And having worked in both a call center (albeit dial-in, not telemarketing/dial-out) and writing spam filters, let me tell you that the latter is DEFINITELY the better job!
Doubt it. The PDA in question in that article is based around the AMD Alchemy line of MIPS chips. The Geode processor that AMD is buying from National Semi is based around an x86 chip.
AMD chips have not generally run any hotter than their Intel counterparts. Occasionally one of the other might consume more power, but they tend to switch order. Right now Intel is quite firmly in the "hot seat" so to speak. Top-end P4's are consuming over 80W of power, while the top AthlonXP chips are only using about 65W of power and the Opteron uses less (though it's exact power consumption is currently undocumented). Back when the Athlon was competing with the PIII, the Athlon consumed more power. Before that the AMD K6-2/K6-III chips consumed less power than comperable PII/Celeron chips, however the K6 chip consumed more power than the Pentium MMX.
In all though, I'm really not sure what AMD is after with this purchase. They already have a line of embedded x86 processors (which DO have a very good use in the embedded market in that they are by far the easiest chips to develop for and can often use a lot of existing software instead of requiring companies to develop their own). They might be looking to take some of the video/sound/etc technology embedded in the Geode chip and add it to their own embedded line. However, AMD has mostly discontinued their line of embedded x86 chips in favor of their new Alchemy line of MIPS chips. Maybe their buying the Geode as a sort of replacement for their old embedded x86 chips but kind of starting that whole division again from scratch? Or maybe they're hoping to glue some of the technology from the Geode onto the Alchemy chips? I don't know.
AMD seems to be finally starting to take chipset design somewhat seriously, plus they finally got a decent third party chipset manufacturer a couple years ago when nVidia signed on. I don't think that they need to make motherboards themselves, but I do believe that they should contract one of the Taiwanese companies to make AMD-branded motherboards.
As for AMD's naming scheme though, I rather like how they are doing things with the Opteron. It's VERY simple but also much more descriptive than using MHz/GHz to describe a chip. You have three numbers, first represents how many of these chips you can pack into a single system (1, 2 or 8), the second represents the core revision (currently only version '4', which I guess is a rather random number to start with), and the last represents relative performance within that core version (0, 2, 4 and now 6).
Personally I find that much easier and less confusing than just MHz. Take Intel's Pentium 4 for example. There were 3 different versions of the 2.0GHz P4 and now 3 different versions of the 2.4GHz chip. The 3.06GHz P4 is faster than one version of the 3.0GHz P4, but slower than the other version of the 3.0GHz P4. To differentiate all these different versions Intel just sticks letters like 'A', 'B' etc. at the end of the clock speed in a fairly random manner. For the 2.0GHz vs. 2.0A chip, the 'A' referred to having more cache and lower power consumption. For the 2.4GHz vs. 2.4B vs. 2.4C chips it's all bus speed (400MHz vs. 533MHz vs. 800MHz). Of course, Intel REALLY out did themselves back with the old 600MHz PIII, where they had no less than 6 different versions of the chip! What's worse, a socket PIII 600MHz chip was NOT the same chip as a Slot 1 PIII 600MHz, but rather the same as a PIII 600E.
Long story short, using MHz/GHz to name chips is VERY confusing in this day and age. Things like cache size, I/O bandwidth and memory bandwidth are of major importance, while clock speed plays only a limited role in many situations.
Uhh, how often have you actually tried getting different versions of Windows to talk to each other over SMB networks? It works... sometimes, sort of, as long as you don't do anything too tricky, or even some not-so-tricky things.
It's especially bad if you try to get older versions of Win9x to talk to WinNT/2K/XP systems and vice versa. Some things works, but a lot of things are either broken or require a bit of massaging to work.
Interestingly the original article mentioned problems with getting the Windows computers to see their Samba server in a network. I used to have horrible problems getting Windows computers to see other Windows computers in an SMB network when I was back at school (gotta love the residence networks!). Put simply, different versions of Windows often do not play nice with one another because the way that SMB works is constantly changing.
So regulation can regulate the truthfulness of spam -- it has to be truthful. False or misleading subject matter or headers or addresses are cause for regulation. Truthful spam is ok.
I would be quite happy if all false and misleading spam resulted in the sender being persecuted. That way the 1 truthful spam I get every year might slip through, but the other 10,000 would not.
I sometimes wonder about how everyone keeps calling for more laws against spam. We don't need more laws against spam, we need existing laws to be enforced! The FCC found that something like 1/3rd of all spam is fraudulent, which I KNOW is a very low estimate. We don't need to throw spammers in jail for spamming, throw them in jail for comitting fraud! Not to mention the spammers sending pornography to minors, those sending beasitality porn, selling illegal copies of software and those operating illegal unlicensed pharmacies. Arrest them and you've taken care of the bulk of spam.
The US government* needs a few high-profile cases where they make examples of people who send spam in order to send a message to others. When people see those selling crap by spam being thrown in jail, they're going to think twice before signing up to do the same thing.
* It probably is going to have to be the US government that does this, even though spam is a global problem. The simple fact of the matter is the VAST majority of spam (80-90% of it) originates from the US, and a lot of that ends up in the inbox's of American citizens. No other country in the world has anywhere near as much spam that starts and ends within their borders.
I used to work in the spam-filtering industry, so I saw a LOT of spam. I think my two favorites while I worked there were:
"I ride ze boat and I take it in ze poopah"
and
"Fill your pants with an elephantine schlong"
An "elephantine schlong"?! First off, who the hell uses the word "elephantine"?! Then to follow it up with the word "schlong"? This particular one was one of about 1000 possible permutations of subject lines for a particular penis-enlargement spam (ie they had a whole list of "Grow a", "Get a", "Please her with a", starting lines, followed by dozens of synonyms for "big", then dozens of slang words for "penis", and the mailer randomly built a subject line from them, common trick for spammers, though usually not too difficult to filter), but of all the possible permutations, the "elephantine schlong" was definitely the funniest IMO.
