The Pentium M is basically a souped-up Pentium-III. The Intel vice presidents and managers who were responsible for the Pentium-IV and its thefts of technologies from DEC don't want to admit that the theft was wasted and the switchover to RAMbus heralded by the Pentium-IV was a complete waste of many billions of dollars of everyone's time, effort, and money.
Tom's Hardware goes into good detail on why the Pentium M is superior, but the basic reason is vastly lower power consumption by not using unnecessary technologies, with its improvements in cooling and reliability.
It doesn't have to be from another city. The ISP's are unwilling to act, lest they lose their common carrier status and lest they lose paying customers who pay them, individually, chunks of money for serious bandwidth, or lest they have to actually inconvenience their paying customers whose machines are being used as spam sites or spam relays. There are plenty of spammers in the same city, and even on the same ISP as the folks who try to get spam blocked, and being a customer doesn't necessarily help.
The law can't be bothered to act: the crimes are usually too small, and any attempt to punish the spammers meets with massive resistence from the Direct Marketing Association, and the fear of "costing jobs" by cutting into online direct marketing of even slightly more reasonable sorts.
The result is that spammers are only legally blocked if they break other laws, such as wirefraud or flat-out theft, and only when it involves large sums. So instead, we have piecemeal enforcement of scattered policies, and occasionally effective vigilante activity such as the DOS attack that finally got Agis to cut off the feed for the spammer Cyberpromo, who was one of their biggest customers.
Vigilantism is nasty, but as long as it is literally the only way to contral these abusive activities, we'll continue to see it used.
Forget it. If I wanted to run an open source version of a dead operating system with no significant development occurring and a dwindling customer base on legacy hardware, I'd run OpenVMS.
OS/2 should have been dumped 5 years ago due to its lack of actual applications and development. It's a sign of IBM's slow turnover of staff and very stable customer base that they've retained it this long.
It also happens a lot less often if you don't expect people to do unnecessary, difficult to trace work with useless repetitive tasks, such as doing unnecessary unit conversions.
The use of calculators encourages this kind of idiocy, because when you say "1/4 inch" and get 0.65 millimeters out, you lose your sense of what the original unit was.
[Note: it's actually 0.65 centimeters, not millimeters. You see the problem?]
In the short term, expect to see a lot of failed wafers. The alignment problems between different fabricated wafers are going to make the interconnectors mismatch and fail under stress, or as manufactured junctions "creep", especially under thermal load. Also expect to see some nasty behavior with capacitive or inductive coupling between transistors which are vertically on top of each other, instead of merely adjacent. Groundplane, groundbounce, and other related issues are about to take a quantum leap in complexity with this approach.
You have a point, the secondary document management problem occurs elsewhere. But the effects you gain from using CSS, those effects so vaunted by the web GUI design tools, don't take CSS. They take careful authorship and functions like the simple PHP "include" operations.
Javascript, which I also loathe in most of its uses, does not actually require separate documents. And images are mostly eye candy: they contribute nothing to the usability or actual information of the page, except in a few cases. For examples of this, take a look at the Slashdot page in front of you. The cutesy icons and cutesy frames around it actually contribute almost nothing to its usefulness and information content.
Certainly. Actually writing the web pages is often done locally, and the contents transferred to the actual web site by copying the file over. If you use CSS files, you have to remember to also transfer the edited CSS files to the correct relative locations, except that a lot of the modern GUI's have a bad habit of replacing any relative links, content, inclusions, or anything else with absolute paths. This includes auto-managing the CSS sheets or any other attachments, inclusions, or associated files.
The result is an incredible mess when you transfer the contents back and forth, and leads to people doing amazing absurdities such as running SMB, unsecured, over unsecured Internet lines so they can edit the files in a locally mounted directory and not have to do transfers.
A free-standing, no inclusion webpage doesn't have this transfer problem. And the level of pure crap auto-generated by many GUI's is not an HTML 3.x vs. HTML 4.x issue: it's simply bad code with excessive and unnecessary, proprietary and badly done "features" stuffed on top of the basic page by the particular GUI.
