Slashdot Mirror

I wrote the first story backing up Rahul's blog here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30043
and then got more info the other day that also backed up the CNet and AMDZone versions, so I wrote this:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30289
Then the new CNet 'backpedal' piece came out, and it looks like someone is spreading hardcore FUD. So, I spent the morning tracking down rumors and leads, calling sources to see who their sources are and the like.

Short story, the sources are not talking to each other, and contrary to the CNet implications, it is not a grand plot by Rahul. I was told last week that it is a done deal, and nothing has changed that view since, but a lot has bolstered it.

The tepid denials (A friend of a guy who knew someone from Dell Australia) and the like are not what I would call good evidence. I have talked to three people who gave me some very convincing evidence about the purchase.

All that said, take it with a grain of salt, but when you start hearing about anouncement dates, it may be more than smoke and mirrors.

          -Charlie

I wrote the first story backing up Rahul's blog here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30043
and then got more info the other day that also backed up the CNet and AMDZone versions, so I wrote this:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30289
Then the new CNet 'backpedal' piece came out, and it looks like someone is spreading hardcore FUD. So, I spent the morning tracking down rumors and leads, calling sources to see who their sources are and the like.

Short story, the sources are not talking to each other, and contrary to the CNet implications, it is not a grand plot by Rahul. I was told last week that it is a done deal, and nothing has changed that view since, but a lot has bolstered it.

The tepid denials (A friend of a guy who knew someone from Dell Australia) and the like are not what I would call good evidence. I have talked to three people who gave me some very convincing evidence about the purchase.

All that said, take it with a grain of salt, but when you start hearing about anouncement dates, it may be more than smoke and mirrors.

          -Charlie

OK, first off everyone take a look at this other article:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25065
From that:
"Rockstar Games describes the upcoming title as one where gamers play a "troublesome schoolboy" who "stands up to bullies, gets picked on by teachers, plays pranks on malicious kids, wins or loses the girl, and ultimately learns to navigate the obstacles of the fictitious reform school.""

Side note: From personal experience I'd say that 90% of bullying is non-physical.

That said, it seems that this game might or might not increase the amount of bullying that goes on in schools.

Now, the problem lies, once again, with the school administration and the parents of the bullies, not with the game.

The parents of the bullies are willing to defend their child to the death with "well, it couldn't be my child, it was those other kids".

So naturally, the school administration chooses to obey the parents and not punish the bully. Assuming however, that the administration ignores the parent and tries to punish the bully in-school, you end up with that parent signing forms exempting the child from any type of punishment.

Via have been making small, cheap, low power cores for some time, whilse Intel and AMD moved to large, expensive high power one.

Now there's a move to multi core designs and blade servers, and even the slowest x86 server is probably over powered for a server, you have to wonder if they could do an x86 version of Niagara

From here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C7

"You can also see a quad-core C7, could be manufactured for the same cost as a single core P4 on 90 nm process."

Now Niagara is 8 core and each core has four threads admittedly, but there's something to be said for a four way x86 chip for blades. The power consumption wouldn't be too bad either. But you can have four C7 cores per P4 core. If I were AMD for example, I'd be playing around with an x86 Niagara.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch/msg/991ff 1390b277b98?hl=en&

Hmm, and I'd find (or invent) some new benchmarks too.

AMD is the clear winner? Do you even know what the rumored prices are for Conroe? Here: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29504 $529 for the 2.67 GHz chip. Even if the FX-60 price drops by half (right now it's just over $1000), Intel will still have them beat in performance/price. AMD is the clear winner? More like, you're clearly a fucking idiot AMD fanboy.

If you can believe The Inquirer and Variety, the PS3 is delayed until the end of the year because of "a hold-up with chips crucial to the success of the console's Blu-ray functions".
See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30108
or http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117939258?catego ryid=18&cs=1&s=h&p=0

The problem for any corporation updating to Vista is that you rather have to replace most of your hardware along the way as well.

And upgrade your memory. Over on The Inquirer they're reporting that Vista consumes 800MB of RAM while idling. This is absolutely insane to someone who first started using computers in the early 1970's. There just isn't that much stuff that an Operating System should be doing. And yes, that really is 3X XP's current requirements, the thought of which certainly is warming Intel's little heart.

