The Ghz Athlon sells for around $500 now. See, for example, www.astak.com, a reliable vendor which is presently selling the 1Ghz Athlon Classic and Thunderbird (both) for $475. Both are OEM of course, but still...
And after. You forgot after. The Apple release is probably going to be "more" stable at first, but anything 100 developers can make, a million users can and will break. That's why it's still a big deal that the Linux version was out first/simultaneously.
...or for other types of information. Download.com and mp3.com are dead meat if broadband takes off.
Don't minimize the impact of other services as well. If broadband takes off, I'm sure that someone will find a way to fill up all that extra bandwidth. Services which send a small amount of data consistently (ICQ/AIM, Quake and other online games) might change their protocols to use that extra bandwidth. And god forbid high quality streaming media starts to become commonplace on the web.
Re:Supercheap Linux system w/firewall
on
Linux In A Box
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps power consumption is an issue? (Especially if you live in California)
The reason is simple. If you already have a super-7 board, this is the cheapest upgrade available. FPU performance is weak, but 600Mhz +3D-NOW! isn't exactly shabby. It's "good enough". And of course, the performance on business apps and all those other things most people do on their computer 90-100% of the time will really fly.
And god forbid you get too close to a coral reef! That's the problem with fast underwater travel - there are too many things to hit, at least compared to air travel.
Can we agree on the fact that the Wiliamette doesn't exist yet?
First, it take full advantage of SSE (which is 128bit) to be able to multiply 4 floats in one operation.
Unfortunately, the software it's running doesn't. Look how much ISSE/3D-NOW! software is out there right now. And as you point out later...
Willamette is faster per clock for SIMD, slightly slower for regular FP, but the clock ticks twice as often.
The "clock ticks twice as often" part refers to the core "integer unit" only, not the fp unit. The "ALU" literally is the integer processing unit. The fp unit is what will get the most press, though, and may well be slower than in the Athlon. The "integer" and SIMD performance will both be excellent, I agree. But the fp performance will sell any new chip, since we already have more than enough integer performance and SIMD only has limited support. Unfortunately, Williamette seems to fall down in that particular area. But who knows for sure, right? What I really want to know is how the Williamette deals with its 20-stage pipeline. Williamette seems to be designed for high clock speeds, which is the #1 selling feature for CPUs. But there's got to be a major penalty for mispredicted branches with a pipeline that long!
A) AMD is in serious trouble. It still has the sheer clock speed advantage, but doesn't have a next-gen architecture to compete with Willamete.
Arguably, they do, and it's called the Athlon. The Williamette isn't out yet, and its specs are a not necessarily impressive (e.g. only a dual-pipelined FPU, compared to the three FPU pipelines of the Athlon). Of course, it could turn out to be an excellent preformer, but unless it's substantially better than the Athlon, AMD need not worry so much.
If Williamette is slower or equal than the Athlon clock for clock, then AMD has no problem (obviously). If it's a bit faster, there's still no problem, since AMD is used to selling its chips a lower price and still making a profit. That's what it's doing right now. If Williamette is far better than the Athlon, then AMD has a problem.
Even then, AMD's Sledgehammer is a wildcard. Although it's a 64-bit chip, it is supposed to have good 32-bit compatibility (unlike the Itanium, for example). I wouldn't count on it to save AMD in the 32-bit market, but even if Williamette kicks ass, AMD may have an ace up its sleeve.
Again, though, AMD's problems start when Williamette is released, and only if it's a good architencture.
The prevailing attitude on Slashdot seems to be that there's no reason at all why women aren't in technical jobs other than "they just don't want them."
I suspect such an attitude could only fly in a few places, such as slashdot. The fact that so many people don't believe that society molds people along broad lines determined by that society's culture could only be belived by a group of people who haven't spent much time participating in that culture. And where I grew up, that's what a "nerd" was -- an antisocial person.
I just felt that I had to say that. Yes, it's probably a troll. Sorry. But by god, it's true. Nobody "just wants to," ever. Their choices are based very much on the values of the society in which they are raised. It's the same reason why baseball is popular in the US and soccer isn't, and why it's the opposite almost everywhere else. Not every American likes baseball, but it's a part of our culture, and thus more Americans like it. The same thing is possible when it comes to gender roles (e.g. for women in choosing between a "technology" career and, say, a "medical" career). And note also that I'm talking about statistical trends here, not absolutes of the "no woman can make it in this field" type.