Of course, my favorite actual spam message of all time was the guy asking for a supplier of Acme flux capacitors and the mind warper. I haven't got a frigging clue how this spam ever made any money for anyone!
SCO loses the case when everyone figures out that the code was actually written by the open source community and then misappropriated by SCO, and the people responsible for all this bullshit are found guilty of fraud and sent to jail.
If the justice system worked properly, this is what would happen, though it won't happen. The people at SCO are crooks. They're stealing way more money than your petty theives stealing old ladies' purses, but they're never going to treated the same way. Why not? Because the US patent and copyright law system is BADLY broken and needs some serious overhauling (the rest of the world isn't doing much better, just ask the Austrailian guy who was granted a patent on the wheel).
Cable is definitely NOT always faster than ADSL, it depends entirely on the quality of service. Both cable and DSL connections can have an artificial speed cap set by whatever company provides the service. However, what's even more important is the upstream bandwidth of the provider. Even if cable offers you a theoretical 5Mbit/s connection vs. a 1.5Mbit/s DSL connection, the actual bandwidth could be higher for DSL if the cable companies upstream connection is saturated.
As for the big bandwidth question, that should be obvious! DSL and cable are all about getting the biggest pr0n pipe!
Tom isn't really an AMD or an Intel "fanboy", he's just a page hit fanboy with an ENORMOUS ego. He tends to write rather opinionated reviews/editorials that he knows will get page hits, truth and accuracy of the reviews be damned!
On the upside, since Tom hasn't really written much of anything on his own site for quite some time, so the quality has gone up slightly. The reviews still tend to be somewhat superficial and make ridiculous conclusions from very limited data (though Tom's Hardware is hardly alone in that regard!), but at least we don't have Tom's overactive ego budding in to trash any company that didn't give him the full, red-carpet and all, royal treatment the last time he went to visit.
Err, perhaps since MIPS/FLOPS become a totally meaningless measure of performance. Hell, it's just as bad as clock freqency!
Think of it, one CPU might be able to accomplish a given task in small number of instructions, possibly just a single instruction. Another CPU might require twice as many instructions to do the same thing, or more (think CISC vs. RISC here, though the difference between the two has become rather blurred).
What's perhaps more important is that chips these days have huge theoretical maximum MIPS/FLOPS, but they never come close to reaching those maximums in any real-world situations because of data starvation, ordering restrictions, branch mispredictions, etc. etc.
In short, MIPS doesn't mean anything. Clock speeds don't mean much, and model numbers are rather arbitrary. The only thing that really matters is how fast a given chip performs in the application(s) you need it to perform in, and how much that chip costs.
Just as a FWIW in case anyone is interested, the Hammer/Athlon64/Opteron processor core has a 12 stage pipeline. Longer then the Athlon's by two stages, but shorter than both the PowerPC 970 and the P4.
Of course, just counting pipeline stages and assuming a clock speed is absolutely ridiculous. Sure, a longer pipeline CAN make it easier to clock the chip higher, but that's certainly not a sure thing. Similarly, a shorter pipeline does NOT equate better per-clock performance. The length of the pipeline is only one of MANY factors that influence performance and clock speeds.
Well, as is often the case, what you should buy depends largely on what your planning on doing with the system. Your best bet is to start by figuring out what applications you spend the most time using and/or those applications that are running the slowest now and you want to run a bit speedier.
As a general system though, I'd start with either an AMD AthlonXP 2600 or 2800 (166/333MHz DDR bus speed), or a P4 2.4C or 2.6C (200/800MHz DDR bus speed) if Intel ever gets around to actually shipping those chips. The performance difference between the two chips is relatively small, and reall you're unlikely to notice the difference, though depending on what applications you run most one or the other may be somewhat faster.
For motherboard chipsets, with the Intel it's only a question of the i865 or i875, with the latter being a bit faster but somewhat more expensive. For the AMD chips, I'd definitely go for a board based around the nVidia nForce2 chipset. While VIA and SiS also make chipsets that would work for either of these systems, I've found the level of driver support to be better on Intel chipsets and better still on nVidia chipsets.
As for video cards, that depends again on what you're going to be doing with the system. The integrated video in the nForce2 chipset is very good and more than sufficient for most people, even if you enjoy the odd game every now and then. However if gaming is the main reason for buying the system, then you'll want something better. Here it comes down to a choice of ATI and nVidia, with each offering a pretty wide range of cards at a range of price points. I tend to favour nVidia again here, again because of the quality of their drivers, though ATI has improved significantly in this regard in the past little while.
After you get past that stuff though, you get to the important things, like memory and hard drive. For most people, these are the two areas that are going to have the biggest effect on how fast the computer "feels" when you're actually using it. Given the price of memory, I'd figure on 512MB for the majority of users, while some power users might want to go for 1GB of memory.
Hard drives are a tough one to follow, but get yourself a FAST one if at all possible. If you're like me though, you'll also want a QUIET hard drive, which is why I'd probably get either one of the new Seagate or IBM drives. www.storagereview.com is a great site for info about hard drives, and they're recommendations are probably more up to date/better then any info I could offer.
