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Most Linux fans are not old enough to remember that Intel did not always dominate the PC processor market. In the late seventies, Intel won the chip war with Motorola and Zilog by offering certain features in its 8086 chip that favored MS-DOS over then existing competitive OSes. Subsequently IBM selected the 8088 for the first PC, knocking both Motorola and Zilog out of the emerging PC market.

I thought IBM chose MS-DOS because they refused to deal with the CP/M, and had Bill Gates & CO steal^H^H^H^H^H write their own DOS for IBM.

Running Linux on Power PC will no more make it survive than did MS-DOS on Intel. It is a matter of power vs. price, although more for the price. That's why AMD is kicking Intel with steel-toed boots in the speed category.

Does anyone have benchmarks for PanQuake? Post them.

2001RC46

Of course. A few months back Toms Hardware posted a step by step guide to ripping a DVD to divx, explaining exactly what software is required and how to use it. decss was not used.

This case is no longer (or never was) about piracy or even the dmca - it's about destroying the defendant.

This was posted just last month: http://www4.tomshardware.com/video/01q2/010424/ind ex.html.

Of course. A few months back Toms Hardware posted a step by step guide to ripping a DVD to divx, explaining exactly what software is required and how to use it. decss was not used.

This case is no longer (or never was) about piracy or even the dmca - it's about destroying the defendant.

This was posted just last month: http://www4.tomshardware.com/video/01q2/010424/ind ex.html.

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But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.

unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.

Still not enough to get me to buy a P4 yet. But I have to admit, the gap is getting a little closer.

A good hardware site that has independant benchmarks is Here

Looks like P4 is still the premium processor for Quake 3 Arena -- if your life revolves around that game..

Woah there. Some LCD monitors use standard analog VGA inputs, but not all. Please research this particular article for a listing of the more popular ones. There really is a difference.

It seems many people do not understand what the AMD Hypertransport technology does. It is a high speed interconnect, meant to be used to hook different high speed, high bandwidth circuits or networks together. For example, look at this diagram of the Intel 820 chipset. The processor talks to the MCH (memory control hub), which itself talks to memory, graphics, and the ICH (I/O control hub). The ICH talks to all the various I/O devices. Hypertransport would not necessarily, and mostly not likely, try to replace PCI, but lets the motherboard designers use it to connect the MCH and ICH (or the equivalent on AMD and VIA chipsets), or connect the PCI bus to the ICH or MCH.

From an interview here with an AMD representative:

Arcadian asks: What are AMD's plans for LDT? Recently, there have been numerous press releases on AMD's success in getting various designers and developers to commit to LDT based designs in the next couple years. I want to know which applications AMD sees LDT competing in? In other words, what are some products where AMD sees LDT being implemented? Does AMD figure that LDT can compete as an alternative to the following technologies: I/O connections, chipset bridge communications, multiprocessor communications, or external communications?

AMD: Well, by the time you read this you should have heard about all of the great things we have been doing over the past year related to our HyperTransport technology (what was previously codenamed LDT). Our HyperTransport technology is not meant to replace I/O connections, or be a competitor with any external communications (PCI/PCI-X, Infiniband, etc). Essentially, HyperTransport can be used to increase internal chip-to-chip communications within a system, and is up to 20 times faster than other technologies currently available. HyperTransport technology is ideal for not only chipset bridge communications, multiprocessor communications, but also for chip-to-chip communications within telecom and networking devices that require large amounts of internal bandwidth like Internet routers.

In conclusion, Hypertransport is not an I/O standard for the end user, it's for board designers. As a consumer, it won't matter to you whether a board you buy has it or not, as it will be invisible to you.

When will we see intel and AMD pushing refrigeration units for their systems?

Ever hear of KryoTech? Their website is pretty much content-free at the moment, but they sell refrigeration systems for overclockers. They also sell prebuilt Athlon-based systems...they had Athlons running at 1.0 GHz months before AMD shipped true 1.0-GHz Athlons. Last time I heard, their equipment, combined with the latest processors, was supposed to enable speeds up to 1.5-1.6 GHz. If a 1.2-GHz Athlon is an even match for a 1.5-GHz P4 in most tasks, imagine how an Athlon @ 1.5 GHz would compare to a 1.5-GHz P4.

There are other companies out there in this business...KryoTech is the one that popped to mind first. I think Tom's Hardware did a review of a similar product from another company, and continues to use a system built around that product as its reference "absolute fastest you can get" system.

Actually, you should check out: Tomshardware. It's a review of 17 coolers. Thermaltake doesn't do so well.

