That way lies making a bad interface nevertheless.
See for example ESR's relatively recent rant (it was on the Slashdot front page too) about his frustrating efforts to configure CUPS on a simple home network. I dunno if you'd consider ESR a retard, but I'd say he's not quite clueless about Unix. Or at least way above the level of an average home user. Yet it took him... what? Several hours?
That was the perfect example of the kind of GUI made not to actually help the user, but simply based on "gah, we must throw together whatever crap GUI with buttons, because retards want that." It's a GUI, but it misses the mark of being easy to use by a mile nevertheless.
Why? Because those people didn't even try to understand the users and to make a program for the _users_.
Users aren't retards. They just don't have the same needs you have. Most of the time that's what the "users are retards" whine means: you haven't even tried to understand what they need, but instead are trying to boss them into accepting whatever _you_ feel like coding. The rest of the time it means "they're retards because they didn't guess which obscure directory my configs are in, or which obscure sequence of programs and options to pipe together to make my crap work."
The thing is, they're paid to do _their_ own job, not to be an IT expert. If someone is, say, a marketting expert, their real job is to market a product, _not_ to learn the Unix CLI and whatever other obscure interface. If they're an architect, again, their job is to design a house, not to wrestle with a piss-poor program interface. Etc.
Each minute they spend wrestling with a bad interface (e.g., searching through a piss-poorly designed menu), adds up slowly to mean needlessly wasted hours when they're _not_ doing their job. And it's an hour that costs their employer money.
A good program at least tries to minimize that. It was written by people who tried to understand _what_ the user does, _how_ he/she does it, what existing skills the user has that can be reused, etc. A bad program, well, you can bet it was written by someone who called the users "retards".
The point isn't as much the degree. I think college didn't teach me too much that I didn't already knew, for example.
The problems are (A) if you love programming, and (B) if you have the mental skills for it. At all. Yes, I've been through the "bah, programming is easy, everyone could do it if they wanted to" phase myself. Then you start to realize that things that are trivial and obvious to you, just aren't so for 90% of the rest of the people.
For example, I've actually sat and watched someone painfully try every single of "*", "&" and nothing, on every single variable on a C program, until it stopped crashing. He just could never wrap his mind around the concept of a "pointer". Some 10 years later, AFAIK he _still_ can't. Made me realize that maybe it's not that trivial a concept as I assumed.
And that's just one example. People just aren't built to, basically, think like a machine. They're hampered by natural language fuzziness, and by the human-to-human expectation that the other gets the basic idea and can work out the details for himself.
And it only becomes worse when you deal with people who don't even intend to learn. They're in it just because they "deserve" to be paid a ton of money. And they're not gonna "waste" their time on such boring stuff as actually learning an algorithm, or even the basics of the language they're paid to program in.
I've dealt with too many people whose _only_ interest is hanging around bored until the next paycheck, and their _only_ skill is marketting themselves to a clueless PHB. They can't program worth shit, and they don't even intend to learn more.
And why would they? They get paid anyway. And in the unlikely case that the boss gets a clue and fires them, they'll just move on to another company to scam. There's one sucker born every minute, after all. Not hard to find another sucker who'll swallow a faked resume. Beats actually working and learning.
And, yes, there are a _lot_ of clueless ex-burger-flippers who did just that. Moved into programming not even "just for the money", but "for _undeserved_ money."
No, I'm not implying that poisoning a river is the _goal_. Of course, money at all cost is the real goal.
I do however claim that _some_ people, even if they _knew_ they're poisoning others, they'd still just not care at all. If you gave them a choice explicitly along the lines of "do we do X, and gain nothing, or do Y and gain 10,000$ at the expense of killing 100 people", they'd choose Y every single time.
Not because they like killing people, of course. Because, worse yet, they just don't care. The only factor in choice Y they see is "and gain 10,000$".
And indeed, they are not comic-book super-villains. In comics, evil is a purpose in and by itself. Super-villains do evil stuff for no other reason than because they enjoy doing it.
Real life "evil" is more like the corporate kind.
It's Al Capone who killed people just for money and power. No hard feelings, nothing personal, just business. I want the extortion money from your half of town too.
It's the Third Reich planning in cold blood to exterminate every single citizen of Poland until the 70's to make room for German colonists. Nothing personal mate, we just want your land. And, totally incidentally, this means you all must go to the gas chambers. It's result, not motive, honestly.
It's the 19'th century factory owners sending armed men to _shoot_ workers on strike. And also those men who took arms and shot starving workers, just for money. Of course, neither was a super-villain, and neither did it just because they liked killing people. Nothing personal, really, just business. Awfully sorry that we must do something as messy as shooting you, really. Will just cost us even more to whitewash those blood stained walls again, you know. But between your life and a few thousands dollars profit, the few thousand dollars win every time.
In a sense, the real life "evil" is not the kind that hates all humanity and wants to cause pain, for pain sake. That makes for at most an idiot going psycho, gunning down 2-3 people, and then getting gunned down himself by SWAT. Not much of a super-villain.
The real life "evil" is the kind that doesn't care. If someone dies or suffers, it's merely result, not motive, but still no reason to stop making money that way.
Some people, simply put, don't give a rat's ass about "correct" or about damage done. They only care about making money. Period.
If it weren't explicitly illegal, they'd even poison a town's water supply just for some money. Not an exaggeration: companies dumped toxic stuff into rivers right until the law forced them to stop. Or into the air. And even then, every time someone told them to use filters, there was endless moaning and bitching and lobbying about it.
Spam, tele-marketting, link-spam, spyware, etc, are just a symptom of the same thing: if it makes money and it's not illegal, hell yeah. Let's pollute and destroy another resource.
There was an interview with a link-spammer on The Register this week. Dunno, I found it surrealistic how the guy basically had _zero_ morals. Not even an "eh, it's wrong, but I need the money" kinda attitude. Nope. The general tone all over was along the lines of "who the damn has time to care about collateral damage? It makes money and it's not illegal. Period. If you have a problem with it, tough shit. Sucks to be you."
Basically it's the same with spyware. These people don't care, that's all. As long as it makes them a buck and isn't explicitly illegal, they'll clog your computer without thinking twice. If it was possible and made them a buck, they'd even make that computer explode without thinking twice.
I didn't say the Athlon 64 is 99% faster. I said that probably 99% _of_ the performance gain _between_ 32 bit programs and 64 bit programs, on an A64, is because of the extra registers. And yes, the performance difference between 32 bit and 64 bit is there, and proven by a ton of benchmarks already.
So I'll say the opposite: I keep hearing the "old, tired rant" that performance doesn't matter, architecture doesn't matter, even developper or code quality doesn't matter. Let's just make a turd and let the compiler handle it.
Nope, sorry. Just isn't true. The performance difference in the A64's case _is_ there. That's what 64 bit vs 32 bit benchmarks measure there: the speed with and without the extra registers.
You may notice how for any other CPU, 64 bit mode is actually _slower_. E.g., the UltraSparc comes to mind. In case you wondered why most applications on a shiny new UltraSparc machine are still 32 bit. On it a 32 bit program actually runs measurably faster than the same program compiled as a 64 bit program.
Because when you have the exact same instructions, and the exact same number of the registers, transferring more data slows you down.
But not the A64. There 64 bit mode is actually faster. What's different? Twice the registers, that's what's different.
Compilers have come a long way, yes. They can do much better with a bad ISA than 10 years ago, yes. Indeed. And you can even take the tired old argument that "bah, for Word and Internet explorer they don't need a faster CPU anyway."
But completely polish a turd into a gold nugget, no, they can't. They can bring it sorta close enough, but no more.
It's funny, really, seeing the first amendment be invoke as some sacred right to troll a privately own bulletin board, or cheat in an online game (apparently duplicating quest items is a form of speech, don't you know), or whatever. And the ones who scream the loudest are the ones who have no fscking clue at all what that ammendment says.
In fact, I'll go one step forward and say: they seem to interpret it as actually meaning anyone _but_ the government. You ban them off a game for cheating, and they'll scream for months about how you violated their first ammendment righst. But if the government decides that it's unpatriotic to say this or that, or imprisons someone for saying non-patriotic things... hey, that's ok. It's the government, after all. They're allowed to do that, right?
Admittedly, I have no clue about the ARM, so I can't really comment there. Still, I'm _guessing_ it's not just a 32 bit version of the 6502, nor opcode compatible. Which is basically what the parent poster was asking for: a machine which can still run Apple ][ programs and take Apple ][ hardware. There's IMHO a bit of a difference between just design similarities, and being hampered by literal 100% compatibility to an Apple ][.
Well, in a way, you _do_ get the most important part of the motherboard directly on the Athlon 64.
And historically, the biggest reason for performance differences and various other issues on motherboards, has been the memory controller. That's for example what used to make Intel's chipsets rock, and Via's suck, or why the NForce 2 quickly became _the_ choice for Athlon XP chipsets.
