One of the biggest problems in the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts is civilian Palestinians facing off against isolated Israeli soldiers. If an Israeli soldier fires his weapon, there's anger. If the bullet hits a kid who's in the wrong place at the wrong time, there's an international uproar.
This isn't a war situation, but it is most definitely a military situation for the Israelis. The Palestinians throwing stones probably aren't trying to kill the soldiers, not directly anyway. The soldiers probably don't want to kill the Palestinians, either.
Nonlethal force could help decellerate the "eye-for-an-eye" counter attacks that both sides seem to practice.
Nonlethal force could give these soldiers a new option, one which would encourage people to resolve their differences without rapid escalation of force.
I grew up more-or-less at the poverty line. I thought then, and still think, that space exploration is a great and necessary thing. Note that I'm discussing space exploration, not microgravity experiments, for the purposes of my argument.
Unmanned space exploration gives us an target. Manned space exploration gives us inspiration. A lot of kids grow up wanting to be an astronaut, regardless of their income bracket. This kind of dream helps propel us to work and try harder at everything we do. I know that much of my early ambition came from this dream.
I'm not an astronaut now, instead I'm a mathematics Ph.D. student. My dad didn't graduate from high school, and my mother wasn't allowed to go to trade school (she had to 'repay' her father by staying on the farm). My academic ambitions sure didn't come from their educations. And it didn't come from tax cuts either, as far as that goes. I wanted to be an astronaut, and I knew that I would have to work hard to get there.
I'm not trying to argue that NASA has always been well-managed and fiscally responsible, or that all space-related research needs to be federally funded. My point is that space exploration is an important part of humanity's dreams and the American social fabric (what little there is).
Reducing poverty, and exploring space, are not mutually exclusive. Giving big tax cuts to millionaires so that they can have better home theaters, and reducing poverty while funding NASA at an appropriate level, are mutually exclusive. I would propose that social goals should take precidence over individual goals, and that America is rich enough as a society to have loftier goals than tax cuts.
Thanks for the reference to Kuhn. I got the quote from a poster in the physics department at my old university, and I suspect it wasn't quoted from Kuhn (perhaps misattributed).
I too am not content to sit back and wait for dumb ideas to die. However, I feel powerless against the masses of unreasoning and ego-controlled intellects out there. So I make a few jokes about the dumb ideas instead. Maybe I can make the unreasoning people laugh, which at least would be a connection!
I think that people aren't (well the dumb ones are) objecting to companies making lots of money off of tax-payer investment, without giving anything back. For instance, Microsoft and Cisco paid no income tax last year. When was the last time you paid no income tax?
Microsoft does very little to improve the social fabric of the US. In fact, many "corporate individuals" do very little to improve the social fabric in proportion to what they gain from our society--for instance, a market. And for some reason this doesn't seem to bother Americans. Except me. For an example from Microsoft, IIRC, they didn't let temp workers bring their kids in during one of those "show your kids where you work days" at Microsoft. Can you imagine anything more mean-spirited?
An easy solution to the "dilema" between your view and the pro-government-using-GPL view is for the government to dual license the work. GPL everything, but offer some sort of small fee license for closed-source work. I know this is at odds with your idea of "free for everyone", but remember that Microsoft and Cisco aren't taxpayers (they didn't pay any taxes last year).;-)
This would do something to enrich the social fabric, at the expense of rich people getting richer.
A big part of the Microsoft bashing came from the lack of security inherent in the scheme. In particular:
1) ActiveX stuff could do whatever it wanted with your machine
2) The digitally signed stuff was a joke at the time. All you had to do was submit a credit card and address, and they'd give you a signature.
3) When someone pointed this out to Microsoft and eventually the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the response from Microsoft was "The security would be too hard to fix, and we'd like you to meet the Verisign legal team."
Go see Fred McLain's story at http://www.halcyon.com/mclain/ActiveX/welcome.html .
Somehow, I feel like I should expect to meet the Verisign legal team soon. From what I've heard, Verisign has become more careful about the signatures. And as we've all heard, Microsoft still thinks fixing security holes is too hard to be worth the effort (to be worthwhile for their shareholders, of course, since they are publicly held).
