Re:Intel C++ Compiler 7.1 Rules
on
GCC 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Intel's compiler smokes gcc in most benchmarks...
How's its performance on SPARC III? Does it optimize well for the Athlons? How about the PowerPC CPUs? And the MIPS CPUs? Does it cross-compile for the IBM mainframes? Does it run on them?
Although it is not 100% compatible with all the gcc features, and therefore can't compile the Linux kernel,...
Oh.
How about the object code? Can its object code be linked to code compiled by gcc, or is using this an all-or-nothing proposition?
I hope the day will soon come when we can compile a whole Linux distribution with the Intel compiler.
That would be nifty, indeed. At least it would be nifty for the distributions which run ONLY on Intel CPUs. Which distribution would that be?
Intel's compiler is certainly peachy, and I would certainly endorse its use by folks who have Intel systems and need to get maximum performance out of them. Same story for the Digital/HPAQ compiler and the folks with the Alpha systems.
For the rest of us, the folks without Intel CPUs, Intel's peachy compiler is not so much of a muchness. But don't let that stop you from going crazy with it.
Sarcasm, ``... a polite attempt at urbane humour...''? You mean there's a difference?
Seriously, it never occured to me that the two might be mutually exclusive.
Of course, whether Lord S of T was being bitingly sarcastic in response to Lord M of B's inane comment or merely joining in Lord M of B's gentle sarcasm would depend on the sort of context which can't be found in that transcript.
By the way, do the first letters of the name and place designators (i.e., M of B and S of T) form unique identifiers, or is it generally necessary to spell them all out?
At the close, SCOX was up 25 cents for the day, on the news. That's up 7.58%. The stock was at a dollar-something in February, and closed at 3.55 today. It's starting to look like a momentum play.
I think it's dangerous to invest in a business you don't understand. I think those figures prove it. No business plan, no product, no hope for the lawsuit... and the stock doubled in three months.
I suppose that some of the buyers must be arbitragers, anticipating the lawsuit-ending buyout by IBM.
If it's reasonable to cast licensing paranoia aside for a moment,...
I don't know that it is reasonable to cast aside worries about MS's licensing schemes.
... Microsoft appears to be offering those who cannot afford their software the ability to get upgrades for free without having to pay for migrating proprietary code to the Linux platform.
I'm sure that they would like nothing better than to have it appear thataway.
If I replaced "Microsoft" with another business name, that would be A Good Thing.
That would be a deeply insightful comment, EXCEPT: if we were talking about another company, we wouldn't be talking about a company which had been convicted of abusing its monopoly power. Then, we might believe that the object of the exercise was charity, and it would be A Good Thing.
Unfortunately, we are talking about MS, the convicted monopolist. The MS with a history of rude, rapacious behavior towards customers and competitors alike. The MS which has used all means possible to extend and maintain their monopoly, including ``... offering those who cannot afford their software the ability to get upgrades for free... ''. Thus, many of us don't see this as A Good Thing. In fact, we see it as more rude, rapacious behavior.
The situation is different when it's MS instead of, say, RedHat, because MS is different than RedHat. At some point, automatic suspicion becomes reasonable rather than paranoid. I think that MS and Charles Manson have past that point at least once. So did IBM, before most slashdotters were born, but IBM has come back to the ``safe'' side of that point since MS lead them down an alley and molested them.
By the way, the postage meter industry is just messy as the desk-top OS industry, except rougher. And except for the fact that anti-trust law worked there, sort of.
The clueless part was not about the corned beef, but the fact (in the reply to Lady S of A) that there already are such restrictions:
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, faxes are already covered, in exactly the same way, by the existing telecoms data protection directive. The essential nature of the privacy directive is to extend that into the question of e-mails.
I hadn't read the earlier discussion; it looks worth reading. Reading the Congressional Record is never worth while; I'm starting to like the House of Lords.
New Asian immigrants from Vietnam for example perform about as well as new immigrants from Mexico (warning: word-of-mouth statistic).
I suspect that word-of-mouth has let you down. I picked my examples because I know that those two groups (Asian and Carribean black) do as well as or better than American whites in the first and second generations, but Carribean blacks become statistically indistinguishable from American blacks by the third generation after immegration. There is no racial difference, but definitely a cultural difference.
In addition if you sort black students by academic success, you'll find that at almost every level, that rich black kids perform much closer to white kids in the same economic class (warning: another word-of-mouth statistic).
This one I agree with. That's a cultural difference. I went to college with some of those middle-class black kids you're talking about: they were raised in Alaska, and their cultural background was the same as mine (I'm white).
I'm sure you're right about the importance of education, but I suspect that culture drives the education. I don't know about Vietnamese immegrants, but Mexican immigrants don't seem to get educated in the second generation at the same rate as whites. Education is desired and respected in the parts of Asia with a Confucian heritage; it is more socially acceptable than wealth (but that never stopped anyone from getting rich!).
This makes me think that US will have some success in Iraq (even without forcing a western culture down their throats), but that Afghanistan probably won't work.
I think you're making sense here, sort of: there certainly isn't anything in Afganistan's culture to give us hope that they are civilizable. Still, they did fairly well under their last king.
You're assuming that a country can be rebuilt without ``forcing a western culture down their throats'', and I'm not sure that I can make any sense out of that idea at all. Certainly in Japan we had to force a wester culture down there throats. The Japanese had been eagerly adopting Western culture for many years by the end of WWII, so it wasn't an impossible task. Insofar as Japan is modern/ democratic/ progressive/ put-your-happy-buzzword-here, today, it is because they have adopted (and sometimes adapted) Western culture. No other culture allows change, social mobility, cooperation by large, anonymous groups, trusting strangers, tolerance of differences, and so on.
Of course my conclusion (unscientific as I admit it is in its current form) has implications for the future success of the US. Are those tax cuts being taken out of school budgets?
We have panel data on US education. Over time in the US, we have seen that illiteracy rates tend to increase with increased spending, across the entire sample. For any given year, the correlation between educational spending and educational attainment is either zero or negative. New York spends hugely on its school system, but has little to show for it. Texas probably spends a lot less per capita than NY (I don't know), but I doubt that the average Texas public school grad is any less educated than the average NYC public school grad.
