Have you thought about sending it through the governmental postal service? They may be slow, but they will deliver to anywhere (so they say). It seems to me you could just waltz into a post office and send it to Russia. I've emailed electronics to Eastern Europe with no problems except really high fees. The problem with private carriers, who are usually more efficient than government agencies, is that they are private businesses and so can make any lame rule they feel like. (not like the Postal Service isn't lame...)
I wouldn't be surprised if this were true. Many other search engines not only rate websites higher if they pay but also shower us with ads. Googles website is so sparse and beautiful, I never thought it could last. How will they make their money? Only by hosting searchs from other sites? Somehow I doubt this is all they had in mind. Also, is this really a bad thing. What difference does it make if it shows Yahoo!'s sites first or some other random site. Many times the site Google chooses to list first is a little strange.
In all fairness, I haven't noticed this to be the case (and I always use Google). In my experience, Google gives far and away the most useful replies to my queries, and I don't see any deal with Yahoo! changing this.
So when a cosmonaut is voted out of the program is he shot and his life expunged from public record?
Or maybe the losers have to go to the space station and try to hold it together with some rope and a couple of safety pins. That would be REAL survivor!
If Cisco routers ran Linux, then no one would have to waste their time getting Cisco certified and Cisco wouldn't be able to make a mint training them. Somehow I don't think Cisco is going to think Linux on their routers is such a good idea.
New electronics substrate (Carbon has same valence
as Silicon).
They already use carbon as an electronics substrate for cryogenic (VERY low temperature) electronics, 1 or 2 Kelvin type of stuff. Also, Silicon Carbide electronics are potentially useful for high power application. There is just no way , though, that Carbon will be used as a general-purpose substrate because:
1. THE MAIN REASON: Silicon has an EXCELLENT oxide (SiO2) that makes field-effect transistors possible. These devices are the basis of the modern computer (that is post 1980) revolution because they are much smaller and use less power than biploar transistors and have in fact made that current crop of microprosessors possible. Without a high-quality native oxide, you don't have a field-effect transistor, so you don't have a leading-edge microprocessor. That's why you don't see Gallium Arsenide microprocessor in the 40 GHz range, because Gallium Arsenide doesn't have a good oxide.
2. Electron mobility: Silicon is much faster than carbon.
3. Ease of fabrication: Silicon is pretty much a miracle material when it comes to fabrication. It is self repairing when annealing in the furnance, is cheap to produce, and very easy to generate in single crystal form.
There are more but Silicon is here to stay for a long, long, time.
Which gets at the real beauty of Gruen's work. Now these
astounding, tiny machines are much closer to reality than ever
before, at a time when there is an intense international push
to develop these microscopic machines--known as MEMS.
MEMS, Microelectromechanical systems, could very well be a revolutionary technology with such applications ranging from tiny actuators for robots or satellites to small, efficient inductors in radio-frequency integrated circuits. While this article implies carbon-diamond MEMS could be revolutionary, it gives no indication they'd be practical.
Remember, silicon (and all semiconductors, including carbon) has a diamond structure, so presumably using these buckyball carbon diamonds would be better. The problem is, how would we fabricate them cheaply?
The key reason silicon micromachines dominate the market for things such as automobile airbag sensors is because they are able to leverage already highly advanced silicon fabrication technologies originally developed for integrated circuits. No such technology exists for pure carbon and developing one would cost an unbelieveably large amount of money and take many years. There had better be some compelling reason for us to do so.
Many times technologies "better" than silicon have come out only to remain niche technologies. A good example is III-V semiconductors such as Gallium Arsenide. While they are indispensible for lasers and such, they are not used for integrated circuits nearly as much as silicon, because they are so damn expensive. Their current main use, RF power amps and fiber-optic receivers, is quickly being impinged upon by advanced silicon CMOS technologies.
My point is that this discovery is pretty interesting, but it is far from "revolutionary". Until someone comes up with a killer app that provides a compelling reason to justify the expense to develop this further, I'm going to keep my money on silicon-based micromachines.
I hope that's a joke man. CMOS electronics have been around since the 60s and today dominate the landscape. When microsoft came up with that acro. for IBM/PCs Bipolar TTL was king. I guess that's why nobody thought it was such a bad idea.
(1): They are made in rather exotic processes incompatible with standard digital CMOS. That means the analog readout and the DSP have to be done in another chip, increasing system cost. This is the key problem.
