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Faulty Microsoft Driver Saps Intel Core Duo power
Critical_ writes "Tom's Hardware recently discovered a bug in Microsoft's ACPI driver implementation under Windows XP SP2 that causes a loss of more than one hour of battery time when connecting any USB 2.0 device to an Intel Core Duo based system. Apparently Microsoft, Intel and ODMs have known of this problem under a confidentiality agreement since July 12, 2005 via (a still private) Knowledge Base article KB899179. The bug lies in the asynchronous scheduler component inadvertently being left running causing Windows' internal task scheduler (ITS) to treat it as a running process involving the attached device. This in turn prevents the ITS from powering down the processor into one of the ACPI sleep states causing the system to use more battery power. At this time there seems to be no fix. Strangely, single-core systems and AMD systems are not affected. This leads one to wonder if it is truely a software problem or if there a much larger hardware problem that may affect Core Duo equipped Apple systems."
Seems best to stay away from both companies.
Why can't they just be honest and say "this is the problem and this is what we're doing about it"
Why does the last phrase target specifically Apple computers since the beginning mentions Win XP. Obviously, this affects XP laptops with a core duo.
This sort of thing should not be permitted. We arent talking about R&D agreements here, this is a *currently selling product*. They are hiding the fact its known defective from the consumer.
Isnt this a basis for a class action fraud suit? If not, it should be investigated by the SEC at least.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yet another reason to buy AMD. I dumped Intel back when I had a brandnew Celeron 400 and have never looked back. I see a class action lawsuit in the future :)
http://religiousfreaks.com/First post from a laptop running XP SP2 with a USB 2.0 device connected with the asynchronous scheduler component running preventing my CPU from entering one of the ACPI sleep states and thus draining my battery life.
Quote: "Since Microsoft's drivers are now believed to be directly involved, then all of Apple's upcoming MacBook Pro systems - which use the Core Duo processor and 945 chipset - should be unaffected by this issue. We have yet to attain access to a MacBook Pro to verify this." Why bring Apple into a conversation about a defective XP driver?
the biggest thing I see here is to stay away from the AMD powered MSI Megabook S270.
That manages to last only 1hour 26 minutes without anything connected.
The intel variants clocked roughly 3 to 4 hours.
liqbase
"Hmm... Microsoft, a bug, Intel, Apple and dual core in the same article. I wonder if this couldn't generate some tasty clicks? Quick, put it on the frontpage!"
"Strangely, single-core systems and AMD systems are not affected."
So once again we have a chance to bash Intel, perfect!
Did you ever stop to consider that maybe that specific state, which cannot be reached, is only utilized by the Core Duo? Maybe if AMD had a laptop dual core chip we'd see the same behavior.. But hey, if we can make Intel look bad because of a Microsoft bug, then we are two for two!
I do not know the exact details, so accept this as a pure speculation.
/sbin/update).
It seems like a software problem. Think it like the "Weak Reference" issue in garbage collection. Since a system task is always demanding CPU the ACPI subsystem will of course not decrease the power.
Such things also happen in Linux world. For example the update daemon causes disk activity every 10 minutes, which prevented the hard disk from spinning down. Since this was a big issue with laptops, it's now fixed in later versions (my system no longer has
Great for Apple that is.
Who wants to bet their next marketing campaign is going to take advantage of this deficiency in Windows, like they did when W95 came out?
Maybe CowboyNeal has been in the living in the basement for too long, but everybody else knows that saying "chink" is very offensive to Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian people.
"Chink in the armour" is an outrageously common phrase in the English language.
My thoughts when I read it? "What does armour have to do with battery runtimes...".
The first thoughts of racist association did not enter my head until I read your comment. I'm from Australia, though, and if people are going to be racist there are much worse words that can be used.
I just recently upgraded to X2 4400+ running Win XP SP2 and 2GB dual channel ram. OS is running off a 15k RPM drive, and storage is on 3 x 250GB 16mb cache drives. The motherboard is A8N32-SLI. Video card is eVGA nvidia 7800GT.
I can't run Windows for more than 24 hours before Outlook takes a hold of one of the CPU's. ending outlook process makes the system pick another process, usually explorer.exe, to take 50% of total CPU (or one whole processor). Shortly after, the entire system freezes.
Seems like AMD has a problem as well. So it could be a Windows issue with dual core processors.