Once we get past some minimum, threshold level, more spending on education doesn't help, and might hinder. The US is WAY past that minimum. Now all we need is for parents to be involved, set high standards for their children and their children's schools, and insist that children and schools live up to those expectations.
Immigrant parents from (just for example; this is not a comprehensive list) Russia, most of Asia and the Carribean, seem to be willing to do that. Most American parents don't. Again, that's a cultural difference.
This is why I said that the problem is cultural, not racial, in the grandparent post: any plan for solving this which begins by setting lower standards for anyone or any group dooms that group to failure.
The best parts
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.
So, at least some in the House of Lords:
wish to be protected from having an email
equate easy credit with pronography with miracle diets
have heard of Monty Python.
I'd say that they compare quite favorably with the US Senate, so far.
[big snip]
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them
Clueless humor, I suppose, but humor.
[big snip]
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, can the Minister think of a name for the enormous amount of unsolicited ordinary mail we receive?
I wonder whether this was sarcasm or more clueless humor?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, when I have a moment I shall bend my mind to that question.
For instance, the Marklar race respond that on average they earn 12,000 a year and have no indoor toilet. This lets the government know 1. Marklars may not be getting the racial equality that in the US should be mandatory. 2. Marklars are not properly being serviced by their government.
1. Does this mean that short folks are going to get leg implants so they can be equal to us tall folks?
2. If the Marklars REALLY want toilets, why can't they earn them, just like the rest of us did?
Seriously, you're right: that's exactly the sort of thinking that lead congress-critters to put that sort of garbage on the long form. My point was that that sort of thinking varies from simply muddled to dangerously wrong.
If racial equality (defined as average income, or anything meaningful) is to be mandatory, we'll have to begin by eliminating our constitution. How else do you propose to get the alcoholism rate on reservations down to that of the general population (or else the general population's alcoholism rate up to match theirs)? We're going to have to start holding the able back, because there's no way we're going to be able to push the unable up to match them.
Anyone who really thinks that ``able'' correlates to race is dead wrong. But, ``able'' does correlate pretty well to culture. Look at the different success rates for new Asian and Carribean immigrants, compared to the grandchildren of earlier immigrants from those same areas. As their families acculturate here, their academic and business achievments tend to fall toward (or below) the mean for the US.
... Senate Majority Leader said that if people didn't want to answer the questions then the Census had no right to compel people to do so.
Here's the funny part. 1. the Census is meant only to count heads. 2. the other questions on the Census are tacked on by Congress 3. Congress in fact gives the Census the mandate to compel people to answer.
The constitution requires the government to count heads. The constitution therefore gives the government the power to count heads. Since there is no constitutional mandate to count toilets, any governmental power to do that would have to be found in the emanations of the penumbra of the commerce clause. Since the Supremes are starting to take a sane view of the commerce clause, as the 10th amendment requires, choosing not to require people to answer the questions may well be the better part of valor: congress may not have felt that it was worth trying to defend the long form before the Supreme court. On a side note, the long form is out (too intrusive, said congress), to be replaced with the American Community Survey, whose funding is in danger. We may just not know about toilet counts in future years. Just like we didn't for most of our history.
Where is the 2000 Census data now? Arizona. In a big vault for the most part.
The forms may be in Arizona, but the data is in a big mainframe in Washington, D.C. Aggregated, perturbed-to-preserve-privacy summaries have been sent (via CD and DVD) all over the US, so that dangerously muddle-headed politicians and civil servants can use it to show that more of someone else's money needs to be spent on the civil servants, in the name of the Marklars.
When the current $20 bills came out, I heard of people having trouble using them, because apparently a few people somehow didn't hear that new bills were being released so obviously thought they were counterfeit.
Look here. I don't think that the ``new look'' will be a big deal: it's not that new.
Now they're saying there will be subtle changes every few years, so in another decade there will be like 4 different versions of the $20 bill, ALL LEGAL. If you saw a fifth version, which was counterfeit, would it be obvious to you?
Here I think you've found a real problem. People DON'T look at their money. It's surprising how few people even check the $50's and $100's. Right now there are two versions of every bill, in 2004, it will be three, and just as you say, NO ONE is going to know what the newest versions look like until they see them.
That leads to a sick-but-funny possibility: some merchant takes a ``new'' $20. Later, you come into his shop, spend your ``new'' $20, and he calls the cops, who haul you away for counterfeitting. The problem? The first $20 was counterfeit, and yours was real, and neither the merchant nor the cops knew the difference.
Since no American is educated about their money, it could happen. When the new bills with the watermarks and threads came out, I had to explain what they were to most of the store clerks who noticed. I only knew about them because I'm a coin collector.
A middle-aged applicant who is looking for a job writing software for retail sale (i.e., at Microsoft or at... who else sells software to the consumer, nowadays?) might be in for a tough time, judging by the stories about age discrimination and worker abuse we've heard here and elsewhere. But, a middle-aged newcomer to programming is probably going to have some experience and/or talent in some field. In that field, there's a good chance that being able to write a program is an asset.
Where I'm working now, we don't have any ``programmers'', but most of us need to program a bit as part of our jobs. Those of us who CAN write a program or use a computer effectively are able to get more done more easily. The rest seem to stumble along.
When we hire for the more analytical jobs, we do ask about programming ability. I suspect that having some sort of certificate could back up your claim to know something. When we hire, we are definitely looking for people with analytical and writing ability, who are able to use computers effectively. Word and Excel aren't enough, and we don't need any more folks stumbling along.
Over all, it might make sense for an older individual to be able to demonstrate coding proficiency, and it might even make sense to go back to school for a while for that purpose. ESPECIALLY if that older individual isn't planning on going to work for MS.
Paul Graham hints at it in his article, but there is no good language right now for writing applications in.
Paul Graham is a well-known Lisp programmer. He didn't beat us over the head with it in his article, but I'm pretty sure that he considers Lisp (Common Lisp, in particular) to be that good language, for yesterday and today at least.