(2): They require high voltage clocks to drive them and so dissipate large amounts of power in the clock drivers. This also tends to increase system cost.
On the other hand, CMOS image sensors can be fabricated in standard CMOS technology with the image sensor, signal conditioning, and image procession all on the same inexpensive chip. While performance isn't quite up to CCDs yet, the price/performance ratio is already far superior.
I am no graphics expert, but I have always been under the impression that a single pixel has 3 values, one each for r-g-b.
No. A single pixel just outputs a voltage proportional to the integrated value of light it receives. It is interpreted as being red, green, or blue by the DSP depending on what color filter is being used for that particular pixel. This is one reason why black and white cameras still get superior resolution.
remember: the pixels do not discriminate photon wavelength (color). They simply integrate the number of photons that pass through them. The only way to get color information out of a solid-state imager is to use some sort of color filter.
I agree wireless networking sucks today, but very soon it will be much better. Bluetooth enabled communications devices will be able to link devices within the home at distances of up to 100 feet.
Basically, in the near future, it would make sense for each home to have one wireline node to connect to the infrastructure and Bluetooth nodes within to interconnect locally. This goes for cell/wireless phones as well. Local wireless connectivity is definately the wave of the future.
In my experience, going to college would have been a really bad move. When I graduated from high school in the early 90s I had strong programming skills in a couple of languages and I guess I could have gotten work but what would be the point? I never would have found out what I was best at and what should be my life's work.
In my first year of college I took many programming and computer courses that showed me just how little I knew about the big picture. While I could have made a good living as a gog in the programming wheel, without school I don't think I could ever have been an independent thinker.
Studying calculus and calculus based physics are the things that in my opinion taught me how to think clearly for the first time. My electronics courses showed me that there was something I was more interested in than software. Theory courses gave me insight into the structure of practical problems and how people have gone about solving them in the past. Only by learning the approaches of yesterday can you "stand on the shoulders of giants" and produce superior solutions.
If you skip college, you sell yourself short. While you may be an excellent programmer without a degree you certainly won't reach your full potential. You won't think as clearly as you could have and your solutions will probably not be as original. Without the insight that painful, in depth study provides (almost impossible to do outside of a classroom) I don't think anyone can be the best they can be.
Besides, what happens when the economy tanks and CS types aren't in as great demand? As shortsighted and unfair as it is, companies will demand a degree. In my field, you need a Master's to be taken seriously and they actually prefer Ph.D's.
That's what the information revolution is about - putting information in the hands of the common man. Information that he have have never had before. Knowledge about How Things Work. This knowledge could spread as fast as MP3s on napster - except it could be nuclear weapons secrets, or other "dangerous" information.
It seems to me that "information" and "knowledge" are very different things. Do you think nuclear secrets would mean anything to the common man (or to you or me)? There is already a lot of information out there but precious little insight.
An "ancient" proverb goes something like this:
When information is free, knowledge will be priceless.
I have a couple problems with the notion of "free agents" in a work context.
First, free agents erode the collective desire to be the best. What I mean by this is a free agent will most likely not be able to be part of a tight design team in the members push themselves and each other to be the best. In my experience, in a design group the staff designers tend to put more of themselves in the job than do the contractors and tend to get better results. I work in the IC business, but is it different in the software and IT businesses where many slashdotters work?
Second, free agentism provides a disincentive to do truly original work. When I was working full time, (I'm a PhD student now), the most original and interesting work came from those staff designers who had been working in the group and on the project for some time and felt a loyalty to the group (if not the organization). The contractors I've worked with tended to be more interested in busting out a kludge and moving on to always greener pastures. I'm not putting anyone down here; the contractors were professionals who did competent work, but they didn't have the drive the staff designers did. Perhaps it was because the staff engineers could hope for some stock options or a bonus as a reward for a job well done where the contractors just got a higher salary.
When I get out of school, I'm not interested in becoming a free agent. I want to join a team where I feel I am valued and am making a difference and then I want to put all my effort into being the best designer I can be.
What a great idea! You could build the world's greatest football player! Jerry Rice could configure his legs muscles as fast-twitch so he could burn the cornerback off the line and after he catches the pass he could reconfigure them as slow-twitch to run the 80 yards to the endzone.
He'd be unstoppable! Unless of course the Muscle Controller (running Windows 2010 of course) crashes and reconfigures his leg muscles into pure fat!
