I generally code for 172 hours a week. (It helps if you constantly travel West at a slow rate. Yeah, every few weeks, you'll lose 23 hours, but that's your vacation time.)
At least in Oregon's system, it takes two photos. One just before you enter the intersection (it assumes you're going to run it based on measured speed,) and one when you are already in the intersection. The photos have the date/time stamp, as well as a "light red for x seconds" note.
In addition, each monitored intersection also has a video camera that records 10 seconds before, and 10 seconds after the still cameras trip. This way, there is indisputable video evidence of your run, as well. (Yes, I've gotten one. I tried to fight it under the grounds that what I did wasn't technically "failure to obey a traffic control device", but rather "improper right turn on red"; only to find out that under Oregon law, they carry the exact same penalty...)
And there's the Republican's (again, a generalization,) second favorite argument: slippery slope.
If we let gays have civil unions, soon we'll have 8-year-olds marrying their dogs!
Slippery slope is another red herring.
Your numbers for share are also wrong. According to an anti-tax group The Tax Foundation, the top 10% pull in 48.05% of the income, and pay 71.22% of the taxes.
However, those in the 6% to 10% range actually pay *LESS* than the average! They make 10.61% of the income, and only pay 10.58% of the taxes. That's about as even as it gets. Obviously, from there down, each income bracket pays a smaller percentage effective tax rate. So it's really only the top 5% that "pay unfairly."
This also only covers "Adjusted Gross Income", or "what we could con the IRS into thinking we make." Many, if not most, people whose AGI is over the "6% mark" have sources of income that don't fall under income taxes. Thus, their actual increase in net worth each year is likely much higher.
I do fully agree, however, that *LOCAL* cost of living should be taken into account. Someone living in Kokomo, Kentucky or Detroit, Michigan will have "poverty line" drawn much lower than someone living in San Francisco or New York City. (Although I do think 'metropolitan statistical area' should be the basis. Yes, it costs a lot more to live in Manhattan than Detroit; but if you work in NYC, you can choose to live in Hoboken, and even the extra cost of transportation isn't enough to increase away the significantly lower cost of living. Likewise with San Francisco vs. Berkeley.)
GPL does not mean they have to give their product away for free to anyone who asks.
It means that whatever pieces of code they use that are under the GPL, they cannot block re-distribution of; and they must provide "access to code to customers who ask". *NOT* to "anyone". And they are free to distribute said code however they want. They can do it by insisting that the customer pay $9.95 shipping to receive just the GPL code on a CD-ROM, AND insist that only paid customers can even place this order.
But, once a customer has received their CD-ROM, they can't do anything to stop that customer from putting an ISO of that CD-ROM on the 'net.
Finally, they can encumber their code with trademark-encumbered pieces for which a user would have to acquire a trademark license, (at least, in GPL 2,) at whatever cost they want. Yes, the customer could remove the trademarked bits and redistribute under another name all they want. But that does prevent "straight out of the box" redistribution.
My latest three desktops have all come with a line-in, as have my latest two notebooks, including a netbook. Only my wife's MacBook doesn't have Line In, of my most recently purchased hardware.
Also, there's the Griffin iMic, a quite cheap device with line in. (Switchable between mic-level and line-level in, even.)
The Republican party (as a generalization,) feeds on "this will hurt anyone who wants to get ahead in life." They make it seem like taxes that target the rich will hurt everyone, because it will cut down on the desire to be rich.