I also applied the "windows dual core hot fix" (google that), and set the registry setting from the KB article to 1, which didn't fix it, so I set it to 0, and that didn't fix it either. So, my system is stable for ~24 hours then kaput.
Indeed. At this point I won't recommend Intel products for home/personal usage, but more importantly I won't recommend them to my clients for business usage.
Most businesses relying on computer systems cannot afford to have downtime caused by nonsense such as this. A laptop unexpectedly running out of battery while writing an important email, or even dying during a presentation to potential clients, could prove to be a massive disaster.
Until things change an Intel, I will only recommend AMD-based systems, and possibly PPC- or SPARC-based systems. Business users need solidly engineered chips. Recent news would suggest that Intel no longer does that sufficiently.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I know it's an old phrase, but niggardly is a word that most people do not use anymore either because of the racist connotations.
Don't be ridiculous. A "chink" in English (including American) is a small crack or a weak spot. And a "niggard" is an English word meaning a miser. It dates back to Middle English, and before that to Scandinavian languages. Neither word has anything to do with racism.
Critical_ sees a typical Wintel bug and thinks Apple has a problem. It's an interesting thought, but not one to publish without checking.
APM and ACPI, designed in part by Microsoft, have always been secretive and buggy. Tricky hardware that constantly varies like Winmodems is the rule and I'm amazed the Linux works so well with any of it.
The only thing worse than the hardware has been Microsoft's software on top of it. While I'm able to keep laptops up for more then 40 days by using APM and hibernation or ACPI and suspend, my Microsoft using friends have to reboot. They tell me that their Word documents get corrupted on resume if the machine resumes at all. Cluster on cluster, all of their complex nasties designed to thwart competitors only bite them in the rear despite the fact they wrote the specs themselves and have hardware details no one else does. This is what to expect from non-free.
IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Our quad opterons (two dualcore) appear perfectly stable under Linux. Have you tried that as a test to rule out hardware?
It is suggested that it may not be the Windows driver that is purely at fault here. It is said that this problem does not manifest itself on AMD systems, for instance. Thus, it should be considered that the problem is more hardware-based, rather than just confined to the Windows XP driver. And when you consider that Apple is using such hardware in their recent systems, it is clearly obvious that they may be affected as well.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm sorry, there must be a spic on my screen. Isn't Arnold Schwartzanigger a fan of Canadian honkey?
I enjoy watching it too sometimes, unless it's a nice windy day out, then I'd rather be out flying a kike.
...to not bother wasting nice new Apple hardware on Windows XP. Stop the dual-boot project!
I wonder how Linux handles the defect, dependant upon how much the defect lies in the hardware.
Informatus Technologicus
How exactly is it "Intel bashing" to point out that similar systems from other manufacturers do not suffer from the same problem? Indeed, following such a faulty train of thought one could easily argue that pointing out the higher stability of Linux relative to Windows 98 is "Microsoft bashing". It obviously isn't "bashing" in any way, but merely pointing out that one manufacturer's product is deficient when compared to another product from another set of developers.
AMD does have dual core chips available, and from another comment in this topic they reportedly work fine. So indeed, this may very well not be a problem with just the Windows XP driver, but may also be a problem with th Intel chips.
Regardless, we can't use faulty systems like these in production settings, regardless of who manufactures them. Even if it is just a problem with Microsoft's driver, I can't recommend this hardware to clients who do wish to use Windows, just because they will run into problems. So I'll just continue to recommend AMD-, PPC- and SPARC-based systems, which often just work.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I understood that macbooks will have socketed processeors (?? for upgrade).
So if I have to send my new macbook (delivery 15th Feb haha believe it when I see it) back for a newer faster processor sometime down the track I won't lose any sleep over it.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
I guess it depends how you read it.
Chink in the armour - An asian in the armour, so clearly your defences are now screwed
Chink in the armour - A slight defect/damage to the armour.
Define in Google says
* offensive terms for a person of Chinese descent
* tinkle: make or emit a high sound; "tinkling bells"
* a narrow opening as e.g. between planks in a wall
(more here but unneeded).
I guess when people can't do a simple check on a word they must run around screaming racist/sexist/whatever, just to make sure we don't miss their ignorance.
I like muppets.
