Lets see here - he is already gifted in math and computers, just like most of us (are / were at that age). Lets assume the kid has just a touch of autism (which is good for computer guys) and already knows his way around a keyboard and a development environment.
Programming isn't about syntax, and it isn't about variable scope or recursion or data structures or loops or any of that crap - it is about expressing, simulating, or recreating real world ideas in a digital format. The biggest problem most programs have isn't that the programmer didn't use the correct syntax of some computer language - it is that he didn't understand the business problems or real world ideas that he was attempting to address digitally in the first place, or he wasn't able to bridge the gap between the real world and the digital recreation of those ideas.
He wants to program computer games, teach him project lifecycle development: 1. Imagine 2. Define 3. Architect 4. Develop 5. Deliver
The imagine phase doesn't happen on a computer, it happens in your brain. Add a box of crayons and some paper, have him sketch out a storyboard to help him envision the flow of the game. The difference between good usable software and crap that nobody likes happens right here.
The define phase doesn't happen in a programming language, it happens in English in Word or OO - or possibly even verbally, have him define it to you so you can help him shape it. Define all the different parts of the program, what all he is going to do. The difference between bloatware and good focused software happens right here.
Architect phase happens with Legos or Crayons - or a whiteboard with colored (easy erase) markers. Could be simple, but doesn't have to be. The difference between web sites that can / cannot handle a slashdotting happens here.
Develop - now he starts coding. Look at what he has designed, how he architected and THEN pick a platform, language. If he wants to code a stock market game then Logo isn't your language. If he wants to make a first person shooter then GW-Basic isn't going to cut it, and ANSI C probably isn't either. Tip here : pick a language that you know so when he needs help you can help him. If he got the first three right, this one pretty much has to succeed.
Deliver - could be deploying it to your ISP if it is a web based game, could be burning it to a CD if it isn't.
Software development doesn't start with 'what language do I want to use?' It starts with 'what EXACTLY do I want to accomplish?' If you fire up VB.NET in an IDE and plunk him down at the keyboard while his goal is still a simple 'make a game' then the poor kid is fuxored. That works if all you want to do is teach him syntax and bad programming habits. If you want him to be good - then show him how the development process starts not with his hands on a keyboard, but with a box of crayons or a whiteboard.
As silly as this sounds, first go read Snow Crash, then get some Star Wars Galaxies accounts. SWG lets you customize the avatar really quite well, it is amazing how many toons I have found walking around that look EXACTLY like me (no, not the Wookiees - the humans.) Once named the avatars own exclusive use of that name on that server so nobody can fake being them. You can own property in game, massive buildings that can have furniture such as chairs and tables, you have facial and body expressions available, expression different social posturing (happy, upset, confused, about 100 different ones), you can log the discussions, you can do private messaging, group messaging for sub-groups, private or group email. And the office building can be so far out away from everybody else you basically have the server to yourself. The client - server connection is secure and encrypted (if I recall correctly) specifically to prevent hackers from listening in (something Sony learned from EverQuest) and the buildings can be whitelisted to keep anybody except your group out.
Perfect solution. Also, if Bob from accounting gets on your nerves you can bust a cap in his ass.
Jimmy Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner - about the best self expression of patriotism I have ever heard.
It was followed shortly thereafter by Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.
Haven't used P2P in about 3 years, got tired of watching my cablemodem crawl along at 3kbps to spend 20 minutes to download a song was a horrible rip with lots of background noise and crap encoding that destroyed the upper range in the name of compression.
I am just looking at the complexity of the trip, and the distance and other hurdles they covered for the time.
It was 1620 if I recall correctly that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. I'm not 100% sure the wheel had even been invented in 1620.
Ok that was a joke, but here are some things that had not been invented yet: Medicine - it wasn't documented that blood circulates in the body until 8 years later. The science of fluid pressure (Pascal, 1652) Vacuum pump - Guericke, 1654 Newton's physics - 1680's Hot air balloon - 1783 Steam engine. Not for another hundred years. Any mechanical way of doing ANYTHING - long time.
They had sticks, stones, handmade cloth and rope, fire, crude metal things they brought with them, and whatever food they could find or kill. Yes, corn and squash grew nicely, but they would have starved to death before the first harvest if they hadn't brought food with them.
Granted, that whole 'breathable air' and 'drinkable water' things were a massive bonus that the Mars settlers won't have - but given the things we have that they didn't I would say they are going to have way better odds now than back then.