Bollocks. When a tax, by definition, only affects the top 2%, it ONLY AFFECTS THE TOP 2%! The fact that the "no taxes" people use this as a red herring to convince people that "If you desire to be rich, you should vote against this" is ridiculous. If you desire to be rich, you should be happy in the fact that you now have to pay a little more taxes. It's proof that you're rich! It's not like someone who makes $5 million a year is going to be taxed so heavily, they take home less than someone who makes $25,000 a year. THEY'LL STILL MAKE MILLIONS! You show me a single person who makes $5 mil a year who spends the same percentage of their net income on physical products as someone who makes $25k a year. There are very few "rich" people who put as high a percentage of their income "back into the economy" as poor people. Poor people HAVE to spend a large percentage of their money on food, housing, etc. For a rich person, the required "reinvest in the economy" percentage is far lower. Yes, the raw dollars is higher, but that same income figure, spread among a larger number of middle-class persons, will put a higher dollar value back in to the economy.
P.S. I'm not a fan of unfair taxes, by any means, I'm all for a "graduated flat tax", where people below the poverty line pay no income tax, and it ramps up to a flat amount (whatever amount that has to be to cover the government expenditures,) at a certain point, say, 2x poverty line. No deductions, no 'bulk credits' that 90% of the population qualifies for every year, no loopholes, no untaxed income. ALL income is taxed at the same rate, as long as you are above 2x poverty line. (Or whatever value makes sense.) Short term credits that are meant to promote certain activities into the mainstream, are just fine, as long as they are VERY targeted, and temporary. If you want people to buy houses instead of rent, you make a short term credit, like the one that is about to expire. If you want people to invest in alternative energy, you make an expiring credit, like the one that is in effect for hybrid cars. You use short-term, targeted credits to "shift the herd", not permanent ones that turn into entitlements to do it. Two dogs can shift a herd just as well as tens of miles of fencing.
I hope nobody points out that not-olympic-sponsor Nike mentions not just olympic athletes, but the Olympics themselves on one of their web pages: Nike Training - Winter Olympics
(Strange, as far as I can tell, the Vancouver Olympic Committee has contracted with Nike to provide material for the games. So VOC is paying Nike, not Nike paying any OC.)
It's called "Apple avoids pissing off repressive regimes that happen to control all of their manufacturing plants."
It's one thing for a website that has zero physical presence in China to thumb their nose at the regime. At worst, Google gets blocked for a day or two; or a small web operator gets permanently banned.
It's completely separate for a company with a physical presence, and lots of money tied up on business there. Apple (even more than Google and Yahoo,) has to do business in China; they CAN'T not follow Chinese law. It would be business suicide.
It would be great if Apple moved their manufacturing back to the U.S.; and was willing to risk losing all their China-based sales, but they *ARE* a business. They are a publicly-traded business, even. If Apple threw away the Chinese market just to make a political statement, the board of directors would be thrown out in a New York Second by the stockholders.
I agree. "Netbook" had a defined market. It was an ultra-portable that could do basic computing, cheaply.
Now companies are just sticking an Atom in what used to be termed a "subnotebook" and calling it a netbook. There was already a market for these, don't blur the line!
To me, the only thing I want them to add to a netbook is battery life. Keep the ultra-low-end CPU. Keep the 512 MB of RAM. Keep the stripped-down Linux. Keep the 8-9" screen. Just add progressively more power-saving hardware, and, if miniaturization of other components allows, increase the battery while keeping the weight down.
Basically, as long as it can play standard def Flash video, I don't care about the specs. Give me an Eee PC 1000HD with an SSD running Ubuntu Netbook remix or Chrome OS; that's what a netbook should be.
My current netbook is an HP Mini 1000 with 16 GB SSD running HP's "Mi" Linux. The only thing I don't like about it is the battery life. If I need more power on the go, I don't want to compromise with slightly more powerful Atom, or a slightly more powerful GPU, or a 160 GB hard drive; I want a full high-power laptop, with a quad-core, good GPU, and 500 GB hard drive.
Yes, there is middle ground, but don't make a system that is really a 'low-end laptop', and call it a netbook. Especially when you're charging a price premium for it. This new Eee has lower battery life, worse processor, worse GPU, smaller HD, and the same weight as many mid-range laptops, for more money!