Of course the ignorant will eventually go away. When they die. Of course, you have to live with their kids, then. With any luck, they won't successfully reproduce. Since bad habits are contagious (possibly stupidity, too), perhaps their descendants will eventually forget to breathe and die out entirely.
I'm not sure if it was Plank, Rutherford, or some other really famous scientist, but one of them said (loosely quoting) "Scientific theories don't become laws because of repeated failure to disprove the theories. Rather, they become laws because all of their opponents die."
When you say "Sorry, but...", I expect that you're going to follow with a solid contradiction of the parent post. You really let me down. Quite a few compared to what? Zero? Even then you're on thin ice. Maybe you mean "Quite a few for small values of few, especially small when compared with the number of civilizations (how defined?) that have existed."
Probably the most important innovation of the open source community is the open source community. Linux was developed via the internet, taking advantage of this new communications medium. I'm suggesting that the innovation is social, not technical.
Progress can mean a lot of things besides a new widget. Sometimes it means finding a better way to do something. I'd say that the open source movement is among the most efficient software-producing strategies anyone has ever seen. I didn't say fastest, I said most efficient -- think (total output) / (total input).
Linus' model for kernel development wasn't obvious, to him or anyone else. Nobody even had a chance to try such a large distributed and uncoordinated undertaking before the Internet was made available to the world public. Linus helped the idea evolve, and made it work.
The GNU project has done something very similar with their development model though they were more academically focussed and based, if I understand correctly -- which eventually evolved alongside the Linux kernel. The model is still evolving, witness sourceforge and services like cosource.
These are very real innvoations. I expect that you have a very specialized definition of innovation which allows you to say "Innovation is usually the result of the work of a few people." In particular, I think your special definition is probably something like "Innovation is the result of the work of a few people." You mind seems closed.
I don't think you want your doctor to charge by time, unless you have so much money you've forgotten about the Real World. If they charge by time, are you going to mention that strange pain you sometimes feel in your left arm?
Do you know what your talking about/asking? Windows is an operating system, providing (too damn few, IMO) useful services to programmers and users. Motif is a set of libraries implementing stuff used in GUIs on X11, as well as some standards for look and feel. This includes widgets, gadgets, IPC, resource management, etc.
You don't 'customize' widget sets -- you customize applications, for instance your window manager. Adding new context menus in (finally) Windows 2000 is a customization of the Windows Presentation Manager, or whatever they call their window manager these days. This option is a nice addition to Windows 2000, but it represents a tiny part of what you might want to customize, and doesn't hold a candle to the customizeability of any window manager I've used under X11. Can you change the bindings on the keys and mouse? Can you change the location, shape, and contents of the title bars? The KDE window manager (kwm?) is okay, and evidently very flexible even though that flexibility isn't exposed through the gui configurator (or wasn't the last time I used it).
When you say you've used Motif, I expect you mean the Motif Window Manager, or mwm. Although this is the default wm on a lot of workstations, I don't actually know anybody that liked it. And the scary 'managability' that you mention probably comes from generality. fvwm is much nicer, IMO, for configuring, and the newer Gnome stuff is pretty easy through the fairly extensive gui configuration programs (but editing textfiles is still the most powerful).
Pure functionality is an interesting term, since it implies some sort of objectivity. I think what you must mean is "The Windows and MacOS window managers are my favorites". Neither one of these supports multiple virtual desktops, AFAIK. Neither one has the variety of applets and monitors that are available via KDE or GNOME or FVWM. And neither one provides decent command-line interfaces -- you can't resize the DOS prompt, no tab completion, no shell language worth speaking of, they don't even install doskey by default. No wonder Windows users are afraid of command line interfaces, the one provided by Windows is so bad!
I have no idea what you mean by "On PDA's, PalmOS follows a close second" -- second to what? Windows on PC? Again, I expect you're talking about window managers, not widget sets or operating systems. And comparing PDAs to PCs is stupid.
