Stuart Corner at iTWire succumbs to our old nemesis, corporate marketing.

Intel have for years pushed the line that megahertz (MHz) equals speed. Apple used to call this the ‘Megahertz Myth‘. Intel competitors AMD and Cyrix were for many years forced to resort to using a ‘Performance Rating‘ system in order to compete. The fact is that computing performance is far more complicated than raw clock speed.

As the marketing droids at Intel gained political superiority within the company in the late 1990s, its architectures devolved into marketectures. The Pentium 4’s NetBurst is a classic example. Unleashed in 2000, in the wake of Intel’s loss to AMD in the race to release the first 1GHz chip, it was widely panned for being slower than similarly-clocked Pentium 3s in some tests. While less efficient clock-for-clock, it was designed to ramp-up in MHz to beat AMD in sheer marketing power.

In recent years, Intel have been hitting the limits of their own fallacy. Higher clock frequencies generate more heat and consume more power, and start pushing the physical limits of the media. You may have noticed the shift in Intel marketing from megahertz to composite metrics like ‘performance per watt‘. What they are trying to indicate is that they are innovating in all parts of the CPU — not just the clock speed — to deliver greater overall performance. Through greater efficiencies, they are able to improve performance per clock cycle, whilst also addressing heat and power usage (which is especially important in portable devices and datacentres).

You should also notice Intel’s sudden emphasis in recent years on model numbers (e.g. ‘Core 2 Duo T7200′) rather than just MHz (e.g. ‘Pentium 4 3.0 GHz’). They are trying to shift the market away from the myth that they so effectively perpetuated over a series of decades. My laptop’s Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0 GHz) is clearly faster than my Pentium 4 desktop running at the same clock speed. Reasons for this include (but are not limited to) the presence of two cores (each running at 2GHz), faster RAM and a much larger cache.

It is interesting to note that the design of the current Core line of CPUs (and its Pentium M predecessor) owes far more to the Pentium 3 than to the marketing-driven Pentium 4.

Now, Stuart makes the mistake of presuming that Intel’s CPUs are not getting any faster since they have not increased in megahertz. Instead of berating Intel for finally being honest, why can’t we praise them? Addressing real performance (not some ‘MHz’ deception), including the previously-ignored factors of power consumption and heat generation, is of benefit to us all.

If there is anyone to criticise, it is the hardware vendors. They have successfully countered Intel’s message by continuing to market their systems using MHz as a key selling point. The general public (and evidently most of the press) are left to believe that computers aren’t getting any faster. Given the convenience of a single number as an indicator of performance, who can blame them?

When end-user experience is taken into account, software developers fall under the microscope. Windows Vista is the obvious posterchild — I’ve seen dual-core 2GB systems that once flew with GNU/Linux and (even) Windows XP, now crippled to the speed of contintental drift after being subjected to the Vista torture.

Update: The article’s content seems to have been edited to remove any criticism of Intel, but the sceptical title (’Intel’s new chips extend Moore’s Law, or do they?‘) remains.

Update 2: Now that I have explained that megahertz on its own is only of minor consequence to CPU performance (leave alone overall system performance), we can see that it is often not even a conclusive way to compare different CPUs. A Pentium 4 can be slower than a similarly clocked Pentium 3. This inability to compare becomes even more stark when scrutinising completely different processor families. Apple had a point when they trumpeted the "Megahertz Myth’ back when they were using PPC CPUs. Clock-for-clock, a PPC CPU of that era was faster than the corresponding (by MHz) Intel chip, often by a considerable margin. Apple countered Intel with benchmarks demonstrating the speed of their CPU versus Intel’s. Benchmark quality aside, their intent was to show that a seemingly ’slower’ PPC chip could outperform its Intel competition. It is a shame that the promotion didn’t convince more of the general populace.

LotD: Real Amber vs Photoshopped Amber

iTnews rehashes the old refrain of ‘Why Linux won’t succeed on the desktop‘ articles.

These sorts of articles come out all the time, and they are always written by people who have not used Linux much and therefore don’t understand how it works and how it is developed. The article is not without merit, but it does display many misunderstandings. Most telling are the omissions — the fact that the real strengths of Linux are ignored and the deficiencies of Windows overlooked. It gives undue weight to proprietary software development and totally forgets about the free alternatives that are available for Linux. And by ‘free’, I mean the proper ‘free as in freedom’ definition, not the tired-old ‘freeware’ misconception that the author makes. As for the antique ‘too many distros’ argument, people only need to use one, and some quick reading would easily narrow the choices down to a small handful, if not one. I personally find the different ‘distros’ of Windows (including WINCE and so on) to be more confusing.

Most Linux people are very well versed in Windows, so they generally know of which they speak. My experience is that many Windows people expect everything to work exactly like Windows, and they complain whenever something is even slightly different, even if it is better. For some reason, they accept crashing, viruses and poor security as a fact of life, and so aren’t attracted to Linux. In fact, it goes further than that: to most people, Windows is computing. Anything else is just heresy.