And you're screwing over the nonprofit in the process! (Okay, somewhere like SA or Goodwill will just turnaround and sell it to some OTHER schmuck for $1.00, I'm talking about other nonprofits.)
My sister worked for a nonprofit that got a donation of a large color laser printer back when they were still new. It had been heavily used, and three of the four toners were nearly empty, and two of the four imaging drums needed replacing as well (the other two were at less than 25% life, to boot ) Yes, the donation earned the donator a hefty tax break; but if they actually wanted to USE the donation, they were going to have to spend over $500 in consumables right up front; with another $300 soon thereafter.
Considering they had an "$80 per 5000 pages" inkjet already, spending $500 to get the laser up and running was just ridiculous.
Really, why would the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Test Center give a rat's ass about net neutrality?
(aka: Watch when you use acronyms. U.S.-centric acronyms are one thing,/. readers are used to it, but non-U.S. acronyms will be completely mis-construed by a vast majority of/.ers.)
Why are SLI and CrossFire a different case? Intel is just using the CPU as another GPU. And in some cases, the CPU is a *FASTER* GPU than the actual GPU. So why not use it? When Larrabee comes out, things may finally be different, but Intel hasn't had a competitive GPU since they launched the very first AGP GPU. If games see real-world benefit from using the CPU as a GPU, why not use it in a benchmark, too? It shows what "Intel graphics" can really do, regardless of where the actual graphics processing is being done.
So when Intel releases their Nehalem integrated-graphics chipsets, where the GPU is on the same die as the CPU, will this still be an issue? It's using the same "chip", after all...
No, that's the way Intel optimizes. It's the same technique nVidia and AMD use for SLI and CrossFire. They have a list of executables that are known to benefit from certain SLI/CrossFire techniques, so when that executable is run, the driver activates a certain SLI/CrossFire mode. Intel is just using it to switch from GPU rendering to CPU rendering. (Which one could argue is a form of SLI/CrossFire.)
They are just using the fastest mode for the given executable. Yeah, in a perfect world, Intel (and nVidia and AMD, for that matter,) would implement some heuristics to pick the rendering mode based on factors determined live during gameplay; but it's probably cheaper for them to pay an intern to just play the games in each mode, and determine which is better.
If they are 'allowed' to do it for actual games, why aren't they allowed to do it for benchmarks, to show that certain techniques they use actually improve performance?
Yeah, in this case, it may be misleading, but any gamer that takes 3DMark scores as the end-all-be-all of graphics performance deserves what they get. (And, of course, really, how many people who are even CONSIDERING Intel integrated graphics are even going to care about the 3DMark score? They are, at most, going to care about how it performs in real games; and if you're using Intel integrated graphics, you likely don't even care too much about that.)
Trains can be an excellent means of transportation. But, as AC post 29622359 points out, the current system is broken.
If you have a well-integrated public transit system already in place; with the train station is a well-served, centrally located place in the city; on BOTH ends, then it would be great. Taking a train between Seattle and Portland is great. Both cities have excellent public transit systems, and both cities' main train stations are located in well-served areas of downtown. If a bullet got put in place between Seattle and Portland; the few dozen daily airline flights between the two cities would probably drop to just a handful.
Obviously, a good rail system is not a replacement for driving, when having your own car at the other end is important; but a properly designed and run rail system CAN be a truly cost-competitive replacement for airline travel in many instances.
The problem is that there is now no way we will get a properly designed and run rail system. Maybe in short spurts (The Pacific Northwest corridor, the Californian corridor, etc.) But not nationwide. We will *NEVER* see a transcontinental bullet. Hell, I think we'd see the pie-in-the-sky (or under-the-ocean, as the case may be,) trans-Pacific underwater vacuum-tube rail line before we see a transcontinental high-speed one.
Intel can't stop OEMs from doing anything. They can withhold advertising subsidies, and they can refuse to sell directly, that's it. That's all that they can do. (For example, when they told OEMs to stop making big-screen netbooks with Atoms, most OEMs cowed; but a few just gave Intel the finger, and gave up the benefits.)