And I agree with you about it being totally stupid - there are massive underutilized expanses of land just waiting for the Americans to roll into with their mechanized divisions of M1A1 tanks and declare 'this is exactly the sort of Lebensraum that we been lookin for!' But forget Antarctica - too damn cold. Just assimilate the Middle East, I mean we already have a foothold, 10% of the world's oil reserves are in Iraq. 90% to go and we are home free. Bah, Bush hasn't got the balls to go out and conquer the world. Is there anybody I haven't offended yet in this paragraph:-)
Actually one way tickets were how America was founded like 250 years ago. Probably took as long for those ships to get here from England as it is going to take a manned space ship to get to Mars, so...
Looks like a good plan, at least as good as the plan to colonize America in the early to mid 1600s - 1700s. Then again, didn't the first few groups of settlers die? I might go, but not on the first go-around.
It was a long time ago, like early 90's.. I think they were just keeping us busy and entertained while they were inventing all those things like file allocation tables and protocol stacks.
Manned space flight (ie, the government spending MAD DOLLARS) is not going to save the economy if the government doesn't do something about outsourcing the jobs. Not just the fancy new space jobs, ALL JOBS.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030316 S0 003 In New Mexico, the unemployment insurance department recently paid (some offshore (India) outsourcing company) $6 million for an online unemployment-claims system. How ironic is that, spending taxpayer money on a system to handle the growing number of unemployed people, but sending all that money overseas and not using it to employ Americans. That's just ignorant.
There is one way to "save the economy" : bring back the jobs. Simple as that. Make off-shoring and outsourcing economically unviable (tax the living hell out of it, for example) or simply make it illegal - or quite simply America is going to be totally and utterly fscked.
Black (Cowboy) Boots made of Ostrich Skin. The most comfortable shoes I have ever worn, from the minute I put them on. The ostrich skin is one of the strongest that boots can be made of (second only to elephant, and sharkskin, IIRC) and at the same time softest of all boot materials (envision the softness and flexibility that goes into a good pair of car-racing gloves) making an unbeatable combination for long term footwear. Black goes with just about anything, and they are fairly attractive. Well lets just say that they are at least as attractive as anything the average geek wears.
They all come with 1" to 1.5" heels, and everybody welcomes an extra inch to inch and a half.
Very very comfy, about like moccasins with more support and pretty much socially accepted everywhere off the reservation (unlike moccasins.) Hold up for years with little maintenance. Look fairly respectable - and the inch and a half height boost is nice.
Get a good pair (Dan Post or Lucchese) for between $250 and $500, will last you for years.
As for the airport, take em off, walk through, put em on - but in the airport and the entire flight they are going to be comfortable as you can possibly imagine. Given that most airports have people taking off sneakers, at least you don't have to jack with shoelaces to get them on and off.
I run RH9 in a VMware guest machine (VMware Workstation 4) - I love it.
Notes: I got the GL drivers in RH8 working fine under VMware but when I installed RH9 something ended up broken and they don't work. I assume responsibility for it not working, as I probably screwed something up. VMware runs better on machines with LOTS of RAM. If you are going to use Gnome in RH9, count on giving the VM 256M plus 256M for your host OS - 512M is a bare minimum for reasonable performance. I recommend at least a Gig, prefer 1.5G to 2G so I can run multiple virtual machines at the same time. Follow the detailed instructions in VMware for installing Linux - there are a few gotchas. Do it according to the dox, or do it more than once trying to get it right. Rolling out new machines is about as easy as copying 8 files to the new machines (over the network, DVD, I really don't care how you get them onto the new machine) and starting the new VM full screen. Installing VMware is a snap too, takes about a minute or two.
I did the math. The Internet2 discussed above (record holder) moved 1.1 terabytes across 7,000 meters in less than 30 minutes. This translates to roughly 5.44 gigabits / second sustained across a distance of 7,000m.
In relation to the 20gigabit meters / second you describe, these guys pumped: 38,080,000 gigabit meters / second. 38,080 terabit meters / second. 38 petabit meters / second.
That is very cool, but what the article doesn't mention is that the files they used were all MP3's and now the RIAA is after them for $647 quadrillion dollars in damages.
They are also considering distance. 20Gb/s x 1 meter = 20Gigabit meters per second. Double the distance to two meters and you have 40Gigabit meters per second.
