Steve Jobs is one of the best things to happen to the Mac from a marketing standpoint. He's also made a lot of frusterating technical decisions. This article from the same site describes how Jobs comes down heavily on the side of having Macs be closed systems, essentially simple information appliances that users should never touch or open up. He's not into clones, expandability, modifications, or any of that.
And he's the CEO of Apple now, and sure enough, we get lots of all-in-one models.
With Cygwin under Windows 2000, and a policy of using programs -- like Mozilla -- that are Open and exist in both MS-Windows and Linux -- I really think I have the best of both worlds.
I've tried this, for when I had to work on a Windows box at work. It has a lot of issues.
A) Setting up and getting software working in Cygwin, unless packaged for Cygwin, is somewhat akin to setting up a Slackware system back in the Bad Old Days. There are all kinds of interesting little oddities in Cygwin (I admit that things have improved enormously in the last few years).
B) Cygwin software is significantly slower. It acts kinda like a slower Linux box.
C) Cygwin definitely has bugs. I never tracked it down, but I'm pretty sure that there is at *least* a problem with select() in Cygwin -- I've seen a number of systems where a program is doing file or network I/O, stops, and just sits and does nothing. Tap a key, and everything wakes up and continues.
D) The Windows virtual terminal (the "DOS Box") really, really sucks compared to a nice xterm. You can use bash, but you're going to be using it in that damn awful virtual terminal.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that a Windows box used by a techie absolutely should have Moz and either Cygwin or UnixUtils on it.
The problem with web forums is that, by and large, they get inundated with Windows users looking for help.
There's the problem. The ratio of knowledgable users in the Linux world is high enough that it isn't just a flood of people asking questions. Also, a lot of those folks are motivated (and able -- I have to admit that it's a lot harder to find out what's going on on a Windows box to troubleshoot it) to try to find stuff themselves.
I see a not insignificant number of people coming into Linux assistance channels like #linpeople (FreeNode) and asking questions like "How do I do X in Excel?" because the people in there actually know computers well and a fair percentage actually provide answers.
Except for the fact that this collides with the standard key bindings used to go forward and back in web browsers.
Actually, I don't have a huge problem with Home/End working one way or the other. (Where Mac style is Home/End == begin/end of document, and Windows style is Home/End == begin/end of line, and Ctrl-Home/End == begin/end of document. I *do* have problems shifting back and forth, however, which I find extremely disruptive.
I tend to feel that the Mac chose a better system. The closest keys to Home and End are Page Up and Page Down, which move the viewable area of the document. As a matter of fact, in my emacs/xemacs setup, I have Home and End bound like the Mac, and Insert and Delete set up to scroll the *window* (rather than the cursor) up and down, a la lynx or links.
For whatever reason, Apple apparently did away with most of the Human Interface Guidelines somewhere between Mac OS 8 and Mac OS X. As a result, things are now much more complicated than they need to be. So, if there is a problem with something in Mac OS 9/Mac OS X, blame Apple... not the Human Interface Guidelines they should have been following.
I agree. I cannot figure out what motivated it. Changes could have easily been made without throwing the whole thing out.
Anyone know what happened politically at Apple that resulted in such a change in UI design (from design-for-ultra-usability to design-for-eye-candy)?
Nonetheless, could you live without the scroll-wheel? You must admit that's a worthwhile innovation, and it's astounding that Apple still hasn't appropriated it.
I'm peeved that nobody has produced a mouse/trackball with a hat switch. Who wants a scroll wheel when you can have a hat switch? This is even more true now that hacks like horizontal scroll wheels are coming out.
Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design.
Second that. It makes perfect sense to someone who has been using a Mac for a while, but for newbies (I remember trying to get some people familiar with the Mac), the "programs running with no windows open" concept just doesn't mesh. It was a sexier and more usable version of Switcher, but friendly it was not.
On the *other* hand, I loathe and despise MDI, so I'm not exactly certain that old-style PC programs had it right...
I wonder if this same algorithms used can apply to image enhancement from spy satellites (or if the distortion used is from something different). That'd make for scarily good detail.
Second of all, one wonders what would happen if there were two satellites that could orbit at right angles to each other, thus getting downtrack resolution in both directions (though one would obviously have to be a bit time-delayed.