Overall, you sound a little confused about the structure of your operating environment. Linux in a nutshell: 1) kernel, 2) shell, 3) X11, 4) window manager. I can't really do Windows in a nutshell, because I'm really not that familiar with it. But I think it's all one big tangled ball of twine, which in Linux would be something like: 1) kernel+shell+X11, 2) window manager, 3) other parts of shell and X11. If you want to pick a fight, try to argue that the Windows model is better for security, stability, or performance.
Oh, and OS/2's Presentation Manager kicked Windows' and MacOS' window managers collective asses! =-)
It's not as though we're struggling to populate this planet. We're still having a lot of problems coping with regular reproduction -- the last thing we need is a new way to make people. Once we're good at controlling our sex urges, then maybe we can be trusted to control our scientific urges.
We can't even agree on what people make good parents -- who is going to parent young clones? Do we vote on it, and mysteriously elect George Bush? Do we use ebay? Or sell the clones to an American set of parents, kidnap them, and resell them to a higher bidder in the UK? Some parents don't seem to mind killing their regularly-conceived children if supporting them is too much work -- I imagine that it will be more difficult to invest your life in a clone.
Most of what you say makes sense. But Abrash optimizing DirectX code doesn't help EVERY game, anymore than EVERY game runs on Windows. DirectX optimizations aren't going to make Linux Quake3 run faster. This is the tragedy of "proprietary"--it means everybody loses except the proprieter.
I don't know what kind of emergency systems you're referring to--not because I think you're wrong, rather I just don't know much about the original design. However, I was told that the early flights used some sort of ejection mechanism, which was later removed for space and weight reasons (once they considered the shuttle safe enough).
I was going to cut you some slack for overlooking obvious counterexamples, but not after you mention toasters. While modern toasters integrate power to arrive at optimal toasting, their springs are weak, often you can't raise the toast extra high, and they only last about 3 years.
* Every motherboard I've owned with an IDE chipset has given me grief after 2 to 3 years. However, the IDE controller card from my 486 worked at least until I stopped using the 486--for a total of about 4 years. I assume it is still working.
* My Western Digital 9 year-old 80MB hard drive still works, as does my 5 year-old 1.2 GB Connor CFA12xxa (don't remember exactly), but I've had a couple Maxtors fail on me w/in 3 years. The Connor still gets regular use, but the WD doesn't.
* My first pair of Adidas "torsion" indoor soccor shoes had really nice leather and lasted over a year (this was the first generation). The next generation were plasticy and didn't last long (say, half a year).
* Computer cases used to be damn-near bullet-proof (some were, in fact, bullet-proof) and never once cut me. Moder cases get bent when UPS drops them (i.e. every time they're shipped with UPS) and cut me more often.
* The previous generation of Pantene Pro-V shampoo and conditioner were better (less volume went farther, better effects on hair) then the current generation. However, the current generation costs $0.50 more and I haven't seen it on sale once.
* My HP 550c inkjet printer rocked. My HP 612c sucks. Not only is the print quality much lower, and it makes lots of funny groaning noises (as does every other 612c I've heard), but it doesn't have as much manual control.
* Recording engineers have gone down the tubes. Old recording almost always sound better. DDD recordings offer no benefits if the engineer had tin ears. This example even includes the word 'engineer', so it should be doubly weighted.
* I think staplers have mostly gotten worse, but I'm not really sure.
* Bread quality really sucks these days. You have to work damn hard to find good bread in a supermarket.
* CPU fans (socket 7, anyway) are junk. Oh, wait, my 486 fan was junk, too.
* It's hard to get a keyboard (a cheap one, anyway) without those damned Win95 keys.
I guess I've gone a little astray on this. Not all of these are engineering examples, but I feel better having publicly posted this gripe list.;-)
By what math are Alphas 2x faster than Intel on the FP side, per clock? Last I checked, SpecFP was 3x faster, and my code moves about 5x faster. And if you can fit everything into the mammoth caches, you'll really move flat-out. (Yes, I'm an Alpha evangelist!)
