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Another alternative that is used on some business laptops is a collapsible RJ45-connector: http://www.pcstats.com/article...

I don't know how much it will be, or if I really care - I'm not big on pics. But my first thought was that third parties will be offering knock off replacements at knock off prices.

Of course, other third parties can be offer replacement cameras with Carl Zeiss optical zoom lenses and more pixels than you can count at a price that would be considerably more than the original phone.

The phone reminds me a bit of the old Handspring PDAs with the expansion slot.

My, aren't you special.

Snark aside - no, no I'm not. Certainly no more special than anybody claiming they always need to try it 3 ways :)

I've used more than one computer where they're on the back and the wrong way up (most go with the 'trident' logo on top). I have a phone and a tablet that are the same plug but the opposite way up and it's small and recessed too.

In which case for the first time around, you didn't look (perhaps you couldn't, because, well, back side of the computer and all) and for the second+ time around, you completely forgot about the first time around.

If it was properly designed, you shouldn't have to look, and if your eyesight's not brilliant that might not help anyway. As to remembering, great if you only have one machine. Not so much when you have four at home, and use many different ones at work or college.

Which just brings us back to people taking a flattened plug horizontally to a port that's oriented vertically even if the port have a 180Â symmetry.

Without seeing the back side of the computer...

Are they vertical?
http://www.computershopper.com...

Or are they horizontal?
http://images.anandtech.com/do...

I guess you could think that it's always parallel to the longest side, but then what orientation does it have when there is no longest side?
http://www.pcstats.com/article...

I guess some people would just have to try it 4 ways around.

Note that I'm in no way saying that I think the USB plugs/sockets were a great design in terms of user-experience. At the time they were certainly better than most anything out there with multiple pins. Plugging in a PS/2 plug when you couldn't see the port, now that was torture. I certainly applaud the new design (for the most part).

Ultimately though, there's always going to be people who have trouble plugging devices in - for whatever reason. Some people have trouble just plugging headsets into their phones (judging by the plethora of scratches surrounding the headphone jacks). Thankfully for them, more and more peripherals are available in wireless form.

( Well, except for the power cables. Ever try to plug a U.S. plug in the wrong way around? Easy to do if you don't check which of the pins is the broader one. The C7P (device-end) is even worse. )

That reminds me of a Kenwood CD drive I bought for my computer. It used a multi-beam technology called TrueX to parellelize reading. It cost more than most readers at the time, but only about 20% more. The technology worked well if you were ripping the whole disc.

I tend to think that the high end ASUS boards are the best money can buy

My experience with ASUS has been frustration with low quality third party chips used to provide excessive numbers or SATA and USB ports and other features. These chips are never as good as the integrated Intel circuits. ASUS is the best of the non-Intel lot, but the others do the same thing; solder on whatever is cheapest and makes the specs look better, damn the bugs or driver issues. Intel also uses third party stuff but they're nowhere near as cavalier about it. Intel's work is not flawless, but they fix it when they screw up. If some Silicon Image chip on a Megasustrix motherboard doesn't work right they aren't going to fix it, or even acknowledge the problem.

I've always thought Intel motherboards only compete in the OEM sector.

That hasn't been true for years. On Newegg only ASUS has more (Intel based) motherboard models available than Intel; Intel has been very responsive to the market of people that want good boards. People like me have long since stopped debugging the poorly engineered products of all these little Taiwanese board makers. My last three personal machines were Intel boards and they're all still running perfectly. Two survived transition from XP to Windows 7 with no driver drama; the OS recognized all the important bits out-of-the-box, which is exactly what I expected and intended.

Dear ASUS, this is an opportunity beyond simply gobbling up the market Intel leaves behind. Now is the time to step up your engineering and qualification of components and produce a line of grown-up boards. I don't need or want 35 USB ports provided by 3 phy implementations, all different. I want conservative, well engineered boards that run cool and don't leak capacitor juice all over the place three years after I buy it. Thanks.

To get that bit rate you need multiple lasers and a few GB of RAM as a buffer. The 11-year old Kenwood TrueX CD ROM benchmarked at 7.74Mbytes/sec by using seven read heads. You may think that's slow by today's standards, but it was "72x" - the fastest CD ROM drive ever built.