Nasa systems that involve human life are highly redundant. I remember a lecture by a NASA engineer about systems on the Shuttle. There are *seven* redundant computers which calculate data. That data requires identical answers from four to be accepted.
On Spirit, power is an issue. More CPUs == more power drain.
Furthermore, I remember the folks initially speculating that something was wrong with the power system. I stopped following it, but it said that this transmission was composed of power subsystem diagnostic data. Could be it's a response requested earlier that it didn't have enough juice to send, in which case more CPUs would have actually exacerbated the problem.:-)
Note that this is not quite as silly as one might think.
I had a friend that stopped using a wireless mouse because it kept getting lost under piles of stuff.
With a wired mouse, you always have a cord to follow.
I, personally, can't figure out the fetish with wirelessness. If you're using a computer monitor, the size is pretty much such that you must be at your desk. If you want to control music or movies, an IR remote is a much better choice -- more comfortable to hold, can be used without a desk, cheap, and the batteries last until kingdom come.
The only possibly justifiable thing I can think of might be that a wireless mouse doesn't have a cord moving around and knocking things over. A keyboard doesn't really move too much. I found it *particularly* irritating to find a *wired* optical trackball that I liked (eventually went with the MacAlly QBALL). Who would want a wireless *trackball*? You don't move the thing, and there's just no way for the cord to whack things.
If you *do* go wireless, you introduce all manner of irritations:
* Security. Obvious. Probably not a huge issue for most, given that attacking your device means physically planting a monitoring device quite nearby. (Perhaps cracking into another nearby computer using a RF or IR sensor might work, but it would still take some doing).
* Batteries. This is a big deal in my mind. Batteries add weight. They mean that voltage starts dropping off, and devices get less reliable. You have to change the durn little things, and if you come back home and discover that your batteries are dead, you're in for some charging/replacing before you can do anything.
* Reliability. Logitech's pre-Bluetooth mice "block" each other when used in the same range. Other RF crap going on can muck with your signal.
* Performance. I remember folks complaining about performance degredation -- not sure whether it was due to latency increases or sampling rate decreases.
Re:The replacement is already here
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United Linux Dead
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Just as an aside from all this -- you know, Red Hat isn't perfect and I realize that "diversity" is a really good justification for providing sizeable competitors. However, they still do a really, awfully good job of sticking to OSS ideology. They donate more money to projects than they need to, they have generous terms (none of the delayed ISO releases that SuSE has), try quite hard to stay OSS (I remember when they dumped Netscape's software -- pretty early on, and earlier than was probably a good idea. They were clearly trying to stimulate Mozilla growth at the cost of some of their own appeal.) They really are, of the major distributors, one of the nicest of the lot (or to be cynical, feel that it's important to consistently act as if they are nice). They don't try for lockout -- there are good, solid reasons that they sell so many copies. Honestly, if I were running RH, I probably wouldn't have played so nicely.
Some of what UL does (and I'm sure I'm probably woefully uninformed) seems to not be as useful as what the LSB does, where *everyone* got on board:
* I wish that real, solid cross-distro and backwards-binary compatibility could be in place -- that I could buy a binary software package and use it on any distro. Most of the games I purchased from Loki two years or so ago, already don't run on the current version of Red Hat, and that's just within a distribution, just two releases down the line. It's so much easier to package and distribute binary software packages on Windows that it's frusterating. I've *seen* folks trying to do it, and it's the primary reason that I've seen vendor people avoiding Linux support -- you can't just provide "a Linux binary package".
* There's no agreed-upon-way to package a daemon. Init systems differ -- there's no standard all-distros-have-it command to use to register/unregister a daemon for system startup. Such a script could operate differently at the back end, but...Linux is just lacking in such standardized wrappers. Currently, some poor sap has to volunteer to package it for Debian, PLD and RH usually have to do the packaging themselves, etc.
* There's no standard meta-spec file that allows one to generate final-quality RPM/DEB/whathaveyou files. Authors would probably *love* to write a single file (preferably with simpler, more standardized syntax than the RPM spec) that can be fed into RPM to produce an RPM and DEB to produce a DEB.
Google is definitely a group of nice folks. They are one of the few entities (perhaps *the* only who could actually get away with it) that could simply get GoogleGear to change their name by just eliminating any references to "googlegear" from their database. Instead, they went for a peaceful solution.
