| Thursday,
April 26, 2001
Jerry
I'm going to rant about your latest column.
>Meanwhile, the engineers who man the exhibits
are themselves interested in >the presentations. And yes, some of them
are women engineers, but "person >the exhibits" is an ugly
affectation and tribute to a rather silly >self-consciousness.
"Human the exhibits" is worse
Come on - never mind the existent, or non-existent
sexism (where I agree that the whole political correctness thing has got
to the silly stage) - the logic is rotten.
You're a writer - you know that if the words come
out wrong one way, you put them another way. "The engineers on the
exhibits", "The people at the booths are themselves the
engineers", etc. In fact you don't even need a re-cast sentence.
There is a perfectly good word in English - and I assume in American also
- "the engineers who staff the exhibits."
By using the argument, "It's the old way or the
silly way." you are contributing to the polarized attitudes to
language which have landed us with this silliness. Let's have *good*
language which offends no one. If a writer can't produce - and promote -
better language, who can?
Philippa
Philippa Sutton philippa@jesmond.co.uk
I stand corrected: your point is well made, and I
suppose "old ways or silly ways" is the wrong stand to take. In
my defense I have been annoyed by people less coherent and polite than
you, and I must confess a certain glee in ruffling their feathers. But
thank you.
Jerry,
If you want to read an extraordinary story written
by an extraordinary young woman, visit Kaycee Nicole's page ( http://www.vanderwoning.com/living/blog.shtml
). She's 19 or 20 years old, and until a couple of years ago was just a
normal teenage girl. She was diagnosed with leukemia a couple of years
ago, and has since beaten cancer twice. She keeps an on-line daily journal
page, and a couple of days ago she told her readers that there's a problem
with her liver and it can't be fixed. I don't know how much longer she has
to live, but it's not long. She's from Kansas and has always wanted to see
the ocean, so a couple of days ago she and her mother packed up the car
and headed for Florida on what she calls her "Journey to Home".
What's amazing is that after fighting cancer for two
years, this kid keeps her sense of humor. I laughed out loud reading her
journal entry this morning. Kaycee doesn't feel sorry for herself, which I
think is incredible given her situation.
Many of us have been following her saga over the
last months, cheering her on. Along with everyone else, I'm hoping for a
miracle, but none of us, least of all Kaycee, are expecting one. There's
nothing any of us can do to help Kaycee, but she does want people to read
her story so many of us have put up links to her page on our own sites. In
case you want to do the same, I'm attaching her logo graphic, which you
can link to the URL above.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com/rbt/thisweek.html
This hardly needs comment beyond noting that the
young lady writes well.
Hi Jerry and welcome back,
Thank you for the subscriber notice about your
report from France. I'll be resubscribing when my annual time is up.
Now to something you have talked about in the past
this is coming back to haunt us -
Remember how you have frequently warned that our
country allowing (not using incentives to keep critical manufacturing
infrastructure active and within this country) all of its industries to
move to locations outside the country will one day be our undoing? Well,
it seems like that has started to happen in an obvious way. I heard on the
radio this morning that Germany and the Netherlands (I may be
misremembering the second country) will not allow the U.S. to sell diesel
submarines to Taiwan. I thought, how can they not allow this? Then the
news report went on to say that the U.S. does not manufacture diesel
submarines anymore and must rely on the two allied countries that do make
them.
It is not too much of a leap from this situation to
one in which the U.S. is at war with mainland China (or any other country,
for that matter) and we need critical military hardware from our
"allies" who are not at war with that country or see things
differently and thus refuse to sell us the goods!
Given the gutting of our manufacturing capability,
how long would it take us to ramp up to produce the required goods? Months
or years probably! Enough time to loose the war.
This is a grave situation that our leaders should
take very very seriously. You were right.
Imagine if we were in a similar situation before
WWII (we were in a bad situation but our native manufacturing capability
was still there). What if we relied on Germany, Japan, France, or any of
numerous other countries that became hostile to us at that time our were
quickly overtaken by countries hostile to us and we had no significant
native manufacturing capability...
Not a pleasant thought,
-Bruce www.BruceEdwards.com
I mentioned this in View. And Yes, it is a grave
situation.
I do not intend endlessly to
discuss the Athlon/Intel matter, but here are some people who disagree
with me. I leave out the pure flames.
Mr. Pournelle, While the i815 chipsets are better
than the i810 they replaced, they are still an increment away from the
440BX chipset of 3 years ago (like the one in my Linux box). While I have
no dislike of integrated chipsets, I do expect better of Intel. Since the
PIII is to be phased out soon, AMD may be the only alternative for those
of us requiring both flexibility in configuration, good performance over
all and the economy of acquisition the computer industry has afforded us
so far. If Intel abandons the low end of the computer market - retail, AMD
may yet get more market share. The P4 is hardly an alternative in this
segment at all. This is a person who would consider a 750 MHz PIII a
serious upgrade.