I tested povray once on my AMD K6-2 450 versus an Alpha 21264 500 I have access to, on a scene that took my old 386 SX-20 a week to render (ah, the good old days). The Alpha finished *20* times faster than the AMD. I think the times were about 12 seconds versus less than 1/2 second, but I really don't remember.
Even if Intel's chips were twice as fast as the K6-2 chips, that's still 10x worse than the Alpha 21264. It is difficult to explain a 20x speedup. That's why we think it was a matter of cache. Also, the compilers we used, some version of egcc on the AMD and DEC's cc on the Alpha, would of course affect things. But egcs on the AMD is pretty good...
How are you measuring RAM? I would guess that you're just looking at what the monitors in Windows and Linux (such as provided from/proc via top or ps) are telling you. I have no idea how the Window's memory monitor (it does come with one, yes?) measures things, but/proc includes the frame buffer on your 64MB super-duper video card.
1) The Aibos are playing, but not well. The wheeled robots are better, from what I've been told and seen.
2) Honda's robots can't do dynamics, just kinetics. What I mean is that they can take actions which are stable at all times, like walking; but not take actions which pass through instabilities, like jumping or running.
This doesn't mean that Honda's robots aren't interesting. It does mean that watching them play football (soccer) wouldn't be interesting!
The Reg is proud of its skew! And any intelligent reader should be able to identify it--it's usually humorous. Obviously you're an intelligent reader. Why does this put so many people off?
And I don't care about protecting readers who can't detect the skew. For those interested, The Reg is skewed against everything--they don't like anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest problems in the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts is civilian Palestinians facing off against isolated Israeli soldiers. If an Israeli soldier fires his weapon, there's anger. If the bullet hits a kid who's in the wrong place at the wrong time, there's an international uproar.
This isn't a war situation, but it is most definitely a military situation for the Israelis. The Palestinians throwing stones probably aren't trying to kill the soldiers, not directly anyway. The soldiers probably don't want to kill the Palestinians, either.
Nonlethal force could help decellerate the "eye-for-an-eye" counter attacks that both sides seem to practice.
Nonlethal force could give these soldiers a new option, one which would encourage people to resolve their differences without rapid escalation of force.
-Paul Komarek
I grew up more-or-less at the poverty line. I thought then, and still think, that space exploration is a great and necessary thing. Note that I'm discussing space exploration, not microgravity experiments, for the purposes of my argument.
Unmanned space exploration gives us an target. Manned space exploration gives us inspiration. A lot of kids grow up wanting to be an astronaut, regardless of their income bracket. This kind of dream helps propel us to work and try harder at everything we do. I know that much of my early ambition came from this dream.
I'm not an astronaut now, instead I'm a mathematics Ph.D. student. My dad didn't graduate from high school, and my mother wasn't allowed to go to trade school (she had to 'repay' her father by staying on the farm). My academic ambitions sure didn't come from their educations. And it didn't come from tax cuts either, as far as that goes. I wanted to be an astronaut, and I knew that I would have to work hard to get there.
I'm not trying to argue that NASA has always been well-managed and fiscally responsible, or that all space-related research needs to be federally funded. My point is that space exploration is an important part of humanity's dreams and the American social fabric (what little there is).
Reducing poverty, and exploring space, are not mutually exclusive. Giving big tax cuts to millionaires so that they can have better home theaters, and reducing poverty while funding NASA at an appropriate level, are mutually exclusive. I would propose that social goals should take precidence over individual goals, and that America is rich enough as a society to have loftier goals than tax cuts.
-Paul Komarek
Thanks for the reference to Kuhn. I got the quote from a poster in the physics department at my old university, and I suspect it wasn't quoted from Kuhn (perhaps misattributed).
I too am not content to sit back and wait for dumb ideas to die. However, I feel powerless against the masses of unreasoning and ego-controlled intellects out there. So I make a few jokes about the dumb ideas instead. Maybe I can make the unreasoning people laugh, which at least would be a connection!
-Paul Komarek
No product can stand against SQL Server -- because it keeps falling over.
