Back in the day, I bought a PII 333 MHz from a pretty good mail-order source my father and I bought all our parts from. The PII 333 MHz was shipped 4 days prior to when I purchased it, so it was pretty much on the bleeding edge. The 7 days it was in transmit, the next PII was released. Having hardware become obsolete in 1 week to 2 months of it being released is just the way it is.
One difference between soldiers under Saddam's rule and soldiers under Bush's rule is: Saddam ordered the civilians to be killed. Bush did not. Did Saddam put his soldiers on trial for killing civilians? Bush and the American government certainly are.
Well, it is being pre-installed on certain systems for the desktop use. I agree that once the mainstream OEMs pre-install Linux these types of issues will go away, but for now, you can get it pre-installed: http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/desktop.html
I own three Gamecube games (Zelda and both Metroids), and they both support progressive scan. Of course, you need to use the component video cables to a TV capable of 480p, but it currently exists on the Gamecube.
Sorry, but that's called "growing up." If everyone were to live in a wonderful world in school, free of germs, bullies, and criticism (oh no, you got a D on a test?!?!), you'd get eaten alive in the professional industry. What happens the moment you get yelled at by a manager or receive constructive feedback? Without learning how rough it *can* be out there, and learning how to *deal* with it, you'd curl up in the fetal position in the corner of the conference room as soon as someone hints that they don't agree with you.
I'm sick of seeing how people want to candy-coat school for kids because it may be too stressful for them. No red ink on grading papers (red connotates bad....give me a break), bending to allow people to pass tests, lowering standards for sciences and math, etc. Growing up is physically and emotionally painful, and trying to take away the latter will be eternally damaging to someone trying to make it outside their little world of childhood.
When the recording industry forced the Gnapster community offline, they all patted themselves on the back for a job well done. But the opennap network was just spinning up, and was bigger and better than the original. Fast forward a few years ahead, and all these attacks on PnP filesharing has generated beautiful, useful protocols like BitTorrent.
Let them keep attacking, because we will always have someone out there out-innovating the money-hungry RIAA and MPAA.
I'm not even sure we need to be unionized in high-tech to run into the issue of purging the dead wood. I work for Intel, and in my 5 years there, I've seen a number of people not performing, yet they remain. I also hear stories from the old-timers about people not getting terminated due to performance issues. What it comes down to is the legal ramifications. You want to see someone who doesn't do their job get motivated? Try and fire them...they have lawyers crawling up the company's ass in no time. Why? Because they can, and for companies like Microsoft and Intel, they have the deep pockets that make it difficult to terminate someone, even if you can prove they weren't competent. It will come back that the company should have done something to put them into a position they'd be more competitive in. The only time I've ever seen *anyone* get fired at Intel in the engineering side is from people surfing for porn, and people who made physical threats to other people. I have yet to see someone let go based on job performance issues. Unions? No, we don't need them. We have lawyers.
You know, the beauty of a democracy is the ability to express one's opinion without retribution or consequence. However, in the spirit of modern-day corporations, the United States government isn't without exception. You can disagree and hate the Bush administration, but the fact of the matter is the people voted him in. Disagree with his and his parties' tactics, their agenda, but what weakens America is the people who stab and shoot down the administration because he "comes across as an idiot" or he doesn't agree with what you think. Again, democracy lets you describe your opinion openly. But dammit, he's in office, and trying to keep you and I safe. Dislike him and his administration, but support it. John Kerry's presidential slogan "For a Stronger America." I don't see how we're stronger with people stabbing our country's management because they don't like it; we'd be stronger to realize democracy put him and his administration in office, support it, but if you disagree, do something about it instead of bitch about it. The more people bitch about the administration, the weaker our government becomes.
AI is designed on pre-programmed pieces of data that we feed machines and programs. This isn't dissimalar to how we teach humans how to speak, read, and think when they're children. The difference here though is we can see results with a child. Their first word, their first step, their first sentence, etc. These are milestones that we can gauge of humans, watching them progress from simple cognitive puzzles (stick the square peg in the square hole...) to arguing with their parents about their curfew. Given all these, what are we trying to achieve with "true AI?" Are we trying to breed a program that we can feed, nurture, and change when it craps its pants? Or are we trying to create HAL who can talk to us and tell us what we want to hear?