I am saving my pennies for an Iwill KK266 board for
my second daughter to take to college. This will give me the flexibility
to install whatever the market has available, perform well and be
relatively "future proof" during her college career. --
Bob Taylor <rmtaylor@bellatlantic.net>
That may be the correct course, but I have had
remarkable success with the D815EEAL board and anything from a 600 up P
III chip; they tend to be trouble free for business and games up to
Everquest although with Everquest you are better off with a Voodoo board.
I have never had problems with iWill boards.
April 25, 2001 jjackson@bwn.net
Dear Jerry,
Since you devoted a full column to AMD vs. Intel, I thought I would
write with my $0.02 worth (and I really wish that keyboard makers hadn't
left out the old "cents" key when they migrated qwertyuiop from
typers to computers).
I have both an Athlon and a Pentium system running in my house. The
Athlon is a 600, pre-Thunderbird, which I built a year ago, and it is my
main machine. The Pentium, a 233MMX, is my wife's.
If my wife did not object to such idiocy, I would name her computer
Boris (because it is "Godunov" for her uses). She uses
occasional business apps like word processing, and a certain amount of
draw and paint software. She also uses the Internet from time to time. I
dropped in the Pentium to reuse a collection of components that had plenty
of service life left; the original CPU was a Cyrix 120 horror that I had
put up with myself for over three years.
I needed a number-cruncher. When I built the Hot Rod Lincoln, the
biggest floating-point bang there was for the buck comes from the AMD
Athlon family, and I don't think this has changed much. The point I'd like
to make is that there are other reasons besides the ones you stated to get
a CPU that does floating-point fast. One that I have, but which I am not
sure is common, is backyard science. Every so often, I download complete
listings of orbital element sets for everything that is currently in
orbit, and put the element sets through some processing to get, among
other things, perigees, apogees, orbital periods, and local pass
predictions. This kind of baloney brought the Cyrix to its knees.
The other big use I have for a number-cruncher is audio processing in
general, and MP3 encoding in particular. I have a large collection of
tapes and vinyl LP's, and am currently converting them to home-made CD's.
As a by-product, I am also encoding the wav files as MP3's for future use
and for archival purposes--if one of my home-made CD's gets trashed, I can
reconstitute it from the MP3 without having to go back to the original
vinyl or tape. If the satellite-orbit calculations were hard on the Cyrix,
this audio business was even worse. Even without the MP3 encoding step, it
was pretty rough, and then there were the all-too-frequent buffer
underruns when burning the finished product.
In short, if you are doing an awful lot of floating-point calculation,
for whatever reason (video authoring, high-end gaming, backyard science,
audio processing, and I'm sure there are others), you need to at least
consider an Athlon.
Something people also need to consider when purchasing an Intel 815EEAL
or any other motherboard with a lot of built-in peripherals, is whether
the mobo has enough expansion slots to handle replacements for all the
built-ins. In my experience, video boards burn up before motherboards do,
and the same goes for modems, sound boards, and NICs. If the all-in-one
mobos are like traditional systems, one or more of the built-in
peripherals will smoke itself, leaving the rest of the board usable. When
that cussed event occurs, you want to be able to just replace the ailing
part, rather than replacing the whole mobo. The 815EEAL has 5 PCI slots,
which should be enough. Other boards may not have as many.
I agree with you re win-modems, or "lose-modems", as I call
them. It's a good idea to find a real modem that will fit your available
slot(s). If PCI is all you have, there are a few, but you have to be
careful when shopping. US Robotics (or 3Com, or whatever) makes one. I
think Zoom does as well. One way to ensure that you do have a real modem
is to check on Linux compatibility, even if you have no use for Linux
itself. If a modem will work under Linux, it is a real modem. When I built
my Athlon system, I got burned on the modem. My supplier, an old pro,
swore it was a real PCI modem. It ran under DOS! It even ran under DOS in
his wife's computer. Alas, it was a lose-modem. It ran under DOS using a
special driver. My friend, the old pro, was embarrassed. The USR
real-modem replacement ran about 15-20% faster than the lose-modem, even
though they were both "56K". Of course, another way to ensure
that you have a real modem is to get an external modem. As far as I know,
all external modems are real modems.
I hope you had a good trip to France, and I really hope Sasha has
recovered completely.
Clear ether, "Sourdough" Jim Jackson
Thanks. Do note that I specifically spoke of the
D815 as a default case motherboard.
Your point about floating point is good, and of
course if you really need a lot of calculations you may need more than the
512 megs memory that the D815 will support.
Me, I wish we still had chip compatible
motherboards but that is not to be.