I'm currently working for a spam-filtering company, so I see a LOT of spam, and I've seen pretty much every trick in the book. Spammers generally can be broken down into three catagories. What you described would be the first catagory:
1. The amature. This is some guy who runs a mail server out of their basement. Mostly just hawking for their own business of running a fraudulant store (ie selling HGH or viagra), or some sort of scam to get users bank accounts or credit cards. These are DEAD EASY to block. Usually it takes all of about 10 seconds to block this sort of spammer. They might get a few thousand messages out in the first 10-20 minutes or so before their spam is spotted, but everything after that will be blocked.
2. The "legitimate business" spammer. These are the people who claim to be some sort of legitimate business. These are the people like 00Fun.com or Joke-of-the-day.com, as well as the people selling you wonderful new kitchen utensils, etc. They all claim that they are in full compliance with the law and that they only send to opt-in mailing lists. The trouble with these spammers is that it's sometimes hard to tell these people appart from some real legitimate businesses mass e-mails. What's worse, I've encountered many services where the spammer clearly used web harvesting software to get their addresses, but they also have had real users sign up to request the e-mails (mailing lists selling religion related products are the worst for this). When you figure out that these people are spammers though, it's usually dead-easy to block them.
3. The professional spammer who doesn't even bother hidding he fact that they're spamming. This is mostly porn, penis enlargement, loan sharks and HGH sellers. This is the only type of spam that is tough to block. These people will use every trick in the book to avoid spam filters. Given enough time, all of these messages can be blocked, the big question is just how much gets through before the filters are in place and how much time it will take to create those filters (often it's just not worthwhile to spend too much time on a single spam, even if it's not being filtered, simply because there's so much more than can easily be blocked).
The one upside to all of this is that, generally speaking the harder it is to block spam, the less likely it is that some moron is actually going to buy the stuff. While you would have to be REALLY incredibly dumb to buy HGH (Human Growth Hormone, aka snake oil) from a message with the subject: "Reverse the Effects of Aging!", you would have to be even stupider to buy HGH from a message with the Subject: "alksjdflksjdffhhfggf sjhdhfhfdsgfd Get Young!!!alosjdfalsdjfklsdjflsdfhhffg jdsjsdfd"
As a bit of a side note, I find that spam paints a REALLY sad picture of our society. Not so much so because there are people so lacking in morals that they think spamming is a legitimate business, but rather because some people actually BUY this crap! Honestly you have to be really REALLY dumb to buy anything from spam. It's blatently obvious that these products are not legitimate to anyone with an IQ above the freezing temperature of water (and I'm talking in degrees C here). But not only are people buying this stuff, but it would seem that there are hundreds of thousands of people buying this stuff. There are approximately 20 billion spam messages sent every day (rough estimate for, but a fairly conservative rough estimate given that Hotmail and AOL alone receive nearly 5 billion spams a day). A good 10% of those are penis enlargement spams. Thats 2 billion penis enlargement spams sent every day. Now, if we figure that it only costs $10 per million spams (it's actually probably at least $100 to send a million spams, when all costs are counted). That's at least $10,000 a day that is spent sending penis enlargement spams. If it costs $50 per dose, that means that at least 500 people need to buy penis enlargement pills every day just to break even (assuming zero costs to process the sale and no cost to supply the pills, which is a reasonable assumption since I doubt that spammers would worry about actually sending any products they sell).
That's definitely true. Intel Penium 4 M chips max out at almost 35W! Just 5 years ago that was a LOT for a desktop chip! The hottest AthlonXP mobile chips come in a comparatively "cool" 25W, which is still enough to melt some components in the small confines of a laptop. Even Intel's new Pentium M, designed from the ground-up for low-power, consumes up to 25W of power at the top-end (though the slower speed/low voltage chips consume less than 10W).
Generally speaking, power consumption of laptop chips has become rather ridiculous. Intel is definitely on the right track with their Pentium M chip, however even with this chip they could use some work, particularly with the 1.4 and 1.6GHz chips.
Good god! Do people STILL believe in this myth of some "Wintel" connection?! Microsoft and Intel have never been more than forced friends, and for the most part they've been more like advisaries!
The only company that Microsoft can't push around in the PC business is Intel, and the only company that Intel can't push around in the PC business is Microsoft. For this reason alone the two have been trying their damndest to find alternative suppliers. Both companies realize that they are heavily dependant on the other for their own success, but given half a chance to support a third party, they always jump all over it. Intel has been a strong supporter of Linux, while Microsoft has gone out of their way to support AMD and now Transmeta.
The whole "Wintel" thing exists only because Microsoft and Intel have pretty much been forced to work together, whether they like it or not.
It's not really a question of profits inflating in Canada, it's more a question of loses shrinking. I haven't seen any exact numbers from Bell, but I don't think that they're making much in the way of money off of broadband. As for Rogers, they've been bleeding red ink ever for a while now. They got hurt BAD when @home went under. Surprise surprise, that's almost exactly the same time that they increased the prices on their broadband connections.
Fortunately though, we're now getting LOTS of competition in the broadband market. It looks like the phone and cable companies have started to see the light and recognize that the best way for them to make money is just to sell the lines. I've been seeing lots of companies sprining up offering third-party DSL connections and even some offering third-party cable modem connections for very reasonable prices. The best broadband service I've had was in such a setup where I an ISP in Sudbury was reselling cable modem service over Regional Northern's cable network. Price was decent ($40 CDN/month), speed was great (downloads were often ~200kbytes/sec), and the connection was hardly ever down (though I wish I could have said as much about the electricity!).
While you are mostly correct, you can still get broadband in some of the very remote areas of Canada. Here's a list of the communities serviced by the ISP I used when I lived up in Sudbury.