Seems to me if MS wants to keep IBM in the fold they should be offering to buy them all new desktops.

I was expecting the same low price with a better processor.....like everything else tech.

Then I see the actual price....and it costs far more than the original and for what?

I was actually shocked that Apple used Core Solo/Duo for the Mac mini. Those processors are not meant for "low end" computers, although the price increase makes the mini "less low-end." I assumed Apple would wait for Core Solo-based Celeron M CPUs and maybe lower the price of the Mac mini.

Is this the first step toward a drive that plays HD DVD and Blu-Ray? Is this even possible?

The Inquirer says they are backing Blu-Ray.

I assume that is because they make blue movies;-)

It doesn't have to kill sales if you start locking after everybody has adopted.

The first 2 years of content could be lock free, so lots of people buy the hardware and content. Then they start shipping content that locks to players.

To implement a content-to-player lock must require either by a "phone home" or writeable disc. In the case of "phone home" they could lock up a user's entire library before they knew it was possible. Sure it will be hackable but not legally and not easy enough for the majority of users.

This guy, at least is really pissed.

Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray have embraced this draconian system [AACS], and the studios are salivating at the prospect of you never actually being able to own content again.

My reaction to this abomination is simple: no way in hell. I will not buy any product that uses this crap, and I hope you'll join me in that boycott. Let these morons see the early adopters staying away in droves. - Mike Evangelist

Found this from theInquirer.net. I'd like to see much more awareness from the general public. Once a powerful DRM scheme gets it's foot in the door it's too late. The general public is the only one getting screwed here. Serious consumers will find a way around the DRM scheme the lazy and uninformed force on them.

See link:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15189

What happens is on each clock, the 1st DIMM transfers its data to the CPU. The 2nd DIMM (if there) transfers its data to the 1st DIMM, the 3rd DIMM (if there) transfers its data to the 2nd DIMM, etc. Thus each DIMM gets the data from the next DIMM, puts it in a buffer, thus regenerating the signal electrically and emits it upstream on the next clock. You could call this "daisy chained". This limits how far each DIMM has to drive its data, which is why FB-DIMMs can claim better electrical characteristics.

What this means is to get data from the 3rd DIMM, it takes 3 clocks just to get the first bit of data (presumably 16 bits) to the CPU. The "good" news is that since this system is (semi-) serial, the clock has to be very high already, so this latency is somewhat mitigated.

FB-DIMMs are point to point, but the point-to-point doesn't mean each DIMM connects to the memory controller, it simply means each DIMM is only on a bus with one other DIMM (well, one upstream bus and one downstream bus). Each DIMM forwards data along these busses in both directions. But again, there is no way for the 3rd DIMM to get to the memory controller without going through (and not just by) the 2nd and 1st DIMM first.

Your extension of my argument to PATA vs SATA just underscores your misunderstanding. My concern is with the latency of intermediate forwarding of data. SATA (well, the version in regular use) doesn't even allow you to attach multiple devices to a single bus, let alone have the devices forward the data to the head. Note that PATA allows multiple devices per bus, but it is a true bus, in that the data from the far device just goes by the near device, not into it and back out.

SATA is taking off due to connector costs and cable routing in the case. RAM doesn't face cable routing difficulties. It does face signal routing difficulties, but these only need to be solved once per motherboard design at worst, not once per installation as in cable routing. In addition, the signal routing complexity is much higher for ultra-high speed busses and thus the problem of signal routing will be solved the same way for FB-DIMMs as for DDR or DDR2, which is one company (Intel) will make a reference design and the other motherboard designers will just leave those signal lines alone and add other signals in the I/O area where they want to put on additional SATA RAID controllers. And in regards to connector costs, FB-DIMMs don't change the DIMM connector and thus don't reduce the cost of the DIMM connector. So I don't see a parallel here at all.

Finally, as to DIMMs and busses being forward compatible forever, it's just not going to happen. You'll have the same problem you did with SDRAM (or DDR or RDRAM). All SDRAM was compatible with each other, just the speeds changed. So you can use your old slow DIMMs as long as you don't mind that slowing down all your memory accesses.