I suppose that it's an acquired taste, but I'm convinced that it's a taste well worth acquiring. Here is a little screed I wrote to explain why I hold that conviction. Graham wrote several articles which tell his reasons. Some which pop to mind are: Beating the averages, Lisp in web based applications and What made Lisp different
By the way, Lisp doesn't have to be very slow. Here is a pointer to a paper which might get you started.
... terrorists don't usually recruit from populations that are happy and treated fairly.
The Symbonese Liberation Army. The Bader-Meinhoff Gang. Those were both terrorist groups, recruited from the spoiled brats of white middle and upper classes of the US and Germany, respectively. The white middle and upper classes in those two countries weren't significantly oppressed during the 60's through 90's. I think that counts as a counter example.
Most of the terrorists we've seen in the news recently have been from Saudi Arabia; I think that they provided at least a plurality of Al Qida manpower. Saudi Arabia is not poor, is under local control, and if they aren't treated fairly, they certainly shouldn't blame us. Yet, they have funded most of the terrorist effort in recent years, and have produced a lot of the suicidal mass murders.
The one thing that all of the terrorists have in common is that they come from truely FOUL dictatorships. The Palestinians are misruled by the PLO. We've all been hearing accounts of how Hussein had oppressed and abused the Iraqis; the PLO is just as murderous. Indonesia and Malaysia are far better than Iraq or Saudi Arabia, but they still have bad governments, and they do produce some terrorists. The Phillipines has a big problem with Muslim terrorists, and also a notoriously corrupt government (they do seem to be working on improving that, slowly). Saudi Arabia has a terribly oppressive government, and in the previous paragraph I pointed out that they've done more than their share to export hatred and death.
Terrorism seems to be a creature of bad government. Even when the governments don't explicitly use it as a tool as Libya did, they use hatred of some convenient target like the US to keep their citizens too busy to hate their oppressors.
Bad government may be a product of bad society, or vise versa. Certainly, soemone who's grown up in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, and watched as evil murders get ahead by doing evil, will have a very different view of the world than will an American.
You'll notice that many of the riots we see reported in the Middle East happen on a Friday, local time. The imams preach in the mosques on Friday. That's not coincidence: the imams preach hatred and murder, and incite the mobs. They go out and riot after church. This religious reinforcement might help explain why oppressive governments in non muslim countries, such as Burma, haven't produced so many terrorists.
Perhaps US foriegn policy should concentrate less on supporting repressive regimes so they can get cheap oil and more on helping the people live free (without all the bombing;) ).
That's what those recent wars in Afganistan and Iraq were all about. If the people there are free, they won't be bombing others.
M$ is going to be successful at this because they know what buttons to push:
* You will be safe from viruses.
* You will be able to avoid spam.
* You can protect your content.
* We will enable delivery of digital content.
* Tigher system security.
Notice that the first and last of these problems, as experienced by most business and home users, were generated by MS themselves. Spam and content were gifts from above... or below. Insofar as this new disaster appears necessary, it's because MS has created, at our expense, the problem they now propose to solve at our expense.
MS behaving more like a government every day.
Re:employment and advancement
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 1
>>They do tell the world that you are taking your career seriously.
Not at all...they tell the world that you are either
a) a kid with rich parents who put him through school
b) someone who couldn't get where they wanted so they kept hanging out on campus until they found something better to do
or c) someone who is taking their career seriously by getting a piece of paper, even if it entails wasting time memorizing stuff they'll never use on the job.
There are few rich people, and their kids aren't likely to be out pounding the pavement looking for work, so (a) isn't such a big problem. Option (b) is a possibility, but the degree still signals some ability to keep on keeping on. These people may not be idiots or jerks, and might do just fine on the job, just as they do in school. Option (c) is probably half or more of the people in the colleges I've attended.
>>this interview, and have something to loose if you screw things up.
I am so sick of you degreed people using the wrong word...it's lose, not loose
Yes. Thanks for catching that. My fingers were going faster than my brain.
>>Getting the degree can be a great way to show the employer that you believe in yourself. >No, it's a great way to show the employer that you buy into their stupid system of advancement.
If you don't buy into your employer's way of doing things, why do you expect him to buy into you? This is the Golden Rule: The employer has the gold, so he makes the rules. There is nothing in the Golden Rule about ``except when the rules are stupid''.
Re:employment and advancement
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 1
Degrees and certifications are a signaling device. They don't (and they really CAN'T) tell the world that you are competent. They do tell the world that you are taking your career seriously.
The problem is that the employer can't tell what sort of worker you are until after you've worked there for a while; not until after you've had enough time to screw things up badly for them. Having a degree/certification tells the employer that you've invested some effort in getting to this interview, and have something to loose if you screw things up.
Having a degree (not a certificate) also tells the employer that you are the sort of person who finds it tolerable to spend 4+ years working toward a difficult and uncertain goal. It tells the employer that you are NOT the sort of person who can't handle deadlines, can't follow instructions and can't deal with authority [1]. If you happened to learn something along the way, that's great, but that's not the primary concern for most jobs and most employers. As evidence of that, many history and english majors get jobs. None of them are likely to get many opportunities to put their knowledge to practical use on the job.
Some people find it very difficult to get a degree. It might be hard for them to stick to a program, it might be hard for them to learn, it might be that they simply can't sit in a class without getting the professor angry at them. They might find that school interferes with their life, or their drugs, or their business. This group is VERY unlikely to make good employees.
That's why I say that the degrees are a signaling mechanism: they show that you're not part of this group. Obviously it's not perfect, but the likelihood that someone with a college degree cannot learn, cannot think, or cannot complete a task is far lower than for the group without the degree.
How does all this apply to advancement, the case in which the employer already knows you?
First, advancement usually implies new responsibilities. Getting some training may or may not help you to handle those, but it will certainly show the employer that you're still willing and able to learn. You have to help the employer to believe in you. Getting the degree can be a great way to show the employer that you believe in yourself. Advancement usually means more hours on the job, too. If you aren't willing to put in the extra hours to get the advancement, why should the employer believe that you won't resent the extra hours on the job?
Second, an organization like SAIC is selling YOU. SAIC's customers don't know you, so SAIC needs to sell you the same way you'd have to sell yourself if you were going to be interviewed for the job. Again, the pieces of paper help signal to the customer that you aren't unsuitable.