It seems as though RHAT has taken the trouble to render its TCP/IP stack into a multi-threaded model, rather than the forked model I understand it used to be. This was identified as the primary deficiency in the previous benchmarks.
Heh, lots of factors have been "identified" as the primary decifiency. Ask most people and they'll say it was the Linux SMP code. That was sort of the "popular explanation at the time", anyway.
There are other possibilities too. Later tests from c't magazine also showed Linux losing in tests when using two ethernet cards but winning the same tests when using one (Mindcraft I used four, and I think Mindcraft II was the same). This could also be the difference, especially considering how NT is supposed to have excellent I/O performance, but be rough on the CPU (with all those extra cycles used up for the GUI and the hardware abstraction layer, and so on). There's also the question of using an "off the shelf" Linux versus a high-end-specific version. Perhaps regular old RedHat would be more fairly compared with Windows 98/ME (in terms of both price and intended market) and RetHat's lesser-known "Enterprise Edition" should be compared to Windows NT/2000.
Why is it that people have such a hard time believing that men and women are "wired up" as much by nurture as by nature? Seriously, how exactly do you know that women weren't persuaded by their culture to move into other careers?
It's really annoying to argue this point in an environment in which posts refer to people who ask important questions like this as "feminazis" (Score: 5). But come on, really! I'm not saying that women are poor and downtrodden. I'm not ignoring decades of work towards gender equality. But I am saying that perhaps upbringing makes a difference. That could be good, bad, neither, whatever... I don't care. But why the hell do some people fail to acknowledge the possibility?
Maybe because it implies that, as much as everyone wants to believe in free will, our decisions are ultimately, very heavily, influenced (though not determined entirely) by our environment and experiences?
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a middle-class white liberal (although I don't really like the terms "liberal" or "conservative").
You realize, of course, that society "molding" people in a certain direction is no better than "self-righteous people who want to mold the world in their own image", right? I mean, it's one thing to go around being self-righteous, but it's entirely another to be aware of the biases which already exist in society for various reasons (e.g. religious-based prejudices, racism, sexism, or just plain-old inerta) and work to counteract them. Actually, I probably shouldn't say that these are entirely different, since you do have to be a bit self-righteous to be confident enough to stand up to anything, especially a well-entrenched social belief. But still, let's not be blind to the fact that there's an institutionalized form of "molding the world" out there. It's one thing to try to mold the world out of arrogance, but it's another to try to balance out the molding which other people or "society" (i.e. lots and lots of other people) are doing.
One of his claims has already been proven true.
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
If the discussion on Slashdot is any sign, then at least one of Jon Katz's claims has been proven true. Katz said:
There were the crackpot critics spouting obligatory warnings and alarms, but they were given short shrift amidst all of the gee-whiz hype...
And sure enough, look at the response on SlashDot. Almost everyone seems to be of the opinion "Change happens, so deal with it".
I suspect that most of these people are too young to remember the Cold War. Can a new technology just plain-old be dangerous. Yes! Unfortunately, that lesson is lost of most SlashDot readers. As Jon Katz said, 15-year-olds who master Linux boxes think they understand technology itself. How true. There are way too many posters on SlashDot who claim to understand technology, then claim that knowing the human genome is harmless, or is "just part of the usual process of technological advancement". Anyone who can't even think of a way in which "normal technological advancement" can be harmful doesn't understand technology. They probably don't think their computers are responsible for pollution either.
Can you imagine a world in which every country had access to the bomb? It's bad enough that India and Pakistan have the bomb, given that they're (for all practical purposes) at war. But imagine if every country in the Middle East had the bomb. Nuclear Winter would have happened by now. So why hasn't it? Simple. The dangers of the atomic bomb were recognized immediately and restrictions on the spread and use of the technology were immediately and strictly enforced. At first, the technology simply was kept a national secret by every nation which had it. Nowadays, there are restrictions on the movement of both entire bombs, and on weapon-grade plutonium.
Now think about the potential dangers associated with knowledge of the human genome. Forget theoretical questions about whether or not breeding "perfect" humans is a good thing or not. Consider instead the deadly chamicals and viruses which could be created (as weapons) by a society which knows everything about the human genome (even moreso if retrovirus technology continues to advance). If you know exactly what you're attacking, you can attack more effectively. Or more subtly, which is even more scary.
So, how exactly do we deal with this? Restrict chemical/viral weapons? Perhaps we can limit more obvious uses of chemical weapons. But unlike weapon-grade plutonium, I doubt we can restrict the use of the tools which are needed to develop such weapons. Then when some country develops a virus which breeds in all people, but only attacks people with certain gene combinations (say, ones which are common in a target country), we've got problems.