Now, Sudbury will appear on most maps of Canada, and if it's a decent map it will also have Timmins. However, you'll have a heck of a time finding even the "medium" sized towns on that list like Kapuskasing or Esponola on anything other than a fairly decent map of Ontario, these are not big population centers by any stretch. Some of the smallest places that they service are villages of only a couple hundred people.
Point being that cable and DSL CAN be done economically even in very small town and remote areas. Places like farms in the middle of nowhere are a bit trickier I suppose, but that's a relatively small percentage of the population in all industrialized countries.
New laws like this aren't really the answer, the real solution is to figure out how to enforce existing laws with respect to spam. Making spam more illegal (by having a law against sending to a "Do Not Send" list) isn't going to help any when most spam already is illegal! Distributing unsolicited pornography to children is against the law in most countries, as is sending beastiality to anyone, not to mention the laws against illegal pyramid schemes and fraudulent scams. Even the fairly tame spam, like selling generic viagra, is in direct violation of existing laws in many countries.
The trick is not new laws, but figuring out how to enforce existing laws with respect to spammers.
Re:They needed three days to figure this out?
on
Spam Meeting Wrap-up
·
· Score: 1
The source can almost never be traved via the headers. Look at spam some day, and try to find the source of it, you'll end up either that it's going through an open proxy, an open-relay, or it's just plain old forged so much that there is no possible way to figure out where it came from.
The Received headers in legitimate e-mail may be used to trace the source because legitimate e-mail doesn't try to hide this information, however when it comes to spam, people go to GREAT lengths to hide where the message is coming from.
VIA chipsets can work well, and they do for millions of users out there, but they can also be problematic. There are a lot of small issues with virtually every VIA chipset I've ever encountered. Fortunately each of these problems are very rare, and for most users you can get by without encountering any of them, or at least without any serious issues resulting from these bugs. However, every now and then one will crop up and bite you on the ass, and then it can be painful to fix.
Now, that being said, anyone you thinks that Intel is immuned to the sort sort of issue is a complete idiot. I've also had all kinds of problems with Intel chipsets. Their first bus mastering drivers for the PIIX4 southbridge (i430TX and i440LX chipsets) were TERRIBLE! The first set of drivers for their i8xx series of chipsets also sucked ass. They had the hugely publicized problems with the i820 chipset, and even some of their high-end workstation and server chipsets have had their fair share of problems.
However, in general, I've found VIA to be one of the most problematic chipset vendors (along with ALi). SiS and AMD have been a bit safer in my experience, and Intel is safer still. That being said, the best chipsets I've encountered have been nVidia's nForce chipsets. These have been the easiest to setup and most problem-free chipsets I've used.
As for the heat thing, Intel P4 chips use more power than AMD's Athlons, so all else being equal, Intel chips run hotter. The reason why people say that AMD chips run hot is because they use small heatsinks on their Athlons and huge monster heatsinks on P4s. Put a 80x80mm heatsink and a slow-spinning fan on an Athlon and it will run nice and cool while being virtually silent.
No, everyone stopped caring after the 386 came out... at least for a few years, until they realized how slow everything was on an old 386. Then they stopped caring about anything beyond a 486, for a few years until that became slow. Than the Pentium was all that anyone would ever need, until that was too slow. But once we got to 200MHz, well really that was fast enough to run all the programs out there.. for a few years until that started to seem too slow. Now that we've got 1GHz chips though! That's for sure all we'll ever need! At least for another year or two until 1GHz chips seem really slow.
I can absolutely guarantee you that in a few years time, people will be saying that their old 1GHz chips are way too slow for their regular every-day software, and other people will be talking about how clock speed doesn't matter beyond 5GHz. This cycle has been repeating itself for the past 15 years, and doesn't show any signs of letting up.
Heat spreaders don't really help cool the processor, They do exactly what their name suggests, they spread out the heat so that the processor core is at a more even temperature.
The P4 and the Opteron both have rather large processor cores, so the differences in temp from one side of the core to the other can actually be quite large, which is not a good thing. Signal properties change with temperature, so large differences in temp can lead to errors, the end result being that companies like Intel and AMD can't clock their chips as high).
The Athlon, especially current Athlons, have very small processor cores, so the differences in temperature from one side of the chip to the other isn't much. As a result, a head spreader isn't nearly as important on the Athlon.
When it comes to actually getting rid of the heat, the heat spreader doesn't make much of a difference. There is a larger surface area to transfer the heat from the heat spreader to the heatsink, but you have an extra thermal junction in there to prevent heat transfer. What's more though is that the real thing holding back heat removal is getting the heat out of the heatsink itself and not so much getting the heat from the processor to the base of the heatsink.
You're definitely right about the last part though, the main reason why P4's run "cooler" than Athlons is due to the fact that they tend to use much larger heatsinks. P4's actually use more power (and therefore run hotter, all else being equal) than Athlons do.
The Itanium2 CAN be fricking fast, but it isn't always.
The performance of the IA-64, at this point in time at least, is really quite uneven. There are some situations where it's just blowing everyone else out of the water, being easily 2-3x (or more) faster then any other chip out there. Intel really likes these benchmarks and likes to show them off. However there are also a number of other applications where the Itanium2 seems to just slow to a crawl.
The trick is that IA-64 is HUGELY dependant on how well a compiler can optimize code for a particular application. As the compilers mature, the weak areas of the Itanium will shrink, though there will always be the odd case that just doesn't work well on IA-64.
As for right now, the Itanium2 and the Power4 are very close competitors in general. Some applications will run a lot better on the Power4, and some will run a lot better on the Itanium2, but most will perform similarly on both architectures. The IBM chip does have an advantage of being a bit more mature though, and it's performance tends to be much more consistant.
