antonywilliams.com

Every 2 years or so, Intel switches to a smaller fabrication process.
This decreases heat substantially, and allows them to increase clockspeed.
The original Core Duo came out in 2005 at 65nm, and the Penryn will be out shortly in 45nm.
In the last two years, AMD has had no way to compete with Intel. Its aging Athlon 64 architecture was no longer good enough, and not energy efficient enough for laptops. The only advantage they've really had was that their entire lineup was x64. Unfortunately, because of micro$oft being 5 years late with Vista, there were no viable options for running a 64bit OS, which essentially made their advantage pointless.
Enter 2007, and AMD finally have something to compete with. The native quadcore Phenom A.K.A. Barcelona. Unfortunately for AMD, it's still 65nm, and still not out. Their delay means that they won't be competing with the Conroe, but with Penryn (that's 45nm)


Here is a pricelist for Intel CPUs that will come out in January 2008.
The Q is Quadcore.
The E is Dualcore
Can you guess which one I'll be buying (barring any surprises from AMD)
I pay money not for clock-speed, but for base capability (In this case, I'd want as many cores and as much cache as possible. (In another post I might mention why cache is so important, but basically it can improve energy efficiency quite a bit, as the more cache you have, the less times you need to recalculate things)
Remember, you can fake clockspeed very easily, but you can't fake anything else.

I'll be getting the Q9450, with a massive 12MB cache! (3MB each core)
I'll probably use an intel X38 Mobo with DDR3 ram.

web stats for www.antonywilliams.com




As you can see, I didn't do much with the site over the summer.
The green bar shows the total amount of times the site was accessed. The blue shows how many different users accessed the site (it doesn't do it by i.p., but by your browser cookies, as if you're behind a router, your external i.p. is shared with others on the network)

Now comes the interesting info.



It's a little displeasing to see a combined 34% of viewers using some form of Internet Exploder, but at least over 60% of you are sensible.

If you split it down by rendering engine, it's easier to understand the numbers
Firefox, Mozilla Internet suite, Camino and Netscape all use the Gecko rendering engine.
Opera uses the Presto rendering engine.
IE uses their own proprietary and rubbish Trident rendering engine.
So:
60% for Gecko
34% for Trident
a few % each for both Presto and WebKit(Webcore)

Why do I hate IE and the Trident engine?

They refuse to conform to the W3C
Basically it means that IE incorrectly reads a lot of HTML, letting people be lax with their coding.
Because of this, if a web designer isn't careful, he can code a website that will display quite differently depending on the rendering engine.

Safari uses WebKit (which is a blatant rip-off of KHTML, the engine behind KDE's Konqueror browser

Unfortunately for products that come late to the market, increasing market share is hard.
In the case of Firefox, it gained its roots from Netscape, and quickly became the top browser for anyone with any knowledge of computers. Unfortunately that doesn't translate into good statistics, as most people who use a computer merely use whatever browser is installed on their machine by defauly without really realising there are better options.

For those using a form of Internet Explorer, or Safari, do us all a favour, and click the fox.

It works on all platforms

Why do Americans think that a tip (for a waiter) is deserved.
Why do they think that 15% is the minimum tip you should be allowed to give ?

In England a waiter has to earn his tips. See, in England, a waiter starts at a hypothetical £0.00 and works his way up if he's good.

In America, people seem to think the waiter starts at 15% and can only earn more. If he sucks, he gets 15%. If he's good, he gets a little more.
That hardly seems like a capitalistic way to do things.
Isn't there something wrong with this mentality?
Why should a waiter get 15% if he sucks. Where is his incentive to do a good job?
If I were a waiter, I'd see my options in the following way:
1) try really hard and run back and forth refilling customers' drinks for 17%
2) be a lazy bum for 15%
which do you think I'd choose?

In my opinion, for a waiter to be good, he need only do two things:
1. refill my drink when it's empty.
2. not keep coming by and bothering me.

Does that sound hard ?
I don't know how many times I've been in a restaurant where I've been with an empty glass for what seemed like an eternity.

Don't get me wrong, I'm more than willing to give a generous tip if the service is good, but giving 15% to a waiter who is useless is out of the question.

In England, the way you tip a waiter who sucks is by giving him a tip of £0.01. It's the British way of saying "I didn't forget to tip you. I just wanted you to know you suck."

Unfortunately, living in a college town, a large percentage of the people I hang out with have, at one time in their lives, been a waiter/waitress. They seem to be the most vocal on the subject. Maybe they just enjoyed being paid well for a job they sucked at.....

In class today, I overheard a girl ask the kid next to her "Where are you from?"
He answered that he was from Alaska. This trigged the common "Is it true they pay you for living there?" question.
The kid proceeded to mention that every year the government automatically put $1200 in his bank account.
The girl replied "......WOW! I think I'll just move there, as I won't have to ever get a job."
freshmen..........