Now that AMD has moved that on the CPU itself, you'll notice that in all benchmarks all motherboards perform the same. (1-2% differences are within the normal margin of error. Even running the same benchmark on the same computer again will occasionally deviate more than that.)
Sure, some might have some gizmo proprietary bus for the south bridge, or a different brand of software RAID drivers, or whatever. But in the end none of those make a real difference.
I.e., (A) AMD doesn't really need to get into that market any more, and (B) it makes no economic sense for them to. When they can get more money for the lowest end Sempron than a whole motherboard costs (bearing in mind that the north- and south-bridge are only a fraction of that cost), it makes no sense for them to use their limited fab space on making north- and south-bridges.
Or to put it otherwise, Athlon 64 market has just become a commodity market. It's several perfectly interchangeable chips, none of them really better than the competitors' offering. Which drives prices down. As they say, "the way to make a small fortune in the commodities market, is to start with a large fortune." There is no reason for AMD to compete in that market.
One of the major peeves I have with the x86 architecture is that the whole instruction set is a kludge. And seein' as I _am_ otherwise a PC fan and have some years of x86 assembly programming experience, I think I can say that as a fact, not trolling.
We've been stuck with, what, 8 general purpose registers? And for what? Just so someone could theoretically still run an ancient 8086 piece of software on it. Except it still won't actually run any software from that era, except in an emulator like DosBox, because of other factors.
And in turn the 8086 was hardly more than a 16 bit hack of the 8080 architecture.
And for an awfully long time, those 8 weren't even that general purpose. E.g., "LOOP" (decrement a counter, jump back to the beginning of the loop if not zero) would _only_ work on CX. E.g., integer multiplication or division again, were hard wired to use only AX and DX. Etc.
And this isn't just about assembly programming. Yeah, you could spend days rewriting stuff to get juuust the right combination of registers for it to work right. It also hurt compiler generated code, and even today it still does. Probably 99% of the speed advantage an Athlon 64 gets in 64 bit mode comes just from AMD's _finally_ breaking byte code compatibility in that mode, to provide twice the number of general purpose registers.
Now kindly get your old Apple II manuals and look at the 6502's instruction set. Egad. Just the thought of giving that one 32 bit registers and calling it a day, is not a pleasant thought.
No, IMHO Apple did the right thing there. They could have emulated the 6502, though, like they did with the 68000 when they moved to PowerPC.
Sorry if it wasn't clear what I meant. I didn't say _you_ were a fanboy for that statement. The "fanboyism" wisecrack was about the deluge of posts and articles along the lines of "look about what PC you could get for that money/size/whatever, but misses the mark by a mile in every other aspect." I.e., about the article itself, not about your post.
Can a better PC be built in that space? Damn right. Been saying that before myself. And I'd love to have one with, say, a 2GHz Centrino. (A Via doesn't really cut it, and a P4 is just way too hot for that confined space without being very noisy.) But it doesn't exist yet, and this one isn't it. That's all I'm saying.
It will most likely take a mobo designed from the scratch for it. Could be one from Asus or MSI or whatever, yes. Or DFI and AOpen, since they already make Centrino desktop motherboards. Or Shuttle, since they already are doing a great SFF business. But it has yet to be designed.
And articles like the one we're talking about are IMHO just misguided PC fanboyism. They miss the mark by a mile, and in fact if anything they just manage to make the Mac Mini look better.
It's not hard to make a PC that's better than the Mac Mini in one of the aspects: speed, size, cost or noise. Hitting all 4 marks is, however, the real challenge. And that's where all these "look what better PC you could get instead" fail miserably.
And to explain it better, the part I call fanboyism is the underlying assumption that even if it missed 3 out of 4 goals by a mile, it's still better for everyone because it's a PC. Now for some tasks, like games, ok, a PC is the only real choice. But assuming that across the board, for _anyone_ and for _any_ task, a slower bigger _and_ noisier machine _must_ be better by definition anyway, just because it's a PC... strikes me as a little fanboyish.
Au contraire, I wish more did the full comparison
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I don't see anything wrong as such with doing a price/something comparison, I just wish people did the _full_ comparison. And not just pick the pieces which fit, and quietly hope everyone doesn't notice the missing half.
The thing is, the Mac Mini niche has _four_ things going for it:
1. Speed
2. Price
3. Size
4. Noise
(A die-hard Apple fan will probably also add "5. Usability". But I'm not trying to get into that flame war. Let's assume that both are exactly as usable. Bear with me.)
No, the Mac Mini is _not_ the absolute winner in either of the 4 categories (well, maybe except size). But the combination of the four is where it's really at. The fact is, there are _four_ pieces to that puzzle, not two, not three.
That's what all these "but my PC is better" posts miss. They have some contender that is better in one aspect, maybe even two, but then don't come even close in the other two.
E.g.:
- yes, one can get a cheaper mid-tower PC, and it may even be _slightly_ faster. (But not by much if it's still cheaper after you factor in the Windows license too.) But it misses the other two criteria by a mile.
- yes, one can get a smaller PC, for example the OQO. Except it's slower and it costs 2000$ with less RAM and less HDD. Oops, it missed the speed and cost points, didn't it?
- yes, one can get a more silent PC, and a faster one at that. E.g., a Hush PC (I think they reviewed them on Tom's Hardware). Perfectly silent, since it uses the case itself as a passive heatsink. Except it's bigger _and_ again, costs over 2000$.
Etc.
So I'm all for doing such comparisons, if they actually considered _all_ the four factors. It would have saved us all from the deluge of "but my big tower is faster" posts that miss the whole point.
While he didn't have a custom mobo made to order, he did get Via to send him a prototype mobo, in a form factor not yet released. Sorry, I'm not sure how that counts as "off the shelf components", seein' as you can't actually find it on the shelf of _any_ shop.
Also, as was said before, I'm not sure that thing even actually runs. Seems more like _only_ an exercise in cramming that parts together in that space. (In which case, it's as much a computer as the cardboard box in which I keep my old boards and such.)
For example I see _no_ mention of a power supply. Yes, I know, the Mac Mini has an external one too, but it also has the circuitry to get the juice from that to, say, the hard drive. Does his nano-ITX have the circuitry to (A) be powered from an external power jack, and (B) supply that to a standard 4 pin power connector that his 40-to-44 connector for the HDD expects. Because without it, that thing won't even boot.
Or what's he gonna do? Cut another hole in the side of the thing and run a thick bunch of cables from an ATX PSU through it? (Bearing in mind that a PC PSU alone is bigger than a Mac Mini and its PSU put together, I'd say that alone makes the whole experiment fail to meet its goal.)
Also let's look at what he's achieved:
- 1 GHz worth of a slow, low IPC VIA CPU (as opposed to 1.42 GHz PowerPC)
- 266 MHz RAM (as opposed to 333 MHz RAM in the Mac Mini)
- integrated crappy Via/S3 graphics (as opposed to a 9200 in the Mac Mini)
So he's achieved... what? Managed to make a PC far slower than the Mac Mini, and it's actually more expensive than the Mac Mini? A 1 GHz VIA chip and mobo is around 230$ on the site he linked to. Add a HDD, RAM, PSU and a Windows license... oops, our crap machine is actually more expensive than the Mac Mini.
You know what? I'm not even a Mac fan. Been poking fun at the odd elitist Mac fanboys before, and got modded down for it. But this time I must say the PC side is where the fanboyism is at.
I had noticed the same effect before, but was at a serious loss as to why would anyone actually try to look stupid.
The thing is, most people _aren't_ as stupid as they try to make themselves look. Sure, computers may not rank high on their list of hobbies, but stupid or completely unable to learn they aren't.
As exhibit number 1: forget mothers. I recently went and taught my GRANDmother to play the latest Sierra empire buiding game. Think SimCity with an acient Chinese theme. Also think a nice 80 year old lady who has positively never ever touched a computer in her whole life before.
You know what? After some coaching, she was doing just fine.
Yes, she _did_ have some problems with the left and right buttons, so I can see Apple's point there. (She: "Which button do I click again to see what's in the warehouse?" Me: "Uh, the right one. No, the one towards the door. Uh. Grandma? You're holding your fingers on itwrong again.") But I find that excusable for someone who started from zero computer literacy at that age.
But again, she was learning pretty damn fast. Especially considering her age. Definitely exceeded my expectations there. But that's what you get when people _don't_ try to be fashionably stupid.
On the other hand, exhibit 2: yeah, let's talk mothers after all. See, unlike most people whose mothers are the example of someone who's computer illiterate, mine used to be a programmer. A damn good one, too, according to her bosses at the time.
Except at some point she caught the "oh, I'm too stupid to use the computer" fashion. And resigned from that line of work. Dunno, maybe it was some new friends she's found. Maybe it got her more attention from dad. No idea.