Why screw around with synapses and "innate productivity enhancers"? If you really "need to take something" just smoke crack. I really don't think people drink coffee to get a caffeine fix. If that were true people would just pop Excederin all day which gives you a pretty good caffeine induced kick-in-the-pants.
That's a neat idea about having the body produce its own caffeine. In fact our body produces something quite similar already: endorphin.
Anyone who's a long-distance runner knows the sweet feeling you get after a long run and how you get irritable and a little depressed when you don't run for a few days. This isn't so different from when my father used to get headaches without his morning coffee. We were both addicts: him to caffeine, me to endorphin.
It seems hacking your body so you get your morning caffeine without drinking coffee is like hacking your body to get endorphin with the requisite run. I think both of these miss the point: caffeine is only a pleasant side effect of people's very pleasurable coffee ritual just as endorphin is a pleasant side effect of doing something good for your body. To get these things without the work turns these rituals into just "using drugs". If the only reason people drank coffee was to get caffeine, we'd just start smoking crack cause it's much more effective and not much more expensive than Starbucks!
I worked at a federal laboratory several years ago and the systems there were under tight security. Every time you logged in a message would come up that what you did could be observed at any time by Lab employees or Federal law enforcement. Pretty freaky. In my group, though, someone wrote a LISP patch for emacs that warned when the sniffers were lurking. Whenever the Lab would be watching what you were doing a message would come up on the emacs message bar saying "Big Brother is Watching". This was right about when the WWW was starting to become popular (we used Mosaic on sunOS!) and I don't think the lab could track web hits yet, so I guess it was checking what directories you were in and what files you were editing to see if your account had been hacked.
It's a very hard problem for the Lab I'm sure, pitting the need for open exchange of ideas between researchers against the need to protect the security of what we were working on.
Anyway, now that there are programs that can monitor web usage, could we write a program that could warn users? Or, are all web hits archived so they don't have to monitor in real-time. If this were the case such a warning would be useless.
Also, is it any suprise companies are reading email, it's as simple as:
root> cat ~"user"/mail/inbox | grep "insert offensive language here"
It seems the MPAA is not exhibiting due care in choosing who it attacks. By going after those who link to copies of DeCSS it seems that it is potentially greatly widening the umbrella of those it considers to be criminal. Before, when they were attacking hacker's sites and freedom advocates, the Powers That Be (PTB) probably approved. Now, however, they could have the PTB turn against them quickly if they start going after some people with actual Power. As much as we may support 2600, they have very little support outside our community, I'm afraid. Imagine how quickly the tide could turn against MPAA if they tried to push around Yahoo! or AOL.
It reminds me of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". When Abigail implicated her powerless enemys and the downtrodden of the village, the Powers That Be (in this case the tribunal) did her bidding. As soon as she got too big for her britches and had the audacity to threaten the head of the tribunal, he quickly shut her down, she was forced to flee, and the Salem Witch Trials were over.
My advice to the MPAA: Be careful who you step on, because if you step on a gorilla, he'll smash your face in.
How do you know that super novae aren't the results of alien wars?
Because we know they are exploding stars. We know that as a fact because we can see several hundred supernovas a year using optical astronomy and infrared spectroscopy. The Supernova Cosomology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds and tracks Type I supernovas (these are a specific type of supernova that occur when a certain type of star explodes and releases a known amount of energy). When you see a star in a specific position on one pass and then you see an emerging supernova in your next past and then a full-blown supernova in the third pass that is pretty good evidence that a supernova is a star, isn't it.
The scientific community is so confident that supernovas are in fact exploding stars (and completely natural) that the red shift exhibited by them can be used to measure the expansion of the universe. In fact, by measuring these supernovas, the Supernova Cosmology Project has provided strong evidence that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing.
While it is certainly true that there is a lot we don't understand about physics and the universe, we actually do understand at a fairly deep level more than most people realize. For example, how could we have modern computers if we didn't understand solids at a truly profound level (Quantum theory of solids, the basis of solid-state physics)?
What I find so strange about the Xbox is that it is going to have an intel processor inside it. I can rattle off lots of processors that are more efficient than x86 (RISC processors such as PA-RISC, MIPS, SPARC, DEC Alpha, ARM, etc.), but Intel is successful largely because of the installed base, dominant operating system (remember NT came out originally for MIPS, Intel and Alpha. Mips and Alpha are long gone), and huge mindshare. A gaming console must do one thing and it must do it well, which screams RISC to me. On the other hand, the Sega Genesis and Commodore Amiga were amazing with what they could do with a 68000.