These critical articles about Linux aren’t new, but they should not be ignored. Linux has many rough edges to smooth out, but then again so does Windows. At the end of the day, it often comes down to people being set in their ways and being afraid of the unfamiliar.

I’ve seen this happen even with Microsoft products: Windows Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but mysteriously not consistently in Outlook) and Windows Vista have been widely criticised for adopting odd and inconsistent interfaces. The first three lack a basic menu bar (each using its own weird alternative), and Vista doesn’t have a Start button (it’s a round circle with a Windows logo). It’s a tech support nightmare. Yet despite the resistance, people force themselves so that they eventually accept them. Some even grow to defend the changes. What possessed people to behave in this way? Is it the marketing, or even the cult of personality that Bill Gates has managed to build, as the article proclaims? We are now in a position where it is easier for an MS Office 2003 user to move to OpenOffice.org than to Office 2007. Why aren’t we seeing this happening more often?

Never underestimate the power of inertia and marketing.

The fact that Linux can prove to be such a great system despite its miniscule desktop market share and lack of resources compared to the proprietary world (which is much bigger than just Microsoft) shows the strength of the free and open source software (FOSS) model. One needs only to look at Mac OS X to see a desktop that is almost unquestionably superior to Windows in every way, thanks in part to its extensive use of FOSS.

Another thing to remember is that the desktop computing market is but a tiny fraction of the overall information and communications technology sector. Linux is quite prevalent, and even dominant, almost everywhere else [PDF]. In most of these markets, Microsoft isn’t represented at all.

By the way, the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ thing is not taken seriously by more established Linux users. The phrase is used mainly by journalists looking for attention, or by more recent Linux users. For everyone else, it’s become more of a running joke, much like Linus Torvalds’ faux ambition of ‘world domination‘.

Update:  Yet more reasons for why Linux is supposedly unsuitable for the desktop.

Update 2:  Here’s another rebuttal to these articles. 

LotD:  I failed basic chemistry 

George Orwell’s classic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many perspectives on human behaviour and society. One of these is how people can be led and manipulated through the control of information. In the story, the Seven Commandments formed a de facto constitution for the Animalistic society. Since only a handful of animals could read, the rest were dependent upon what they were told was written. Gradually, the writing was cunningly altered to the benefit of the pigs above all other animals, and the populace was taught to not trust their recollections of what was written in the past.

What made this subversion possible was the inability of most animals to read. The two animals that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do anything about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read information is an important cornerstone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increasingly defined by electronic records, there needs to be a way for independent viewing and auditing. Paper is easily read, but computer files require software to decypher them. Imagine if you needed special (and expensive) glasses just to read the letter that you yourself wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of discussion in the press regarding the OpenDocument and the so-called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this reporting thus far has been on the political and technical facets. This is slowly changing, as the importance of long-term data preservation and freedom of information become apparent to ordinary folk.

The BBC has published a report on the problem, and discusses how the UK National Archives are attempting to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-sighted approach, relying on virtualisation of older operating systems and applications, through a direct partnership with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/viewers (not to mention the operating system and software performing the virtualisation itself) remain closed in source and specification, and one must deal with a cumbersome virtual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guarantee that files can be read hundreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper documents such as the historic Magna Carta? How does this partnership benefit me, an ordinary citizen who might wish to view ten- (or even two-) year-old public documents that are only available in a proprietary electronic format?

It’s both sad and frustrating to see that history is yet again repeating itself. Whilst the contents of the Domesday Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after completion, the digital BBC Domesday Project was rendered virtually unreadable a mere 16 years later.

Thankfully, there are efforts to create an infrastructure for long-term preservation and management of digital documents. To start with, there are open formats such as OpenDocument and PDF. The Australian National Archives have long been supporters of OpenDocument, to the extent that they are standardising upon it. Putting their money where their mouths are, they are building a completely open source (GPL, no less) data managment system that anybody can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux.conf.au about this technology, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK counterparts seem to have forgotten that access to data is not just a privilege for those able to make exclusive agreements with purveyors of lock-in technologies, the Australian National Archives have been striving to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… better? Let’s prevent this subversion from happening.

LotD:  Mexican ‘world’s richest person’

Microsoft have announced their Zune music/video player to take on Apple’s iPod. Like Apple, they consider colour to be an important differentiator in the marketplace. With white having been co-opted by Apple, and black being the generic (and hence indistinctive) hue, what does that leave Microsoft?

Apparently, it is brown.

Once again, Ubuntu is vindicated! What’s next, naked people?

In January, during Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote speech announcing the new Intel Macintoshes, Microsoft made a "commitment" to continue to develop for and support the Apple Macintosh platform. In true Microsoft style, they conveniently didn’t explain how deeply that commitment went. Now we know.