So I'm surprised at the great lengths she'll go to prove that she's as stupid as she claims. Forget about left and right buttons. That's lightweight stuff.
By comparison, take this: one time I told her to just plug her camera in the USB port. It's something she's done before a thousand times, FFS. (Not to mention she's done far more complicated than that back in her geek days.)
She: "But I don't know which one is USB!" Me: "Mom, just plug it in the only connector that fits that size and shape. You really can't miss."
So she squeezes the cable between the pins of the serial port. *sigh*
Sorry, there's no way to take that as anything but putting up a (bad) show. There's no f***ing way anyone would think an USB connector is supposed to go there. Except, that is, someone for whom it would be unfashionable to admit that she knows anything about computers, including such basics as which is the USB port.
Another time she went and deleted her photos instead of copying them (and what a good excuse for tears and guilt trips that is) just to show that no, goddamn it, she really can't copy them without my help. Never mind that she's copied them just fine a thousand times before on her own. (And yes, of course I undeleted them for her. But you know what? I highly suspect that she knew how to do that too.)
That's what I've been wondering too
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Now I _don't_ believe that the G4 is the super-computer that Apple's marketting makes it sound like. It's a good CPU, but that's about it.
But a 1 GHz _Via_ CPU? Gimme a break. Those things are a dog, performance wise. They're not just lower MHz, they're also lower IPC (instructions per cycle) even than a P4 Prescott.
The fact that they only have 64K L2 cache doesn't really help there either. And Via's being still stuck on a 133 MHz SDR bus also doesn't help.
Also it seems that the article just illustrates what's wrong with all these "I can build a better PC" attempts. E.g., in this case they couldn't also fit a CD drive too in that case, so you have to use an external USB one.
Which is just missing the whole bloody point. So at the end of it, when you count the PC Mini _and_ the external CD drive, you have twice the desk space needed and nearly twice the volume.
Sorry, but for example I play all my Playstation games in an emulator, right off the original CDs. There is _no_ ROM image involved, and there is _no_ copying the data off the CD involved.
Furthermore, just for the sake of beating on the obvious fallacy some more: even for SNES or GBA games, it would be trivial to make a connector (or a gamepad with a connector) so you can run games directly off the original cartridge. Just plug it in, and run the game off it. No copying or ROMs involved. Dunno if it's been done, but it would be trivial to do it, if there was a market for it.
So, no, emulation is _not_ a synonim for "ROMs downloaded off some warez site." They are completely different things, and completely different issues.
What the law might or might not say, is that you're not allowed to play off a ROM image if your old console still works. It also _does_ say is that you can't rip your games and offer them for download over the Internet. Sorry, that's not _one_ copy, that's not for personal use, it is not for archival, and sure as heck leaves you with no way to erase all copies downloaded when you get rid of the cartridge. So anyway you want to interpret the law, hosting a site full of ROMs _is_ illegal.
But does it say that "_emulation_ is illegal"? Gimme a break. That's the most brain dead interpretation I've ever heard. It just shows that the author has no clue what emulation even means.
Or let me rephrase it: it shows that for them "emulation" just means "downloading pirated ROMs off the Internet". Sorry, no. It doesn't.
1. Their runes were made to be inscribed on wood. (Hence for example no curved lines. And no horizontal lines, which would be along the fiber and split the wood.)
2. They had no numerals at all.
Considering that they did a LOT of trading, seems to me like bookkeeping was a royal pain in the arse. Think about carving on wood something like "Sold two hundred fifty seven furs for one thousand seven hundred sixty eight coins". Sounds to me like an accountant back then needed serious physical condition:P
"Big" is almost _never_ a plus, in and by itself. Usually people take "big" because it also means they get more of something else in the process.
E.g., those 17" laptops are bought for the... big screen. Reducing everything to "either it's graphics editing, or it doesn't need high resolution" is so over-simplified, it's not even funny. E.g., most programmers on our floor work in 1600x1200, because they can see more of the program. E.g., some of us actually like large fonts that we can't read without squinting. Especially on a laptop where you might have to put up with piss-poor lighting conditions, it can make all the difference in the world for eye comfort when working on it. Etc.
Ditto for a lot of other things. A bigger car means you can haul more stuff, if needed. A bigger house gets you more space. A bigger TV is a comfort factor, if you don't watch it from 2 ft distance. Ditto for monitors: there have actually been studies that show that, for example, people actually do better in games with a bigger monitor, or rather with it filling more of their vision angle. A bigger computer case, for those who prefer those, lets you use more expansion slots and it's easier to work in. (And yes, I do know people that filled all the PCI slots on a standard size ATX motherboard.) Etc.
Yes, people tend to over-estimate how much of that extra something they need. Or rather include a hefty safety margin, just to be on the safe side.
On the other hand, when size _doesn't_ bring you anything useful, it's actually a perceived disadvantage. I could fill a mile long list of products where small is a perceived advantage, or at least doing damn well. (Assuming, of course, comparable price and performance to the bigger versions.) E.g.:
- Palmtops vs the Apple Newton, which is mentioned right in the summary. The huge Newton _wasn't_ perceived as being better.
- Walkmen/DiskMen/MP3-players vs a big huge boombox. When was the last time you saw someone on the bus with their headphones plugged into a bloody huge boombox?
- Apple's iPod vs a lot of the lame huge clones of old, that packed a freaking 5.25" drive. Which one sold better?
- SFF PCs. Last I've heard, Shuttle was doing a thriving business with those.
- Laptops vs the old "luggable" computers. (In case you haven't seen one of those, it was a bloody huge and heavy PC with a small CRT on one side. Think lugging around a full size tower, with a handle and small CRT on the top side.) When was the last time you saw a company announcing a new one of those?
- TFT vs CRT. Probably _the_ most invoked reason to go TFT is "but it doesn't take as much space on my small desk."
- For that matter, notice how in the last 20 years, CRTs (both monitors and TVs) have become shorter. There's a lot of money invested in R&D each year to hopefully shave an extra inch off the depth of TVs or monitors.
- The X-Box controller. _The_ number one reason to dis the X-Box at launch was that the controller was too big for some people's hands. Penny Arcade had their grizzly-bear-for-a-controller strip about it. Not many people thought "W00T! Big gamepads are sooo macho."
- Or speaking of consoles, see how the PS/2 getting slimmer didn't hurt its sales at all.
Ask Roman Cavalry why they didn't do a charge with lances;)
Yes, there are several ways of fighting on horseback. You could use a spatha (long sword), like the Romans did. Or you could do a downwards strike with a short-ish spear, like ancient greek cavalry did. Or you might even be able to use a lance, sorta, if you use the other hand to hold tight, instead of using a shield effectively. Or you could stay away and use bows as much as possible, like the Parthians and Mongolians did. Or various other ways.
The stirrups are not 100% _needed_ to fight on horseback, that is true indeed. They just make a particular style of fighting very effective.
Being able to stay in the saddle using your legs alone, if nothing else gives you full use of one arm for the shield. Increasing the rider's survivability even by a small fraction, can make a huge difference. Add the fact that an injury to the left arm doesn't make the rider completely unfit to fight, as was the documented case with ancient Greek cavalry, and you have one hell of a troop type.
That's basically what the stirrups did. They gave heavy cavalry just the extra edge to become _the_ deadliest troop type on the battlefield.
But, indeed, no more. People certainly fought on horseback before stirrups.
Dunno about him, but I never pretended to have some higher morals about it.
Having any rights has not much to do with morals, it has to do with (A) a sort of a "truce" we came up with, so we can live with each other ("ok, I won't kill you if you won't kill me"), and (B) basically being able to defend it, by hurting anyone _hard_ if they break those rules. (Or more accurately we've let the government handle the hurting part. It's more efficient that way.)
Either way, there is nothing inherent, divine or universal about those "morals". It's just an arbitrary collective truce we've come up with at some point in history -- and which is also continuously changing -- so we can live together.
However, like any truce, you need to be as dangerous to the other as he/she is to you. Otherwise one of the sides has no incentive to enter it. You could kill me, but then I could kill you instead. Maybe I'll be faster. Maybe I'll do it in your sleep. Hmm... better let's aggree that we both have a right to live. That's morals.
It's sorta like the cold war: ok, we could all become extinct, or we can just sulk and fume at each other and aggree to not shoot those missiles. That's human morals, in a nutshell.
And again, a large part in having any rights was having a big enough stick to threaten those who don't want to play by those rules.
You can probably see how that all doesn't apply to bunnies. They're cute, they're fluffy, but they're not in much of a position to make a truce with us. Now if we were talking killer bunnies like in Monty Python, who can each massacre a squad of armed elite soldiers without breaking a sweat... now that's a race we'd be willing to make a truce with. Those would have plenty of rights.
Not saying this is the "right" or moral or sensitive way to think about it. It's just the historical way it is.