After reading your most recent Byte Article I
thought you might be interested in this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/18481.html
Basically it is talking about a new batch of Athlon
Thunderbird chips capable of 1.4 - 1.5+ ghz.
You don't seem to like Athlon boards based on the
VIA KT133 chipset. Why this is so I have no idea. The Current crop of
KT133A boards are fantastic. Most of the boards from the get-go have
received very good marks for both speed and stability.
If you have people you trust telling you that the
KT133 is bad, you have to go with that. I can tell you that I was hesitant
to go with an AMD chip and VIA chipset at first. I bit the bullet and was
so happy I bought another one!
My Abit KT-7 RAID with a Duron 650 ran rings around
my brothers ABIT BX133 RAID with a Celeron 600. He was so disgusted he
bought the same board with a TBird 850 (the 850 was under $120 2 months
ago!)
I bought a Duron 800 a month ago for $67.00. A FIC
AZ11E board for $90.00 with onboard sound. I can buy a decent 10/100 NIC
for $20. A GeForce 2 MX for $95.00 everything else is the same. This box
will run rings around any intel system you put together for the same
amount.
At the moment(4/2001) AMD has the low end all over
Intel. Most "experts" agree that this is so. The high end is
another story depending on who you believe. (me or your own eyes...)
Even with the worldwide internet, there are times
when I would trade it for membership to a resurrected BIX.
I do not want to make too much of the problems
with the VIA chip set boards. Most people will probably not see the
difficulties, which tend to be in the video bridge and in USB support. If
they were common they would long ago have been fixed, of course.
And as I said many times, the differences are not
large in any case; and I am very grateful for the AMD competition which
keeps Intel prices lower.
One more on this theme and it is enough:
I have two topics to mention in response to your
recent article on AMD versus Intel.
1. A lot of people say you won't see much difference
between opening word on a 550 Mhz system versus a 1 Ghz system. Well that
isn't always true! It depends on what else you have open with your
machine. I know that on my system at work in a large corporation network,
my 550 Mhz Pentium 3 is the least responsive computer I've had to deal
with. If I have an mp3 player going on, just opening a webpage can cause
the mp3 to stutter and the computer to go really slow until it's finished
loading the page. So if you have multiple windows running, which is more
and more likely as people use larger monitors, people will run into this.
You would think that with 256MB of ram I wouldn't have these problems. I'm
sure part of it is corporate monitoring programs like SMS. Other than that
I can only assume there must be a memory leak in some programs I'm
running. I would LOVE being upgraded to a 1 Ghz Athlon at work. For one
thing Athlons are great at MP3 encoding. Check out the recent benchmarks
at http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q2/pentium4-1.7/index.x?pg=8
where you'll see a 1.2 Ghz Athlon is a little better at MP3 encoding than
a Pentium 4 1.7!! Of course it's hard to make a business case for an
upgrade because MP3's put too much load on my computer, so I'll just have
to suffer with this darn Pentium 3.
2. I used to be Intel only before the Athlon, but
now I'm AMD only for personal machines. I've been very pleased with my
Athlon computers, I have an 800 Mhz Athlon for my linux server that I
bought and I'm building a 1.3 Ghz Athlon system. All of my geek friends
only buy Athlons. Even the artists I know have only built or bought Athlon
systems for PC computers. Of course some of them still buy Mac G4s. The
artist still raves about how much of an improvement he saw when he bought
an Athlon. It's pretty cool to see an artist rave about hardware. :) With
the new P4 pricing, the days of Pentium 3 are numbered, as are the high
gross margins at Intel. It's too bad that people don't realize that for
most things a 1.3 Ghz Athlon is better than a 1.7 Ghz Pentium 4.
Paul
I routinely keep a LOT of windows open -- Eric
has often remarked on it -- and I don't see a lot of difference with
Athlon and Intel systems. I play Everquest on both interchangeably; the
Athlon is a bit faster but it tends for reasons not known to me to be just
a little less stable; or so I think, but it's hard to document because
it's a fairly rare happening, so it could be chance.
Thank you for the data.
And one final as a sort of summary of many:
Subject: you
You have no Idea what your talking about.
mark [markjclark@ameritech.net]
Informative. Very.
And Mr. St Onge scours the news for us:
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
subject: news, grim and otherwise
Dear Jerry:
Over at http://townhall.com/columnists/kathleenparker/
, Kathleen Parker tells us why youth violence is likely to continue, or
get worse -- illegitimacy plus day care.
John Mccaslin mentions that only half of the
'educational establishment workforce are teachers at http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnmccaslin/jm20010425.shtml
.
Oh well, Roswell, Buffy and Angel were all good, and
new this week.
Best, Stephen
Stephen M. St. Onge
Thanks. Between you and Roland I tend to find out
what's going on...
