... apparently some hybrid vehicles can be used to power your home during an outage.
Actually, ordinary car batteries can work fine for this task. My grandpa lives on a farm and has a stack of 5 car batteries wired up to an inverter to power the pump for the well water, in case of an outage.
I guess with a hybrid car you could use it as a generator as well... converting gas into electricity. But of course you can do that with any old car, just grab 12V from the battery and hook up your inverter to get AC. But that's noisy and inefficient as hell:-)
While allowing the IETab Firefox extension is somewhat progressive,...
"Allowing" the IETab Firefox extension is not "somewhat progressive"... it is the same damn thing as running IE, just with different window decorations and menus around it.
It's MS-Windows only, and can be exploited by nearly all of the security flaws that plague IE.
While the police seem to be objecting to this policy for no good reason, it sounds like the Dallas Fire Department accepts that they are subject to the same law as everyone else. From TFA:
For the fire department, it's much more cut-and-dried, said Lt. Joel Lavender, a Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman.
"We don't really have a lot of business running lights, period," Lt. Lavender said. "If you mess up and you're not on an emergency run, you get a ticket. They're subject to the same penalty, in addition to being punished by the fire department."
According to the wikipedia page on the X2, the E4 and E6 steppings were for Socket 939 and didn't support AMD-V. While the F2, F3, and G1 steppings support it, but are socket AM2 only.
It doesn't seem like there's any deep reason why AMD couldn't offer the latter steppings in a Socket 939 form... but I guess they've moved on and now concentrate on the Socket AM2 exclusively.
I upgraded my work computer with an X2 3600+, ECS mobo with ATI radeon graphics, and 1gb DDR2 RAM for $170 a couple of weeks ago. Now I'd like to do the same at home, but I'd like to keep my current mobo and RAM.
But as far as I can find, none of the Socket 939 X2's support hardware virtualization, which is a biggie for me as I do a lot of cross-platform development.
Are there *any* socket 939 X2's that support hardware virt?
actually you don't need a chroot at all to run 32bit programs in a 64bit linux environment. Atleast with gentoo all you need are the correct 32 bit libraries installed and you can compile and run32bit programs (like firefox coupled with flash) natively.
Ditto with Debian and Ubuntu and probably every other 64-bit distro:-) Just install the 32-bit libs and you're good to go. It's a little messy to set this up for flash, but frankly... we can blame that on Adobe/Macromedia and their proprietary not-64-bit-safe crap code. Millions of lines of open source code got cleaned up for 64-bit over the past few years: why can't Adobe get their ass in gear?
Frankly, I got a 64-bit CPU cause I wanted to *use* it. It gives me extra registers (important for x86 code!) and access to more memory. And the warm smug feeling of knowing that all my Linux apps run 64-bit native *years* before the same can be said of Windows.
As for running a 64bit environment, the biggest factor is memory usage. Its true that 64bit programs yield slightly faster performance boosts, they take a lot more ram (think cumulative of all programs running and you can imagine what i mean) than their 32bit counter parts.
This is certainly a noticeable effect. Though so many apps use so much memory, I imagine there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve memory usage without worrying too much about 64bit vs 32bit.
Copyright controls the distribution of ideas Patents control the methods in which ideas are implemented Trademark control the appearance or signage of ideas
Oh, I don't deny the similarities between them, which you've appropriately recognized.
It's just that--in terms of actual business practices--there's no valid reason to conflate them. Trademark disputes, copyright disputes, and patent disputes should all be discussed and handled in different ways. I've never heard anyone publicly refer to their own "intellectual property" rights except as a threat.
I'd hope for the same thing too. Pidgin??? Seriously, it sounds stupid. You'd think that they'd be able to come up with a better name than that. It doesn't have to be an acronym either.
As a linguistics nerd, I totally frickin' disagree. Pidgin is an awesome name, since it refers to a language that develops to allow people to communicate who don't share a common language. IM with GAIM is a lot like that, since it supports different protocols with a unifying interface. And because IM-speak often seems to exhibit the simplified grammar of many English-lexified pidgins.
Not at all. It's no different than grouping Christianity, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. under the banner of "religion".
Well, I often have a problem with that too. People of other religions often assume that *my* religion requires a kind of faith similar to theirs, and that it affects my life in similar ways to theirs. When in fact different religions often have strikingly different effects on the societies in which they exist: for example, it's often said Islam encourages a confluence of spiritual and temporal authority, while in most Christian-majority societies this has rarely been the case since the Reformation. But I digress...