A 12x blu ray drive exists. It can get about 50MB/sec. Seven read heads on a drive like that could get you to 350MB/sec using readily available media. That should be enough throughput to run a lossless video codec. Samsung and Kenwood need to get together and build a new drive to make 4k media happen.

LCD TVs dont have mesurable power fluctuations due the changing colors/brightness

Are you sure? Modern LCD TVs adjust the backlight brightness according to the image displayed, in order to improve the contrast, and this does appear to be measurable.

This is ONLY true for CRT screens.

So on this page (you know, the article), down in the table labeled "Greyscales and Computer monitor power consumption", where it clearly shows the LCD using 40W on a white screen and 35.5W on a black screen, you're saying that's not true, correct? Is their data wrong, is their LCD monitor faulty, or is everyone claiming that brightness has zero effect on an LCD power draw mistaken?

I'm having a real hard time figuring out why all these (smart?) people on Slashdot are claiming that brightness has no effect on power consumption in an LCD when we have hard data that very clearly and obviously shows that this is not the case. Are people just jumping in to comment on their profound knowledge of backlights without bothering to even glance at the data that they're commenting about? Don't get me wrong, a theoretical knowledge of how LCD monitors work is great, but we have an article here with very specific data which shows a very specific conclusion to a question that has been discussed about for a while. Why is everyone just ignoring the data now?

The question has been answered - yes, brightness has a fairly significant effect on CRTs, up to 25%. And yes, it also has an effect on LCDs, but only by about 10% (and the LCD is already using about half the power of the CRT anyway). So yeah, LCDs are more efficient than CRTs, and brightness does in fact effect power consumption in both CRT and LCD monitors. I don't see how anyone can come to any other conclusion.

You are correct: you do not need a discreet sound card. I haven't had a discrete sound card in the last few computers I've bought or built or the past several years and games and everything sounded just fine. Every motherboard I've bought since 2004 supported 7.1 channels like the 2004 MSI K8T Neo2 Socket 939 motherboard

The article confirms this: "That brings me to the question we posed at the beginning of this review, which is whether you really need a sound card at all. The simple answer is no. You can get by with integrated audio and live blissfully unaware of what you're missing or stubbornly claim that no difference exists."

Correct.

Big ass case - for example this one with 10 internal hard drive slots and 5 DVD sized slots which you can convert using something like this that converts 3 x 5.25" into 4 x 3.5" drives, so you'd have 14 hard drives in total.

There are cheaper cases with only 8 or 9 standard 3.5 inch slots for hard drives and at least 3 x 5.25" slots, so the least amount of hard drives you could store is 12. But you don't have to be limited by the slots already made. You could get 2 metal plates, drill some holes and screw the drives in a column on the plates and lock this column with some screws to the bottom of the case or to the side panel.

Motherboard - any will do, most have 5-6 sata connectors. There are cheap 50$ sata controllers that add 4 sata ports so you can plug two of these and you have 14 sata ports in the computer.
You don't even need to get 1 to 5 port extenders which only slow down the transfer.

The only thing you have to worry with something like this is to get a good power supply - ideally one of those with a single voltage rail or 4 independent voltage rails in which case you make sure to attach 4-5 drives on each rail so that the load is balanced.

As for the hard drives themselves, check the specifications on WD's site, on Seagate's site, and pick the ones that heat the less and maybe even check reviews for heat information. Though it's enough to have some 120 mm fans in front of the case blowing air to keep them chilled. 5900 rpm drives are fast enough for your needs.

Windows 7 (and I think XP) has ReadyBoost. I haven't been able to find anything similar for Linux. It is also not clear how much difference ReadyBoost makes. The only benchmark I was able to find uses a crappy USB flash drive. I was wondering how much difference something like the 80GB x-25m would make. There is clearly potential for huge gains as MaxIQ benchmarks show.

This would be an awesome speedup if it was supported: just add a 40-80GB SSD for swap & file cache, and gain a massive performance boost over a standard cheap 7200RPM drive. Given that the price per GB for SSD is likely to stay very high for the foreseeable future, this seems like the best way to go. If only there was OS support for it...

The alternative (that I'm waiting for) is for SSD prices to drop.

My main point about this wasn't so much as it being a full-re-write or whatever Microsoft's marketing and PR department says, but that as long as it tenaciously holds on to legacy code and doesn't excise it completely will be unable to move forward and compete. But this means a new format, new bios, new memory allocation methods, new i/o mapping, and so on. Much of that "legacy code" is actually the interface between the OS and the older hardware, which is why 90%+ of all crashes and bugs occur. The OS asks the crappy hardware to do something it doesn't want to or is too slow to do and boom - you're back to square one.