[1] Those may present difficulties, but not insurmountable difficulties; otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to complete your degree.
Here at my desk I have a Tandy 102, circa early 1980's (NOT my primary machine). Its OS is by Microsoft, and is reported to contain the last production code BillG personally worked on. A few K of RAM, a few K of ROM, and an 8(I think) line, 40-column screen. You can see some of the bad ideas which were stolen from CPM and enshrined in DOS, like 8.3 filenames (files in RAM) and the three letter filename extension gives file type.
It still works, and its spreadsheet easily uses relative cell references. That nifty little feature seems to have gotten lost in MS's spreadsheets between then and now. Today, one of my cow orkers needed to do something in a spreadsheet... ``relative references!'' I told him. Half an hour later, none of us could figure out how to do it in Excel.
Sometimes, the old stuff is good enough to warrent putting up with its limitations. In this case, maybe not. But MS's spreadsheets have gone way downhill since the early '80's.
... who else than the rest of the World uses metric anyway?
It's only the rest of the world who uses metric, so who cares.
I can tell you WHY they use it: expressing their speeds in kilometers per hour makes it sound as if they're really going fast. It helps make up for their dinky cars with under nourished hamsters for engines. The metric system is really just a coping mechanism for an inferiority complex.
If we wanted to bring the rest of the workd back to the traditional system, all we'd have to do is start quoting our speeds in furlongs per fortnight. Since the American brown snail can travel at about 15 furlongs per fortnight, it's plain that our speed numbers would again exceed theirs, and their coping mechanism would be shattered. They would have to come flocking back to our familiar, traditional system.
It might seem a harsh thing, but it would be best for them. The additional arithmatic skill required by the traditional units is clearly the explanation for the United State's consistant superiority in all things mathematical over the benighted metric world.
>>At least with Linux you don't have to reboot the machine every time you apply a patch like you need to do after patching Windows.
>Not always. Depends on the particular patch being applied.
So far as I know, you never HAVE to reboot Linux after doing apt-get upgrade. You can even upgrade your kernel package without rebooting. To actually get the new kernel running, you must stop the old one and start the new... that's a reboot. But you don't have to do that until you're ready. Patch today, reboot next week. Further, you may be able to go years at a time between necessary kernel patches.
So, if I understand correctly, Linux has one package, the kernel, which can't be replaced completely without a reboot. I suspect that Linus, et al, are working on that little problem.
Here at work, users' machines must be rebooted after the noon patch. This suggests that reboots are a lot harder to avoid after patching on Win2K. I think that Win2K will generally function after patching without the reboot, but I don't think that the new DLLs replace the old until the reboot. That's not nearly so easy to deal with as the Linux case.
Then there's the problem of ``what are the patches going to break?'' On Debian, that hasn't been a problem for me so far (knock on woody). I ran Potato for nearly two years, and have run Woody since midway through the freeze, and security updates haven't broken anything for me yet (knock knock...). I suspect that's because the stuff in the stable distribution is pretty well integrated, and pretty well understood by the guys doing and testing the patching.
Now, MS, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother disaster. I don't think that the Microserfs care about third-party software, and I'm not sure that they understand enough about it or their own nightmare to be able to avoid breaking stuff if they did care. We know that MS patches have a nasty reputation for buggering up other folks applications. Sometimes that breakage looks intentional. THAT's why patching is such a big problem in MS-land: you must test it to find out whether the cure is worse than the disease.
I suspose that if I had big bucks riding on a server, I'd stress-test Debian security patches, too. It would be mostly pro forma; I'd be surprised to find any show-stoppers.
We've been talking about MS versus Linux. Is there anyone reading who has experience with AIX, Solaris, HP-unix, Tru64, and such? Is it safe to patch there? Is it common for third-party apps to be broken by patches? Are there lots of bugs that require patching? Is it common for the vendor to get you patches fast enough?
That's what I do, and I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Things get fixed, usually before I ever knew they were broken, deamons get restarted, nothing gets interrupted, life goes on... If I took the trouble to make it a cron job, I'd never even know.
... Craig Fiebig,... is quoted as saying "In dollar terms, patching is the most expensive security measures...
Is Mr Fiebig telling us that things don't go so smoothly if you use MS products? Or that MS can't keep up with a bunch of amatures? Do MS patches break non-MS apps? Could all this be why so many worms and viruses manage to spread across unpatched MS products? Could it be that MS patches are as bad as the bugs they fix? SAY IT AIN'T SO, CRAIG!
My current desktop is a 1GHz Athlon, with a Nvidia GX400 card, Redhat7.2 and the Nvidia drivers that came with that. I also use a P2 233MHz laptop, and a 486 laptop. On the desktop, I use KDE, on the newer laptop I use wmaker, and on the old laptop I use blackbox, both Debian Woody. Those choices are dictated more by taste and RAM than speed. I've never noticed a window drawing on any of them. The laptops are more or less slow, but that's limited RAM and bus speed.
I've no idea what I might be doing differently than you were.
One of these days, when I'm rich and famous, I'll try one of those snazzy new Macs. Until then, I'm much too cheap to buy prebuilt when I can put together a homebuilt. My next laptop will probably be a Mac, though, since there's no hope of home building there. I'd like to try OSX, and the Mac hardware isn't bad for the price, when you're talking prebuilt.
Re:how about this...
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... if you want to buy the hardware and software for your $300 PC to make it do everything that $2750 mac can do, you will spend way way more on the PC's accessories.
True. Are you're saying that Macs are price-competitive with home-built PC's? That would be wonderful news, if true... I can build a PC significantly cheaper than I can buy a ready-made one of comparable quality.
I can build a PC with a fast FSB, CAS2 RAM, a decent graphics card (I like Matrox, for my purposes) and so on, for more than a Dell/Hpaq/eMachines POS, and less than a comparable x86 workstation. I can build a POS with scavenged parts for a bit less than the Dell/HPaq POS, but here I won't save enough to make wages.
If Mac is now competitive with the homebuilt instead of with the workstation, I'll quit building PCs and start buying Macs.
