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" This is only modded interesting cause the Athlon64 got its ass handed to it in the benchmarks he posted."

Tom's has long since been known to skew results to please their advertising Masters, whoever they may be at any given time. The choice of benchmarks and the particular machine setup account for many of the results yielded. To prove this, I can show you a review in which the P4s get their asses handed to them in gaming benchmarks by the slowest Athlon64. From that link:

"As you can see, Athlon 64 won eight of the nine benchmarks, and one of them by 27%. For those who need superior gaming performance than a 3.2 GHz P4, but at less cost, these benchmarks indicate that the Athlon 64 3000+ is the way to go."

Thus, thine conclusion is predicated upon a prejudicial generalization.

When you're done looking up all those words, go away.

Might Darl McBride face prison time?

No. The ice and snow of Finland are too much, even for thickly bearded hackers.

That just goes to show that you shouldn't have gotten a P4.

Whoops!

Just to get my word in, an Athlon64 3000+ based system would be cheaper, and much faster for gaming. They must be pretty good chips, as even Intel is buying the AMD64 boxes.

"I'm looking forward to a full Intel^3 (cpu/chipset/board) solution for ultimate stability."

I've had too many problems with Intel boards to touch them ever again. If I were you, I'd definitely go with an Asus setup. The quality is better, and the tech support is excellent. Then again, I'm a reseller, so I don't know what the end user tech support is like. Anyway, don't think that just because Intel makes lots of ads that they're somehow super-duper stable by any measure. Just as any other tech company, they have plenty of problems with their products.

Just to get my word in, an Athlon64 3000+ based system would be cheaper, and much faster for gaming. They must be pretty good chips, as even Intel is buying the AMD64 boxes.

"I'm looking forward to a full Intel^3 (cpu/chipset/board) solution for ultimate stability."

I've had too many problems with Intel boards to touch them ever again. If I were you, I'd definitely go with an Asus setup. The quality is better, and the tech support is excellent. Then again, I'm a reseller, so I don't know what the end user tech support is like. Anyway, don't think that just because Intel makes lots of ads that they're somehow super-duper stable by any measure. Just as any other tech company, they have plenty of problems with their products.

the inquirer has the specs

Solaris 10 x86 free downloads reinstated
Free for personal use, $90/yr with support.

What if a highly critical bug is discovered tomorrow, something big enough that several exploits are in the wild by next week? Will they release a patch then, or will they stick to their
Already there:
A CHINESE RESEARCHER has discovered seven new security holes in Internet Explorer

And that article was written November 29th, which was almost two weeks ago. So if you wanted to launch a virus that takes advantage of one or all 7 of those defects, rest assured Microsoft won't do anything about it for at least another month.

And they claim there's nothing to worry about? I think the title of this article sums it up:
Microsoft cerebrates fifteen years of poor security, which by the way is an interesting read.

What if a highly critical bug is discovered tomorrow, something big enough that several exploits are in the wild by next week? Will they release a patch then, or will they stick to their
Already there:
A CHINESE RESEARCHER has discovered seven new security holes in Internet Explorer

And that article was written November 29th, which was almost two weeks ago. So if you wanted to launch a virus that takes advantage of one or all 7 of those defects, rest assured Microsoft won't do anything about it for at least another month.

And they claim there's nothing to worry about? I think the title of this article sums it up:
Microsoft cerebrates fifteen years of poor security, which by the way is an interesting read.

AOL assimilated by the Microsoft Borg

So one of the things Microsoft has to offer vs Linux is AOL.

iPod has a secret? Well at least it was a secret to me... lol iPod's secret (from theinquirer.net)

See this article for some reasons why some people are fed up with Adobe Acrobat.

Remember the floating-point-calculation bug in the early Pentiums? Intel had found it, fixed it in their new Pentiums, and kept quiet, hoping nobody will notice. Of course someone did, (someone always does!) and it turned out that lots of people were using faulty calculations in their work.

The decision not to extend the Pentium processor line to 64-bit, and to stick with the Itanium ( which does not natively support 32-bit operation) is another shot-in-the-leg. Market signals (very few Itaniums sold) and voiced concerns from people like Linus Torvalds did not cut into their strategy.

AMD on the other hand, is building a new factory (Fab 36) in anticipation of the increased demand for Opterons and Athlon64s. The desktops we will be buying in 2005 (2004?) will be 64-bit, and it looks they won't be "Intel inside".