Note - this also means a total re-working of motherboard designs to have more speed and better interfaces as well. We're essentially using recycled 1980s technology and tweaking it. It works fine, but it's just about hit a wall. For instance, find me a motherboard with actual PCIe 16X X2 specs. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2056 This seems to be the only one I could find, but what's next? It's hit a wall. (and any devices you use on the machine share that PCI bus - as do all motherboards for PCs)

So what happens when we have to get around that "wall" in five or ten years? As I see it, Microsoft has no game plan for the true next generation of computers.

Then support holographic memory. There appears to be at least one company doing work with it. There may be more. I didn't look very hard.

we can't assume people bought their computer last week

True, but if they've got even a Pentium 4 (remember those?), they can get 2 to 5 GB/sec. See:

A 2Ghz P4 can get 2GB/sec for ordinary "integer" code

and up to 5GB/sec for better optimized SSE2 code.

Those CPUs are old, and they could still mix an entire orchestra, in real time, without breaking a sweat.

Take a look at the bar graph at the bottom, most CPUs released in the last few years easily do 5GB+ even for "integer" code (SSE3 would be more than double), and the Core i7s do 25GB/sec, which is higher than I thought.

There's just no need to 'standardize' on anything, or even have kernel-mode drivers for anything other than basic "input" or "output". Write your sound mixing code in ordinary C (even Java or C# would be fast enough!), and just send it down the line...

Heck, take a look at software defined radio, there's just no need for dedicated hardware for a lot of things when the CPU is so ridiculously powerful.

And also a doubling of the size of every pointer, meaning an inflation in the size of every instruction, causing an increase in the number of cache misses and an increase in the size of application binaries which means greater memory usage.

64-bit is *not* a panacea. It's better in some cases, worse in others, and which is better, 32-or 64-bit, depends entirely on workload.

While true, on x86-64, the the positives tend to outweigh the negatives. However, on architectures where 64-bit was not an afterthought, the negatives seem to outweigh the positives.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2

Enter the technology developed by Zen. Instead of rotating the disc above and beyond the physical limits by some act of magic, they have devised a means to read seven tracks concurrently. Those seven streams of data flow through a specially designed RISC chip and to your computer with no additional CPU-load.

The 72x CD drive is a lie. It's probably spinning at 40x speeds(or lower) - although as the sandra benchmarks show, if you have to read 7 tracks at once, it's way faster than any other drives out at the time.

I was always under the impression that the 72x CD drives managed the feat not by spinning it faster but by reading multiple tracks concurently. Here is a bit from on review on the drive:

"Enter the technology developed by Zen. Instead of rotating the disc above and beyond the physical limits by some act of magic, they have devised a means to read seven tracks concurrently. Those seven streams of data flow through a specially designed RISC chip and to your computer with no additional CPU-load."

Thats from:http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2/

They didn't use multiple lasers though they used some sort of prism to split one beam I believe. However they did it it wasn't very reliable and the Kenwood 72x drivers were notoriously unreliable as well as incompatible with many types of DRM. I believe Kenwood was the only manufacturer of CD drives of that speed and I believe they patented the technology. I think thats why no one else made drives that fast.

Cheers,
Greg

Keep it actually plugged in and running for 50 years. Configure the BIOS to wake on LAN, so it can recover from blackouts. Better yet, if it has a wireless network card. You could wall it away, and even remotely ping it every now and then to see if it is still alive.

I wonder if you could replace the BIOS battery (which obviously won't lasts 50 years) with a nuclear pacemaker. Contact Medtronic to see if they could donate one for this cause. Either that, or remove the battery and provide enough instructions to boot the machine with default (dead battery) BIOS settings.

I think in 50 years there will still be enough experts in antique computers (The original Mac just turned 25 for perspective) to get the machine up and running, as long as nothing has corroded beyond repair. New motherboards and high end power supplies are being made with polymer capacitors that last a lot longer.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2113

According to this page, the same PC I mentioned before uses up 40 more watts when under full load than when idling. That's about 27% of the 150 watts I mentioned before.

