Slashdot Mirror

Intel was reluctant to swallow its pride and admit that AMD was defining 64-bit computing, so it announced a 64-bit instruction set of its own called Extended Memory 64-bit Technology (EM64T). Frothy name aside, EM64T is almost identical to AMD64, enabling it to run Windows XP x64. Newer Pentium 4s, such as the 600 and 800 series, support EM64T. The main difference between EM64T and AMD64 is that EM64T includes SSE3 support, which has been added to only the latest Venice core Athlon 64 processors.

Where did you get a G5 Powerbook? Are you thinking of a G$, as Apple hasn't come out with a G% Powerbook yet? G5s get too hot for laptops. Here's an article, Apple denies eyeing Intel chips, about the possibility of Mac OS on Intel. The relevant part about G5 Powerbooks is down at the bottum, almost as in passing where it says:

"Of course there is every chance that this is all a smokescreen and next month, at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference., CEO Steve Jobs will unveil a 3GHz Power Mac and a G5 PowerBook. Two years ago, there was similar talk of a tie-up between Apple and AMD, though nothing materialised."

Personally the next computer I get I plan on making it a 17" Powerbook, and am hoping Apple releases the G5 Powerbook soon.

http://www.techsmec.com/index.php/2005/05/23/apple _denies_intel_rumour
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/73057/apple-denies-eye ing-intel-chips.html
http://www.dvhardware.net/article5037.html

Of course, one could argue that Apple wouldn't want this news to be leaked

That's because M$ ended production of IE for the Mac, also here.

And if you weere designing pages on the Mac, and testing them in IE Mac and expecting them to look the same on a Windows box, I have some prime realestate under Manhattan for you.

Same news more public forum:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/72465/british-schoolki ds-overcharged-for-software.html

Interesting thing with this recently respected uk magazine, they had on their A-list for some months last year:- openoffice as the only office suite... until (the ms moguls gottem and) both OpenOffice and emmessophice now appear together -- the latter appears with a "corporate" tag (whoops wotta wopping spelling mistake -- must start using ispell again).

Cheers,

Joc

PC Pro who interestingly claim the best business model for a download site is allofmp3.com, and their choice of player is the Rio Carbon.

Windows server: Sure, some folks buy it, but plenty don't. So far, Microsoft only has about one third of this space, and Linux is nipping at its heels. They knifed Windows for Itanium, to the disappointment of both Itanium users.

Server appications: IIS has lost market share to Apache in recent years, and Exchange isn't ubiquitous yet either. SQL server enjoys showing the web its limits.

Windows CE/Mobile/Tablet/whatever: Still no monopoly, and since sales of PDAs are shrinking and tablet PC's haven't really caught on, even if MS did take over this market...

Game Consoles: XBox did just have its first profitable quarter. Ever. But it doesn't seem to sell so well overseas, and Nintendo and Sony haven't been persuaded to go away yet.

Media: Media Center PC's aren't selling so well, and in a world with iTuneszilla stomping around, Windows Media suddenly seems less likely to rule the universe than it did a few years ago, even with "PlaysForSure."

Internet Services: Even with its added features, MSN Messenger doesn't seem to be destroying AIM or Yahoo Messenger. MSN doesn't seem to be destroying anybody in general, even if Verizon throws it in free with DSL, and even if MSN is the homepage for Internet Explorer. Now Microsoft wants to go after Google, too.

It's pretty interesting to consider that Windows Client and Office are so frickin' profitable that Microsoft can afford to throw gobs of money at their unprofitable products and divisions (which are pretty much everything but Windows Client and Office) and still have huge heaps of cash left over.