I've seen Mac fanciers say that when you compare like with like, Macs aren't more expensive. When I've investigated, I've always found that's roughly true, BUT: when I compare the price of ``exactly what I want'' with the price of the Mac, Apple is slightly more expensive than a prebuilt PC, and much more expensive than homemade.
The lesson here is that Apple doesn't try to compete with homemade, and Apple doesn't target machines at engineers and number-crunchers.
Linux is cheaper, but not if you want it for desktop use, in which case it just wont work well at all
Well, it's been working on MY desktop for about five years now, because it's always been better for MY use than the alternatives, such as Windows and Mac. I understand that's not the case for you. Your statement is a bit too broad to be true.
Re:OT, may the mods have mercy on my karma
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
8-inch disks. CP/M. Punch-tape! Those were the days!
Remember the hard-sectored floppys? Vector machines had 8in hard-sectored floppys. When they had problems (when didn't they!), they'd use the floppy drive LED to blink Morse code for trouble-shooting.
Didn't Altos use hard-sectored 5 1/4 floppys? Or am I imagining that?
Does anyone else remember how cool it was to have a 486 that would dir a directory listing faster then you could read it?
I remember overclocking a Kaypro four by putting in a faster crystal and a 6MHz Z-80. It was so much faster than the IBM PC (a measly 4.77MHz clock) that the difference was astounding. SBASIC and Wordstar just flew!
By the time that the 486's rolled around, there just wasn't much novelty left in it for me.
Slashdot Mirror
How's its performance on SPARC III? Does it optimize well for the Athlons? How about the PowerPC CPUs? And the MIPS CPUs? Does it cross-compile for the IBM mainframes? Does it run on them?
Although it is not 100% compatible with all the gcc features, and therefore can't compile the Linux kernel, ...
Oh.
How about the object code? Can its object code be linked to code compiled by gcc, or is using this an all-or-nothing proposition?
I hope the day will soon come when we can compile a whole Linux distribution with the Intel compiler.
That would be nifty, indeed. At least it would be nifty for the distributions which run ONLY on Intel CPUs. Which distribution would that be?
Intel's compiler is certainly peachy, and I would certainly endorse its use by folks who have Intel systems and need to get maximum performance out of them. Same story for the Digital/HPAQ compiler and the folks with the Alpha systems.
For the rest of us, the folks without Intel CPUs, Intel's peachy compiler is not so much of a muchness. But don't let that stop you from going crazy with it.
Seriously, it never occured to me that the two might be mutually exclusive.
Of course, whether Lord S of T was being bitingly sarcastic in response to Lord M of B's inane comment or merely joining in Lord M of B's gentle sarcasm would depend on the sort of context which can't be found in that transcript.
By the way, do the first letters of the name and place designators (i.e., M of B and S of T) form unique identifiers, or is it generally necessary to spell them all out?
I think it's dangerous to invest in a business you don't understand. I think those figures prove it. No business plan, no product, no hope for the lawsuit ... and the stock doubled in three months.
I suppose that some of the buyers must be arbitragers, anticipating the lawsuit-ending buyout by IBM.
I don't know that it is reasonable to cast aside worries about MS's licensing schemes.
I'm sure that they would like nothing better than to have it appear thataway.
If I replaced "Microsoft" with another business name, that would be A Good Thing.
That would be a deeply insightful comment, EXCEPT: if we were talking about another company, we wouldn't be talking about a company which had been convicted of abusing its monopoly power. Then, we might believe that the object of the exercise was charity, and it would be A Good Thing.
Unfortunately, we are talking about MS, the convicted monopolist. The MS with a history of rude, rapacious behavior towards customers and competitors alike. The MS which has used all means possible to extend and maintain their monopoly, including `` ... offering those who cannot afford their software the ability to get upgrades for free ... ''. Thus, many of us don't see this as A Good Thing. In fact, we see it as more rude, rapacious behavior.
The situation is different when it's MS instead of, say, RedHat, because MS is different than RedHat. At some point, automatic suspicion becomes reasonable rather than paranoid. I think that MS and Charles Manson have past that point at least once. So did IBM, before most slashdotters were born, but IBM has come back to the ``safe'' side of that point since MS lead them down an alley and molested them.
By the way, the postage meter industry is just messy as the desk-top OS industry, except rougher. And except for the fact that anti-trust law worked there, sort of.
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, faxes are already covered, in exactly the same way, by the existing telecoms data protection directive. The essential nature of the privacy directive is to extend that into the question of e-mails.
I hadn't read the earlier discussion; it looks worth reading. Reading the Congressional Record is never worth while; I'm starting to like the House of Lords.
I suspect that word-of-mouth has let you down. I picked my examples because I know that those two groups (Asian and Carribean black) do as well as or better than American whites in the first and second generations, but Carribean blacks become statistically indistinguishable from American blacks by the third generation after immegration. There is no racial difference, but definitely a cultural difference.
In addition if you sort black students by academic success, you'll find that at almost every level, that rich black kids perform much closer to white kids in the same economic class (warning: another word-of-mouth statistic).
This one I agree with. That's a cultural difference. I went to college with some of those middle-class black kids you're talking about: they were raised in Alaska, and their cultural background was the same as mine (I'm white).
I'm sure you're right about the importance of education, but I suspect that culture drives the education. I don't know about Vietnamese immegrants, but Mexican immigrants don't seem to get educated in the second generation at the same rate as whites. Education is desired and respected in the parts of Asia with a Confucian heritage; it is more socially acceptable than wealth (but that never stopped anyone from getting rich!).
This makes me think that US will have some success in Iraq (even without forcing a western culture down their throats), but that Afghanistan probably won't work.
I think you're making sense here, sort of: there certainly isn't anything in Afganistan's culture to give us hope that they are civilizable. Still, they did fairly well under their last king.
You're assuming that a country can be rebuilt without ``forcing a western culture down their throats'', and I'm not sure that I can make any sense out of that idea at all. Certainly in Japan we had to force a wester culture down there throats. The Japanese had been eagerly adopting Western culture for many years by the end of WWII, so it wasn't an impossible task. Insofar as Japan is modern/ democratic/ progressive/ put-your-happy-buzzword-here, today, it is because they have adopted (and sometimes adapted) Western culture. No other culture allows change, social mobility, cooperation by large, anonymous groups, trusting strangers, tolerance of differences, and so on.