I suspect that many people will ignore the above as just a hypothetical possibility. "The technology doesn't exist" and "If we can create the disease, we can create the cure" will probably be used as arguments for ignoring what I said. Although I suspect it's easier to create a super-effective carcinogen than to create a cure for cancer, I suppose it's fair to say that my concerns are speculation. But even then, we still have to deal with all of the subtler effects of knowledge of the human genome. As one example, consider that discrimination now has a new, "scientific" grounding. In the extreme version, this new technology likely to inspire the next Hitler. On a lesser level, concerns have already been raised that DNA analysis could be used to discriminate in areas from employment ("Sure you're experienced, but you don't have the following high-intelligence related genes...") to insurance ("I know you have no accidents, but this DNA analysis says your manual dexterity is relatively poor..."). God forbid if immigration got their hands on DNA analysis (The phrase "We don't want your type" would take on a whole new meaning...) Of course, at this point most people are probably shouting "Nature vs. Nurture". Reality check time: most people don't understand the difference. And even if they did, that doesn't mean that nature isn't still a factor. As long as they're concerned with probabilities, not certainty, then discrimination on the basis of DNA makes sense.
I hope people will really think about this issue. Basically, Jon Katz is right. Any new technology is generally hyped up early on in its life, with concern for the negative consequences coming in later. The automobile was thought to be a great thing at first. Only later did we realize the negative effects of all that pollution (not to mention the way we had to redesign our cities and even our lifestyles around cars). Nuclear power seems like a good idea. "So cheap it won't even be metered" they said. But radioactive waste and Three-Mile Island type disasters were not brought up as concerns... at first. So please, let's think this genome thing through now. Knowledge of the human genome could be both as destructive as the A-bomb and as lifesytle-altering as the automobile. So let's think about it now, not just say "Hey, technologial change is normal, so let's just let it proceed as it will".
And remember, the important thing is to avoid discussing what we're going to do about it. Be smarter by not thinking! Control your fate by letting others control you!
Perhaps we should distinguish between symbols and logos. If I wear the United States flag on my shirt, am I wearing a "logo"? Probably not. A flag is a symbol of a nation, but calling it a "logo" sounds wrong. But patriotic types will still wear stars-and-stripes patterned clothes as evidence of their patriotism.
Any symbol can be used as "a shorthand for what the wearer/user wants others to think of them". But not all symbols are logos. Is the source code of DeCSS a logo? No, but if it appears on someone's shirt it tells you something about what the wearer wants you to think of them. The Red Hat "Shadowman" is a logo, but I'm not so sure that Tux is, and certainly any old stuffed pengiun is not. But if that stuffed penguin is sitting on top of my monitor at work, it's a symbol, and it's meaningful, without being a logo.
Be careful when bashing logos. Don't trash symbolism in general just because some companies try to market themselves as a brand and use their symbols to represent that brand.
Don't underestimate the power of understanding exactly what's going on. The problem has just been announced. The fix is here now. What the fix involves is well documented. Sound anything like the release of an MS patch to NT?
Not to disagree with you about Tom's bias, but you do realize that the "new" BX133 is just the old BX chipset running at a 133Mhz FSB, right? Since the BX chipset doesn't technically support the 133 Mhz FSB at all, and Intel has been trying to phase it out for a long time, it is in fact something of an exception, even if it runs just fine.
Exactly! Irregardless of what Scott Miller says now, the consumer is bound by the exact wording of that license.
Ironically, this means that every time I buy a game, I become bound by some new legal contract. Thus I find it particularly ironic that Scott Miller's lawyer thinks it's funny that "everyone thinks they understand the law". I mean, we have to at least interpret the law all the time to understand these legal contracts everyone keeps trying to bind us with, right? Okay, so we're not lawyers, but we are defined as "PURCHASER" by that licensing agreement there, so we'd better be prepared to use whatever legal knowledge we have. Even if this particular licensing agreement is harmless, making fun of people's attempts to understand a legally binding contract which they are bound by is, quite frankly, sickening.
Or perhaps Scott Miller thinks we should just trust whatever legalese we happen to be handed without thinking about it. Licensing agreements are in fact intended to apply to the average consumer. Perhaps there should be a consumer protection law which requires them to be written more clearly:)
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about?
The Ghz Athlon sells for around $500 now. See, for example, www.astak.com, a reliable vendor which is presently selling the 1Ghz Athlon Classic and Thunderbird (both) for $475. Both are OEM of course, but still...