I've read the article over at Ars on the Emotion Engine and it looks like if software developers can get their heads around it, the Playstation 2 should lay waste to the Xbox. Nintendo's Dolphin (or whatever it's going to be called this week) also looks tight with it's PPC core. x86 has been looking tired for several years now and I can't imagine a high-performance graphics machine should be based on it.
To me, it seems M$ is shooting itself in the foot using an Intel processor considering that the leverage they will get from any installed base will be small given that gamers are used to buying a different architecture each time they upgrade. The fact that so many developers already design games for Windows may help though.
In summary, I think going with Intel may be a serious technical gaff but we'll have to wait and see if it will be a marketing win. As much as we may dislike M$, they are smart.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the Linux Kernal compliation test that all 3 chips couldn't pass? Without open source, how could you possibly compile the Kernal yourself? If the chip sucked but only ran on Windows and it crashed alot, you'd blame windows right?
I have Win98 dual-booted with Linux and Win98 crashes about every other day and Linux has never crashed. Ever. Not once.
Believe me, I wasn't praising AMD. Back in the 80s they were the quintessential market-driven company sitting on their PAL (programmable array logic) cash cow until Xilinx, Altera, and AT&T blew them out of the water with FPGAs. They became an engineering company because their life as a company depended on it, much as Apple suddenly became much more interesting after they got worked over in the mid 90s. I think almost any company would love to be a Goliath but we praise the ones that fight and innovate even though they are like that simply because they have to be.
But, smart as Intel has been over the last decade or so, it seems strange they would risk it all in a lame benchmarking race with a MUCH smaller rival.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure I'm not the only slashdot reader who doesn't know.
Have you thought about sending it through the governmental postal service? They may be slow, but they will deliver to anywhere (so they say). It seems to me you could just waltz into a post office and send it to Russia. I've emailed electronics to Eastern Europe with no problems except really high fees. The problem with private carriers, who are usually more efficient than government agencies, is that they are private businesses and so can make any lame rule they feel like. (not like the Postal Service isn't lame...)
In all fairness, I haven't noticed this to be the case (and I always use Google). In my experience, Google gives far and away the most useful replies to my queries, and I don't see any deal with Yahoo! changing this.
Or maybe the losers have to go to the space station and try to hold it together with some rope and a couple of safety pins. That would be REAL survivor!
CVD cheap?!? You must not know that much about semiconductor manufacturing.
If Cisco routers ran Linux, then no one would have to waste their time getting Cisco certified and Cisco wouldn't be able to make a mint training them. Somehow I don't think Cisco is going to think Linux on their routers is such a good idea.
They already use carbon as an electronics substrate for cryogenic (VERY low temperature) electronics, 1 or 2 Kelvin type of stuff. Also, Silicon Carbide electronics are potentially useful for high power application. There is just no way , though, that Carbon will be used as a general-purpose substrate because:
1. THE MAIN REASON: Silicon has an EXCELLENT oxide (SiO2) that makes field-effect transistors possible. These devices are the basis of the modern computer (that is post 1980) revolution because they are much smaller and use less power than biploar transistors and have in fact made that current crop of microprosessors possible. Without a high-quality native oxide, you don't have a field-effect transistor, so you don't have a leading-edge microprocessor. That's why you don't see Gallium Arsenide microprocessor in the 40 GHz range, because Gallium Arsenide doesn't have a good oxide.
2. Electron mobility: Silicon is much faster than carbon.
3. Ease of fabrication: Silicon is pretty much a miracle material when it comes to fabrication. It is self repairing when annealing in the furnance, is cheap to produce, and very easy to generate in single crystal form.
There are more but Silicon is here to stay for a long, long, time.
MEMS, Microelectromechanical systems, could very well be a revolutionary technology with such applications ranging from tiny actuators for robots or satellites to small, efficient inductors in radio-frequency integrated circuits. While this article implies carbon-diamond MEMS could be revolutionary, it gives no indication they'd be practical.
Remember, silicon (and all semiconductors, including carbon) has a diamond structure, so presumably using these buckyball carbon diamonds would be better. The problem is, how would we fabricate them cheaply?
The key reason silicon micromachines dominate the market for things such as automobile airbag sensors is because they are able to leverage already highly advanced silicon fabrication technologies originally developed for integrated circuits. No such technology exists for pure carbon and developing one would cost an unbelieveably large amount of money and take many years. There had better be some compelling reason for us to do so.
