Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Updated collection of Mac OS X articles (in Finnish) -- Comment()
I noticed that Macsanomat pointed to my recently updated collection of Mac OS X articles (available in Finnish). These articles were published in the @CSC magazine.

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Apple sells ten million tunes: "Apple says it has sold more than ten million songs on its iTunes Music Store since its launch four months ago." [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]

Testing the Fortran 90/95 compilers by IBM and Absoft (on Mac OS X) -- Comment()
I compared the speed of code generated by the IBM and Absoft Fortran 90/95 compilers on Mac OS X. The test code was an iterative solver for linear equations. The size of the system was 1600x1600, using a dense matrix formulation in double precision.

In summary, the average time (in 20 runs for each compiler) to solve the 1600x1600 system was 1.7 seconds with the IBM compiler, and 2.1 seconds with the Absoft compiler. Thus, there was some difference in the speed, but the difference was not dramatical, only about 20% less cpu time with the IBM compiler.

The Absoft compiler was version 7.0 (current is 8.0), and the IBM was 8.0 beta. For both compilers the optimization level was -O3. The tests were done on a 1 GHz PowerBook G4.

By the way, this was quite respectable speed: on a Compaq AlphaServer ES45 with 1 GHz Alpha EV68 processors the run time was 2.6 seconds on average.

There were several other appications running, so there was some variability in the cpu time taken for the different runs. I paused for 5 seconds between each comparison run. Half of the runs were made with IBM version first, half with Absoft version first. There was a pause of 8 seconds between each pair of runs. In all pairs of runs the code generated by the IBM Fortran compiler was faster than Absoft.

Having a corner room is a pain -- Comment()
I'm a bit dissatisfied with my new room at work. At first I thought it was nice to have a corner room with two sets of windows. But then it turned out that I have less shelf space. This was not so bad: I discarded a third of my old things. A worse problem is that I used to have a big noteboard where I could stick photos of my family, important lists, etc. Now the windows take so much space I don't have that luxury.

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Migrating saved Mail structure and data to a new machine: "When upgrading from my old G4 cube to my new dualie, I wanted to keep all the mail I had organized into folders (in the "On my mac" section of the mailboxes drawer). I found that I could simply drag the folders from Mail.app to the desktop. I zipped them up, uploaded them to my iDisk, set up the new computer, downloaded them, and dragged them to the On my Mac part of the Mail.app mailboxes drawer." [macosxhints]

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iTunes: over 10 million songs downloaded: "Apple let it be known they have sold over 10 million tunes since the iTunes launch 4 months ago. Extrapolated over a year, it comes to sales of over 30 million tunes and would be approach the number of CD + LP singles sold in the past 2 years." [Ars Technica]

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BBEdit Version Control: "CVS originated on Unix, and like most Unix software, it runs perfectly on OS X. There's just one downside: until recently, the only way to access CVS was through OS X's Terminal application -- not an enticing prospect for most Mac users. -- With BBEdit 7.0, you can open old versions of files, save new versions, and collaborate on team projects, all from the comfort of a polished Mac interface." [visakopu.net]

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Apple: reselling iTunes Music Store songs is a pain, so don't bother: '"Apple's position is that it is impractical, though perhaps within someone's rights, to sell music purchased online," Peter Lowe, Apple's director of marketing for applications and services, told CNET News.com in an interview. "They would have to somehow give their account info to the person they were selling to in order to get their Mac authorized to play the music being sold," he said.' [Ars Technica]

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That Linking Is Legal In Scientology Case: "The Court of Appeal in The Hague today rejected all of Scientology's claims in appeal in Scientology's action against XS4ALL, Karin Spaink and ten other internet providers. As a result, Karin Spaink's website, which Scientology sought to remove from the Internet based on copyright claims, is entirely legal in the Netherlands. The court also overturned two lower court rulings, one of which said that linking to material that infringed a copyright was itself actionable. The other ruling said that ISPs that failed to act on credible notification of a copyright violation could be held liable for that. The Appeals Court felt that this was too vague a standard, and thus posed a threat to free speech. More info at ScientologyWatch.org."