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Seriously, if a MySQL developer is worried about the legality of running Linux then maybe he has the wrong job ;)

Clickable link :)

(From a rejected story I submitted)

This Inquirer story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.

Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0

They did as there was some miscommunication between Brinkhorst and the dutch parliament http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16984

Secunia posted (almost a month ago) a very interesting open letter at The Inquirer, about how Microsoft downplays this issue... An interesting read..

Secondly, EM64T processors are expensive, server-oriented Xeons.

It wouldn't make much sense to compared them with cheap desktop Athlon64s.

It would make perfect sense to compare socket 939 Athlon64s to EM64T Pentium 4s on 925X chipset, but I don't think EM64T P4s are easy to get without purchasing a whole workstation (oddly, boxed EM64T P4s are available in Japan). Can't Anandtech mooch a CPU from Intel for review purposes?

Know issue: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17819/a Looks like you need a firmware update ie: no microsoft fault.

Actually, this may not be as horrible as everyone makes it out to be.

I disagree. This isn't limited to just Microsoft. Take a look

• Microsoft pushes technological solutions to protect data (DRM) with "trusted computing" via "secure BIOS".
• RIAA pushes for DMCA-like laws that prevent circumvention of the aforementioned technological solutions by making it unlawful to do so. The RIAA has demonstrated that it is will not hesitate to use these tools to their advantage.
• The RIAA is using propaganda campaigns to indoctrine our youth and to gloss over the many concerns that we have for our civil liberties. Take, for example, the RIAA's blurring of the distinction between copyright infringement and theft.

So, you see, there's end-to-end lockout being put in place. If you happen to be smart enough to see through the bullshit, you can't do what you want because the technology stops you. If you happen to be smart enough to circumvent the technology, you can't tell others unless you want to risk going to jail. And even if you were some kind of law-savvy uber-hacker, do you have enough money to survive the SLAPP?

I'm not an alarmist, but come on, folks, this is alarming! Microsoft learned the hard way that their behavior isn't beyond the scope of anti-trust regulation, but they also realized that the government is too damn slow to properly stop them. I don't doubt for an instant that they won't use every competitive advantage available to them. Content producers also learned the hard way about fair use with the Betamax decision; don't fool yourself into thinking that they're going to let the Internet slip past them.

"What it does is let you take an XBox and play back all your MCPC media on the screen the console is connected to."

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18385

which I think is..

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/eva luation/devices/xboxextenderkit.mspx

to be sure, matching your line becomes very exacting. but manufacturers usually have plenty of reference materials on how to lay good traces, what specs your shooting for.

getting paths down doesnt seem THAT hard. i want to work out each individual piece, lay my traces between two points and be done. everything short of 'my software will lay my traces for me'. thats not THAT sinfully bad. getting to spec doesnt look oh so difficult.

crosstalk, on the other hand, scares the crap out of me. you've got a board layed out that you KNOW has good impedences, know to be layed out right, know you have equal trace lenghts and its still not working. what then?

i know it'll end up an excuse to just use MORE pins, but right now halving the pin count seems really really nice. take this inquirer article on fb-dimm. article. look at the difference! pci suffers a similar bus-going-everywhere effect which pcie reduces marginally.

with good solid connectors, good helpful specs, doing this stuff shouldnt be that hard. yes, its higher speed, but an idiot like me migh have a chance of making an uber-high-speed board if i use some liberal spacing.

i could be dead wrong.

Sun exempt if MS starts open source legal war

I cannot reveal my identity but on a visit with Sun, Chancellor Scott McFreaky, told me and two others from my company that MS intends to rain a patent storm all over OSS projects, regardless of merit. The intent is to do whatever to slow down OSS proliferation. The legal costs would be nothing to MS compared to revenue they're already losing to Linux, Mozilla, OO, Apache, PHP, MySQL etc...

McFreaky's pitch was that after MS is done, there will only be two viable companies left, Sun (of course) and MS.

He of course didn't have any good answers to my prompting about IBM, HP, Novell, SGI, Oracle amongst others having issue with an MS crusade against OSS.

I walked out of the session kind of shaking, it smelled a lot of FUD to it. But it's still very plausible.

with the new 6600 cards coming out, this is going to be a firm kick to the nether regions of ATI. There just isn't a card on the market that can hold a candle to it

Since the GeForce 6600's are not available in retail yet, I wouldn't declare the future's "mainstream" ($150-$200) winner until we see x700 benchmarks and both are on retail shelves. Until then, the current mainstream cards are GeForceFX 5700/5750 and ATI Radeon 9600/x600.

both are cranking out full steam ahead

What makes you say that? Especially given recent price cuts to "Reduce excess inventories". In fact, just google for Intel excess inventories!