If you don't believe me, go take a look at how people use FrontPage and MS Word-generated HTML, and compare it to a simply written and much smaller webpage actually written with a text editor.
Both have tended to be absolute dreck when generated by various web design GUI's. Editing the CSS is in fact worse, becauase integrating and transferring the locations for the CSS tags for upload is even worse than having to deal with single files for single functions.
Both benefit tremendously from being written by good programmers or written with good, clean code generating tools. But the number of those in webwork is very small.
Who knows when IE will ever support any standard correctly? By keeping the pages and the layout consistent with the oldest HTML standards, I know that my stuff will always work.
I block yahoo email, and hotmail. It prevents a lot of spam, and out of all the email I manage, I got one complaint about it being blocked, from a VP whose wife I talked to and gave her a direct dialup line on our corporate hosted external spamtrap server.
It saves my spam filters a lot of work.
Agreed. 242 million dollars was just too much to pretend "we cannot help you, go talk to this other office". Stealing that much money would get Interpol and the various countries embassies to actually notice, and cut off Nigerian bankloans and aids.
The Nigerian scams will continue unabated as long as Nigeria is so poor and fraud one of their main sources of good solid foreign currency.
Leave out the Javascript. There's usually no excuse for it, and once again the little pop-up widgets and cutesiieness that requires Javascript makes the pages harder to use for the blind or even people with RSI as they try to get the mouse to *just the right place* to do what they need without the annoying pop-ups obscuring their motions.
I'm in a happy place. The old code works, and will continue to work for many years because so much data and so much archived web content uses the old content.
It's like the "requirement" to update to C++. CSS is not sufficiently stable, legible, or consistent to use it yet as a standard. By simply writing good, clean HTML, you get all the benefits that CSS was supposed to provide, without the prettified silliness that actually obscures the content of the page.
I tend to use tables for things that benefit from them, like columns of text where the entries all actually need to be in the same row or column to be readable, instead of doing it just because I can. The only time I use font for is when I want a specific line of text to be different for appearance reasons: I find its general overuse instead of using things like H1, H2, etc. tages to be an incredibly burdensome behavior of many automatic web generating tools.
I'll stick with the bold tag, thank you, because it's smaller, faster to write, and renders correctly iin everything I've ever seen with any browser I've used.
You mean "deprecated", not "depreciated". If its fiscal value were dropping over time, then it would have "depreciated".
But deprecating this very common tag is an example of the problem of theoretical constructs being poorly implemented in practice. It's one of the commonest tags in existence, its meaning is completely clear, and it's extremely lightweight. Trying to deprecate it is a complete waste of the W3C's time.
The bold flag is still in wide use, even by the various commercial webdesign tools. It's also completely understood in its behavior, faster to type, and represents fewer bytes in the web page itself.
It mentions how to do CSS well and avoid the weirdnesses so common to the auto-generated stylesheets of various design tools that I mention above, and I can where such well-written CSS could help.
However, the badly written, auto-generating, extremely bad "GUI" based webdesign tools such as FrontPage among Windows users yield complete trash. Given the overwhelming percentage of such awful CSS on websites, and the use of such style sheets where simply not necessary at all, I'm forced to conclude that the underlying technology should be discarded where feasible.
Everything good that style sheets does can be done in PHP. This creates a slight serverload, but in my experience creates much better, cleaner, fast-to-download web pages.
Linus, is that you? Excellent!
I use flat HTML, test with Lynx, and it works on everything. If I need shared content among web pages, I'll use PHP and includes.
Coding to simpler and more robust standards, rather than "feature-driven" ones, reduces the load on the browser, on the server, on the bandwidth, and in the long-term on the designer. It allows the pages to work correctly years later without re-writing it every six months for yet-another-client or yet-another-server.
It also keeps the websites accessible and workable for the blind or almost blind, with whom I've worked, who may need extensive aids to read even simple flat text web pages and find magical pop-ups, expandind and morphing weblinks, and other demoware frippery to actively interfere with the most basic web access.
