Nothing can improve *more* than linearly with clock speed (which I assume when you say "CPU power"). Linear increase is the upperbound. Often the increase is lower due to memory (and other) bottlenecks.
When I said linear, I meant linear with a slope of 1. My mistake. (The slope is greater than 1 -- that is, a 10% increase in clock speed can give a slightly greater than 10% performance boost -- because of the constant overhead of Windows, device drivers, IDE CPU utilization, FlasK MPEG, etc., that is less relative to higher clock speeds.)
The original purpose behind the P4 is to be able to crank up the clock speed. Looks like they have reached their goal and even increase the IPC by just a little. So it looks like this will be a win for Intel. When the Athlon reached its max clock speed, and the P4 continues to crank up its speed all the way up to 10Ghz, you'll see.
The original idea was to introduce a new architecture. Intel claimed that the Willamette (sp?) core would greatly increase the speed per clock cycle -- in other words, a 1.5 GHz P4 would be as fast as a faster (in GHz) Athlon. That's what we're paying a premium for. What this shows is that in the best case scenario, when something is specfically recompiled for the P4 and it's a task that it performs best, the P4's advantage is almost statistically unimportant.
Again, its only real advantage here is the clock speed versus the Athlon. True, the P4 is very scalable, but so is AMD's next processor core. The P3 was also very scalable, but AMD ended up beating out Intel when they introduced the Thunderbird core revision. The same thing's likely to happen here -- Intel has the technicaly advantage here that they can crank up the clock speed in the future, but by the time they actually do it, AMD will have its next core ready, and they'll be able to do it to.
Come on, of all the complaints Tom brought up in his review, why do you think they picked the MPEG4 compression one? Simple: pick one task the P4's good at and let it speak for the processor as a whole.
Before anybody shoots this down as anti-Intel flamebait, think about it. Why else would Intel risk the bad publicity of using an "illegal" program for benchmarking purposes? I mean, why not recompile gcc or OpenUT for P4 optimizations? Because they knew the P4 would do well at MPEG4 compression.
That's not to say that it would do any better than the Athlon. Some of the speed difference could be attributed to the P4's higher clock speed, but a lot of it is because of the Intel-compiled FlasK's SSE2 support. Had AMD recompiled FlasK to support the Athlon's 3DNow+ MPEG extensions, I'm sure the Athlon would have gained a lot of ground too.
The fact that it made such massive gains on all processors just speaks to that theory. I mean, think about it -- if Intel's compiler could magically make your average program run twice as fast, like it did for FlasK MPEG, developers would be lining up outside of Intel's offices for copies. This means that either (a) Intel changed the internals of the program to "cheat" by lowering quality and skip the parts that the P4 did poorly at, or (b) FlasK MPEG is a special case.
And the numbers aren't quite as amazing as Tom suggests. If you take the x87 version and assume for simplification that FPS scales up linearly as MHz increases (which is not true -- if anything, something as CPU intensive as MPEG compression will probably improve significantly better than linearly with CPU power) then virtually all of the speed is accounted for by the fact that the P4 is 1.5 GHz -- the Athlon gets 9.28 frames per GHz, whereas the P4 gets 9.35 frames per GHz.
I know this is a terrible method for comparing CPU power, but it shows the basic idea here -- that most of the P4's advantage is due to its speed in MHz, not the architecture. While this is all well and good for Intel if all programs are recompiled overnight for the P4 and Intel can continue to out-clock AMD (given Intel's recent history that's not too likely), in the real world AMD still has the advantage.
So what about those SSE2 scores? Tom glosses over the fact that all but the lowest score are for lower-quality encoding. So yay, we're getting 22.85 FPS . . . in the lowest-quality setting. The high-quality SSE2 setting gives a not-so-stunning 4 FPS boost over the x87 version, which isn't that great of a boost, considering that an Intel engineer hand-optimized the program to work better with P4s. (Well, Intel claims they just recompiled it. But I have yet to see a compiler that adds SSE2 instructions on its own, let alone one that can add new options to a dialog box with SSE2 features.)
At any rate, none of this helps the Office benchmarks, or the UT benchmarks, or the 3DS Max benchmarks . . . or any other benchmark that reflects performance computer users might get except in special cases. Not every computer user can use exclusively GPL software that he/she can recompile at will to support his/her new processor. Besides, that would take a while, since the gcc scores aren't very good either.:)
(And am I the only one that noticed that Intel modified a GPLed program and refused to distribute the source or allow Tom to redistribute it? Isn't that illegal?)
Microsoft today announced the development of Windows NE (Nanomachine Edition). Microsoft is targeting this long-rumored OS, a scaled-down version of Windows CE, to the developing nanomachine market.
"Now doctors can perform complicated surgery with the reliablility of the Windows (R) platform," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced in a press conference today. "Provided that they pay the appropriate license fees, of course."
Microsoft has plans to license the OS on a per-machine basis, for a low price of $10.00 a nanomachine. Industry speculators predict that the sheer number of nanomachines required for many surgeries will provide Microsoft with a very large profit margin. Microsoft officials would neither confirm nor deny rampant rumors that license fees would be charged for the future children of users whose lives are saved by these operations.
