Windows, I've never once had a screwed up registry. I don't like the registry, and it's an obvious failure point, but it hasn't caused me any problems. The myth of the fragile registry needs to go away.
And the advantage of putting Linux in a PDA is...?
on
Linux Cell Phone/PDA
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· Score: 2
Seriously. Does it matter? It's not like you can just bring up a shell and hack away. Imagine if, after years of using it, that it was announced that your current calculator of PDA actually ran a Linux kernel internally. Would it matter to you?
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
I try to be fair to the estranged Mr. Katz, but this is just plain dumb. So kids are smart and older people are vapid? Sure, a 15 year old may know how to use a PDA and PlayStation 2, but then his mom knows how to cook a thansgiving dinner and use a sewing machine.
Arguing that knowledge of pop-cultre, mass market fluff is empowerment is, well, really dumb. If anything, it leads to short-sightedness. For example, there are quite a few young open source hackers who seem to think they know everything is there to know about software engineering at age 19. This includes such knowledge as not creating regression test suites, and tossing in minimally tested features right before uploading a new version.
All teenagers think they know everything. That's the nature of the beast. By the time they realize they don't know everything, they have kids who think they know everything.
The differences between UNIXalikes are not worth quibbling about. From a user perspective and a programmer perspective, they are just about the same beast. It's like arguing about the radical differences between driving Ford Explorer and a Chevy Blazer (hint: there are none).
The only trouble here is that some people have religiously latched onto Linux and don't want to hear that it is 95% of something called UNIX, which has been around for nearly 30 years. They want Linux to be some kind of l33t inside secret. But in truth BSD and Linux are identical twins with different hobbies. That's not a put down of either system--or any of the other UNIXalikes such as Solaris--just a suggestion that this shouldn't be a feud.
I agree completely that small and simple applications are the way to go. This is the one thing that Microsoft continually gets wrong (my DevStudio folder is something l42 megabytes alone, even after deleting all the help files). Unfortunately, the open source Linux crowd is following Microsoft in this regard, with hugely bloated applications and desktop environments. You've got to give Linus credit in that he tries hard to keep cruft ouf the kernel. He's one of the few.
What's odd is that when people think "small," they equate that with "minimalist and unusable." But really, that's not how it has to be at all. They key is just keep focused on the problem at hand, and not adding crazy tangential features that are outside of your domain (like email, so the old joke goes). I get the feeling that many developers for, say, KDE (not to pick on it specifically), are more concerned about adding impressive features than they are about usability. And that, sadly, is the same mistake that most big software developers have been making for years.
MIPS processors are popular because they give a very good balance between price, performance, and power consumption. Compared to x86 processors, MIPS chips are much cheaper, use much less power, and give better performance at the same clock rate.
Additionally, the MIPS core is smaller than that of equivalent speed Pentiums and Athlons. This makes it easier to customize the processor and to put it on a chip with other parts. Sony has done both of these.
Um so he has a honorable PHD, wrote some of the most popular free software, re-engrized the free software movement, helped develop a CPU and also has time to develop a famliy, while moving from his native land/launage. And he is how old? 30-40?
Looking at this rationally, the key item is that he wrote the Linux kernel. It had the side effect of re-energizing Stallman's free software movement, but that wasn't something Linus really did. Moving, having a job, and raising a family are not typically reasons that you write an autobiography, you know?
I don't know about this. Linus decided to write a UNIX kernel because he didn't like Windows or MS-DOS. Brilliant, that he pulled it off. But in all honesty, he's pretty much spent the last ten years tweaking his kernel and managing other people. That's cool, but an _autobiography_?
Linus became a folk hero because of what his creation touched off. It enabled idealistic rants of a previous generation of isolated and fading UNIX geeks to go mainstream. And it isn't the kernel that gets attention any more, but KDE and Gnome and The Gimp and Apache and all the application people who are trying to conquer the world.
I expect Linus's book to be on par with "Weaving the Web," by the creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. It was interesting in a technical sense, but it was obvious that his views and ideas were not what people think of when they think about the web.
I don't understand the geek angle
on
Geek Charities?