A lot of FLOSS people despise the term "intellectual property" since it's often used intentionally to confuse people, by encouraging the belief that trademarks, copyrights, and patents give the same kinds of monopoly rights. When in fact, this is far from true.
For example, Linus Torvalds holds the TRADEMARK for the name "Linux". But he does not hold the copyright for most of the code in the Linux kernel, since most of it has been written by other individuals and companies. And IBM may hold the patents on some algorithms used in the Linux kernel, but again this does not mean they hold the copyright for all of the code. None of this is a problem as long as no one is suing anyone.
But then we get ass clowns like SCO or Microsoft who come along and make threats about how "Linux is infringing on our 'intellectual property' rights." That frightens a lot of users needlessly, and it's complete bullshit unless they care to specify exactly what rights they are talking about: trademark, copyright, or patents. All have COMPLETELY different repercussions. The FSF are totally right to deplore the use of the term "intellectual property" in my opinion. It is meaningless except as FUD.
Second time I've seen the same sentiment "useful time and resource wasted on IP issues." And I wonder, why the fuck don't all these open source dudes make a point of not trying to walk around in the exact same footsteps as the ground breakers?
How hard would it have been to not call the project Gee - AIM(tm)?
Actually, you have the chronology backwards! Originally the official "AIM" was called "AOL Instant Messenger". And GAIM was called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger" in its infancy.
AOL complained, so GAIM changed its name to... "GAIM". This is the crucial point: GAIM was officially called GAIM before AIM was officially called AIM. Surprising but true. But AOL then trademarked the name AIM and has aggressively/ass-hattedly defended that trademark. Trademark law is weird... unlike patents, coming up with it first doesn't matter. And once you have a trademark, you must aggressively defend it in order to keep it.
AOL may have been total dicks in this case, but its not clear that the law gives them a lot of wiggle room in this case. GAIM is a very prominent competing product with a similar name, and so it's quite likely that they could've lost their trademark right without taking this action.
In any case, despite the name change, rest assured that Pidgin will continue to be awesome, and the official AIM client will continue to be a big piece of crap.
Well, Intel's next-generation CPU core is supposed to move the memory controller on-die and actually adopt a dedicated HyperTransport-style arrangement, rather than the frankenstein layout Intel currently uses. If that's true, I really hope that AMD has something special in the pipeline, because Intel will absolutely crush them in performance. (Note: I am a huge AMD fan, so that's saying something.)
Right on. I think AMD has an impressive string of innovations under its belt... thrashing the Pentium III/IV, AMD64, HyperTransport, virtualization. But Intel's superior fabrication juggernaut is just beating the crap out of them these days. Personally I am very happy with the current situation as I got a dual-core Athlon 64 for just $70 from Newegg while the cheapest Core 2 Duo is about $130, and the benchmarks are pretty close.
But I am pretty sure that AMD is hemorrhaging cash in the current price war, and I agree that they'd better have something pretty impressive up their sleeves. I'm eagerly awaiting quad-core A64s, and I'm enthusiastic about the GPU+CPU Fusion products and the DTX form factor for building small highly-integrated systems, but I'm not sure if those will be big money-makers or not.
Ahead by about $30, yeah. The Intel mainboard and the $1440 in processors really eat into that. If your arrangement is suitable for your purposes, that's great and an excellent price. But it's not the same machine as the Mac Pro.
You're right. I guess that I recoil against the prices Apple charges for their high-end stuff since I've never understood the appeal of some of the extras they provide. Why does anyone who needs a $3000 workstation *care* about that fancy anodized case? And why do you need custom heat spreaders on the RAM? And the fact that they'll sell you an 8-core box with only 1gb of RAM suggests that the Mac Pro is marketed as much for its "wow" factor as for the kinds of practical use that it might see.
As to why I'd prefer the 2x2 arrangement, it's due to extreme inefficiency in the way Intel cores communicate. There are also times when I am not using massively multithreaded applications, but I'm using a lot of them simultaneously. The 800MHz speed boost across four cores works best given the multicore affinity of OS X when running these applications. All told, the machine would be faster all around, and for major number crunching, the biggest practical speed loss is much closer to 10% than 40%...and 3 hours and 30 minutes vs. 3 hours and 45 minutes is not enough of a difference to give up 30% in single-threaded performance.