Slashdot Mirror
And having worked in both a call center (albeit dial-in, not telemarketing/dial-out) and writing spam filters, let me tell you that the latter is DEFINITELY the better job!
Doubt it. The PDA in question in that article is based around the AMD Alchemy line of MIPS chips. The Geode processor that AMD is buying from National Semi is based around an x86 chip.
AMD chips have not generally run any hotter than their Intel counterparts. Occasionally one of the other might consume more power, but they tend to switch order. Right now Intel is quite firmly in the "hot seat" so to speak. Top-end P4's are consuming over 80W of power, while the top AthlonXP chips are only using about 65W of power and the Opteron uses less (though it's exact power consumption is currently undocumented). Back when the Athlon was competing with the PIII, the Athlon consumed more power. Before that the AMD K6-2/K6-III chips consumed less power than comperable PII/Celeron chips, however the K6 chip consumed more power than the Pentium MMX.
In all though, I'm really not sure what AMD is after with this purchase. They already have a line of embedded x86 processors (which DO have a very good use in the embedded market in that they are by far the easiest chips to develop for and can often use a lot of existing software instead of requiring companies to develop their own). They might be looking to take some of the video/sound/etc technology embedded in the Geode chip and add it to their own embedded line. However, AMD has mostly discontinued their line of embedded x86 chips in favor of their new Alchemy line of MIPS chips. Maybe their buying the Geode as a sort of replacement for their old embedded x86 chips but kind of starting that whole division again from scratch? Or maybe they're hoping to glue some of the technology from the Geode onto the Alchemy chips? I don't know.
AMD seems to be finally starting to take chipset design somewhat seriously, plus they finally got a decent third party chipset manufacturer a couple years ago when nVidia signed on. I don't think that they need to make motherboards themselves, but I do believe that they should contract one of the Taiwanese companies to make AMD-branded motherboards.
As for AMD's naming scheme though, I rather like how they are doing things with the Opteron. It's VERY simple but also much more descriptive than using MHz/GHz to describe a chip. You have three numbers, first represents how many of these chips you can pack into a single system (1, 2 or 8), the second represents the core revision (currently only version '4', which I guess is a rather random number to start with), and the last represents relative performance within that core version (0, 2, 4 and now 6).
Personally I find that much easier and less confusing than just MHz. Take Intel's Pentium 4 for example. There were 3 different versions of the 2.0GHz P4 and now 3 different versions of the 2.4GHz chip. The 3.06GHz P4 is faster than one version of the 3.0GHz P4, but slower than the other version of the 3.0GHz P4. To differentiate all these different versions Intel just sticks letters like 'A', 'B' etc. at the end of the clock speed in a fairly random manner. For the 2.0GHz vs. 2.0A chip, the 'A' referred to having more cache and lower power consumption. For the 2.4GHz vs. 2.4B vs. 2.4C chips it's all bus speed (400MHz vs. 533MHz vs. 800MHz). Of course, Intel REALLY out did themselves back with the old 600MHz PIII, where they had no less than 6 different versions of the chip! What's worse, a socket PIII 600MHz chip was NOT the same chip as a Slot 1 PIII 600MHz, but rather the same as a PIII 600E.
Long story short, using MHz/GHz to name chips is VERY confusing in this day and age. Things like cache size, I/O bandwidth and memory bandwidth are of major importance, while clock speed plays only a limited role in many situations.
Uhh, how often have you actually tried getting different versions of Windows to talk to each other over SMB networks? It works... sometimes, sort of, as long as you don't do anything too tricky, or even some not-so-tricky things.
It's especially bad if you try to get older versions of Win9x to talk to WinNT/2K/XP systems and vice versa. Some things works, but a lot of things are either broken or require a bit of massaging to work.
Interestingly the original article mentioned problems with getting the Windows computers to see their Samba server in a network. I used to have horrible problems getting Windows computers to see other Windows computers in an SMB network when I was back at school (gotta love the residence networks!). Put simply, different versions of Windows often do not play nice with one another because the way that SMB works is constantly changing.
So regulation can regulate the truthfulness of spam -- it has to be truthful. False or misleading subject matter or headers or addresses are cause for regulation. Truthful spam is ok.
I would be quite happy if all false and misleading spam resulted in the sender being persecuted. That way the 1 truthful spam I get every year might slip through, but the other 10,000 would not.
I sometimes wonder about how everyone keeps calling for more laws against spam. We don't need more laws against spam, we need existing laws to be enforced! The FCC found that something like 1/3rd of all spam is fraudulent, which I KNOW is a very low estimate. We don't need to throw spammers in jail for spamming, throw them in jail for comitting fraud! Not to mention the spammers sending pornography to minors, those sending beasitality porn, selling illegal copies of software and those operating illegal unlicensed pharmacies. Arrest them and you've taken care of the bulk of spam.
The US government* needs a few high-profile cases where they make examples of people who send spam in order to send a message to others. When people see those selling crap by spam being thrown in jail, they're going to think twice before signing up to do the same thing.
* It probably is going to have to be the US government that does this, even though spam is a global problem. The simple fact of the matter is the VAST majority of spam (80-90% of it) originates from the US, and a lot of that ends up in the inbox's of American citizens. No other country in the world has anywhere near as much spam that starts and ends within their borders.
I used to work in the spam-filtering industry, so I saw a LOT of spam. I think my two favorites while I worked there were:
"I ride ze boat and I take it in ze poopah"
and
"Fill your pants with an elephantine schlong"
An "elephantine schlong"?! First off, who the hell uses the word "elephantine"?! Then to follow it up with the word "schlong"? This particular one was one of about 1000 possible permutations of subject lines for a particular penis-enlargement spam (ie they had a whole list of "Grow a", "Get a", "Please her with a", starting lines, followed by dozens of synonyms for "big", then dozens of slang words for "penis", and the mailer randomly built a subject line from them, common trick for spammers, though usually not too difficult to filter), but of all the possible permutations, the "elephantine schlong" was definitely the funniest IMO.