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· Score: 2
Do geeks just not want to donate to traditional charities that help the homeless, the hungry, and so on?
The Linux connection is a red herring. Nobody, except a particular group of geeks, cares at all what is beneath the hood of a console, especially in terms of system software. Yeah, Linux is cool and all that, but it needs to take a seat in the far back of the theatre is this case, lest we all start defending really lame games simply because they run on the Indrema.
The "open" angle of the Indrema is something that is being overhyped. Open is good, yes, but consider how few decent games have been developed for Linux. Linux is the perfect platform for amateur game developers. All the tools--OpenGL, gcc, gdb, various libraries and toolkits--are free. You can get a GeForce 2 based graphics card for $129. You can get a very capable TNT or TNT2 based card for $50-$80. But we're seeing very, very little from indie game groups. Little enough that I wouldn't expect to see *any* independently developed pro-quality games for the Indrema.
Thoughts from a game developer
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 2
Most consumers and compulsive upgraders don't realize how underutilized video cards are. We go through two or three generations of cards during the development of a single game, and more than anything we're just trying to keep up with it all. The bottom line, and I mean this sincerely, is that the kind of performance people are seeing from cards based on chips like the GeForce 2 could be coaxed out of cards from two years ago. It's not that the card is crap, but that the bottleneck is almost always on the code side of things. People don't want to hear that, though. Or maybe they do, because it validates their reasons for upgrading to new CPUs and video cards.
If you look at the PlayStation 1 hardware from five years ago, it doesn't even have bilinear filtering or zbuffering. It's also a total dog. And yet there are PS1 games that look as good or better than many current PC titles that require a TNT2 or better (maybe 15x faster than the PS1 hardware). So theoretically an "old" card like the Voodoo2, which is still 10x faster than a PS1, could do amazing, amazing things--much better than what people expect to see from a GeForce. But we don't bother, because things keep changing at a crazy rate and we're simply trying to get things out the door.
In a way, I'm starting to see new video cards as a way of getting suckers to part with their money.
It seems that for the most important political job in the US (and arguably much of the world) the applicants should be the greatest of the great statesmen. They should be the brilliant minds that make people want to listen, the kind of person who could (literally) write _the_ textbook on politics. Instead, we get dolts who get ramrodded through the system. Is being governor of a state enough of a qualification? I don't think so. Neither is being a lawyer.
One year ago is like ancient history in hacker-time
That's not true at all, unless you're into having the latest and greatest hardware and such simply for the sake of newness. For example, I've been using a 2.0 Linux kernel for a few years now, and the "benefits" of newer versions are pretty minor in the overall scheme of things.
I'm continually surprised at how slowly things move in the computer world. There are performance improvements on the hardware side, yes. Sometimes there are real bullets, like the catch-up game PC video cards have been playing for the last three years. Overall, though, programming and computer use are the same as they were ten years ago. I used a UNIX variant on a Sun workstation from 1990 through 1993. It felt about the same speed as the other machines I've used over the years. But that machine was running some kind of 20MHz 68020-class processor. I don't feel like we've advanced much. Programming is still the same. If someone stopped writing code in 1990 and started up again in 2000, he wouldn't feel like the world had passed him by. Heck, even BASIC still has a reputation as a slow, interpreted language, though machines are now 1000x faster than they were when that repuation stated.
The AI and the adaptablilty are truly unprecedented.
So you've actually played the game? I hope so, if you're making comments like that. People never seem to learn that you can't take game hype at face value, even after being burned dozens of times.
Operating systems should not be one size fits all. Therefor, microsoft should consider making an OS that is less "dumb". I don't want cute buttons that make me click 30 times before something happens. I want to be able to do things fast and effecient.
In most cases, all the power user needs to do is open up a shell window--in either OS X, KDE, Gnome, or Windows--and there you go.
The trouble with the GUI layer in all of these systems is that they're endless filling with garbage. What was the difference between Windows 98SE and Windows ME? Microsoft added a movie editor, a skinnable media player, and some system utilities. What's new with each release of KDE? Not so surprisingly, lots more accessories and applications. It's not like either side--if we must choose sides--is doing anything to make things easier for *anyone*. They're both just adding doodads and gadgets, which is a far cry from focusing on making computers smoother to use, both for advanced and novice users.