Finally, the reason RDRAM failed isn't as simple as your comments that the RAM people screwed RAMBUS. The problem was the RAM people didn't feel like being screwed by RAMBUS. RAMBUS wanted license fees on all RAM made (see their grab at applying their patents to DDR) and so they tried to make RDRAM the standard. Intel also wanted more money per motherboard sold (not just happy selling the CPU). Intel's first attempt at making this happen was Slot 1, where they force-bundled the 2nd level cache memory in with the CPU (2nd level cache SRAM revenue could be $30-$50 per mobo back in the Socket 7 days). Note that 2nd level cache moved to the main CPU chip later. Intel additionally decided to license slot 1, claiming patents on it. Regular front side busses could not be patented, as they were purely functional, considered the most basic way to do something. Slot 1 was positioned so as to patent the physical connector and form factor so they could enforce their fees.

Intel decided to threaten VIA (a very popular Socket 7

It has a screen, keyboard and in some cases a pointing device. It has storage, and many computers these days -- especially laptops -- have an antenna. Mobile phones run WinCE, PDAs run WinCE, computers run WinCE. Mobile phone == computer. Clear on that?

Microsoft sell computer OSes, in fact have an economic monopoly on them. Microsoft have been slapped down (well, slapped on the wrist in the USA) for bundling other products with their OS (MSIE and WMP being two specific examples) to force it into peoples' hands, thus heading off competitors. Tangent have just sued Microsoft for damages from non-compliance with said slapping-down. Microsoft are convicted anti-trust violators, there is no question of that in said lawsuit. Clear on that?

Why should bundling a (doubtless proprietary and DRMmed to the gills) VoIP product in exactly the same way be any different from bundling WMP or MSIE?

It certainly flies in the face of the spirit if not the letter of their existing antitrust convictions. If they released a genuinely platform-agnostic H.323 application, then they would have no problem. Chances of that? Ahuk, ahuk.

Someone posted this months ago, and it tells how to gut-out a lot of the add-ins that make acrobat so slow to open. You lose some functionality, but much of it is un-needed while viewing pdfs on the web.

How to use liposuction to repair Adobe Reader 6

I couldn't believe the difference it made.

This is just like how they denied claims their rootkit was harmful. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27416

Apparently the currently shipping CoreDuo machines do not have virtualisation enabled. See here.

"We're positioning the PS3 as a supercomputer", he says, "But people won't recognize it as a computer unless we call it a computer, so we're going to run an OS on it. In fact, the Cell can run multiple OSes. In order to run the OSes, we need a hard disk. So in order to declare that the PS3 is a computer, I think we'll have [the hard disk] preinstalled with Linux as a bonus.

I would like to see sony do this. I wouldn't even care if i had to pay the full cost of the hardware. If it's a full featured computer, I'd buy it for 800 bucks. It's gonna have a pretty nice video card and 7 vector units! Bluetooth, bluray, gigabit ethernet, etc... etc... Even for 900 it's a bargain if you can do whatever you want with the nice hardware. Hook up a hdtv and witness glory, of hardware accelerated nethack.

Just have some sort of lame ass drm to prevent you from playing pirated games. It'll get cracked eventually, but even the xbox 360's going to be modded. Just give it time.

Even if bluray doesn't win the war with hd-dvd, it'll be a contender. 27 gig bd-rs will eventually drop down in price. 27 gigs is quite a bit of data. I know i'll probably get a bd-r drive (probably to burn all those pirate... err... movies)

Intel's new firmware is called EFI. It fills the same function in Intel-based Macs that OpenFirmware fills in PowerPC-based Macs.

In order to boot legacy operating systems that rely on BIOS (such as Windows 2000, Windows XP) there is a feature of EFI that enables it to emulate BIOS. Apple took this feature out of their EFI implementation. That is why nobody can get Windows XP running on the Intel Macs. Some say that Vista will work because it supports EFI but apparently it is not that simple due to different versions of EFI and the timing of the Vista release. Probably the first versions of Vista will require BIOS.