IIRC, the music industry is only around two hundred million something a year. (This came up when someone pointed out that for a while, the music industry was looking at fighting both the tech and telecom industries, which were so much larger by far that it was ridiculous.)
I challenge someone to name one band that has gone gold without an RIAA marketing push.
You probably don't need to take an album gold, as long as you have capital and are making a good chunk of the profit (i.e. online retailing), to do well on the music alone.
The current online distributor going rate for music seems to be in the neighborhood of $1 a song, based on the three or so distributors that Slashdot's linked to recently. If an artist makes, say, 50 cents from each song, and sells only 100,000 online copies, and the album has ten songs, that's half a million dollars. If a group has five people, that's $100,000 a person.
That assumes that these people have access to an environment that they can record in. I have a friend who built a home recording studio for the heck of it -- it isn't that hard. It also doesn't pay for marketing.
I'm vaguely reminded of HSC, later MetaCreations -- they made and sold a plugin (KPT) to enhance a program (Photoshop and Painter). A couple of years later, they had enough money to buy the host program (Painter) from the company that produced it.
The dollar hasn't been backed by gold in ages. Dollars don't exist in the sense that you're thinking of them, except by convention.
More accurately, they're paying lots of money to twiddle a couple of bits in a database somewhere.
Verisign makes money doing the same thing. As do the name registrars. As do banks.
I think the thing here that's so different is that it's amazing that people are willing to *pay* for items in a game (For chrissake, it's a game. Isn't the whole point of a game to have fun *getting* the items?)
I'm kind of tired of you armchair OS coders. So the happy few, highly paid Microsoft employees, 20 years experience in copying IBM, thousands of stock options in Redmond decide the next gen OS will have some wack FS and they have to be called morons? How do you know better? Hasn't Microsoft produced the best selling OS on the market for 15 years? Why don't YOU have the job leading the Longhorn team?
Oh. Yeah... LINUX.
There's a rather crucial difference here. You are very much not Linus. As a matter of fact, I will happily bet that you have never submitted a patch to Linux. As have most of the people on Slashdot vicariously living through Linus's triumpths.
Linus might, in fact, be a not unreasonable critic, to some degree, of the pipeline length being discussed in the article. He, unlike most Slashdotters, is actually familiar with (a) high level system architecture, (b) the x86 instruction set that's being used here, and (c) probably, by virtue of enough low level work, (plus, he may have potentially done work in the field) at least something about the code gcc and other compilers are spitting out.
Here's some metric of how far most Slashdotters are from being qualified to comment on this: I'm probably reasonably knowledgeable on the issues involved relative to the bulk of Slashdotters, using only the other posts as a watermark for what other Slashdotters know.
One assignment I had, back at Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad in a CS class, was to design a very simple processor. The assignment would have made a CE laugh out loud -- we didn't have to worry about gate delay or initial states or inductance or anything that's an issue in the real world. We got to ignore all timing problems. We could split signals as much as we wanted. It was strictly a logical processor. That processor is probably more than most Slashdotters have built.
I have a friend in grad school who is a CE. He laughed his ass off when he heard about the assignment. He, however, is a grad student. He hasn't published for years, he doesn't have much experience, and he has a *lot* to learn. He designs chips on a pretty regular basis.
If *he* came along and said "those people at Intel are idiots", *he'd* be laughed down by a PhD in the field. Why? Because he simply hasn't done research in branch prediction or any of the related issues, and isn't remotely qualified. Of course, *he* wouldn't be out trying to call out the Intel engineers because he's aware of how competent they are.
As a matter of fact, anyone who hasn't either gotten into serious compiler design research (not just "I wrote a compiler once for a class") or whatever areas are relevant to the CE chip work probably isn't qualified to criticize the Intel engineers on design decisions. You aren't seeing a lot of those in this article. Why? Because they have a fair amount of respect for the Intel folks and know enough to avoid making damn fools out of themselves.
Folks who are end users -- software engineers, system builders, etc -- are really qualified to judge the processor on price and performance as a black box, and not much else. I include myself in there, and I've read a number of research papers on the thing in the past. And, frankly, the Intel folks have done a pretty good job if you measure the product as a black box from a performance standpoint. If you want to complain, complain about the price. Don't try to say "Well, that P4 sure is good, but what the Intel engineers really messed up on is that HyperThreading stuff. Boy, if they only understood PCI, then they never would have done anything like it." I see way too many completely and utterly uninformed posts, and it propagates.