KDE and Gnome has great userfaces as well, but haven't brought something completly new and cool up that we haven't seen before, simply because they haven't put millions into research...
In all honesty, it's because the KDE and Gnome people are spending all their time copying whatever Microsoft does, so it isn't surprising that they're a few steps behind. That's not a flame, just the way it is (but maybe not the way some people want it to be).
The purpose of college has always been to get a well-rounded education that includes one area of expertise and several lesser areas. In all honestly, though, most so-called geek jobs don't involve the kind of thing you need advanced education for: system administration, web site scripting, general data munging in Perl and Python, writing enterprise applications that are mostly GUI-oriented database front ends (using tools like Filemaker, Foxpro, Visual Basic, Toolbook, and Delphi), lots of glue and script programming. Looking through newspaper and online ads supports this. So if you're going to spend some years doing lightweight code monkeying, is there much point in getting a hardcore degree like EE or CS?
Yes, there are also jobs that require real math and programming skills, but those are not the kind of jobs that are being created by the dot.com boom. If you're shooting for current skills that most employers want, then you might as well get some good use out of college by getting a degree in history or science or even literature. There's no sense in overloading on geekdom and regretting it later.
Am I the only person who finds all it annoying that most anti-Pentium retorts always include something positive about AMD? It's not like AMD is breaking amazing new ground. They're still keeping the x86 family alive, with all of its standard troubles (too many instructions, overly complex addressing modes, too much legacy baggage, too few registers, stack-oriented design of the floating point processor). The processors from both Intel and AMD are too expensive for what you get, and use too much power, especially when compared against other chip designs outside the x86 world. So both these companies are having a high-end pissing contest that only seems to be advancing the so-called state of the art in minor, expected ways, trading more power consumption and die space for speed increases of a few percent. Yee-haw!
I would love for another company to walk in and set things straight. Too bad Motorola seems to have trouble figuring out where to go with the PowerPC.
This is a bad kind of message to post, I think, considering the preponderance of crazed AMD supporters. But let's not let fanaticism for a corporation get in the way of real progress, okay?
Pentium 4 previews and reviews leave me with the same funny feeling I get when armchair tech wannabes discuss the architecture of the PlayStation 2. You see lots of buzzwords and mumbo jumbo and speculation, but it's not at all clear why or how any of it is relevant. Do microarchitectural decisions have any real connection with end performance or usability? They often _sound_ like they do, when laid out on the table, but it's so much noise. For example, wouldn't it make more sense to discuss internal architectural decisions inside of performance demanding applications, like C++ compilers and video compressors? It's not like the performance of an application is initimately tied to the processor. With retooling, you could make most any application several hundred percent faster, which is more significant than the 10-15% increases we're seeing from expensive CPU pissing contests. But we never see articles tearing apart the reasons why major applications are so slow, for example.
In general, these elaborations of the Pentium 4 design sound like so much marketing, like phony tech-oriented car ads you see in Scientific American. Heck, you could make Linux sound like a piece of crap by trotting out the old "microkernels are more modern and beautiful" debate, but is it relevant?
In response to these kind of articles, someone usually posts about how they don't know what to do with all their current processor speed, and they're not sure what the benefit of upgrading is. Usually they get shouted down by people citing "video compression," "3D modeling," and "solving systems of equations with tens of thousands of unknowns."
CPU speed aside, the Pentium 4 introduction is marking the beginning of the end for constant upgrading. It is:
1. expensive
2. very power hungry & puts out a lot of heat
3. the first link in a chain requiring other components to be upgraded (need a new motherboard and power supply; only a matter of time until "Pentium 4 optimized" application start showing up).
What do were get for all of this? From the benchmarks being posted, the answer is almost nothing. In the best case you get a pointless speed increase in some 3D games, but we're talking about going from Way Too Many Frames Per Second to Way Too Many Frames Per Second Plus A Few More. The increase is buried in a lot of noise.