Intel doesn't want OEMs using nVidia's "ION platform", either. But they can't stop it. Anyone can go buy Atom processors from a distributor, and put them in whatever they want. They may not qualify for the advertising and branding licensing, so can't put Intel's shiny "Atom" sticker on the case, but they can make the computer. (Look at Apple. They don't qualify for "Centrino" branding, but do you think they care?)
The Atom 330 should work just fine on the 945GSE chipset. It would probably be easier to make that work than to force the chipset to recognize two physically separate chips. Which is why I think this is bogus.
(Yes, I'm replying to myself instead of separating into replying to three of the other people that replied to my TLP.)
Why wouldn't they just have used the Atom 330? Yes, it's a "nettop" processor, rather than a "netbook" processor; but it's natively dual-core, supports 64-bit, and would use less power than two physical separate N270s.
Not to mention, it would have been a *LOT* cheaper for them to develop than to "modify Intel's 945 chipset", as they claim to have done. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm going to have to call BS on this. If they literally "worked for six months", on this, it wouldn't be cheap. Claiming that this is cheaper than just throwing in a dual-core Celeron is bogus. (Atom may be ultra-low-power, and ultra-cheap; but it is still slower than a Celeron.)
Slashdot Mirror
Slackers.
I generally code for 172 hours a week. (It helps if you constantly travel West at a slow rate. Yeah, every few weeks, you'll lose 23 hours, but that's your vacation time.)
The company I work for makes to different pieces of security/monitoring software that can both detect this.
It's not exactly a new thing...
I don't know if your grandparents were "mod" or not. Mine were, although they were a bit old for the 'proper' mod culture timing.
At least in Oregon's system, it takes two photos. One just before you enter the intersection (it assumes you're going to run it based on measured speed,) and one when you are already in the intersection. The photos have the date/time stamp, as well as a "light red for x seconds" note.
In addition, each monitored intersection also has a video camera that records 10 seconds before, and 10 seconds after the still cameras trip. This way, there is indisputable video evidence of your run, as well. (Yes, I've gotten one. I tried to fight it under the grounds that what I did wasn't technically "failure to obey a traffic control device", but rather "improper right turn on red"; only to find out that under Oregon law, they carry the exact same penalty...)
Yup, you're right. I was misremembering the "any third party" part, obviously. I thought that was a GPL v3-only thing.
C'mon... I'm not the only one that thought it.
And there's the Republican's (again, a generalization,) second favorite argument: slippery slope.
If we let gays have civil unions, soon we'll have 8-year-olds marrying their dogs!
Slippery slope is another red herring.
Your numbers for share are also wrong. According to an anti-tax group The Tax Foundation, the top 10% pull in 48.05% of the income, and pay 71.22% of the taxes.
However, those in the 6% to 10% range actually pay *LESS* than the average! They make 10.61% of the income, and only pay 10.58% of the taxes. That's about as even as it gets. Obviously, from there down, each income bracket pays a smaller percentage effective tax rate. So it's really only the top 5% that "pay unfairly."
This also only covers "Adjusted Gross Income", or "what we could con the IRS into thinking we make." Many, if not most, people whose AGI is over the "6% mark" have sources of income that don't fall under income taxes. Thus, their actual increase in net worth each year is likely much higher.
I do fully agree, however, that *LOCAL* cost of living should be taken into account. Someone living in Kokomo, Kentucky or Detroit, Michigan will have "poverty line" drawn much lower than someone living in San Francisco or New York City. (Although I do think 'metropolitan statistical area' should be the basis. Yes, it costs a lot more to live in Manhattan than Detroit; but if you work in NYC, you can choose to live in Hoboken, and even the extra cost of transportation isn't enough to increase away the significantly lower cost of living. Likewise with San Francisco vs. Berkeley.)
GPL does not mean they have to give their product away for free to anyone who asks.