Errata for the above -- "Some of the units would move to even more instructions per cycle." should be "Some of the units would move to even more cycles per instruction."
You have to remember that a garden variety PC is a very unpredictable environment. You have network packets coming in, mouse events, keyboard presses, USB chatter, DMA access, every event generates and interrupt that requires the processor to stop what it's doing, and start the pipeline over again.
It's nothing personal, but articles like this one, as well as posts like this, drive me absolutely batty with the amount of incorrect ideas propagated. It's not that one particular person is misinformed -- it's just that the amount of generally bogus information is silly.
First off, at some point, as far as I can tell, a bunch of people read Maximum PC or somesuch consumer "PC enthusiast" magazines, and read about "The Megahertz Myth". Maybe Ars Technica ran the story that started all this. Heck if I know. All that the original author was trying to do was point out that people shouldn't judge processors strictly by clock speed.
Boy, did they ever create a monster. Somehow, a bunch of folks managed to get the idea that Intel was pulling this as some sort of PR job to deliberately trick people into buying their processors. For Chrissake, this is such an incredibly stupid idea. The OEMs have purchasers that know what they're buying. Not only are they not going to just sit down and look at benchmarks, they're going to have a bunch of test machines built when deciding what to go with. That and business considerations outweight any "MHz rating". The OEM market just plain doesn't care. The only people getting excited about the "MHz Myth" are the "PC enthusiasts", a tiny, tiny sliver of a group when it comes to dollar value. If the sort of "PC enthusiast
riffraff really think that they constitute any kind of a significant market to Intel -- enough for Intel to *redesign their entire processor*, using a longer pipeline and higher clock rate, around getting them to purchase a computer, they are vastly overestimating their own importance in the universe.
When Intel makes the decision about a new processor, it's a pretty safe bet that they don't run out and say "Gee, how would Joe Assmunch in Marketing like us to structure this thing?" They have many, many PhDs in chip and circuit design who have many competing ideas about what the best designs would be. They run many, many simulations before even thinking about deciding on major design decisions.
The "PC enthusiast" folks who think that Intel has taken this path to trick those people that buy from Dell, and that, ho ho ho, *they* are smart enough to see through the trick are ridiculous. If Intel wanted a high clock rate to put on stickers, they could jack the thing through the sky, run at 10GHz, then demux data and only accept data at a lower rate into the various units. Some of the units would move to even more instructions per cycle.
The *current* poster is talking about *keyboard* and *mouse* events? "USB chatter"? Those don't even show up on the *radar*. You roll that mouse, send your 200 Hz interrupts, and you worry about 200 measly mispredictions per second? Just blowing away the page table cache during process switches (which runs at 100 Hz on Linux 2.4 x86 by default) already dwarfs any misprediction performance hit from the said devices, and folks frequently bump it up by an order of magnitude or so and don't see any measurable performance hit -- on Pentium IIs.
As for DMA, the entire point of DMA is so that the processor *isn't* running code from the host. It can continue on in its own happy little world while a co-processor pokes at the memory bus.
You might see significant branch misprediction issues with an inner loop with a branch statement that flicks back and forth just about every loop or so to screw over the branch caching. And "significant" is still pretty minor. The compilers hint to the CPU whether a branch is likely to be taken...it's not as if there's this massive, awful mistake that all the chip designers in the world are making that Joe I-Built-My-Own-Computer-
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I'm sure that the EU will distribute these funds to the poor windows users who were so abused, right?
Or will it just sit in an EU bank account to help pay for trips, cars, etc. for the EU ranking members?
Can we say "cash grab"?
Which ultimately means that those funds flow to people working in tourism, auto manufacturing, etc.
Pretty much the same thing that MS execs probably spend it on now.
Steve Jobs is one of the best things to happen to the Mac from a marketing standpoint. He's also made a lot of frusterating technical decisions. This article from the same site describes how Jobs comes down heavily on the side of having Macs be closed systems, essentially simple information appliances that users should never touch or open up. He's not into clones, expandability, modifications, or any of that.