This article really pinpoints to me one of the best things of all about Apple switching to Intel, REAL OS COMPETITION. Now at last if Windows seems dog slow, you can't claim it's the Intel chip... or when the Finder seems the suckage, you KNOW it's the Finder and not the PPC chip running at a lower MHz. Once we start seeing these systems getting into people's hands and they notice a real difference between the two OS' on the same hardware you can bet they'll be whining about it and performance will definitely be a focus for both OS venders. In the past they could have been lax about it... thinking "But what can they compare it to?" but now if they can show that Quartz drawing is 3x slower than DirectX or vice versa, you can bet there will be performance updates in the near future. This is better for all of us.
P.S. Linux doesn't really count in this manner because it gets ignored as a "geek OS" and not really something anybody can run.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The first thoughts of racist association did not enter my head until I read your comment.
... looks like he's got a chink in his armor." My mother made him apologize for that one. Not that it mattered: I didn't get the joke anyway.
Me neither. The problem comes in when words (which often have multiple meanings, like "chink") that are offensive in one context are presumed to be unusable in all contexts. And if we went along with that, we'd have to shrink the dictionary by 50% at least. Personally, I think that people should just develop mental armor without any chinks in it and not be so blasted sensitive.
Now, having said that I remember watching a movie with my father, when I was maybe 8 years old, and in it the protagonist (a spy) steals a tank from a Chinese military base to make his escape (apparently he wasn't a very good spy.) In any event, unbeknownst to our hero one of the base solders was clinging to the outside, waiting for an opportunity. My Dad got that gleam in his eye, and said, "uh oh
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No offense while I am not a intel supporter or a mac zealot I find it quite funny that every time there is a problem with Intel everyone begins to bash them simply because of a list of problems. No problem simply do a recall. It's quite obvious to me that the Yonah chips where rushed because of Apple. Plus it states XP driver. Nothing related to Apple because they don't use "XP drivers". Or maybe these flaws are intentional so that Windows runs poorly on them. But I seriously doubt they would sacrifice there marketshare just for that. Also AMD has it's own flaws as well, instead of keeping your eye on one thing why not both? From what I read in another /. comment which gave a link to the AMD Duron with a list of 124 flaws. But correct me if I am wrong.
Nothing is ever perfect and for you AMD lovers your chip is not perfect either. So live with it.
I am pretty sure when you bought a piece of software you just never had to upgrade it right?
I'm not sure you can label the product as "defective". Software is too complicated to be labelled "defective" just becuase it has bugs. Moreover, I'm not sure you could legally require Microsoft to reveal every bug they know about, especially since the software you bought carried a prominent notice in the EULA saying, roughly "This software is not guaranteed to work; if it fails to function in some way it's not our problem -- you shouldn't have relied on it in the first place". They never promised the ACPI driver will actually work. Note that the GPL carries a similar clause.
That said, I'd rather rely on free software to function as advertized. When the big pieces fail (kernel, web broswer, ...) fixes are usually quick since many experts are working transparently. When small pieces fail (my favorite editor) I can fix them myself and submit a patch.
The other solution, of course, is to pay for warranty. The problem is that no-one is willing to guarantee Windows will work, and that includes the hardware OEM -- I'm sure the people who make the laptop will say that they can't warranty someone else's OS.
on my bigass American TV.
Sarcasm, right?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What if the current ACPI driver isn't faulty but the previous one was? What if Intel relied on the previous driver to design the sleep functions for the Core Duo? Then Microsoft fixes the ACPI driver. Uh-oh. This kind of thing happens in software all the time. There does seem to be some evidence for this scenerio in the article.
The problem is only reported on the latest Service Pack.
The problem has been known for seven months but not "fixed."
The problem only occurs on the Core Duo.
Microsoft seems ready to take responsibility for the problem even though the evidence points to a hardware problem.
The following quote from the Intel rep -- "It is something we have asked our engineers to put a high priority on. At this time, we may be able to solve the problem through drivers, firmware and software. If there is no solution from a software persepctive, we will look into hardware fixes for future platforms to prevent this issue."
And this other quote pointing a finger at the reference implementation -- "All the vendors have to design their products according to the power management specifications. If one component is not working properly, the whole system may be impacted."
So even if the bug was a Microsoft bug it could still affect all other system using the hardware designed to run on Windows.
You'd think the authors might install Linux on the notebook to check.
So, you bought a macbook? I guess you've got too much money in your hands. You could have a much faster Intel based laptop for half of what you've spent on that overpriced designer shit.