These figures are just ballpark numbers which give a rough idea. There are all kinds of people running these programs... Some make computer farms specifically to run them, some others don't buy new computers but leave theirs when they otherwise wouldn't, and then there's those who don't change their habits because of distributed computing. There's everything in between as well, making it very hard to estimate the real impact.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

PCStats' Shopping List is also a great resource, updated monthly.

A lot of high end MMO games are notorious for memory leaks and when you are playing for several hours plus running voice communications, internet browsing etc I have seen my pagefile hit 1.5 GB before. Microsoft actually recommends 4GB. Best practices for partitioning a hard disk http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/tulloch_partition.mspx I also do a lot of multi-tasking and photoshop work so the pagefile does get up there. Anyhow for those still sticking with XP the above link and this one are good starters for increasing performance. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1590&page=1

I've read a variety of posts about the problems with FireWire (see here and here from what I found on Google), and the big problem is that FireWire didn't become a de facto standard seven or eight years ago when it was really needed. These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.

I've heard this is chiefly due to Apple's initial intransigence regarding licensing; they demanded $1 per computer to use the "FireWire" name, making other device makers really angry. Considering how slim hardware margins are, no one was going to go for it. FireWire 400 is still technically superior to USB 2.0 in many ways, even today, but it's never reached the market penetration it needs, and now USB 2.0 is "good enough" for most purposes.

I use a Mac and so do many family members, and I've long counseled them to get only FireWire drives for backups. When Leopard came out, some were shopping for drives, and I found that I could not find FW400/USB 2 drives for as little as plain USB 2.0 drives. In other words, the FireWire premium for HDs appears to be at least $30. Not a good sign for market penetration.

Now FW 3200 is being discussed when FW 800 already seems dead on arrival in consumer land, and only supported to the limited extent it is by Apple. Not making it backwards compatible with FW400 was an idiotic decision that ensured whatever chance it had in the market was gone. In the meantime, eSATA and the like have come along and perhaps obviated the need for many FireWire applications altogether.

32bit isn't any faster than 64bit overall. In some cases it is, in some cases it isn't. For gaming, it by and large is because most games are 32bit, and 32bit software takes less memory in general. But don't state it as if it's a fact for everything, because it's not true.

Only a fraction of the 64-bit capable desktops and workstations are running 64-bit applications. What's more, there are very few mainstream 64-bit applications out there, despite the fact that for gaming, audio processing, image processing/photoshop apps, and video there would still be performance advantages (memory bandwidth and operation throughput), even if you don't yet have > 4GB of RAM.

It's not really compelling - plus or minus a few percent. And you need to test two binaries which is expensive. So unless you're absolutely forced to use more than 4GB per process, I think people won't bother.

Looks pretty compelling from here! Take a look at the 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmarks shown here for instance! If I was a game developer, I'd gladly take 40FPS over 30FPS if it only meant a recompile targeting a 64-bit platform! You only need to test two binaries if you also choose to support 32-bit as well - a suitably advanced app/game could just make a 64-bit capable AMD/Intel chip a prerequisite these days (DOOM required a 386 or better during a similiar 16/32-bit transition period)

"Sherman set the wayback machine to the early 90's, and the great 16-32 bit transition" You might recollect the introduction of the mighty 386 processor, extended memory modes, the Win32s API, but probably most importantly, killer apps like DOOM loading up their own 32-bit memory managers to sidestep the OS, which really wasn't ready to provide good 32-bit native support. Apps that did this completely took over the system, putting the host OS in stasis until the app was exited.

Sounds much like the same situation - the majority of users are running an OS that can't tap the full potential their CPU has to offer. So - why aren't we seeing similar application tricks, like those that enabled 32-bit protected mode now? The proposition of writing an application which would sidestep Windows XP 32-bit and set up a mini 64-bit host environment (not really a full OS) is not that radically different, right?

If you really want 64 bit, I don't see why you can't use Windows x64. Sure you'll need to be careful that you have hardware which has x64 drivers, but that's life.

*I* can (and regularly use XP-64, W2K3 64-bit, and even Vista 64-bit these days) - but if I'm writing a high-end app/game for a reasonably wide audience, you have to realize there's a lot of Windows XP 32-bit boxes out there running on CPUs capable of running in 64-bit "long" mode. It would be mighty sweet to tap into that power for high-end gaming, audio/video processing/transcoding, ray-tracing, etc.