And he's the CEO of Apple now, and sure enough, we get lots of all-in-one models.
With Cygwin under Windows 2000, and a policy of using programs -- like Mozilla -- that are Open and exist in both MS-Windows and Linux -- I really think I have the best of both worlds.
I've tried this, for when I had to work on a Windows box at work. It has a lot of issues.
A) Setting up and getting software working in Cygwin, unless packaged for Cygwin, is somewhat akin to setting up a Slackware system back in the Bad Old Days. There are all kinds of interesting little oddities in Cygwin (I admit that things have improved enormously in the last few years).
B) Cygwin software is significantly slower. It acts kinda like a slower Linux box.
C) Cygwin definitely has bugs. I never tracked it down, but I'm pretty sure that there is at *least* a problem with select() in Cygwin -- I've seen a number of systems where a program is doing file or network I/O, stops, and just sits and does nothing. Tap a key, and everything wakes up and continues.
D) The Windows virtual terminal (the "DOS Box") really, really sucks compared to a nice xterm. You can use bash, but you're going to be using it in that damn awful virtual terminal.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that a Windows box used by a techie absolutely should have Moz and either Cygwin or UnixUtils on it.
MS-Windows, on the other hand, hasn't always been entirely honest about exactly what it does have open (nmap is your friend).
You've had a time where the local netstat output disagrees with an nmap scan, and nmap is correct?
The problem with web forums is that, by and large, they get inundated with Windows users looking for help.
There's the problem. The ratio of knowledgable users in the Linux world is high enough that it isn't just a flood of people asking questions. Also, a lot of those folks are motivated (and able -- I have to admit that it's a lot harder to find out what's going on on a Windows box to troubleshoot it) to try to find stuff themselves.
I see a not insignificant number of people coming into Linux assistance channels like #linpeople (FreeNode) and asking questions like "How do I do X in Excel?" because the people in there actually know computers well and a fair percentage actually provide answers.
Except for the fact that this collides with the standard key bindings used to go forward and back in web browsers.
Actually, I don't have a huge problem with Home/End working one way or the other. (Where Mac style is Home/End == begin/end of document, and Windows style is Home/End == begin/end of line, and Ctrl-Home/End == begin/end of document. I *do* have problems shifting back and forth, however, which I find extremely disruptive.
I tend to feel that the Mac chose a better system. The closest keys to Home and End are Page Up and Page Down, which move the viewable area of the document. As a matter of fact, in my emacs/xemacs setup, I have Home and End bound like the Mac, and Insert and Delete set up to scroll the *window* (rather than the cursor) up and down, a la lynx or links.
For whatever reason, Apple apparently did away with most of the Human Interface Guidelines somewhere between Mac OS 8 and Mac OS X. As a result, things are now much more complicated than they need to be. So, if there is a problem with something in Mac OS 9/Mac OS X, blame Apple... not the Human Interface Guidelines they should have been following.
I agree. I cannot figure out what motivated it. Changes could have easily been made without throwing the whole thing out.
Anyone know what happened politically at Apple that resulted in such a change in UI design (from design-for-ultra-usability to design-for-eye-candy)?
Nonetheless, could you live without the scroll-wheel? You must admit that's a worthwhile innovation, and it's astounding that Apple still hasn't appropriated it.
I'm peeved that nobody has produced a mouse/trackball with a hat switch. Who wants a scroll wheel when you can have a hat switch? This is even more true now that hacks like horizontal scroll wheels are coming out.
Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design.
Second that. It makes perfect sense to someone who has been using a Mac for a while, but for newbies (I remember trying to get some people familiar with the Mac), the "programs running with no windows open" concept just doesn't mesh. It was a sexier and more usable version of Switcher, but friendly it was not.
On the *other* hand, I loathe and despise MDI, so I'm not exactly certain that old-style PC programs had it right...
Wow...never thought about stuff like that.
I wonder if this same algorithms used can apply to image enhancement from spy satellites (or if the distortion used is from something different). That'd make for scarily good detail.
Second of all, one wonders what would happen if there were two satellites that could orbit at right angles to each other, thus getting downtrack resolution in both directions (though one would obviously have to be a bit time-delayed.
Unless GDB 6 has a "both" follow-fork mode, I'd suspect not WRT parent *and* child.