Even if they price the P4 chip way low, the only way they're going to come under $1000 is to use normal-performance components.

The P4 is stuck with RAMBUS RAM, so that jacks up the cost, and for under $1K you're only getting PC600 RDRAM. Since the P4's only advantage is in high-bandwidth applications, choking the RAM is going to make a slow computer, even on optimized apps. Just get a DDR Athlon if you're going to get a sub $1K system. Don't bother with a P4 unless you're getting a $2K-plus system and have the optimized software.

Tom's has a good one on this

As usual, tom's hardware has a really good story on the P4.

As usual, tom's hardware has a really good story on the P4.

Server missing for 4 years found, still ticking

Server missing for 4 years found, still ticking

Novell Inc. experts helped IT workers at the University of North Carolina solve the mystery of the missing network server. Though it hadn't missed a packet in four years, nobody knew physically where the machine existed until the joint team followed the clues in the form of the actual physical cable that connected it through a wall that maintenance workers had inadvertently put up, sealing off the server.
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Tom's Hardware ran a preview of the ATi Radeon Mobility and the GeForce2 Go chips a few weeks ago. Though he doesn't have actual numbers, he did simulate them use them using the GeForce MX and Radeon LE cards.

Tom's Hardware ran a preview of the ATi Radeon Mobility and the GeForce2 Go chips a few weeks ago. Though he doesn't have actual numbers, he did simulate them use them using the GeForce MX and Radeon LE cards.

Caveat emptor, any or all of this could be hype. :)

I think I currently trust AMD's word more than I trust Intel's. The ones I tend to trust most are Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, and Aces' Hardware.

I see ZD-Net, C|Net, and and their ilk as being informative as long as you take their endorsement of any platform with a skeptical grain of salt. When you surf these sites you have to keep in mind that each has its own interests tied closely to various hardware manufacturers.

At least Tom's, Anand's, and Aces' have no overt interest in the succes of one of the big tech companies over another. That's a positive mark for them in my book.

Tom's Hardware Guide has a good article on it too. It's 'the longest article he has ever written and it doesn't even have any bar graphs.'

don't forget Tom;s Hardware

It's going to be hard for AMD to keep up the clock speed race with the Pentium 4, but this is a good start. Here's two more reviews, Anandtech and Tom's Hardware.

Don't forget my fave, AnandTech. Lots of people like Tom's Hardware as well.

best CPU for MPEG-4 and check this out too MPEG-4 DVD to CD-ROM The masses won't be using this anytime soon. Just to decode the thing it takes 80% of your CPU with a Pentium 450Mhz. To Encode it it'll take 36 hours. Although they said an Athlon 1.1GHz can do it in like 6 to 10 hours.

So in a year or two years when my grandma has a P500 or above..only then will I convert all my mini-DV homevideo tapes to Divx and pass them around like candy. Bottomline though..is it's coming..just a matter of time..Right now it's just for new unreleased movies not out on DVD yet.

best CPU for MPEG-4 and check this out too MPEG-4 DVD to CD-ROM The masses won't be using this anytime soon. Just to decode the thing it takes 80% of your CPU with a Pentium 450Mhz. To Encode it it'll take 36 hours. Although they said an Athlon 1.1GHz can do it in like 6 to 10 hours.

So in a year or two years when my grandma has a P500 or above..only then will I convert all my mini-DV homevideo tapes to Divx and pass them around like candy. Bottomline though..is it's coming..just a matter of time..Right now it's just for new unreleased movies not out on DVD yet.

This proves clearly that Pentium 4 lives from the high memory bandwidth that RDRAM is finally able to deliver.

I remember reading on Toms Hardware that in about a year Intel is going to release a chipset for it's PIV that does not require RAMBUS RAM.

Of course by that time RAMBUS will have become entrenched enough in the marketplace to have a foothold and with Intel backing them that is all you really need.

The solution to this problem, like many, is to not support company's that engage in these types of business practices.

However it seems entrenched in the minds of the masses, and sadly it seems the majority of IT professionals, that if Intel is not Inside, the product must be inferior. While I'm not bashing Intel, they make a good product, they would love to become the only CPU chipmakers for desktop PCs.

Always keep in mind that like anything if you allow big business to narrow your selection to one product it becomes very hard to change that. The only option then is have the gov step in and I hope you all know what kind of mess that can result

Having 10 patents myself, I know a little about this business.

"There goes their patent" is actually a better phrasing of it. You can patent anything unique you invent - the trick is to patent something valuable - e.g. something the market actually wants.

RAMBUS went on this strategy of suing SDRAM makers because their own technology turned out to be inferior, offering massively higher price with no matching performance gain.