My understanding is that HyperTransport gives AMD an edge in terms of multi-core systems, explaining the popularity of 2/4/8-way Opteron systems. I wonder if Apple will ever build AMD-based systems... for me AMD has always been a better value proposition since about 1999, and perhaps that's part of why I see the Intel Macs as overpriced.
Okay, if your employer has nothing better to do than *take away* a monitor which was *discarded* because you haven't filled out the proper paperwork... then gosh, that sounds like a ship sinking under the weight of a bureaucracy.
I'm in academia, but I worked at a software company for a couple years and if I felt that something could make me more productive, I got it. Especially if it's something like a monitor that costs practically nothing in the grand scheme of things for even a smallish company.
2x4 1.86GHz CPUs != 2x2 2.66GHz CPUs. I'd rather have the latter any day, and I don't intend on buying a Mac Pro.
Uh... why? It'll be up to 30% slower (for purely CPU-bound tasks) when running a single unparallelizable task, but up to 40% faster (for purely CPU-bound tasks) when running 8 threads at once. Presumably, you won't buy an 8-core system *or* a 4-core system unless you're gonna be doing a lot of number-crunching, image rendering, etc... the kinds of things that are highly parallelizable.
Even beyond that, the case is not comparable (Mac Pro cases are expensive, heavy, and sturdy), the motherboard used in the Mac Pro is an Intel (at substantially higher cost), the RAM has custom heat spreaders and is certainly of a higher grade than Kingston, and EACH of the base Mac Pro's two Woodcrest Xeons are $719.99.
Okay... double the cost of the case and RAM, I'm still ahead, right? Though, frankly, that case I linked to is what I would consider "heavy and sturdy". Apple doesn't sell Mac Pro cases alone, but I doubt they spend >$100 on 'em.
Sorry sorry sorry. Indeed, I missed the 3 GHz part. I didn't mean to troll but clearly I did, since I was looking at the lower speed grades of quad-core Xeon. In any case, you *can* get an 4x2 Xeon setup for about $2k... same cache and Clovertown core, but 1.86 GHz processors. For anyone who still cares, these are the components I was looking at on Newegg:
2 x Intel Xeon E5320 Clovertown 1.86GHz Socket 771 Active or 1U Processor Model BX80563E5320A - Retail 2 x $485 2 x Kingston 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) ECC Fully Buffered Server Memory Model KVR667D2S8F5/512 - Retail 2 x $64.99 SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O Dual Socket 771 Intel 5000X ATX Server Motherboard - Retail $389.99 APEVIA MX-PLEASURE-NW-BK Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case ATX 500W dual fan w/ automatic fan speed control Power Supply - Retail $99.99 SAMSUNG 18X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write, LightScribe Technology Black SATA Model SH-S183L - OEM $41.99 SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD252KJ 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $64.99 EVGA 256-P2-N436-LX GeForce 7300GS 256MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail $69.99 Targus PAKB010U Black USB Wired Standard Keyboard - Retail $19.99 Microsoft N71-00007S Black 3 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB Wired Optical Wheel Mouse - OEM $9.99
Total: $1796.91, with free shipping. I think you could go cheaper on a lot of the parts... mobo, case, mouse, kbd, DVD burner, but this looks like a solid system to me. It includes everything the Mac Pro does except an OS. Personally, I'd run Ubuntu Linux x86_64 on this bad boy, but even if you go with Windows Ultimate ($399 at retail?), you've got the whole system for $2200k. That's a 2x4 1.86 GHz Xeon setup still for less than the base price of the 2x2 Mac Pro.
Anyway, sorry for my trolling. As soon as the 3 GHz 4-core Xeons go on retail sale, we can work out the price for this Mac-Pro-clone with those instead.
Sorry, bud... But if this is a design house, I hope they have someone that can spend their time sourcing parts. If it is a freelancer spec'ing out their own machine, they are doing themselves a disservice by not spending an hour looking around for alternatives. Just to point out how bad the price gouging is...
Yes, these are exactly the kinds of things I was referring to. Buying commodity parts does not mean buying "junk" or "toy" parts...
I think Apple wants to maintain the illusion that their computers aren't built out of the same made-in-Taiwan/China commodity parts as everyone else's.
I don't know what their customer base looks like, but if they have the hardware that people want, then I don't think the default OS is going to keep people away.
How about the ridiculous price of said hardware? I went on Newegg and spec'd out components similar to the "entry-level" $4000 Mac Pro... for about $2000.