DDD, at least, can apparently handle following child, from my skimming people talking about it. I swore off GUI debuggers, so not too sure.
How often is a bug the fault of an RTOS, and how often introduced by the coders working on a particular project?
Nasa systems that involve human life are highly redundant. I remember a lecture by a NASA engineer about systems on the Shuttle. There are *seven* redundant computers which calculate data. That data requires identical answers from four to be accepted.
:-)
On Spirit, power is an issue. More CPUs == more power drain.
Furthermore, I remember the folks initially speculating that something was wrong with the power system. I stopped following it, but it said that this transmission was composed of power subsystem diagnostic data. Could be it's a response requested earlier that it didn't have enough juice to send, in which case more CPUs would have actually exacerbated the problem.
These are the machinations of a dying dinosaur. Protectionism NEVER works. Not in politics, not in economy, and definitely not in business.
It's worked pretty well for Microsoft in the form of maintaining a monopoly for two decades now.
What Microsoft does is *exactly* what the free market is designed to avoid -- the consumer *isn't* benefiting, and things are stagnating.
Note that this is not quite as silly as one might think.
I had a friend that stopped using a wireless mouse because it kept getting lost under piles of stuff.
With a wired mouse, you always have a cord to follow.
I, personally, can't figure out the fetish with wirelessness. If you're using a computer monitor, the size is pretty much such that you must be at your desk. If you want to control music or movies, an IR remote is a much better choice -- more comfortable to hold, can be used without a desk, cheap, and the batteries last until kingdom come.
The only possibly justifiable thing I can think of might be that a wireless mouse doesn't have a cord moving around and knocking things over. A keyboard doesn't really move too much. I found it *particularly* irritating to find a *wired* optical trackball that I liked (eventually went with the MacAlly QBALL). Who would want a wireless *trackball*? You don't move the thing, and there's just no way for the cord to whack things.
If you *do* go wireless, you introduce all manner of irritations:
* Security. Obvious. Probably not a huge issue for most, given that attacking your device means physically planting a monitoring device quite nearby. (Perhaps cracking into another nearby computer using a RF or IR sensor might work, but it would still take some doing).
* Batteries. This is a big deal in my mind. Batteries add weight. They mean that voltage starts dropping off, and devices get less reliable. You have to change the durn little things, and if you come back home and discover that your batteries are dead, you're in for some charging/replacing before you can do anything.
* Reliability. Logitech's pre-Bluetooth mice "block" each other when used in the same range. Other RF crap going on can muck with your signal.
* Performance. I remember folks complaining about performance degredation -- not sure whether it was due to latency increases or sampling rate decreases.
Just as an aside from all this -- you know, Red Hat isn't perfect and I realize that "diversity" is a really good justification for providing sizeable competitors. However, they still do a really, awfully good job of sticking to OSS ideology. They donate more money to projects than they need to, they have generous terms (none of the delayed ISO releases that SuSE has), try quite hard to stay OSS (I remember when they dumped Netscape's software -- pretty early on, and earlier than was probably a good idea. They were clearly trying to stimulate Mozilla growth at the cost of some of their own appeal.) They really are, of the major distributors, one of the nicest of the lot (or to be cynical, feel that it's important to consistently act as if they are nice). They don't try for lockout -- there are good, solid reasons that they sell so many copies. Honestly, if I were running RH, I probably wouldn't have played so nicely.
Some of what UL does (and I'm sure I'm probably woefully uninformed) seems to not be as useful as what the LSB does, where *everyone* got on board:
* I wish that real, solid cross-distro and backwards-binary compatibility could be in place -- that I could buy a binary software package and use it on any distro. Most of the games I purchased from Loki two years or so ago, already don't run on the current version of Red Hat, and that's just within a distribution, just two releases down the line. It's so much easier to package and distribute binary software packages on Windows that it's frusterating. I've *seen* folks trying to do it, and it's the primary reason that I've seen vendor people avoiding Linux support -- you can't just provide "a Linux binary package".
* There's no agreed-upon-way to package a daemon. Init systems differ -- there's no standard all-distros-have-it command to use to register/unregister a daemon for system startup. Such a script could operate differently at the back end, but...Linux is just lacking in such standardized wrappers. Currently, some poor sap has to volunteer to package it for Debian, PLD and RH usually have to do the packaging themselves, etc.
