Ophidiana

By Jerry Pournelle

May 5, 2003

(Ophidiana :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 273 (Continued from the Previous Week)

The Need for Speed

So: aside from games, why do we need the screaming new systems like the D875PBZ?

One answer is that you don't for ordinary office work, and for that matter for most games. For the moment the most likely customer for a system like Anastasia will be an enthusiast (who, incidentally, would never, ever, put a nice but not state of the art board like a RADEON 9100 into a D875PBZ with a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4/FSB 800 with Hyper-Threading, any more than he'd drop a VW engine into a Ferrari). Enthusiasts—often including me—have been the early adopters who drive advances in the computer state of the art.

On the other hand, there's no such thing as too much speed in a communications computer. Despite the best efforts of my Internet Service Providers, over two hundred spams a day get through to my desktop. I never see most of them because I have an elaborate series of Outlook Rules that move my mail around. My rule system is more complicated than many because I get a lot of press and PR releases that look a lot like spam, but which I really should read. Slowly, over the past few years, I have developed rules that get rid of most of the spam and still bring me mail I should see; but because the rules are so complex, everything slows down.

Outlook is already pretty bad about locking up as mail comes in. Now all the mail has to be scanned by Norton, then filtered through about 40 rules. My rules look only at the header, but if I had a way to set limits on the process I'd let the system read a few lines of the text in mail that got past other rules. I was going to work on that, but now I think I will wait for Outlook 2003 and see what that does before I invest too much time in the project.

SpamBayes

On that subject: if you like experimenting with Outlook, by all means go to http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ and BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2003