I'll have to agree here. Age hardly matters with classic vintage games, they're still very fun. It's just that the graphical technology for older games are quite dated and make the games feel old. There's nothing better than seeing a new face on such games.
One of my favorite games is StarFlight, made back around 1986. The universe was quite expansive, and you could literally spend months just exploring it and figuring out how to interact with all the races. For a very long time, I've been wishing that someone would make a new StarFlight, with modern graphical interfaces, sound, and all the other good multimedia stuff we've come to enjoy in current games (and for heavens sake, fix that horrible save game system!). It seems that my prayers are partially being answered:
It's more likely that they do have a clue, and are just being elusive on this fact. Their entire argument is based on the fact that DeCSS is facilitating piracy; as soon as this is disproven, the case disappears. They're doing everything they can to make the courts ignore this fact at all costs.
Most "high profile" auctions that I've seen on eBay, usually linked from other sites, are from sellers that have never sold on eBay before. If I remember correctly, both the recent Cray and id Software SGI were from first-time sellers.
You want to look at feedback when you're buying something like a CPU or graphics card that you're going to stick in your computer and will want to work, since you're (usually) paying less than if you just bought it new at an online retailer. You're putting your trust in them to send you a working product for a low price.
When buying something rare that costs a lot of money, you EXPECT that it'll be legit. Afterall, you can't just make a simple PayPal payment for tens, hundreds of thousands, or even a few million dollars. Both the buyers and seller will have to go through a few more ropes to finalize the sale.
It sounds like you want 3 inch square buttons with the candidates' names on them as a means of voting. The ballot was as clear as day to me. Not only is there an arrow pointing from the candidate's name to the hole you should punch for that candidate, there is a number next to the arrow that corresponds to the number in the hole that you punch! I would be embarrassed to claim that was confusing to me. I would be embarrased to live in West Palm Beach county.
Not everybody in our country has to be a genius. In fact, there are a lot of people out there who can barely read and write. But EVERY citizen has the right to vote, and shouldn't be discriminated against. This is why the NAACP is getting involved. Some voters may have gone in thinking just to punch in the second hole because they remembered Gore was the second candidate on their sample ballot.
I'm not sure why you think the ballot wasn't tested prior to be putting into use. Republicans and Democrats reviews the ballot and OKed it. Why was this issue not brought up earlier? This just astonishes me.
I'm not sure either, because the ballot was in fact ILLEGAL under Florida law. Their law states that the first and second candidates listed on the ballot are always Republican and Democrat respectively. Plus, all punch holes must be lined up on the right side of all the candidate. Two features of this ballot's formatting were not in accordance with Florida law, and it was reviewed and passed when it shouldn't have been.
Open disclosure: I didn't vote for either Bush or Gore, and wouldn't care less which of those won. But I do see something seriously wrong when 19,000 voters have their rights taken away by an obvious mistake on their ballot.
Bzzzzt. Read the article at insane hardware. Those pins are required even if you alter the bridges on top of the processor.
Bzzzzt. I don't care what the people at Insane Hardware say... The FID pins are only for the motherboard to tell the CPU what speed it should run. The copper bridges internally tell the CPU itself what it should run at. They are what originally set what the CPU runs at. If they didn't actually work, then the CPU has no idea what to run at. It has to fall back on something, and the copper bridges are the lowest level of multiplier and voltage determination.
So, I dont' blame one bit for AMD to stop as much as they can on OC'ing their chips. It's not to stop your or me from taking one of their chips up a few extra mhz. It's for the bonehead local OEMs from selling a Duron OC'ed to 850+ as a genuine 850+ chip. Which sadly to say, I've seen it done all too often.
Well, it's interesting that you would say that. It's hard to tell how much AMD is actually stopping remarkers by doing this, compared to making it harder for overclockers to changer their multipliers...
Taking out the pins only disables the functionality about being able to easily adjust the clock multiplier in BIOS. The other way to change the Tbird/Duron's clock multiplier is to modify the copper bridges on the top ceramic of the processor, by cutting some with an X-acto knife and closing others with a conductive pen (or even pencil lead).