32 bit Windows already has PAE which is the moral equivalent of a Dos extender. I think Outlook and MS SQL server can use it. So there isn't really a hole for a 64 bit Windows extender.

PAE only gives you access to more memory, it doesn't enable the CPU 64-bit processing, so it's not interesting to me. What's more - programming to these "bank switching" style memory extensions really is quite cumbersome.

I've often wondered what would happen if you could make bootable games - e.g. Linux+ATI and NVidia drivers+a game binary on a LiveCD. But to make it work you'd need to be able to offer much better graphics performance than regular Windows, just like Doom's extended Dos had better performance than regular Dos.

And given the amount of effort NVidia and ATI spend on Linux drivers compared to Windows ones, I'm not sure that's the case. DirectX is thinner layer over the driver than OpenGL too.

Yes - using a stripped down Unix core could achieve the same goal, I suppose. Again the DOS4GW dos extender did some mojo regarding drivers such that it leveraged the existing 16-bit DOS drivers for a number of s

The wrap-around design looks like an improvement over the standard system without going overboard like the ASUS Striker Extreme. How do these two cooling systems compare?

with lots of pictures but no real "meat". This one from 2004 is far superior; They even have pictures of the solder wave machine which this article didn't even include at all. BTW that first machine that the author couldn't name is a solder paste screen printer. The other machine the athor hinted at (the one with the reels) is apparently a bios chip testing station. Really, for such a good site I'm suprised they bothered to type this one up when it's been done so well before... I think Gigabyte does this every year or couple of years as a pretty decent PR op. My advice: RTFA Extremetech's first, then go to the link above for a lot more detail if you're still interested.

More indepth for those who care. The flowing solder is (to me) th emost interesting and sparse par however, though AMD (did) have a few interesting articles on how mass automated soldering is done.

I like http://www.pcstats.com/

You, sir, are a cad and a bounder. What do the ScienceMark and Primordia scores show on Page 11 of the article you linked (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid= 2097&page=11)? Did you not need to include this data so we can arrive at fair conclusions?

ScienceMark 2.0 has the Athlons run four times faster in 64-bit mode than 32; the Core2 Duo speeds up by a factor of three. Primordia has the AMD64 speed up by a factor near 8/7; Core2 by the smaller factor of 9/8. I'd say that it's swings and roundabouts, as ever with computer architectures.

Where's your proof?

You've already had someone respond with a link to benchmarks showing exactly the opposite of what you claim:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2 097&page=12

Where are the benchmarks that show what you claim?

Cheers,

Roger

I decided to look for 64-bit and 32-bit comparison charts. So I googled and found one at PCStats.com. So what does zlib Mini-GZIP 1.2.3 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmark says? It still says Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) beats AMD Athlon64 FX-62 (WinXP 64/64 Bit) by roughly 30%. So does 64-bit DivX encoding.
And even at Science Mark 2.0 at which Intel C2Duo is slower than FX-62, switching into 64 bit reduces time needed to run the test from 66.241sec to 21.36.

At least provide some sort of sources when claiming performance drop in 64 bit mode. According to the above benchmark I do want to buy C2Duo and run it in 64-bit mode to do all the gzipping.

By the time consumers will start to care about PCI DMA eating more than 4GB of memory, the new revision of Intel CPU will be out with on-die controller ;)

AMD is the best choice for budget customers right now

Wow. What a response. Guess a lot of Slashdotters are backpackers too.

You can get very small light but quite powerful PCs at around 1 kg with full blown Windows. If you're looking for something cheaper look for a second hand Casio Fiva on eBay: It's the smallest fully functional PC I've ever seen: Windows or Linux. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=6 79 http://www.fixup.net/tips/fiva/Casio%20Fiva%20and% 20Windows%202000.htm or http://www.edkeyes.org/obsolete/fiva.html. Don't bring an expensive, full-size PC. I did once; LCD screen was damaged, and it's a huge extra weight. Besides, If you're really backpacking, you'll find you have little time to use a PC.

Don't waste days sitting around documenting your trip or organizing photos when you can be out enjoying where you are! Don't walk around with your brain plugged into an iPod when you can be meeting the locals and enjoying the sights and sounds of where ever you are (people rarely start conversations with people with headphones).

Travel light. Take as little as you can. I travel with a small backpack that carries a change of jeans, some clothes and a down jacket. When I get off the train, I can head straight for the mountains instead of dragging a big fat suitcase to a hotel.

