The Tech Report - Intel's Pentium 4 processor

THE PENTIUM 4 IS THE FIRST truly new processor design from Intel since the Pentium Pro debuted at under 200MHz. Believe it or not, the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Xeon, and Celeron processors were all based on the same P6 microarchitecture. Intel added some goodies like MMX, SSE, and integrated cache over the years, and they changed the way the processors were made, but they were all the same basic design.

The P4 is based on Intel's radical new NetBurst microarchitecture, and it's a different animal altogether. To best understand why I'm calling the P4 design radical, we could use a car analogy.

But I hate car analogies, so let's not.

The Register: Microsoft outsources some DNS servers to Linux - or so it seems.

Talking of Akamai I remembered a condition placed on students that worked as interns for the company - if they dropped out of university the wouldn't be offered a full-time job. As usual Google came up trumps: Class Struggle: MIT Students, Lured To New Tech Firms, Get Caught in a Bind --- They Work for Professors Who May Also Oversee Their Academic Careers --- Homework as `Nondisclosure'

Since its founding, Akamai has aggressively used its MIT connections. Of the firm's 104 employees, 20 were students in the last semester, including 16 who were undergraduates or enrolled in a joint bachelor's-master's degree program. Ten more students have been hired to work for the summer.

"This company exists because of students," says Paul Sagan, the company's president. MIT, plus its faculty and students, now have about 40% of the company's shares.

But to maintain good ties with the school, Akamai has had to negotiate some tricky policy positions.

For one, the company voices a strong stance against students dropping out. Early on, Mr. Sagan says, some students approached him about going full time. "I told them that if they drop out of college before completing their undergraduate degree because they want to work full time at Akamai, we won't offer them a full-time job," says Mr. Sagan.

Joel on Software: Daily Builds are Your Friend

In 1982, my family took delivery of the very first IBM-PC in Israel. We actually went down to the warehouse and waited while our PC was delivered from the port. Somehow, I convinced my dad to get the fully-decked out version, with two floppy disks, 128 K memory, and both a dot-matrix printer (for fast drafts) and a Brother Letter-Quality Daisy Wheel printer, which sounds exactly like a machine gun when it is operating, only louder. I think we got almost every accessory available: PC-DOS 1.0, the $75 technical reference manual with a complete source code listing of the BIOS, Macro Assembler, and the stunning IBM Monochrome display with a full 80 columns and ... lower case letters! The whole thing cost about $10,000 including Israel's then-ridiculous import taxes.

... we shelled out $600 for IBM Pascal, which came on three floppy diskettes. The compiler's first pass was on the first diskette, the second pass was on the second diskette, and the linker was on the third diskette. I wrote a simple "hello, world" program and compiled it. Total time elapsed: 8 minutes.

Joel's obviously older than he looks in his weblog photo! OTOH, he certainly has an old and wise head on those shoulders so I'll leave it to you to read the rest of his article on the worth of performing daily builds. Recommended.

The second semester of the academic year at Strathclyde starts tomorrow. The first semester exams finished last Friday and I've almost finished marking my questions from the Low-level Programming exam paper. Some of the answers have appalled me and I'm not sure whether to be depressed or angry. I think I'll go for anger as I know the answers to the questions set were to be found in the lecture notes and/or the coursework set for the students. I find it inconceivable that students can manage to score 0, 1, 2, ... out of 20 for a question and yet they manage it ;-) It must take a special skill.

Alas, I don't think I can quote from some of the answers. I would dearly love to as they make scary/hilarious reading. My only comfort is that those that do so badly are likely to fail most/all of their other exams and so won't be graduating with a CS degree from Strathclyde thus preserving the good name of our degree (and, incidentally, the premium employers seem to place on our graduates [which I've already alluded to in an earlier post]).

Well, back to exam marking. Wish me luck!!