Also, see the register article (from five days ago I might add), which agrees with TFA in that this is the fifth week so far this year, not the second as the submitter says.

From The Enquirer.net.

I know yuo're joking, but see this article; might wipe the smile off your face.

So did Slashdotters call this one?

No. They really didn't. Of course SP2 was going to cause *some* problems, but poo-pooing everything MS in a knee-jerk fashion doesn't help anyone and probably is keeping people from installing it, which is a real shame because:

1. Firewall on by default. Power users can easily shut it off. How many Slashdot posts do we have that wish MS did this, but when they do suddenly MS is doing wrong. Yes an admin can shut it off even with an activeX control. Such is the life of running as admin.

Firewall only filters incoming traffic, totally oblivious to outgoing. (2nd paragraph, last sentence) How long has free Zone Alarm had this feature? Years. Strike one.

4. "Drive by installs" are not going to be as common as IE requires an extra step to install/download stuff and blocks pop-ups natively and by default. Man, how many slashdoot posts did we have about "MS should do something about pop-ups and click installs!" Well, they did. Sure, they didnt remove activeX altogether, but no one was expecting that.

Popup blocking is WAAAAAYYYY too late to even think about giving MS any credit. Mozilla, Opera, Google, and umpty-five 3rd party companies all provided it long before MS. Pathetic. Strike two.

5. NX support for AMD 64. Wow.

Nope, broken. Strike three.

Finally, Microsoft warns that installing SP2 on a spyware-infested PC is a bad idea.

No shit. Installing ANYTHING on a spyware infested PC will cause all sorts of problems. Fighting spyware is what SP2 is trying to do. Give it time or at least introduce your friends and co-workers to a little thing called Ad Aware, especially if they'll never switch to FireFox. Face it, many people will never switch and will go to their deathbeds using bundled software.

Must we delineate MS's culpability for the glut of spyware in the first place?

So did Slashdotters call this one?

Yup. Absolutely.

Granted, if you take the negative approach to life 24/7 you will be right every so often or at least subjectively, but I feel these are much needed changes and will help technophobes better use their machines. MS can do things right. Yeah, break out the smelling salts...

Or, if you take the negative approach to Microsoft 24/7 you will be right, objectively, 99.999% of the time.

When I met John Terpstra at the Southern California Linux Expo, I bought the book and had him sign it. He was wearing a Caldera jacket that I asked about. He smiled at me and said "I'm actually trying to sell it, would you like to buy it?" We shared a good laugh.

John Terpstra working for SCO is the most rediculous thing I've ever heard of. Did you foget that Samba shot back at SCO for being such pricks and hypocrites?

This also reminds me of when the BSA tried to get a university to take down unlicensed copies of MS Office that were, in fact, copies of Open Office. Link here.

Seriously, you'd think these people would bother to at least give files a once over before sending out cease-and-desist letters.

Small point: ATI *DRIVERS* are highly optimized for DirectX. OpenGL and DirectX both accomplish the same things. They diverge a bit in the pixel shader arena, but that's to be expected.
But otherwise, yes, ATI's drivers in general suck. In other news, ATI is said to be rewriting their OpenGL support from the ground up, to make it more competitive with NVidia's offerings. Seems like a nail in DirectX's coffin to me.

4 procs, dual cores? Kickass. A short read on implementation differences between AMD64 & Intel's 64. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17906

The arrangements of the pins are slightly different, preventing punters from simply snipping off a pin, and using their old Athlon64 CPU in a shiny new motherboard. As I understand, the Athlon64 chips integrate a memory controller onto the die, so every time the memory controller design is changed, the socket must also change.

The 940 pin Athlon64 required expensive, slower ECC ram, just like the Opteron. But unlike the Opteron, the Athlon64 was intended to be sold to people who might not appreciate the tradeoffs involved in using ECC. AMD corrected this oversight, and then released a new socket because a new motherboard design would be required anyway.

...Netgear can start manufacturing routers that don't totally fuck the NTP server at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

10) Compatibility mode is so slow people say it is non-compatible

Yeah it is pretty slow.

8) Alpha development halted for years before Itanic caught up

And the Alpha development team is now working for Intel. Let's see what they've done with IA64 next year.