If RAMBUS is unable to enforce their patent against SDRAM, then the patent is - from a business standpoint - worthless. All it could be used for is preventing unauthorized copies of RAMBUS memory, which most customers don't want anyway.

Will people want to steal it? That's a measure of true value of course.

No wait, True Value is a hardware store.

Damn! Real hardware can be found at Tom's or Anand's.

I wonder if Tom and Anand date?

But a date is a fruit! I wonder if they bake cakes together, even if they don't date.

Will people steal the cake if they bake it? Probably not. They'd rather steal Sue's Chocolate Wafer Roll .

WebWord.com -- Industrial Strength Usability

Tom's Hardware recently did a write-up on this portable with many examples of customizing it.

Tom's Hardware recently did a write-up on this portable with many examples of customizing it.

Just look at some of the benchmarks on Tom'sHardware. The majority of them are all dead even after processor speeds hit 8 or 9 hundred Mhz.

Some of the newer Athlon processors have 12x multipliers. That means the processor is working 12 times as fast as the rest of the system. This is wasteful, and you end up with a lot of dead processor cycles because the RAM/system bus can't provide enough data for processing. Manufacturer's need to stop throwing money at superfast processor development, and work on improving system bus speeds, and latency/throughput of RAM.

What I find even more annoying than multiple banners scattered around the page, are sites, like TomsHardware that only have one or two ads per page, but trim the content down to one or two paragraphs per page, and have a 30 page article. I'd much rather deal with multiple banners on a static page than have to click through 10-30 pages to read a single story.

The Athlon was also bleeding-edge overclocking; they now have a device for $20 to $50 US that will allow you to overclock a Slot A Athlon without cracking the case and desoldering and resoldering resistors.

The only real drawback I've seen to overclocking is the possiblity of frying your processor, motherboard or other components. The person who got me into overclocking toasted 6 Abit BP6 motherboards trying to figure out how to get a Coppermine Celeron to work in the board. While studing the pin diagrams and attempting to reroute traces on the motherboard isn't the norm, it does happen.

Aside from horror stories like the one above, there are two things to watch for when overclocking: heat and over-voltage.

As for heat, don't skimp on the heat sinks and check a page like [H]ard|OCP or Toms Hardware (links below) for heatsink information, case modifications and the like.

Voltage can be trickier to deal with. As bus and processor speeds become higher and higher, the transistor count rises and, hence, the current required by the processor, chipset and other components of the system. Modern processors lower the voltage significantly in order to conserve current. Some processors require 2 volts (or less!) in the core. If you're familiar with electronics at all, you'll soon see that the signal to noise ratio becomes a real factor. The solution is to increase the signal by raising the voltage. It's a tightrope act; raise the voltage too high and you could fry your chip in microseconds, not high enough and it doesn't add any noise rejection but does add heat.

Something that used is cited as a factor now that I don't really find relavent is processor life. Transistors do not last forever. Stuff that goes on at the quantum level degrades the PNP/NPN junctions over time. Granted, in most situations this can be over the course of years or decades, but with transistors as small as those in a typical processor die, it's generally on the lines of 5 to 7 years. That's if you run them at the manufacturer's suggested voltage. Increase the voltage, decrease the life.

That being said, with processors doubling in speed every 18 months or so, I don't really see any current chip being in service on a desktop 7 years from now. Even if you were to cut the operating life of your processor in half from 7 to 4.5 years, would it matter much? Incedentally, I have a Linux box here running on a Pentium 166MMX overclocked to 233. I bought the processor and motherboard in '97 or '98, if I remember correctly. It's been on 24/7 for all but the few days it took to move from California to Phoenix.

If you're interested in overclocking, the best way to get into it is to search the hardward sites, read their guides and try it.

It will also help to know a bit more about the x86 architecture. For example, understanding the workings of SDRAM fetch settings in your BIOS, how to figure out the PCI bus speed after overclocking your motherboard's bus from 133 to 145 and so on. [H]ard|OCP and Toms Hardware (links I promised above =) have some very good information on just that sort of thing.

If I missed anything or blew a couple of concepts, feel free to offer a friendly correction. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

Good luck!

Everytime there is a story about overclocking on Slashdot the naysayers flood the forums with comments about how terrible an idea it is to overclock. They say things like "You only save a little bit and spend more on cooling..." or "Your chip will be unstable and then have a shorter life."

I would like to clear some things up about overcloking for the uninformed people.