And not "Windows outside", I think :)

But right now, I'm stuck with Celeron/WinXP boxes at work, unfortunately. Gasp.

The Inquirer: Linus Torvalds, Itanium "threw out all the good parts of the x86"
AMD Breaks Ground on 300 Millimeter Manufacturing Facility in Dresden, Germany

Is Intel so intreched that their value doesn't even matter any more?

Sadly, yes. From today's Inquirer:

Chipzilla bungs IBM $18 million to keep Intel Inside

The awesome power of marketing coop funds

By Eva Glass: Friday 05 December 2003, 08:33
NAOMI SAYS that IBM's attitude towards AMD and its pesky Opteron chips is lackluster, at best.

Just like in the old days when different divisions of Big Blue used to compete with each other to sell RS systems, AS/400s, big tin and PCs, Sam Palmisano doesn't have a corporate wide policy towards AMD she says.

So every marketing manager gets to have her or his say in what goes down. Take, for instance the x325. IBM engineers, she says, did little more than to do the metalwork, while a Taiwanese company made the living giblets at the heart of the machine. MSI she murmured, MSI.

She also says that the small server division kindly accepted something like $18 million from Intel's capacious marketing funds to stop whingeing about Opteron chips and get with the Xeon game.

If you're expecting 2U or 4U Opteron boxes in the next three months or so, said Naomi, think again. The 1U system won't go in a 2U box easily because the mechanicals are all wrong.

And Fortuna 500 folk think there's not enough management features for these machines anyway.

Sheesh!

OTOH, the Tier 1 vendors keep losing market share to the white box makers. Golly, wonder why.

This is nonsense. The Prescott will dissipate over 100 Watts. The current crop of P4s are up around 90 W. Those high clockspeeds directly translate into high power consumption.

There is no real-world thermal issue with AMD CPUs. They even have Intel-like thermal protection these days...

My first and best guess would be trough their assess. No more, no less.

Never forget that this is the company that have claimed wonderfull things like 'a web browser is part of the system kernal' and that 'a media player is inseperable from a operating system'.

Any thing coming out of that company should be taken with a truckiload of salt.

I guess I don't care about mainstream anymore, I think mainstream will eventually be replaced with the likes of Slashdot, The Inquirer, Drudge Report, and Google Tech. Let us see how long it takes for my prediction to come true we can check the progress here.

The way you interpret a proposed law!

Amazing!

You should go clerk for the Supremes!

Your deep linking argument is flawed. Try deep linking to the National Electical Code.

And as for everything else, try strolling down your local Best Buy, then posting their prices on your website. Before you do, go talk to FatWallet about BestBuy. Then go talk to the other corporations that aren't mentioned in this slashdot article, who are also pushing this to prevent price comparisons, something you would know if you were following the issue.

Then go read up on the lexis/nexis issues over this proposed law.

Then go read up on the building codes issues, and public laws issues on this proposed law.

Then maybe you should read the Library Association's position on the law.

Then go take a law 101 class.

Actually, they are. It's Arima, and the only laptops of theirs that I can actually get info on are Pentium M-based laptops, but the C|Net article said that it would be either an Athlon XP-M or Celeron CPU in these things.

Arima, as pointed out in this article. It says here that Walmart has already placed an order for 100,000 notebooks for their test-run.

I have a vested interest in this analogy since my company is in one of the Rambus lawsuits. They are going to take a while to play out to the bitter end, but there has been quite a bit of back and forth in them. I think they are currently looking good from their most recent appeal, but there are still cases ongoing with multiple companies. Rambus, at least, unlike SCO are still able to continue with their real business instead of just becoming a litigation factory. They were originally convicted of fraud, but that was overturned on appeal. The suits continue. I see the same possibility of repeated appeals in the SCO case, so don't look for them to be crushed in the first decision and that be the end of it.

I'm getting a lot of karma mileage from this Power5 MCM review these days. They visited the same Microprocessor Forum that Ars did.

The MS money machine revealed.

That lack of focus explains a lot. No wonder they are having difficulty selling these

>ASRock are actually 100% owned by AsusTek

*Were* owned by them. Don't go about saying that!

It even threatens legal action against Asrock customers who associate these motherboards with Asustek, in a surprising example of Chinese Walls.

I have to explain to enough people bamboozled by this sort of half-truth I don't need more people saying that!