Refer to this article:

Why XP Will Never Officially Work On The Mac

So ... if Apple is planning to run MS Windows on the new Intel-based Macs they are sure going about it in a strange way by making systems that can't even run Windows at all.

And ... if Apple is planning to run MS Windows on the Mac then they sure are going to a lot of trouble to create BOTH Mac OS X (PowerPC) and Mac OS X (Intel) and also Server versions, not to mention Mac-only applications. For example a few years ago they bought Emagic and canned Logic for Windows and gave hardware rebates to the Windows using customers. Now two versions later what are they going to do, port the Mac OS X version to Windows? Ha ha Microsoft will have to build some pro audio plumbing first (compare to Apple's CoreAudio, CoreMIDI, AudioUnits.)

And ... Apple is going to a lot of trouble to prevent people from running Mac OS X (Intel) on generic Intel hardware for a company that is about to abandon Mac OS X.

It is hard for Dvorak and other PC bigots to face the fact that they ran MS Windows on promises for 10 years and for their trouble they are hip-deep in crapware and watching helplessly as Apple proves itself right.

Gatta start watchin Intel's sucker punches.

You mean you're only beginning to watch now?

This is just the latest round in Intel's ongoing anti-competetive war against AMD.

First, they advertised that they'd sell the thing you really wanted at the price they were supposed to charge. Then people got there and discovered that there were no Xboxes being sold unbundled despite the advertisements. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27963

Second, this policy was not approved by the upper best buy management, thus the heads of the lower managers who told the stores to do this rolled.

You may act all shocked that managers are getting fired, but I bet you'd do the same to any employees below you that made up pretend corporate policies.

From your article

You know that it will be about a good chunk faster clock for clock, per core, than Dothan, especially on multimedia apps. Numbers like 30% are being passed around for encoding. Why? ... The other big one is an early exit for some instructions, and if memory serves, idiv is one. What this means is that an instruction can be retired after eight or so stages of the 13 in the pipeline. This can make a huge difference for things like encoding movies and the like.

Would this be why Apple went with Intel?

This whole multi-core trend concerns me. Sun Niagra is now out, in the form of the Sunfire T1000 and T2000 computers. These are fine computers. But they really only excel for very specific workloads. Meanwhile, facts are facts. The chips are starved for data.

It's almost comical how the Slash community seems to be so back and forth over which chip is "best". Cart meet horse. Get behind, thee!

So. I am a bit of an AMD fanboi. I admit it. But it's not really about the chip. It's the IO fabric. Hypertransport (which does happen to be on chip) is why AMD is winning this race right now. It's affordable, and scales linearly with the number of chips. Around the corner on AMD's front is HORUS (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18251), the memory fabric to rule them all. Intel should be really afraid here.

I personally can't get all excited about these multi core chips. Now IO solutions. Those interest me.

Computers are entirely IO bound these days. Hello?

Do any Slashdot readers happen to be home in there!?

*knockety knock*

C//

Wow, who would have guessed? Me.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29550

Want to know what the problem is? Near the bottom here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25349
(Yes, I know I spelled it wrong, it was a verbal tip....)

            -Charlie

Wow, who would have guessed? Me.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29550

Want to know what the problem is? Near the bottom here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25349
(Yes, I know I spelled it wrong, it was a verbal tip....)

            -Charlie

yeah its going to take place in London during the 1969 period. Should be interesting.

As for traffic lights, those are a special case, not white, and must be heavy-duty. But, that's beside the point:

LED lights for sale today are still less efficient than the average compact fluorescent, and nowhere near as efficient as fluorescent tubes, but these guys claim to have made a breakthrough. Perhaps LEDs that replace fluorescents could come soon after all.

Do tell....

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28454

                            -Charlie

"Basically what happened is we purchased OEM copies of software and slapped them on custom built machines. Apparantly you aren't allowed to do that. OEM means you have to resell it to another customer or had bought it with that machine. It also means when the machine dies, your license dies -- you can't just migrate it over -- this is why the sticker is attached to the computer."