It means that whatever pieces of code they use that are under the GPL, they cannot block re-distribution of; and they must provide "access to code to customers who ask". *NOT* to "anyone". And they are free to distribute said code however they want. They can do it by insisting that the customer pay $9.95 shipping to receive just the GPL code on a CD-ROM, AND insist that only paid customers can even place this order.
But, once a customer has received their CD-ROM, they can't do anything to stop that customer from putting an ISO of that CD-ROM on the 'net.
Finally, they can encumber their code with trademark-encumbered pieces for which a user would have to acquire a trademark license, (at least, in GPL 2,) at whatever cost they want. Yes, the customer could remove the trademarked bits and redistribute under another name all they want. But that does prevent "straight out of the box" redistribution.
Just look at Red Hat.
My latest three desktops have all come with a line-in, as have my latest two notebooks, including a netbook. Only my wife's MacBook doesn't have Line In, of my most recently purchased hardware.
Also, there's the Griffin iMic, a quite cheap device with line in. (Switchable between mic-level and line-level in, even.)
And therein lies the problem.
The Republican party (as a generalization,) feeds on "this will hurt anyone who wants to get ahead in life." They make it seem like taxes that target the rich will hurt everyone, because it will cut down on the desire to be rich.
Bollocks. When a tax, by definition, only affects the top 2%, it ONLY AFFECTS THE TOP 2%! The fact that the "no taxes" people use this as a red herring to convince people that "If you desire to be rich, you should vote against this" is ridiculous. If you desire to be rich, you should be happy in the fact that you now have to pay a little more taxes. It's proof that you're rich! It's not like someone who makes $5 million a year is going to be taxed so heavily, they take home less than someone who makes $25,000 a year. THEY'LL STILL MAKE MILLIONS! You show me a single person who makes $5 mil a year who spends the same percentage of their net income on physical products as someone who makes $25k a year. There are very few "rich" people who put as high a percentage of their income "back into the economy" as poor people. Poor people HAVE to spend a large percentage of their money on food, housing, etc. For a rich person, the required "reinvest in the economy" percentage is far lower. Yes, the raw dollars is higher, but that same income figure, spread among a larger number of middle-class persons, will put a higher dollar value back in to the economy.
P.S. I'm not a fan of unfair taxes, by any means, I'm all for a "graduated flat tax", where people below the poverty line pay no income tax, and it ramps up to a flat amount (whatever amount that has to be to cover the government expenditures,) at a certain point, say, 2x poverty line. No deductions, no 'bulk credits' that 90% of the population qualifies for every year, no loopholes, no untaxed income. ALL income is taxed at the same rate, as long as you are above 2x poverty line. (Or whatever value makes sense.) Short term credits that are meant to promote certain activities into the mainstream, are just fine, as long as they are VERY targeted, and temporary. If you want people to buy houses instead of rent, you make a short term credit, like the one that is about to expire. If you want people to invest in alternative energy, you make an expiring credit, like the one that is in effect for hybrid cars. You use short-term, targeted credits to "shift the herd", not permanent ones that turn into entitlements to do it. Two dogs can shift a herd just as well as tens of miles of fencing.
I hope nobody points out that not-olympic-sponsor Nike mentions not just olympic athletes, but the Olympics themselves on one of their web pages:
Nike Training - Winter Olympics
(Strange, as far as I can tell, the Vancouver Olympic Committee has contracted with Nike to provide material for the games. So VOC is paying Nike, not Nike paying any OC.)
It's called "Apple avoids pissing off repressive regimes that happen to control all of their manufacturing plants."
It's one thing for a website that has zero physical presence in China to thumb their nose at the regime. At worst, Google gets blocked for a day or two; or a small web operator gets permanently banned.
It's completely separate for a company with a physical presence, and lots of money tied up on business there. Apple (even more than Google and Yahoo,) has to do business in China; they CAN'T not follow Chinese law. It would be business suicide.