Sure, the hardware is really cool. But if you don't want/like/need Mac OS, you can get it waaaay cheaper elsewhere. This is Apple's typical strategy for its high-end stuff: sell hardware that's so dazzling and cutting-edge that customers forget how much they're getting ripped off for the Apple brand image.
That being said, Solaris was on the way out when I quit my sysadmin job some 8 years ago. PCs with Linux were not only much cheaper, but also better (more complete, easier to manage) as desktops. I really wonder how you'd justify a Solaris desktop for the general user these days. Since the arrival of Windows 2000 (rock solid, in my experience) it replaced Solaris/Linux as my desktop; Cygwin/X with ssh/VNC to a Linux box, or a VMWare/Virtual PC with Linux, provides all the Linux functionality I need these days. (Despite Cygwin's poor performance. I've never seen it crash btw.)
I absolutely agree about Solaris. I worked at a speech synthesis software company about 5 years ago. Linux desktops (GNOME, KDE) were in their infancy, but they were positively cutting-edge compared to our Solaris boxes. CDE is a dog. We had to use ugly, expensive, external SCSI drives on the Solaris boxes, and few of them had CD drives, which were a nightmare to configure. The whole non-commodity-hardware thing really put a damper on my enthusiasm for Unix boxes. The only thing I liked about the Sun boxes were the Type 5 keyboards... I still pine for my Sun keyboard whenever I'm in emacs.
I wouldn't willingly switch from Unix/Linux to Windows on my desktop... *shudder*. But I'd say there's almost no reason to have a dedicated Unix workstation on the desktop today: commodity hardware running Linux or *BSD can do the job better, cheaper, and more flexibly. Heck, Sun will now sell you an Opteron-based x86_64 workstation with Linux support if you want. And it costs about 1/2 what their SPARC boxes do.
I think the iPhone has potential. As a device, it's extremely well-designed. The multitouch interface is certainly something new and could redefine the way people interact with mobile devices. They've clearly put a lot of top-of-the-line hardware into it; the demo Jobs gave of things like Cover Flow on the iTunes portion of it is proof enough of that, and every smartphone -- or product that pretends to be a smartphone, anyway -- should have 802.11 these days.
As a product, ehhhh. Who are they selling to? Certainly not Joe Consumer -- who has $499 to throw away on a 4GB iPod, even if it also happens to be a cellphone and web browser? For $499, I want a device that matches up to what the iPhone ACTUALLY is -- a handheld OS X device. But no, Apple had to go and lock the machine down and give a bunch of phony excuses for it, when all it really comes down to is "Jobs wants to be emperor of 'his' product." So all of the potential that it had as a handheld OS X machine -- the potential that they actually touted with all of the talk about it "running OS X" and "having Cocoa" -- will go to waste. No GNU tools. No open-source software. Bah.
OK, maybe we agree more than disagree.:)
I think so!
I mean... I'd love to have an attractive handheld computer/media/communications device with a touchscreen and expertly-designed user interface. $500? Maybe if I wasn't a grad student anymore, yeah I'd pay that.
But the closed-source thing just squanders its potential *completely*. When are consumer electronics makers gonna pull their heads out of their asses and notice that hardware sells BETTER when it's open??? Why do Linksys routers sell so well? Because people change the open source Linux firmware and add all kinds of nifty things to use them as web servers, robotics controllers, home automation, etc.
My cell phone is totally locked down, and as a result I use it only as a phone. I'll never pay for a better phone, because it will similarly be locked down. No matter how cool a phone I get, Verizon will still want to charge me $2.50 for a ringtone. WTF? I'd rather buy a better PC, where I can use the hardware to its full potential with Linux.
What I'm excited about is the OpenMoko. Now THAT will be a revolutionary phone. I expect the US carriers will try to keep it off their networks. There will be a back-and-forth game between the carriers and the hackers, à la PSP or Xbox. Wheee, what fun:-)
And I thought the iPhone was gonna be a flop... but now that John Dvorak says so, I *must* be wrong.
The man is a giant windbag of nerd conspiracy theories and technical misunderstanding. Why do the slashdot eds. slurp up all of his moonshot predictions?
In the meantime, you can get an AMD X2 3600 (65nm Brisbane core) for around $85 now, and probably in the $60 range well before these new products hit. The high end is one thing, but who actually buys it? Very few. I don't know anyone that bought the latest FX when it came out, or an Opteron 185 when they hit, or even a Core2Duo Extreme. All this does is push the mid- to low-end products down, and a ~$65 dual core that overclocks like crazy (some are getting 3 GHz on stock volts on the 3600) would seem like the best price/performance to me.