Review sites that even bother reviewing the P4 should find themselves another business. This processor has no practical value to anyone.
I fully expect this to be tagged as flamebait, but there's not much I can do about that.
I can see this as primarily a benefit to businesses...for individuals, why not just donate to Freeboxen? (www.freeboxen.com) Then you don't even need to pay the shipping...
One of the great delusions of the consumer era is that donating is better than throwing out. It's true, to some extent, but you're making the assumption that people want your old crap. At the one extreme, you have mattress retailers who make you feel good by offering to donate your old mattress to charity. The result in many cases is that you have charities getting flooded with smelly, stained mattresses that they don't know what to do with and have to pay to have hauled away. A 286 may be of value, yes, but really what are most people going to do with it? You'd have to really dig to find software, and then you'd be out in the cold without manuals or support or anyone to turn to. Is it worth getting yourself reliant on software that's ten or more years old? Unfortunately, using old software and hardware is not so easy.
Borland already gives away the C++ compiler and linker from their C++ Builder package. They also include the full source code to their Visual Component Library (VCL) with both Delphi and C++ Builder.
In the future, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they (1) release the Object Pascal compiler for free, and (2) make the VCL source code available for free. These moves do not hurt their prime products, which are the Delphi and C++ development suites, including form and property editors and an IDE which integrates the VCL and compilers. That's what people want Delphi/Kylix for. They don't just want raw compilers.
Personally, I would love for Borland to give away their Object Pascal compiler, both for Windows and Linux. What a masterpiece it is! It would get a huge following among amateur programmers, because of its speed and ease of use. Don't try to say that Free Pascal is the same thing, because it isn't. The big advantage of Object Pascal is that it compiles darn near instantaneously on any machine. I'm talking over a million lines per minutes on a halfway decent machine from two years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I get tired of hearing about the "fight" between C, C++, and Java (and now C#), as if those are the only three programming languages in existence. Even putting aside so-called scripting languages like Perl and Python (which are more than scripting languages these days), you have dozens of good, solid options. I have no idea why the view of programming languages is so bloody narrow).
In all the years I've used Windows, I've never once had a screwed up registry. I don't like the registry, and it's an obvious failure point, but it hasn't caused me any problems. The myth of the fragile registry needs to go away.
Seriously. Does it matter? It's not like you can just bring up a shell and hack away. Imagine if, after years of using it, that it was announced that your current calculator of PDA actually ran a Linux kernel internally. Would it matter to you?
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
I try to be fair to the estranged Mr. Katz, but this is just plain dumb. So kids are smart and older people are vapid? Sure, a 15 year old may know how to use a PDA and PlayStation 2, but then his mom knows how to cook a thansgiving dinner and use a sewing machine.
Arguing that knowledge of pop-cultre, mass market fluff is empowerment is, well, really dumb. If anything, it leads to short-sightedness. For example, there are quite a few young open source hackers who seem to think they know everything is there to know about software engineering at age 19. This includes such knowledge as not creating regression test suites, and tossing in minimally tested features right before uploading a new version.
All teenagers think they know everything. That's the nature of the beast. By the time they realize they don't know everything, they have kids who think they know everything.
Just out of curiosity, where is this battle that you see?
A Slashdot headline of "BSD to Leapfrog Linux?" which pointed to an article on that subject. I didn't mean "a battle in the discussion threads."
The differences between UNIXalikes are not worth quibbling about. From a user perspective and a programmer perspective, they are just about the same beast. It's like arguing about the radical differences between driving Ford Explorer and a Chevy Blazer (hint: there are none).
The only trouble here is that some people have religiously latched onto Linux and don't want to hear that it is 95% of something called UNIX, which has been around for nearly 30 years. They want Linux to be some kind of l33t inside secret. But in truth BSD and Linux are identical twins with different hobbies. That's not a put down of either system--or any of the other UNIXalikes such as Solaris--just a suggestion that this shouldn't be a feud.
