TrustedReviews: IBM, Sony, Toshiba to acCELerate Processor Market?
After three years of co-development between industry giants IBM, Sony and Toshiba the fruit of their labours has finally been detailed to the public. The Cell processor, which among other things will power Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, is a multicore chip that its designers boast has the potential to run 10 times faster than current PC chips.
They don't mention it in at the end of that article, but in this one (German) they make it pretty clear that this cell processor thing is a 64-bit, multi-core, scaled-down Power5. It's a similar manufacturing scheme as the current Power4 machines from IBM and the Apple G5 line of Power Macs. Can you say 'Power Mac G7'? I thought you could.
There are a couple of things that are interesting in these articles. Apparently, they're already being fabricated. IBM will be introducing them in a workstation line later this year, and the PlayStation 3 is already under development, so prototypes probably exist. Secondly, the price of the chip will be less than those in Intel's line-up. The introduction of the G5 lagged behind the Power4 by just over a year. That means if Apple opts for the cell, and if reports are accurate about its performance they should definitely consider it, we could see the new processor wearing something stylish sometime next year, and with a lower price-tag than the G5s.
So, wonder what Motorola's up to these days? Probably somewhere ordering rubber dicks with Tom Sizemore.
So, I booted up my WIndows computer yesterday, for the first time in a while. What a patronizing, pedantic little shit that thing is. First of all, I get about 50 little things popping up in my system tray, telling me my virus definitions are outdated, that this or that program is trying to contact the Internet, then some pop-up window trying to sell me Half-Life 2, which I already bought about 3 months ago, and that there are approximately six relevant system updates I really, really need to install (I already installed SP2 on this dick thing here, wasn't that just last month?). It also found a "New USB HID Device", which it finds every single time it boots, and can't seem to remember. The signal-to-noise ratio in Windows is rapidly approaching zero.
But I'll be damned if a little pop-up didn't come up at the end and tell me that my Desktop has too much stuff on it, and maybe I don't think I should maybe get off my ass and run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard for once. What is this thing, my mother? Can't try to do anything around here without some little window popping up at you and telling you you're doing it wrong. I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there's only like a baker's dozen things on my desktop. I run my monitor at extra-big resolution and believe me, I've seen worse. I mean, check this out:
It's not exactly bursting at the seams, now is it? But, I figure, what the hell, I'll spend a little time wiping Windows' ass for a change. So, I grab the Quicktime Player icon and drag it over to the trashcan. Easy, one step operation, right?
You might not be able to read German, but that's a dialog telling me that, despite what I probably think, throwing away a link doesn't un-install the application. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but honestly I wasn't even expecting it to un-install the application. I was throwing a link in the trash. The observant among you may have noticed two suspicious things about this dialog:
- There's no "Do not show this again" checkbox. I cannot fathom this.
- There's no option to un-install the program in this dialog.
Every single time you throw a link away from your desktop, you get this dialog saying you're doing it wrong. Don't believe me? Ok, here's one for Ad-aware:
Aaaand, here's one for iTunes:
Aaand here's one for QuickBooks:
Huh? QuickBooks just got deleted, and there's no dialog? What's up with that? Hmmm...maybe he's figured I know what I'm doing. Ok, I'll just throw away Trillian:
What the fuck? Hmm...maybe it doesn't say anything about deleting quickbooks because it actually DID uninstall the program? Nope. More likely because it's a competitor with MS Money.
You piss-ant little fucker. Who the hell came up with this workflow here? First, he tells my desktop, MY DESKTOP, is too cluttered. Did I mention that it is, after all, MY FUCKING DESKTOP? Then he bitches and moans about every single little fucking thing I do, that I'm not doing it right.
Windows, you whiny-ass little bitch. If I had half a choice I'd de-rez your ass.
When deciding what to have engraved on your iPod, please try to be sober.
Jesus, that's one huge fucking pile of crockery.
Back in the good old-to-middlin' days, I was an avid user of OS/2. It had a lot of technical trickery you could entertain yourself with. Shadows, for example. Shadows were like the links you can make in Windows, except they actually worked. In Windows, a link isn't much more that a text file with the path of a document or program in it and the .lnk suffix. This means, of course, that if the document ever moves the link doesn't work any more. It's not a link at all, really: It's a bookmark. Not so with shadows; once made, you could move the document to wherever you wanted, and the shadow would always know where it had gotten off to. Incidentally, Mac OS X is the only operating system I'm aware of that has this functionality today, eComStation excepted.
OS/2 wasn't perfect, though. It was ugly, even by the standards of 1994. It also had a weird interface to it. Sometimes, dialogs were arranged in tabs along the right, sometimes along the top, and they hardly ever had OK buttons. Presentation Manager, the OS/2 version of Windows' Explorer, also had some quirks when viewing things in tree fashion. The multimedia subsystem sucked, frankly. You couldn't reliably changed things like screen resolution, or color depth. The on-screen fonts were powered by some weird, mutated version of Adobe Type Manager, which wasn't compatible with any other version, so you had to convert your Windows ATM fonts over with UNIX tools, just in case you had an SGI sitting around (we did, fortunately). And, compared to DOS and Windows, it was slow and memory-intensive to do anything with.
Probably the only things I miss about OS/2 now are the applications I used with it. You see, kids, back then, when you said 'Office', you just as likely meant Lotus Smartsuite or WordPerfect Office as Microsoft Office. Smartsuite/2 was a combination of Ami Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, Organizer, and Freelance, all distributed on about 40 3.5" diskettes. The very first word processor written for Windows, Ami Pro was a nice environment to get stuff done in. Then Lotus bought it. Then they bought Harvard Graphics out, I think. Then Paradox, the database. While they were busy buying and ruining the pieces they didn't have, and suing people like Borland over competing products (the Lotus lawsuit over Quattro touched off a couple of years of "Look & Feel" paranoia), IBM was getting ready to buy their asses and return the favor.
There were also some pretty innovative programs you could play around with. DeScribe, for example, was the first word-processor that included as-you-type background spellchecking. Clearlook tried really, really hard to be all frame-y like Ami Pro/Word Pro, but was more like KWord than anything else. Galactic Civilizations was a kick-ass Civilization-in-Space game. Then there was OpenDoc. I was really excited about OpenDoc, seeing as OLE sucked ass back then, as it still does today. That functionality is actually worse today than it was back then! OpenOffice is about the only spreadsheet/word processing combo where you can still 'Paste Link'. That doesn't even work with Office anymore. I guess I was the only schmoe that thought it was useful. Ah, the fruits of Taligent, doomed by market forces and the absolutely grisly OS/2 typography engine.
Between IBM and Corel, the roadkill and also-rans of computing history have finally found a home. Kind of like the Island of Misfit Toys, or some'n.