Many times technologies "better" than silicon have come out only to remain niche technologies. A good example is III-V semiconductors such as Gallium Arsenide. While they are indispensible for lasers and such, they are not used for integrated circuits nearly as much as silicon, because they are so damn expensive. Their current main use, RF power amps and fiber-optic receivers, is quickly being impinged upon by advanced silicon CMOS technologies.
My point is that this discovery is pretty interesting, but it is far from "revolutionary". Until someone comes up with a killer app that provides a compelling reason to justify the expense to develop this further, I'm going to keep my money on silicon-based micromachines.
I hope that's a joke man. CMOS electronics have been around since the 60s and today dominate the landscape. When microsoft came up with that acro. for IBM/PCs Bipolar TTL was king. I guess that's why nobody thought it was such a bad idea.
(1): They are made in rather exotic processes incompatible with standard digital CMOS. That means the analog readout and the DSP have to be done in another chip, increasing system cost. This is the key problem.
(2): They require high voltage clocks to drive them and so dissipate large amounts of power in the clock drivers. This also tends to increase system cost.
On the other hand, CMOS image sensors can be fabricated in standard CMOS technology with the image sensor, signal conditioning, and image procession all on the same inexpensive chip. While performance isn't quite up to CCDs yet, the price/performance ratio is already far superior.
No. A single pixel just outputs a voltage proportional to the integrated value of light it receives. It is interpreted as being red, green, or blue by the DSP depending on what color filter is being used for that particular pixel. This is one reason why black and white cameras still get superior resolution.
remember: the pixels do not discriminate photon wavelength (color). They simply integrate the number of photons that pass through them. The only way to get color information out of a solid-state imager is to use some sort of color filter.
Basically, in the near future, it would make sense for each home to have one wireline node to connect to the infrastructure and Bluetooth nodes within to interconnect locally. This goes for cell/wireless phones as well. Local wireless connectivity is definately the wave of the future.
In my first year of college I took many programming and computer courses that showed me just how little I knew about the big picture. While I could have made a good living as a gog in the programming wheel, without school I don't think I could ever have been an independent thinker.
Studying calculus and calculus based physics are the things that in my opinion taught me how to think clearly for the first time. My electronics courses showed me that there was something I was more interested in than software. Theory courses gave me insight into the structure of practical problems and how people have gone about solving them in the past. Only by learning the approaches of yesterday can you "stand on the shoulders of giants" and produce superior solutions.
If you skip college, you sell yourself short. While you may be an excellent programmer without a degree you certainly won't reach your full potential. You won't think as clearly as you could have and your solutions will probably not be as original. Without the insight that painful, in depth study provides (almost impossible to do outside of a classroom) I don't think anyone can be the best they can be.
Besides, what happens when the economy tanks and CS types aren't in as great demand? As shortsighted and unfair as it is, companies will demand a degree. In my field, you need a Master's to be taken seriously and they actually prefer Ph.D's.
It seems to me that "information" and "knowledge" are very different things. Do you think nuclear secrets would mean anything to the common man (or to you or me)? There is already a lot of information out there but precious little insight.
An "ancient" proverb goes something like this:
When information is free, knowledge will be priceless.
First, free agents erode the collective desire to be the best. What I mean by this is a free agent will most likely not be able to be part of a tight design team in the members push themselves and each other to be the best. In my experience, in a design group the staff designers tend to put more of themselves in the job than do the contractors and tend to get better results. I work in the IC business, but is it different in the software and IT businesses where many slashdotters work?
Second, free agentism provides a disincentive to do truly original work. When I was working full time, (I'm a PhD student now), the most original and interesting work came from those staff designers who had been working in the group and on the project for some time and felt a loyalty to the group (if not the organization). The contractors I've worked with tended to be more interested in busting out a kludge and moving on to always greener pastures. I'm not putting anyone down here; the contractors were professionals who did competent work, but they didn't have the drive the staff designers did. Perhaps it was because the staff engineers could hope for some stock options or a bonus as a reward for a job well done where the contractors just got a higher salary.
When I get out of school, I'm not interested in becoming a free agent. I want to join a team where I feel I am valued and am making a difference and then I want to put all my effort into being the best designer I can be.
He'd be unstoppable! Unless of course the Muscle Controller (running Windows 2010 of course) crashes and reconfigures his leg muscles into pure fat!