Thank you... I was waiting for someone to point this out! AMD's prices at the low-end of dual-core are *amazing* these days. I just bought an X2 3600 Brisbane for $79 from Newegg. For only $40 more you can combo it with one of two ECS mobos, your choice of ATI Radeon Xpress 11000 or NVidia GeForce 6100 onboard. I'm on a grad-student budget and want to try out dual-core and especially hardware virtualization. I run Linux, do a lot of compiling, and want to run Windows EDA tools under Linux... so this is the ticket for me. $120 for the AMD X2 and mobo vs. about $220 for the cheapest Intel C2D and mobo is a no-brainer.
There's a pretty interesting matchup between the latest AMD and Intel processors from Techreport a few days ago (conclusions at http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q1/cpus/index.x? pg=14). Basically, Intel tears AMD a new one in the upper half of the range, but AMD holds its own in the mid-to-low range.
Although Intel clearly has a big lead in fabrication technology and yield right now, I feel that AMD has demonstrated better "instincts" and innovation over the last few years:
* their 64-bit instruction set has been a huge hit (especially with the Linux crowd where we don't have to wait years for proprietary software to be recompiled) * on-die memory controller * HyperTransport * they started concentrating on dual-core while Intel was still lost playing the clock speed game
So I feel pretty good about buying a cheap X2 with the confidence that there will be something even cooler to put in that AM2 socket in a year or two.
Nehalem is a river in Oregon--where the chip will be fabbed--and it means "rivers" in Hebrew--many of Intel's recent processors have been designed in Israeli.
The name is a pretty nice nod to cross-continental cooperation, I'd say. I'm still an AMD fanboy though, dangit.
I had to send my HP laptop in for warranty repair once. They told me the hard drive would be formatted, which I refused. After a few minutes of me basically telling them, "look, the AC socket is physically broken and it has nothing to do with software", they agreed that I could send in the computer without the hard drive.
I suggest that anyone having hardware issues with a computer running Linux do the same: explain to the tech support people that the issue has nothing to do with software, and that you've diagnosed the specific hardware failure. Make sure they let you send in the computer for repair without the hard drive included, so you won't have them hassling you about what OS you run.
Yeah, this reminded me of FPGAs too... a bit less configurable though. Of course, you could accomplish that with FPGAs as well, by having a system that combined an ASIC processor and support chips with an FPGA or two.
FPGAs are very exciting, versatile, and fun, so I don't want to knock them.
This "innovation" doesn't seem to be anything all that new, other than the efficiency and performance numbers, which I find hard to believe.
I work in a physics lab and use acetone all the time, and it's true that acetone "feels" even cooler than ethanol as it evaporates. By the way, I wouldn't handle pure acetone with bare hands!
Ethanol is probably more practical than acetone since it's cheap,it's already produced in huge quantities and distributed to fueling stations, and it's less toxic.
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Actually, ordinary car batteries can work fine for this task. My grandpa lives on a farm and has a stack of 5 car batteries wired up to an inverter to power the pump for the well water, in case of an outage.
I guess with a hybrid car you could use it as a generator as well... converting gas into electricity. But of course you can do that with any old car, just grab 12V from the battery and hook up your inverter to get AC. But that's noisy and inefficient as hell
"Allowing" the IETab Firefox extension is not "somewhat progressive"
It's MS-Windows only, and can be exploited by nearly all of the security flaws that plague IE.
Darn it! That's what I thought :-(
According to the wikipedia page on the X2, the E4 and E6 steppings were for Socket 939 and didn't support AMD-V. While the F2, F3, and G1 steppings support it, but are socket AM2 only.
It doesn't seem like there's any deep reason why AMD couldn't offer the latter steppings in a Socket 939 form... but I guess they've moved on and now concentrate on the Socket AM2 exclusively.
I upgraded my work computer with an X2 3600+, ECS mobo with ATI radeon graphics, and 1gb DDR2 RAM for $170 a couple of weeks ago. Now I'd like to do the same at home, but I'd like to keep my current mobo and RAM.
But as far as I can find, none of the Socket 939 X2's support hardware virtualization, which is a biggie for me as I do a lot of cross-platform development.
Are there *any* socket 939 X2's that support hardware virt?