Enjoy yourself! I (and nearly 400 other slashdotters) wish we were coming with you! :-)

NO KIDDING! I was thinking the same thing... this is OLD news. And for a reputed nerd community the lack of knowledge about the current Core 2 Duo over clocking CRAZINESS is quite stunning - (http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/18/overclocki ng-guide-part-1/index.html). The whole point of water cooling is to get immense ROI on hardware, not some nerdy obsession thing, at least not at the moment. If the gains were in the 10% region I would agree, this would be a bad/expensive idea, but the gains are in the 50 - 75% range with current technology. Wake up and smell the freon nerds! And if anyone wants to see real ridiculous, check this out - http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 793

wonder if they're suing these guys too? At least that device actually is infringing.

For mortal users (most of us), the benefit is an instant CPU performance boost of around 20-30% at least on Athlon 64 units when using the 64-bit instruction set vs the 32-bit instruction set. I have a dual-core AMD64 now, but I'm running everything 32-bit as the performance is more than acceptable. However, in a couple of years I will upgrade everything to 64-bit once all these glitches are solved and I should get a free upgrade in speed.

This PCStats article has some benchmarks on the topic. Anandtech had some too, but I couldn't find them immediately.

That looks promising. However it's not as good as a card that comes with a nice quiet cooling solution because:

1) you're effectively paying for two coolers (the stock one and the Thermaltake)
2) a good number of people who want a quiet graphics card would still be hesitant to pull bits off of theirs (even if it's easy for someone who knows what they are doing).
3) if the card dies you have the hassle of reinstalling the stock cooler before returning it.

The ASUS EN7800GT card mentioned by Rob above is just the sort of thing I was thinking of - good performance and absolutely silent. I just wish it was available in my country! :)

Here are links to the company websites, look for "Silent-Pipe" or "Silent" in the name...
http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/VGA/Products_Lis t.aspx?VenderType=ATi&BUSType=PCI-E&BUSSpeed=16
http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/VGA/Products_Lis t.aspx?VenderType=NVIDIA&BUSType=PCI-E&BUSSpeed=16
http://usa.asus.com/products2.aspx?l1=2&l2=8
http://usa.asus.com/products2.aspx?l1=2&l2=6

32 bits is generally more than enough.

8 registers, however, are not.

Other than e-penis, why would anyone (today) with the status of 64 bit software as it stands want to use a 64 bit OS / drivers / programs.

Because they're faster.

Several parallelizeable operations can be done faster using a 64-bit architecture than a 32-bit architecture. While it is a bit silly to run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit architecture or to buy a 64-bit architecture and forever run it on a 32-bit OS, 64-bit programs on a 64-bit OS will outperform their counterparts in several important instances. Once we have 64-bit optimized programs it'll be silly not to be running a 64-bit processor...

MP3 Decoding and Encoding, as well as Video Decoding and Encoding, are significantly faster in AMD64 mode than i386.

Of course, if you want proper end-to-end AMD64 software you'll need Linux.

AMD64's performance improvements are a reality on Linux, today.

Some benchmarks:
http://enterprise.linux.com/enterprise/05/06/09/14 13209.shtml?tid=121

Some more benchmarks, on XP!:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 665&page=6

There are many, many, many more out there. If you're doing math-intensive things, AMD64 out performs i386. It's irrelevant whether its the larger address space or greater number of registers; either way, it works better.

here here! I agree totally =)

Though AMD's naming scheme isn't quite as bad as Intel's, it's still a bit confusing. I just recently built my first amd system after owning 5 intels over the last 15 years. I couldn't decide on which dual core make I wanted to get, some have 2x512k L2 cache, some have 2x1mb L2 cache. I ended up going with the cheapest one (Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2.0ghz dual core 2x512k L2 cache). Some people have been able to overclock their X2 3800+ from the stock 2.0ghz upto 2.5~2.7ghz. A 25% increase or more. Eventually when my warranty expires I will be pushing this chip past it's stock speed. I'm happy with the speed as it is, two 2.0ghz cores is way faster than my old P4 2.66ghz single core.