I'm a big fan of development in the computer science field, and a big supporter of finding how to let a program be able to adapt to an environment or situation. For example, a pilot program would be perfect that could be programmed to fly me from here to there. But true AI would allow that pilot program to feel "tired," or be allowed to make mistakes. Is this what we want?? What do we want from AI; do we really want something that can decide that wants to sleep, or do we want to control it and say it's going to fly us from point to point?? It's really the question of should we vs. can we? If we ignore the should we, it might be the case that we actually realize something like Skynet, in some extreme case, or we get a new court law against the unlawful termination of a computer program who is self-aware when you hit CTRL-C. Cringing at the potential...
Being someone who works in the logic development side of Intel, I can say for a fact they know exactly what they're talking about, and it's not marketing FUD. Think of how long it takes to make a chip design (I'll give you a hint - it's roughly 1-2 years for a rev. 0 design, with 6 months to a year more for a production-worthy design to be available). If we're announcing something next month, be rest assured that the designs, expectations, and work have already been done in knowing what this beast will look like on the other side.
Companies buy other companies all the time, and make decisions that will impact a group of end users every time. The reason this is such breaking news on/., IMO, is that it's Microsoft "appearing" to give the shaft to *nix platforms. I'm sure MS didn't say "let's buy this company so we can stick it to the Linux guys." They have made unethical decisions before, but this would have been just stupid business sense. The primary reason they purchased this company, as the article states, is to have anti-virus technology for their messenger components. Why invest time and resources internally to develop something when they can just buy the technology already working? Cutting support for *nix was just a bonus. In all reality, would it make better business sense for them to continue developing and supporting software for the OS's that directly compete with them? No!
Some people may recall a company called Sequent. Here's a perfect example of a company who had a great product, and threatened a titan in the industry (IBM). IBM purchased them, took the technology that they wanted (low-level locking that exists in AIX 5L today), and trashed the rest of the company. It left all the PTX customers out to dry. But why would they care to continue developing PTX on Sequent platforms when they wanted to advance their POWER-based servers running AIX?
This is really nothing exciting IMO. So Microsoft acquired a company and dropped support for *nix. That is the most logical thing they could have done with the acquisition. Please try again for interesting news instead of touting the "you bastards!" picket sign outside the Evil Empire's headquarters.
As far as I recall, doesn't Weta and Pixar use Linux for their OS in the render pools? I concede that LOTR certainly didn't open-source the artwork, nor did Nemo et. al, but how much closer to open-source entertainment are we with this? Do I get to see the movie for free (small donation optional)? I'd go see it if I got my Sour Patch Kids for free I suppose...
Their (Intel) whole business plan has been based off of their vast number of production plants and relatively cheap process of putting hordes of chips on the market
....
AMD on the other hand has always started out chips on the enthusiast / enterprise market because they simply don't have the fabrication capacity that Intel does.
Do you even know what Intel's first dual-core processor is? It's the Smithfield product, or, in market terms, the Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840. I'd be willing to argue this isn't targeted at the general desktop world as much as it's targeted at the enthusiast market. The next chip that is releasing (Presler I believe) is aimed at the Xeon, again, not exactly an end-user part.
I think what is more accurate is once Intel has matured a product (to an extent), they use their manufacturing juggernaut to flood the market with their parts. Whereas, AMD cannot, since they don't have the fab capacity, so once their part does become mature (to an extent), they're still producing a seemingly low volume. Therefore, they must target higher ASP's (servers, workstations) in order to make money.
That's great. But what does this have to do with anything? It has no release date, has no features, etc. This quote has nothing of substance to combat any competitor. Please try again.
Absolutely not! AMD was so guitly of this back in the Athlon days, when they'd announce something that wasn't ready, but was needed to compete with what Intel was doing. Intel has not announced something on paper but not have anything to show; we (I work for design...) have shipped over 2,000 samples to vendors for evaluation. Specifically, we have shipped ~2,000 dual-core Cedar Mill processors them. *that* doesn't look like vaporware to me.