When the processor is overclocked in BIOS, it's much easier to tell, since you can go into the section that has FSB and multiplier adjustments and see if they're set at default or at a specific clock lock. If the bridges were modified, you can't tell at all until you open up your computer, take off the heatsink, and look at the top of the processor's die.
So as far as remarkers are concerned, I'd imagine that they'll go ahead and do the bridge modification, especially since it's harder to detect. Meanwhile, the overclocking hobbiests can't take advantage of the overclocking features of their new Asus K7A or Abit KT7 motherboards they just bought.
Looking at the Samuel review by Tom's Hardware, I don't think that you can call a 1GHz Samual "competitive".
The 533 Samual may have been overclockable to 733MHz, but even then it couldn't beat a Celeron 500! This is what Van Smith had to say:
"We thought the floating point performance of the original Cyrix III was poor, but the new Cyrix III has a staggeringly poor FPU. To achieve the feeble FPU potency of a 500 MHz Celeron, the Cyrix III would have to run at greater than 1.6 GHz!"
Geez, the Samual has to run at 1.6GHz to be equivalent to a Celeron 500. 1GHz doesn't sound so great to me, even if it is overclockable. It'll probably do okay for simple integer-based applications like business suites, but gamers will stay away from the Samuel for a while. Thankfully, we still have AMD to turn to as an alternative to Intel... so competition so far is good (AMD's going to drop the price of their 1GHz Thunderbird to below $500... can you say SWEET!)
There's still a large debate over whether AMD has actually locked their Socket-A CPUs yet or not. Almost everybody writing on AMD-related messageboards seem to have unlocked CPUs so far, since the L1 bridges on their CPU are all connected (indicating unlocked status). So the multiplier switch on the A7V may be more useful than most people think.
There is even a rumor going around about an Athlon 2 in the future, which will be an unlocked Tbird (nevermind the fact that they still seem to be unlocked so far), and that AMD will be working with AMI and Award to make BIOSes that will help prevent the remarking of AMD CPUs by displaying the true original CPU speed alongside the overclocked speed (e.g., "AMD Duron 600 @ 800MHz").
I have a celeron 300A in a Tyan Tiger S1832 MB. I can overclock the celeron to 450, but my system is incredibly unstable. yes, it gives me a performance increase of 50% on benchmarking programs, but everything else I run works fine with just the 300.
When you overclock your Celeron, you're increasing the entire bus speed for all your devices, such as PCI cards, AGP graphics card, memory, etc., since you have to increase the Front-Side Bus (FSB) to do so.
With the A7V coupled with an unlocked Athlon/Duron, you only change the clock multiplier of the CPU. The only thing to worry about in this case is overheating the processor. The rest of your components remain at the same bus speeds, so instability with the rest of your motherboard won't occur.
So Microsoft Office gets ported to new platforms...this is new? Microsoft has been willing to port its code to popular alternatives to their Windows OS for quite some time--they're even starting to do a semi-decent job of it on the Mac. After all, why let any other Office vendor take over a market?
Office was hardly ported from Windows to the Mac. It was originally created for the Mac, well before Microsoft had their own functional GUI. Microsoft wasn't always Windows-centric.
Just to nit-pick slightly, civilian GPS signals were not "jammed", they had an inaccuracy built into them (hence the same "Selective Accuracy"). Each satellite would report themselves as being in positions slightly different than where they actually were.
GPS signals can still be regionally jammed by the government, for national security concerns.
Also, besides the technicalities of what the human eye can distinguish, all these FPS ratings are an average of how fast a graphics card can display a level demo. This means that in certain scenes with relatively little going on, you'll get greater FPS, and with busy scenes with lots of explosions and monsters running around the FPS will decrease. The minimum FPS your graphics card can pump out can be a factor in how playable the game is. Can you still manage to keep control of a situation after a bunch of rocket explosions with pretty little smoke trails (and subsequent blood splatter and trails) suddenly occur in front of you? That all depends on your card. If you've got at least a 70 FPS average, probably. If your average is around the magical 30 FPS, probably not.