>ASRock boards are EOL Asus products.

Now that is completely wrong.

Many AS Rock boards carry PC Chips parts, part numbers, and PC Chips designs. PC Chips and ECS are pretty much the same company (or at least sell identical products, down to everything but the color of PCB), however, ECS is the "high support" (as in they can speak English properly) version of PC Chips.

The quality of Asrock boards is entirely different from the quality of Asustek boards, the memo continues.

Here's a link with some details. Apparently it's a direct hypertransport tap between the CPUs. Interesting, I was thinking of something like this when I first heard about AMD64 using hypertransport.

You're probably referring to Culturecom Holdings Ltd's V-Dragon chip as mentioned in this Slashdot story.

(as featured on bbspot's daily links) has some interesting info on internet radio and it's legality.

This could be one of the final nails in itanic's coffin (or maybe the iceberg that finally sinks it.)

When will Carly wield the axe? And what will intel do now?

It's the Inquirer, so grain of salt required:
Rumour of big HP Opteron deal rolls around
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9911

According to the Inquirer:

AMD IS LIKELY to get a boost from Hewlett Packard today, with reports saying the firm will start selling a Presario 8000Z as soon as Wednesday.

According to the report on cnet.mp3.com, HP will offer a variety of different options with the desktop, which will be available in retail this week.

The machine, the report says, is just one of a family of Athlon 64 desktops HP will sell, and costs $1,239 for a basic machine.

But HP won't start using the Athlon FX - a sort of Opteron - for a little while, it appears. If and when it does, it will be offered as a gaming machine.

The announcement is a boost for AMD, coupled with Sun's expected endorsement of its Opteron microprocessors today.

UltraSPARC is still being developed, although it's not what it was, but with this AMD alliance, 64-bit Solaris on Opteron (and Linux) and with such poor competition from Dell, HP, etc. Sun is on to a winner.

If you trust its reporting, you can see that its main two cash cows are sliding and more and more is spent on marketing. I'd speculate that even some of the non-marketing line items include activities that other companies would consider marketing.

Keep in mind that other hype engines, Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, to name a few, also showed nice profits -- until their books got a proper going over. Given that it's a company found guilty of illegal anti-comptetitive activities and during the trial video testimony was forged and several contradictions in executive testimonies leave a suspicion of perjury and there is a history of cooking the books to hide an $18 billion loss, I'd be suspicious of any self-reported figures. But, hey, it's your money.

Even if the oft-cited-but-still-unseen money in the bank is real, it could disappear in security penalties, false advertising fines or anti-trust action. $1 trillion is a lot larger than $50 billion. Or, even if it is real and does not disappear in fines, then it could be used up trying to get vapourware such as .not and leghorn to market by 2006. Three years is too long for businesses to suffer with tools that are not ready for the Internet when most have enterprise level drop-in GNU/Linux, BSD, or Mac OS X replacements which are Internet ready now.

Once national investments and the larger funds have divested, there won't be any pretense to pretend that the company is viable.

He had rich parents with rich friends... which made financing a company a lot easier.

Good product? You a tard or something?

As for distribution, remember the antitrust action in which MS was declared a monopoly? Bush didn't buy the EU government antitrust people.

Why would you want to do such a thing? You would only end up with a substandard version of Windows...

Also (DMCA, not NET) Dennis Rocci went to jail for selling Xbox mod chips.

Everyone knows about Skylarov getting picked up, but this seems to be another untold story of jail time for copyright convictions.

The first DMCA conviction was Thomas Michael Whitehead for selling DirectTV cracks.

Did you know your PDA can also become your phone? Its true and this type of thing isnt going to stop there. You'r PDA may one day function as the remote control to your media collection in your house/car/workplace or tempreture control in home/car etc.

Check out this PCMCIA GSM mobile phone

And the mobile phone in a CF Memory card

PDA's arnt dead. Nor will they be in the short term. PDA's will adapt to become other devices such as mobile phones and remote controls with more hardware and software functionality built into them and also in the form of PCMCIA and other such technologies.

And lets not forget the people who try and combine the functionality of the phone and PDA into one clever device!

I like the phone ad-on idea though (CF/PCMCIA)!

What about B = JD Edwards; A = Peoplesoft; C = Oracle? I'd say that is a pretty good example...

How about SAP + MySQL + SUSE? That would be a nice European team for enterprise software / OS...

