Gadget Lab Comments of the Week - Fourth Edition

Our coverage of Windows 7's pros and cons sparked a storm of commentary, much of it predictably angry and partisan. But a few comments stood out.

One, posted on our first look at Windows 7, is from dereleased, who rebutted other commenters by citing a source on Microsoft customer satisfaction (even including a URL), presenting a thoughtful argument and adding a new wrinkle to the conversation:

OS X is built to run on homegrown hardware that they know inside and out and can always predict.

Linux (and variants) is Open Source, and therefore being maintained at lightning speed by a dedicated community of people who will make it work on anything, anywhere if they can, with the polish being added later. ...

Windows, however, is in a fairly unique situation to the other two: it is designed to run on any hodge-podge of software you can throw together. Does it accomplish this goal? Arguably, yes. I know, it must suck when your XYZ brand component doesn’t work as perfectly as you want, but when you think about the absolutely _staggering_ number of different parts you can plug into that beast (tens of processors, hundreds of video cards, motherboards, etc, etc) and still have it run, it’s actually a bit impressive.

Yes, you can include URLs in Gadget Lab comments, and we especially like it when those URLs point to a source, not just some spam blog.

Unrelated to the Windows 7 controversy, two Gadget Lab stories this week drew attention to the limitations of modern computer architecture. Commenters on each of these stories added erudite, informed opinions that, perhaps not coincidentally, drew attention to the same problem: The limitations of the bus that connects a CPU with the rest of the computer, including its main memory.

On "Hardware Hackers Create a Modular Motherboard," commenter jneutron5 made some valid points about challenges of parallel programming and current Intel architecture.

Parallelism in coding is hard, at times unintuitive, that’s true. But what these guys are doing is not only admirable, it’s way overdue. The fact is, unfortunately most of the best and brightest engineering colleagues of mine, even those that come from the top universities, know nothing about what it takes to code for parallel architectures.

From "DNA May Help Build the Next Generation of Chips," a commenter called sixwings had this to say:

However, there is a monster that threatens to rain on IBM’s beautiful parade. It’s called memory bandwidth. It is a monster that gets meaner and nastier every time you add another core to a processor. The reason is that all the cores must use a single data bus and a single address bus to access a single piece of data at a time and this creates a paralyzing bottleneck.

...

We must come up with a completely different type of computer, one that solves the bandwidth problem by embedding huge numbers of elementary processors directly into the memory substrate.

Sixwings and jneutron5 -- You guys should put your heads together. I think you're on the same track!

Finally, on our story about what women want in gadgets, Tooloohoohoo had an interesting, if somewhat rambling, response:

“Fashionable” is certainly more important for women, but fashionable actually has little to do with appearance. It means that something is “in fashion,” that a culture which the consumer belongs to has begun to esteem the product, and the consumer wants to increase his or or her standing in that culture by possessing the product while it is still on the rise. Right now male culture esteems these things more than female culture.

All of these comments, among many others, were worthy and useful contributions to Gadget Lab this week. But we're awarding the prize -- a Leatherman Freestyle CX donated by the Leatherman company -- to dereleased. Thanks for citing your sources.

Thanks to everyone who posted comments on Gadget Lab this week and please keep them coming! We're all out of prizes for now, but with luck we'll be able to bring them back in the near future.