Microsoft doesn't just *tell* them to use it. They hardcode it into their web design tools. If you've ever dealt with FrontPage or other Microsoft tools, you'll see them "embrace and extend" their features right into userland where the site owner or their secretary are expected to integrate address changes, and it gets sold to them as a "managed package".
AMD doesn't have the Palladium, renamed Trusted Computing, yet. That's a compelling reason to switch to to Intel instead of AMD when you factor in that the one core piece of Microsoft still used by a majority of Apple users is Microsoft Office. If they can't use their Microsoft Office, or get the document signatures working and wireless computing to work right with Microsoft-based networks, there will be even more pressure not to use MacOS in the workplace.
It's not that these reasons are compelling, but enough encouraging reasons like this added together could get Apple to switch to Intel. There doesn't have to be only one reason.
I agree with your comments about BSD or other open source licenses being good approaches: I just prefer the GPL license for a number of subtle reasons.
But on what possible basis do you claim Windows is clean? Given the settlements with DEC for David Cutler and his merry gang of software pirates re-using David's old work at DEC to build NT, and the numerous patent and copyright violations Microsoft has been caught at since then, and the plain old obvious theft of technologies like the Microsoft Mouse, how can you possibly claim that Windows is clean of blatant intellectual property theft?
Active Directory is damned easy to use, until you try to actually secure it or put any load on it or interoperate properly with any other services. Then it breaks, badly, and in undocumented ways. The DNS implementation alone in a 1000 machine alone will take a full time staff person to manage and secure.
But those costs have to be presented to the management, who are being shown lots of charts and demoware that frankly lie about AD.
No, some end users leave long and intense simulation jobs running. Others don't want to have to re-open their windows, others have active network connections monitoring other services, others are just dumb and forget to save their work, others hate having to log in and leave their login sessions active for weeks.
I've seen all of these behavior in the last week among fewer than 10 people.
Slashdot Mirror
The Pentium M is basically a souped-up Pentium-III. The Intel vice presidents and managers who were responsible for the Pentium-IV and its thefts of technologies from DEC don't want to admit that the theft was wasted and the switchover to RAMbus heralded by the Pentium-IV was a complete waste of many billions of dollars of everyone's time, effort, and money.
Tom's Hardware goes into good detail on why the Pentium M is superior, but the basic reason is vastly lower power consumption by not using unnecessary technologies, with its improvements in cooling and reliability.
It doesn't have to be from another city. The ISP's are unwilling to act, lest they lose their common carrier status and lest they lose paying customers who pay them, individually, chunks of money for serious bandwidth, or lest they have to actually inconvenience their paying customers whose machines are being used as spam sites or spam relays. There are plenty of spammers in the same city, and even on the same ISP as the folks who try to get spam blocked, and being a customer doesn't necessarily help.
The law can't be bothered to act: the crimes are usually too small, and any attempt to punish the spammers meets with massive resistence from the Direct Marketing Association, and the fear of "costing jobs" by cutting into online direct marketing of even slightly more reasonable sorts.
The result is that spammers are only legally blocked if they break other laws, such as wirefraud or flat-out theft, and only when it involves large sums. So instead, we have piecemeal enforcement of scattered policies, and occasionally effective vigilante activity such as the DOS attack that finally got Agis to cut off the feed for the spammer Cyberpromo, who was one of their biggest customers.
Vigilantism is nasty, but as long as it is literally the only way to contral these abusive activities, we'll continue to see it used.
Forget it. If I wanted to run an open source version of a dead operating system with no significant development occurring and a dwindling customer base on legacy hardware, I'd run OpenVMS.
OS/2 should have been dumped 5 years ago due to its lack of actual applications and development. It's a sign of IBM's slow turnover of staff and very stable customer base that they've retained it this long.
It also happens a lot less often if you don't expect people to do unnecessary, difficult to trace work with useless repetitive tasks, such as doing unnecessary unit conversions. The use of calculators encourages this kind of idiocy, because when you say "1/4 inch" and get 0.65 millimeters out, you lose your sense of what the original unit was. [Note: it's actually 0.65 centimeters, not millimeters. You see the problem?]