* There's no standard meta-spec file that allows one to generate final-quality RPM/DEB/whathaveyou files. Authors would probably *love* to write a single file (preferably with simpler, more standardized syntax than the RPM spec) that can be fed into RPM to produce an RPM and DEB to produce a DEB.
*
Google is definitely a group of nice folks. They are one of the few entities (perhaps *the* only who could actually get away with it) that could simply get GoogleGear to change their name by just eliminating any references to "googlegear" from their database. Instead, they went for a peaceful solution.
IIRC, the music industry is only around two hundred million something a year. (This came up when someone pointed out that for a while, the music industry was looking at fighting both the tech and telecom industries, which were so much larger by far that it was ridiculous.)
I challenge someone to name one band that has gone gold without an RIAA marketing push.
You probably don't need to take an album gold, as long as you have capital and are making a good chunk of the profit (i.e. online retailing), to do well on the music alone.
The current online distributor going rate for music seems to be in the neighborhood of $1 a song, based on the three or so distributors that Slashdot's linked to recently. If an artist makes, say, 50 cents from each song, and sells only 100,000 online copies, and the album has ten songs, that's half a million dollars. If a group has five people, that's $100,000 a person.
That assumes that these people have access to an environment that they can record in. I have a friend who built a home recording studio for the heck of it -- it isn't that hard. It also doesn't pay for marketing.
God, I hate that show. It has the most idiotic, forced dialog I've ever seen.
Here I was, wondering desperately how I could get my hands on some more advertisements -- and here Apple comes to save the day!
I'm vaguely reminded of HSC, later MetaCreations -- they made and sold a plugin (KPT) to enhance a program (Photoshop and Painter). A couple of years later, they had enough money to buy the host program (Painter) from the company that produced it.
The dollar hasn't been backed by gold in ages. Dollars don't exist in the sense that you're thinking of them, except by convention.
More accurately, they're paying lots of money to twiddle a couple of bits in a database somewhere.
Verisign makes money doing the same thing. As do the name registrars. As do banks.
I think the thing here that's so different is that it's amazing that people are willing to *pay* for items in a game (For chrissake, it's a game. Isn't the whole point of a game to have fun *getting* the items?)
I'm kind of tired of you armchair OS coders. So the happy few, highly paid Microsoft employees, 20 years experience in copying IBM, thousands of stock options in Redmond decide the next gen OS will have some wack FS and they have to be called morons? How do you know better? Hasn't Microsoft produced the best selling OS on the market for 15 years? Why don't YOU have the job leading the Longhorn team?
Oh. Yeah... LINUX.
There's a rather crucial difference here. You are very much not Linus. As a matter of fact, I will happily bet that you have never submitted a patch to Linux. As have most of the people on Slashdot vicariously living through Linus's triumpths.
Linus might, in fact, be a not unreasonable critic, to some degree, of the pipeline length being discussed in the article. He, unlike most Slashdotters, is actually familiar with (a) high level system architecture, (b) the x86 instruction set that's being used here, and (c) probably, by virtue of enough low level work, (plus, he may have potentially done work in the field) at least something about the code gcc and other compilers are spitting out.
Here's some metric of how far most Slashdotters are from being qualified to comment on this: I'm probably reasonably knowledgeable on the issues involved relative to the bulk of Slashdotters, using only the other posts as a watermark for what other Slashdotters know.
One assignment I had, back at Carnegie Mellon as an undergrad in a CS class, was to design a very simple processor. The assignment would have made a CE laugh out loud -- we didn't have to worry about gate delay or initial states or inductance or anything that's an issue in the real world. We got to ignore all timing problems. We could split signals as much as we wanted. It was strictly a logical processor. That processor is probably more than most Slashdotters have built.
I have a friend in grad school who is a CE. He laughed his ass off when he heard about the assignment. He, however, is a grad student. He hasn't published for years, he doesn't have much experience, and he has a *lot* to learn. He designs chips on a pretty regular basis.
If *he* came along and said "those people at Intel are idiots", *he'd* be laughed down by a PhD in the field. Why? Because he simply hasn't done research in branch prediction or any of the related issues, and isn't remotely qualified. Of course, *he* wouldn't be out trying to call out the Intel engineers because he's aware of how competent they are.