It would be great if Apple moved their manufacturing back to the U.S.; and was willing to risk losing all their China-based sales, but they *ARE* a business. They are a publicly-traded business, even. If Apple threw away the Chinese market just to make a political statement, the board of directors would be thrown out in a New York Second by the stockholders.
I agree. "Netbook" had a defined market. It was an ultra-portable that could do basic computing, cheaply.
Now companies are just sticking an Atom in what used to be termed a "subnotebook" and calling it a netbook. There was already a market for these, don't blur the line!
To me, the only thing I want them to add to a netbook is battery life. Keep the ultra-low-end CPU. Keep the 512 MB of RAM. Keep the stripped-down Linux. Keep the 8-9" screen. Just add progressively more power-saving hardware, and, if miniaturization of other components allows, increase the battery while keeping the weight down.
Basically, as long as it can play standard def Flash video, I don't care about the specs. Give me an Eee PC 1000HD with an SSD running Ubuntu Netbook remix or Chrome OS; that's what a netbook should be.
My current netbook is an HP Mini 1000 with 16 GB SSD running HP's "Mi" Linux. The only thing I don't like about it is the battery life. If I need more power on the go, I don't want to compromise with slightly more powerful Atom, or a slightly more powerful GPU, or a 160 GB hard drive; I want a full high-power laptop, with a quad-core, good GPU, and 500 GB hard drive.
Yes, there is middle ground, but don't make a system that is really a 'low-end laptop', and call it a netbook. Especially when you're charging a price premium for it. This new Eee has lower battery life, worse processor, worse GPU, smaller HD, and the same weight as many mid-range laptops, for more money!
It works, it really does!
(Google just turned on revenue sharing for my most popular YouTube video.)
And you're screwing over the nonprofit in the process! (Okay, somewhere like SA or Goodwill will just turnaround and sell it to some OTHER schmuck for $1.00, I'm talking about other nonprofits.)
My sister worked for a nonprofit that got a donation of a large color laser printer back when they were still new. It had been heavily used, and three of the four toners were nearly empty, and two of the four imaging drums needed replacing as well (the other two were at less than 25% life, to boot ) Yes, the donation earned the donator a hefty tax break; but if they actually wanted to USE the donation, they were going to have to spend over $500 in consumables right up front; with another $300 soon thereafter.
Considering they had an "$80 per 5000 pages" inkjet already, spending $500 to get the laser up and running was just ridiculous.
Come on, nVidia... Stop with the re-branding already.
This is just a die-shrunk 9800 GT, which was just a die-shrunk 8800 GT.
Yes, it's a great card for $100. But stop misleading people into thinking it's the same tech as the GTX 260-285.
(They did the same with the "GTS 250", which is just a re-badged 9800 GTX, which was just a re-badged 8800 GTS.)
Yeah, someone obviously had never used those. I loved all the buttons.
Really, why would the U.S. Army's Cold Regions Test Center give a rat's ass about net neutrality?
(aka: Watch when you use acronyms. U.S.-centric acronyms are one thing, /. readers are used to it, but non-U.S. acronyms will be completely mis-construed by a vast majority of /.ers.)
eh, I had no problems with the latest versions of both iTunes and Google Desktop (which includes Google Toolbar.)
Maybe they had older versions?
Heck, I had more compatibility issues upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard.
Why are SLI and CrossFire a different case? Intel is just using the CPU as another GPU. And in some cases, the CPU is a *FASTER* GPU than the actual GPU. So why not use it? When Larrabee comes out, things may finally be different, but Intel hasn't had a competitive GPU since they launched the very first AGP GPU. If games see real-world benefit from using the CPU as a GPU, why not use it in a benchmark, too? It shows what "Intel graphics" can really do, regardless of where the actual graphics processing is being done.
So when Intel releases their Nehalem integrated-graphics chipsets, where the GPU is on the same die as the CPU, will this still be an issue? It's using the same "chip", after all...