Here is the Inq writeup on this from a few days ago: Man that inspired The Matrix reckons we should all learn assembler

Sure, fonts can be scaled just fine. But that's not the only user interface element that needs to be scaled.

Here at work, we have several of those IBM T22[01] displays. 24" diagonal with 3840x2400 resolution. I haven't done the math, but I think that's somewhere around 200 ppi. That's way too fine to do everyday work on.

So you scale up the font size. Great. What about images on web pages? What about the size of your scroll bars? What about toolbar buttons? What about ....

You see the dilemma.

Until there is a display technology like Quartz Extreme or what I hear rumor of in Longhorn (or a proposal like this, which could conceivably scale all X11 content), very high ppi displays are going to suffer serious usability problems.

Why don't they use IBM's Power5 CPU instead of the G5?

Intel wants to market Itanium as a server chip. That means that they are putting 3MB or 6MB on the high end Itaniums. Soon they will have a 9MB cache version. Lots of cache means lots of transistors means lots of heat.

Intel is not fabbing Itanium with a state of the art process. Intel leads the world in process technology, yet their Itanium is still on a 130nm process.

Speaking of cache, somewhat under-reported in the technical press was IBM's revelations of its upcoming Power5 server architecture. Yup, that's four dual-core processors each with 2MB of L2 cache, and four 36MB L3 cache chips all in the same package. IBM is leveraging it's packaging advantages against Intel's process advantages. Well, that, and making each processor die dual-core multithreaded.

The government needs to do *something* to bring down the massive amount of pirating. No one can afford MS softwre if you have to pay $140 for it and the average person only makes about $300 a year. Plus whether one likes it or not, there is standardization in every organization. Many government agencies here in the US standardize on a desktop OS and if you work there, you use that desktop, end of story. Also, not only does this government have to fight back the MS monopoly, they have to fight against the massive piracy going on. A tactic like this may seem wrong, however it appears to me to be the only choice until the market is fair again. Espcially when you have powerfull IT companies like MS that have much sway with the US government by bribing them with campaign contributions. Look at the Homeland Security joke. Tom Ridge was put in charge of it and after some nice campaign contributions from MS, he decalred that the Homeland Security intitiative would standardize on MS solutions even when industry experts Urge the Dept of Homeland Security to avoid Microsoft

here

an alterntive article if you can't get your hands on the (large, and soon to be slashdotted) article above.

Generally speaking a DSP is just like any other processor

In "general", yes. However THIS ONE is not.

This thing probably has some very specialized optical processing elements that can do thousands of "ops" in parallell if your code can utilize it fully.

You are "probably" right if you do not RTFA. However one look at the artcle reveals a diagram of the EnLight256 Optical Core. This is a VERY special purpose device and you CANNOT write code for it. It can do one thing, and one thing only. It preforms a general matrix transformation of a vector array, and it does so with limited precision.

It's an interesting device. It is amazingly fast for certain purposes. It cannot be used as a CPU.

-

The article says "The Ablaze(TM) is the Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) in the optical core of the EnLight256(TM)". Going by the graphic in the Inquirer article, they shine a row of blinking lights through a LCD-like device (and some lenses and mirrors I assume) and collect the results in a column of light sensors on the other end.

Each pattern of on/off elements on the LCD-like device gives them a different transformation running at however fast you could emit and sense the light. I doubt they mechanically move the optical arrangment so that would seem to limit the number of transformations. Some of the LCD patterns might give useful transformations. A vector multiply, a Fast Fourier Transform (maybe) or a sort (I doubt it)?

If the numbers are an analog light intensity level the precision would depend on how precise the light emitters and sensors you have are. Packaging the mirrors and lenses small enough is a neat trick. Having a problem that fits the available transformations and can supply data in and out fast enougth is another. I wonder anything useful can be done by quickly switching LCD matrix pattern, or directly feeding outputs back as inputs?

Other panelists, including representatives from Trolltech, SuSE Linux, and MySQL's CEO, Marten Mickos, commented on the SCO legal claims.

Eireik Chambe-Eng of Trolltech, said: "The SCO case is like a speed bump in the history of Linux and something which will strengthen Linux. It brings focus on IP and I think that's a good thing. SCO has a very bad case, it doesn't seem like they have a case at all. It's difficult to understand why they'd be playing the way they're playing if they had a good case".

Actually, it would appear to accelerate those
plans:

Sparc 64 Roadmap writeup