7) Microsoft calls AMD64 by the name x64

You smart computers good.

6) Code-size is twice x64, so needs 2x cache and 2x memory bandwidth

You do realise that code bandwidth and cache usage is usually orders of magnitude less than data bandwidth and cache usage?

5) Fewer software tool vendors support it now than a year ago

blah

One notable tools vendor - Parametric Technology Corp. - pulled back its support for Itanium this year, and the Northrop Grumman customer said at least three other tools vendors, including Synopsys, have reneged on their support as well.

4) Even before Win-x64 is released, MS supports more products on x64

The intersection of people who care about MS, and people who care about Itanium is unsurprisingly, probably quite small.

But we are talking about server things like Exchange Server, Commerce Server, Host Integration Server. Again, a big clue.

3) Don't know anyone buying one, just someone who got one for free

When did you last leave your parents' house?

2) Marketing keeps telling people to buy the not-yet-released version

Wha?

Also note that 1.7 Ghz is not really much more than 1.5 that has been out for a year. In fact, AMD will probably increase clocks from 2.4 to 2.6 in the next couple months.

1) People call it Itanic

Clowns are funny.

article in the Inquirer?

Wendy Grossman has a short article on the back story of Microsoft and ContentGuard. The patent portfolio comes from Mark Stefik at Xerox PARC. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18130

Then again, if your machine is restarting all the time, then you don't have to worry!

"MICROSOFT HAS ISSUED a Knowledge Base article which says that if you install Windows XP SP2 on a machine with an AMD 64-bit chip your computer may repeatedly re-start." (It is an NX issue)

Windows XP SP2 a tad borked on AMD64 chips

Don't confuse "The National Enquirer" with "The Inquirer". Two totally different publications with pretty much nothing in common.

Mmm, didn't know that - The Inquirer and The Register were started by the same guy...

Congratulations, you have just described the format war that will follow DVD-R9. Say hello to Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

• Ms. Sandlin is so devoted to [Firefox] that she has taped a note to her monitor warning guests not to click on the desktop shortcut to Internet Explorer. "Do not touch the blue E!" the note says.

• Using Microsofts Internet Explorer Web browser to surf the Internet has become a marked risk even with the latest security patches installed.

• The US Government has sent out a warning out to internet users through its Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), pleading users to stop using Microsofts Internet Explorer.

• [A]ll-conquering Internet Explorer has been stuck in the mud for the past year, as Microsoft stopped delivering new versions. The company now rolls out only an occasional fix as part of its Windows updates. Gates and company won the browser war, so why keep fighting it?

[oh the shame]I have a Hotmail Plus account[/oh the shame] (Yep, I like it for the Outlook integration and Messenger alerts, besides the fact that it's been a great spam-free address since 1997). I've been on a 2GB mailbox since July. Not all Hotmail Plus accounts have been upgraded yet though.

IIRC the process of rolling the free subscribers up to 250MB will take time. If you don't mind the hassle of changing email, there's always Yahoo (or Gmail if you can snarf one).

And oh, the Inquirer article the OSViews article was based on contained very little hard facts and no sources. And nowhere does it explicitly say the 2GB is for free (of course, if they do give that to free users, more power to them).

Microsoft paid, what, $400 million for Hotmail. Then they must have paid quite a bit to port the back end to Windows.

OK, googled it, found these: In 1998, the attempt to migrate to NT apparently failed. And in 2002, they appear to have tried again.

Anybody know if it worked?

RTFA... misleading /. headings strike again...

Reading the deeper linked article from the top linked article, which is: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17949/ It does not specifically mention the "free" snotmail account gets 2GB.

Reading M$N's page about it, http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/ it looks like the M$N Plus accounts will get 2GB, which means the ones you pay $19.95/mo for. This is NOT the free snotmail account getting 2GB. These will get 250MB. Not GB, MB.

Jeez the /. editors need to do a little more fact checking eh? But /. editors actually RTFA??? Naaaahhhhh.

Google is still ahead in the actual FREE email storage space war. 100MB for Yahoo, 250MB for M$N. ... so, anyone got gmail beta invites? ;)

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17949

No sources are cited.

Official site of the games part of the festival, Nvidia sponsors and some pre-Fringe hype. And my 2 pence: it's nice to see games being part of a celebration of culture, and that they've found their place as an established medium.

Believe me, I trust the Mozilla Foundation, and I sincerly doubt that they would ever bundle this extension in, but my comment was based more on http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15045/.

