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Ocks then detailed testing which showed this behaviour where a system thread — in this case one cleaning out blocks of disk cache memory — is running at the same time as worker threads. "With Intel HT technology, logical processors share L1 & L2 caches. As you would guess [this] behaviour can potentially trash L1 & L2 caches," he said.

Here I am with a shiny new Motorola phone which I find really really shiny and nice, but as you may have guessed from the previous blog entry, I'm not happy with the software. I must hearken back to the past when we had a separate Sony and Ericsson phone company. Sony manufactured really pretty phones, with good user interfaces, but the hardware behind the phone itself sucked. Ericsson created technically good phones, but their software and look sucked. When they came together it has been good for the both of them. The phones look good, they have good software and they make good calls (for the most part, don't buy the low end phone models). With Motorola they've always had technically good stuff, it's worked well, but their software has always made me want to hurl. My first phone was an old Timeport. It had an IR port, Bluetooth didn't exist at that time. I thought that the phone software was good. Oh foolish, foolish me. I went back to have a look at it again recently. What a piece of shite. The menu system is incomprehensible and performing the simplest of tasks on the phone is a nightmare. Fast forward to today. The menu system has improved significantly, but they've still got things wrong in the most critical of ways, the extra click here, the missing option there. The fact that practically all the configuration in the phone is accessible through the initial setup screen. I mean really folks, the purpose of an initial setup screen is to get enough information to use the phone - like a wizard. Ask the person if they want to set the date/time or use auto-update (missing on the Vodafone branded ones; I think it's because they can't actually get the network clock correct - lazy buggers!), then off they go with their new phone.

How do I configure Bluetooth? Menu -> Connectivity -> Bluetooth Link (only option, I know there's a possibility of truesync and IR, but if there's only one then take the fucker and don't ask me) -> Setup

How do I compose a text message? Menu -> Messages -> New Message -> New Short Message. Considering that 85% of all phone messages are text messages a shortcut to go straight to a compose window would be nice.

I won't even pretend to understand how the Speed No 'feature' works, it really is that bad; mind you the Sony one wasn't much good either for the non-smartphone models.

I regularly have to switch my phone to silent and back to my regular profile. How do I do this on these phones? I have to navigate through to the specific profile for silent, or else change the volume for the current profile using the volume control keys.

The phone book. Again, multiple entries for each name, the only thing identifying them is the tiny logo in the corner. The 'preferred number' feature is laughingly ineffectual, as far as I can tell it just puts one number ahead of the others.

Let's see, now for the slogan: Motorola, solid phones, shitty interfaces.

My old, unreliable mobile phone died a couple of days ago, and I needed to buy a replacement. I'm not able to upgrade my phone for another 2 months so I decided to buy a pay-as-you-go phone and just slip my SIM into it (same network, no issues with locking). People who know me, will understand that I have a liking for flip-phones, so I went for the Motorola V3 (Razr). Aargh! christ, but the phonebook is the biggest piece of shit I've ever come across. I understand this misbegotten need to have the phone book maintain some compatibility with the SIM, but for christ's sake, they need to get their act together on this. Practically every contact in my phone book has two entries, in fact most have 3. On the motorola phone book every contact is a separate entry on the person list. This means I have to wade through 2+ entries per person to scroll from one person to the next. Factor in that I store people's full names on the phone, in surname order, wading through the 9 Shanahan's in the book takes a long time. It always integrates the SIM contacts onto the phone book. There is no visible option to disable this 'feature' (my SIM contacts always were a backup of my phone entries), so I end up with loads of duplicates (or purge my SIM). I can't send my entire contact details to someone, I have to send it piece by piece. It shows the email addresses interspersed with the phone numbers which is pointless most of the time.

The next complaint is really a bit of a click-fascist thing. You know what I mean by this - it just seems to take an extra click or two to perform some tasks. Just enough to annoy perceptibly.

Then there's the syncing software. Following the really annoying splash screen - slow, irritating and serving no purpose, we are presented with a rendering of my phone on the bottom right corner of the screen, a bunch of icons and no idea what does what without mousing over one of the icons and seeing what it does, based on the tooltip! Come on people, tooltips cannot replace text! Apparently I can dial numbers from the number pad (never would have guessed at that). The only way to pop up the menu is to hit a box that's about 20 pixels square, replicating the menu button on the phone itself. Too small to hit easily, and there is no keyboard navigation, unless you can guess at the magic hotkeys. Most of the hard work is farmed off to other applications, none of which share details of the current state of the phone (contacts, calendar), each sub-application launch causes the data to be re-read, which takes ~30 seconds each. None of these sub-applications are keyboard navigable (bugbear of mine). Quitting the application requires either clicking on the really small off switch, or doing the acme Alt+F4 close the window trick. Practically everything visual about this application could do with a rewrite.
On the plus side, it does synchronize, which is it's primary role, but I just wish it wasn't so annoying about it.

Badly implemented phonebook aside, practically everything else about the phone is good. It's small, neat and call quality is great. I've not tested the bluetooth functionality very much so I can't say either way on it. Over all, I'd consider it a good replacement phone, but unless something good happens with the phone book, I'm not planning on buying another Motorola phone in the forseeable future after this one.

Now if only I could make my own phone book. I wonder if it's even possible on these kinds of phone. Maybe I should check this out.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 conv=noerror,sync

Dangnabbit, of all the companies to have released a relally nice gaming laptop it's Dell. The XPS2 laptop is a really shit hot piece of kit. We're talking big display, reasonable battery life (2.5 hours), groovalicious graphics card (6800 go Ultra - faster than anything I've got). It's got insane blinky lights. It looks like Dell have finally gone out and done something really, really nice. I would have been following ths piece of hardware if it weren't for the fact that I've been distracted these last few months. Maybe I should buy one! that would mean it becomes reasonably priced for everyone else. My current guide price is a hair under €4000, which is really, really expensive.

I've been pricing apple laptops and there's no way - even at a stretch I can make the 4k mark! I mean really - apple; you're not trying here!

Ironic as it sounds, Sun is the inexpensive leader in Opteron workstation design.

The Little Engine that Could is an article about the Linksys WRT54G and what you can accomplish with such a small piece of kit. I'm surprised that it's not happening around the globe.

Well a couple of comments about the tackiness and I had to post a shot of the cover. This time taken with my digital camera, which does a better job than the phone on showing the brighness of the red.

I have two of them at my desk at the moment. I feel all geeky.

I took delivery of two shiny new acer Ferrari laptops yesterday. I'm getting solaris working on them. It's a 64bit AMD processor so I'll be having some fun with it.