Actually, I believe that is a very questionable part of the MS license. Yes, it's how they WANT it to work, and they pretty much manage to enforce the selling of OEM versions with hardware (see the classic "FDD Ribbon Cable + OEM Copy" sale), but if you purchased a copy, you should be able to use it. (Especially if you used that FDD cable that came with it in the machine!) I remember MS themselves saying that they were only going to OEM WinXP-64, but even they said that sellers could "just include a cable or something". (link: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16919)

Then again, what company is really going to stand up to Microsoft's BS licensing schemes?

No, here's what happened. Someone informally asked Bill Gates asked if he would buy Nintendo, given the opportunity. He said he would. Nintendo got a little upset when the press went crazy with rumors. Welcome to the video game industry where for every true rumor, there's a hundred false ones. Regardless, I do find it amazing how opinion can influence memory.

As for the multi-platform support, I believe that was always one of Watcom's fortes, in addition to the fact that it was the compiler used for PowerBuilder, which runs on Unix, (multiplatform benefit, yeh?) although it was most popular on Windows in the client-server realm.

Actually, what's even more cool than an open source version of an *excellent* compiler is SciTech's work with x86 drivers, one of the companies supporting the open source version of Watcom. Speaking of OS/2, key thing IBM missed was providing good driver support, Microsoft made that a top focus. For Linux to be more competitive with Windows, this is a must.

Interesting article from today about the Canadian government's reply, and the ongoing IP jurisdiction battle...

Canada wants to save Blackberry
US Patent nonsense can't cross the border

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20924

SVG: Microsoft implemented vector graphics in Internet Explorer years ago with VML, which they submitted to the W3C in 1998.

CSS: A partial list of fixes regarding CSS that will be in Internet Explorer 7 can be found on the IEBlog. They've fixed a lot.

PNG: Internet Explorer 7 will have support for the PNG alpha channel, bringing it up to the level of support that other browsers have.

JPEG2000: JPEG2000 is patent encumbered. Mozilla/Firefox doesn't support it.

XForms: XForms support is available through a plugin.

The only really valid complaint you have there is their lack of support for the DOM. In particular, it would be very nice if they implemented DOM 2 Events, but I don't think that's likely to happen for Internet Explorer 7.

Except that MS brings in roughly 1 billion dollars in revenue every quarter... according to this Inquirer article a couple years ago; http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13350

The prices are listed at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29141 and they have more on different versions including the AIW and certain retailers in later articles.

Not that MS is going to give a shit about Softvault, except to stomp them. But the bad press from the suit is something it appears to want to avoid.

Face it. MS is a movement, not a technology company.

deliberately and repeatedly duped Internet users into downloading intrusive advertising software....(download PDF)

Oh, the irony. Acrobat Reader must be the most resource-hungry bloatware I've ever come across, and it displays ads, and has been used as spyware...

I believe you are mistaken in your analys.

It doesn't mean it "sounds simular to psychology 101" it is what you think to read. It's just flattering you praise my ability to recognise psychological patterns and making an analogy as accurate it makes you suspect I speak out of experience or am writing from my subcontious.

There was no personal information in my post, but mostly it seems most slashdotters seem to relate best to "highschool dynamics" and analogies relating to that. I do not speak in terms of "smarter", "the whole school", cause I haven't been there in quite a while. I don't mirror myself to my "popularity" to define myself or to place myself into society (nor my intelligence, nor my education, nor my possesions).

As a matter of fact when you get into the "real world" (I'm assuming you're a highschool kid) popularity matters not. The results you deliver matter, your actions and how you take care of your family and people who have value in your life and not how "cool" people think you are.

You don't have to agree persé, people disagree, not everyone thinks the same. Doesn't mean the other has "unresolved social issues" when one doesn't share your views or misses the motivation of certain comments which imply IE-usage is down and decling. Exact percentages are impossible to show. Cause ofcourse windowsupdate will have a near 100% usage IE browsers.

Now, you say "You cannot neglect 80%" (as that seems to be your point). You cannot neglect that 20% goes out to actively download a browser when one is installed in the OS already, which caused IE to win the browserwars. In my view Microsoft is trying to stop people migrating away and implementing features which weren't planned to keep up.
So to you, Microsoft has remained its identity of "staying steady on front in a dominating position" when they sortof lost interest before?