Ditto with Debian and Ubuntu and probably every other 64-bit distro
Frankly, I got a 64-bit CPU cause I wanted to *use* it. It gives me extra registers (important for x86 code!) and access to more memory. And the warm smug feeling of knowing that all my Linux apps run 64-bit native *years* before the same can be said of Windows.
This is certainly a noticeable effect. Though so many apps use so much memory, I imagine there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to improve memory usage without worrying too much about 64bit vs 32bit.
Oh, I don't deny the similarities between them, which you've appropriately recognized.
It's just that--in terms of actual business practices--there's no valid reason to conflate them. Trademark disputes, copyright disputes, and patent disputes should all be discussed and handled in different ways. I've never heard anyone publicly refer to their own "intellectual property" rights except as a threat.
As a linguistics nerd, I totally frickin' disagree. Pidgin is an awesome name, since it refers to a language that develops to allow people to communicate who don't share a common language. IM with GAIM is a lot like that, since it supports different protocols with a unifying interface. And because IM-speak often seems to exhibit the simplified grammar of many English-lexified pidgins.
Well, I often have a problem with that too. People of other religions often assume that *my* religion requires a kind of faith similar to theirs, and that it affects my life in similar ways to theirs. When in fact different religions often have strikingly different effects on the societies in which they exist: for example, it's often said Islam encourages a confluence of spiritual and temporal authority, while in most Christian-majority societies this has rarely been the case since the Reformation. But I digress...
A lot of FLOSS people despise the term "intellectual property" since it's often used intentionally to confuse people, by encouraging the belief that trademarks, copyrights, and patents give the same kinds of monopoly rights. When in fact, this is far from true.
For example, Linus Torvalds holds the TRADEMARK for the name "Linux". But he does not hold the copyright for most of the code in the Linux kernel, since most of it has been written by other individuals and companies. And IBM may hold the patents on some algorithms used in the Linux kernel, but again this does not mean they hold the copyright for all of the code. None of this is a problem as long as no one is suing anyone.
But then we get ass clowns like SCO or Microsoft who come along and make threats about how "Linux is infringing on our 'intellectual property' rights." That frightens a lot of users needlessly, and it's complete bullshit unless they care to specify exactly what rights they are talking about: trademark, copyright, or patents. All have COMPLETELY different repercussions. The FSF are totally right to deplore the use of the term "intellectual property" in my opinion. It is meaningless except as FUD.
Actually, you have the chronology backwards! Originally the official "AIM" was called "AOL Instant Messenger". And GAIM was called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger" in its infancy.
AOL complained, so GAIM changed its name to... "GAIM". This is the crucial point: GAIM was officially called GAIM before AIM was officially called AIM. Surprising but true. But AOL then trademarked the name AIM and has aggressively/ass-hattedly defended that trademark. Trademark law is weird... unlike patents, coming up with it first doesn't matter. And once you have a trademark, you must aggressively defend it in order to keep it.
AOL may have been total dicks in this case, but its not clear that the law gives them a lot of wiggle room in this case. GAIM is a very prominent competing product with a similar name, and so it's quite likely that they could've lost their trademark right without taking this action.
In any case, despite the name change, rest assured that Pidgin will continue to be awesome, and the official AIM client will continue to be a big piece of crap.
Right on. I think AMD has an impressive string of innovations under its belt... thrashing the Pentium III/IV, AMD64, HyperTransport, virtualization. But Intel's superior fabrication juggernaut is just beating the crap out of them these days. Personally I am very happy with the current situation as I got a dual-core Athlon 64 for just $70 from Newegg while the cheapest Core 2 Duo is about $130, and the benchmarks are pretty close.
But I am pretty sure that AMD is hemorrhaging cash in the current price war, and I agree that they'd better have something pretty impressive up their sleeves. I'm eagerly awaiting quad-core A64s, and I'm enthusiastic about the GPU+CPU Fusion products and the DTX form factor for building small highly-integrated systems, but I'm not sure if those will be big money-makers or not.
You're right. I guess that I recoil against the prices Apple charges for their high-end stuff since I've never understood the appeal of some of the extras they provide. Why does anyone who needs a $3000 workstation *care* about that fancy anodized case? And why do you need custom heat spreaders on the RAM? And the fact that they'll sell you an 8-core box with only 1gb of RAM suggests that the Mac Pro is marketed as much for its "wow" factor as for the kinds of practical use that it might see.