No. If you ever read about any of the roadmaps, you'd know. Smithfield: the first dual-core processor, which is two Prescott dies welded together. No big news. Then a family at that level. Then the big one, Cedar Mill. This was designed with dual-core in mind. I won't talk about the real performance, because I'm not allowed to. But let's say Smithfield is paving the way. I know/. is a big supporter of the underdog in most cases, but really man, read the roadmaps for both companies, and you'll learn that Intel has a huge dual-core product lineup, which dates back before AMDs Opteron announcements.
I hope this is a shift for the good. Speaking as a frustrated AIX admin, I'd love to see IBM shift their focus to quality and hardening of their software base. Our shop abuses any OS you give us, so we knock all the corner cases out, and I'll tell you, AIX has more than I'd like to admit.
I'm sure many people have success stories of where companies have replaced an OS with Linux (Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.), but here's a few examples I've been able to see directly: 1) Anyone remember the recent NASA Columbia simulator? That huge Intel Itanium 2 cluster built by SGI, which was toying with top dog for the fastest supercomputer? That ran Linux (in favor of other "hardened" OS's). 2) I work for Intel, and I must say, we have a Linux environment not for the faint of heart. In the chip design world, my group manages ~7,000 Linux servers in a distributed computing environment. Add up all the design groups at Intel, and you're totaling ~25,000 Linux machines, and growing rather fast. The job these things are doing were being done by Windows machines. However, the powers-that-be actually listened when we said "it doesn't work," and let us implement a Linux solution. This is a huge risk, at the core component of the world's largest chip maker, and what a win.
I love Linux, and will take it any day over Windows. But it really pisses me off when a company won't look closely at the problem they're trying to solve in order to make the correct decision for their environment. Our correct choice (so far) is Linux. A small publishing business, Windows or Mac OS X (or OS 9) is probably a better approach. These studies of who has better TCO is dumb in my opinion, because if you try to fit Linux into a role it's not intended to be in right now, it will fail. If you try and fit Windows into a role that it's not designed or built for, it will fail. They need to first define what a common field is (file serving, web serving, mail serving, etc.), then do the TCO studies. Asking someone if they feel that Windows or Linux is more secure is asking me how I feel on a Monday before I've had my second cup of tea. You should already know the answer based on the look on my face.
Many people have thought it, but I want to ask the question: why didn't they go for the thing that was thought to be in violation of antitrust laws (at least in the US)? I understand the points that DRM with WMP could present a corner market, but the thing is, I don't really mind WMP. I personally use mplayer on Linux, but it takes some work to get all the Quicktime plugins installed, all the WMP codecs installed, and then the AC3/MPG4, etc., codecs installed, etc. There is something to be said about a media player that understands most codecs (obviously not Quicktime), and isn't difficult to use.
Now consider IE; go grab Firefox or Mozilla or Opera. You now have argueably a better browser, with the same amount of functionality. You only lose where people use MS-specific Javascript extensions, along with a small handful of other nuances. So they remove the program that really doesn't make a difference, in my mind, and leave the one that MS really got in trouble for. Good job EU!
Sure there are supposed to be multicore P4s and Pentium Ms, but they are "hacked" together, not optimized for it. AMD's Opteron, on the other hand, has been designed for it from the start.
I can't argue the fact (and won't) that AMD designed their Opteron for dual-core from its inception, due to the memory controller, and today's P4's and PM's are not. However, you really should read up on the Cedar Mill and Smithfield platforms that Intel has announced. Sure the first dual-core procs they'll release will be two Prescotts welded together (presumably by running them next to each other...), but the true "dual-core" procs they intend to sell are designed from the beginning to be dual-core. I've seen one of the Cedar Mill processors running in the debug lab, and trust me, it's running much faster than the current procs, plus it's dual-core, and it consumes less overall power than today's single proc (think 5 GHz, dual-core, ~90 watts, vs. 3.6 GHz PSC, ~110 watts) and does not suffer from the memory bus starvation that the Xeon's currently die from. Intel has their designs right for their dual-core line.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day, I bought a PII 333 MHz from a pretty good mail-order source my father and I bought all our parts from. The PII 333 MHz was shipped 4 days prior to when I purchased it, so it was pretty much on the bleeding edge. The 7 days it was in transmit, the next PII was released. Having hardware become obsolete in 1 week to 2 months of it being released is just the way it is.