Dude, effectively riding a horse into battle is _not_ a question of going "I know! Let's ride them instead of making them pull charriots!"
Yes, they wanted to ride them, but staying on the horse in battle is not as easy as it sounds. You try charging at an enemy without a saddle or stirrups, and you'll fall as soon as you hit the first enemy. It's in fact, more dangerous to yourself than to the enemy.
Early uses of horses for riding were limited to mounted infantry. Meaning that they rode the horse for transport, then dismounted and fought like infantry. Again, because they didn't have a saddle.
So basically that's what your friend's scientists were researching there. "How the heck do we keep a rider from falling right off the horse when he hits an enemy? Hmm..." And if it only took them 200 years, hey, that's a lot shorter than in took real life.
(And from discovering the saddle to being able to do a proper medieval cavalry charge, another millenia or two passed, and another invention was needed: the stirrups. But that's another discussion, for another time.)
You do bring some valid questions about communism, so here's some first-hand info. And the comparison to The Sims. Now I dunno about China, but in the Eastern European/Soviet kind of communism:
- you did get more money if you got a promotion, or simply by staying longer in the same job. They had some standardized lists of job levels, number of years in the same job, etc, which gave you a standard salary for whatever bracket you fit in.
I.e., if anything The Sims is _more_ Soviet style than American capitalism. I don't remember my Sims ever negotiating a salary... and discovering that they're paid half of what Bob Newbie earns at the same job level. Just because Bob is a white male, whereas your Sim happens to be black or female, so he/she can only get a token job at the reception.
- communism was all about giving everyone a job, and keeping them in it, regardless of any economics. (Which is one thing that drove their economy into the ground.) It couldn't happen that you suddenly got fired because the comrade commissar leading the company got a better deal outsourcing to India, or "downsized" half the company to please the shareholders.
Just like in The Sims. (You can get fired in TS2, though, but only if you choose the most spectacularly stupid choices in those random events.)
- You certainly could move to another company or switch carreers, and I personally know people who did. E.g., from economist to programmer. Or here's another bit of _fact_ for you: _all_ KGB employees had branched into it from another job. Their agents had to have a university/college degree in some unrelated job, and had been later given the opportunity to switch carreer to the KGB if the KGB deemed them worthy. Or a lot of the army officers and NCOs were poor workers and peasants who had basically switched carreer to the military because it paid better (and obviously went through a military school for it.)
Just like in The Sims, eh?
- You could definitely buy _most_ stuff without a waiting list and without anyone's approval. There were indeed things like cars, and a few others that did require waiting for years, because the economy could only supply about a tenth of the demand.
But then again, you can't even buy a car in The Sims, at all, ever. So...
- You did have to go through approval (and massive corruption) for some other stuff, depending on the country, like moving to a major city. Or in China for moving to another city at all.
Then again, in The Sims you can't even move to another _street_. You're stuck to living around Sim Lane for ever. In TS2 you can move a family to another town, but neither of them is really more than a village, so in most communist countries that would need no more paperwork than in, say, western Germany. You just had to inform the authorities that you moved there, basically.
- A lot of the stuff was heavily based on corruption and nepotism. Knowing the right person and giving them the right "gift" did more for your carreer or your position on those waiting lists, than basically anything else. Having a friend of a friend who can introduce you to the one who'll approve or deny your paperwork, was usually more than half the solution. (Yet another thing that drove their economy into the ground.)
Where have we seen something similar enough? Yep, in The Sims. You need enough friends for a promotion.
Etc.
Basically communism wasn't _that_ different as you seem to assume, once you get to the micro level that The Sims is all about. Yes, it was pretty much a synonim for oppression, corruption and poverty. No arguments there. But at micro level, you weren't exactly a slave chained to the desk where you work, either.
Their brand of slavery was slightly more subtle, and based on having not much other choice. It was a _macro_ thing, rather than micro-managing everyone. E.g., they didn't plan that _you_ are sold into slavery to do Job X for the rest of your days. They just planned that there are 200,000 of jobs i
Consumerism isn't really new or american
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know about China, but I can tell you first hand that in Eastern Europe during communism, people also bought stuff to feel good about themselves. There were people starving themselves and their family for a lifetime to get a bigger TV or an imported car, or to show off at work that they can afford imported cigarettes or whatever.
Again, from experience, I can tell you that The Sims could have been just as well about a Soviet family, or a Czech one, or a Bulgarian one, or an East German one. Maybe the prices would be 10 times higher, then, but that's about it. (Well, and also homosexuality would get your sims arrested.)
The difference is the abbundance and cost of goods. In America you might not _need_ to take a loan to get a new fridge. (But you might do it anyway.) And in The Sims you only need to "save up" for 3 days or so for a fridge. In Eastern Europe, you'd feel the monthly paymets a lot more.
But the basic phenomenon is the same. It's basically about keeping up with the Joneses, or preferrably one-upping the Joneses.
And it's existed everywhere humans live, and for as long as humans have existed. No offense to the Egyptians, whose ancient culture I actually admire, but the pyramids are the perfect example of that phenomenon happening verbatim some 4000 years ago. They started with a small mastaba, and ended up with monstrosities that took a lifetime to build, and cost the country a lot. Because each pharaoh wanted to show all y'all that his... ahem... obelisk, is bigger than yours. And than the previous pharaoh's.
Or in the same ancient times phoenicians made a fortune trading in luxury items, like purple dye. It had no other value than being an expensive thing to show off with. Made some people good about themselves that they can afford it. Proto-Consumerism at its finest back then, eh?
And so on, and so forth.
So basically I think the Chinese government is kidding themselves if they think that China is above consumerism.
Having totalled more than a year of playing The Sims 1 and several months of TS2, I can however say that it will _never_ happen spontaneously. Unlike, say, "Singles" which gives you a gay guy and a lesbian among the character choices from the start, in TS all sims start as straight as a fir tree. You have to actually deliberately babysit them into same-sex love.
So I'm not sure what Beijing is trying to protect the upstanding chinese youth from. From the idea that homosexuality does exist? Well, it seems to me that they had to already know that, if they pushed their sims down that path.
"Woohoo"ing in TS2 is even more intriguing. Bearing in mind that it's not even some hot steamy pornography, but some cartoonish something-nondescript-happening-under-the-blanket animation.
So Beijing is trying to do... what? Keep their youth (and by that I don't mean "children", since the ESRB rating already says it's not for children) safe from the idea that people can and occasionally do have sex? Just gotta wonder.
I was wondering about that too
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I mean, as a die-hard The Sims and The Sims 2 player, I can't see much that would count as either capitalist or communist in it. It's a generic family, in a generic foreign country (they don't even speak English or any real language), and earning some made up currency (it's "simoleans" not "dollars", and you can't easily convert that into any real currency, because the price ratios and wages are all wrong for any real country.) They go to work, they spend their money on groceries and a bigger TV, and occasionally have dinner with their friends. They can't even open their own business at home, or anything that would count as capitalistic.
I.e., it's generic stuff that's no different in communist China from the USA.
I mean, that TS2 family could just as well be two communist patriotic comrades going to work in the government-owned factories, and buying their fridge from a government-owned store.
One reason the AMD 64 works so well is precisely because they _reduced_ latency. That's basically the great advantage that the IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) offers.
Funny abstraction layers and everything being agnostic of everything else is a nice CS theoretician fantasy. In a CS theory utopia everything should be abstracted, or better yet virtualized. Any actual hardware or other implementation details should be buried 6 ft deep, under layers after layers of abstraction or better yet emulation.
The problem is that reality doesn't work that way. Every such abstraction layer, such as buffering and translating some generic RAM interface costs time. Every single detail you play agnostic about, runs you the risk of doing something extremely stupid and slow. (E.g., from another domain: I've seen entirely too many program implementations that, in the quest to abstract and ignore the database, end up with a flurry of connections just to save one stupid record.) Performance problems here we come.
The AMD 64 runs fast precisely because it has one _less_ level of abstraction and virtualization. Precisely because their CPU does _not_ play agnostic and let the north-bridge handle the actual RAM details. No, they know all about RAM, and they use it better that way.
So adding an abstraction layer right back (even if one that moves the north-bridge on the RAM stick) would solve... what? Shave some 10% out of the performance? No, thanks.
Or you mention SRAM. Well, the only advantage to SRAM is that it's faster than DRAM. Adding an extra couple of cycles of latency to it would be just a bloody stupid way to get DRAM performance out of expensive SRAM. Over-priced under-performing solutions, here we come.
Wouldn't it be easier to just stick to DRAM _without_ extra abstraction layers to start with? You know, instead of then having to pay a mint for SRAM just to get back to where you started?
Not meant as a flame. Just a quick reflection on how the real world is that-a-way, and utopias with a dozen abstraction layers are in the exact opposite direction.