Of course, my favorite actual spam message of all time was the guy asking for a supplier of Acme flux capacitors and the mind warper. I haven't got a frigging clue how this spam ever made any money for anyone!
SCO loses the case when everyone figures out that the code was actually written by the open source community and then misappropriated by SCO, and the people responsible for all this bullshit are found guilty of fraud and sent to jail.
If the justice system worked properly, this is what would happen, though it won't happen. The people at SCO are crooks. They're stealing way more money than your petty theives stealing old ladies' purses, but they're never going to treated the same way. Why not? Because the US patent and copyright law system is BADLY broken and needs some serious overhauling (the rest of the world isn't doing much better, just ask the Austrailian guy who was granted a patent on the wheel).
Cable is definitely NOT always faster than ADSL, it depends entirely on the quality of service. Both cable and DSL connections can have an artificial speed cap set by whatever company provides the service. However, what's even more important is the upstream bandwidth of the provider. Even if cable offers you a theoretical 5Mbit/s connection vs. a 1.5Mbit/s DSL connection, the actual bandwidth could be higher for DSL if the cable companies upstream connection is saturated.
As for the big bandwidth question, that should be obvious! DSL and cable are all about getting the biggest pr0n pipe!
Tom isn't really an AMD or an Intel "fanboy", he's just a page hit fanboy with an ENORMOUS ego. He tends to write rather opinionated reviews/editorials that he knows will get page hits, truth and accuracy of the reviews be damned!
On the upside, since Tom hasn't really written much of anything on his own site for quite some time, so the quality has gone up slightly. The reviews still tend to be somewhat superficial and make ridiculous conclusions from very limited data (though Tom's Hardware is hardly alone in that regard!), but at least we don't have Tom's overactive ego budding in to trash any company that didn't give him the full, red-carpet and all, royal treatment the last time he went to visit.
Err, perhaps since MIPS/FLOPS become a totally meaningless measure of performance. Hell, it's just as bad as clock freqency!
Think of it, one CPU might be able to accomplish a given task in small number of instructions, possibly just a single instruction. Another CPU might require twice as many instructions to do the same thing, or more (think CISC vs. RISC here, though the difference between the two has become rather blurred).
What's perhaps more important is that chips these days have huge theoretical maximum MIPS/FLOPS, but they never come close to reaching those maximums in any real-world situations because of data starvation, ordering restrictions, branch mispredictions, etc. etc.
In short, MIPS doesn't mean anything. Clock speeds don't mean much, and model numbers are rather arbitrary. The only thing that really matters is how fast a given chip performs in the application(s) you need it to perform in, and how much that chip costs.
Just as a FWIW in case anyone is interested, the Hammer/Athlon64/Opteron processor core has a 12 stage pipeline. Longer then the Athlon's by two stages, but shorter than both the PowerPC 970 and the P4.
Of course, just counting pipeline stages and assuming a clock speed is absolutely ridiculous. Sure, a longer pipeline CAN make it easier to clock the chip higher, but that's certainly not a sure thing. Similarly, a shorter pipeline does NOT equate better per-clock performance. The length of the pipeline is only one of MANY factors that influence performance and clock speeds.
Well, as is often the case, what you should buy depends largely on what your planning on doing with the system. Your best bet is to start by figuring out what applications you spend the most time using and/or those applications that are running the slowest now and you want to run a bit speedier.
As a general system though, I'd start with either an AMD AthlonXP 2600 or 2800 (166/333MHz DDR bus speed), or a P4 2.4C or 2.6C (200/800MHz DDR bus speed) if Intel ever gets around to actually shipping those chips. The performance difference between the two chips is relatively small, and reall you're unlikely to notice the difference, though depending on what applications you run most one or the other may be somewhat faster.
For motherboard chipsets, with the Intel it's only a question of the i865 or i875, with the latter being a bit faster but somewhat more expensive. For the AMD chips, I'd definitely go for a board based around the nVidia nForce2 chipset. While VIA and SiS also make chipsets that would work for either of these systems, I've found the level of driver support to be better on Intel chipsets and better still on nVidia chipsets.
As for video cards, that depends again on what you're going to be doing with the system. The integrated video in the nForce2 chipset is very good and more than sufficient for most people, even if you enjoy the odd game every now and then. However if gaming is the main reason for buying the system, then you'll want something better. Here it comes down to a choice of ATI and nVidia, with each offering a pretty wide range of cards at a range of price points. I tend to favour nVidia again here, again because of the quality of their drivers, though ATI has improved significantly in this regard in the past little while.
After you get past that stuff though, you get to the important things, like memory and hard drive. For most people, these are the two areas that are going to have the biggest effect on how fast the computer "feels" when you're actually using it. Given the price of memory, I'd figure on 512MB for the majority of users, while some power users might want to go for 1GB of memory.
Hard drives are a tough one to follow, but get yourself a FAST one if at all possible. If you're like me though, you'll also want a QUIET hard drive, which is why I'd probably get either one of the new Seagate or IBM drives. www.storagereview.com is a great site for info about hard drives, and they're recommendations are probably more up to date/better then any info I could offer.
If you're reading Tom's Hardware once every few months (for a quick laugh), then you're reading it at least as much as you should! :>
On the other hand, if you haven't already done so, you should read Tom'z Hardware Bible!