Perhams something is needed to help people see the truth. Games marketing, just like most marketing has become a matter of hyping up every aspect of the game/system. Whenever a new console comes out it's the one that's supposed to kill all other systems, and whenever a new game is out it's supposed to be the last game you'll ever need. So the best way to know if hype is BS or not is to actually try out the thing in question

Conroe will have an on-die memory controller, more bandwidth, and a larger register file than Yonah, which will buy it 10% at least in performance on Yonah.
Where did you get that part of information? The latest news I could find,
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28602,
still claims Conroe will lack an integrated memory controller.
Also, AMD 65 nm chips are expected for this year, not next year.

I could never figure out why they got involved in the news business by creating MSNBC.

Why not buy the Cartoon Channel instead and sell Xbox 360's, Napster and Rio MP3 players all day long for free!

It must have seemed like a great idea in 95 when the Microsoft Total World Domination Machine was in full power. Taking on CNN and Fox News in a battle royale must have seemed like fun to King Gates.

But to have it all fall apart at a time when their arch rival is pulling the World's biggest rug from under Microsoft in super slow motion must really hurt like hell!

Performance apart, it seems that good ol' Apple is charging $1300 for a machine that costs around $900(according to market research firm iSuppli) to them. A markup of around 45% in a ultra-competitive market like PC hardware!

Build cheap, claim big, advertise huge...no wonder the stock market can't get enough of Steve Jobs. I'd envy a man who has the ability to charge above market prices for a near commodity product(a PC) and in the process command a cultish following among the buyers.

but is providing Athlon64 class performance with much lower power consumption.

Lower power consumption yes, Athlon64 performance? Not yet. According to this roadmap the highest clockspeed Yonah core is slated for January 2006 release and it's 2.16 GHZ. Now, Anandtech did some tests of the 2.0 GHZ core. This 2.0 GHZ core is barely able to reach Athlon64 3800+ X2 performance levels (the "slowest" AMD dualcore CPU, 90nm vs 65nm of Yonah). A 2.16 GHZ version should reach the 4200+ X2 and that's about it. Yonah is a nice CPU, but nowhere near top AMD performance. Maybe with higher clockspeeds in the future, not today though.

i read a news release the other day that actually said MS only had 600k units sold total, where are the other 400k? http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29000

I agree, it seems like it would be logical for a company with a vested interest in Linux on the desktop to either start manufacturing/rubberstamping hardware under a brand name ... and the fact that we don't see that I think is indicative of the fact that there really isn't any company with a big interest in seeing Linux on the desktop. At least not that has the resources to do something like that. (Except perhaps Novell/SuSE, but they're pretty occupied with their merger right now.)

You're right, the US based companies won't touch Linux except as an afterthought for fear of provoking Microsoft and effectively being driven out of business if they had their discounts terminated. Plus, I'm not sure there's really demand in the States for Linux desktops yet; it's probably ready as an OS for corporate-desktop use (limited number of applications, tech people on call) but companies are afraid of being un-interoperable, and it's perceived as being too complicated and "different" by most home users.

I think the biggest possibility is Lenovo -- they have strong ties to IBM, a big Linux proponent (I recall IBM at one point was going to dump Windows for Linux, but then backed away from it) and are Chinese, where they could potentially get a lot of government support for a solution that doesn't pay a tithe to Redmond. If some Chinese corporation came to them and said it wanted to equip itself with new Lenovo laptops running RedHat, it would be pretty easy for them to put it together -- since a RedHat based IBM Linux distro already exists for ThinkPads. (I don't know what its Chinese language support is like, but I'd bet it's probably pretty good.) From there, they could put together a whole line of Linux-compatible hardware and accessories to support their customers with. It just depends on whether there's any demand/interest in a non-Windows corporate/governmental solution for the desktop.

It always has disappointed me that IBM didn't carry through on their threat (or proposal, whatever you want to call it) to dump Windows as their desktop client and switch to RedHat. They came really close, as close as any large US organization has come (that I've seen), but they stepped back. If they had, it would have been huge -- 300,000+ employees, many client-facing, each running "IBM Desktop Linux" (or whatever it was called)? The increased demand for Linux-supported hardware alone would have been huge, not to mention the exposure to a lot of powerful people.