And after. You forgot after. The Apple release is probably going to be "more" stable at first, but anything 100 developers can make, a million users can and will break. That's why it's still a big deal that the Linux version was out first/simultaneously.
...or for other types of information. Download.com and mp3.com are dead meat if broadband takes off.
Don't minimize the impact of other services as well. If broadband takes off, I'm sure that someone will find a way to fill up all that extra bandwidth. Services which send a small amount of data consistently (ICQ/AIM, Quake and other online games) might change their protocols to use that extra bandwidth. And god forbid high quality streaming media starts to become commonplace on the web.
Perhaps power consumption is an issue? (Especially if you live in California)
The reason is simple. If you already have a super-7 board, this is the cheapest upgrade available. FPU performance is weak, but 600Mhz +3D-NOW! isn't exactly shabby. It's "good enough". And of course, the performance on business apps and all those other things most people do on their computer 90-100% of the time will really fly.
This is one of two reasons why computers aren't shaped like wheels.
0.55" diagonal? That's not a digital viewfinder, it's more like a digital mood ring:
White: Aiming at something
Black: Not aiming at something
Red: Camera unhappy, replace batteries
And god forbid you get too close to a coral reef! That's the problem with fast underwater travel - there are too many things to hit, at least compared to air travel.
The Williamette is a LOT faster than an Athlon.
Can we agree on the fact that the Wiliamette doesn't exist yet?
First, it take full advantage of SSE (which is 128bit) to be able to multiply 4 floats in one operation.
Unfortunately, the software it's running doesn't. Look how much ISSE/3D-NOW! software is out there right now. And as you point out later...
Willamette is faster per clock for SIMD, slightly slower for regular FP, but the clock ticks twice as often.
The "clock ticks twice as often" part refers to the core "integer unit" only, not the fp unit. The "ALU" literally is the integer processing unit. The fp unit is what will get the most press, though, and may well be slower than in the Athlon. The "integer" and SIMD performance will both be excellent, I agree. But the fp performance will sell any new chip, since we already have more than enough integer performance and SIMD only has limited support. Unfortunately, Williamette seems to fall down in that particular area. But who knows for sure, right? What I really want to know is how the Williamette deals with its 20-stage pipeline. Williamette seems to be designed for high clock speeds, which is the #1 selling feature for CPUs. But there's got to be a major penalty for mispredicted branches with a pipeline that long!
A) AMD is in serious trouble. It still has the sheer clock speed advantage, but doesn't have a next-gen architecture to compete with Willamete.
Arguably, they do, and it's called the Athlon. The Williamette isn't out yet, and its specs are a not necessarily impressive (e.g. only a dual-pipelined FPU, compared to the three FPU pipelines of the Athlon). Of course, it could turn out to be an excellent preformer, but unless it's substantially better than the Athlon, AMD need not worry so much.
If Williamette is slower or equal than the Athlon clock for clock, then AMD has no problem (obviously). If it's a bit faster, there's still no problem, since AMD is used to selling its chips a lower price and still making a profit. That's what it's doing right now. If Williamette is far better than the Athlon, then AMD has a problem.
Even then, AMD's Sledgehammer is a wildcard. Although it's a 64-bit chip, it is supposed to have good 32-bit compatibility (unlike the Itanium, for example). I wouldn't count on it to save AMD in the 32-bit market, but even if Williamette kicks ass, AMD may have an ace up its sleeve.
Again, though, AMD's problems start when Williamette is released, and only if it's a good architencture.
The prevailing attitude on Slashdot seems to be that there's no reason at all why women aren't in technical jobs other than "they just don't want them."
I suspect such an attitude could only fly in a few places, such as slashdot. The fact that so many people don't believe that society molds people along broad lines determined by that society's culture could only be belived by a group of people who haven't spent much time participating in that culture. And where I grew up, that's what a "nerd" was -- an antisocial person.
I just felt that I had to say that. Yes, it's probably a troll. Sorry. But by god, it's true. Nobody "just wants to," ever. Their choices are based very much on the values of the society in which they are raised. It's the same reason why baseball is popular in the US and soccer isn't, and why it's the opposite almost everywhere else. Not every American likes baseball, but it's a part of our culture, and thus more Americans like it. The same thing is possible when it comes to gender roles (e.g. for women in choosing between a "technology" career and, say, a "medical" career). And note also that I'm talking about statistical trends here, not absolutes of the "no woman can make it in this field" type.