Also from Paul Walker:
Found these articles on a site called "morons.org"
Sign language found to be distruptive http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010418/us/sign_language_ban_3.html
Don't try this at home http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/abc/20010405/en/gma010404jackass_imitator_1.html
School Violence Insanity Applies Only to Students
http://www.uniontrib.com/news/metro/20010407-9999_6m7sweet.html
Town outlaws dancing http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/04/15/footloosetown.ap/index.html
It really makes one wonder at how dumb we can be as
a group.
- Paul pdwalker@quagmyre.com
And from Alex Pournelle
Ok, so this weekend we spent working like dogs to
make a short video. Three more weeks, at least. Fun, silly, great
practice, amusing, achievable--therefore desirable.
It was a giant pain in the hienie, involving much
physical labor. Not, you would say, a lark, a way to relax, a recharging
method appropriate to the weekend paradigm. It did have many Fun Things in
it; fun, if you're a film nerd. We had to struggle with a lighting setup;
try and try to kill the shadows, while the actor sat patiently, waiting.
An hour to get one 20 second shot... not unusual for a 'real' film.
And this was with, mind, a tiny crew, a camera which
doesn't need very much light, some nice lights, the germ of a good grip
kit. The harder jobs, the bigger plans, the more complicated scripts
await. (Waiting, particularly for lighting, will be the one constant of
film- or video-making, at least the way I plan to do them. Dogme 95 isn't
my style, right now.)
Oh, yes, there are lots of tedium, but occasionally
you catch lightning in a bottle. There were certain moments, looking
through the camera (with one eye. I don't squinch up the other one,
either. Learned to turn one off ages ago), when something unexpected
happened. More than once I had to bite back laughter at the physical humor
in front of me; kind of stupid when the cinematographer blows a sound
take, don't you think?
That moment, that glimpse of the unexpected, is at
once so cliched and so unexplored, and it is the center of this little
discussion. I would not trade it for anything.
* * *
I have this theory, that there is no single Great
American Novel. Thank the Positive Role Model for that; if there were, it
probably would have been written already. (Then where would we be, we
would-be writers of same?)
There are, of course, paragons, touchstones, books
which seem to stand the test of time. There are new chrome-plated
supercharged literary works, gleaming with hard-fought plots and studded
with intensely modern sentence constructions, sandwiched between
raised-letter covers, with editors and designers and accountants
acknowledged or even thanked, the current sausage-packaging which
perpetrates paperbacks.
Even, occasionally, there's something worth reading.
(I will leave it to another time to discuss whether
this path is generally upward; has Man improved over time? Simply stated,
without edu-speak, the question would be: Has anyone written a better
novel since "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"? Papa Hemingway
didn't think so. Discuss.)
* * *
It's that transcendence, that flash of the divine,
glimpsing the live spark of creation--that's what it's about for me.
That's the thing, the goal, the place to reach for.
I'm an intermittently gluttonous man, when it comes
to life. I want everything, always, all the time, complete life lessons,
to saturation and then some. I hold my friends by the pants cuffs and
shake till the experiences fall from their pockets, to be gathered up and
hoarded, to be sat upon like a dragon hoarding treasure. And I am, I find,
pretty good at it, at coaxing the fine print of new thoughts from minds
around me, of peering into an ear and finding... newness.
Then, I forget, 'go to sleep' metaphorically,
somnambulistically wander through life, on auto-pilot from point B to D,
straight ahead and level, boring (the exact word) through life.
It's my friends and family, and those remembered
gems of experience, which wake me up again from this life-like-sleep, into
wakefulness, into DOING SOMETHING, creating, spinning a new meaning or
insight.
To which I can only say: Keep it up. Keep applying
the wingtip gluteous kick-start, and keep me on course. I shall try to do
the same for you.
And, if you have any ideas for more movies, longer
ones, something of feature length we can make, be proud of together--I'm
no longer so much of an iconoclast that I think I'm the only human being
on the planet capable of writing. (See discussion of novels above.)
Yes, the procedure of writing is independent,
solitary, a joy or a job. (Not all forms. Another discussion.) To have
written is an accomplishment, to write is a chore. But, some expressions
of writing are less solipsistic; they involve arguing and collaborating
and external expressions of the internal idea, waiting and sipping coffee
and burning your fingers on a too-hot PAR can and having six clothespins
on your pants pocket (for clipping tough-spun to lights) and using the
word "Sorcey" to mean the light's wrong and the rest of the
deal. It's both sloppy and very exact; sloppy during principal, exact
during post; the audience sees exactly what you show them, but it's only
out of what you shot. A many-sided game, impossible to "win" yet
always possible to improve. Not the only game in town, if the town is
'creativity', just the storefront I gaze into the most.
And that, I suppose, is why I like making movies.
--Alex
I have put a copy of this on the
reports page.
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