Many roads to go down, I chose one, and that made all the difference

May Frost forgive me.

I have written in these pages about the Intel ATOM 330 and its instantiation in an Intel Motherboard, the D945GCLF and D945GCLF2. Both of these boards have really good performance for a mobo costing $90 or less!

Always, there comes along a better mousetrap. Nvidia has done itself proud it would seem with the ION. The ION addresses what are, in my opinion, the worst shortcomings of the Intel mobo offerings

The ION has DDR3, 2 GB built in. The D945GCLFx has a slot for memory and will only use DDR2.

The ION has GeoForce 9400M. The Intel has Intel 945 graphics chip. The 9400M is by all sorts of measurements "ten times faster".

The ION mobo and small box have much better connector support for IO and have only external SATA drive support. This is better.

Some other recent work shows that the JFS appears to seriously outperform ext3 for Linux file systems in many ways. Since I want to upgrade my mass storage drive on my (current) main Linux development system to 1.5+ TB from 250 MB and an older drive using EXT3, I will do the work there to test. Should that work, I will back up the home directories and other /usr/local and /opt directories and copy the main drive to another large disk using JFS. There appears to be much better dynamic control over inodes in JFS rather than attempting one size fits all (pun intended).

We are back in old man winter after a brief respite. This makes it easy not to do outside work that needs doing and to read another novel. I could not remember much of A Separate Peace by John Knowles so I decided to polish off this novel(la?) yesterday and today.

Soeaking of today, Tom Rondeau and I made a pitch to Dr. Saltman, director of CCR and Dr. Boyack, director of computing CCR about two labs we need to efficiently do our software radio and cogntive radio work. They bought all of the arguments and told us to draw up a list of things we need, procedures for transferring code to and fro, etc. It was a nice meeting.

Frank Brickle gave a nice talk today at work on SDR, CR, VR, ... etc. It was great.