;-)
Well, jealousy gets you nowhere...
For the record, please take advantage of your infinite Anonymous Coward wisdom and find us some high-performance laptops which run MacOS X in a completely supported manner. Your budget is precisely half the cost of a new MacBook Pro.
Go for it, I know you can do it! Go, go, go!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Why do so many chinks have to act so niggardly all the time? :-p
(coming from someone of korean descent)
This guy's the limit!
So the big deal is that the processor doesn't sleep and may run your laptop battery down a tiny bit faster?
Okay, so maybe the big deal is that they were (are?) keeping this secret. If it is such a big secret, then why, and how, do we know about it?
For a desktop system, I'll take AMD over Intel any day, especially one I've specced and built myself. I've got the parts for an Athlon 64 X2-based system on the way to my door from NewEgg right now. :)
For a pre-purchased desktop system, I'd prefer AMD over Intel, but unfortunately, prebuilt systems with AMD CPUs often aren't the nicest systems available. There are some (such as Sun's Opteron-based machines), but it's a lot harder to find a prebuilt system with high overall quality which contains an AMD CPU than with an Intel CPU. That's why my fathers' new file server is Intel-based - you can't get Dell PowerEdge systems with AMD CPUs. Say what you want about Dell, while some of their lower-end systems may be crap, my experience has been that their higher end servers and laptops are incredibly solid and well designed systems. The PE830 has one of the nicest internal designs I've seen in a long time, and both my father's Inspiron 8000 and my I8200 have been flawless for me. (Or at least, have been since I nuked XP from my 8200 and installed Win2k because XP's SpeedStep implementation is utter fucking crap compared to Intel's SpeedStep control applet for Win2k.)
When it comes to laptops, Intel is the only viable choice. Whether or not the Turion 64 is better or worse than the Pentium M, it's impossible to actually buy a high-end Turion 64 based machine from a reputable vendor. Every Turion-based system I've seen has been either from a small-time noname vendor or is an incredibly low-end system (crappy screen, crappy video card, etc). There simply are no Turion-based systems that can even come close to competing with IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads or Dell's higher-end Inspirons like the XPS M170, the 9300, and 9400. If there are, they are impossible to find.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"in the way the currently available version of the ICH7-M Southbridge communicates with Microsoft's ACPI driver," "The specific piece which Intel and Microsoft now say is responsible for the power drain is Windows' Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI) driver, which is a software component provided through the operating system." Seems like a driver issue to me so before you go on insulting people maybe try reading the entire article. Does not seem to be the southbridge at fault but how the ACPI microsoft driver talks to it. But this is a undergoing investigation so I will refrain from any such comments like yours.
You're an idiot. The word "chink" as used here has as much to do with the derogatory term for a Chinese person, and the word "niggard" has as much to do with the derogatory term for a person of African descent, as the Chinese surname "Ho", or the old Wade-Giles transliteration of the word for river, has to do with a derogatory street-slang term for women derived from the slang word for a prostitute. Shall we force all people with the last name "Ho" to change their names because they are calling women prostitutes?
I am a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Chinky People and I demand that Slashdot write an official letter of apology to all the people of Asian descent who were greatly offended by the use of such racist and derogatory language.
"IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare."
No, it isn't. It's not even going to come close. It's not even going to exist, ever. 90% of the Cell's computing horsepower is in the SPUs, which are optimized for signal processing and geometry processing applications (namely, grinding away on lots of number crunching). No instruction reordering, floating-point only, and very limited branching functionality. The coprocessors are more comparable to devices such as Analog Devices' TigerSHARC or TI's TMS320 series than any general purpose CPU. Despite the insane floating point performance, you don't see TigerSHARC or TMS320 based computers, do you? That's because they are not suitable for general purpose computing in any way.
The Cell's general purpose "controller" CPU is an incredibly stripped down PPC core that has incredibly low performance compared to any standard general purpose CPU.
While it will have incredible performance for gaming and signal processing, the Cell is an utterly crap CPU for general purpose computing. Using a Cell in a normal desktop machine is like trying to cut a tree trunk with a cordless electric drill rather than a reciprocating saw. No matter how nice of a drill it is, it's going to do a shitty job compared to even the cheapest recipro saw, if it manages to do the job at all.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The term "oriental" has a hug freight of ideological baggage, basically painting every culture in the entire geographical swath from Giza and Istanbul to Kushiro and Kupang as effeminate, devious, and inscrutable for 2500 years. Read Edward Said's book on "Orientalism" to see why it is usually offensive when applied to a person or style (as opposed to the simple geographical usage). Comparing this to an idiot who doesn't understand that "chink in the armor" or "chink glasses" has nothing to do with being Chinese reveals a great deal of insensitivity to language.