I'm currently working for a spam-filtering company, so I see a LOT of spam, and I've seen pretty much every trick in the book. Spammers generally can be broken down into three catagories. What you described would be the first catagory:
1. The amature. This is some guy who runs a mail server out of their basement. Mostly just hawking for their own business of running a fraudulant store (ie selling HGH or viagra), or some sort of scam to get users bank accounts or credit cards. These are DEAD EASY to block. Usually it takes all of about 10 seconds to block this sort of spammer. They might get a few thousand messages out in the first 10-20 minutes or so before their spam is spotted, but everything after that will be blocked.
2. The "legitimate business" spammer. These are the people who claim to be some sort of legitimate business. These are the people like 00Fun.com or Joke-of-the-day.com, as well as the people selling you wonderful new kitchen utensils, etc. They all claim that they are in full compliance with the law and that they only send to opt-in mailing lists. The trouble with these spammers is that it's sometimes hard to tell these people appart from some real legitimate businesses mass e-mails. What's worse, I've encountered many services where the spammer clearly used web harvesting software to get their addresses, but they also have had real users sign up to request the e-mails (mailing lists selling religion related products are the worst for this). When you figure out that these people are spammers though, it's usually dead-easy to block them.
3. The professional spammer who doesn't even bother hidding he fact that they're spamming. This is mostly porn, penis enlargement, loan sharks and HGH sellers. This is the only type of spam that is tough to block. These people will use every trick in the book to avoid spam filters. Given enough time, all of these messages can be blocked, the big question is just how much gets through before the filters are in place and how much time it will take to create those filters (often it's just not worthwhile to spend too much time on a single spam, even if it's not being filtered, simply because there's so much more than can easily be blocked).
The one upside to all of this is that, generally speaking the harder it is to block spam, the less likely it is that some moron is actually going to buy the stuff. While you would have to be REALLY incredibly dumb to buy HGH (Human Growth Hormone, aka snake oil) from a message with the subject: "Reverse the Effects of Aging!", you would have to be even stupider to buy HGH from a message with the Subject: "alksjdflksjdffhhfggf sjhdhfhfdsgfd Get Young!!!alosjdfalsdjfklsdjflsdfhhffg jdsjsdfd"
As a bit of a side note, I find that spam paints a REALLY sad picture of our society. Not so much so because there are people so lacking in morals that they think spamming is a legitimate business, but rather because some people actually BUY this crap! Honestly you have to be really REALLY dumb to buy anything from spam. It's blatently obvious that these products are not legitimate to anyone with an IQ above the freezing temperature of water (and I'm talking in degrees C here). But not only are people buying this stuff, but it would seem that there are hundreds of thousands of people buying this stuff. There are approximately 20 billion spam messages sent every day (rough estimate for, but a fairly conservative rough estimate given that Hotmail and AOL alone receive nearly 5 billion spams a day). A good 10% of those are penis enlargement spams. Thats 2 billion penis enlargement spams sent every day. Now, if we figure that it only costs $10 per million spams (it's actually probably at least $100 to send a million spams, when all costs are counted). That's at least $10,000 a day that is spent sending penis enlargement spams. If it costs $50 per dose, that means that at least 500 people need to buy penis enlargement pills every day just to break even (assuming zero costs to process the sale and no cost to supply the pills, which is a reasonable assumption since I doubt that spammers would worry about actually sending any products they sell).
Just some food for thought.
That's definitely true. Intel Penium 4 M chips max out at almost 35W! Just 5 years ago that was a LOT for a desktop chip! The hottest AthlonXP mobile chips come in a comparatively "cool" 25W, which is still enough to melt some components in the small confines of a laptop. Even Intel's new Pentium M, designed from the ground-up for low-power, consumes up to 25W of power at the top-end (though the slower speed/low voltage chips consume less than 10W).
Generally speaking, power consumption of laptop chips has become rather ridiculous. Intel is definitely on the right track with their Pentium M chip, however even with this chip they could use some work, particularly with the 1.4 and 1.6GHz chips.
Good god! Do people STILL believe in this myth of some "Wintel" connection?! Microsoft and Intel have never been more than forced friends, and for the most part they've been more like advisaries!
The only company that Microsoft can't push around in the PC business is Intel, and the only company that Intel can't push around in the PC business is Microsoft. For this reason alone the two have been trying their damndest to find alternative suppliers. Both companies realize that they are heavily dependant on the other for their own success, but given half a chance to support a third party, they always jump all over it. Intel has been a strong supporter of Linux, while Microsoft has gone out of their way to support AMD and now Transmeta.
The whole "Wintel" thing exists only because Microsoft and Intel have pretty much been forced to work together, whether they like it or not.
It's not really a question of profits inflating in Canada, it's more a question of loses shrinking. I haven't seen any exact numbers from Bell, but I don't think that they're making much in the way of money off of broadband. As for Rogers, they've been bleeding red ink ever for a while now. They got hurt BAD when @home went under. Surprise surprise, that's almost exactly the same time that they increased the prices on their broadband connections.
Fortunately though, we're now getting LOTS of competition in the broadband market. It looks like the phone and cable companies have started to see the light and recognize that the best way for them to make money is just to sell the lines. I've been seeing lots of companies sprining up offering third-party DSL connections and even some offering third-party cable modem connections for very reasonable prices. The best broadband service I've had was in such a setup where I an ISP in Sudbury was reselling cable modem service over Regional Northern's cable network. Price was decent ($40 CDN/month), speed was great (downloads were often ~200kbytes/sec), and the connection was hardly ever down (though I wish I could have said as much about the electricity!).
While you are mostly correct, you can still get broadband in some of the very remote areas of Canada. Here's a list of the communities serviced by the ISP I used when I lived up in Sudbury.
