Ad Terras Per Aspera

Sudhain is running a review about a desktop Pentium M setup. And I have to say, they pretty much get it right. For about two or three years now, I’ve been saying that it was a mistake to drop the finely tuned P6 core (of which the Pentium 2 and 3 were based on), and pick up the clunky, overheating, poor performing Pentium 4 core.

Over the past few years, the Pentium 4 has only gotten worse, while AMD’s K7 core offerings have only gotten better. When the P6 core was locked up in the attic, a Pentium 3 and an Athlon running at the same speed got very similar results, both excelling in different areas. The main selling point of the Pentium 3 was the fact that it had the SSE floating point math SIMD language and Athlons didn’t; or at least, not right away.

However, many did not believe this was much of a selling point, even though for floating point math heavy applications SSE was a godsend; everyone purchased Athlons as fast as AMD could manufacture them. Slowly, AMD soaked up a larger and larger chunk of the x86 desktop market, and Intel wondered why their new Pentium 4 product was failing.

Intel so far has not improved the Pentium 4 core much at all. They have improved some of the flaws, such as using pricey and under-performing Rambus memory and switching over to dual banks of DDR2 to feed the Pentium 4′s insatiable hunger for memory bandwidth. However, in the mean time, AMD was developing the Opteron core, in all it’s onboard memory controller glory.

Having an onboard memory controller helps deal with not having enough memory bandwidth to do data heavy calculations constantly. Even if the Opteron had bus bandwidth in excess of what the Pentium 4 has now, the lack of a super fast integrated memory controller would still give it very poor performance. In other words, x86 sucks.

Sudhian’s review almost gets this. Its not because the Pentium M is designed better, and doesn’t need lots of memory bandwidth, its because x86 was designed by a retard and even if you gave the Pentium M more memory bandwidth, it couldn’t use it effectively.

All in all, that looks like a great candidate for fast, small, sub-$400 computers.

About a few months back in September, Jason Kottke posted information about Ken Jennings’ loss on Jeopardy, and on the 28th of November he posted an audio clip of Ken Jennings’ loss (of which the episode aired two days later). Sony contacted him and told him to take the clip down, and now that the episode has aired, they are still pursuing him legally. Jason has recently updated the public on this situation.

I’ve been watching this legal drama unfold for the last month, and I am disappointed in Sony’s actions. It is considered, well frankly, retarded to someone just reporting the news; and this is all Sony is doing. Jason Kottke is just reporting the news just like any other self respecting journalist would be doing, and Sony steps on him only because they think he is a small fry. (Jason also has a good entry on why blogs are the new journalism.)

However, they failed to realize the social implications of trying to shut a blogger up. As of this writing, the situation update entry has 61 trackbacks; this means that there has been at least 61 people now taking up arms to protect free speech… using free speech as their weapon.

I don’t get people sometimes. You try to help them, and all they do is bitch about it and threaten to do something in return. I wonder if these people ever realize that people like me are only trying to help them; case in point, someone on an IRC network (who and where I am not saying) has a very insecure script on their client that has a ‘!page’ trigger to send a message to their pager.

This trigger, of course, is something normal people would only allow trusted users to use. Instead, it is available for everyone to use; unfortunately, I don’t think he realized this could be abused by anyone who didn’t like him. I said that it probably should be fixed before someone does abuse it, and instead of it being fixed, I got a kickban from the IRC channel said user resides in for being a troublemaker.

How does telling someone of a bug in their script equate to being a troublemaker? For normal people, it doesn’t; in fact, helping someone fix a security hole in something before it is used is a good thing. But not all people are normal, and a large number of these people (who are out of touch with the reality of the situation) would rather blame those who found it instead.

I find it depressing there is no way to help these people, and I would hate to see how these people act in real life situations. Its also depressing to realize I probably wasn’t the first person to find this security bug and warn him about it and get punished for it.

For the most part, I think I’ve finally finished my template. There may be minor changes every once in awhile, but is pretty much finished. By the way, it doesn’t work in Microsoft Internet Explorer, and never will.

NASA is now reporting that at 03:24 UTC (five minutes ago) Earth has recieved the launch data from Cassini, and Huygens has sucessfully detached from Cassini and is now on it’s way.

Update: AP is reporting it, and NASA has it up on their website now.