So you're saying we should be niggardly in our use of the word chink? Maybe clean up our language, make it spic and span, so it cracks like a cracker?
Aside from the fact that you're probably trolling, you're also probably a bitch. Too bad.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
for the last little while, I've been noticing that my compaq R3000 AMD64 WinXP SP2 laptop has been running with the fan at full tilt almost all of the time.
I normally run plugged into power with music playing so I didn't think much about it, other than noting it being weird.
right now the fan is running at full tilt. and has been for hours. even when the system is 99% idle. the ambient temp is about 70F. the computer is cool to the touch everywhere.
I unplugged my ipod shuffle.
the fan went into halfspeed mode about 5 seconds later.
it's about 2 minutes later and it still hasn't stepped down to lowspeed fan. but even this is an improvement.
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.
First, the article isn't hidden and available to just MS and OEM's. I can see it fine through Premier Online (requires a select or enterprise agreement granted). The article also says NOTHING about any processor architecture - it is ALL of them - AMD, Intel, dual core, single core, hyperthreading - doesn't matter. According to the article, it is anything runnning XPSP2.
Shiat, relax. True, he used a word that has a double meaning, but anyone who has a half-decent grasp of the english language would understand it for its real meaning.
So, before you get all righteous on everyone, Mr McPoliticallyCorrect, and start hurling around comments like racist, realise that chink was a valid word in the english language long before it was used in a negative way.
In the words of Maynard, "Get off your f***ing cross, we need the space for the next fool martyr."
tinfoilmedia
The Windows scheduler is different in single and dual core, or more specifically: single or multi CPU. This is quite understandable, as there are some optimizations possible for the synchronization objects if you know for a fact that there is only one real execution path. Synchronization in different forms is used A LOT in the NT kernel, as it's a piece of full reentrancy fetishism.
I assume this has been posted previously, this is what you've got to do:
c es\USB
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate, and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servi
Note If the USB subkey does not exist, create it. To do this, follow these steps:a. Select the Services key. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Key.
b. Type USB in the New Key #1 box to name the new key "USB."
3. Right-click USB, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. In the New Value #1 box that appears, type EnIdleEndpointSupport, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click EnIdleEndpointSupport, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, leave the Hexadecimal option selected, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor.
You must be crackers; any one can see that this is a slippery slope. And being sued for your racist talk doesn't spook you -- well, you must have a lot of guineas saved up.
You would do well to keep your language spic and span.
Bemopolis, a lousy mick
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Exactly. I love catching people with the oriental/occidental thing. Try telling someone that you're offended when they refer to you as being "western" and they just get confused.
This guy's the limit!
Last sentence: This leads one to wonder if it is truely a software problem or if there a much larger hardware problem that may affect Core Duo equipped Apple systems.
...meaning that the problem being discussed could be much larger than initially thought in general, and not necessarily making the leap to Apple computers yet.
:)
Did they mean "...Core Duo equipped Apple systems AS WELL" ? Or was it supposed to read "windows systems" still and may be a typo?
Clearly there's implications for Duo Core equipped Apple Systems. Just wondering if they meant to implicate that at that point and were just sloppy about it, or what.
A Windows XP SP2-based portable computer uses its battery power more quickly than you expect when a USB 2.0 device is connected
c es\USB
View products that this article applies to.
Partner Only Article Article ID : 899179
Last Review : July 12, 2005
Revision : 1.0
Important This article contains information about how to modify the registry. Make sure to back up the registry before you modify it. Make sure that you know how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up, restore, and modify the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
256986 (https://premier.microsoft.com/kb/256986/) Description of the Microsoft Windows registry
SYMPTOMS
Consider the following scenario. You install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on a portable computer. Then, you connect a USB 2.0 device to the computer. In this scenario, the computer uses its battery power more quickly than you expect.