-IN fact, there's at least one OpenSource tool (mental blank, forgot the name) which will happily transparently induce latency and random packet loss to a specified %...
If only they made computers that were smaller, lighter, easier for a single person to carry. Maybe a slightly more expensive version of the computers we currently use, with a built in keyboard and a flip-up lid with a screen on it.
Naw, that would never work.
-G
As for the discussion, I was looking at a way to get about 6 CDs worth of data to a friend just this week. I considered how long it would take to upload 3G at about 118K/s sustained (cablemodem is fast downstream, but throttled pretty bad upstream at 128K)... 10 hours plus if everything went ok the first run. I ended up just burning him copies and UPS'ing them. It wasn't faster to UPS them, but it was pretty dang close.
Replace '6 CD's' with '10 DVD's' and all of a sudden even UPS ground is faster than the upstream connection on my cablemodem.. 4.6 Days if everything went 100% smoothly with no disconnects or slowdowns during transmission.
Change '10 DVD's' to two 160G IDE drives and it would probably be faster for me to drive them cross country myself.
Simple : most computers only come with two SATA ports on the motherboard and nobody wants to waste one of them on a CD-ROM, particularly if it means now they can't do RAID-0 using SATA drives for insanely fast throughput.
No. Read it again in context. It means Pichinson and friends come in as the consultants from the movie Office Space (Bob and Bob) and tell the managers to fire people.
Those people go freaky from time to time and walk back into their office with guns, take hostages and generally raise a ruckus because white people don't handle being fired out of the blue very well, particularly if they have been working hard and making sacrifices to help the company survive.
That is when hostage negotiation skills come in handy.
Outlook Express - Right click on the incoming email, click Properties. Select the Details tab. Click the Message Source button. Brings up the entire email as a text file that you can read, and it effectively does it without actually touching the email, flagging it as read, or processing any of the embedded code.
Any email I get that is obvious spam gets deleted unread. Any email I get that is questionable, I do this to and generally delete it after seeing what is in the Message Source.
Crap you are right - just by turning on HT on the same box he saw a 65% boost in performance.
I think it was a case of -wanting- to see a specific number and juggling things in his head until he got the number he wanted. Intel touts the 30% range and if he initially got the 65% number he probably discarded it and kept juggling the books to get the number in the 30's that he wanted.
As someone that has a P4 2.4 (not HT) box sitting right next to a P4 2.4 (HT) box I will assure you that in real life you are not going to see a 65% sustained boost in performance in day to day use. Not 30% sustained boost either, unless you are only running apps that are heavily optimized and multithreaded.
$80 difference on a $700 machine (assumes a usable amount of RAM, a real video card, a usable performance hard drive, and a legit copy of XP Pro (XP Pro gives you the best performance on the SMT chips, I have seen roughly 5%-10% gains)) means that for every 8 P4 2.6GHz HT machines you were going to buy, you can buy 9 Celeron 2.6GHz machines. Even if you go display-less (no monitors) and use a free OS (Linux or recycled Win2000Pro CDs) you are talking $500 absolute minimum, you are talking 7 Celeron boxes for the same price as 6 P4 boxes. I don't think my honey is going to fall for the 'but I need another 7 computers' line again this year.
At $80 difference, I don't see the price difference being worth it. Particularly given a two year lifespan wherein apps will be developed to get that 30% performance boost we see in a few of the charts (ie, the programs that are multithreaded, and SMT friendly.)
Then again if we applied the $80 towards another half gig of memory, tested same price boxes but the Celeron had another 512M of RAM... I can see the Celeron simply dominating the P4.
How about two people in moderate shape being able to push wood through a single wood chipper than a single person who is in great shape (assuming the wood is piled up 18 feet away = cache miss).
The single wood chipper being analogous to the actual processing part of the core, is only going to be able to shred so much wood - but if two people fetching wood from the woodpile can keep it running at 100% capacity they will shred more wood than a single guy running back and forth to the wood pile by himself.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree. I have written some pretty demented, borderline evil code in Pascal.
All Pascal demands is that you define things before you use them, you end each statement in a semicolon, and that the program have a Begin and an End.
Lets see here - he is already gifted in math and computers, just like most of us (are / were at that age). Lets assume the kid has just a touch of autism (which is good for computer guys) and already knows his way around a keyboard and a development environment.