-Paul Komarek
I think that people aren't (well the dumb ones are) objecting to companies making lots of money off of tax-payer investment, without giving anything back. For instance, Microsoft and Cisco paid no income tax last year. When was the last time you paid no income tax?
Microsoft does very little to improve the social fabric of the US. In fact, many "corporate individuals" do very little to improve the social fabric in proportion to what they gain from our society--for instance, a market. And for some reason this doesn't seem to bother Americans. Except me. For an example from Microsoft, IIRC, they didn't let temp workers bring their kids in during one of those "show your kids where you work days" at Microsoft. Can you imagine anything more mean-spirited?
-Paul Komarek
An easy solution to the "dilema" between your view and the pro-government-using-GPL view is for the government to dual license the work. GPL everything, but offer some sort of small fee license for closed-source work. I know this is at odds with your idea of "free for everyone", but remember that Microsoft and Cisco aren't taxpayers (they didn't pay any taxes last year). ;-)
This would do something to enrich the social fabric, at the expense of rich people getting richer.
-Paul Komarek
A big part of the Microsoft bashing came from the lack of security inherent in the scheme. In particular:
l .
1) ActiveX stuff could do whatever it wanted with your machine
2) The digitally signed stuff was a joke at the time. All you had to do was submit a credit card and address, and they'd give you a signature.
3) When someone pointed this out to Microsoft and eventually the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the response from Microsoft was "The security would be too hard to fix, and we'd like you to meet the Verisign legal team."
Go see Fred McLain's story at http://www.halcyon.com/mclain/ActiveX/welcome.htm
Somehow, I feel like I should expect to meet the Verisign legal team soon. From what I've heard, Verisign has become more careful about the signatures. And as we've all heard, Microsoft still thinks fixing security holes is too hard to be worth the effort (to be worthwhile for their shareholders, of course, since they are publicly held).
-Paul Komarek
Of course the ignorant will eventually go away. When they die. Of course, you have to live with their kids, then. With any luck, they won't successfully reproduce. Since bad habits are contagious (possibly stupidity, too), perhaps their descendants will eventually forget to breathe and die out entirely.
I'm not sure if it was Plank, Rutherford, or some other really famous scientist, but one of them said (loosely quoting) "Scientific theories don't become laws because of repeated failure to disprove the theories. Rather, they become laws because all of their opponents die."
-Paul Komarek
When you say "Sorry, but ...", I expect that you're going to follow with a solid contradiction of the parent post. You really let me down. Quite a few compared to what? Zero? Even then you're on thin ice. Maybe you mean "Quite a few for small values of few, especially small when compared with the number of civilizations (how defined?) that have existed."
-Paul Komarek
Probably the most important innovation of the open source community is the open source community. Linux was developed via the internet, taking advantage of this new communications medium. I'm suggesting that the innovation is social, not technical.
Progress can mean a lot of things besides a new widget. Sometimes it means finding a better way to do something. I'd say that the open source movement is among the most efficient software-producing strategies anyone has ever seen. I didn't say fastest, I said most efficient -- think (total output) / (total input).
Linus' model for kernel development wasn't obvious, to him or anyone else. Nobody even had a chance to try such a large distributed and uncoordinated undertaking before the Internet was made available to the world public. Linus helped the idea evolve, and made it work.
The GNU project has done something very similar with their development model though they were more academically focussed and based, if I understand correctly -- which eventually evolved alongside the Linux kernel. The model is still evolving, witness sourceforge and services like cosource.
These are very real innvoations. I expect that you have a very specialized definition of innovation which allows you to say "Innovation is usually the result of the work of a few people." In particular, I think your special definition is probably something like "Innovation is the result of the work of a few people." You mind seems closed.
-Paul Komarek
I don't think you want your doctor to charge by time, unless you have so much money you've forgotten about the Real World. If they charge by time, are you going to mention that strange pain you sometimes feel in your left arm?
-Paul Komarek
It appears to be an AMD K6-II 500, not a Pentium 500 as the poster suggested. Heck, this is faster than any of my home machines!