The design of AMD dual core chips is better than Intels too. AMD dual core chips communicate directly with each other on the die, Intel chips have to communicate through the much slower FSB. You can read about it here

Windows XP Firewall did NOT block outbound traffic until SP2. Read this link and see for yourself. There are numerous reviews all over the net that support what I say.

http://www.scorpioncity.com/images/crash/m/bsod.pn g http://www.windowsitpro.com/Files/301/Screen_01.gi f http://www.pcstats.com/articleimages/200409/BSOD_2 .gif

Disables nearly all pre-installed ActiveX controls to prevent potentially vulnerable controls from being exposed to attack. You can easily enable or disable ActiveX controls as needed through the Information Bar and the Add-on Manager.

The beta of Internet Explorer 7 is neat to play with but it has one quirky feature where it does not allow users to install unsigned Active X controls. Unfortunately since it's still beta, virtually all Active X addons (like Shockwave, Flash) are unsigned which means they cannot be installed by default. Trying to do so causes IE 7 to spit out an error message.
Not all is lost however, if you load up the Internet Options (Tools -> Internet Options...), click the "Security" tab and in Internet security settings click the Custom Level... utton. In the "ActiveX Controls and plugins" section, find the "Download unsigned ActiveX Controls" option and change it from "Disable" to "Prompt". After that's done click the OK button and you're set!

BTW the only announced pricing I have seen is at least $1000.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/03/09/umpc/index .php
"Samsung plans to put the Q1 on sale in Europe before the end of June. The device will cost around 1,000 (US$1,190), it said."

Exactly what does this get you that a tiny subnotebook would not? Except looking like a dork as you stand around using it. Even using my PDA to read a lot, I prefer to sit down. If you are sitting down, a small notebooks is better has a real keyboard, holds itself up even in your lap to watch movies etc. With a tablet you have to hold it. Compare the size of the Samsung UMPC to the Sony VAIO. Almost the same, I would much rather have the Sony. Fold it and throw it in a bag. This thing will get scratched unless you carry it in a case....

Size:
Samsung Q1 UMPC: 779g 230mm x 140mm 7-inch touchscreen LCD
VAIO PCG-C1MSX: 998g 249mm x 152mm 8.9" LCD (only slightly bigger but real keyboard, bigger screen)

Jpgs:
http://www.engadget.com/media/2006/03/samsung_q1.j pg
http://www.transmetazone.com/articleimages/transva ioc1msx_perpspec2.jpg

More stuff on the VAIO, I think this one never made it to North america, but the could bring it back using the UMPC chips:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1 058

Put the same processor in each, which would you rather have, tablet or submini notebook?

I did real all 3 pages. However I also saw on the page of the article I sent you that the picture showing how much better the signal routing on FB-DIMMs is a "dual-channel" setup, despite having 4 DIMMs.

I consider this a typical setup, and the article does too.

The real crux of this thing is you confused "point-to-point" with each DIMM necessarily connecting straight to the memory controller and stated such. That's not the case and I wanted to clear that up. For ultimate performance, you would do such a thing, but the positioning of FB-DIMMs seems to be for servers (and lotsa DIMMs) instead of for home machines at this time.

See pic here:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 812&page=2

and other places. FB-DIMM is heralded as the way to attach more RAM more than to attach the same RAM faster. And I think given cost structure (it'll cost more), that's wise.

We'll see what happens with this. Like I said, I'm nervous about it, given the history behind the companies involved.

What you've described is how FB-DIMMs work on a single channel. Each FB-DIMM channel connects seperately to the memory controller and is a seperate path (the memory controller is a switch). Each channel off the memory controller is exactly as you describe... up to eight double sided memory modules daisy chained. See link for a picture of what you describe (which is a single FB-DIMM channel). Then go to page 2 of that article where it shows that the standard is up to six such channels can hang off a single memory controller. To sum it up:

Since the serial links have a lower pin-count than conventional memory buses and better data handling abilities, more channels can be implemented in a single memory controller. In entry-level servers and high-end desktops, four FB-DIMM modules, each with a channel of their own will have a considerable bandwidth advantage over a conventional dual-channel memory controller supporting two DDR2 DIMMS on each channel.

I haven't heard much about the VIA C7 Chips, which were supposed to perform a bit below the Pentium M's, but were also supposed to have extremly low power consumtion and heat output. They are supposed to have come out by now, but I have yet to hear anything other than the general specs articles.

If you've never heard of the C7 this article give a pretty good outline of it:
http://www.pcstats.com/artvnl.cfm?articleID=1833