It seems as though RHAT has taken the trouble to render its TCP/IP stack into a multi-threaded model, rather than the forked model I understand it used to be. This was identified as the primary deficiency in the previous benchmarks.
Heh, lots of factors have been "identified" as the primary decifiency. Ask most people and they'll say it was the Linux SMP code. That was sort of the "popular explanation at the time", anyway.
There are other possibilities too. Later tests from c't magazine also showed Linux losing in tests when using two ethernet cards but winning the same tests when using one (Mindcraft I used four, and I think Mindcraft II was the same). This could also be the difference, especially considering how NT is supposed to have excellent I/O performance, but be rough on the CPU (with all those extra cycles used up for the GUI and the hardware abstraction layer, and so on). There's also the question of using an "off the shelf" Linux versus a high-end-specific version. Perhaps regular old RedHat would be more fairly compared with Windows 98/ME (in terms of both price and intended market) and RetHat's lesser-known "Enterprise Edition" should be compared to Windows NT/2000.
Why is it that people have such a hard time believing that men and women are "wired up" as much by nurture as by nature? Seriously, how exactly do you know that women weren't persuaded by their culture to move into other careers?
It's really annoying to argue this point in an environment in which posts refer to people who ask important questions like this as "feminazis" (Score: 5). But come on, really! I'm not saying that women are poor and downtrodden. I'm not ignoring decades of work towards gender equality. But I am saying that perhaps upbringing makes a difference. That could be good, bad, neither, whatever... I don't care. But why the hell do some people fail to acknowledge the possibility?
Maybe because it implies that, as much as everyone wants to believe in free will, our decisions are ultimately, very heavily, influenced (though not determined entirely) by our environment and experiences?
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a middle-class white liberal (although I don't really like the terms "liberal" or "conservative").
You realize, of course, that society "molding" people in a certain direction is no better than "self-righteous people who want to mold the world in their own image", right? I mean, it's one thing to go around being self-righteous, but it's entirely another to be aware of the biases which already exist in society for various reasons (e.g. religious-based prejudices, racism, sexism, or just plain-old inerta) and work to counteract them. Actually, I probably shouldn't say that these are entirely different, since you do have to be a bit self-righteous to be confident enough to stand up to anything, especially a well-entrenched social belief. But still, let's not be blind to the fact that there's an institutionalized form of "molding the world" out there. It's one thing to try to mold the world out of arrogance, but it's another to try to balance out the molding which other people or "society" (i.e. lots and lots of other people) are doing.
If the discussion on Slashdot is any sign, then at least one of Jon Katz's claims has been proven true. Katz said:
There were the crackpot critics spouting obligatory warnings and alarms, but they were given short shrift amidst all of the gee-whiz hype...
And sure enough, look at the response on SlashDot. Almost everyone seems to be of the opinion "Change happens, so deal with it".
I suspect that most of these people are too young to remember the Cold War. Can a new technology just plain-old be dangerous. Yes! Unfortunately, that lesson is lost of most SlashDot readers. As Jon Katz said, 15-year-olds who master Linux boxes think they understand technology itself. How true. There are way too many posters on SlashDot who claim to understand technology, then claim that knowing the human genome is harmless, or is "just part of the usual process of technological advancement". Anyone who can't even think of a way in which "normal technological advancement" can be harmful doesn't understand technology. They probably don't think their computers are responsible for pollution either.
Can you imagine a world in which every country had access to the bomb? It's bad enough that India and Pakistan have the bomb, given that they're (for all practical purposes) at war. But imagine if every country in the Middle East had the bomb. Nuclear Winter would have happened by now. So why hasn't it? Simple. The dangers of the atomic bomb were recognized immediately and restrictions on the spread and use of the technology were immediately and strictly enforced. At first, the technology simply was kept a national secret by every nation which had it. Nowadays, there are restrictions on the movement of both entire bombs, and on weapon-grade plutonium.
Now think about the potential dangers associated with knowledge of the human genome. Forget theoretical questions about whether or not breeding "perfect" humans is a good thing or not. Consider instead the deadly chamicals and viruses which could be created (as weapons) by a society which knows everything about the human genome (even moreso if retrovirus technology continues to advance). If you know exactly what you're attacking, you can attack more effectively. Or more subtly, which is even more scary.
So, how exactly do we deal with this? Restrict chemical/viral weapons? Perhaps we can limit more obvious uses of chemical weapons. But unlike weapon-grade plutonium, I doubt we can restrict the use of the tools which are needed to develop such weapons. Then when some country develops a virus which breeds in all people, but only attacks people with certain gene combinations (say, ones which are common in a target country), we've got problems.