-Paul Komarek
Do you know what your talking about/asking? Windows is an operating system, providing (too damn few, IMO) useful services to programmers and users. Motif is a set of libraries implementing stuff used in GUIs on X11, as well as some standards for look and feel. This includes widgets, gadgets, IPC, resource management, etc.
You don't 'customize' widget sets -- you customize applications, for instance your window manager. Adding new context menus in (finally) Windows 2000 is a customization of the Windows Presentation Manager, or whatever they call their window manager these days. This option is a nice addition to Windows 2000, but it represents a tiny part of what you might want to customize, and doesn't hold a candle to the customizeability of any window manager I've used under X11. Can you change the bindings on the keys and mouse? Can you change the location, shape, and contents of the title bars? The KDE window manager (kwm?) is okay, and evidently very flexible even though that flexibility isn't exposed through the gui configurator (or wasn't the last time I used it).
When you say you've used Motif, I expect you mean the Motif Window Manager, or mwm. Although this is the default wm on a lot of workstations, I don't actually know anybody that liked it. And the scary 'managability' that you mention probably comes from generality. fvwm is much nicer, IMO, for configuring, and the newer Gnome stuff is pretty easy through the fairly extensive gui configuration programs (but editing textfiles is still the most powerful).
Pure functionality is an interesting term, since it implies some sort of objectivity. I think what you must mean is "The Windows and MacOS window managers are my favorites". Neither one of these supports multiple virtual desktops, AFAIK. Neither one has the variety of applets and monitors that are available via KDE or GNOME or FVWM. And neither one provides decent command-line interfaces -- you can't resize the DOS prompt, no tab completion, no shell language worth speaking of, they don't even install doskey by default. No wonder Windows users are afraid of command line interfaces, the one provided by Windows is so bad!
I have no idea what you mean by "On PDA's, PalmOS follows a close second" -- second to what? Windows on PC? Again, I expect you're talking about window managers, not widget sets or operating systems. And comparing PDAs to PCs is stupid.
Overall, you sound a little confused about the structure of your operating environment. Linux in a nutshell: 1) kernel, 2) shell, 3) X11, 4) window manager. I can't really do Windows in a nutshell, because I'm really not that familiar with it. But I think it's all one big tangled ball of twine, which in Linux would be something like: 1) kernel+shell+X11, 2) window manager, 3) other parts of shell and X11. If you want to pick a fight, try to argue that the Windows model is better for security, stability, or performance.
Oh, and OS/2's Presentation Manager kicked Windows' and MacOS' window managers collective asses! =-)
It's not as though we're struggling to populate this planet. We're still having a lot of problems coping with regular reproduction -- the last thing we need is a new way to make people. Once we're good at controlling our sex urges, then maybe we can be trusted to control our scientific urges.
We can't even agree on what people make good parents -- who is going to parent young clones? Do we vote on it, and mysteriously elect George Bush? Do we use ebay? Or sell the clones to an American set of parents, kidnap them, and resell them to a higher bidder in the UK? Some parents don't seem to mind killing their regularly-conceived children if supporting them is too much work -- I imagine that it will be more difficult to invest your life in a clone.
-Paul Komarek
What a let-down. At first I thought the slashdot title was "Self-Adhesive Websites."
-Paul Komarek
Most of what you say makes sense. But Abrash optimizing DirectX code doesn't help EVERY game, anymore than EVERY game runs on Windows. DirectX optimizations aren't going to make Linux Quake3 run faster. This is the tragedy of "proprietary"--it means everybody loses except the proprieter.
-Paul Komarek
I don't know what kind of emergency systems you're referring to--not because I think you're wrong, rather I just don't know much about the original design. However, I was told that the early flights used some sort of ejection mechanism, which was later removed for space and weight reasons (once they considered the shuttle safe enough).
-Paul Komarek
I was going to cut you some slack for overlooking obvious counterexamples, but not after you mention toasters. While modern toasters integrate power to arrive at optimal toasting, their springs are weak, often you can't raise the toast extra high, and they only last about 3 years.