Point being, especially in the multi-player first-person-shooting world, FPS is king. If your card can get you through lots of sudden animation effects without flinching, then you'll be better off (assuming that you're reasonably skilled at this sort of game).
The performance of most "preview" products nowadays are pretty much on par with the retail products to follow them. It's pretty rare to have a large discreptancy in performance; we can see this in all the recent motherboard, CPU, and video reviews. Many reviewers have given their obligatory caveats in their previews, warning readers that the product is just "beta", but these caveats rarely actually mean anything anymore.
As Anand put it best, the Voodoo5 5500 is literally just weeks away from release. It's highly unlikely that 3dfx is going to manufacture a card much different from their preview samples in such an amount of time. The only thing that can vary the Voodoo5's performance at this point, pretty much, are the drivers (which can make a big difference; just look at the difference between the 3.x and 5.x beta nVidia reference drivers).
Creating a new adaptation from an existing concept is always a risky proposition. The original creators lose their hold on a possible money-maker (Virtual Defender, or Space Invaders 2000, for hypothetical examples), if the image of the original concept has been hurt by cheap clones.
But if the original creators do an extraordinary job on their game, and follow it up with epic sequels and spin-offs to their own concepts, it shouldn't hurt them that much, like in id Software's example. After their Wolf3D fame, DOOM was one of the most awaited games of its time (at least to me and the group of people I hung out with). Once it came out, DOOM ][ was the next most-awaited game.
I remember when the "cheap clones" such as Operation: Body Count and Rise of the Triad were released. They had some interesting, slightly different values to them, but they ended up falling flat on their face and not doing much to id Software's revenues. There's just something to say for playing the games of the people who revolutionized the 3D FPS genre, and continuing with their legacy (Quake, Quake II, Quake 3 Arena). And not only do they just simply release sequels with new levels, but they also make new revolutionary advancements in their newer games. Quake II's engine was so much more advanced than Quake, and tons of game developers licensed it for their own use. Now there's Q3A, with extradinary leaps in graphics over Q2.
id Software isn't just resting on their laurels and allowing their games to collect dust. They're continually taking an active role in the computer gaming industry. They have a lot of good competition out there. A lot of other FPS games aren't just cheap clones. But id Software, after all these years, have a good following of fans. That's more than we can say for Hasbro. <sarcasm>Oooh, 3D Pac-Man</sarcasm>.
Anyone stop to think that if George Lucas did call a rock radio station he would at least let the webmaster at www.starwars.com post the same story?
Yes, it's because LucasFilm, Ltd., hasn't been ready to make an official announcement on it yet. The fellow at dvdfile.com said that LucasFilm, Ltd., would send him an official public statement "very soon".
And the purpose of Lucas calling the radio station wasn't specifically to announce the DVD, it just happened to slip out in the middle of their conversation.
Re:how good is the human eye?
on
Carmack Speaks
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· Score: 1
Another reason for higher frame rates: to achieve consistently adequate frame rates throughout gameplay. Let's say you have a 3D card that can give you about 40fps in Quake 3 most of the time. But then you get into the heat of battle and four or five guys explode, leaving trails of blood that bring your card down to its knees (maybe around 15fps). You try to look away from it all to gain your faster frame rates again, but in the meantime someone else has taken advantage of you with a rocket. You're dead. If you had a good 3D card that gave you 100fps normally, then the blood trails would bring you down to say around 50fps. It's still an acceptable framerate. So average FPS measurements for cards don't tell you how well your card will run 100% of the time, just most of the time. A 30fps card just won't cut it, because you're relying on the game not having any graphics-intensive events every once in a while. Having higher fps cards also means you can turn on more graphics goodies in the game to look prettier;)
You can get your hands on a Celeron II? Really?? That's strange, I don't see it for sale by any reputable retailers right now. Or did you mean that reviewers can get their hands on them and perform totally lame sets of benchmarks on the processors? The Spitfire's so close to being out that it's very well worth speculating about. In fact, there really isn't much to speculate about. We all know it's going to have on-die cache. That's really the only difference between it and the current Athlons. So what's there to speculate?