In the short term, expect to see a lot of failed wafers. The alignment problems between different fabricated wafers are going to make the interconnectors mismatch and fail under stress, or as manufactured junctions "creep", especially under thermal load. Also expect to see some nasty behavior with capacitive or inductive coupling between transistors which are vertically on top of each other, instead of merely adjacent. Groundplane, groundbounce, and other related issues are about to take a quantum leap in complexity with this approach.
You have a point, the secondary document management problem occurs elsewhere. But the effects you gain from using CSS, those effects so vaunted by the web GUI design tools, don't take CSS. They take careful authorship and functions like the simple PHP "include" operations.
Javascript, which I also loathe in most of its uses, does not actually require separate documents. And images are mostly eye candy: they contribute nothing to the usability or actual information of the page, except in a few cases. For examples of this, take a look at the Slashdot page in front of you. The cutesy icons and cutesy frames around it actually contribute almost nothing to its usefulness and information content.
Certainly. Actually writing the web pages is often done locally, and the contents transferred to the actual web site by copying the file over. If you use CSS files, you have to remember to also transfer the edited CSS files to the correct relative locations, except that a lot of the modern GUI's have a bad habit of replacing any relative links, content, inclusions, or anything else with absolute paths. This includes auto-managing the CSS sheets or any other attachments, inclusions, or associated files.
The result is an incredible mess when you transfer the contents back and forth, and leads to people doing amazing absurdities such as running SMB, unsecured, over unsecured Internet lines so they can edit the files in a locally mounted directory and not have to do transfers.
A free-standing, no inclusion webpage doesn't have this transfer problem. And the level of pure crap auto-generated by many GUI's is not an HTML 3.x vs. HTML 4.x issue: it's simply bad code with excessive and unnecessary, proprietary and badly done "features" stuffed on top of the basic page by the particular GUI.
If you don't believe me, go take a look at how people use FrontPage and MS Word-generated HTML, and compare it to a simply written and much smaller webpage actually written with a text editor.
Both have tended to be absolute dreck when generated by various web design GUI's. Editing the CSS is in fact worse, becauase integrating and transferring the locations for the CSS tags for upload is even worse than having to deal with single files for single functions. Both benefit tremendously from being written by good programmers or written with good, clean code generating tools. But the number of those in webwork is very small.
Who knows when IE will ever support any standard correctly? By keeping the pages and the layout consistent with the oldest HTML standards, I know that my stuff will always work.
I block yahoo email, and hotmail. It prevents a lot of spam, and out of all the email I manage, I got one complaint about it being blocked, from a VP whose wife I talked to and gave her a direct dialup line on our corporate hosted external spamtrap server. It saves my spam filters a lot of work.
Agreed. 242 million dollars was just too much to pretend "we cannot help you, go talk to this other office". Stealing that much money would get Interpol and the various countries embassies to actually notice, and cut off Nigerian bankloans and aids.
The Nigerian scams will continue unabated as long as Nigeria is so poor and fraud one of their main sources of good solid foreign currency.
Leave out the Javascript. There's usually no excuse for it, and once again the little pop-up widgets and cutesiieness that requires Javascript makes the pages harder to use for the blind or even people with RSI as they try to get the mouse to *just the right place* to do what they need without the annoying pop-ups obscuring their motions.
I'm in a happy place. The old code works, and will continue to work for many years because so much data and so much archived web content uses the old content.
It's like the "requirement" to update to C++. CSS is not sufficiently stable, legible, or consistent to use it yet as a standard. By simply writing good, clean HTML, you get all the benefits that CSS was supposed to provide, without the prettified silliness that actually obscures the content of the page.
I tend to use tables for things that benefit from them, like columns of text where the entries all actually need to be in the same row or column to be readable, instead of doing it just because I can. The only time I use font for is when I want a specific line of text to be different for appearance reasons: I find its general overuse instead of using things like H1, H2, etc. tages to be an incredibly burdensome behavior of many automatic web generating tools.