CAUSE
Windows XP SP2 installs a USB 2.0 driver that initializes any connected USB device. However, the USB 2.0 driver leaves the asynchronous scheduler component continuously running. This problem causes continuous instances of memory access that prevent the computer from entering the deeper Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) processor idle sleep states. These processor idle sleep states are also known as C states. For example, these include the C3 and C4 states. These sleep states are designed, in part, to save battery power. If an otherwise idle portable computer cannot enter or maintain the processor idle sleep states, the computer uses its battery power more quickly than you expect.
RESOLUTION
Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk. To resolve this problem, add the EnIdleEndpointSupport entry to the USB registry key. To do this, follow these steps:1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate, and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servi
Note If the USB subkey does not exist, create it. To do this, follow these steps:a. Select the Services key. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Key.
b. Type USB in the New Key #1 box to name the new key "USB."
3. Right-click USB, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. In the New Value #1 box that appears, type EnIdleEndpointSupport, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click EnIdleEndpointSupport, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, leave the Hexadecimal option selected, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor.
STATUS
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
APPLIES TO
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, when used with:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Top of Page
Keywords: kbtshoot kbbug kbnofix kbprb KB899179
They'll be releasing a new driver with the latest version of Windows that extends batery life by 1 hour. Ingenius!
No Sigs!
Language changes and meanings change constantly. Just because the "original" root of a word wasn't racist doesn't mean that current usages of it aren't racist.
To say that the "original" meaning should hold priority still is implying that God came down in our History and gave us a Grand Dictionary to use to learn how to talk, and to make any changes to His Grand Dictionary or the Definitions Therein would send us all straight to Hell.
So... seeing as how words like "verbose," "parse," "compile," and "de-bug" (that one's a favorite... ENIAC kids actually went in and collected dead moths and bugs from vacuum tubes) all have different meanings now from what their earlier pre-technology definitions were, it means we're all going to BURN IN HELL!
Besides, if we wanted to say that the "original" meaning of words is the "real" meaning of words, we'd have to go back to how "UHhhHH uhh HUUUHUH huh" meant "wooly mammoth over there. let's get him!"
Given that ACPI barely works on it and is very buggy, therefore most people usually avoid doing anything fancy such as configuring power saving functionalities...
We have this XP driver work fine with all CPU's from AMD and Intel, including Core Solo, but bugging out with Core Duo.
Given it was written before Duo existed, it's not really fair to call it "bug in the driver". Intel and MS are probably to share the blame, with Duo not exactly working as per spec, and XP maybe taking a shortcut or two that happen not to work on the Duo.
This is called incompatibility, not bug. Also even if it's a hardware bug, it's most likely possible to work around with a software patch by Microsoft, just like most of the critical CPU bugs are worked around in software via the compilers.
Oh no, it's already affecting the spell check! I guess it *truly* is a software problem...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Windows is full of bugs like these. I own a laptop, running Windows XP, it is an Acer 8100 series. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB from the installed 1GB of RAM. Occasionally the computer would not enter hibernate while in standby and would instead wake up, stay awake and suck down battery power. XP would throw up an error about being unable to complete the API because of insufficient resources. Why a machine with 2GB of RAM would ever have not enough resources is beyond me. At any rate, to obtain the fix I had to call the support line at Microsoft and get e-mailed a URL and password for a password protected archive. Installing the files from this archive fixed the problem, but that is too much work for something that should have been caught in SP2. Supposedly this fix will show up in XP SP3, whenever that happens.
I still have trouble with the laptop not going to sleep all of the time when closing the lid. Sometimes after I close the laptop it displays a scrambled screen. I am afaid of trying to get this fixed if this is a hardware problem, because in my opinion, laptops disassembled and reassembled outside the factorey are never quite the same as they were. Maybe I just need to flash the BIOS.
Yes, I tried to run Linux on this computer, Fedora Core 4, X did not work properly, and Linux would lock up if the pcmcia deamon started and every few seconds the acpi daemon would print a message to the console complaining about something in the BIOS. Granted X stopped working after I tried to set the screen resolution to 1680x1050, the native resolution of the panel.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
I don't know ANY white people who are offended by the term "honkey".
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
This:
I dual boot between Windows XP Pro SP2 for gaming and Windows XP Pro x64 for work, and both work absolutely perfectly.
and this:
I have been running this system since November with only one or two reboots.
does not compute.
KB899179 looks curiously like a shade of olive green.
http://outcampaign.org/
Why sue over every little flaw? Wake the hell up, its how things are done now.