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That way lies making a bad interface nevertheless.
See for example ESR's relatively recent rant (it was on the Slashdot front page too) about his frustrating efforts to configure CUPS on a simple home network. I dunno if you'd consider ESR a retard, but I'd say he's not quite clueless about Unix. Or at least way above the level of an average home user. Yet it took him... what? Several hours?
That was the perfect example of the kind of GUI made not to actually help the user, but simply based on "gah, we must throw together whatever crap GUI with buttons, because retards want that." It's a GUI, but it misses the mark of being easy to use by a mile nevertheless.
Why? Because those people didn't even try to understand the users and to make a program for the _users_.
Users aren't retards. They just don't have the same needs you have. Most of the time that's what the "users are retards" whine means: you haven't even tried to understand what they need, but instead are trying to boss them into accepting whatever _you_ feel like coding. The rest of the time it means "they're retards because they didn't guess which obscure directory my configs are in, or which obscure sequence of programs and options to pipe together to make my crap work."
The thing is, they're paid to do _their_ own job, not to be an IT expert. If someone is, say, a marketting expert, their real job is to market a product, _not_ to learn the Unix CLI and whatever other obscure interface. If they're an architect, again, their job is to design a house, not to wrestle with a piss-poor program interface. Etc.
Each minute they spend wrestling with a bad interface (e.g., searching through a piss-poorly designed menu), adds up slowly to mean needlessly wasted hours when they're _not_ doing their job. And it's an hour that costs their employer money.
A good program at least tries to minimize that. It was written by people who tried to understand _what_ the user does, _how_ he/she does it, what existing skills the user has that can be reused, etc. A bad program, well, you can bet it was written by someone who called the users "retards".
The point isn't as much the degree. I think college didn't teach me too much that I didn't already knew, for example.
The problems are (A) if you love programming, and (B) if you have the mental skills for it. At all. Yes, I've been through the "bah, programming is easy, everyone could do it if they wanted to" phase myself. Then you start to realize that things that are trivial and obvious to you, just aren't so for 90% of the rest of the people.
For example, I've actually sat and watched someone painfully try every single of "*", "&" and nothing, on every single variable on a C program, until it stopped crashing. He just could never wrap his mind around the concept of a "pointer". Some 10 years later, AFAIK he _still_ can't. Made me realize that maybe it's not that trivial a concept as I assumed.
And that's just one example. People just aren't built to, basically, think like a machine. They're hampered by natural language fuzziness, and by the human-to-human expectation that the other gets the basic idea and can work out the details for himself.
And it only becomes worse when you deal with people who don't even intend to learn. They're in it just because they "deserve" to be paid a ton of money. And they're not gonna "waste" their time on such boring stuff as actually learning an algorithm, or even the basics of the language they're paid to program in.
I've dealt with too many people whose _only_ interest is hanging around bored until the next paycheck, and their _only_ skill is marketting themselves to a clueless PHB. They can't program worth shit, and they don't even intend to learn more.
And why would they? They get paid anyway. And in the unlikely case that the boss gets a clue and fires them, they'll just move on to another company to scam. There's one sucker born every minute, after all. Not hard to find another sucker who'll swallow a faked resume. Beats actually working and learning.
And, yes, there are a _lot_ of clueless ex-burger-flippers who did just that. Moved into programming not even "just for the money", but "for _undeserved_ money."
No, I'm not implying that poisoning a river is the _goal_. Of course, money at all cost is the real goal.
I do however claim that _some_ people, even if they _knew_ they're poisoning others, they'd still just not care at all. If you gave them a choice explicitly along the lines of "do we do X, and gain nothing, or do Y and gain 10,000$ at the expense of killing 100 people", they'd choose Y every single time.
Not because they like killing people, of course. Because, worse yet, they just don't care. The only factor in choice Y they see is "and gain 10,000$".
And indeed, they are not comic-book super-villains. In comics, evil is a purpose in and by itself. Super-villains do evil stuff for no other reason than because they enjoy doing it.
Real life "evil" is more like the corporate kind.
It's Al Capone who killed people just for money and power. No hard feelings, nothing personal, just business. I want the extortion money from your half of town too.
It's the Third Reich planning in cold blood to exterminate every single citizen of Poland until the 70's to make room for German colonists. Nothing personal mate, we just want your land. And, totally incidentally, this means you all must go to the gas chambers. It's result, not motive, honestly.
It's the 19'th century factory owners sending armed men to _shoot_ workers on strike. And also those men who took arms and shot starving workers, just for money. Of course, neither was a super-villain, and neither did it just because they liked killing people. Nothing personal, really, just business. Awfully sorry that we must do something as messy as shooting you, really. Will just cost us even more to whitewash those blood stained walls again, you know. But between your life and a few thousands dollars profit, the few thousand dollars win every time.
In a sense, the real life "evil" is not the kind that hates all humanity and wants to cause pain, for pain sake. That makes for at most an idiot going psycho, gunning down 2-3 people, and then getting gunned down himself by SWAT. Not much of a super-villain.
The real life "evil" is the kind that doesn't care. If someone dies or suffers, it's merely result, not motive, but still no reason to stop making money that way.
Some people, simply put, don't give a rat's ass about "correct" or about damage done. They only care about making money. Period.
If it weren't explicitly illegal, they'd even poison a town's water supply just for some money. Not an exaggeration: companies dumped toxic stuff into rivers right until the law forced them to stop. Or into the air. And even then, every time someone told them to use filters, there was endless moaning and bitching and lobbying about it.
Spam, tele-marketting, link-spam, spyware, etc, are just a symptom of the same thing: if it makes money and it's not illegal, hell yeah. Let's pollute and destroy another resource.
There was an interview with a link-spammer on The Register this week. Dunno, I found it surrealistic how the guy basically had _zero_ morals. Not even an "eh, it's wrong, but I need the money" kinda attitude. Nope. The general tone all over was along the lines of "who the damn has time to care about collateral damage? It makes money and it's not illegal. Period. If you have a problem with it, tough shit. Sucks to be you."
Basically it's the same with spyware. These people don't care, that's all. As long as it makes them a buck and isn't explicitly illegal, they'll clog your computer without thinking twice. If it was possible and made them a buck, they'd even make that computer explode without thinking twice.
I didn't say the Athlon 64 is 99% faster. I said that probably 99% _of_ the performance gain _between_ 32 bit programs and 64 bit programs, on an A64, is because of the extra registers. And yes, the performance difference between 32 bit and 64 bit is there, and proven by a ton of benchmarks already.
So I'll say the opposite: I keep hearing the "old, tired rant" that performance doesn't matter, architecture doesn't matter, even developper or code quality doesn't matter. Let's just make a turd and let the compiler handle it.
Nope, sorry. Just isn't true. The performance difference in the A64's case _is_ there. That's what 64 bit vs 32 bit benchmarks measure there: the speed with and without the extra registers.
You may notice how for any other CPU, 64 bit mode is actually _slower_. E.g., the UltraSparc comes to mind. In case you wondered why most applications on a shiny new UltraSparc machine are still 32 bit. On it a 32 bit program actually runs measurably faster than the same program compiled as a 64 bit program.
Because when you have the exact same instructions, and the exact same number of the registers, transferring more data slows you down.
But not the A64. There 64 bit mode is actually faster. What's different? Twice the registers, that's what's different.
Compilers have come a long way, yes. They can do much better with a bad ISA than 10 years ago, yes. Indeed. And you can even take the tired old argument that "bah, for Word and Internet explorer they don't need a faster CPU anyway."
But completely polish a turd into a gold nugget, no, they can't. They can bring it sorta close enough, but no more.
It's funny, really, seeing the first amendment be invoke as some sacred right to troll a privately own bulletin board, or cheat in an online game (apparently duplicating quest items is a form of speech, don't you know), or whatever. And the ones who scream the loudest are the ones who have no fscking clue at all what that ammendment says.
In fact, I'll go one step forward and say: they seem to interpret it as actually meaning anyone _but_ the government. You ban them off a game for cheating, and they'll scream for months about how you violated their first ammendment righst. But if the government decides that it's unpatriotic to say this or that, or imprisons someone for saying non-patriotic things... hey, that's ok. It's the government, after all. They're allowed to do that, right?
Sad.
Admittedly, I have no clue about the ARM, so I can't really comment there. Still, I'm _guessing_ it's not just a 32 bit version of the 6502, nor opcode compatible. Which is basically what the parent poster was asking for: a machine which can still run Apple ][ programs and take Apple ][ hardware. There's IMHO a bit of a difference between just design similarities, and being hampered by literal 100% compatibility to an Apple ][.
Well, in a way, you _do_ get the most important part of the motherboard directly on the Athlon 64.
And historically, the biggest reason for performance differences and various other issues on motherboards, has been the memory controller. That's for example what used to make Intel's chipsets rock, and Via's suck, or why the NForce 2 quickly became _the_ choice for Athlon XP chipsets.