:
Programming isn't about syntax, and it isn't about variable scope or recursion or data structures or loops or any of that crap - it is about expressing, simulating, or recreating real world ideas in a digital format. The biggest problem most programs have isn't that the programmer didn't use the correct syntax of some computer language - it is that he didn't understand the business problems or real world ideas that he was attempting to address digitally in the first place, or he wasn't able to bridge the gap between the real world and the digital recreation of those ideas.
He wants to program computer games, teach him project lifecycle development
1. Imagine
2. Define
3. Architect
4. Develop
5. Deliver
The imagine phase doesn't happen on a computer, it happens in your brain. Add a box of crayons and some paper, have him sketch out a storyboard to help him envision the flow of the game. The difference between good usable software and crap that nobody likes happens right here.
The define phase doesn't happen in a programming language, it happens in English in Word or OO - or possibly even verbally, have him define it to you so you can help him shape it. Define all the different parts of the program, what all he is going to do. The difference between bloatware and good focused software happens right here.
Architect phase happens with Legos or Crayons - or a whiteboard with colored (easy erase) markers. Could be simple, but doesn't have to be. The difference between web sites that can / cannot handle a slashdotting happens here.
Develop - now he starts coding. Look at what he has designed, how he architected and THEN pick a platform, language. If he wants to code a stock market game then Logo isn't your language. If he wants to make a first person shooter then GW-Basic isn't going to cut it, and ANSI C probably isn't either. Tip here : pick a language that you know so when he needs help you can help him. If he got the first three right, this one pretty much has to succeed.
Deliver - could be deploying it to your ISP if it is a web based game, could be burning it to a CD if it isn't.
Software development doesn't start with 'what language do I want to use?' It starts with 'what EXACTLY do I want to accomplish?' If you fire up VB.NET in an IDE and plunk him down at the keyboard while his goal is still a simple 'make a game' then the poor kid is fuxored. That works if all you want to do is teach him syntax and bad programming habits. If you want him to be good - then show him how the development process starts not with his hands on a keyboard, but with a box of crayons or a whiteboard.
Glonoinha's Rule #1 of production systen hardware : if it works, don't fsck with it.
As silly as this sounds, first go read Snow Crash, then get some Star Wars Galaxies accounts. SWG lets you customize the avatar really quite well, it is amazing how many toons I have found walking around that look EXACTLY like me (no, not the Wookiees - the humans.) Once named the avatars own exclusive use of that name on that server so nobody can fake being them. You can own property in game, massive buildings that can have furniture such as chairs and tables, you have facial and body expressions available, expression different social posturing (happy, upset, confused, about 100 different ones), you can log the discussions, you can do private messaging, group messaging for sub-groups, private or group email. And the office building can be so far out away from everybody else you basically have the server to yourself. The client - server connection is secure and encrypted (if I recall correctly) specifically to prevent hackers from listening in (something Sony learned from EverQuest) and the buildings can be whitelisted to keep anybody except your group out.
Perfect solution. Also, if Bob from accounting gets on your nerves you can bust a cap in his ass.
Jimmy Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner - about the best self expression of patriotism I have ever heard.
It was followed shortly thereafter by Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.
Haven't used P2P in about 3 years, got tired of watching my cablemodem crawl along at 3kbps to spend 20 minutes to download a song was a horrible rip with lots of background noise and crap encoding that destroyed the upper range in the name of compression.
I am just looking at the complexity of the trip, and the distance and other hurdles they covered for the time.
:
:-)
It was 1620 if I recall correctly that the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. I'm not 100% sure the wheel had even been invented in 1620.
Ok that was a joke, but here are some things that had not been invented yet
Medicine - it wasn't documented that blood circulates in the body until 8 years later.
The science of fluid pressure (Pascal, 1652)
Vacuum pump - Guericke, 1654
Newton's physics - 1680's
Hot air balloon - 1783
Steam engine. Not for another hundred years.
Any mechanical way of doing ANYTHING - long time.
They had sticks, stones, handmade cloth and rope, fire, crude metal things they brought with them, and whatever food they could find or kill. Yes, corn and squash grew nicely, but they would have starved to death before the first harvest if they hadn't brought food with them.
Granted, that whole 'breathable air' and 'drinkable water' things were a massive bonus that the Mars settlers won't have - but given the things we have that they didn't I would say they are going to have way better odds now than back then.