I agree completely that small and simple applications are the way to go. This is the one thing that Microsoft continually gets wrong (my DevStudio folder is something l42 megabytes alone, even after deleting all the help files). Unfortunately, the open source Linux crowd is following Microsoft in this regard, with hugely bloated applications and desktop environments. You've got to give Linus credit in that he tries hard to keep cruft ouf the kernel. He's one of the few.
What's odd is that when people think "small," they equate that with "minimalist and unusable." But really, that's not how it has to be at all. They key is just keep focused on the problem at hand, and not adding crazy tangential features that are outside of your domain (like email, so the old joke goes). I get the feeling that many developers for, say, KDE (not to pick on it specifically), are more concerned about adding impressive features than they are about usability. And that, sadly, is the same mistake that most big software developers have been making for years.
Why the heck is MIPs so popular?
:)
The correct name is MIPS. It isn't a plural
MIPS processors are popular because they give a very good balance between price, performance, and power consumption. Compared to x86 processors, MIPS chips are much cheaper, use much less power, and give better performance at the same clock rate.
Additionally, the MIPS core is smaller than that of equivalent speed Pentiums and Athlons. This makes it easier to customize the processor and to put it on a chip with other parts. Sony has done both of these.
Um so he has a honorable PHD, wrote some of the most popular free software, re-engrized the free software movement, helped develop a CPU and also has time to develop a famliy, while moving from his native land/launage. And he is how old? 30-40?
Looking at this rationally, the key item is that he wrote the Linux kernel. It had the side effect of re-energizing Stallman's free software movement, but that wasn't something Linus really did. Moving, having a job, and raising a family are not typically reasons that you write an autobiography, you know?
I don't know about this. Linus decided to write a UNIX kernel because he didn't like Windows or MS-DOS. Brilliant, that he pulled it off. But in all honesty, he's pretty much spent the last ten years tweaking his kernel and managing other people. That's cool, but an _autobiography_?
Linus became a folk hero because of what his creation touched off. It enabled idealistic rants of a previous generation of isolated and fading UNIX geeks to go mainstream. And it isn't the kernel that gets attention any more, but KDE and Gnome and The Gimp and Apache and all the application people who are trying to conquer the world.
I expect Linus's book to be on par with "Weaving the Web," by the creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. It was interesting in a technical sense, but it was obvious that his views and ideas were not what people think of when they think about the web.
Do geeks just not want to donate to traditional charities that help the homeless, the hungry, and so on?
The Linux connection is a red herring. Nobody, except a particular group of geeks, cares at all what is beneath the hood of a console, especially in terms of system software. Yeah, Linux is cool and all that, but it needs to take a seat in the far back of the theatre is this case, lest we all start defending really lame games simply because they run on the Indrema.
The "open" angle of the Indrema is something that is being overhyped. Open is good, yes, but consider how few decent games have been developed for Linux. Linux is the perfect platform for amateur game developers. All the tools--OpenGL, gcc, gdb, various libraries and toolkits--are free. You can get a GeForce 2 based graphics card for $129. You can get a very capable TNT or TNT2 based card for $50-$80. But we're seeing very, very little from indie game groups. Little enough that I wouldn't expect to see *any* independently developed pro-quality games for the Indrema.
Most consumers and compulsive upgraders don't realize how underutilized video cards are. We go through two or three generations of cards during the development of a single game, and more than anything we're just trying to keep up with it all. The bottom line, and I mean this sincerely, is that the kind of performance people are seeing from cards based on chips like the GeForce 2 could be coaxed out of cards from two years ago. It's not that the card is crap, but that the bottleneck is almost always on the code side of things. People don't want to hear that, though. Or maybe they do, because it validates their reasons for upgrading to new CPUs and video cards.
If you look at the PlayStation 1 hardware from five years ago, it doesn't even have bilinear filtering or zbuffering. It's also a total dog. And yet there are PS1 games that look as good or better than many current PC titles that require a TNT2 or better (maybe 15x faster than the PS1 hardware). So theoretically an "old" card like the Voodoo2, which is still 10x faster than a PS1, could do amazing, amazing things--much better than what people expect to see from a GeForce. But we don't bother, because things keep changing at a crazy rate and we're simply trying to get things out the door.