No....this article from today: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/ 08/1942207 is the GPU they recently released. The article from *this* post is about their new SLI-compatible chipset. Completely different hardware...
Because TFA talks about the new Core 2 duo lineup being the target for this chipset...
/. readers just not read articles anymore, and trust the snippet commentary will fulfill their unbiased news consumption?
Does the majority of
I am still waiting to see "Jews in space!!!"
One difference between soldiers under Saddam's rule and soldiers under Bush's rule is: Saddam ordered the civilians to be killed. Bush did not. Did Saddam put his soldiers on trial for killing civilians? Bush and the American government certainly are.
Well, it is being pre-installed on certain systems for the desktop use. I agree that once the mainstream OEMs pre-install Linux these types of issues will go away, but for now, you can get it pre-installed: http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/desktop.html
I own three Gamecube games (Zelda and both Metroids), and they both support progressive scan. Of course, you need to use the component video cables to a TV capable of 480p, but it currently exists on the Gamecube.
Sorry, but that's called "growing up." If everyone were to live in a wonderful world in school, free of germs, bullies, and criticism (oh no, you got a D on a test?!?!), you'd get eaten alive in the professional industry. What happens the moment you get yelled at by a manager or receive constructive feedback? Without learning how rough it *can* be out there, and learning how to *deal* with it, you'd curl up in the fetal position in the corner of the conference room as soon as someone hints that they don't agree with you.
I'm sick of seeing how people want to candy-coat school for kids because it may be too stressful for them. No red ink on grading papers (red connotates bad....give me a break), bending to allow people to pass tests, lowering standards for sciences and math, etc. Growing up is physically and emotionally painful, and trying to take away the latter will be eternally damaging to someone trying to make it outside their little world of childhood.
When the recording industry forced the Gnapster community offline, they all patted themselves on the back for a job well done. But the opennap network was just spinning up, and was bigger and better than the original. Fast forward a few years ahead, and all these attacks on PnP filesharing has generated beautiful, useful protocols like BitTorrent.
Let them keep attacking, because we will always have someone out there out-innovating the money-hungry RIAA and MPAA.
I'm not even sure we need to be unionized in high-tech to run into the issue of purging the dead wood. I work for Intel, and in my 5 years there, I've seen a number of people not performing, yet they remain. I also hear stories from the old-timers about people not getting terminated due to performance issues. What it comes down to is the legal ramifications. You want to see someone who doesn't do their job get motivated? Try and fire them...they have lawyers crawling up the company's ass in no time. Why? Because they can, and for companies like Microsoft and Intel, they have the deep pockets that make it difficult to terminate someone, even if you can prove they weren't competent. It will come back that the company should have done something to put them into a position they'd be more competitive in. The only time I've ever seen *anyone* get fired at Intel in the engineering side is from people surfing for porn, and people who made physical threats to other people. I have yet to see someone let go based on job performance issues. Unions? No, we don't need them. We have lawyers.
You know, the beauty of a democracy is the ability to express one's opinion without retribution or consequence. However, in the spirit of modern-day corporations, the United States government isn't without exception. You can disagree and hate the Bush administration, but the fact of the matter is the people voted him in. Disagree with his and his parties' tactics, their agenda, but what weakens America is the people who stab and shoot down the administration because he "comes across as an idiot" or he doesn't agree with what you think. Again, democracy lets you describe your opinion openly. But dammit, he's in office, and trying to keep you and I safe. Dislike him and his administration, but support it. John Kerry's presidential slogan "For a Stronger America." I don't see how we're stronger with people stabbing our country's management because they don't like it; we'd be stronger to realize democracy put him and his administration in office, support it, but if you disagree, do something about it instead of bitch about it. The more people bitch about the administration, the weaker our government becomes.
AI is designed on pre-programmed pieces of data that we feed machines and programs. This isn't dissimalar to how we teach humans how to speak, read, and think when they're children. The difference here though is we can see results with a child. Their first word, their first step, their first sentence, etc. These are milestones that we can gauge of humans, watching them progress from simple cognitive puzzles (stick the square peg in the square hole...) to arguing with their parents about their curfew. Given all these, what are we trying to achieve with "true AI?" Are we trying to breed a program that we can feed, nurture, and change when it craps its pants? Or are we trying to create HAL who can talk to us and tell us what we want to hear?