I suspect that many people will ignore the above as just a hypothetical possibility. "The technology doesn't exist" and "If we can create the disease, we can create the cure" will probably be used as arguments for ignoring what I said. Although I suspect it's easier to create a super-effective carcinogen than to create a cure for cancer, I suppose it's fair to say that my concerns are speculation. But even then, we still have to deal with all of the subtler effects of knowledge of the human genome. As one example, consider that discrimination now has a new, "scientific" grounding. In the extreme version, this new technology likely to inspire the next Hitler. On a lesser level, concerns have already been raised that DNA analysis could be used to discriminate in areas from employment ("Sure you're experienced, but you don't have the following high-intelligence related genes...") to insurance ("I know you have no accidents, but this DNA analysis says your manual dexterity is relatively poor..."). God forbid if immigration got their hands on DNA analysis (The phrase "We don't want your type" would take on a whole new meaning...) Of course, at this point most people are probably shouting "Nature vs. Nurture". Reality check time: most people don't understand the difference. And even if they did, that doesn't mean that nature isn't still a factor. As long as they're concerned with probabilities, not certainty, then discrimination on the basis of DNA makes sense.
I hope people will really think about this issue. Basically, Jon Katz is right. Any new technology is generally hyped up early on in its life, with concern for the negative consequences coming in later. The automobile was thought to be a great thing at first. Only later did we realize the negative effects of all that pollution (not to mention the way we had to redesign our cities and even our lifestyles around cars). Nuclear power seems like a good idea. "So cheap it won't even be metered" they said. But radioactive waste and Three-Mile Island type disasters were not brought up as concerns... at first. So please, let's think this genome thing through now. Knowledge of the human genome could be both as destructive as the A-bomb and as lifesytle-altering as the automobile. So let's think about it now, not just say "Hey, technologial change is normal, so let's just let it proceed as it will".
And remember, the important thing is to avoid discussing what we're going to do about it. Be smarter by not thinking! Control your fate by letting others control you!
Perhaps we should distinguish between symbols and logos. If I wear the United States flag on my shirt, am I wearing a "logo"? Probably not. A flag is a symbol of a nation, but calling it a "logo" sounds wrong. But patriotic types will still wear stars-and-stripes patterned clothes as evidence of their patriotism.
Any symbol can be used as "a shorthand for what the wearer/user wants others to think of them". But not all symbols are logos. Is the source code of DeCSS a logo? No, but if it appears on someone's shirt it tells you something about what the wearer wants you to think of them. The Red Hat "Shadowman" is a logo, but I'm not so sure that Tux is, and certainly any old stuffed pengiun is not. But if that stuffed penguin is sitting on top of my monitor at work, it's a symbol, and it's meaningful, without being a logo.
Be careful when bashing logos. Don't trash symbolism in general just because some companies try to market themselves as a brand and use their symbols to represent that brand.
Don't underestimate the power of understanding exactly what's going on. The problem has just been announced. The fix is here now. What the fix involves is well documented. Sound anything like the release of an MS patch to NT?
Although you realize that the large complainer to do-er ratio may also have something to do with it?
P.S. Political Correctness Rocks! (Of course, I'm just saying that because everyone on Slashdot says it, right?)
Not to disagree with you about Tom's bias, but you do realize that the "new" BX133 is just the old BX chipset running at a 133Mhz FSB, right? Since the BX chipset doesn't technically support the 133 Mhz FSB at all, and Intel has been trying to phase it out for a long time, it is in fact something of an exception, even if it runs just fine.
Exactly! Irregardless of what Scott Miller says now, the consumer is bound by the exact wording of that license.
:)
Ironically, this means that every time I buy a game, I become bound by some new legal contract. Thus I find it particularly ironic that Scott Miller's lawyer thinks it's funny that "everyone thinks they understand the law". I mean, we have to at least interpret the law all the time to understand these legal contracts everyone keeps trying to bind us with, right? Okay, so we're not lawyers, but we are defined as "PURCHASER" by that licensing agreement there, so we'd better be prepared to use whatever legal knowledge we have. Even if this particular licensing agreement is harmless, making fun of people's attempts to understand a legally binding contract which they are bound by is, quite frankly, sickening.
Or perhaps Scott Miller thinks we should just trust whatever legalese we happen to be handed without thinking about it. Licensing agreements are in fact intended to apply to the average consumer. Perhaps there should be a consumer protection law which requires them to be written more clearly