In a way, I'm starting to see new video cards as a way of getting suckers to part with their money.
It seems that for the most important political job in the US (and arguably much of the world) the applicants should be the greatest of the great statesmen. They should be the brilliant minds that make people want to listen, the kind of person who could (literally) write _the_ textbook on politics. Instead, we get dolts who get ramrodded through the system. Is being governor of a state enough of a qualification? I don't think so. Neither is being a lawyer.
How we got into this mess is beyond me.
One year ago is like ancient history in hacker-time
That's not true at all, unless you're into having the latest and greatest hardware and such simply for the sake of newness. For example, I've been using a 2.0 Linux kernel for a few years now, and the "benefits" of newer versions are pretty minor in the overall scheme of things.
I'm continually surprised at how slowly things move in the computer world. There are performance improvements on the hardware side, yes. Sometimes there are real bullets, like the catch-up game PC video cards have been playing for the last three years. Overall, though, programming and computer use are the same as they were ten years ago. I used a UNIX variant on a Sun workstation from 1990 through 1993. It felt about the same speed as the other machines I've used over the years. But that machine was running some kind of 20MHz 68020-class processor. I don't feel like we've advanced much. Programming is still the same. If someone stopped writing code in 1990 and started up again in 2000, he wouldn't feel like the world had passed him by. Heck, even BASIC still has a reputation as a slow, interpreted language, though machines are now 1000x faster than they were when that repuation stated.
The AI and the adaptablilty are truly unprecedented.
So you've actually played the game? I hope so, if you're making comments like that. People never seem to learn that you can't take game hype at face value, even after being burned dozens of times.
Operating systems should not be one size fits all. Therefor, microsoft should consider making an OS that is less "dumb". I don't want cute buttons that make me click 30 times before something happens. I want to be able to do things fast and effecient.
In most cases, all the power user needs to do is open up a shell window--in either OS X, KDE, Gnome, or Windows--and there you go.
The trouble with the GUI layer in all of these systems is that they're endless filling with garbage. What was the difference between Windows 98SE and Windows ME? Microsoft added a movie editor, a skinnable media player, and some system utilities. What's new with each release of KDE? Not so surprisingly, lots more accessories and applications. It's not like either side--if we must choose sides--is doing anything to make things easier for *anyone*. They're both just adding doodads and gadgets, which is a far cry from focusing on making computers smoother to use, both for advanced and novice users.
KDE and Gnome has great userfaces as well, but haven't brought something completly new and cool up that we haven't seen before, simply because they haven't put millions into research...
In all honesty, it's because the KDE and Gnome people are spending all their time copying whatever Microsoft does, so it isn't surprising that they're a few steps behind. That's not a flame, just the way it is (but maybe not the way some people want it to be).
More than anything, I am stunned that this was moderated up as "Funny."
The purpose of college has always been to get a well-rounded education that includes one area of expertise and several lesser areas. In all honestly, though, most so-called geek jobs don't involve the kind of thing you need advanced education for: system administration, web site scripting, general data munging in Perl and Python, writing enterprise applications that are mostly GUI-oriented database front ends (using tools like Filemaker, Foxpro, Visual Basic, Toolbook, and Delphi), lots of glue and script programming. Looking through newspaper and online ads supports this. So if you're going to spend some years doing lightweight code monkeying, is there much point in getting a hardcore degree like EE or CS?
Yes, there are also jobs that require real math and programming skills, but those are not the kind of jobs that are being created by the dot.com boom. If you're shooting for current skills that most employers want, then you might as well get some good use out of college by getting a degree in history or science or even literature. There's no sense in overloading on geekdom and regretting it later.
Am I the only person who finds all it annoying that most anti-Pentium retorts always include something positive about AMD? It's not like AMD is breaking amazing new ground. They're still keeping the x86 family alive, with all of its standard troubles (too many instructions, overly complex addressing modes, too much legacy baggage, too few registers, stack-oriented design of the floating point processor). The processors from both Intel and AMD are too expensive for what you get, and use too much power, especially when compared against other chip designs outside the x86 world. So both these companies are having a high-end pissing contest that only seems to be advancing the so-called state of the art in minor, expected ways, trading more power consumption and die space for speed increases of a few percent. Yee-haw!