I'm a big fan of development in the computer science field, and a big supporter of finding how to let a program be able to adapt to an environment or situation. For example, a pilot program would be perfect that could be programmed to fly me from here to there. But true AI would allow that pilot program to feel "tired," or be allowed to make mistakes. Is this what we want?? What do we want from AI; do we really want something that can decide that wants to sleep, or do we want to control it and say it's going to fly us from point to point?? It's really the question of should we vs. can we? If we ignore the should we, it might be the case that we actually realize something like Skynet, in some extreme case, or we get a new court law against the unlawful termination of a computer program who is self-aware when you hit CTRL-C. Cringing at the potential...
Being someone who works in the logic development side of Intel, I can say for a fact they know exactly what they're talking about, and it's not marketing FUD. Think of how long it takes to make a chip design (I'll give you a hint - it's roughly 1-2 years for a rev. 0 design, with 6 months to a year more for a production-worthy design to be available). If we're announcing something next month, be rest assured that the designs, expectations, and work have already been done in knowing what this beast will look like on the other side.
Companies buy other companies all the time, and make decisions that will impact a group of end users every time. The reason this is such breaking news on /., IMO, is that it's Microsoft "appearing" to give the shaft to *nix platforms. I'm sure MS didn't say "let's buy this company so we can stick it to the Linux guys." They have made unethical decisions before, but this would have been just stupid business sense. The primary reason they purchased this company, as the article states, is to have anti-virus technology for their messenger components. Why invest time and resources internally to develop something when they can just buy the technology already working? Cutting support for *nix was just a bonus. In all reality, would it make better business sense for them to continue developing and supporting software for the OS's that directly compete with them? No!
Some people may recall a company called Sequent. Here's a perfect example of a company who had a great product, and threatened a titan in the industry (IBM). IBM purchased them, took the technology that they wanted (low-level locking that exists in AIX 5L today), and trashed the rest of the company. It left all the PTX customers out to dry. But why would they care to continue developing PTX on Sequent platforms when they wanted to advance their POWER-based servers running AIX?
This is really nothing exciting IMO. So Microsoft acquired a company and dropped support for *nix. That is the most logical thing they could have done with the acquisition. Please try again for interesting news instead of touting the "you bastards!" picket sign outside the Evil Empire's headquarters.
Let's hope not...
As far as I recall, doesn't Weta and Pixar use Linux for their OS in the render pools? I concede that LOTR certainly didn't open-source the artwork, nor did Nemo et. al, but how much closer to open-source entertainment are we with this? Do I get to see the movie for free (small donation optional)? I'd go see it if I got my Sour Patch Kids for free I suppose...
Their (Intel) whole business plan has been based off of their vast number of production plants and relatively cheap process of putting hordes of chips on the market
....
AMD on the other hand has always started out chips on the enthusiast / enterprise market because they simply don't have the fabrication capacity that Intel does.
Do you even know what Intel's first dual-core processor is? It's the Smithfield product, or, in market terms, the Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840. I'd be willing to argue this isn't targeted at the general desktop world as much as it's targeted at the enthusiast market. The next chip that is releasing (Presler I believe) is aimed at the Xeon, again, not exactly an end-user part.
I think what is more accurate is once Intel has matured a product (to an extent), they use their manufacturing juggernaut to flood the market with their parts. Whereas, AMD cannot, since they don't have the fab capacity, so once their part does become mature (to an extent), they're still producing a seemingly low volume. Therefore, they must target higher ASP's (servers, workstations) in order to make money.
Here's info on the Intel release.
So he ate popcorn while watching Doom 3?
That's great. But what does this have to do with anything? It has no release date, has no features, etc. This quote has nothing of substance to combat any competitor. Please try again.
Absolutely not! AMD was so guitly of this back in the Athlon days, when they'd announce something that wasn't ready, but was needed to compete with what Intel was doing. Intel has not announced something on paper but not have anything to show; we (I work for design...) have shipped over 2,000 samples to vendors for evaluation. Specifically, we have shipped ~2,000 dual-core Cedar Mill processors them. *that* doesn't look like vaporware to me.