My understanding is that HyperTransport gives AMD an edge in terms of multi-core systems, explaining the popularity of 2/4/8-way Opteron systems. I wonder if Apple will ever build AMD-based systems... for me AMD has always been a better value proposition since about 1999, and perhaps that's part of why I see the Intel Macs as overpriced.
Okay, if your employer has nothing better to do than *take away* a monitor which was *discarded* because you haven't filled out the proper paperwork... then gosh, that sounds like a ship sinking under the weight of a bureaucracy.
I'm in academia, but I worked at a software company for a couple years and if I felt that something could make me more productive, I got it. Especially if it's something like a monitor that costs practically nothing in the grand scheme of things for even a smallish company.
Uh... why? It'll be up to 30% slower (for purely CPU-bound tasks) when running a single unparallelizable task, but up to 40% faster (for purely CPU-bound tasks) when running 8 threads at once. Presumably, you won't buy an 8-core system *or* a 4-core system unless you're gonna be doing a lot of number-crunching, image rendering, etc... the kinds of things that are highly parallelizable.
Okay... double the cost of the case and RAM, I'm still ahead, right? Though, frankly, that case I linked to is what I would consider "heavy and sturdy". Apple doesn't sell Mac Pro cases alone, but I doubt they spend >$100 on 'em.
Sorry sorry sorry. Indeed, I missed the 3 GHz part. I didn't mean to troll but clearly I did, since I was looking at the lower speed grades of quad-core Xeon. In any case, you *can* get an 4x2 Xeon setup for about $2k... same cache and Clovertown core, but 1.86 GHz processors. For anyone who still cares, these are the components I was looking at on Newegg:
2 x Intel Xeon E5320 Clovertown 1.86GHz Socket 771 Active or 1U Processor Model BX80563E5320A - Retail 2 x $485
2 x Kingston 512MB 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) ECC Fully Buffered Server Memory Model KVR667D2S8F5/512 - Retail 2 x $64.99
SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DAL-E-O Dual Socket 771 Intel 5000X ATX Server Motherboard - Retail $389.99
APEVIA MX-PLEASURE-NW-BK Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case ATX 500W dual fan w/ automatic fan speed control Power Supply - Retail $99.99
SAMSUNG 18X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write, LightScribe Technology Black SATA Model SH-S183L - OEM $41.99
SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD252KJ 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $64.99
EVGA 256-P2-N436-LX GeForce 7300GS 256MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail $69.99
Targus PAKB010U Black USB Wired Standard Keyboard - Retail $19.99
Microsoft N71-00007S Black 3 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB Wired Optical Wheel Mouse - OEM $9.99
Total: $1796.91, with free shipping. I think you could go cheaper on a lot of the parts... mobo, case, mouse, kbd, DVD burner, but this looks like a solid system to me. It includes everything the Mac Pro does except an OS. Personally, I'd run Ubuntu Linux x86_64 on this bad boy, but even if you go with Windows Ultimate ($399 at retail?), you've got the whole system for $2200k. That's a 2x4 1.86 GHz Xeon setup still for less than the base price of the 2x2 Mac Pro.
Anyway, sorry for my trolling. As soon as the 3 GHz 4-core Xeons go on retail sale, we can work out the price for this Mac-Pro-clone with those instead.
Yes, these are exactly the kinds of things I was referring to. Buying commodity parts does not mean buying "junk" or "toy" parts...
I think Apple wants to maintain the illusion that their computers aren't built out of the same made-in-Taiwan/China commodity parts as everyone else's.
How about the ridiculous price of said hardware? I went on Newegg and spec'd out components similar to the "entry-level" $4000 Mac Pro... for about $2000.
Sure, the hardware is really cool. But if you don't want/like/need Mac OS, you can get it waaaay cheaper elsewhere. This is Apple's typical strategy for its high-end stuff: sell hardware that's so dazzling and cutting-edge that customers forget how much they're getting ripped off for the Apple brand image.
I absolutely agree about Solaris. I worked at a speech synthesis software company about 5 years ago. Linux desktops (GNOME, KDE) were in their infancy, but they were positively cutting-edge compared to our Solaris boxes. CDE is a dog. We had to use ugly, expensive, external SCSI drives on the Solaris boxes, and few of them had CD drives, which were a nightmare to configure. The whole non-commodity-hardware thing really put a damper on my enthusiasm for Unix boxes. The only thing I liked about the Sun boxes were the Type 5 keyboards... I still pine for my Sun keyboard whenever I'm in emacs.