Microsoft have decided to kill their Virtual PC product, removing a virtualisation option from Mac OS at the same time that similar functionality is being folded into Windows Vista. They are aware that virtualisation is quickly becoming a killer feature, and they’ll be damned if they allow anyone else to have it. Fortunately (and probably preferably), VMware will be made available for the Apple Intel platform. There’s also Parallels, but they still do not have any server-oriented products.

In addition, Microsoft will also be removing Visual Basic support from Office for Mac. If you can’t stop supporting something, why not cripple it instead? Many businesses are dependent upon VB scripting, or exchange files with people/organisations that make use of it, so this is a major blow indeed for Apple. Such a deficiency will be subtle: people will purchase Office for Mac expecting it to work with files created in its Windows counterpart (or vice versa), and will be sorely disappointed. This has already been occurring for a number of years, but the problem is becoming increasingly acute.

Ultimately, the best solution is to remove our dependency on proprietary formats and languages, for they are the root cause of this mess. OpenOffice.org already does what most people require, and in some cases it does it better. It even has growing support for Visual Basic for Applications. OpenOffice is truly looking like a better Office than MS Office. The OpenOffice file filtering support developers work hard to support all the MS Office formats they can find (people have counted over 20 different versions of the Word .DOC format alone), which is more than I can say about the MS Office programmers, who are notorious for breaking compatibilty with older versions. Using the OpenDocument formats (which are now an ISO standard) assures that your data will be accessible on many different platforms for many years to come.

The main stumbling block to OpenOffice adoption on Mac OS is the Windows-like interface and its reliance on X11 for display. There is work being done on a native Aqua version, but in the meanwhile there is NeoOffice.

Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs has delivered his keynote address to Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). It’s amazing what he would have us believe. Apple has apparently invented virtual desktops. What does Microsoft have to say about it, given they applied for a patent on the technology in 2004 (complete with images ripped out of GNOME and KDE!)? Let’s just forget that they have existed since at least 1985, shall we?

That aside, I am heartened to see that OpenDarwin did not close their doors a couple of weeks ago in vain. Apple themselves are sponsoring Mac OS Forge, and in the process they have made readily available the source code for Bonjour, Collaboration (Darwin Calendar Server), WebKit (which is really just KHTML on steroids anyway), Launchd and even their XNU kernel (minus some essential proprietary parts). They have even licensed some of these projects under the Apache Licence 2.0. I pray that this signifies the start of a new era of collaboration between Apple and the FLOSS community, and not just a cheap attempt to contribute the minimum amount required to keep the bulk of the community on-side.

So with Tiger being favourably compared to the forever-delayed Windows Vista, what does that make Leopard? Mac OS just gets better and better, while the Windows debacle is far from over. With screw-ups such as this [video], it’s no wonder that Microsoft feels the need to prevent/destroy all competition.

Update (2006-08-13): Here is a much more sober evaluation of the so-called ‘copying’ going on between Mac OS and Windows. It puts everything into more perspective, showing that some of their killer features in fact originated elsewhere. It reminds me of a funny quotation: "Mac OS, Windows, BeOS: they’re all just Xerox copies."

As much as Paul Thurrott likes to claim that Spotlight is a copy of Windows Search, Apple had the same functionality in the mid-1990s with its Copland Project.

KDE4 development is underway, and users and developers are having their say on how it should look. One thing that irks me is when someone posts a mockup of some ‘new’ idea, when in fact that idea is just lifted from somewhere else. I have no problem with derivation or inspiration from elsewhere (that’s how software evolves, after all), but for ghod’s sake please don’t pass off some other idea as your own.

Take for example this mockup. Look at the file browser. Can you say Windows Vista? Some person, whom I pray is not a Konqueror developer, was so enamoured with it that he created an interactive version.

I’m not saying that it is unattractive, but I don’t understand why this sort of blind copying takes place. I’ll admit that graphic design isn’t one of FLOSS’s strong points, but with that said we do have some truly innovative and beautiful designs. Amarok comes to mind.

I wrote this in response to a Slashdot article about the Windows spyware programme Gator:

PRESS RELEASE: MICROSOFT INNOVATES IN NEW VERSION OF INTERNET EXPLORER

Store all your passwords, financial data and other personal information on a central server! Never again will you have to remember a password or PIN, since you can conveniently access all your data from a Microsoft server*! Microsoft have made it so easy for you by uploading all your data automatically, no questions asked! In addition, we use our patented Malware(TM) advanced artificial intelligence to analyse your movements online and offer services tailored just for you! To make this as pleasant an experience as possible, we even share your data with third parties so that you are only offered services that suit your interests.

"Microsoft has always strived to deliver the best value for money in the industry," reported Tom Rort of The Gartner Group. "Microsoft products pay off big time for me! I’d give this release a rating of five dollar-signs," said Mary Swindle of The Aberdeen Group.

Once again, Microsoft has shown its commitment to looking out for the best interests of its customers.

* cost of retrieval is $US9.99 per transaction, and since Microsoft already have your financial data, we conveniently deduct the money from your bank account automatically.