Now that AMD has moved that on the CPU itself, you'll notice that in all benchmarks all motherboards perform the same. (1-2% differences are within the normal margin of error. Even running the same benchmark on the same computer again will occasionally deviate more than that.)
Sure, some might have some gizmo proprietary bus for the south bridge, or a different brand of software RAID drivers, or whatever. But in the end none of those make a real difference.
I.e., (A) AMD doesn't really need to get into that market any more, and (B) it makes no economic sense for them to. When they can get more money for the lowest end Sempron than a whole motherboard costs (bearing in mind that the north- and south-bridge are only a fraction of that cost), it makes no sense for them to use their limited fab space on making north- and south-bridges.
Or to put it otherwise, Athlon 64 market has just become a commodity market. It's several perfectly interchangeable chips, none of them really better than the competitors' offering. Which drives prices down. As they say, "the way to make a small fortune in the commodities market, is to start with a large fortune." There is no reason for AMD to compete in that market.
Egads, what a ghastly thought.
One of the major peeves I have with the x86 architecture is that the whole instruction set is a kludge. And seein' as I _am_ otherwise a PC fan and have some years of x86 assembly programming experience, I think I can say that as a fact, not trolling.
We've been stuck with, what, 8 general purpose registers? And for what? Just so someone could theoretically still run an ancient 8086 piece of software on it. Except it still won't actually run any software from that era, except in an emulator like DosBox, because of other factors.
And in turn the 8086 was hardly more than a 16 bit hack of the 8080 architecture.
And for an awfully long time, those 8 weren't even that general purpose. E.g., "LOOP" (decrement a counter, jump back to the beginning of the loop if not zero) would _only_ work on CX. E.g., integer multiplication or division again, were hard wired to use only AX and DX. Etc.
And this isn't just about assembly programming. Yeah, you could spend days rewriting stuff to get juuust the right combination of registers for it to work right. It also hurt compiler generated code, and even today it still does. Probably 99% of the speed advantage an Athlon 64 gets in 64 bit mode comes just from AMD's _finally_ breaking byte code compatibility in that mode, to provide twice the number of general purpose registers.
Now kindly get your old Apple II manuals and look at the 6502's instruction set. Egad. Just the thought of giving that one 32 bit registers and calling it a day, is not a pleasant thought.
No, IMHO Apple did the right thing there. They could have emulated the 6502, though, like they did with the 68000 when they moved to PowerPC.
Sorry if it wasn't clear what I meant. I didn't say _you_ were a fanboy for that statement. The "fanboyism" wisecrack was about the deluge of posts and articles along the lines of "look about what PC you could get for that money/size/whatever, but misses the mark by a mile in every other aspect." I.e., about the article itself, not about your post.
Can a better PC be built in that space? Damn right. Been saying that before myself. And I'd love to have one with, say, a 2GHz Centrino. (A Via doesn't really cut it, and a P4 is just way too hot for that confined space without being very noisy.) But it doesn't exist yet, and this one isn't it. That's all I'm saying.
It will most likely take a mobo designed from the scratch for it. Could be one from Asus or MSI or whatever, yes. Or DFI and AOpen, since they already make Centrino desktop motherboards. Or Shuttle, since they already are doing a great SFF business. But it has yet to be designed.
And articles like the one we're talking about are IMHO just misguided PC fanboyism. They miss the mark by a mile, and in fact if anything they just manage to make the Mac Mini look better.
It's not hard to make a PC that's better than the Mac Mini in one of the aspects: speed, size, cost or noise. Hitting all 4 marks is, however, the real challenge. And that's where all these "look what better PC you could get instead" fail miserably.
And to explain it better, the part I call fanboyism is the underlying assumption that even if it missed 3 out of 4 goals by a mile, it's still better for everyone because it's a PC. Now for some tasks, like games, ok, a PC is the only real choice. But assuming that across the board, for _anyone_ and for _any_ task, a slower bigger _and_ noisier machine _must_ be better by definition anyway, just because it's a PC... strikes me as a little fanboyish.
I don't see anything wrong as such with doing a price/something comparison, I just wish people did the _full_ comparison. And not just pick the pieces which fit, and quietly hope everyone doesn't notice the missing half.
The thing is, the Mac Mini niche has _four_ things going for it:
1. Speed
2. Price
3. Size
4. Noise
(A die-hard Apple fan will probably also add "5. Usability". But I'm not trying to get into that flame war. Let's assume that both are exactly as usable. Bear with me.)
No, the Mac Mini is _not_ the absolute winner in either of the 4 categories (well, maybe except size). But the combination of the four is where it's really at. The fact is, there are _four_ pieces to that puzzle, not two, not three.
That's what all these "but my PC is better" posts miss. They have some contender that is better in one aspect, maybe even two, but then don't come even close in the other two.
E.g.:
- yes, one can get a cheaper mid-tower PC, and it may even be _slightly_ faster. (But not by much if it's still cheaper after you factor in the Windows license too.) But it misses the other two criteria by a mile.
- yes, one can get a smaller PC, for example the OQO. Except it's slower and it costs 2000$ with less RAM and less HDD. Oops, it missed the speed and cost points, didn't it?
- yes, one can get a more silent PC, and a faster one at that. E.g., a Hush PC (I think they reviewed them on Tom's Hardware). Perfectly silent, since it uses the case itself as a passive heatsink. Except it's bigger _and_ again, costs over 2000$.
Etc.
So I'm all for doing such comparisons, if they actually considered _all_ the four factors. It would have saved us all from the deluge of "but my big tower is faster" posts that miss the whole point.
While he didn't have a custom mobo made to order, he did get Via to send him a prototype mobo, in a form factor not yet released. Sorry, I'm not sure how that counts as "off the shelf components", seein' as you can't actually find it on the shelf of _any_ shop.
Also, as was said before, I'm not sure that thing even actually runs. Seems more like _only_ an exercise in cramming that parts together in that space. (In which case, it's as much a computer as the cardboard box in which I keep my old boards and such.)
For example I see _no_ mention of a power supply. Yes, I know, the Mac Mini has an external one too, but it also has the circuitry to get the juice from that to, say, the hard drive. Does his nano-ITX have the circuitry to (A) be powered from an external power jack, and (B) supply that to a standard 4 pin power connector that his 40-to-44 connector for the HDD expects. Because without it, that thing won't even boot.
Or what's he gonna do? Cut another hole in the side of the thing and run a thick bunch of cables from an ATX PSU through it? (Bearing in mind that a PC PSU alone is bigger than a Mac Mini and its PSU put together, I'd say that alone makes the whole experiment fail to meet its goal.)
Also let's look at what he's achieved:
- 1 GHz worth of a slow, low IPC VIA CPU (as opposed to 1.42 GHz PowerPC)
- 266 MHz RAM (as opposed to 333 MHz RAM in the Mac Mini)
- integrated crappy Via/S3 graphics (as opposed to a 9200 in the Mac Mini)
So he's achieved... what? Managed to make a PC far slower than the Mac Mini, and it's actually more expensive than the Mac Mini? A 1 GHz VIA chip and mobo is around 230$ on the site he linked to. Add a HDD, RAM, PSU and a Windows license... oops, our crap machine is actually more expensive than the Mac Mini.
You know what? I'm not even a Mac fan. Been poking fun at the odd elitist Mac fanboys before, and got modded down for it. But this time I must say the PC side is where the fanboyism is at.
I had noticed the same effect before, but was at a serious loss as to why would anyone actually try to look stupid.
The thing is, most people _aren't_ as stupid as they try to make themselves look. Sure, computers may not rank high on their list of hobbies, but stupid or completely unable to learn they aren't.
As exhibit number 1: forget mothers. I recently went and taught my GRANDmother to play the latest Sierra empire buiding game. Think SimCity with an acient Chinese theme. Also think a nice 80 year old lady who has positively never ever touched a computer in her whole life before.
You know what? After some coaching, she was doing just fine.
Yes, she _did_ have some problems with the left and right buttons, so I can see Apple's point there. (She: "Which button do I click again to see what's in the warehouse?" Me: "Uh, the right one. No, the one towards the door. Uh. Grandma? You're holding your fingers on itwrong again.") But I find that excusable for someone who started from zero computer literacy at that age.
But again, she was learning pretty damn fast. Especially considering her age. Definitely exceeded my expectations there. But that's what you get when people _don't_ try to be fashionably stupid.
On the other hand, exhibit 2: yeah, let's talk mothers after all. See, unlike most people whose mothers are the example of someone who's computer illiterate, mine used to be a programmer. A damn good one, too, according to her bosses at the time.
Except at some point she caught the "oh, I'm too stupid to use the computer" fashion. And resigned from that line of work. Dunno, maybe it was some new friends she's found. Maybe it got her more attention from dad. No idea.
