Finally – seems a laptop that has everything I need for now. Dual core, Fast GPU (by all accounts kick ass), large screen. Now where’s the bluetooth 🙂
The GPU is Linux compatible (but seeing as ATI released a new driver last week, that point is moot). they’re still doing the €300 for a memory doubling, and while about 10 minutes ago I thought I could buy faster memory for about 1/2 that, I’ve just been proved wrong by the crucial website – it’s cheaper from Dell at the moment.
XP on the mac
It’s unofficially doable; a few folks won the $14,000 odd prize for it. Practically nothing on the machine works, though. I am reminded of the situation of Solaris on X86 – noone wants it because the hardware support is so poor. The reason for the poor hardware support is that there isn’t anywhere the number of driver developers as there would be for such beasts as Linux or Windows.
640×480 (or 800×600 I think) VGA graphics drive, no wifi, no networking, no bluetooth. Pretty much useless from the usable laptop front. I’d take Linux on it before Windows if that’s the case. Of course theres a fully functional unix machine under the hood for Mac OS X, and while someone will probably want to shoot me for it, the fact that it’s proprietary isn’t too much of a big loss.
I was talking to my mate Mark on St. Paddys day about Hyper Threading processors, and he was mentioning that they’re not the best at high-performance computation (without extensive and expensive hints in the code). I agreed, mentioning that the latest generation of multi-core processors offer roughly equivalent cost and scale almost multi-processorly. I then went on to explain that the multi-threaded processors are better for I/O workloads, you shove a lot of the scheduling cost back into the silicon where it belongs, rather than having the OS deal with it in software.
For a big server, performing lots of I/O, a multi-core and multi-threaded processor would be the best of both worlds, and based on the direction that Sun is taking with the Niagra system, one can see that this can be taken to a scary extreme – consider 8 core with 8 threads per core all on the one processor module. The power-savings alone would be enough to warrant buying these machines.
Im still waiting for quotes on a few more laptops. I can wait, I just don’t know for how much longer. Meanwhile I’ll probably buy a phone. Nokia 6230i looks like a cheap and easy option – buyable from €260.19. Or maybe an annoying smartphone like the iMate PDA 2K (it’s the original of the O2 XDA IIs).
New 3d graphics card features in 2006
Wow, just wow. The visuals are just amazing.
Buy one for Mid January (Xbox 360s in Tralee)
I wandered into the store yesterday and they have sold out of Xboxes. Now they have a sign up telling people that they can pay for the box now, and expect it in mid January. Well, I would just love to see the face of some snotty little kid on Christmas day, expecitng and Xbox and getting a card saying: ‘iou in mid January’.
Liver liver on the wall, who’s the swollenest of them all.
New Xboxes for sale in Tralee
Considering al the insanity that followed the launch in the USA with people having to get the next generation console it is refreshing to note that there are Xbox consoles for sale in the Smyths toy shop in Manor West in Tralee. Of course, I’m not going to buy one. I did buy a television on Sunday – the smell of fried capacitors on the old one convinced me that it needed to be replaced.
Widow PC are building their dual-core laptops
The folks at Widow PC are building their dual core laptops already – the text on the Sting laptop page tells people that they’re starting to ship before Christmas.
Alienware are listing a delivery date of 30 Jan 2006. Cough, no chance then.
Did you get your 360 today?
I’m wondering if my friend ‘Tipp got his Xbox 360 today. I certainly didn’t get one. I’ll just saunter down to the nearest toy shop and see if they have one. If they do, then maybe I’ll get it, or maybe not. I don’t really have the time to invest in games at the moment.
Shock horror! hyperthreading not perfection in a box!
Yawn, an article on zdnet news tells us that hyperthreading isn’t all that for overloaded servers. All I have to say is duh! that’s not what it’s intended for. Mind you the benchmark was:
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.
It looks like all this information came from a blog posting from a SQL server bod in Microsoft. Hyperthreading was never intended to be a replacement for multiple processors. It is evident from the examples cited that the systems in question were not designed with a two-tier processor model in mind, it treats both processors as if they were actual separate processors, and as such makes utterly bone-headed decisions in scheduling that cause massive performance degredation.
That and the fact that there is a thread that churns through vast amounts of memory deciding to store certain database pages out to disk. Ouch! That sounds a tad slow and broken.
Considering the blog entry and the two comments at the end, I’d have to say that yes, indeed, treating a multi-threaded processor like multiple processors is a bad thing to do.
Nearly holding my breath for a dual core laptop
I just want to wait until after Christmas before making any decisions. Of course by that time the Intel dual core laptops will be just around the corner. Rockdirect have been selling dual core laptops for a while. I need to see some reviews about them. Fun for all the family.
The search for a slogan for Motorola mobile phones
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.