;-)
* Every motherboard I've owned with an IDE chipset has given me grief after 2 to 3 years. However, the IDE controller card from my 486 worked at least until I stopped using the 486--for a total of about 4 years. I assume it is still working.
* My Western Digital 9 year-old 80MB hard drive still works, as does my 5 year-old 1.2 GB Connor CFA12xxa (don't remember exactly), but I've had a couple Maxtors fail on me w/in 3 years. The Connor still gets regular use, but the WD doesn't.
* My first pair of Adidas "torsion" indoor soccor shoes had really nice leather and lasted over a year (this was the first generation). The next generation were plasticy and didn't last long (say, half a year).
* Computer cases used to be damn-near bullet-proof (some were, in fact, bullet-proof) and never once cut me. Moder cases get bent when UPS drops them (i.e. every time they're shipped with UPS) and cut me more often.
* The previous generation of Pantene Pro-V shampoo and conditioner were better (less volume went farther, better effects on hair) then the current generation. However, the current generation costs $0.50 more and I haven't seen it on sale once.
* My HP 550c inkjet printer rocked. My HP 612c sucks. Not only is the print quality much lower, and it makes lots of funny groaning noises (as does every other 612c I've heard), but it doesn't have as much manual control.
* Recording engineers have gone down the tubes. Old recording almost always sound better. DDD recordings offer no benefits if the engineer had tin ears. This example even includes the word 'engineer', so it should be doubly weighted.
* I think staplers have mostly gotten worse, but I'm not really sure.
* Bread quality really sucks these days. You have to work damn hard to find good bread in a supermarket.
* CPU fans (socket 7, anyway) are junk. Oh, wait, my 486 fan was junk, too.
* It's hard to get a keyboard (a cheap one, anyway) without those damned Win95 keys.
I guess I've gone a little astray on this. Not all of these are engineering examples, but I feel better having publicly posted this gripe list.
-Paul Komarek
By what math are Alphas 2x faster than Intel on the FP side, per clock? Last I checked, SpecFP was 3x faster, and my code moves about 5x faster. And if you can fit everything into the mammoth caches, you'll really move flat-out. (Yes, I'm an Alpha evangelist!)
I tested povray once on my AMD K6-2 450 versus an Alpha 21264 500 I have access to, on a scene that took my old 386 SX-20 a week to render (ah, the good old days). The Alpha finished *20* times faster than the AMD. I think the times were about 12 seconds versus less than 1/2 second, but I really don't remember.
Even if Intel's chips were twice as fast as the K6-2 chips, that's still 10x worse than the Alpha 21264. It is difficult to explain a 20x speedup. That's why we think it was a matter of cache. Also, the compilers we used, some version of egcc on the AMD and DEC's cc on the Alpha, would of course affect things. But egcs on the AMD is pretty good...
-Paul Komarek
Is your point about lutes players, or about geeks? I think you're trying to diss lutes.
-Paul Komarek
How are you measuring RAM? I would guess that you're just looking at what the monitors in Windows and Linux (such as provided from /proc via top or ps) are telling you. I have no idea how the Window's memory monitor (it does come with one, yes?) measures things, but /proc includes the frame buffer on your 64MB super-duper video card.
-Paul Komarek
I know where you're coming from--I hate days like that.
;-)
-Paul Komarek
1) The Aibos are playing, but not well. The wheeled robots are better, from what I've been told and seen.
2) Honda's robots can't do dynamics, just kinetics. What I mean is that they can take actions which are stable at all times, like walking; but not take actions which pass through instabilities, like jumping or running.
This doesn't mean that Honda's robots aren't interesting. It does mean that watching them play football (soccer) wouldn't be interesting!
-Paul Komarek
The Reg is proud of its skew! And any intelligent reader should be able to identify it--it's usually humorous. Obviously you're an intelligent reader. Why does this put so many people off?
And I don't care about protecting readers who can't detect the skew. For those interested, The Reg is skewed against everything--they don't like anyone.
-Paul
Nice use of 'ad hominum'.
-Paul Komarek