No, that's the way Intel optimizes. It's the same technique nVidia and AMD use for SLI and CrossFire. They have a list of executables that are known to benefit from certain SLI/CrossFire techniques, so when that executable is run, the driver activates a certain SLI/CrossFire mode. Intel is just using it to switch from GPU rendering to CPU rendering. (Which one could argue is a form of SLI/CrossFire.)
They are just using the fastest mode for the given executable. Yeah, in a perfect world, Intel (and nVidia and AMD, for that matter,) would implement some heuristics to pick the rendering mode based on factors determined live during gameplay; but it's probably cheaper for them to pay an intern to just play the games in each mode, and determine which is better.
If they are 'allowed' to do it for actual games, why aren't they allowed to do it for benchmarks, to show that certain techniques they use actually improve performance?
Yeah, in this case, it may be misleading, but any gamer that takes 3DMark scores as the end-all-be-all of graphics performance deserves what they get. (And, of course, really, how many people who are even CONSIDERING Intel integrated graphics are even going to care about the 3DMark score? They are, at most, going to care about how it performs in real games; and if you're using Intel integrated graphics, you likely don't even care too much about that.)
Well, my Seattle public transit knowledge is a few years (*cough* decades *cough*) old; has it gone downhill that badly?
Trains can be an excellent means of transportation. But, as AC post 29622359 points out, the current system is broken.
If you have a well-integrated public transit system already in place; with the train station is a well-served, centrally located place in the city; on BOTH ends, then it would be great. Taking a train between Seattle and Portland is great. Both cities have excellent public transit systems, and both cities' main train stations are located in well-served areas of downtown. If a bullet got put in place between Seattle and Portland; the few dozen daily airline flights between the two cities would probably drop to just a handful.
Obviously, a good rail system is not a replacement for driving, when having your own car at the other end is important; but a properly designed and run rail system CAN be a truly cost-competitive replacement for airline travel in many instances.
The problem is that there is now no way we will get a properly designed and run rail system. Maybe in short spurts (The Pacific Northwest corridor, the Californian corridor, etc.) But not nationwide. We will *NEVER* see a transcontinental bullet. Hell, I think we'd see the pie-in-the-sky (or under-the-ocean, as the case may be,) trans-Pacific underwater vacuum-tube rail line before we see a transcontinental high-speed one.
Intel can't stop OEMs from doing anything. They can withhold advertising subsidies, and they can refuse to sell directly, that's it. That's all that they can do. (For example, when they told OEMs to stop making big-screen netbooks with Atoms, most OEMs cowed; but a few just gave Intel the finger, and gave up the benefits.)
Intel doesn't want OEMs using nVidia's "ION platform", either. But they can't stop it. Anyone can go buy Atom processors from a distributor, and put them in whatever they want. They may not qualify for the advertising and branding licensing, so can't put Intel's shiny "Atom" sticker on the case, but they can make the computer. (Look at Apple. They don't qualify for "Centrino" branding, but do you think they care?)
The Atom 330 should work just fine on the 945GSE chipset. It would probably be easier to make that work than to force the chipset to recognize two physically separate chips. Which is why I think this is bogus.
(Yes, I'm replying to myself instead of separating into replying to three of the other people that replied to my TLP.)
Why wouldn't they just have used the Atom 330? Yes, it's a "nettop" processor, rather than a "netbook" processor; but it's natively dual-core, supports 64-bit, and would use less power than two physical separate N270s.
Not to mention, it would have been a *LOT* cheaper for them to develop than to "modify Intel's 945 chipset", as they claim to have done. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm going to have to call BS on this. If they literally "worked for six months", on this, it wouldn't be cheap. Claiming that this is cheaper than just throwing in a dual-core Celeron is bogus. (Atom may be ultra-low-power, and ultra-cheap; but it is still slower than a Celeron.)