So I'm surprised at the great lengths she'll go to prove that she's as stupid as she claims. Forget about left and right buttons. That's lightweight stuff.
By comparison, take this: one time I told her to just plug her camera in the USB port. It's something she's done before a thousand times, FFS. (Not to mention she's done far more complicated than that back in her geek days.)
She: "But I don't know which one is USB!"
Me: "Mom, just plug it in the only connector that fits that size and shape. You really can't miss."
So she squeezes the cable between the pins of the serial port. *sigh*
Sorry, there's no way to take that as anything but putting up a (bad) show. There's no f***ing way anyone would think an USB connector is supposed to go there. Except, that is, someone for whom it would be unfashionable to admit that she knows anything about computers, including such basics as which is the USB port.
Another time she went and deleted her photos instead of copying them (and what a good excuse for tears and guilt trips that is) just to show that no, goddamn it, she really can't copy them without my help. Never mind that she's copied them just fine a thousand times before on her own. (And yes, of course I undeleted them for her. But you know what? I highly suspect that she knew how to do that too.)
Now I _don't_ believe that the G4 is the super-computer that Apple's marketting makes it sound like. It's a good CPU, but that's about it.
But a 1 GHz _Via_ CPU? Gimme a break. Those things are a dog, performance wise. They're not just lower MHz, they're also lower IPC (instructions per cycle) even than a P4 Prescott.
The fact that they only have 64K L2 cache doesn't really help there either. And Via's being still stuck on a 133 MHz SDR bus also doesn't help.
Also it seems that the article just illustrates what's wrong with all these "I can build a better PC" attempts. E.g., in this case they couldn't also fit a CD drive too in that case, so you have to use an external USB one.
Which is just missing the whole bloody point. So at the end of it, when you count the PC Mini _and_ the external CD drive, you have twice the desk space needed and nearly twice the volume.
<sarcasm>Yeah, buddy. Way to go...<sarcasm>
Sorry, but for example I play all my Playstation games in an emulator, right off the original CDs. There is _no_ ROM image involved, and there is _no_ copying the data off the CD involved.
Furthermore, just for the sake of beating on the obvious fallacy some more: even for SNES or GBA games, it would be trivial to make a connector (or a gamepad with a connector) so you can run games directly off the original cartridge. Just plug it in, and run the game off it. No copying or ROMs involved. Dunno if it's been done, but it would be trivial to do it, if there was a market for it.
So, no, emulation is _not_ a synonim for "ROMs downloaded off some warez site." They are completely different things, and completely different issues.
What the law might or might not say, is that you're not allowed to play off a ROM image if your old console still works. It also _does_ say is that you can't rip your games and offer them for download over the Internet. Sorry, that's not _one_ copy, that's not for personal use, it is not for archival, and sure as heck leaves you with no way to erase all copies downloaded when you get rid of the cartridge. So anyway you want to interpret the law, hosting a site full of ROMs _is_ illegal.
But does it say that "_emulation_ is illegal"? Gimme a break. That's the most brain dead interpretation I've ever heard. It just shows that the author has no clue what emulation even means.
Or let me rephrase it: it shows that for them "emulation" just means "downloading pirated ROMs off the Internet". Sorry, no. It doesn't.
AFAIK:
:P
1. Their runes were made to be inscribed on wood. (Hence for example no curved lines. And no horizontal lines, which would be along the fiber and split the wood.)
2. They had no numerals at all.
Considering that they did a LOT of trading, seems to me like bookkeeping was a royal pain in the arse. Think about carving on wood something like "Sold two hundred fifty seven furs for one thousand seven hundred sixty eight coins". Sounds to me like an accountant back then needed serious physical condition
"Big" is almost _never_ a plus, in and by itself. Usually people take "big" because it also means they get more of something else in the process.
E.g., those 17" laptops are bought for the... big screen. Reducing everything to "either it's graphics editing, or it doesn't need high resolution" is so over-simplified, it's not even funny. E.g., most programmers on our floor work in 1600x1200, because they can see more of the program. E.g., some of us actually like large fonts that we can't read without squinting. Especially on a laptop where you might have to put up with piss-poor lighting conditions, it can make all the difference in the world for eye comfort when working on it. Etc.
Ditto for a lot of other things. A bigger car means you can haul more stuff, if needed. A bigger house gets you more space. A bigger TV is a comfort factor, if you don't watch it from 2 ft distance. Ditto for monitors: there have actually been studies that show that, for example, people actually do better in games with a bigger monitor, or rather with it filling more of their vision angle. A bigger computer case, for those who prefer those, lets you use more expansion slots and it's easier to work in. (And yes, I do know people that filled all the PCI slots on a standard size ATX motherboard.) Etc.
Yes, people tend to over-estimate how much of that extra something they need. Or rather include a hefty safety margin, just to be on the safe side.
On the other hand, when size _doesn't_ bring you anything useful, it's actually a perceived disadvantage. I could fill a mile long list of products where small is a perceived advantage, or at least doing damn well. (Assuming, of course, comparable price and performance to the bigger versions.) E.g.:
- Palmtops vs the Apple Newton, which is mentioned right in the summary. The huge Newton _wasn't_ perceived as being better.
- Walkmen/DiskMen/MP3-players vs a big huge boombox. When was the last time you saw someone on the bus with their headphones plugged into a bloody huge boombox?
- Apple's iPod vs a lot of the lame huge clones of old, that packed a freaking 5.25" drive. Which one sold better?
- SFF PCs. Last I've heard, Shuttle was doing a thriving business with those.
- Laptops vs the old "luggable" computers. (In case you haven't seen one of those, it was a bloody huge and heavy PC with a small CRT on one side. Think lugging around a full size tower, with a handle and small CRT on the top side.) When was the last time you saw a company announcing a new one of those?
- TFT vs CRT. Probably _the_ most invoked reason to go TFT is "but it doesn't take as much space on my small desk."
- For that matter, notice how in the last 20 years, CRTs (both monitors and TVs) have become shorter. There's a lot of money invested in R&D each year to hopefully shave an extra inch off the depth of TVs or monitors.
- The X-Box controller. _The_ number one reason to dis the X-Box at launch was that the controller was too big for some people's hands. Penny Arcade had their grizzly-bear-for-a-controller strip about it. Not many people thought "W00T! Big gamepads are sooo macho."
- Or speaking of consoles, see how the PS/2 getting slimmer didn't hurt its sales at all.
Etc.
Ask Roman Cavalry why they didn't do a charge with lances ;)
Yes, there are several ways of fighting on horseback. You could use a spatha (long sword), like the Romans did. Or you could do a downwards strike with a short-ish spear, like ancient greek cavalry did. Or you might even be able to use a lance, sorta, if you use the other hand to hold tight, instead of using a shield effectively. Or you could stay away and use bows as much as possible, like the Parthians and Mongolians did. Or various other ways.
The stirrups are not 100% _needed_ to fight on horseback, that is true indeed. They just make a particular style of fighting very effective.
Being able to stay in the saddle using your legs alone, if nothing else gives you full use of one arm for the shield. Increasing the rider's survivability even by a small fraction, can make a huge difference. Add the fact that an injury to the left arm doesn't make the rider completely unfit to fight, as was the documented case with ancient Greek cavalry, and you have one hell of a troop type.
That's basically what the stirrups did. They gave heavy cavalry just the extra edge to become _the_ deadliest troop type on the battlefield.
But, indeed, no more. People certainly fought on horseback before stirrups.
Dunno about him, but I never pretended to have some higher morals about it.
Having any rights has not much to do with morals, it has to do with (A) a sort of a "truce" we came up with, so we can live with each other ("ok, I won't kill you if you won't kill me"), and (B) basically being able to defend it, by hurting anyone _hard_ if they break those rules. (Or more accurately we've let the government handle the hurting part. It's more efficient that way.)
Either way, there is nothing inherent, divine or universal about those "morals". It's just an arbitrary collective truce we've come up with at some point in history -- and which is also continuously changing -- so we can live together.
However, like any truce, you need to be as dangerous to the other as he/she is to you. Otherwise one of the sides has no incentive to enter it. You could kill me, but then I could kill you instead. Maybe I'll be faster. Maybe I'll do it in your sleep. Hmm... better let's aggree that we both have a right to live. That's morals.
It's sorta like the cold war: ok, we could all become extinct, or we can just sulk and fume at each other and aggree to not shoot those missiles. That's human morals, in a nutshell.
And again, a large part in having any rights was having a big enough stick to threaten those who don't want to play by those rules.
You can probably see how that all doesn't apply to bunnies. They're cute, they're fluffy, but they're not in much of a position to make a truce with us. Now if we were talking killer bunnies like in Monty Python, who can each massacre a squad of armed elite soldiers without breaking a sweat... now that's a race we'd be willing to make a truce with. Those would have plenty of rights.