I'll stick with the bold tag, thank you, because it's smaller, faster to write, and renders correctly iin everything I've ever seen with any browser I've used.
You mean "deprecated", not "depreciated". If its fiscal value were dropping over time, then it would have "depreciated".
But deprecating this very common tag is an example of the problem of theoretical constructs being poorly implemented in practice. It's one of the commonest tags in existence, its meaning is completely clear, and it's extremely lightweight. Trying to deprecate it is a complete waste of the W3C's time.
The bold flag is still in wide use, even by the various commercial webdesign tools. It's also completely understood in its behavior, faster to type, and represents fewer bytes in the web page itself.
I don't think it's going away soon.
The W3C guide you mention is fascinating, and a good read, at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/.
It mentions how to do CSS well and avoid the weirdnesses so common to the auto-generated stylesheets of various design tools that I mention above, and I can where such well-written CSS could help.
However, the badly written, auto-generating, extremely bad "GUI" based webdesign tools such as FrontPage among Windows users yield complete trash. Given the overwhelming percentage of such awful CSS on websites, and the use of such style sheets where simply not necessary at all, I'm forced to conclude that the underlying technology should be discarded where feasible.
Everything good that style sheets does can be done in PHP. This creates a slight serverload, but in my experience creates much better, cleaner, fast-to-download web pages.
Linus, is that you? Excellent! I use flat HTML, test with Lynx, and it works on everything. If I need shared content among web pages, I'll use PHP and includes. Coding to simpler and more robust standards, rather than "feature-driven" ones, reduces the load on the browser, on the server, on the bandwidth, and in the long-term on the designer. It allows the pages to work correctly years later without re-writing it every six months for yet-another-client or yet-another-server. It also keeps the websites accessible and workable for the blind or almost blind, with whom I've worked, who may need extensive aids to read even simple flat text web pages and find magical pop-ups, expandind and morphing weblinks, and other demoware frippery to actively interfere with the most basic web access.
Can you post the code that does this, please?
Microsoft doesn't just *tell* them to use it. They hardcode it into their web design tools. If you've ever dealt with FrontPage or other Microsoft tools, you'll see them "embrace and extend" their features right into userland where the site owner or their secretary are expected to integrate address changes, and it gets sold to them as a "managed package".
AMD doesn't have the Palladium, renamed Trusted Computing, yet. That's a compelling reason to switch to to Intel instead of AMD when you factor in that the one core piece of Microsoft still used by a majority of Apple users is Microsoft Office. If they can't use their Microsoft Office, or get the document signatures working and wireless computing to work right with Microsoft-based networks, there will be even more pressure not to use MacOS in the workplace.
It's not that these reasons are compelling, but enough encouraging reasons like this added together could get Apple to switch to Intel. There doesn't have to be only one reason.
And a chainsaw. Don't forget the chainsaw.
I agree with your comments about BSD or other open source licenses being good approaches: I just prefer the GPL license for a number of subtle reasons.
But on what possible basis do you claim Windows is clean? Given the settlements with DEC for David Cutler and his merry gang of software pirates re-using David's old work at DEC to build NT, and the numerous patent and copyright violations Microsoft has been caught at since then, and the plain old obvious theft of technologies like the Microsoft Mouse, how can you possibly claim that Windows is clean of blatant intellectual property theft?
Active Directory is damned easy to use, until you try to actually secure it or put any load on it or interoperate properly with any other services. Then it breaks, badly, and in undocumented ways. The DNS implementation alone in a 1000 machine alone will take a full time staff person to manage and secure.
But those costs have to be presented to the management, who are being shown lots of charts and demoware that frankly lie about AD.
No, some end users leave long and intense simulation jobs running. Others don't want to have to re-open their windows, others have active network connections monitoring other services, others are just dumb and forget to save their work, others hate having to log in and leave their login sessions active for weeks.
I've seen all of these behavior in the last week among fewer than 10 people.