No. If you ever read about any of the roadmaps, you'd know. Smithfield: the first dual-core processor, which is two Prescott dies welded together. No big news. Then a family at that level. Then the big one, Cedar Mill. This was designed with dual-core in mind. I won't talk about the real performance, because I'm not allowed to. But let's say Smithfield is paving the way. I know /. is a big supporter of the underdog in most cases, but really man, read the roadmaps for both companies, and you'll learn that Intel has a huge dual-core product lineup, which dates back before AMDs Opteron announcements.
I hope this is a shift for the good. Speaking as a frustrated AIX admin, I'd love to see IBM shift their focus to quality and hardening of their software base. Our shop abuses any OS you give us, so we knock all the corner cases out, and I'll tell you, AIX has more than I'd like to admit.
I'm sure many people have success stories of where companies have replaced an OS with Linux (Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.), but here's a few examples I've been able to see directly: 1) Anyone remember the recent NASA Columbia simulator? That huge Intel Itanium 2 cluster built by SGI, which was toying with top dog for the fastest supercomputer? That ran Linux (in favor of other "hardened" OS's). 2) I work for Intel, and I must say, we have a Linux environment not for the faint of heart. In the chip design world, my group manages ~7,000 Linux servers in a distributed computing environment. Add up all the design groups at Intel, and you're totaling ~25,000 Linux machines, and growing rather fast. The job these things are doing were being done by Windows machines. However, the powers-that-be actually listened when we said "it doesn't work," and let us implement a Linux solution. This is a huge risk, at the core component of the world's largest chip maker, and what a win.
I love Linux, and will take it any day over Windows. But it really pisses me off when a company won't look closely at the problem they're trying to solve in order to make the correct decision for their environment. Our correct choice (so far) is Linux. A small publishing business, Windows or Mac OS X (or OS 9) is probably a better approach. These studies of who has better TCO is dumb in my opinion, because if you try to fit Linux into a role it's not intended to be in right now, it will fail. If you try and fit Windows into a role that it's not designed or built for, it will fail. They need to first define what a common field is (file serving, web serving, mail serving, etc.), then do the TCO studies. Asking someone if they feel that Windows or Linux is more secure is asking me how I feel on a Monday before I've had my second cup of tea. You should already know the answer based on the look on my face.
Many people have thought it, but I want to ask the question: why didn't they go for the thing that was thought to be in violation of antitrust laws (at least in the US)? I understand the points that DRM with WMP could present a corner market, but the thing is, I don't really mind WMP. I personally use mplayer on Linux, but it takes some work to get all the Quicktime plugins installed, all the WMP codecs installed, and then the AC3/MPG4, etc., codecs installed, etc. There is something to be said about a media player that understands most codecs (obviously not Quicktime), and isn't difficult to use.
Now consider IE; go grab Firefox or Mozilla or Opera. You now have argueably a better browser, with the same amount of functionality. You only lose where people use MS-specific Javascript extensions, along with a small handful of other nuances. So they remove the program that really doesn't make a difference, in my mind, and leave the one that MS really got in trouble for. Good job EU!
Sure there are supposed to be multicore P4s and Pentium Ms, but they are "hacked" together, not optimized for it. AMD's Opteron, on the other hand, has been designed for it from the start.
I can't argue the fact (and won't) that AMD designed their Opteron for dual-core from its inception, due to the memory controller, and today's P4's and PM's are not. However, you really should read up on the Cedar Mill and Smithfield platforms that Intel has announced. Sure the first dual-core procs they'll release will be two Prescotts welded together (presumably by running them next to each other...), but the true "dual-core" procs they intend to sell are designed from the beginning to be dual-core. I've seen one of the Cedar Mill processors running in the debug lab, and trust me, it's running much faster than the current procs, plus it's dual-core, and it consumes less overall power than today's single proc (think 5 GHz, dual-core, ~90 watts, vs. 3.6 GHz PSC, ~110 watts) and does not suffer from the memory bus starvation that the Xeon's currently die from. Intel has their designs right for their dual-core line.