Of course my conclusion (unscientific as I admit it is in its current form) has implications for the future success of the US. Are those tax cuts being taken out of school budgets?
We have panel data on US education. Over time in the US, we have seen that illiteracy rates tend to increase with increased spending, across the entire sample. For any given year, the correlation between educational spending and educational attainment is either zero or negative. New York spends hugely on its school system, but has little to show for it. Texas probably spends a lot less per capita than NY (I don't know), but I doubt that the average Texas public school grad is any less educated than the average NYC public school grad.
Once we get past some minimum, threshold level, more spending on education doesn't help, and might hinder. The US is WAY past that minimum. Now all we need is for parents to be involved, set high standards for their children and their children's schools, and insist that children and schools live up to those expectations.
Immigrant parents from (just for example; this is not a comprehensive list) Russia, most of Asia and the Carribean, seem to be willing to do that. Most American parents don't. Again, that's a cultural difference.
This is why I said that the problem is cultural, not racial, in the grandparent post: any plan for solving this which begins by setting lower standards for anyone or any group dooms that group to failure.
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.
So, at least some in the House of Lords:
wish to be protected from having an email
equate easy credit with pronography with miracle diets
have heard of Monty Python.
I'd say that they compare quite favorably with the US Senate, so far.
[big snip]
Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them
Clueless humor, I suppose, but humor.
[big snip]
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, can the Minister think of a name for the enormous amount of unsolicited ordinary mail we receive?
I wonder whether this was sarcasm or more clueless humor?
Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, when I have a moment I shall bend my mind to that question.
Definitely sarcasm.
1. Marklars may not be getting the racial equality that in the US should be mandatory.
2. Marklars are not properly being serviced by their government.
1. Does this mean that short folks are going to get leg implants so they can be equal to us tall folks?
2. If the Marklars REALLY want toilets, why can't they earn them, just like the rest of us did?
Seriously, you're right: that's exactly the sort of thinking that lead congress-critters to put that sort of garbage on the long form. My point was that that sort of thinking varies from simply muddled to dangerously wrong.
If racial equality (defined as average income, or anything meaningful) is to be mandatory, we'll have to begin by eliminating our constitution. How else do you propose to get the alcoholism rate on reservations down to that of the general population (or else the general population's alcoholism rate up to match theirs)? We're going to have to start holding the able back, because there's no way we're going to be able to push the unable up to match them.
Anyone who really thinks that ``able'' correlates to race is dead wrong. But, ``able'' does correlate pretty well to culture. Look at the different success rates for new Asian and Carribean immigrants, compared to the grandchildren of earlier immigrants from those same areas. As their families acculturate here, their academic and business achievments tend to fall toward (or below) the mean for the US.
Here's the funny part. 1. the Census is meant only to count heads. 2. the other questions on the Census are tacked on by Congress 3. Congress in fact gives the Census the mandate to compel people to answer.
The constitution requires the government to count heads. The constitution therefore gives the government the power to count heads. Since there is no constitutional mandate to count toilets, any governmental power to do that would have to be found in the emanations of the penumbra of the commerce clause. Since the Supremes are starting to take a sane view of the commerce clause, as the 10th amendment requires, choosing not to require people to answer the questions may well be the better part of valor: congress may not have felt that it was worth trying to defend the long form before the Supreme court. On a side note, the long form is out (too intrusive, said congress), to be replaced with the American Community Survey, whose funding is in danger. We may just not know about toilet counts in future years. Just like we didn't for most of our history.
Where is the 2000 Census data now? Arizona. In a big vault for the most part.
The forms may be in Arizona, but the data is in a big mainframe in Washington, D.C. Aggregated, perturbed-to-preserve-privacy summaries have been sent (via CD and DVD) all over the US, so that dangerously muddle-headed politicians and civil servants can use it to show that more of someone else's money needs to be spent on the civil servants, in the name of the Marklars.
Now they're saying there will be subtle changes every few years, so in another decade there will be like 4 different versions of the $20 bill, ALL LEGAL. If you saw a fifth version, which was counterfeit, would it be obvious to you?
Here I think you've found a real problem. People DON'T look at their money. It's surprising how few people even check the $50's and $100's. Right now there are two versions of every bill, in 2004, it will be three, and just as you say, NO ONE is going to know what the newest versions look like until they see them.
That leads to a sick-but-funny possibility: some merchant takes a ``new'' $20. Later, you come into his shop, spend your ``new'' $20, and he calls the cops, who haul you away for counterfeitting. The problem? The first $20 was counterfeit, and yours was real, and neither the merchant nor the cops knew the difference.
Since no American is educated about their money, it could happen. When the new bills with the watermarks and threads came out, I had to explain what they were to most of the store clerks who noticed. I only knew about them because I'm a coin collector.
Where I'm working now, we don't have any ``programmers'', but most of us need to program a bit as part of our jobs. Those of us who CAN write a program or use a computer effectively are able to get more done more easily. The rest seem to stumble along.
When we hire for the more analytical jobs, we do ask about programming ability. I suspect that having some sort of certificate could back up your claim to know something. When we hire, we are definitely looking for people with analytical and writing ability, who are able to use computers effectively. Word and Excel aren't enough, and we don't need any more folks stumbling along.
Over all, it might make sense for an older individual to be able to demonstrate coding proficiency, and it might even make sense to go back to school for a while for that purpose. ESPECIALLY if that older individual isn't planning on going to work for MS.
Paul Graham is a well-known Lisp programmer. He didn't beat us over the head with it in his article, but I'm pretty sure that he considers Lisp (Common Lisp, in particular) to be that good language, for yesterday and today at least.
I suppose that it's an acquired taste, but I'm convinced that it's a taste well worth acquiring. Here is a little screed I wrote to explain why I hold that conviction. Graham wrote several articles which tell his reasons. Some which pop to mind are: Beating the averages, Lisp in web based applications and What made Lisp different
By the way, Lisp doesn't have to be very slow. Here is a pointer to a paper which might get you started.