(Oh, and I left off Apple, because if 95% of the world abruptly switched to Apple, Microsoft is second only to Apple itself in Mac software development, and would still be one of the most profitable companies out there, on sales of Office for Mac, VirtualPC, etc. Also, because as long as Apple is out there, and isn't owned by Microsoft, Microsoft can point at it and say "look, there are other choices, we're not that much of a monopoly!" :)

The other day I was wondering why n-in-1 USB card readers that supported the xD format were so bloody expensive when compared to their non-xD brothers and sisters. It didn't take long to come to the conclusion that it must cost more to license xD than other formats, otherwise, the price disparity wouldn't make much sense to anyone.

Sure enough, after looking into it, there is a royalty that one has to pay to use the xD connector. On this site there's a blurb that reads under the "Media Cards" sub-heading:

Of these cards, only the last one has a royalty charged for the use of the connector. As our contact stated - the IP holders have finally gotten it right not to charge those seeking to be able to accept their media on products the OEM designs. In the case of the XD Picture Card, the royalties were characterized as "high."

Here's some information you can get here on the new 1GB xD card:

The ultra-compact xD-Picture Card will have a 1GB version early in 2005, according to Fuji Photo Film and Olympus, which have jointly developed the new addition.

Dubbed the M1GB, the 'M' stands for 'Multi Level Cell', a new high-density flash memory technology. MLC purportedly offers a capacity potential of up to 8GB. The mini cards measure just 20mm x 25mm x 1.7mm.

While such storage in such a small dimension would once have been considered fantastic, the need for greater capacity is being driven by the higher resolution offered by multi-mega pixel digital cameras.

The xD-Picture Card was launched in September 2002.

Episode V

The Spammer Strikes Back

It is a dark time for the Internet. Although Spamford Wallace has been shut down, Atriks spammers have driven the irate users from their inboxes and pursued them into court.

Evading the dreaded Distributed Mail Corporation, a group of freedom fighters led by Jay Stuler has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Ohio.

The evil lord Darth Haberstroh, obsessed with harassing young Stuler, has dispatched thousands of spambots into the far reaches of the Internet...

From TFA: Extensive testing by PC Pro's labs has revealed that photographs produced by inkjet printers can be both far more expensive than those from traditional photo processors and fade far more quickly.

Moderate this comment
Negative: Offtopic Flamebait Troll Redundant
Positive: Insightful Interesting Informative Funny

This month the UK "PC Pro" magazine has a review of the Scan White Cobra gaming machine.

This is a fine example of SLI running with jaw dropping performance...a quote from the review puts Doom 3 running at 98fps!

Now I know what I want for Christmas, just not a snowball's chance in hell of getting one! :)

-- Pete.

BreakOut, Super BreakOut... (photoshop) ?

Currently XIII

But, if you need a hit-me-over-the-head obvious comparison, enumerating how OOo is better, then look at PC Pro's review of OOo1.1.2. Or you can read Replacing FrameMaker with OOo Writer, which makes several direct and indirect comparisons.

Or you can try editing a long document with OOo and see for yourself. Menus are flexible. File sizes are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude smaller. Support for styles is better, as is the ability to export to PDF including PDF forms.

Acquisition and installation has no cost except labor, which is perhaps less since OOo is easier to install than MSO. There are no annual fees or overhead such as the tracking of licenses. There are no hidden gotchas such as the need to purchase additional servers, and user licenses for those servers, to manage Digital Restrictions, etc.

Businesses running MS Office 2003 also need to pony up for M$ Server 2003 + the requisite number of CALs for M$ Server 2003.

Alternately, they can drop M$ altogether and go for a top of the line productivity suite instead.

This guy knows how to do it. He is still a teenager, and he is manipulating stocks for $90k and acting as a bogus bookie, netting himself $1M. Ok, so he is caught - but he got a slap on the wrist. This kid has a future in Vegas.

Regarding open source Java and with characteristic bite, Scooter says 'I don't know what problem that would solve apart from IBM's childhood envy,' (Stupid free reg required.)

Given PCPro's article: Sun's
Scott McNealy squashes idea of Java becoming open source !

I think he was referring to this.

Indeed...

Yes, that's how it is in most countries of the world (such as, for example in Britain or many other European countries).

