Random articles!

[giza]

I do a lot of reading online, and I bookmark those articles that I find interesting. Here's a collection of what I've come across over the past few weeks:

• How to stay alive - I found this article in an issue of Police Magazine. It contains tips for new police officers on how to well, stay alive when dealing with suspects. I don't know of any law enforcement types that read this LJ, but I think the article is good reading and contains practical advice, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation.


• A20 - A Pain From The Past - A great little article about the A20 gate, the different ways it got implemented on systems, and why it's such a pain for people who work with the bare metal.


• But Macs Are Slower, Right? - An article about Macs and how their speed compares to PCs. Remember kids, if you are comparing a clock speed from a G4 chip versus a P4 chip (which is entirely different), then please stop making a fool of yourself, okay?


• But Macs Are More Expensive, Right - An article that looks at the costs of Macs.


• The Right to Read - An essay written by Richard Stallman some years ago on the issue of being able to use things you bought without having to get them activated (Quake 2, anyone?) or otherwise get permission from the copyright holder. It was updated in 2002 to cover things like the DMCA and Palladium.


• Rockin' on without Microsoft - One CEO's story about being audited by the SPA, treated like a criminal for missing a few licenses, and his company's transition to not using any microsoft products.

Finally, let's talk about Electronic Arts and why I think they suck. There was a recent article on Slashdot that linked to the LJ of ea_spouse that talks about the way EA treats their employees. It discussed mandatory unpaid overtime, working people from 9 AM to 10 PM 7 days a week, and the like. EA calls this "crunch time". but that's pretty much a lie, because crunch time is normally in the final days of a project when you want to meet a deadline. This is more like "pre-crunch crunch" which is happening MONTHS before the project is finished, just "in case the schedule starts to slip". It's really sad that management is abusing their employees like this, just trying to squeeze a little extra work out of them without having to pay anything extra. (cheapskates!)

Additional reading about the EA thing included this comment on Slashdot about long hours and employee productivity and this article on ZdNet about an overtime lawsuit that's been filed. Additionally, The New York Times wrote an article about the blog posting. Also written was this article explaining why overtime is just plain stupid.

That's all for now, hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

Comments

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Circular reasoning. "FP matters most, because people think FP benchmarks matter most."

Now I'm almost certain you're just trolling.

Case 1: CPU performance matters at all.
If this is the case, then FP is the benchmark we care about, because it's the metric that has most impact on the cpu-heavy tasks performed by users.

Case 2: CPU performance doesn't matter.
If this is the only case you're considering important, why the hell are you debating about whether x86 or power4/5 is the better architecture?

If gaming is any significant part of the market at all, Case 1 is relevant.


Even with heavy calculation, moving data fast is still at least as important [you need to do something with those results, no?]

This is, frankly, not the case for the vast majority of workloads put on computers. Neither office-work machines nor unclued-user home machines stress the memory subsystem at all. Gaming stresses the FPU a lot more than it stresses the memory subsystem - memory subsystem isn't the bottleneck.

The only application for which the memory subsystem _is_ the bottleneck is media editing, and even that is debatable (2D image manipulation algorithms can use chunking algorithms to reduce the load to main memory, and video manipulation goes through enough material that disk access is likely the bottleneck). Either way, this represents a far smaller slice of the market than gaming machines, making memory subsystem performance a distant second in the "metrics that matter" list.

Does this clear things up for you?


Plus, these days, games rely on the graphics card far more than the CPU

Physics isn't done on the graphics card, and it requires detailed manipulation of the world model's geometry. It's the primary load on the CPU, for games.

I'm including here also visibility calculations for AI ("can this critter see me?"), and decisions on what to light, and where to put shadow masks, for lighting dynamic enough to require this (the T&L engines on the graphics card aren't magical).


Though using games as a pro-FP argument for Apples is rather silly. :3

Where did you get the impression I was claiming this? Certainly not from any of my statements about the market breakdown. The people who use Macs in industry are graphic designers, as the software is more mature on that platform, and the people who use Macs at home are the people who like them (either people who use them at work, or people whose first experiences were on a Mac). Gamers generally use PCs, for a wider game publisher base.

What I've been taking issue with are your statements about benchmarking.

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

Case 2: CPU performance doesn't matter.
If this is the only case you're considering important, why the hell are you debating about whether x86 or power4/5 is the better architecture?

Yes, thanks for rewording my argument and ignoring the context. If you hadn't gotten so involved in the same little holy war you were chiding but one post below you'd have noticed that I wasn't comparing FP performance at all. I never said which is better, I never claimed it is useless. What I did claim however is that floating point operations do not present an important benchmark for a majority of computer users. It doesn't matter what research labs or specialized institutions need them for, they are NOT a major market share. THIS is why FP as a benchmark is utter nonsense.

The other bits are frankly a derailment on the point of the argument. No matter how much CPU power Havoc ragdoll calculation, quasi advanced AI algorithms or complex Photoshop filters take up, the majority of the market doesn't use them, making the benchmark equally irrelevant.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

I wasn't comparing FP performance at all. I never said which is better, I never claimed it is useless. What I did claim however is that floating point operations do not present an important benchmark for a majority of computer users.

Ok, this pretty much proves you're trolling. Goodbye.

^^

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for playing! Don't let the cop out hit you on the way out.