I would love for another company to walk in and set things straight. Too bad Motorola seems to have trouble figuring out where to go with the PowerPC.
This is a bad kind of message to post, I think, considering the preponderance of crazed AMD supporters. But let's not let fanaticism for a corporation get in the way of real progress, okay?
Pentium 4 previews and reviews leave me with the same funny feeling I get when armchair tech wannabes discuss the architecture of the PlayStation 2. You see lots of buzzwords and mumbo jumbo and speculation, but it's not at all clear why or how any of it is relevant. Do microarchitectural decisions have any real connection with end performance or usability? They often _sound_ like they do, when laid out on the table, but it's so much noise. For example, wouldn't it make more sense to discuss internal architectural decisions inside of performance demanding applications, like C++ compilers and video compressors? It's not like the performance of an application is initimately tied to the processor. With retooling, you could make most any application several hundred percent faster, which is more significant than the 10-15% increases we're seeing from expensive CPU pissing contests. But we never see articles tearing apart the reasons why major applications are so slow, for example.
In general, these elaborations of the Pentium 4 design sound like so much marketing, like phony tech-oriented car ads you see in Scientific American. Heck, you could make Linux sound like a piece of crap by trotting out the old "microkernels are more modern and beautiful" debate, but is it relevant?
In response to these kind of articles, someone usually posts about how they don't know what to do with all their current processor speed, and they're not sure what the benefit of upgrading is. Usually they get shouted down by people citing "video compression," "3D modeling," and "solving systems of equations with tens of thousands of unknowns."
CPU speed aside, the Pentium 4 introduction is marking the beginning of the end for constant upgrading. It is:
1. expensive
2. very power hungry & puts out a lot of heat
3. the first link in a chain requiring other components to be upgraded (need a new motherboard and power supply; only a matter of time until "Pentium 4 optimized" application start showing up).
What do were get for all of this? From the benchmarks being posted, the answer is almost nothing. In the best case you get a pointless speed increase in some 3D games, but we're talking about going from Way Too Many Frames Per Second to Way Too Many Frames Per Second Plus A Few More. The increase is buried in a lot of noise.
Review sites that even bother reviewing the P4 should find themselves another business. This processor has no practical value to anyone.
I fully expect this to be tagged as flamebait, but there's not much I can do about that.
I can see this as primarily a benefit to businesses...for individuals, why not just donate to Freeboxen? (www.freeboxen.com) Then you don't even need to pay the shipping...
One of the great delusions of the consumer era is that donating is better than throwing out. It's true, to some extent, but you're making the assumption that people want your old crap. At the one extreme, you have mattress retailers who make you feel good by offering to donate your old mattress to charity. The result in many cases is that you have charities getting flooded with smelly, stained mattresses that they don't know what to do with and have to pay to have hauled away. A 286 may be of value, yes, but really what are most people going to do with it? You'd have to really dig to find software, and then you'd be out in the cold without manuals or support or anyone to turn to. Is it worth getting yourself reliant on software that's ten or more years old? Unfortunately, using old software and hardware is not so easy.
Borland already gives away the C++ compiler and linker from their C++ Builder package. They also include the full source code to their Visual Component Library (VCL) with both Delphi and C++ Builder.
In the future, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they (1) release the Object Pascal compiler for free, and (2) make the VCL source code available for free. These moves do not hurt their prime products, which are the Delphi and C++ development suites, including form and property editors and an IDE which integrates the VCL and compilers. That's what people want Delphi/Kylix for. They don't just want raw compilers.
Personally, I would love for Borland to give away their Object Pascal compiler, both for Windows and Linux. What a masterpiece it is! It would get a huge following among amateur programmers, because of its speed and ease of use. Don't try to say that Free Pascal is the same thing, because it isn't. The big advantage of Object Pascal is that it compiles darn near instantaneously on any machine. I'm talking over a million lines per minutes on a halfway decent machine from two years ago.