You're right in being suspicious about Intel and AMD cutting corners, because they are. Right now, the MHz war is all marketing. That little speed rating marked on their CPUs make a large difference when it comes to selling machines with tier-1 computer manufacturers, which makes a large difference on their quarterly revenue sheets. This doesn't mean, however, that Intel and AMD are resting on their laurels because they can simply up the speed on each new processor by 50MHz easily. What goes on in the background is their roadmap for the future, like the Willamette and Thunderbird processors for instance, or the Itanium and Sledgehammer in the more distant future. There are long term advancements in CPU technology to be had, but they won't make short-term ideals of their shareholders happy if that's their main focus. Just look at where AMD was last year for proof of this. AMD was developing their next mother-of-all-processors, the one and only Athlon, which was to settle the playing field. However, it was only vaporware until August. They didn't have anything to keep them too profitable at the time. The K6-2 and K6-III weren't doing very well, and AMD couldn't just do something like release a K6-2 that was 50MHz faster to keep them going, because hardly anybody (except for the strictly economy-minded people and manufacturers) wanted them. Therefore, AMD and their shareholders lost quite a lot of potential earnings, even though AMD had the promise of the Athlon coming on the horizon. Now the picture is different for AMD. The market is eating up their Athlons like crazy, and they know what may be a relatively small increase in speed and performance will do very well in the market just because of the psychology of the "MHz" number, and the fact that their processor has been so successful. They can afford the time to develop their next innovation in processor technology. And it does take time. I don't mind it at all, I'll be happy as a pig in mud for the next year or so sitting on my Athlon 650, knowing that the GHz CPUs won't benefit me very much.
Visiting the URL posted for the Netscape time capsule reveals a 403 Error: Access Forbidden.
"If you received this message from attempting to access the web site "http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla", please do not bother sending e-mail to the administrators; the site has been taken down due to overload problems."
The mentality of "Linux is for geeks and hackers only, forget about the Windoze lusers" needs to be done away with. The entire reason for Linux was to offer a better, more stable, and saner operating system for the x86 platform. The prime OS that Linux is competing against on this platform should be pretty simple: Microsoft Windows. Linux is not only a geek's operating system. It's not only an Open Source operating system that people can share the development on. It's also a superior, stable, robust operating system that everybody can benefit from.
Allowing the average Windows users to continue using Windows, and not offer something better to them from the Linux world, will force them to continue buying Windows products, and continue supporting Microsoft, when this is exactly the opposite effect that the Linux community should want. By not educating the clueless, they will continue to do the wrong things. None of us are elite to any other human on this planet, and just because someone doesn't know as much about computers as we do doesn't mean they don't deserve anything better than Windows. Some of them are simply ignorant, and ignorant people can be taught and lead to the right path.
With all these distributions available, you would think that someone could come up with a new distribution, made specifically with the average Windows or Mac user in mind, and bundle it with various applications that they would normally have available in Windows, and even provide a lot of documentation to help get them started. Heck, make the distribution easily utilize some extra hard drive space on their Windows partition and install it so that they can easily use both Linux and Windows, and offer an Uninstall feature in case they decide that it's not their cup of tea. This should have no effect on people who are already using Linux, because they're already using other distributions such as RedHat, Slackware, Debian and the like. The new "Windows User" distribution won't affect them one iota.
Let's stop acting like we're some sort of elite secret society that only wants hand-picked people and give other people a chance. There's a lot of unrecognized, potential talent out there that are not using Linux. They could be the ones who could help tip the scales into Linux's favor in a big way. Microsoft? Who's that? Oh yeah, those people who secretively write their software and only distribute it as binaries. How passe.
That's correct, the aluminum.18 micron CPUs are coming out of Austin's Fab 25. The Dresden Fab 30 is working on.18 micron CPUs with copper interconnects. You won't see these ones until Q1 or Q2 next year.
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I'll have to agree here. Age hardly matters with classic vintage games, they're still very fun. It's just that the graphical technology for older games are quite dated and make the games feel old. There's nothing better than seeing a new face on such games.