I wouldn't willingly switch from Unix/Linux to Windows on my desktop... *shudder*. But I'd say there's almost no reason to have a dedicated Unix workstation on the desktop today: commodity hardware running Linux or *BSD can do the job better, cheaper, and more flexibly. Heck, Sun will now sell you an Opteron-based x86_64 workstation with Linux support if you want. And it costs about 1/2 what their SPARC boxes do.
I think so!
I mean... I'd love to have an attractive handheld computer/media/communications device with a touchscreen and expertly-designed user interface. $500? Maybe if I wasn't a grad student anymore, yeah I'd pay that.
But the closed-source thing just squanders its potential *completely*. When are consumer electronics makers gonna pull their heads out of their asses and notice that hardware sells BETTER when it's open??? Why do Linksys routers sell so well? Because people change the open source Linux firmware and add all kinds of nifty things to use them as web servers, robotics controllers, home automation, etc.
My cell phone is totally locked down, and as a result I use it only as a phone. I'll never pay for a better phone, because it will similarly be locked down. No matter how cool a phone I get, Verizon will still want to charge me $2.50 for a ringtone. WTF? I'd rather buy a better PC, where I can use the hardware to its full potential with Linux.
What I'm excited about is the OpenMoko. Now THAT will be a revolutionary phone. I expect the US carriers will try to keep it off their networks. There will be a back-and-forth game between the carriers and the hackers, à la PSP or Xbox. Wheee, what fun
And I thought the iPhone was gonna be a flop... but now that John Dvorak says so, I *must* be wrong.
The man is a giant windbag of nerd conspiracy theories and technical misunderstanding. Why do the slashdot eds. slurp up all of his moonshot predictions?
Thank you... I was waiting for someone to point this out! AMD's prices at the low-end of dual-core are *amazing* these days. I just bought an X2 3600 Brisbane for $79 from Newegg. For only $40 more you can combo it with one of two ECS mobos, your choice of ATI Radeon Xpress 11000 or NVidia GeForce 6100 onboard. I'm on a grad-student budget and want to try out dual-core and especially hardware virtualization. I run Linux, do a lot of compiling, and want to run Windows EDA tools under Linux... so this is the ticket for me. $120 for the AMD X2 and mobo vs. about $220 for the cheapest Intel C2D and mobo is a no-brainer.
There's a pretty interesting matchup between the latest AMD and Intel processors from Techreport a few days ago (conclusions at http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q1/cpus/index.x
Although Intel clearly has a big lead in fabrication technology and yield right now, I feel that AMD has demonstrated better "instincts" and innovation over the last few years:
* their 64-bit instruction set has been a huge hit (especially with the Linux crowd where we don't have to wait years for proprietary software to be recompiled)
* on-die memory controller
* HyperTransport
* they started concentrating on dual-core while Intel was still lost playing the clock speed game
So I feel pretty good about buying a cheap X2 with the confidence that there will be something even cooler to put in that AM2 socket in a year or two.
Yeah, the dual meaning of Nehalem is pretty cool.
Nehalem is a river in Oregon--where the chip will be fabbed--and it means "rivers" in Hebrew--many of Intel's recent processors have been designed in Israeli.
The name is a pretty nice nod to cross-continental cooperation, I'd say. I'm still an AMD fanboy though, dangit.
I had to send my HP laptop in for warranty repair once. They told me the hard drive would be formatted, which I refused. After a few minutes of me basically telling them, "look, the AC socket is physically broken and it has nothing to do with software", they agreed that I could send in the computer without the hard drive.
I suggest that anyone having hardware issues with a computer running Linux do the same: explain to the tech support people that the issue has nothing to do with software, and that you've diagnosed the specific hardware failure. Make sure they let you send in the computer for repair without the hard drive included, so you won't have them hassling you about what OS you run.
Yeah, this reminded me of FPGAs too... a bit less configurable though. Of course, you could accomplish that with FPGAs as well, by having a system that combined an ASIC processor and support chips with an FPGA or two.
FPGAs are very exciting, versatile, and fun, so I don't want to knock them.
This "innovation" doesn't seem to be anything all that new, other than the efficiency and performance numbers, which I find hard to believe.
I work in a physics lab and use acetone all the time, and it's true that acetone "feels" even cooler than ethanol as it evaporates. By the way, I wouldn't handle pure acetone with bare hands!
Ethanol is probably more practical than acetone since it's cheap,it's already produced in huge quantities and distributed to fueling stations, and it's less toxic.