Now, Sudbury will appear on most maps of Canada, and if it's a decent map it will also have Timmins. However, you'll have a heck of a time finding even the "medium" sized towns on that list like Kapuskasing or Esponola on anything other than a fairly decent map of Ontario, these are not big population centers by any stretch. Some of the smallest places that they service are villages of only a couple hundred people.
Point being that cable and DSL CAN be done economically even in very small town and remote areas. Places like farms in the middle of nowhere are a bit trickier I suppose, but that's a relatively small percentage of the population in all industrialized countries.
New laws like this aren't really the answer, the real solution is to figure out how to enforce existing laws with respect to spam. Making spam more illegal (by having a law against sending to a "Do Not Send" list) isn't going to help any when most spam already is illegal! Distributing unsolicited pornography to children is against the law in most countries, as is sending beastiality to anyone, not to mention the laws against illegal pyramid schemes and fraudulent scams. Even the fairly tame spam, like selling generic viagra, is in direct violation of existing laws in many countries.
The trick is not new laws, but figuring out how to enforce existing laws with respect to spammers.
The source can almost never be traved via the headers. Look at spam some day, and try to find the source of it, you'll end up either that it's going through an open proxy, an open-relay, or it's just plain old forged so much that there is no possible way to figure out where it came from.
The Received headers in legitimate e-mail may be used to trace the source because legitimate e-mail doesn't try to hide this information, however when it comes to spam, people go to GREAT lengths to hide where the message is coming from.
VIA chipsets can work well, and they do for millions of users out there, but they can also be problematic. There are a lot of small issues with virtually every VIA chipset I've ever encountered. Fortunately each of these problems are very rare, and for most users you can get by without encountering any of them, or at least without any serious issues resulting from these bugs. However, every now and then one will crop up and bite you on the ass, and then it can be painful to fix.
Now, that being said, anyone you thinks that Intel is immuned to the sort sort of issue is a complete idiot. I've also had all kinds of problems with Intel chipsets. Their first bus mastering drivers for the PIIX4 southbridge (i430TX and i440LX chipsets) were TERRIBLE! The first set of drivers for their i8xx series of chipsets also sucked ass. They had the hugely publicized problems with the i820 chipset, and even some of their high-end workstation and server chipsets have had their fair share of problems.
However, in general, I've found VIA to be one of the most problematic chipset vendors (along with ALi). SiS and AMD have been a bit safer in my experience, and Intel is safer still. That being said, the best chipsets I've encountered have been nVidia's nForce chipsets. These have been the easiest to setup and most problem-free chipsets I've used.
As for the heat thing, Intel P4 chips use more power than AMD's Athlons, so all else being equal, Intel chips run hotter. The reason why people say that AMD chips run hot is because they use small heatsinks on their Athlons and huge monster heatsinks on P4s. Put a 80x80mm heatsink and a slow-spinning fan on an Athlon and it will run nice and cool while being virtually silent.
No, everyone stopped caring after the 386 came out... at least for a few years, until they realized how slow everything was on an old 386. Then they stopped caring about anything beyond a 486, for a few years until that became slow. Than the Pentium was all that anyone would ever need, until that was too slow. But once we got to 200MHz, well really that was fast enough to run all the programs out there.. for a few years until that started to seem too slow. Now that we've got 1GHz chips though! That's for sure all we'll ever need! At least for another year or two until 1GHz chips seem really slow.
I can absolutely guarantee you that in a few years time, people will be saying that their old 1GHz chips are way too slow for their regular every-day software, and other people will be talking about how clock speed doesn't matter beyond 5GHz. This cycle has been repeating itself for the past 15 years, and doesn't show any signs of letting up.
Heat spreaders don't really help cool the processor, They do exactly what their name suggests, they spread out the heat so that the processor core is at a more even temperature.
The P4 and the Opteron both have rather large processor cores, so the differences in temp from one side of the core to the other can actually be quite large, which is not a good thing. Signal properties change with temperature, so large differences in temp can lead to errors, the end result being that companies like Intel and AMD can't clock their chips as high).
The Athlon, especially current Athlons, have very small processor cores, so the differences in temperature from one side of the chip to the other isn't much. As a result, a head spreader isn't nearly as important on the Athlon.
When it comes to actually getting rid of the heat, the heat spreader doesn't make much of a difference. There is a larger surface area to transfer the heat from the heat spreader to the heatsink, but you have an extra thermal junction in there to prevent heat transfer. What's more though is that the real thing holding back heat removal is getting the heat out of the heatsink itself and not so much getting the heat from the processor to the base of the heatsink.
You're definitely right about the last part though, the main reason why P4's run "cooler" than Athlons is due to the fact that they tend to use much larger heatsinks. P4's actually use more power (and therefore run hotter, all else being equal) than Athlons do.
The Itanium2 CAN be fricking fast, but it isn't always.
The performance of the IA-64, at this point in time at least, is really quite uneven. There are some situations where it's just blowing everyone else out of the water, being easily 2-3x (or more) faster then any other chip out there. Intel really likes these benchmarks and likes to show them off. However there are also a number of other applications where the Itanium2 seems to just slow to a crawl.
The trick is that IA-64 is HUGELY dependant on how well a compiler can optimize code for a particular application. As the compilers mature, the weak areas of the Itanium will shrink, though there will always be the odd case that just doesn't work well on IA-64.
As for right now, the Itanium2 and the Power4 are very close competitors in general. Some applications will run a lot better on the Power4, and some will run a lot better on the Itanium2, but most will perform similarly on both architectures. The IBM chip does have an advantage of being a bit more mature though, and it's performance tends to be much more consistant.