One of my favorite games is StarFlight, made back around 1986. The universe was quite expansive, and you could literally spend months just exploring it and figuring out how to interact with all the races. For a very long time, I've been wishing that someone would make a new StarFlight, with modern graphical interfaces, sound, and all the other good multimedia stuff we've come to enjoy in current games (and for heavens sake, fix that horrible save game system!). It seems that my prayers are partially being answered:
www.starflight3.com
It's more likely that they do have a clue, and are just being elusive on this fact. Their entire argument is based on the fact that DeCSS is facilitating piracy; as soon as this is disproven, the case disappears. They're doing everything they can to make the courts ignore this fact at all costs.
You want to look at feedback when you're buying something like a CPU or graphics card that you're going to stick in your computer and will want to work, since you're (usually) paying less than if you just bought it new at an online retailer. You're putting your trust in them to send you a working product for a low price.
When buying something rare that costs a lot of money, you EXPECT that it'll be legit. Afterall, you can't just make a simple PayPal payment for tens, hundreds of thousands, or even a few million dollars. Both the buyers and seller will have to go through a few more ropes to finalize the sale.
Not everybody in our country has to be a genius. In fact, there are a lot of people out there who can barely read and write. But EVERY citizen has the right to vote, and shouldn't be discriminated against. This is why the NAACP is getting involved. Some voters may have gone in thinking just to punch in the second hole because they remembered Gore was the second candidate on their sample ballot.
I'm not sure either, because the ballot was in fact ILLEGAL under Florida law. Their law states that the first and second candidates listed on the ballot are always Republican and Democrat respectively. Plus, all punch holes must be lined up on the right side of all the candidate. Two features of this ballot's formatting were not in accordance with Florida law, and it was reviewed and passed when it shouldn't have been.
Open disclosure: I didn't vote for either Bush or Gore, and wouldn't care less which of those won. But I do see something seriously wrong when 19,000 voters have their rights taken away by an obvious mistake on their ballot.
Bzzzzt. I don't care what the people at Insane Hardware say... The FID pins are only for the motherboard to tell the CPU what speed it should run. The copper bridges internally tell the CPU itself what it should run at. They are what originally set what the CPU runs at. If they didn't actually work, then the CPU has no idea what to run at. It has to fall back on something, and the copper bridges are the lowest level of multiplier and voltage determination.
Well, it's interesting that you would say that. It's hard to tell how much AMD is actually stopping remarkers by doing this, compared to making it harder for overclockers to changer their multipliers...
Taking out the pins only disables the functionality about being able to easily adjust the clock multiplier in BIOS. The other way to change the Tbird/Duron's clock multiplier is to modify the copper bridges on the top ceramic of the processor, by cutting some with an X-acto knife and closing others with a conductive pen (or even pencil lead).
When the processor is overclocked in BIOS, it's much easier to tell, since you can go into the section that has FSB and multiplier adjustments and see if they're set at default or at a specific clock lock. If the bridges were modified, you can't tell at all until you open up your computer, take off the heatsink, and look at the top of the processor's die.
So as far as remarkers are concerned, I'd imagine that they'll go ahead and do the bridge modification, especially since it's harder to detect. Meanwhile, the overclocking hobbiests can't take advantage of the overclocking features of their new Asus K7A or Abit KT7 motherboards they just bought.
The 533 Samual may have been overclockable to 733MHz, but even then it couldn't beat a Celeron 500! This is what Van Smith had to say:
Geez, the Samual has to run at 1.6GHz to be equivalent to a Celeron 500. 1GHz doesn't sound so great to me, even if it is overclockable. It'll probably do okay for simple integer-based applications like business suites, but gamers will stay away from the Samuel for a while. Thankfully, we still have AMD to turn to as an alternative to Intel... so competition so far is good (AMD's going to drop the price of their 1GHz Thunderbird to below $500... can you say SWEET!)
There is even a rumor going around about an Athlon 2 in the future, which will be an unlocked Tbird (nevermind the fact that they still seem to be unlocked so far), and that AMD will be working with AMI and Award to make BIOSes that will help prevent the remarking of AMD CPUs by displaying the true original CPU speed alongside the overclocked speed (e.g., "AMD Duron 600 @ 800MHz").
When you overclock your Celeron, you're increasing the entire bus speed for all your devices, such as PCI cards, AGP graphics card, memory, etc., since you have to increase the Front-Side Bus (FSB) to do so.
With the A7V coupled with an unlocked Athlon/Duron, you only change the clock multiplier of the CPU. The only thing to worry about in this case is overheating the processor. The rest of your components remain at the same bus speeds, so instability with the rest of your motherboard won't occur.
Office was hardly ported from Windows to the Mac. It was originally created for the Mac, well before Microsoft had their own functional GUI. Microsoft wasn't always Windows-centric.
GPS signals can still be regionally jammed by the government, for national security concerns.
Also, besides the technicalities of what the human eye can distinguish, all these FPS ratings are an average of how fast a graphics card can display a level demo. This means that in certain scenes with relatively little going on, you'll get greater FPS, and with busy scenes with lots of explosions and monsters running around the FPS will decrease. The minimum FPS your graphics card can pump out can be a factor in how playable the game is. Can you still manage to keep control of a situation after a bunch of rocket explosions with pretty little smoke trails (and subsequent blood splatter and trails) suddenly occur in front of you? That all depends on your card. If you've got at least a 70 FPS average, probably. If your average is around the magical 30 FPS, probably not.
Point being, especially in the multi-player first-person-shooting world, FPS is king. If your card can get you through lots of sudden animation effects without flinching, then you'll be better off (assuming that you're reasonably skilled at this sort of game).
As Anand put it best, the Voodoo5 5500 is literally just weeks away from release. It's highly unlikely that 3dfx is going to manufacture a card much different from their preview samples in such an amount of time. The only thing that can vary the Voodoo5's performance at this point, pretty much, are the drivers (which can make a big difference; just look at the difference between the 3.x and 5.x beta nVidia reference drivers).
But if the original creators do an extraordinary job on their game, and follow it up with epic sequels and spin-offs to their own concepts, it shouldn't hurt them that much, like in id Software's example. After their Wolf3D fame, DOOM was one of the most awaited games of its time (at least to me and the group of people I hung out with). Once it came out, DOOM ][ was the next most-awaited game.
I remember when the "cheap clones" such as Operation: Body Count and Rise of the Triad were released. They had some interesting, slightly different values to them, but they ended up falling flat on their face and not doing much to id Software's revenues. There's just something to say for playing the games of the people who revolutionized the 3D FPS genre, and continuing with their legacy (Quake, Quake II, Quake 3 Arena). And not only do they just simply release sequels with new levels, but they also make new revolutionary advancements in their newer games. Quake II's engine was so much more advanced than Quake, and tons of game developers licensed it for their own use. Now there's Q3A, with extradinary leaps in graphics over Q2.
id Software isn't just resting on their laurels and allowing their games to collect dust. They're continually taking an active role in the computer gaming industry. They have a lot of good competition out there. A lot of other FPS games aren't just cheap clones. But id Software, after all these years, have a good following of fans. That's more than we can say for Hasbro. <sarcasm>Oooh, 3D Pac-Man</sarcasm>.
Yes, it's because LucasFilm, Ltd., hasn't been ready to make an official announcement on it yet. The fellow at dvdfile.com said that LucasFilm, Ltd., would send him an official public statement "very soon".
And the purpose of Lucas calling the radio station wasn't specifically to announce the DVD, it just happened to slip out in the middle of their conversation.
Another reason for higher frame rates: to achieve consistently adequate frame rates throughout gameplay. Let's say you have a 3D card that can give you about 40fps in Quake 3 most of the time. But then you get into the heat of battle and four or five guys explode, leaving trails of blood that bring your card down to its knees (maybe around 15fps). You try to look away from it all to gain your faster frame rates again, but in the meantime someone else has taken advantage of you with a rocket. You're dead. If you had a good 3D card that gave you 100fps normally, then the blood trails would bring you down to say around 50fps. It's still an acceptable framerate. So average FPS measurements for cards don't tell you how well your card will run 100% of the time, just most of the time. A 30fps card just won't cut it, because you're relying on the game not having any graphics-intensive events every once in a while. Having higher fps cards also means you can turn on more graphics goodies in the game to look prettier ;)
You can get your hands on a Celeron II? Really?? That's strange, I don't see it for sale by any reputable retailers right now. Or did you mean that reviewers can get their hands on them and perform totally lame sets of benchmarks on the processors? The Spitfire's so close to being out that it's very well worth speculating about. In fact, there really isn't much to speculate about. We all know it's going to have on-die cache. That's really the only difference between it and the current Athlons. So what's there to speculate?
You're right in being suspicious about Intel and AMD cutting corners, because they are. Right now, the MHz war is all marketing. That little speed rating marked on their CPUs make a large difference when it comes to selling machines with tier-1 computer manufacturers, which makes a large difference on their quarterly revenue sheets. This doesn't mean, however, that Intel and AMD are resting on their laurels because they can simply up the speed on each new processor by 50MHz easily. What goes on in the background is their roadmap for the future, like the Willamette and Thunderbird processors for instance, or the Itanium and Sledgehammer in the more distant future. There are long term advancements in CPU technology to be had, but they won't make short-term ideals of their shareholders happy if that's their main focus. Just look at where AMD was last year for proof of this. AMD was developing their next mother-of-all-processors, the one and only Athlon, which was to settle the playing field. However, it was only vaporware until August. They didn't have anything to keep them too profitable at the time. The K6-2 and K6-III weren't doing very well, and AMD couldn't just do something like release a K6-2 that was 50MHz faster to keep them going, because hardly anybody (except for the strictly economy-minded people and manufacturers) wanted them. Therefore, AMD and their shareholders lost quite a lot of potential earnings, even though AMD had the promise of the Athlon coming on the horizon. Now the picture is different for AMD. The market is eating up their Athlons like crazy, and they know what may be a relatively small increase in speed and performance will do very well in the market just because of the psychology of the "MHz" number, and the fact that their processor has been so successful. They can afford the time to develop their next innovation in processor technology. And it does take time. I don't mind it at all, I'll be happy as a pig in mud for the next year or so sitting on my Athlon 650, knowing that the GHz CPUs won't benefit me very much.
"If you received this message from attempting to access the web site "http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~clau/mozilla", please do not bother sending e-mail to the administrators; the site has been taken down due to overload problems."
Allowing the average Windows users to continue using Windows, and not offer something better to them from the Linux world, will force them to continue buying Windows products, and continue supporting Microsoft, when this is exactly the opposite effect that the Linux community should want. By not educating the clueless, they will continue to do the wrong things. None of us are elite to any other human on this planet, and just because someone doesn't know as much about computers as we do doesn't mean they don't deserve anything better than Windows. Some of them are simply ignorant, and ignorant people can be taught and lead to the right path.
With all these distributions available, you would think that someone could come up with a new distribution, made specifically with the average Windows or Mac user in mind, and bundle it with various applications that they would normally have available in Windows, and even provide a lot of documentation to help get them started. Heck, make the distribution easily utilize some extra hard drive space on their Windows partition and install it so that they can easily use both Linux and Windows, and offer an Uninstall feature in case they decide that it's not their cup of tea. This should have no effect on people who are already using Linux, because they're already using other distributions such as RedHat, Slackware, Debian and the like. The new "Windows User" distribution won't affect them one iota.
Let's stop acting like we're some sort of elite secret society that only wants hand-picked people and give other people a chance. There's a lot of unrecognized, potential talent out there that are not using Linux. They could be the ones who could help tip the scales into Linux's favor in a big way. Microsoft? Who's that? Oh yeah, those people who secretively write their software and only distribute it as binaries. How passe.
That's correct, the aluminum .18 micron CPUs are coming out of Austin's Fab 25. The Dresden Fab 30 is working on .18 micron CPUs with copper interconnects. You won't see these ones until Q1 or Q2 next year.