Besides, if you give an inch, they will take a foot. Corporate America is NOT to be trusted. At all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No, releasing a driver to get more performance beyond what you bought is another matter. That would be considered legal and fair. Selling short would not be grounds for a suit.
However, selling a device that you know does not meet the stated performance is fraud.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Strange, I am Chinese and speak several dialects nontheless, I still don't know what are you talking about. Given the fact that the Chinese language has internal variations that rival the whole Latin family, I wouldn't be surprised though; if you want to play the game, most Chinese names (or any name) can be transliterated into something that has derogatory meaning in some dialect of Chinese.
I didn't grow up in America and I don't feel offended by the word "chink", however I wouldn't blame someone of being overly sensitive if (s)he were repeatly teased by this word during the childhood.
If the intention of the user was not racist, the word is not racist. Racism is in the eye of the beholder here. The ones who are racist are the ones who jump all over innocent speakers/writers, misinterpreting their meaning and dragging things off on a tangent instead of paying attention to what they obviously intended to say.
I am willing to bet that Microsoft's driver was written by Intel vendors using Intel reference code. The ACPI spec is horribly complicated/confusing, making the Intel reference code that much more important.
I would be very surprised if MS developed an ACPI driver from scratch in-house. Similarly, I would also be surprised if Apple developed their own driver.
What does this mean? Apple and MS may both use the same Intel ACPI reference code, possibly exposing the same issue. We won't know for sure until testing.
yes exactly. I totally agree. But to say that the original root of the word makes it impossible for that meaning to change depending on usage and interpretation is wrong.
Additionally, it's possible for the intent of a word to not be racist/offensive, but the person can still be offended. for example, saying "that's so gay" isn't intended to offend, but many people are offended because it's equating gayness with something bad.
I also pissed off someone recently by using the word "verbose" to mean simply being wordy... I didn't know that it usually gets interpreted as "loud/rude/obnoxious" to people outside the tech world. so there's an example where pointing out how a word is usually seen helped me.
HOWEVER, you're right... this little tangent is getting totally out of hand because it's obvious that "chink in the armor" had nothing to do with being derogatory to Japanese/Chinese/Korean people and whoever started this thread smells a lot like a troll.
I like what you have worked on much better than I like your analogies. Do you think a handheld cell device would do well with something like VOIP or CU30? It it could do that, play music, browse the web and text edit / email, I'd say it was a very nice general purpose device. General purpose does not take much. Would I notice all that you say the cell lacks any more than I would notice delays on a 150 MHz Pentium?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You failed to observe anything because you don't understand the purpose of hibernation. Well, that and your choice of an OS that forces a reboot every 14 days and flakes out much sooner. You are so used to the workarounds to your system's reliability and usability problems that you just don't get it.
Hibernation and suspend on laptops are for portability and place keeping. You take your work with you, open the lid and there it is for you to do what you need. When you are done, you close the lid and move on. My laptops never hibernate for more than a few days but the two or three projects I'm working on are always there when I'm ready to get back to work.
Place keeping works much better with a decent window manager with virtual desktops, and a session manager which the software you describe lacks. You could almost get away with flaky performance if only your work would appear as you left it after a reboot but none of my Windoze using friends has ever told me about a M$ session manager that works. When you try to work on more than one project, you have to hunt through a crappy icon bar for your work. When I open my laptop's lid my projects are right where I left them, spread out over several virtual desktops.
Yeah, I've seen the new M$ "Power Tools" that finally give the user virtual desktops. It has a kind of KDE look to it, but is not nearly as nice. The ability to display more than one desktop at a time on the screen almost makes up for the lack of a pager, but all of it is useless without system stability. If you can't keep your machine up for more than a day, there's not much point in trying to keep open more than one project's worth of work, is there? Might as well keep single tasking, the way Bill intended. Yeah, keep on keeping on until Bill does it, then suddenly it's going to be the bestest most hypest thing in the world.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And when someone calls me Orientalist, then maybe I might have cause to be offended. "Oriental", though, has absolutely no negative connotations, and ascribing it a new one seems to me to be yet another attempt by western thought to fall into the same errors it ironically claims to try to avoid.
on my bigass American TV.
Sarcasm, right?
No, just descriptive.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yes, it will.
Maybe you should tell that to IBM, so that they don't waste time & money researching the possibility of building "incredibly low performance" Cell-based Blade servers.
