2011 — 29 July: Friday
Resuming my audio engagements with the Ubuntu box, I'm at least slightly reassured by an email telling me that those evil soundcard manufacturers have been hanging on to their digital audio code. Still, the quality of the analogue audio1 is essentially flawless, so why should I worry?
The first cup that soothes is now a distant memory.
Quite nice weather into which I shall soon have to venture for a few more edible bits and pieces. Better get dressed first, I suppose.
[Pause]
That's better: shopping shopped, a little light banter with an ex-IBMer from many years back, breakfast made and eaten (a tasty new oat and wheat mix loaf with tangy cheese and that fabulous "SuperJam"), and "More Great Moments of Vinyl History" while copying a bunch of further music files over to the Ubuntu PC. I must say, I find I'm liking this 'Unity' desktop more and more as I continue to stumble across neat things it can do. Interestingly,2 the file copying (8.5MB/sec), music playing and web browsing is currently keeping the Core2Duo strolling along at around 35% which is far more than BlackBeast's six-core brain. But then there's also no swapping going on, and the working set in memory is a "mere" 525 MB or so.
I re-read Donald Knuth's thoughts on multi-core architectures just the other day. Source and snippet:
I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and
that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won't be surprised at all
if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific — until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically
impossible to write.
Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I've written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can't think of even five of those programs that would have been
enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading.
Simply getting Win 7 out of bed and all fired up (as it were) seems to take 1.2 GB of RAM before I've run anything remotely useful by way of applications. Amazing difference. (As for how I could run twenty or so RISC OS applications in a session, using a 4MB operating system kept in a ROM and 64MB of RAM on my StrongARM RiscPC... better not go back there, I suppose.)
I shall be...
... off on the road to examine another wonder PC in a few minutes. Not mine, I hasten to add. So, first, a hasty lunch as I listen to "Feedback" while the boss lady of BBC Radio 4 actually talks to (though it's less clear that she listens to) some of her audience.
Having never thought it was a smart idea to be able to obtain a patent on software (not a majority opinion among those of my ex-colleagues who rather liked the extra income potential) I found this NPR piece fascinating.
It's a good job...
... Brian tipped me off about how long the Banshee media player on Ubuntu can take to absorb and process a large number of MP3 files. Otherwise, some two hours into the process, I would be starting to worry. Len's wonder PC would probably have finished the task in the time it took me to drive home, but that's another story :-)
I can still remember Intel's Core2Duo being regarded as rather rapid, but not any more (or should that be "Moore"?). It's now 20:25 and looking rather grey and twilighty out there.
Bother!
I fear Banshee has joined the growing list of MP3 player and library management systems on all three platforms that is deficient. I am equally unimpressed with iTunes on OSX, with Windows Media Player, Media Monkey, and iTunes on Windows (a bad joke at best)... they can generally play individual files well enough, but managing a large collection of files seems to become problematic. I find duplicates and missed files. I expect neither.