As a matter of fact, anyone who hasn't either gotten into serious compiler design research (not just "I wrote a compiler once for a class") or whatever areas are relevant to the CE chip work probably isn't qualified to criticize the Intel engineers on design decisions. You aren't seeing a lot of those in this article. Why? Because they have a fair amount of respect for the Intel folks and know enough to avoid making damn fools out of themselves.
Folks who are end users -- software engineers, system builders, etc -- are really qualified to judge the processor on price and performance as a black box, and not much else. I include myself in there, and I've read a number of research papers on the thing in the past. And, frankly, the Intel folks have done a pretty good job if you measure the product as a black box from a performance standpoint. If you want to complain, complain about the price. Don't try to say "Well, that P4 sure is good, but what the Intel engineers really messed up on is that HyperThreading stuff. Boy, if they only understood PCI, then they never would have done anything like it." I see way too many completely and utterly uninformed posts, and it propagates.
Errata for the above -- "Some of the units would move to even more instructions per cycle." should be "Some of the units would move to even more cycles per instruction."
You have to remember that a garden variety PC is a very unpredictable environment. You have network packets coming in, mouse events, keyboard presses, USB chatter, DMA access, every event generates and interrupt that requires the processor to stop what it's doing, and start the pipeline over again.
It's nothing personal, but articles like this one, as well as posts like this, drive me absolutely batty with the amount of incorrect ideas propagated. It's not that one particular person is misinformed -- it's just that the amount of generally bogus information is silly.
First off, at some point, as far as I can tell, a bunch of people read Maximum PC or somesuch consumer "PC enthusiast" magazines, and read about "The Megahertz Myth". Maybe Ars Technica ran the story that started all this. Heck if I know. All that the original author was trying to do was point out that people shouldn't judge processors strictly by clock speed.
Boy, did they ever create a monster. Somehow, a bunch of folks managed to get the idea that Intel was pulling this as some sort of PR job to deliberately trick people into buying their processors. For Chrissake, this is such an incredibly stupid idea. The OEMs have purchasers that know what they're buying. Not only are they not going to just sit down and look at benchmarks, they're going to have a bunch of test machines built when deciding what to go with. That and business considerations outweight any "MHz rating". The OEM market just plain doesn't care. The only people getting excited about the "MHz Myth" are the "PC enthusiasts", a tiny, tiny sliver of a group when it comes to dollar value. If the sort of "PC enthusiast
riffraff really think that they constitute any kind of a significant market to Intel -- enough for Intel to *redesign their entire processor*, using a longer pipeline and higher clock rate, around getting them to purchase a computer, they are vastly overestimating their own importance in the universe.
When Intel makes the decision about a new processor, it's a pretty safe bet that they don't run out and say "Gee, how would Joe Assmunch in Marketing like us to structure this thing?" They have many, many PhDs in chip and circuit design who have many competing ideas about what the best designs would be. They run many, many simulations before even thinking about deciding on major design decisions.
The "PC enthusiast" folks who think that Intel has taken this path to trick those people that buy from Dell, and that, ho ho ho, *they* are smart enough to see through the trick are ridiculous. If Intel wanted a high clock rate to put on stickers, they could jack the thing through the sky, run at 10GHz, then demux data and only accept data at a lower rate into the various units. Some of the units would move to even more instructions per cycle.
The *current* poster is talking about *keyboard* and *mouse* events? "USB chatter"? Those don't even show up on the *radar*. You roll that mouse, send your 200 Hz interrupts, and you worry about 200 measly mispredictions per second? Just blowing away the page table cache during process switches (which runs at 100 Hz on Linux 2.4 x86 by default) already dwarfs any misprediction performance hit from the said devices, and folks frequently bump it up by an order of magnitude or so and don't see any measurable performance hit -- on Pentium IIs.
As for DMA, the entire point of DMA is so that the processor *isn't* running code from the host. It can continue on in its own happy little world while a co-processor pokes at the memory bus.
You might see significant branch misprediction issues with an inner loop with a branch statement that flicks back and forth just about every loop or so to screw over the branch caching. And "significant" is still pretty minor. The compilers hint to the CPU whether a branch is likely to be taken...it's not as if there's this massive, awful mistake that all the chip designers in the world are making that Joe I-Built-My-Own-Computer-