Intel, OEMs Face Lawsuit For Megahertz Marketing

prostoalex writes "A group of PC owners filed a lawsuit against Intel, Gateway and HP, stating that companies spread misleading information about Pentium 4 processor performing faster than Pentium 3 or Athlon. The complaint alleges that 'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.' PC World has more details in its story." I wonder if the same litigants have a suit against the USPS for ads leading one to expect prompt service from courteous, competent employees.

Comments

While talking about lawsuits...

[Browzer]

What about:

1. Taking AMD to court for not forcing motherboard manufacturers to implement mb shutdown due to heat - especially taking in consideration the heat the AMD processors operate at.

2. Taking AMD to court for contradictory technical documents. Is anybody out there capable of differentiating between MP and XP at the bios level.

3. Taking AMD to court for incompetent technical support. One day they say non-recommended motherboards can screw up the warranty of the processors, the next day they "re-phrase" the answer, and say, they'll work with the customer to fix any problems.

4. Taking both AMD and Tyan to court for misleading the public - Tiger S2460 is "NOT" a recommended AMD/SMP platform inspite what Tyan claims, and inspite AMD failure to warn the public that Tyan claims otherwise - call it "internal politics".

Not the Drives: The Keyboard

[EvilTwinSkippy]

It's not the drives that are keeping computers slow, it's the keyboard. Actually on several levels. The first and obvious is that the keyboard americans grew up on is actually designed to slow down typists.

When mechanical typewriters first came out, the keys were arrange alphabetically. Secretaries would get so fast at typing, they would jam the keys. Back to the drawing board, someone [name escapes me] layed out the keyboard to be monsterously innefficient. The vowels are scattered all over the place. It favors left-handers. The only "enhancement" to the QWERTY keyboard is the fact you can type TYPEWRITER using the top row.

Like all standards, once set in, it is not easily dislodged. Rather like a certain Office Suite and Operating System.

On the other level is the fact that the slowest part of the computer, far from the drives, the RAM, the baud rate of the modem, is THE USER. Humans can only process information at 12 frames per second, and can only process signals less than 22Khz. We have between 5 and 9 registers for processing information (YMMV) with a latency that exceeds 1 second! Our eyes can only see to about 300DPI, and can recognize about 1 million colors.

Short of plug in the back of the head, computers are never going to get any faster for the average mammal than they are right now. Our senses can't process any of the extra speed, color, or fidelity.

Re:I'm sure some one beat me to this but remember.

[MaxVlast]

The first browser was written on NEXTSTEP (WWW.app) by Tim Berners-Lee, as his protocol was nice, but needed a browser. Mosaic was written by Marc Andreessen (sp?) for some other platform.

Interesting

[guttentag]

2002-08-17 23:19:36 Intel, Gateway and HP Sued Over P4 Performance (articles,intel) (rejected)

Yesterday I submit a story linking directly to the PCWorld article on this, and today the editors post a story linking to a less-detailed Inquirer re-write of the PCWorld story (I'm not grousing about the fact that my submission was not picked; I'm grousing about the fact that an inferior copy of the story I linked to was picked). Is there a bias against PCWorld, or are the editors just trying to make it appear that Slashdot stories come from a greater variety of eclectic sources?

OK, how many metres in a kilometre ???

[knorthern knight]

> This little naming issue gets worse as sizes get bigger too. I built several multiterabyte
> RAIDs and it really becomes apparent then. 1TB in hard disks are really only 931 GiB.

You're flat out wrong on this one as far as official standards are concerned. Check out the UK Metrication website. And I quote...

On 7 April 1795 (18 Germinal, year III) the Convention decreed that the new "Republican Measures" were to be henceforth legal measures in France

* mètre (length), are (surface), litre (volume), gram (mass), bar (pressure). The prefixes were Greek words for multiples
* déca- (x 10), hecto- (x 100), kilo- (x 1 000), myria- (x 10 000) and latin prefixes for fractions
* déci- (1/10), centi- (1/100), milli- (1/1 000)

Last I heard, there were still 1,000 metres in a kilometre and 1,000 grams in a kilogram. For the official US standards, check out the NIST website for official prefixes. In Canada check out The WEIGHTS AND MEASURES ACT and click on PART V
"Prefixes* for Multiples and Submultiples of Basic, Supplementary and Derived Units of Measurement". They use a weird "folio" system for maintining the webpage, so deep links aren't stable.

Re:It *was* unethical

[Tablizer]

While most Slashdot readers see through computer marketing hype, the average person (you know, the other 99%) doesn't have the time or the inclination to do real research on every PC component they purchase. Is that Intel's fault? No.

There are many parallels in other industries. For example, makers of hobby telescopes often use "power" (magnification) to compare scopes. However, magnification is a misleading benchmark. The most important metrics are the main apature and the quality optics, but most people don't know this. (The term "precision ground" is supposed to mean something in the business, but enforcement is weak.)

One can manufacture a $20 scope with 1000x magnification, but it would be useless because the image would be dim and blurry.

Manufactures end up including an eyepeice with useless magnification so that they can put a big number on the box. Hopefully the kit also includes some usable eyepeices in the mix.