Firstly, the stability issue. Overclockers hate instability. Most of us go way out of our way to make sure that the system we are running is not going to be acting all flaky when we overclock. The whole point of overclocking is to get the most out of the system, and if your system is freezing all of the time you aren't getting much out of it are you? We accomplish this by running benchmarks and torture tests to make sure that the overclock isn't adversely affecting performance or stability, if it is then we step it off.

Second, with the exception of a few extreme instances, most overclockers save money for the same performance. We don't all go out and buy peltiers and liquid cooled heatsinks. Most of us spend more on cooling than the average person but not by much, and our cooling system usually lasts through several cpus. Compare the $50 hsf I'm using now with your $10, so I spent $40 more than average, big deal, I saved $300 on the cpu and I'll use this cooler with my next upgrade too.

Which brings me to the savings. We save a lot of money for the performance. When I purchased my Celeron300A I spent $109 for it and after I overclocked it, the performance I got out of the chip in games at the time was almost identicle to a P2-450 which was selling for well over $600.
Now thats about as good as overclocking gets, but there are many other examples of chips since then that have done almost as well.

That celeron300a I spoke of is still running at the same overclocked speed as the day I put it in, and it's rock solid. You want stability, there you go.

On top of all of this, overclocking is fun! No really. It's an enjoyable experience, you learn a lot about hardware, and at the end of the day you can be happy that you have a screaming fast system for a fraction of the price you could have spent.

If you want to think about overclocking try checking out some of the sites around the net:
www.overclockers.com
www.hardocp.com
www.anandtech.com
www.tomshardware.com

Try it, you might like it.

All i really want to understand is what the difference is between a $600 Geforce3 card and a $1000 Oxygen GVX 420 card Why couldn't or shouldn't i pay $1000 for the higher priced card if it can do the same things a $600 card can do. And if an Oxygen card can't do what a Geforce 3 card can do. Why not? See the problem here is that i simply don't know enough about video cards and apparently i'm too busy to RTFM

"the Power Box is a real system, running quietly and reliably without making any headaches" - Tom's Hardware

If Tom found that the box was not running stable, he would have lowered the clock speed until he found a speed that worked perfectly. That's what he does, and that's what he's trying to do here.. push the available technology to its limits and see just how fast fast can get.

"the real reason we have a computer on our desktops - to perform productive work for our bosses"

First of all, speak for yourself, not everyone else.. there are plenty of other uses for computers besides producing for an employer. Secondly, how can you claim that a faster computer will not aid in productivity? The world is FULL of applications just waiting for faster computers to become available. Real time video processing, ray tracing, language interpretation, gene analysis.. etc.

WTF? IMHO, Maxtor makes the best IDE hard drives available right now. This article on Tom's Hardware rates the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus at the top of the list!

I swapped my 6gb drive out with a 20gb and it works fine.

The only downside is when the Jukebox starts up, it takes a couple minutes to create its database file (why this couldn't be cached in the flash mem, I don't know).

The Nomad Jukebox isn't perfect, but it's one of the better hard disk-based players out there.

And so has the Nomad. See Tom's Hardware

The only totally fair way to compare is to boot a non-SMP kernel, run the benchmark, then boot an SMP kernel and run exactly the same benchmark.

None of those are brands that I have messed with. Tom's Hardware ran a piece about three months ago on mobos using the i815 chipset. The usual suspects (Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, etc...) all had high benchmarks and high subjective ratings of reliabilty from the testers.

In the past, any attempt at integration on the chipset absolutely sucked. It's not much better now if you only consider the three boards reviewed in this article. Don't forget that it is entirely beneficial if the engineers have the time and resources to finish the job before the deadline imposed by the marketing assholes.

Just think of the performance enhancements that can be had by moving the remainder of the video processing off of the cpu, or using an integrated LAN circuit rather than wasting PCI polls on a NIC that sits idle most of the time.

Hmm...lots of interesting thoughts.

I've seen quite a few people point out that the situation isn't likely to get better until bandwidth costs go down. The assumption there is that once badnwidth is less expensive then sites will be able to better afford to exist on meagre advertising revenues. But I think that there's another reason that more bandwidth is one of the answers. Multimedia and interactivity. Once bandwidth becomes more plentiful and less expensive, web-based advertising can finally evolve from a stupid little flashing banner to something more effective, whether that be through integrated video/audio, etc. Regular commercial breaks might even someday make it into web sites.

BTW, I too hate animated .GIF's. When I first began playing with Flash animations, I created a simple logo for my own website. When saved as a flash animation, it was only 8k in size. For kicks, I saved it as an animated .GIF and it was 72k in size. Who wants to download a 72KByte logo on a 48Kbit connection? No wonder people hate banner ads!

Personally, what I think the wave of the immediate future in online advertising is in product sponsorship. And not just random junk either. My "other job" is as a crew member for an auto racing team. Big-time auto racing like NASCAR and Formula 1 only exists because of advertising. And they have a very effective sponsorship model. Many race fans would decide whether to buy a particular brand of product based on whether or not they sponsor auto racing (all else being roughly equal). It builds an extended sense of comraderie with the teams because the consumer knows that by purchasing product x they are supporting their racing team.

I've seen dozens of people point out that they buy stuff from ThinkGeek or other similar merchants who advertise on Slashdot, and that they would be more inclined to click-thru on ads if they knew that they had been hand-picked by the editors. Well isn't that what sponsorship is? It certainly has the potential to be that.

Let's do a hypothetical Slashdot sponsorhsip. ThinkGeek probably can't afford to be the sole sponsor of Slashdot, but they could afford to be an associate sponsor. So then Slashdot recruits a couple other sponsors. VA Linux, Sun, Cisco, etc. Companies whose target markets are the same as Slashdots. Then instead of banner ads, maybe they sponsor a certain section of the site. I dunno...the VA Linux Slashback page. Or they get prominent placement on certain types of Slashdot pages. Maybe they even have a tie-in...like 1% off the purchase price of a Sun Enterprise Server if you mention a special Slashdot discount code.

So what do the sponsors get? Targeted advertising that is much more likely to generate clickthrus and/or other revenue for the company. Their customers are Slashdot readers. In the case of marketing tie-in's, they even get statistics on how the sponsorship affects their sales.

What does Slashdot get? Money to pay the bills.

What do the readers get? Slashdot for one. And information on goods and services that likely interest them and that they are likely to make use of. I personally had never heard of ThinkGeek untill I saw their ad on Slashdot. But I have purchased from them twice in the past month. So targeted advertising does work for both advertisers and consumers.

The Register did an interesting "experiment" a year or so ago where they "sold their souls" to Compaq for a week. Basically, they only ran Compaq ads for that entire week in a pseudo-sponsorship deal. I never did hear how it worked out, but I'd be curious to find out.

Honestly though, when advertising on the net first came into being, I think that sponsorship was the way that it generally worked. And then people got lazy because nobody wanted to spend time and effort tracking down sponsors or sites to sponsor. It was easier to just join an ad network and get some generic crap. But now we're seeing that doing it the lazy way doesn't necessarily work. Like anything else, the readers can tell if you put any work into it...and if you haven't, they'll ignore it.

When I think of some of the sites that are still pretty successful though, I think that they do rely (to an extent) on sponsorhsip-style ads versus banner ads. It seems to me that Anandtech always has ads from the same hardware vendors. Same with Tom and many many others. Even Slashdot probably has direct relationships with companies selling products rather than companies placing ads. And you'll notice that they aren't the web sites complaining about the ad services cutting them loose.

Just some food for thought.

I wouldn't suggest buying one, though. The plastic shells tend to generate more static electricity than their metal counterparts and we all know that's bad for PC components. Also, the metal provides shielding from electromagnetic and radio interference.

The product is called the "FireBox 400" from Procomp and is reviewed here at tom's hardware. It allows you to connect any ATA IDE device to a firewire bus ... very cool.

Another advantage of the P4 is that it will scale more easily to higher clocks.

Of course, in the real world, it will be a while before MS can take advantage of this. (Anyone know if gcc can optimize for P4 yet?)
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"Pentium 4 beats Athlon by quite a long shot. Only in a clock-for-clock comparison of Pentium 4 1.5 GHz and Athlon 1.466 GHz Athlon can reach the same scores as Pentium 4."

Isn't that the stuff from Larry Niven's Ringworld?

That stuff would seem to me to be like a long, flexible nanotube loop.

srry 'bout that last link...I can't find anything more direct.

Actually you can upgrade the HD, as it is only a standard 2.5" notebook HD. Tom's hardware has instructions on how to do this here. You can upgrade to any size of notbook HD, but there are certain problems, depending on how many mp3's you have, mainly the boot time gets higher and higher the more mp3. 20 GB of mp3 will likely make for a 2-3 minute boot time, which IMHO, sucks arse...

This looks pretty cool, but it's still a bit out of my price range. It isn't a solid-state player either, but I might be able to live with that if I was convinced this thing could endure the shock and abuse associated with a portable music player. Also, the battery life isn't that great (~4 hours?) but it's still much better than all of those 64MB players out there that can't hold a full CD.