I can clearly see the typical usage that could be made of such servers. Your VPN server spends 90% of it's CPU time doing crypto-related operations ? Replace it with a Cell-based server using a Cell-optimized crypto library. You have a server farm doing video encoding ? Replace it with Cell-based servers using Cell-optimized video encoding routines.
Regarding Cell-based workstations, I can't predict whether this market will ever develop or not because it all depends on the software that will be ported to it. Open source apps have a net advantage of course, since they simply need to be recompiled for the Cell. IBM has already ported Linux to the Cell too. And as a Linux/BSD guru, I would not hesitate to buy a Cell-based workstation just to play with it. Because I know I don't need a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 to browse the web, send emails, read PDFs, write some code, play a few MP3s, etc. I was an early adopter of AMD64, I bought my dual-Opteron box, and have contributed various assembly-optimized code to various open source projects. I expect to do the same with the Cell.
This bug only appears on Windows. They already said the software issue lied with the scheduling. The Linux kernel has had /many/ similar issues in the past in the scheduler that affected SMP systems only. I doubt that the fact that single CPUs aren't affected means it has anything to do with hardware.
I think this is a good ol fashioned Slashdot troll post. The more people comment, the more money they make.
Notice that this bug was introduced by service pack 2 BTW
Hah! Another reason why I'm glad I didn't "update" to SP2!
Oh, right, I'm running a single-core AMD system . . . still, though!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
... unplug your USB2.0 devices when you set your laptop into stand-by.
Not the optimal solution, but hey, who am I to judge.
It's all on where the emphasis lies, eh?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This greatly offends me as an Asian-American.
You greatly offend me as an Asian-American. I thought we were smart. Evidently I was wrong.
If you've never heard the phrase "chink in the armor" then you obviously don't know enough about the English language to criticize use of it.
OS X is irrelevant. Support is irrelevant. You will be upgraded. Your hardware and software distinctiveness will be removed. You will exist to buy Intel.
The article you linked to stated insane floating point performance, not insane integer performance. Thus the Cell isn't necessarily going to perform well for crypto (crypto is integer-based, not FP.) The Cell in general is highly optimized for FP performance.
Your link to an IBM Cell-based blade server means nothing as far as the Cell's suitability for general purpose computing. Keep in mind that many of IBM's customers purchase VERY large special-purpose systems. Building a blade motherboard based on Cell for those that want to perform scientific computing (one of the few areas where Cell will excel at) is nothing compared to designing an entire custom special purpose processor, which IBM *has* done for at least two customers - Microsoft (Xbox 360) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (BlueGene/L uses custom CPUs designed specifically for the type of work BlueGene/L does.)
Myself, I do indeed look forward to playing with a Cell-based system, but that's because my focus in graduate school was on signal processing for communications, which is one of the areas at which the Cell does excel. But there's no way I'm ever going to spec a Cell processor for a general purpose machine.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Asian Americans Defying Traditional Stereotypes
More and More Are Lazy, Stupid
The Onion rules...
I am sorry if you bought hardware from a manufacturer who does not support Linux, but you will have to take this up with the vendor - there's nothing the Linux kernel developers can do if your vendor won't release the necessary information to write a driver.
Fortunately there are plenty of modern machines that Linux fully supports. If you want to make Linux a better OS, evan if you never plan to run it, you can help by purchasing from a Linux friendly vendor. You can ask on any Linux user web forum or mailing list how well a given laptop is supported, before you buy.
In general, avoid Nvidia video cards, and Broadcom and Atheros wireless - these work but may require a binary only driver which is a real pain, can destabilise your system, and generally negates the benefits of an open source OS (eg you won't be able to run 64bit linux if the vendor only releases 32bit drivers).
Blah blah blah windoze sux blah blah blah M$ blah blah blah linux is teh bestest blah blah blah.
That's all nice and good, and while I appreciate your essay on hybernation and the things Windows cannot do (which are all untrue, since of course the last time you used Windows Bill Clinton was still president), you happily did some selective quoting and failed to address the fact that I and everyone else called you on your ignorance about cell processors.
But hey, I see your pathetic little crusade is still going strong so I'm not surprised.
So, it seems that mixing bad hardware with bad software is bad for the environment? That is too funny...
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
My previous post was certinly Off Topic, but it was not a Troll. I linked to the amazon.com page about the book that I was speaking of. It's a book that I own and read.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano