But what about SPECint? Or their benchmarks that relate to SMP/threads? If a DBA decides to deploy a memory-inefficient implementation of anything, that DBA is just plain stupid.
And if Mathematica uses a fast malloc() on PowerPC, it would make sense that Mathematica would also use fast malloc() on x86. Apple is NOT comparing apples to apples (couldn't help myself).
If the compiler is the same, you are testing the implementation of the compiler and the processor, not just the processor itself. gcc's code for PowerPC is different than gcc's code for x86. Way different. This is in no way a level playing field. Don't be fooled -- Apple is using this compiler because it's slower than Intel's compiler, and every Windows/x86 vendor uses Intel's compiler because that's how Windows/x86 apps are built.
A level playing field is possible only by maximizing the performance of both platforms. Then let both platforms duke it out.
So then they should. And we should be comparing the MS or Intel compilers to THAT compiler if we want to make hardware-to-hardware comparisons that aren't TOTALLY inappropriate.
Also, if Apple is claiming to have configured systems as they ship, they should have to COMMIT to their use of fast malloc(), and they should have also left all of Intel's default options (including hyperthreading) enabled for all tests.
That would be an argument against the system's single DDR 400 channel, especially since it has to push around a lot more (64-bit vs 32-bit) whenever it wants to send a memory address.
The SPEC benchmarks do NOT test the performance of the processor. The SPEC benchmarks test the performance of the processor AND the compiler (and they may also test the memory interface... I don't know how data-intensive SPECint and SPECfp are).
If GCC sucks on NT, and professional software written for NT doesn't use GCC but rather MS/Intel compilers, and those Dell dual Xeon systems are installed with a variant of NT and not Linux or BSD, what business does Apple have using gcc to compile SPEC for the Dell platform? One could argue that a small minority of Dell server/workstation administrators install Linux on their machines, but that's only a very small subset of the users who buy a Dell platform.
Why on earth would you want to separate the software from the hardware? This isn't a IBM vs Intel comparison. This is an Apple vs Dell comparison. Apple is selling a platform, not a bunch of PCB boards. I sure as heck won't use GCC to compile SAS or Oracle just before I put up a mission-critical database server...
Actually, Tiger boards are primarily used in high end servers and workstations.
The problems with the VIA KT133A are very well documented. It's not a board issue. MSI, Soyo, Abit, Asus, etc. all suffer problems due to the KT133A chipset.
The computer I built for my girlfriend, a first-generation nForce 1, has had absolutely no problems whatsoever.
The first AMD computer I built, an 800Mhz Athlon Thunderbird with an ECS mobo using a VIA KT133 chipset crashed every 12 hours to 3 days, which sucks since I was using it as a web and database server. Thinking it was a heat issue, I bought a big ThermalTake heatsink and tried to install it, but lo and behold I cracked the core because AMD refuses to update their packaging (who the hell still uses ceramic packaging anyway). No, I'm not a heatsink-installing newbie. This was probably the 10th computer I built. I was forced to turn my P3-450 desktop into a webserver to replace the system, and it worked flawlessly.
I then bought an Abit KT133A-based mobo and an Athlon XP 1.2GHz. The motherboard chipset fan started making sounds and died after only a few days, so I had to replace that. Then, when I upgraded my video card from a GF2 GTS to a GF4 Ti4200, I developed crashing problems in all kinds of settings. After doing a little bit of reasearch, it seems to relate to VIA's drivers (or perhaps the hardware itself). Flashing the BIOS made the problem worse, not better, and Abit has stopped posting BIOSes for my motherboard.
Then, I built a dual AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz with a Tiger S2460 mobo (uses the AMD760MP chip), to be used as a game server. The machine worked great for 6 months, and then I started getting kernel panics. Turns out that the motherboard had corrupted various portions of my 4 sticks of 256MB Crucial registered ECC DDR. I was pissed.
I don't think the culprit is the processor. I think it's pretty clearly the chipsets. I will never buy another AMD or VIA chipset again after these experiences, which for the most part leaves me with NVIDIA and Intel. Hyperthreading looks really, really cool, so I think it's bye-bye AMD for me and hello to a company that's willing to support their processors with rock-solid chipsets and drivers.
The Athlon chips have not been super-sensitive to changes in FSB. The performance impact of the Athlon XP moving from 2x133MHz to 2x166MHz was significantly less than the P4's gains going from 4x100MHz to 4x133MHz. The P4 gains have been incredible with the jump to 4x200MHz.
It seems that AMD is trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of an architecture that would be better squeezed by being optimized, i.e. Opteron. It's a shame that AMD's yields of Opteron have proven to be dismal, but if I was a motherboard manufacturer I'd be pretty mad at AMD right now. More motherboard manufacturers are going to have to qualify their boards and more chipset manufacturers will have to qualify their products as well, even if they can already meet 400MHz operation. Will the performance impact really justify the costs that all parties incur by moving to yet a new FSB in less than, what, 6 months?
I'm a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jonathan Smith teaches CSE350 every semester (our software engineering course). Last year we wrote a kernel-level firewall for OpenBSD. It was a great course, and he's pretty much the only professor here with any idea what software engineering means.
It's a shame that this grant was cancelled. He could do a lot for the gov's computers.
Now I know why we used OpenBSD in the course and not Linux.:)
I hope that you bookmark this so that when you're 35 and a female Ukranian or Indian engineer replaces you, you realize what an ass of yourself you just made. Assuming you actually have firsthand experience with "engineering women".
Just don't try to use winex with ATI cards. It won't work very well at all. Check out transgaming's website, and you'll see almost everyone uses NVIDIA cards because of that.
ATI is still pretty broken when it comes to running 3D games in Linux.
Er, so what products have benefited from piracy? MAYBE obscure music, where the publishers couldn't afford to effectively market an album, but that's a BIG maybe. These bands would already get great marketing from online music services if it wasn't for the fact that nobody used them (because everyone has a friggin huge MP3 collection). While many pieces of software get great advertising through piracy (crippleware CD burning software, for example), that doesn't translate to more profit for the software developer.
Damn right I'll save my profits. You're not going to do it for me by not paying me for the software you use. Since when am I not entitled to pursue MAXIMUM PROFIT from the stuff made out of my own sweat and blood?
But it is optional. Just disable the security (hardware manufacturers have promised that you CAN disable it), and then run an unsigned kernel. You won't be able to run a secure OS, secure apps, or secure media, but you can run anything you want.
Which is why OSS isn't going to be affected at all by this, but piracy will, so this is a Good Thing for those of us who sell software or content for a living.
Matrox is a private company. No pitch had to be made to the shareholders. Matrox is also a VERY bad example. Since Matrox is a private company, it does not have to publish its financial records. However, Matrox's market share has greatly dwindled, and they are now forced to pursue incredibly niche markets. I'd wager that due to the incredible shrinkage of their marketshare, they are making less money today than they were before, if they are turning a profit at all.
If Apple wanted to follow Matrox's example, someone would first have to buy all the public shares and make it a private company. They would also have to be willing to follow the example of a company which has become less competitive over time.
And about this: "It's harsh, but if they can't make a living while still doing what's best for everyone, then they should go find some other industry to work in."
What company makes a living while still doing what's best for everyone? Companies make money by doing what their customers want and charging for it. If I open up a gas station, providing greater competition and cheaper prices to my customers, I can profit. However, Green Peace would surely not be happy with me wanting to open up another gas station.
I'm really curious as to what company you work for (or own) that could actually say "We do what's best for everyone" with a straight face. Heck, I'd be shocked if any INDIVIDUAL could say that what they do is best for everyone without lying or being incredibly narrow-minded/misinformed. Companies, just like people, are self-interested. Don't fault Apple for wanting to give their shareholders like jobs huge piles of cash because they can provide something to people who are willing to pay for it, because it meets THEIR self-interests as well. Don't fault Jobs for being more successful than you.
RedHat makes its money through service, not software. Check those financial statements you referred to.
In a straight up, software only fight between RedHat and Apple (although this sounds like a "who can piss furthest" contest and not really a point), we should all be reminded that Apple innovates, creating new hardware and software technologies as well as pushing other vendor's stuff that, before them, was entirely unadopted (remember USB?). RedHat's primary role is taking packages written by other people, validating them at some level, and packaging it into a GPL'd distribution. So far, the most innovative things RedHat has done are:
1) push for an easy-to-use Linux kernel-based OS, and more lately
2) merge the appearances of KDE and GNOME.
Sounds like pretty narrow, boring goals that have definitely impacted less lives than Apple's accomplishments. Of course, this is why Apple is more profitable than RedHat.
So of course Apple cannot disclose everything about their systems and still make a profit. You can't run a company off of R&D alone unless you are PROVIDING R&D to other companies and charging them for it, in which case you wouldn't be able to disclose the R&D anyway. Why should Apple give up all of their IP protections so that a company or individuals can copy-cat their work until Apple is non-existent?
As far as your operating systems point, only Apple can highjack their own operating system, and then they'd have to deal with the reprocussions. But Apple is not in a position to make users "eat it and like it", as there are competitors with greater server and desktop mindshare. Apple is the #2 consumer desktop OS out there, which is why they've decided to try to get as much market share from #1 as possible, by providing a different focus and NOT support DRM. Do you want to kill the only viable alternative to Windows by requiring it to give up everything? Is Apple REALLY taking away your freedoms, or supplying you with a viable commercial choice?
Re: Skip to the last page for the most interesting
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 1
Got a link to support your claims about Intel trying to outlaw open source? Or heck, even Microsoft? Microsoft is anti-GPL, but they are not trying to outlaw it, and they fully support BSD and other licenses where they can use source.
AMD is firing people. AMD is losing tons and tons and tons of cash. AMD has been delaying its products left and right, and has been substantially underdelivering on clock speed even to its motherboard manufacturers and OEM partners (it's AWFULLY hard to guarantee a motherboard will work with a 2.0GHz Opteron when you cannot test with a 2.0GHz Opteron).
Where is the money or staffing coming from if AMD is creating these "subsidiary firms"? The mere creation of these firms would become public information. This subsidiary creation has not happened. If it had happened you can bet investors would be jumping AMD's ship as quickly as possible because they'd smell financial hide-and-go-seek rather than some kind of "blow Intel's doors right right" innovation.
The smartest thing AMD can do in a business where it's all about who can spend the most R&D and marketing dollars is either secure more R&D and marketing dollars or find another business.
I don't have a problem with electoral voting. I don't like our current system with undefined states. I'm not crazy about the electoral college, but I haven't decided it's a bad idea altogether. I just wish it was designed in such a way that ties would be impossible, or Congress had clear guidelines on how they were supposed to vote on a candidate if a tie did occur.
Political scientist have known for years that the US election system does not capture the "will" of the voter as well as a proportional representation system. This math is certainly not new. However, there are a number of drawbacks to other forms of election that should be expounded on.
1: In proportional representation, there are more likely to be minority parties with elected officials who have extreme/radical viewpoints that are dissimilar to the viewpoints of the "average" voter. Because of the US' election system, no candidate can choose to isolate a significant portion of the population with his views and yet still be elected, to a large "smoothing out" extremist policy. While many feel that this is a bad thing, almost all extremist policy is not realistic to implement, and partial or full implementation of this policy can cause a good bit of damage.
2: In proportional representation, the government is generally unitary in nature, meaning that the entire government is controlled by one party. Although there are more parties beyond the controlling party and another party represented, they still have a HUGE capability to control government policy. If the party in charge changes (and they often change), the entire government policy may change as well. Imagine if a country implemented social security, and then cancelled it 12 years later because the Socialists were replaced by Libertarians!
3: Most other countries do not implement a form of federal government. While this may work for countries where there country is roughly the size of a US region, it makes interests associated with a geographical locale very difficult to achieve. While every vote should be equal (or as equal as possible), the reality is that interests are largely decided by the environment of the voter, and partitioning the environment, and tiering government, means more interests of more voters are going to be met without completely missing the interests of other voters.
4: Most unitary governments do not have a strong set of checks and balances; i.e., judges and execute officials are appointed via the parliament/prime minister, and the prime minister is elected by the parliament. The effect of this election policy is similar again to point 2: a shift in political power can cause a dramatic shift in policy in a short period of time because there are fewer roadblocks between the will of the current parliament and the implementation of that will.
Out of all of the election policies I've studied, IGNORING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE (because it's a system with several undescribed states, if we were to somehow reach one of those states by having an election of an official "tied" in enough ways we wouldn't know what the next step would be), I prefer the US government system. It's not designed to reflect the will of the people right now. It's designed to reflect the long-term interests of the people after filtering out extreme views. Its perponderance of gridlock has prevented so many stupid things from happening it's totally uncountable. That being said, I like the way Australian government is structured, except I REALLY do not like the idea of being able to put multiple candidates on a list. Political scientist mathemeticians have shown that by being able to list multiple candidates on a piece of paper, it increases the voting power of a citizen to > 1, and they can use these voting lists to perform elaborate tricks to achieve an end result which might not effect the will of the voting populace at all.
IBM or Apple take over the computer software business, providing a relatively uniform and easy-to-use GUI?
What makes you think Microsoft is the only software company in the world that would become a monopoly? And what makes you think that they wouldn't use their monopolistic powers to enter other businesses?
That may potentially solve uninstallation (although I haven't looked at the software, it may even delete the stuff from/usr/* or/bin/ afterwards), but it still does not solve the missing library problems. One can argue what's more efficient: supplying the DLLs you might possibly need on a Windows installation CD/package, or requiring the user to download the.so file that they are missing, after they perform some kind of reverse-lookup to determine what package contains.so.1 or.h or.c file they are looking for, or at the very least include some way to auto-solve these dependencies inside of configure. Personally, I don't give a crap about package size, and the vast majority of Linux users don't give a crap about package size either, since they download their distro or run off of a corporate network rather than buy it in a store... so why make things unneccessarily difficult? Especially for applications that are CLEARLY targetted towards a computer user rather than a network administrator (mplayer is a great example of a good application with lousy management in that sense)?!! I like Windows' way because I don't have to WORK to get an app working.
Hi. What software companies are getting sued out of existence for providing a GUI that crashes way less than KDE/GNOME/any other UI I've used on Linux, including really stupid, simple ones like BlackBox?
What is shitty about MS software? MS makes BY FAR the most stable software, whether you look at application-space or kernel space. MS's kernel never crashes. Drivers developed for MS's kernel do. That's what happens when one single person doesn't decide what goes into the kernel and what doesn't.
And what a surprise, Windows supports more hardware and software than Linux! Sure, you might actually see a BSOD where I have to reboot and lose all my applications. But the same thing happens in Linux when X crashes and I have to restart it, losing all of my X sessions. Who cares if the kernel didn't crash?
Slashdot Mirror
But what about SPECint? Or their benchmarks that relate to SMP/threads? If a DBA decides to deploy a memory-inefficient implementation of anything, that DBA is just plain stupid.
And if Mathematica uses a fast malloc() on PowerPC, it would make sense that Mathematica would also use fast malloc() on x86. Apple is NOT comparing apples to apples (couldn't help myself).
If the compiler is the same, you are testing the implementation of the compiler and the processor, not just the processor itself. gcc's code for PowerPC is different than gcc's code for x86. Way different. This is in no way a level playing field. Don't be fooled -- Apple is using this compiler because it's slower than Intel's compiler, and every Windows/x86 vendor uses Intel's compiler because that's how Windows/x86 apps are built.
A level playing field is possible only by maximizing the performance of both platforms. Then let both platforms duke it out.
So then they should. And we should be comparing the MS or Intel compilers to THAT compiler if we want to make hardware-to-hardware comparisons that aren't TOTALLY inappropriate.
Also, if Apple is claiming to have configured systems as they ship, they should have to COMMIT to their use of fast malloc(), and they should have also left all of Intel's default options (including hyperthreading) enabled for all tests.
That would be an argument against the system's single DDR 400 channel, especially since it has to push around a lot more (64-bit vs 32-bit) whenever it wants to send a memory address.
The SPEC benchmarks do NOT test the performance of the processor. The SPEC benchmarks test the performance of the processor AND the compiler (and they may also test the memory interface... I don't know how data-intensive SPECint and SPECfp are).
If GCC sucks on NT, and professional software written for NT doesn't use GCC but rather MS/Intel compilers, and those Dell dual Xeon systems are installed with a variant of NT and not Linux or BSD, what business does Apple have using gcc to compile SPEC for the Dell platform? One could argue that a small minority of Dell server/workstation administrators install Linux on their machines, but that's only a very small subset of the users who buy a Dell platform.
Why on earth would you want to separate the software from the hardware? This isn't a IBM vs Intel comparison. This is an Apple vs Dell comparison. Apple is selling a platform, not a bunch of PCB boards. I sure as heck won't use GCC to compile SAS or Oracle just before I put up a mission-critical database server...
Actually, Tiger boards are primarily used in high end servers and workstations.
The problems with the VIA KT133A are very well documented. It's not a board issue. MSI, Soyo, Abit, Asus, etc. all suffer problems due to the KT133A chipset.
I swore off AMD as well due to chipset problems.
The computer I built for my girlfriend, a first-generation nForce 1, has had absolutely no problems whatsoever.
The first AMD computer I built, an 800Mhz Athlon Thunderbird with an ECS mobo using a VIA KT133 chipset crashed every 12 hours to 3 days, which sucks since I was using it as a web and database server. Thinking it was a heat issue, I bought a big ThermalTake heatsink and tried to install it, but lo and behold I cracked the core because AMD refuses to update their packaging (who the hell still uses ceramic packaging anyway). No, I'm not a heatsink-installing newbie. This was probably the 10th computer I built. I was forced to turn my P3-450 desktop into a webserver to replace the system, and it worked flawlessly.
I then bought an Abit KT133A-based mobo and an Athlon XP 1.2GHz. The motherboard chipset fan started making sounds and died after only a few days, so I had to replace that. Then, when I upgraded my video card from a GF2 GTS to a GF4 Ti4200, I developed crashing problems in all kinds of settings. After doing a little bit of reasearch, it seems to relate to VIA's drivers (or perhaps the hardware itself). Flashing the BIOS made the problem worse, not better, and Abit has stopped posting BIOSes for my motherboard.
Then, I built a dual AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz with a Tiger S2460 mobo (uses the AMD760MP chip), to be used as a game server. The machine worked great for 6 months, and then I started getting kernel panics. Turns out that the motherboard had corrupted various portions of my 4 sticks of 256MB Crucial registered ECC DDR. I was pissed.
I don't think the culprit is the processor. I think it's pretty clearly the chipsets. I will never buy another AMD or VIA chipset again after these experiences, which for the most part leaves me with NVIDIA and Intel. Hyperthreading looks really, really cool, so I think it's bye-bye AMD for me and hello to a company that's willing to support their processors with rock-solid chipsets and drivers.
The Athlon chips have not been super-sensitive to changes in FSB. The performance impact of the Athlon XP moving from 2x133MHz to 2x166MHz was significantly less than the P4's gains going from 4x100MHz to 4x133MHz. The P4 gains have been incredible with the jump to 4x200MHz.
It seems that AMD is trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of an architecture that would be better squeezed by being optimized, i.e. Opteron. It's a shame that AMD's yields of Opteron have proven to be dismal, but if I was a motherboard manufacturer I'd be pretty mad at AMD right now. More motherboard manufacturers are going to have to qualify their boards and more chipset manufacturers will have to qualify their products as well, even if they can already meet 400MHz operation. Will the performance impact really justify the costs that all parties incur by moving to yet a new FSB in less than, what, 6 months?
I'm a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jonathan Smith teaches CSE350 every semester (our software engineering course). Last year we wrote a kernel-level firewall for OpenBSD. It was a great course, and he's pretty much the only professor here with any idea what software engineering means.
:)
It's a shame that this grant was cancelled. He could do a lot for the gov's computers.
Now I know why we used OpenBSD in the course and not Linux.
I hope that you bookmark this so that when you're 35 and a female Ukranian or Indian engineer replaces you, you realize what an ass of yourself you just made. Assuming you actually have firsthand experience with "engineering women".
Dunno why I got suckered into this troll...
Is it just me, or is the icon that appears next to this slashdot entry an AMD logo?
Just don't try to use winex with ATI cards. It won't work very well at all. Check out transgaming's website, and you'll see almost everyone uses NVIDIA cards because of that.
ATI is still pretty broken when it comes to running 3D games in Linux.
We need a solution to the site maintainers duping!
Who here wants to jump into the SlashCode source with me and code in moderation on maintainers so we can fire current ones and get better ones? :)
Er, so what products have benefited from piracy? MAYBE obscure music, where the publishers couldn't afford to effectively market an album, but that's a BIG maybe. These bands would already get great marketing from online music services if it wasn't for the fact that nobody used them (because everyone has a friggin huge MP3 collection). While many pieces of software get great advertising through piracy (crippleware CD burning software, for example), that doesn't translate to more profit for the software developer.
Damn right I'll save my profits. You're not going to do it for me by not paying me for the software you use. Since when am I not entitled to pursue MAXIMUM PROFIT from the stuff made out of my own sweat and blood?
But it is optional. Just disable the security (hardware manufacturers have promised that you CAN disable it), and then run an unsigned kernel. You won't be able to run a secure OS, secure apps, or secure media, but you can run anything you want.
Which is why OSS isn't going to be affected at all by this, but piracy will, so this is a Good Thing for those of us who sell software or content for a living.
Mandrake was profitable ever? Can you provide a link?
Thanks.
Matrox is a private company. No pitch had to be made to the shareholders. Matrox is also a VERY bad example. Since Matrox is a private company, it does not have to publish its financial records. However, Matrox's market share has greatly dwindled, and they are now forced to pursue incredibly niche markets. I'd wager that due to the incredible shrinkage of their marketshare, they are making less money today than they were before, if they are turning a profit at all.
If Apple wanted to follow Matrox's example, someone would first have to buy all the public shares and make it a private company. They would also have to be willing to follow the example of a company which has become less competitive over time.
And about this: "It's harsh, but if they can't make a living while still doing what's best for everyone, then they should go find some other industry to work in."
What company makes a living while still doing what's best for everyone? Companies make money by doing what their customers want and charging for it. If I open up a gas station, providing greater competition and cheaper prices to my customers, I can profit. However, Green Peace would surely not be happy with me wanting to open up another gas station.
I'm really curious as to what company you work for (or own) that could actually say "We do what's best for everyone" with a straight face. Heck, I'd be shocked if any INDIVIDUAL could say that what they do is best for everyone without lying or being incredibly narrow-minded/misinformed. Companies, just like people, are self-interested. Don't fault Apple for wanting to give their shareholders like jobs huge piles of cash because they can provide something to people who are willing to pay for it, because it meets THEIR self-interests as well. Don't fault Jobs for being more successful than you.
Whaaaat?
RedHat makes money on selling software?
RedHat makes its money through service, not software. Check those financial statements you referred to.
In a straight up, software only fight between RedHat and Apple (although this sounds like a "who can piss furthest" contest and not really a point), we should all be reminded that Apple innovates, creating new hardware and software technologies as well as pushing other vendor's stuff that, before them, was entirely unadopted (remember USB?). RedHat's primary role is taking packages written by other people, validating them at some level, and packaging it into a GPL'd distribution. So far, the most innovative things RedHat has done are:
1) push for an easy-to-use Linux kernel-based OS, and more lately
2) merge the appearances of KDE and GNOME.
Sounds like pretty narrow, boring goals that have definitely impacted less lives than Apple's accomplishments. Of course, this is why Apple is more profitable than RedHat.
So of course Apple cannot disclose everything about their systems and still make a profit. You can't run a company off of R&D alone unless you are PROVIDING R&D to other companies and charging them for it, in which case you wouldn't be able to disclose the R&D anyway. Why should Apple give up all of their IP protections so that a company or individuals can copy-cat their work until Apple is non-existent?
As far as your operating systems point, only Apple can highjack their own operating system, and then they'd have to deal with the reprocussions. But Apple is not in a position to make users "eat it and like it", as there are competitors with greater server and desktop mindshare. Apple is the #2 consumer desktop OS out there, which is why they've decided to try to get as much market share from #1 as possible, by providing a different focus and NOT support DRM. Do you want to kill the only viable alternative to Windows by requiring it to give up everything? Is Apple REALLY taking away your freedoms, or supplying you with a viable commercial choice?
Got a link to support your claims about Intel trying to outlaw open source? Or heck, even Microsoft? Microsoft is anti-GPL, but they are not trying to outlaw it, and they fully support BSD and other licenses where they can use source.
C'mon, how is this INSIGHTFUL?
AMD is firing people. AMD is losing tons and tons and tons of cash. AMD has been delaying its products left and right, and has been substantially underdelivering on clock speed even to its motherboard manufacturers and OEM partners (it's AWFULLY hard to guarantee a motherboard will work with a 2.0GHz Opteron when you cannot test with a 2.0GHz Opteron).
Where is the money or staffing coming from if AMD is creating these "subsidiary firms"? The mere creation of these firms would become public information. This subsidiary creation has not happened. If it had happened you can bet investors would be jumping AMD's ship as quickly as possible because they'd smell financial hide-and-go-seek rather than some kind of "blow Intel's doors right right" innovation.
The smartest thing AMD can do in a business where it's all about who can spend the most R&D and marketing dollars is either secure more R&D and marketing dollars or find another business.
I don't have a problem with electoral voting. I don't like our current system with undefined states. I'm not crazy about the electoral college, but I haven't decided it's a bad idea altogether. I just wish it was designed in such a way that ties would be impossible, or Congress had clear guidelines on how they were supposed to vote on a candidate if a tie did occur.
Political scientist have known for years that the US election system does not capture the "will" of the voter as well as a proportional representation system. This math is certainly not new. However, there are a number of drawbacks to other forms of election that should be expounded on.
1: In proportional representation, there are more likely to be minority parties with elected officials who have extreme/radical viewpoints that are dissimilar to the viewpoints of the "average" voter. Because of the US' election system, no candidate can choose to isolate a significant portion of the population with his views and yet still be elected, to a large "smoothing out" extremist policy. While many feel that this is a bad thing, almost all extremist policy is not realistic to implement, and partial or full implementation of this policy can cause a good bit of damage.
2: In proportional representation, the government is generally unitary in nature, meaning that the entire government is controlled by one party. Although there are more parties beyond the controlling party and another party represented, they still have a HUGE capability to control government policy. If the party in charge changes (and they often change), the entire government policy may change as well. Imagine if a country implemented social security, and then cancelled it 12 years later because the Socialists were replaced by Libertarians!
3: Most other countries do not implement a form of federal government. While this may work for countries where there country is roughly the size of a US region, it makes interests associated with a geographical locale very difficult to achieve. While every vote should be equal (or as equal as possible), the reality is that interests are largely decided by the environment of the voter, and partitioning the environment, and tiering government, means more interests of more voters are going to be met without completely missing the interests of other voters.
4: Most unitary governments do not have a strong set of checks and balances; i.e., judges and execute officials are appointed via the parliament/prime minister, and the prime minister is elected by the parliament. The effect of this election policy is similar again to point 2: a shift in political power can cause a dramatic shift in policy in a short period of time because there are fewer roadblocks between the will of the current parliament and the implementation of that will.
Out of all of the election policies I've studied, IGNORING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE (because it's a system with several undescribed states, if we were to somehow reach one of those states by having an election of an official "tied" in enough ways we wouldn't know what the next step would be), I prefer the US government system. It's not designed to reflect the will of the people right now. It's designed to reflect the long-term interests of the people after filtering out extreme views. Its perponderance of gridlock has prevented so many stupid things from happening it's totally uncountable. That being said, I like the way Australian government is structured, except I REALLY do not like the idea of being able to put multiple candidates on a list. Political scientist mathemeticians have shown that by being able to list multiple candidates on a piece of paper, it increases the voting power of a citizen to > 1, and they can use these voting lists to perform elaborate tricks to achieve an end result which might not effect the will of the voting populace at all.
Tired of rambling, so I think I'll stop here.
IBM or Apple take over the computer software business, providing a relatively uniform and easy-to-use GUI?
What makes you think Microsoft is the only software company in the world that would become a monopoly? And what makes you think that they wouldn't use their monopolistic powers to enter other businesses?
That may potentially solve uninstallation (although I haven't looked at the software, it may even delete the stuff from /usr/* or /bin/ afterwards), but it still does not solve the missing library problems. One can argue what's more efficient: supplying the DLLs you might possibly need on a Windows installation CD/package, or requiring the user to download the .so file that they are missing, after they perform some kind of reverse-lookup to determine what package contains .so.1 or .h or .c file they are looking for, or at the very least include some way to auto-solve these dependencies inside of configure. Personally, I don't give a crap about package size, and the vast majority of Linux users don't give a crap about package size either, since they download their distro or run off of a corporate network rather than buy it in a store... so why make things unneccessarily difficult? Especially for applications that are CLEARLY targetted towards a computer user rather than a network administrator (mplayer is a great example of a good application with lousy management in that sense)?!! I like Windows' way because I don't have to WORK to get an app working.
Hi. What software companies are getting sued out of existence for providing a GUI that crashes way less than KDE/GNOME/any other UI I've used on Linux, including really stupid, simple ones like BlackBox?
What is shitty about MS software? MS makes BY FAR the most stable software, whether you look at application-space or kernel space. MS's kernel never crashes. Drivers developed for MS's kernel do. That's what happens when one single person doesn't decide what goes into the kernel and what doesn't.
And what a surprise, Windows supports more hardware and software than Linux! Sure, you might actually see a BSOD where I have to reboot and lose all my applications. But the same thing happens in Linux when X crashes and I have to restart it, losing all of my X sessions. Who cares if the kernel didn't crash?