AOL has a nasty habit of dropping cash (much needed, yes) on the MF whenever they decide to release a new version of Netscape (which was supposed to be dead).

Now, it's most likely because they take some of the key players from Mozilla to make it work with their "enhancements", but this is AOL we're talking about, and I don't trust them at all.

As for starting your own project, this is all well-and-good for the more tech-savvy, but with IE being the main opponent for Mozilla (or Firefox in particular), finding an offshoot of the Mozilla product will not be easy (at first, the project may garner enough of a following) but there will be a initial fallback to IE. With the latest improvements in SP2, and the so-called re-investment in IE 7, the competition just got a lot more fierce.

Right, as if Intel has never had any problems.

There's no mention whatever of the whole Extreme Edition line being stopped, in fact they recently said they would be making further new ones in the near future... This is mentioned (with new FSB and clock speeds) here and here and here, for instance - and all quite recently.

Market demand for the Intel Pentium 4 processor Extreme Edition supporting Hyper-Threading technology 3.20GHz with 800MHz processor system bus in mPGA478 packaging has shifted to higher performance Intel processors.

Which is That..... and we made it especially for dell and we dont like dell anymore...

Seriously, how hard can it be for MS to write an application as straightforward, yet secure as Firefox.

Perhaps lots of people, including Microsoft itself, have an interest in perpetuating the myth that software is inherently insecure.

at some danish company

Actually, the chipset that supports Nocona is known as Lindenhurst.

Though Xeon-Nocona has been available for more than a month it seems there there are no substantial reports on 64-bit performance of Nocona. Is there anyone here who can report anything about the 64-bit performance of Nocona?

For those curious about the Electronic Civil Disobedience hubub, the Inquirer has a couple paragraphs on what happened.

Think about what you've written above, and then add this to it all.

Makes sense now, doesn't it?

There has been a great deal of discussion regarding the availability of the Lindenhurst chipset, and WIN Enterprises is pleased to offer developers the latest Xeon technology for their embedded controllers and platforms. WIN Enterprises, Inc., a leading designer and manufacturer of customized embedded controllers and x86-based electronic products for OEMs, has announced the availability of the latest Intel 64-bit Xeon core module for developers of high-performance embedded platforms - Nocona / Lindenhurst. WIN Enterprises is pleased to offer leading-edge, long-life solutions based on Nocona / Lindenhurst for everything from embedded single board computers to platform systems. For OEMs looking to incorporate the newest Xeon technology, WIN Enterprises has developed a proven core module for Nocona / Lindenhurst to create custom embedded controllers. "We have spent an extensive amount of time debugging and perfecting this specific core module," said Chiman Patel, WIN Enterprises' CEO and CTO. "This will allow our OEM customers to bring their application-specific Nocona / Lindenhurst embedded products to market quickly and cost-effectively." For more information, please contact WIN Enterprises at 978-688-2000 or sales@win-ent.com. Visit www.win-ent.com to learn more about WIN Enterprises' embedded design and manufacturing services.

Also, people are right that in the SPEC results the 3.4 Ghz chip has a 2 MB level-3 cache and the 3.6 Ghz does not.

If you mean Soundstorm....they got rid of it for the Nforce3. They'll bring it back for the Nforce4.

Which (unfortunately) is still an uncorfirmed rumor.

There seem to be conflicting messages. The Inquirer has had two articles ([1], [2]) where they claim there will be a "SoundStorm 2" / SP-10 onboard.

However it has not been corfirmed by nVidia. In fact a "guy" from nVidia has said:"There may be some truth in there, but none of it has anything to do with audio. Makes me wonder how old this guy's data is.". [source].

If you mean Soundstorm....they got rid of it for the Nforce3. They'll bring it back for the Nforce4.

Which (unfortunately) is still an uncorfirmed rumor.

There seem to be conflicting messages. The Inquirer has had two articles ([1], [2]) where they claim there will be a "SoundStorm 2" / SP-10 onboard.

However it has not been corfirmed by nVidia. In fact a "guy" from nVidia has said:"There may be some truth in there, but none of it has anything to do with audio. Makes me wonder how old this guy's data is.". [source].

I know this is a silly question since the rumours say 64bit windows won't be out until 1H 2005, but I recently saw a demo that claims to be 27% faster compiled as 64bit vs the 32bit version.

Have any id employees mentioned anything about an AMD64 version?