So, I'm taking Physics 281.
Despite having a cheap $25 book (written by the professor) we have to buy a $35 iClicker.
Still, for a physics class, $60 seems reasonable, right ?
Starting tomorrow (2nd day of class) we'll have daily quizzes during the first 5 mins of class.
Still doesn't sound too unreasonable, right ?
I'm not finished.
If you forget the iClicker, or are late, you don't get to take the quiz.
Still seems normal.
There's just one problem.
The BYU Bookstore is sold out of iClickers.
Their ever so elegant solution ? Pay for it now, and they'll get them in stock soon.
The result ? I get a 0 on every quiz until that happens.

There's a very easy way for this problem not to happen.
Classes requiring an iClicker tell the bookstore how many students are registered in their classes. The bookstore then buys that many iClickers (either used, or from the factory)
Is that a difficult concept ?
Obviously I don't know who's to blame. Either the classes aren't reporting the numbers correctly, or the bookstore is just incapable of adding* (or there's a supply shortage, which I'll get to in Q2).
It doesn't really matter whose fault it is. Students are still screwed, and get the added unnecessary stress during the first week of school

Now, I've had a few comments from people claiming that someone not studying business couldn't possibly judge a company's business practices.
That kind of a statement is ridiculous.
It's like saying that unless you're a maths major, you can't do addition*.


Despite being clear in my last post, many comments seemed as though they hadn't even read my arguments (asking questions I'd already answered).
This time, I've decided to give a answers to the questions those people would use in an attempt to refute my arguments

Refute: It's your fault. If you'd bought your iClicker earlier, you wouldn't have run in to trouble.

Answer: True, but that's a stupid question, and it doesn't solve the very basic problem of the bookstore not ordering enough. Granted, if I'd bought earlier, I'd have mine, but the bookstore would have still run out, and instead of me being without one, it would have been someone else.

Refute 2: It's a supply problem. We (the bookstore) wanted to order more, but they were out of stock.
Answer 2: Nope, it's still the fault of someone at BYU. When you decided what overpriced quiz-taking gadget to use in your classes, the ability of that company to produce and supply enough for your needs should have been taken into account.

Refute 3: We ordered enough, but they still sold out!
Answer 3: Are you trying to tell me that people not needing them for class bought them ?
seriously......

Unfortunately this is one of those situations where those to blame, and those who suffer are completely different people. Shame. It's hard to learn from your mistakes when you're not affected by them.....

It's that time of year again. BYU is starting again on the 4th of Sept.
Despite having lived in Provo for the entire summer, I didn't get around to buying my books. With all the stupid freshman around, I don't dare try to get them now, so I suppose I'll just be looking over my shoulder in class :)
Don't you just hate the first 2 weeks of fall semester. It's worse than a summer full of EFY kids. Not only are they everywhere, but they block hallways, stairs and are just loud.

I'm taking:
ECEn 483: A robotics class
Physics 281: Solid State Physics
ECEn 320: Advanced Digital Logic Design

I'm also taking a religion class, and HEPE.

I've found that 3 tough classes is enough for me in any given semester (especially when working 20 hours a week). Even with that, I'll be pretty much full between 9-5.

It annoys me how the BYU Bookstore is.
Instead of trying to get your business by actually being better than the competition (i.e. by being cheaper) they use the unfair advantage of being part of BYU, and don't list what books your classes require until right before school starts.
This is intended to stop would-be buyers from purchasing their books online, and at half the price.
I know plenty of people who, by waiting for the list to come out, then spend the first 2 weeks of class waiting for their book to be shipped to them.
Disgraceful.
And no, I don't need to be majoring in business to figure that one out.
I understand that some classes might be restructuring, or might be changing to a new book, but for the most part, BYU knows exactly what book you'll be using, yet refuses to tell you until it's too late to buy from the competition.

Still, there's nothing I can do but whine, so I will.....

Another bit of good news, I found out I got a minor in CS (Computer Science)
The CS department decided to change (read: lower) the requirements, and only require 5 classes (3 of which are required for my major anyway - I took the other 2 as Technical Electives)

It just goes to show just how ridiculous the EE (Electrical Engineering) major is.
You have to take so much maths, physics and computer science, that without taking a single additional class, you can minor in all 3.
Isn't that unbelievable ?

The EE Core classes put you short 2 classes for CS, 1 class for Maths, and 1 class for Physics and, since you have to take several electives from a list of approved 'Technical Electives' (almost any 300/400 level Maths/Physics/CS/EE) anyway, you could just pick those.

My Technical Electives so far are CS 236, CS 324, (thus getting me the CS minor), and both 320 and 483.
I've considered getting the maths minor, but I think I'd rather get hit by a bus.