And I agree with you about it being totally stupid - there are massive underutilized expanses of land just waiting for the Americans to roll into with their mechanized divisions of M1A1 tanks and declare 'this is exactly the sort of Lebensraum that we been lookin for!' But forget Antarctica - too damn cold. Just assimilate the Middle East, I mean we already have a foothold, 10% of the world's oil reserves are in Iraq. 90% to go and we are home free. Bah, Bush hasn't got the balls to go out and conquer the world. Is there anybody I haven't offended yet in this paragraph
Actually one way tickets were how America was founded like 250 years ago. Probably took as long for those ships to get here from England as it is going to take a manned space ship to get to Mars, so ...
Looks like a good plan, at least as good as the plan to colonize America in the early to mid 1600s - 1700s. Then again, didn't the first few groups of settlers die? I might go, but not on the first go-around.
It was a long time ago, like early 90's .. I think they were just keeping us busy and entertained while they were inventing all those things like file allocation tables and protocol stacks.
Bonus points for knowing the Netware CNE first exam question :
CGA - Color Graphics Adapter
EGA - Enhanced Graphics Adapter
VGA - Video Graphics ARRAY
Man they caught a bunch of people on that one. Luckily the voices in my head knew the answer.
All the computer guys that have been around long enough to produce commercial release stuff grew up in a world of eight character filenames.
Which is a better product name:
XBox
Incred~1
The second one is 'Incredible Game Box' but old school computer guys automagically trunc that to Incred~1.
Manned space flight (ie, the government spending MAD DOLLARS) is not going to save the economy if the government doesn't do something about outsourcing the jobs. Not just the fancy new space jobs, ALL JOBS.
6 S0 003
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK2003031
In New Mexico, the unemployment insurance department recently paid (some offshore (India) outsourcing company) $6 million for an online unemployment-claims system. How ironic is that, spending taxpayer money on a system to handle the growing number of unemployed people, but sending all that money overseas and not using it to employ Americans. That's just ignorant.
There is one way to "save the economy" : bring back the jobs. Simple as that. Make off-shoring and outsourcing economically unviable (tax the living hell out of it, for example) or simply make it illegal - or quite simply America is going to be totally and utterly fscked.
Black (Cowboy) Boots made of Ostrich Skin. The most comfortable shoes I have ever worn, from the minute I put them on. The ostrich skin is one of the strongest that boots can be made of (second only to elephant, and sharkskin, IIRC) and at the same time softest of all boot materials (envision the softness and flexibility that goes into a good pair of car-racing gloves) making an unbeatable combination for long term footwear. Black goes with just about anything, and they are fairly attractive. Well lets just say that they are at least as attractive as anything the average geek wears.
They all come with 1" to 1.5" heels, and everybody welcomes an extra inch to inch and a half.
Very very comfy, about like moccasins with more support and pretty much socially accepted everywhere off the reservation (unlike moccasins.) Hold up for years with little maintenance. Look fairly respectable - and the inch and a half height boost is nice.
Get a good pair (Dan Post or Lucchese) for between $250 and $500, will last you for years.
As for the airport, take em off, walk through, put em on - but in the airport and the entire flight they are going to be comfortable as you can possibly imagine. Given that most airports have people taking off sneakers, at least you don't have to jack with shoelaces to get them on and off.
-3. anything that isn't 90 to 120fps just isn't worth playing IMHO
You are kidding, right?
Try Star Wars Galaxies.
I run RH9 in a VMware guest machine (VMware Workstation 4) - I love it.
:
Notes
I got the GL drivers in RH8 working fine under VMware but when I installed RH9 something ended up broken and they don't work. I assume responsibility for it not working, as I probably screwed something up.
VMware runs better on machines with LOTS of RAM. If you are going to use Gnome in RH9, count on giving the VM 256M plus 256M for your host OS - 512M is a bare minimum for reasonable performance. I recommend at least a Gig, prefer 1.5G to 2G so I can run multiple virtual machines at the same time.
Follow the detailed instructions in VMware for installing Linux - there are a few gotchas. Do it according to the dox, or do it more than once trying to get it right.
Rolling out new machines is about as easy as copying 8 files to the new machines (over the network, DVD, I really don't care how you get them onto the new machine) and starting the new VM full screen. Installing VMware is a snap too, takes about a minute or two.
Whoops.
:
I did the math. The Internet2 discussed above (record holder) moved 1.1 terabytes across 7,000 meters in less than 30 minutes. This translates to roughly 5.44 gigabits / second sustained across a distance of 7,000m.