The Symbonese Liberation Army. The Bader-Meinhoff Gang. Those were both terrorist groups, recruited from the spoiled brats of white middle and upper classes of the US and Germany, respectively. The white middle and upper classes in those two countries weren't significantly oppressed during the 60's through 90's. I think that counts as a counter example.
Most of the terrorists we've seen in the news recently have been from Saudi Arabia; I think that they provided at least a plurality of Al Qida manpower. Saudi Arabia is not poor, is under local control, and if they aren't treated fairly, they certainly shouldn't blame us. Yet, they have funded most of the terrorist effort in recent years, and have produced a lot of the suicidal mass murders.
The one thing that all of the terrorists have in common is that they come from truely FOUL dictatorships. The Palestinians are misruled by the PLO. We've all been hearing accounts of how Hussein had oppressed and abused the Iraqis; the PLO is just as murderous. Indonesia and Malaysia are far better than Iraq or Saudi Arabia, but they still have bad governments, and they do produce some terrorists. The Phillipines has a big problem with Muslim terrorists, and also a notoriously corrupt government (they do seem to be working on improving that, slowly). Saudi Arabia has a terribly oppressive government, and in the previous paragraph I pointed out that they've done more than their share to export hatred and death.
Terrorism seems to be a creature of bad government. Even when the governments don't explicitly use it as a tool as Libya did, they use hatred of some convenient target like the US to keep their citizens too busy to hate their oppressors.
Bad government may be a product of bad society, or vise versa. Certainly, soemone who's grown up in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, and watched as evil murders get ahead by doing evil, will have a very different view of the world than will an American.
You'll notice that many of the riots we see reported in the Middle East happen on a Friday, local time. The imams preach in the mosques on Friday. That's not coincidence: the imams preach hatred and murder, and incite the mobs. They go out and riot after church. This religious reinforcement might help explain why oppressive governments in non muslim countries, such as Burma, haven't produced so many terrorists.
Perhaps US foriegn policy should concentrate less on supporting repressive regimes so they can get cheap oil and more on helping the people live free (without all the bombing ;) ).
That's what those recent wars in Afganistan and Iraq were all about. If the people there are free, they won't be bombing others.
* You will be safe from viruses.
* You will be able to avoid spam.
* You can protect your content.
* We will enable delivery of digital content.
* Tigher system security.
Notice that the first and last of these problems, as experienced by most business and home users, were generated by MS themselves. Spam and content were gifts from above ... or below. Insofar as this new disaster appears necessary, it's because MS has created, at our expense, the problem they now propose to solve at our expense.
MS behaving more like a government every day.
Not at all...they tell the world that you are either
a) a kid with rich parents who put him through school
b) someone who couldn't get where they wanted so they kept hanging out on campus until they found something better to do
or c) someone who is taking their career seriously by getting a piece of paper, even if it entails wasting time memorizing stuff they'll never use on the job.
There are few rich people, and their kids aren't likely to be out pounding the pavement looking for work, so (a) isn't such a big problem. Option (b) is a possibility, but the degree still signals some ability to keep on keeping on. These people may not be idiots or jerks, and might do just fine on the job, just as they do in school. Option (c) is probably half or more of the people in the colleges I've attended.
>>this interview, and have something to loose if you screw things up.
I am so sick of you degreed people using the wrong word...it's lose, not loose
Yes. Thanks for catching that. My fingers were going faster than my brain.
>>Getting the degree can be a great way to show the employer that you believe in yourself.
>No, it's a great way to show the employer that you buy into their stupid system of advancement.
If you don't buy into your employer's way of doing things, why do you expect him to buy into you? This is the Golden Rule: The employer has the gold, so he makes the rules. There is nothing in the Golden Rule about ``except when the rules are stupid''.
The problem is that the employer can't tell what sort of worker you are until after you've worked there for a while; not until after you've had enough time to screw things up badly for them. Having a degree/certification tells the employer that you've invested some effort in getting to this interview, and have something to loose if you screw things up.
Having a degree (not a certificate) also tells the employer that you are the sort of person who finds it tolerable to spend 4+ years working toward a difficult and uncertain goal. It tells the employer that you are NOT the sort of person who can't handle deadlines, can't follow instructions and can't deal with authority [1]. If you happened to learn something along the way, that's great, but that's not the primary concern for most jobs and most employers. As evidence of that, many history and english majors get jobs. None of them are likely to get many opportunities to put their knowledge to practical use on the job.
Some people find it very difficult to get a degree. It might be hard for them to stick to a program, it might be hard for them to learn, it might be that they simply can't sit in a class without getting the professor angry at them. They might find that school interferes with their life, or their drugs, or their business. This group is VERY unlikely to make good employees.
That's why I say that the degrees are a signaling mechanism: they show that you're not part of this group. Obviously it's not perfect, but the likelihood that someone with a college degree cannot learn, cannot think, or cannot complete a task is far lower than for the group without the degree.
How does all this apply to advancement, the case in which the employer already knows you?
First, advancement usually implies new responsibilities. Getting some training may or may not help you to handle those, but it will certainly show the employer that you're still willing and able to learn. You have to help the employer to believe in you. Getting the degree can be a great way to show the employer that you believe in yourself. Advancement usually means more hours on the job, too. If you aren't willing to put in the extra hours to get the advancement, why should the employer believe that you won't resent the extra hours on the job?
Second, an organization like SAIC is selling YOU. SAIC's customers don't know you, so SAIC needs to sell you the same way you'd have to sell yourself if you were going to be interviewed for the job. Again, the pieces of paper help signal to the customer that you aren't unsuitable.
[1] Those may present difficulties, but not insurmountable difficulties; otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to complete your degree.
Are ``Victory for free speech'' and ``perversion of justice'' mutually exclusive?
Homework: Explain how ``free speech'' must be defined to make the XOR appropriate.
Extra credit Define ``justice'' and ``perversion''.
For the folks who have already gotten the degree/student loans/pink slip, here is a rant I wrote about dealing with unemployment insurance in the US.
It still works, and its spreadsheet easily uses relative cell references. That nifty little feature seems to have gotten lost in MS's spreadsheets between then and now. Today, one of my cow orkers needed to do something in a spreadsheet ... ``relative references!'' I told him. Half an hour later, none of us could figure out how to do it in Excel.
