A really great article about the performance of the Pentium 4 vs (mainly) Athlons by Darek Mihocka. Darek really knows the ins and outs of the various processors and the article has lots of great insights. Recommended. His summary:

So it's deja vu all over again for Intel. Here we are in November 2001. Almost one full year since Intel launched the disaster known as Pentium 4. A year ago it was the Pentium 4 vs. the Athlon on Windows Millennium and Windows 2000. This year it's the Pentium 4 vs. the Athlon XP on Windows XP. In both cases, the same result: AMD produces a faster less expensive processor. And taking into account the year 1999, when the Athlon debuted and dethroned the Pentium III as fastest processor, this now marks the third Christmas buying season in a row that Athlon based PCs offer better value than Intel based machines. If someone were to buy me a computer this Christmas and it didn't have a AMD Athlon XP processor inside of it, I think I would throw it right back at the idiot who wasted his money on it.

How many times does he say CLOCK SPEED IS NOT EVERYTHING!?

>Ref: http://duncan.smeed.org/1779
>
>I have just ordered the version update of BBEdit 6.5 
>(http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit.html):

Those great folks over at Bare Bones shipped the CD and manual on 7 November and it arrived on Tuesday 13 November.

It's now installed and I eagerly await having the time to explore its new capabilities.

One issue was that Frontier could no longer install the shared menu 'Site' that I use to marry BBEdit and Frontier together in terms of rendering pages, etc. This was a real bummer until it dawned on me that BBEdit's script menu allows a user to write their own scripts and have these incorporated into the menu bar. Since Frontier's UserTalk is an OSA-compliant scripting language it was a simple matter of exporting the relevant scripts from my Frontier BBSite guest database and copying these into a scripts sub-folder. Worked like a charm. I can now render pages, etc., by harnessing Frontier's page generation capabilities from within BBEdit. Awesome!!

via SiT[Re: Weblog Madness: Roll Your Own] - Daniel Schneider's Portals Pointers @ TECFA

"Portals" is used in a wide sense here. We focus specifically on collaborative information portals, but sometimes have pointers to any sort of portal software, e.g. enterprise application integration (EAI software), "smart" Forums and News Pages, Enterprise Information Portals, even a little bit of CSCW or Groupware systems. You can find more variety in this older page. We specifically do NOT mention educational platforms here.

A nice collection of links to resources. Again, no mention of Conversant so I'll drop him an e-mail suggesting that he add that to his list.

via HtP - Comdex: IBM to use Intel's Foster chip in servers

IBM is using six fans and water-cooled heat synchs (sic) that rise from each Xeon chip. The water is in a vacuum container that is aerated by the heat synch (sic) fins, cooling the chips.

You have to wonder at the technical competence of reporters that thynch synch is the correct spelling of s... ;-)

And get a load of how many times the word 'server' is hyperlynched to Infoworld's KnowledgeLynch database! Overkill or what!?

Hey, I've just realised that a cool term for someone commandeering a domain that expires and holding it to ransom by, for example, redirecting it to a porn site could be called a 'hyperlyncher'.

Outlook Hopeless!(tm) is a reiteration of guidelines for my students when they are e-mailing me ;-)

Adam Curry's Weblog : Weblogs in Education

"Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed... To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life... One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated." Thomas Moore

Gotta love that Oban Ladies Man* cartoon further down the page too!

* This is my favourite anagram of Osama bin Laden ;-)

John Robb's Radio Weblog

XP product activation is needlessly anti-consumer. Correct.

The larger game plan is focused on building a direct connection to consumers to compete with AOL. Here's the game plan:...

Brian's Knowledge Logging with Conversant article is definitely an incentive for me to sort out the Jotter:

Following on the things that John Robb has been writing about knowledge management and web logs, I've really started to use the term "knowledge logging" to describe what I do on the various web sites I run. To be honest, I really don't care about the web or weblogging or Blogger or Manila or Conversant -- what I care about are a) the things I already know, b) the things I learn that I didn't know, and c) the interconnections and intersections among the things I know.

via Scripting News - Using RSS News Feeds - Webreference.com

I updated the list of memorable lecturing moments to include the 'DMA' lecture. Unfortunately DMA in its full form has a very unfortunate spoonerism. You might like to check out The history of spoonerisms to find out how/why!

The Register: MS promotes Linux from threat to 'the' threat - Memo By Thomas C Greene in Washington

"Linux is the long-term threat against our core business. Never forget that!" Microsoft Windows Division Veep Brian Valentine exclaims in a confidential memo to his Sales Brownshirts obtained by The Register. (our emphasis)

...

It's no secret that MS has long regarded Linux as a threat, at least not since Eric Raymond broke the news two years ago with the infamous Halloween Documents. But it's lovely to see it becoming the threat, apparently because it empowers people to operate computers and networks without buying into the nebulous Microsoft .NET vision, which, as you'll see below, the company thinks of as something to be 'positioned' by its products.

In today's low-level programming lecture I was telling the students of the old Ambrosia (remember that means MS!) mantra - Google Search: "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". See for example: link.archive.9710: Re: MS gets creamed!.

Since Billy has a habit of lying about how benign Ambrosia is, history indicates otherwise. E.g. Lotus, DR-DOS, Netscape... Who'll be next?

Wonka

Wonka is ACUNIA's cleanroom Virtual Machine for the JavaTM language. It is extremely portable and self-contained, and can optionally be used with its own real-time executive (OSwaldTM) to provide a complete solution for embedded devices. It is a full implementation of the Java language, not just a subset. And it's Open Source.