In relation to the 20gigabit meters / second you describe, these guys pumped
38,080,000 gigabit meters / second.
38,080 terabit meters / second.
38 petabit meters / second.
That is very cool, but what the article doesn't mention is that the files they used were all MP3's and now the RIAA is after them for $647 quadrillion dollars in damages.
They are also considering distance.
20Gb/s x 1 meter = 20Gigabit meters per second.
Double the distance to two meters and you have 40Gigabit meters per second.
-IN fact, there's at least one OpenSource tool (mental blank, forgot the name) which will happily transparently induce latency and random packet loss to a specified % ...
Sounds like my ISP.
If only they made computers that were smaller, lighter, easier for a single person to carry. Maybe a slightly more expensive version of the computers we currently use, with a built in keyboard and a flip-up lid with a screen on it.
... 10 hours plus if everything went ok the first run. I ended up just burning him copies and UPS'ing them. It wasn't faster to UPS them, but it was pretty dang close.
.. 4.6 Days if everything went 100% smoothly with no disconnects or slowdowns during transmission.
Naw, that would never work.
-G
As for the discussion, I was looking at a way to get about 6 CDs worth of data to a friend just this week. I considered how long it would take to upload 3G at about 118K/s sustained (cablemodem is fast downstream, but throttled pretty bad upstream at 128K)
Replace '6 CD's' with '10 DVD's' and all of a sudden even UPS ground is faster than the upstream connection on my cablemodem
Change '10 DVD's' to two 160G IDE drives and it would probably be faster for me to drive them cross country myself.
Simple : most computers only come with two SATA ports on the motherboard and nobody wants to waste one of them on a CD-ROM, particularly if it means now they can't do RAID-0 using SATA drives for insanely fast throughput.
No. Read it again in context. It means Pichinson and friends come in as the consultants from the movie Office Space (Bob and Bob) and tell the managers to fire people.
Those people go freaky from time to time and walk back into their office with guns, take hostages and generally raise a ruckus because white people don't handle being fired out of the blue very well, particularly if they have been working hard and making sacrifices to help the company survive.
That is when hostage negotiation skills come in handy.
Outlook Express - Right click on the incoming email, click Properties. Select the Details tab. Click the Message Source button. Brings up the entire email as a text file that you can read, and it effectively does it without actually touching the email, flagging it as read, or processing any of the embedded code.
Any email I get that is obvious spam gets deleted unread. Any email I get that is questionable, I do this to and generally delete it after seeing what is in the Message Source.
Crap you are right - just by turning on HT on the same box he saw a 65% boost in performance.
I think it was a case of -wanting- to see a specific number and juggling things in his head until he got the number he wanted. Intel touts the 30% range and if he initially got the 65% number he probably discarded it and kept juggling the books to get the number in the 30's that he wanted.
As someone that has a P4 2.4 (not HT) box sitting right next to a P4 2.4 (HT) box I will assure you that in real life you are not going to see a 65% sustained boost in performance in day to day use. Not 30% sustained boost either, unless you are only running apps that are heavily optimized and multithreaded.
$80 difference on a $700 machine (assumes a usable amount of RAM, a real video card, a usable performance hard drive, and a legit copy of XP Pro (XP Pro gives you the best performance on the SMT chips, I have seen roughly 5%-10% gains)) means that for every 8 P4 2.6GHz HT machines you were going to buy, you can buy 9 Celeron 2.6GHz machines. Even if you go display-less (no monitors) and use a free OS (Linux or recycled Win2000Pro CDs) you are talking $500 absolute minimum, you are talking 7 Celeron boxes for the same price as 6 P4 boxes. I don't think my honey is going to fall for the 'but I need another 7 computers' line again this year.
... I can see the Celeron simply dominating the P4.
At $80 difference, I don't see the price difference being worth it. Particularly given a two year lifespan wherein apps will be developed to get that 30% performance boost we see in a few of the charts (ie, the programs that are multithreaded, and SMT friendly.)
Then again if we applied the $80 towards another half gig of memory, tested same price boxes but the Celeron had another 512M of RAM
How about two people in moderate shape being able to push wood through a single wood chipper than a single person who is in great shape (assuming the wood is piled up 18 feet away = cache miss).
The single wood chipper being analogous to the actual processing part of the core, is only going to be able to shred so much wood - but if two people fetching wood from the woodpile can keep it running at 100% capacity they will shred more wood than a single guy running back and forth to the wood pile by himself.