Why screw around with synapses and "innate productivity enhancers"? If you really "need to take something" just smoke crack. I really don't think people drink coffee to get a caffeine fix. If that were true people would just pop Excederin all day which gives you a pretty good caffeine induced kick-in-the-pants.
Anyone who's a long-distance runner knows the sweet feeling you get after a long run and how you get irritable and a little depressed when you don't run for a few days. This isn't so different from when my father used to get headaches without his morning coffee. We were both addicts: him to caffeine, me to endorphin.
It seems hacking your body so you get your morning caffeine without drinking coffee is like hacking your body to get endorphin with the requisite run. I think both of these miss the point: caffeine is only a pleasant side effect of people's very pleasurable coffee ritual just as endorphin is a pleasant side effect of doing something good for your body. To get these things without the work turns these rituals into just "using drugs". If the only reason people drank coffee was to get caffeine, we'd just start smoking crack cause it's much more effective and not much more expensive than Starbucks!
It's a very hard problem for the Lab I'm sure, pitting the need for open exchange of ideas between researchers against the need to protect the security of what we were working on.
Anyway, now that there are programs that can monitor web usage, could we write a program that could warn users? Or, are all web hits archived so they don't have to monitor in real-time. If this were the case such a warning would be useless.
Also, is it any suprise companies are reading email, it's as simple as:
root> cat ~"user"/mail/inbox | grep "insert offensive language here"
It reminds me of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". When Abigail implicated her powerless enemys and the downtrodden of the village, the Powers That Be (in this case the tribunal) did her bidding. As soon as she got too big for her britches and had the audacity to threaten the head of the tribunal, he quickly shut her down, she was forced to flee, and the Salem Witch Trials were over.
My advice to the MPAA: Be careful who you step on, because if you step on a gorilla, he'll smash your face in.
Because we know they are exploding stars. We know that as a fact because we can see several hundred supernovas a year using optical astronomy and infrared spectroscopy. The Supernova Cosomology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds and tracks Type I supernovas (these are a specific type of supernova that occur when a certain type of star explodes and releases a known amount of energy). When you see a star in a specific position on one pass and then you see an emerging supernova in your next past and then a full-blown supernova in the third pass that is pretty good evidence that a supernova is a star, isn't it.
The scientific community is so confident that supernovas are in fact exploding stars (and completely natural) that the red shift exhibited by them can be used to measure the expansion of the universe. In fact, by measuring these supernovas, the Supernova Cosmology Project has provided strong evidence that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing.
While it is certainly true that there is a lot we don't understand about physics and the universe, we actually do understand at a fairly deep level more than most people realize. For example, how could we have modern computers if we didn't understand solids at a truly profound level (Quantum theory of solids, the basis of solid-state physics)?
I've read the article over at Ars on the Emotion Engine and it looks like if software developers can get their heads around it, the Playstation 2 should lay waste to the Xbox. Nintendo's Dolphin (or whatever it's going to be called this week) also looks tight with it's PPC core. x86 has been looking tired for several years now and I can't imagine a high-performance graphics machine should be based on it.
To me, it seems M$ is shooting itself in the foot using an Intel processor considering that the leverage they will get from any installed base will be small given that gamers are used to buying a different architecture each time they upgrade. The fact that so many developers already design games for Windows may help though.
In summary, I think going with Intel may be a serious technical gaff but we'll have to wait and see if it will be a marketing win. As much as we may dislike M$, they are smart.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the Linux Kernal compliation test that all 3 chips couldn't pass? Without open source, how could you possibly compile the Kernal yourself? If the chip sucked but only ran on Windows and it crashed alot, you'd blame windows right? I have Win98 dual-booted with Linux and Win98 crashes about every other day and Linux has never crashed. Ever. Not once.
Yeah, the "certain conditions" were:
1. Chip plugged into Board.
2. Board powered up.
"But boss, it worked fine until I hit the ON switch!"
Believe me, I wasn't praising AMD. Back in the 80s they were the quintessential market-driven company sitting on their PAL (programmable array logic) cash cow until Xilinx, Altera, and AT&T blew them out of the water with FPGAs. They became an engineering company because their life as a company depended on it, much as Apple suddenly became much more interesting after they got worked over in the mid 90s. I think almost any company would love to be a Goliath but we praise the ones that fight and innovate even though they are like that simply because they have to be. But, smart as Intel has been over the last decade or so, it seems strange they would risk it all in a lame benchmarking race with a MUCH smaller rival.