Sometimes, the old stuff is good enough to warrent putting up with its limitations. In this case, maybe not. But MS's spreadsheets have gone way downhill since the early '80's.
It's only the rest of the world who uses metric, so who cares.
I can tell you WHY they use it: expressing their speeds in kilometers per hour makes it sound as if they're really going fast. It helps make up for their dinky cars with under nourished hamsters for engines. The metric system is really just a coping mechanism for an inferiority complex.
If we wanted to bring the rest of the workd back to the traditional system, all we'd have to do is start quoting our speeds in furlongs per fortnight. Since the American brown snail can travel at about 15 furlongs per fortnight, it's plain that our speed numbers would again exceed theirs, and their coping mechanism would be shattered. They would have to come flocking back to our familiar, traditional system.
It might seem a harsh thing, but it would be best for them. The additional arithmatic skill required by the traditional units is clearly the explanation for the United State's consistant superiority in all things mathematical over the benighted metric world.
>Not always. Depends on the particular patch being applied.
So far as I know, you never HAVE to reboot Linux after doing apt-get upgrade. You can even upgrade your kernel package without rebooting. To actually get the new kernel running, you must stop the old one and start the new ... that's a reboot. But you don't have to do that until you're ready. Patch today, reboot next week. Further, you may be able to go years at a time between necessary kernel patches.
So, if I understand correctly, Linux has one package, the kernel, which can't be replaced completely without a reboot. I suspect that Linus, et al, are working on that little problem.
Here at work, users' machines must be rebooted after the noon patch. This suggests that reboots are a lot harder to avoid after patching on Win2K. I think that Win2K will generally function after patching without the reboot, but I don't think that the new DLLs replace the old until the reboot. That's not nearly so easy to deal with as the Linux case.
Then there's the problem of ``what are the patches going to break?'' On Debian, that hasn't been a problem for me so far (knock on woody). I ran Potato for nearly two years, and have run Woody since midway through the freeze, and security updates haven't broken anything for me yet (knock knock...). I suspect that's because the stuff in the stable distribution is pretty well integrated, and pretty well understood by the guys doing and testing the patching.
Now, MS, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother disaster. I don't think that the Microserfs care about third-party software, and I'm not sure that they understand enough about it or their own nightmare to be able to avoid breaking stuff if they did care. We know that MS patches have a nasty reputation for buggering up other folks applications. Sometimes that breakage looks intentional. THAT's why patching is such a big problem in MS-land: you must test it to find out whether the cure is worse than the disease.
I suspose that if I had big bucks riding on a server, I'd stress-test Debian security patches, too. It would be mostly pro forma; I'd be surprised to find any show-stoppers.
We've been talking about MS versus Linux. Is there anyone reading who has experience with AIX, Solaris, HP-unix, Tru64, and such? Is it safe to patch there? Is it common for third-party apps to be broken by patches? Are there lots of bugs that require patching? Is it common for the vendor to get you patches fast enough?
apt-get upgrade
That's what I do, and I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Things get fixed, usually before I ever knew they were broken, deamons get restarted, nothing gets interrupted, life goes on ... If I took the trouble to make it a cron job, I'd never even know.
Is Mr Fiebig telling us that things don't go so smoothly if you use MS products? Or that MS can't keep up with a bunch of amatures? Do MS patches break non-MS apps? Could all this be why so many worms and viruses manage to spread across unpatched MS products? Could it be that MS patches are as bad as the bugs they fix? SAY IT AIN'T SO, CRAIG!
My current desktop is a 1GHz Athlon, with a Nvidia GX400 card, Redhat7.2 and the Nvidia drivers that came with that. I also use a P2 233MHz laptop, and a 486 laptop. On the desktop, I use KDE, on the newer laptop I use wmaker, and on the old laptop I use blackbox, both Debian Woody. Those choices are dictated more by taste and RAM than speed. I've never noticed a window drawing on any of them. The laptops are more or less slow, but that's limited RAM and bus speed.
I've no idea what I might be doing differently than you were.
One of these days, when I'm rich and famous, I'll try one of those snazzy new Macs. Until then, I'm much too cheap to buy prebuilt when I can put together a homebuilt. My next laptop will probably be a Mac, though, since there's no hope of home building there. I'd like to try OSX, and the Mac hardware isn't bad for the price, when you're talking prebuilt.
True. Are you're saying that Macs are price-competitive with home-built PC's? That would be wonderful news, if true ... I can build a PC significantly cheaper than I can buy a ready-made one of comparable quality.
I can build a PC with a fast FSB, CAS2 RAM, a decent graphics card (I like Matrox, for my purposes) and so on, for more than a Dell/Hpaq/eMachines POS, and less than a comparable x86 workstation. I can build a POS with scavenged parts for a bit less than the Dell/HPaq POS, but here I won't save enough to make wages.
If Mac is now competitive with the homebuilt instead of with the workstation, I'll quit building PCs and start buying Macs.
I've seen Mac fanciers say that when you compare like with like, Macs aren't more expensive. When I've investigated, I've always found that's roughly true, BUT: when I compare the price of ``exactly what I want'' with the price of the Mac, Apple is slightly more expensive than a prebuilt PC, and much more expensive than homemade.
The lesson here is that Apple doesn't try to compete with homemade, and Apple doesn't target machines at engineers and number-crunchers.
Linux is cheaper, but not if you want it for desktop use, in which case it just wont work well at all
Well, it's been working on MY desktop for about five years now, because it's always been better for MY use than the alternatives, such as Windows and Mac. I understand that's not the case for you. Your statement is a bit too broad to be true.
Remember the hard-sectored floppys? Vector machines had 8in hard-sectored floppys. When they had problems (when didn't they!), they'd use the floppy drive LED to blink Morse code for trouble-shooting.
Didn't Altos use hard-sectored 5 1/4 floppys? Or am I imagining that?
Are we off-topic yet?
I remember overclocking a Kaypro four by putting in a faster crystal and a 6MHz Z-80. It was so much faster than the IBM PC (a measly 4.77MHz clock) that the difference was astounding. SBASIC and Wordstar just flew!
By the time that the 486's rolled around, there just wasn't much novelty left in it for me.