Not saying this is the "right" or moral or sensitive way to think about it. It's just the historical way it is.
Dude, effectively riding a horse into battle is _not_ a question of going "I know! Let's ride them instead of making them pull charriots!"
Yes, they wanted to ride them, but staying on the horse in battle is not as easy as it sounds. You try charging at an enemy without a saddle or stirrups, and you'll fall as soon as you hit the first enemy. It's in fact, more dangerous to yourself than to the enemy.
Early uses of horses for riding were limited to mounted infantry. Meaning that they rode the horse for transport, then dismounted and fought like infantry. Again, because they didn't have a saddle.
So basically that's what your friend's scientists were researching there. "How the heck do we keep a rider from falling right off the horse when he hits an enemy? Hmm..." And if it only took them 200 years, hey, that's a lot shorter than in took real life.
(And from discovering the saddle to being able to do a proper medieval cavalry charge, another millenia or two passed, and another invention was needed: the stirrups. But that's another discussion, for another time.)
You do bring some valid questions about communism, so here's some first-hand info. And the comparison to The Sims. Now I dunno about China, but in the Eastern European/Soviet kind of communism:
- you did get more money if you got a promotion, or simply by staying longer in the same job. They had some standardized lists of job levels, number of years in the same job, etc, which gave you a standard salary for whatever bracket you fit in.
I.e., if anything The Sims is _more_ Soviet style than American capitalism. I don't remember my Sims ever negotiating a salary... and discovering that they're paid half of what Bob Newbie earns at the same job level. Just because Bob is a white male, whereas your Sim happens to be black or female, so he/she can only get a token job at the reception.
- communism was all about giving everyone a job, and keeping them in it, regardless of any economics. (Which is one thing that drove their economy into the ground.) It couldn't happen that you suddenly got fired because the comrade commissar leading the company got a better deal outsourcing to India, or "downsized" half the company to please the shareholders.
Just like in The Sims. (You can get fired in TS2, though, but only if you choose the most spectacularly stupid choices in those random events.)
- You certainly could move to another company or switch carreers, and I personally know people who did. E.g., from economist to programmer. Or here's another bit of _fact_ for you: _all_ KGB employees had branched into it from another job. Their agents had to have a university/college degree in some unrelated job, and had been later given the opportunity to switch carreer to the KGB if the KGB deemed them worthy. Or a lot of the army officers and NCOs were poor workers and peasants who had basically switched carreer to the military because it paid better (and obviously went through a military school for it.)
Just like in The Sims, eh?
- You could definitely buy _most_ stuff without a waiting list and without anyone's approval. There were indeed things like cars, and a few others that did require waiting for years, because the economy could only supply about a tenth of the demand.
But then again, you can't even buy a car in The Sims, at all, ever. So...
- You did have to go through approval (and massive corruption) for some other stuff, depending on the country, like moving to a major city. Or in China for moving to another city at all.
Then again, in The Sims you can't even move to another _street_. You're stuck to living around Sim Lane for ever. In TS2 you can move a family to another town, but neither of them is really more than a village, so in most communist countries that would need no more paperwork than in, say, western Germany. You just had to inform the authorities that you moved there, basically.
- A lot of the stuff was heavily based on corruption and nepotism. Knowing the right person and giving them the right "gift" did more for your carreer or your position on those waiting lists, than basically anything else. Having a friend of a friend who can introduce you to the one who'll approve or deny your paperwork, was usually more than half the solution. (Yet another thing that drove their economy into the ground.)
Where have we seen something similar enough? Yep, in The Sims. You need enough friends for a promotion.
Etc.
Basically communism wasn't _that_ different as you seem to assume, once you get to the micro level that The Sims is all about. Yes, it was pretty much a synonim for oppression, corruption and poverty. No arguments there. But at micro level, you weren't exactly a slave chained to the desk where you work, either.
Their brand of slavery was slightly more subtle, and based on having not much other choice. It was a _macro_ thing, rather than micro-managing everyone. E.g., they didn't plan that _you_ are sold into slavery to do Job X for the rest of your days. They just planned that there are 200,000 of jobs i
I don't know about China, but I can tell you first hand that in Eastern Europe during communism, people also bought stuff to feel good about themselves. There were people starving themselves and their family for a lifetime to get a bigger TV or an imported car, or to show off at work that they can afford imported cigarettes or whatever.
Again, from experience, I can tell you that The Sims could have been just as well about a Soviet family, or a Czech one, or a Bulgarian one, or an East German one. Maybe the prices would be 10 times higher, then, but that's about it. (Well, and also homosexuality would get your sims arrested.)
The difference is the abbundance and cost of goods. In America you might not _need_ to take a loan to get a new fridge. (But you might do it anyway.) And in The Sims you only need to "save up" for 3 days or so for a fridge. In Eastern Europe, you'd feel the monthly paymets a lot more.
But the basic phenomenon is the same. It's basically about keeping up with the Joneses, or preferrably one-upping the Joneses.
And it's existed everywhere humans live, and for as long as humans have existed. No offense to the Egyptians, whose ancient culture I actually admire, but the pyramids are the perfect example of that phenomenon happening verbatim some 4000 years ago. They started with a small mastaba, and ended up with monstrosities that took a lifetime to build, and cost the country a lot. Because each pharaoh wanted to show all y'all that his... ahem... obelisk, is bigger than yours. And than the previous pharaoh's.
Or in the same ancient times phoenicians made a fortune trading in luxury items, like purple dye. It had no other value than being an expensive thing to show off with. Made some people good about themselves that they can afford it. Proto-Consumerism at its finest back then, eh?
And so on, and so forth.
So basically I think the Chinese government is kidding themselves if they think that China is above consumerism.
Having totalled more than a year of playing The Sims 1 and several months of TS2, I can however say that it will _never_ happen spontaneously. Unlike, say, "Singles" which gives you a gay guy and a lesbian among the character choices from the start, in TS all sims start as straight as a fir tree. You have to actually deliberately babysit them into same-sex love.
So I'm not sure what Beijing is trying to protect the upstanding chinese youth from. From the idea that homosexuality does exist? Well, it seems to me that they had to already know that, if they pushed their sims down that path.
"Woohoo"ing in TS2 is even more intriguing. Bearing in mind that it's not even some hot steamy pornography, but some cartoonish something-nondescript-happening-under-the-blanket animation.
So Beijing is trying to do... what? Keep their youth (and by that I don't mean "children", since the ESRB rating already says it's not for children) safe from the idea that people can and occasionally do have sex? Just gotta wonder.
I mean, as a die-hard The Sims and The Sims 2 player, I can't see much that would count as either capitalist or communist in it. It's a generic family, in a generic foreign country (they don't even speak English or any real language), and earning some made up currency (it's "simoleans" not "dollars", and you can't easily convert that into any real currency, because the price ratios and wages are all wrong for any real country.) They go to work, they spend their money on groceries and a bigger TV, and occasionally have dinner with their friends. They can't even open their own business at home, or anything that would count as capitalistic.
I.e., it's generic stuff that's no different in communist China from the USA.
I mean, that TS2 family could just as well be two communist patriotic comrades going to work in the government-owned factories, and buying their fridge from a government-owned store.
One reason the AMD 64 works so well is precisely because they _reduced_ latency. That's basically the great advantage that the IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) offers.
Funny abstraction layers and everything being agnostic of everything else is a nice CS theoretician fantasy. In a CS theory utopia everything should be abstracted, or better yet virtualized. Any actual hardware or other implementation details should be buried 6 ft deep, under layers after layers of abstraction or better yet emulation.
The problem is that reality doesn't work that way. Every such abstraction layer, such as buffering and translating some generic RAM interface costs time. Every single detail you play agnostic about, runs you the risk of doing something extremely stupid and slow. (E.g., from another domain: I've seen entirely too many program implementations that, in the quest to abstract and ignore the database, end up with a flurry of connections just to save one stupid record.) Performance problems here we come.
The AMD 64 runs fast precisely because it has one _less_ level of abstraction and virtualization. Precisely because their CPU does _not_ play agnostic and let the north-bridge handle the actual RAM details. No, they know all about RAM, and they use it better that way.
So adding an abstraction layer right back (even if one that moves the north-bridge on the RAM stick) would solve... what? Shave some 10% out of the performance? No, thanks.
Or you mention SRAM. Well, the only advantage to SRAM is that it's faster than DRAM. Adding an extra couple of cycles of latency to it would be just a bloody stupid way to get DRAM performance out of expensive SRAM. Over-priced under-performing solutions, here we come.
Wouldn't it be easier to just stick to DRAM _without_ extra abstraction layers to start with? You know, instead of then having to pay a mint for SRAM just to get back to where you started?
Not meant as a flame. Just a quick reflection on how the real world is that-a-way, and utopias with a dozen abstraction layers are in the exact opposite direction.