The US however, are once more for big business (the telemarketers) and anti-people, and word their laws in such a way that you need a different Do Not Call list per different media!

The TLD co.uk for Britain! The British are a force not to be neglected!

More coverage (copied from USF site):
NY Times,
C|Net,
San Jose Business Journal,
NPR,
UK PC Pro
USF News

This article talks more about Questar and confirms our worst fears! It's pretty clear to me that thanks to RIAA, people can sued into submission. I think there will be many other smaller companies who just pay a few $thousand to make it all go away.

"Questar whom reports quote as claiming their use of Linux to be so light that the trifling cost of paying off SCO was the better option to the likelihood of meeting the ever-more litigious SCO in court."

SCO has filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for not responding to letters sent to Unix licencees demanding they perform a software audit proving they are complying with the confidentiality provisions and other terms of the software licence.
SCO is seeking an injunction to bar DaimlerChrysler from further violations of that licence, to fix past violations and be awarded damages to be decided in court as well as costs.
However, the violation in question is simply that of not responding to the audit request, rather than any misappropriation of trade secrets or use of Linux as with other litigation SCO is pursuing.

...so long ago I'd forgotten it was necessary.

Thanks for the link. I'm not much into payback, but I'm glad to see the copier's authors excising protection features as well as the descrambler. It puts across the message that they have been playing nicely despite being attacked, but that they will not make a doormat of themselves.

I'm wondering whether this might also have an impact.

Try: here

Sun fires back over Open Source Java accusations

Apparently Xmas took them by surprise and they need 90 more days to recover from the shock.

Also, it seems they haven't really caught anything so far and want to fish about that other nook too (non-sysV AIX and dynix stuff).

For once I find myself hoping the judge doesn't have a sense of humour.

I'm not sure why, but a couple of links were removed from the edited post. I haven't yet used MS Office 2003, so I'm not in a position to say whether or not the PC World review 'sums things up pretty well' (not my words) or not. Some of the other edits do clarify, however. As for the "spectacular-conglomeration dept.", if that referred to this post, a tip of the hat to simoniker.

For anyone who cares, here's how it looked as submitted, with an additional Google link for PC Pro article to bypass their registration page. The interesting thing is that PC Pro changed the headline which was definitive about shutting out Macs to something less than absolute.

The first users of MS Office 2003 are weighing in and the response is decidedly mixed. The new Outlook has received a favorable response but the mantra seems to be there's little reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features. Microsoft probably heard this in beta trials and has adopted the curious strategy of denigrating previous versions of Office as "too hard to find things" and having a "clunky" interface. Meanwhile, Bill Gates dismissed the open source competition. One of the new features - self-destructing documents - seems to have caused some confusion because 'Microsoft says the new feature is not designed to remove all traces of a file' and MS spokesman Mike Pryke-Smith says, "The message will still be in various places." E-mails will not self-destruct. Another problem is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management that will shut out Mac users (Google link). PC World has a long and detailed review of Microsoft Office 2003 (single-page).

This topic reminded me of an article in the print version of UK mag PC Pro by Jon Honeyball. He tells of one of his (consultancy) "clients" looking for a SAN/RAID solution from Dell and EMC, which would cost 120,000.

Aparently, Apples offering was 2TB storage for 9000 - vs 80,000 for 2TB from Dell/EMC.

In the article he says;The obvious question is whether you can put fibre channel cards into your Windows servers and connect them up too. Apple tells me this is possible The idea being to use the storage for SQL*Server databases and the like.

I'm not surprised this is such a good solution for use with Linux.

Here

PC Pro also has an article about this. Linky.

There is no 64 bit version os MS SQL

Bullshit, it's been out for months, see This article. As to the rest of your argument check out TPC-C results and say that MS SQL doesn't scale, it's the second highest scorer and has 6 of the top 10 results. This is a real world load testing benchmark that many companies base purchasing decisions on. (ok the MS solutions are a little unusual in that they are shared-nothing but the other competitiors are free to do likewise).