This comparison really makes me wonder about the Intel-based PowerMac replacement. What kind of processor are they going to put into that? The logical choice would seem to be the Conroe. There are rumors of a 3.3 GHz dual-cores being sent out later this month. Intel claims that Conroe will outperform Core Duo 2-1 on a performance-per-watt basis. So a 3.3 GHz Conroe might be as much as 3.6 times as fast (pure performance, it's ok for a desktop chip to consume twice as much juice as a laptop, right?) as a Core Duo. So if you take the iMac comparisons against the current G5s and extrapolate... well a PowerMac based on a Conroe could be a mighty beast. Give it 4 GB of RAM like the PowerMac in the comparison, and it should easily outperform the PowerMac (at least on non-Altivec tasks, but that's a different story.) Of course it's still going to have the stupid front side bus, albeit running at 1.0+ GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache.

Another possibility would be for Apple to wait for the Extreme Edition of the Conroe, the Kentsfield. That would give them four cores, like the current PowerMacs. It won't be out until 2007, and Apple seems anxious to switch everything over ASAP. So they could go with Woodcrest, basically Conroe for servers. This might let them put together a dual-cpu/dual-core setup like they have with the current PowerMacs. This kind of setup was demonstrated by Intel last fall. There were also rumors last year of Apple pressuring Intel to give them Woodcrest chips ahead of schedule.

And of course there's the more mundane question of what will they call the PowerMac replacement? They seem to want to get away from the Power prefix, while stressing the Pro tie-in to their Pro apps. So maybe Mac Pro? Seems too short. Maybe bring out the whole name, Macintosh Pro. Whatever it is, can it make people as upset as "MacBook" did?

This comparison really makes me wonder about the Intel-based PowerMac replacement. What kind of processor are they going to put into that? The logical choice would seem to be the Conroe. There are rumors of a 3.3 GHz dual-cores being sent out later this month. Intel claims that Conroe will outperform Core Duo 2-1 on a performance-per-watt basis. So a 3.3 GHz Conroe might be as much as 3.6 times as fast (pure performance, it's ok for a desktop chip to consume twice as much juice as a laptop, right?) as a Core Duo. So if you take the iMac comparisons against the current G5s and extrapolate... well a PowerMac based on a Conroe could be a mighty beast. Give it 4 GB of RAM like the PowerMac in the comparison, and it should easily outperform the PowerMac (at least on non-Altivec tasks, but that's a different story.) Of course it's still going to have the stupid front side bus, albeit running at 1.0+ GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache.

Another possibility would be for Apple to wait for the Extreme Edition of the Conroe, the Kentsfield. That would give them four cores, like the current PowerMacs. It won't be out until 2007, and Apple seems anxious to switch everything over ASAP. So they could go with Woodcrest, basically Conroe for servers. This might let them put together a dual-cpu/dual-core setup like they have with the current PowerMacs. This kind of setup was demonstrated by Intel last fall. There were also rumors last year of Apple pressuring Intel to give them Woodcrest chips ahead of schedule.

And of course there's the more mundane question of what will they call the PowerMac replacement? They seem to want to get away from the Power prefix, while stressing the Pro tie-in to their Pro apps. So maybe Mac Pro? Seems too short. Maybe bring out the whole name, Macintosh Pro. Whatever it is, can it make people as upset as "MacBook" did?

"My source said there was some stuff, "some very, very cool stuff," that Jobs couldn't unveil because of "supply issues."

"They can't get enough Core Duo (chips)," said my source.

"CORPORATE BUYERS of notebooks from Dell and HP are fuming that people can buy Duo Core machines from Apple now, while they will have to wait for weeks for Yonah based notebooks."

Oh are you talking about Pure Video? You mean the same Pure Video that took 8 months to actually "work" after it was advertised as being a key feature? Surely you cant be talking about this http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2305

OR THIS http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20515

Yes I am bitter since I was one of those GF 6800 Ultra owners

The Inquirer is reporting that this game may have been rushed into release because its Save Game feature seems buggy enough to delete entire saved games in some cases. As usual, buyer beware.

first gen Conroe won't be 64bit capable..

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26086