The "Rendezvous" software of Tibco is messaging software. Apple's is networking configuration. There doesn't seem to be any real attempt of Apple to capitalize on Tibco's reputation (because, naturally, Apple is some upstart company trying to leech off of the mighty Tibco...).

After all, wasn't this case sort of settled with the battle of Apple Records versus Apple Computer - there's not likely to be confusion in the products, and the Apple Records name had a hell of a lot more influence than Tibco does now.

A couple more news stories on this, more reputable but not much more information:
http://www.smartmoney.com/bn/ON/index.cfm?story=ON -20030828-000863-0816
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?http://www.pcpro.co.uk/new s/news_story.php?id=46737

Here are some articles of merit about this PDA.

Here

Here

and here

Last week SCO announced acquiring the assets and technology of Vultus, a web services company, who offer web development tools called WebFace ("Runs on Internet Explorer 5 and up").

While SCO predicted that they would obtain 15%-20% of a $3.7bn Web Services market, I have to admit to being perplexed how this is supposed to happen, and also wondering how well an Internet Explorer-based product could fit into SCO's UNIX offerings.

ComputerWorld has an alternative explanation of the Vultus acquisition, they call it: "SCO's Shell Game".

One thing is for sure - it sure is lucky that Vultus was in the same (Canopy-owned) building as SCO (check the picture), even before the acquisition!

Update: More on this story at GROKLAW

Repost: Form-4 filings with the SEC reveal Executives profiting from SCO stock sales: they made $398,833.90 in June, and $781,964.70 in July (so far)!

Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,' she explained.

Total Irony and Wimp. If access to the underlying code was all M$ cared about, they would have all of their software ported (non-free of course) to Linux and BSD. Mac OSX is as close as they would come, but because OSX is controled by Apple, M$ has to bow out. They are paranoid of the dirty tricks they play on others and can't stand to work with anything but their own garbage. People said that M$ was only working with Apple for the anti-trust trials. Now they seek to eliminate them.

I say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha!" M$ has as much a chance to eliminate Apple as they do to eliminate free software. People like it, use it and will pay for the services. It's more likely that people will continue to abandon the M$ rape. It was obvious to me that KDE had a better browser and interface and word processor and ... anyway.

Okay, could someone remind me which animals have souls and which don't? Is it only humans? It's hard to tell sometimes, especially when other animals exhibit soulful behavior.

FWIW, the UK mag PC Pro says in the Dec 2001 issue (this is with the 1800, not 1900, Athlon-XP):

"Is there any bad news? Yes, but only for Intel. The Athlon XP 1800+ sees AMD back as the undisputed king of the performance castle. With a score of 5.24 in our 2D application benchmarkss, the MESH is comfortably ahead of any 2GHz Pentium 4 machine we've seen. In 3DMark 2001, meanwhile, it achieves a monster score of 7,611 at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour. The fact that it can still delIver 5,271 3DMarks at a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 speaks volumes - Athlon XP and GeForce3 Ti 500 Is a potent 3D combination."

The same issue has a review of a 2GHz P4 which benchmarks at slower than an Athlon 1.33GHz!

Jon Honeyball, in his 'Advanced Windows' column in October's PC Pro (page 251) made a pitch to Visio's Guy Tweedale about hooking into the MMC window to allow visualisation of the Active Directory structure. Give away a free viewer as a default, with paid for versions that allow editing and management of large multidomain environments.

Dick Pountain, a long-standing computer industry commentator in the UK, has some comments in his column in the latest issue of PC Pro in which he draws interesting analogies between genetics and operating systems. Specifically, he suggests compiling a piece of Linux kernel which works and whose purpose is well understood, and patching it into a copy of Windoze 95. Even if Windoze runs, one day something awful is going to happen to the system... and surely the same implications are present for genetics (even without species crossover).