Microsoft also announced its plans to market the.NET version of Windows NE, which would allow users to rent Windows NE on a monthly basis. "All we are asking for is a small fee every month for saving a number of lives," Gates told reporters. "Of course, if said fee is not paid, then said life will automatically be revoked by the advanced licensing system of Windows NE."
However, some of Microsoft's competitors were very vocal in their opposition to Microsoft's announcement. Larry Ellison lambasted Microsoft's announcement, stating that "Microsoft isn't thinking about the future. In the future, medical operations won't be limited to just computers and nanomachines -- ordinary household pens will be able to drill into your skin to perform routine surgery." Not coincidentally, Oracle announced today its intent to develop an OS to power ink, which it plans to market primarily to tattoo parlors worldwide.
So they decided to focus on their single-processor customers first. At least this way customers will be able to get at least a single-processor P4 board on the P4 launch date.
I was speaking hypothetically about ATI not manufacturing their own video cards; I didn't actually expect them to change their business plans. The Rage 128, like the Radeon, was an excellent product at its annoucement, but the time between its unveiling and its actual release was so great that the products it was trying to beat were already supplanted by a newer, faster generation of chips. ATI aimed for the hardcore gamer market but missed, because what would have top-of-the-line had it been released on time was behind nVidia's latest offering by the time it was actually released.
The fact that the Radeon was a large success with the hardcore gamer market owes a lot to the fact that it was delivered on time, which in turn owes a lot to ATI's expansion. Without the extra fabs, engineers, techs, etc., ATI would probably have had to push the release date much further back, which means they would have to face much hotter technology.
I'm certainly not suggesting that ATI's business model isn't sound. I've used a lot of ATI products in many of my computers (especially the cheaper ones) since the mid 90's, and I'm pleased with the results, although admittedly I still would probably prefer a GeForce 2 card over a Radeon card. I was pointing out that ATI was one of the few companies where their strategy did work, which owes a lot to their size and expertise in the field. You can't expect any old chip manufacturer like S3 or 3dfx to duplicate ATI's success by suddenly turning into a full-fledged card manufacturers. These companies succeeded in making 3D chips because of their nimbleness, and suddenly strapping on a manufacturing division crippled them when they found out that they simply didn't have the resources to spread around.
3dfx learned a very difficult and expensive lesson with its purchase of STB: it's too easy to spread yourself too thin. As a chip manufacturer, 3Dfx only had to deal with designing the chips, manufacturing them, writing drivers, and selling the chips to manufacturers.
Once 3dfx decided to make its own video cards, it had to worry about technical support, more extensive marketing (actual product promotion, not just brand promotion), the manufacturing of the rest of the components, etc. It's very hard to do all of these and do a decent job of them. The once-nimble 3dfx fell behind nVidia in product release schedule, and many of the products it did released were far from polished enough (remember the shoddy quality of the first Voodoo 3 drivers?) to win over the very same gamers that once used Voodoo 2 SLI rigs religiously.
The only company to date that's pulled this off well is ATI, and they didn't exactly do it right overnight. The constant delays of the Rage 128 line cost ATI valuable market share, because in the time that ATI took to finally ship the Rage 128 nVidia had released the TNT2, which was superior to ATI's offering. Had ATI not needed to worry about actually manufacturing and supporting the video cards, it could have probably gotten the Rage 128 out on time, and ATI could have gotten a lot greater sales out of it. ATI only managed the minor coup that it pulled with Radeon because it has expanded greatly in the past year or so to be able to manufacture both chips and cards.
Incidentally, this is hardly the first failure of video-chip-manufacturers-turned-video-card-makers. S3 also suffered huge losses after buying Diamond Multimedia, with a large part of the blame lying in the decision to maufacture their own video cards, and they eventually had to sell their graphics chip business to Via. Of course, Diamond's infamously bad tech support and drivers probably helped destroy S3's video business just as much as the extra "dead weight" that video card manufacturing brought on, but then again S3 wouldn't have had to consider that if they just manufactured video chips and left the product support to somebody else.
On a lighter note, do you think they'll bring back the capital D in 3Dfx?:)
Sadly, today school districts think that they are above the law and above their own rules when it comes to doling out punishment, especially when it comes to students who act out of the norm.
This even happened to me during high school, so I'm not being delusional. During my junior year of high school, I discovered that my computer account was disabled. I E-mailed the system administrator, who told me to talk with my principal, who wanted my accound disabled.
I met with the principal, who told me that my account was terminated because it contained copies of three copyrighted programs on the school computers. It quickly became obvious that someone stole my password for my account and used it to copy copyrighted software onto my account. This is quite easily accomplished, since our passwords were our student ID numbers, and we were required to wear our IDs around our neck at all times (something I was a vocal opponent of), and we couldn't change our passwords. After seeing the list of what was on my account, it was obvious that this is exactly what happened -- someone (I still don't know who) who didn't like me decided to get me in trouble and didn't have much difficulty doing it thanks to the school's computer "security" system.
What made me mad wasn't the fact that it was disabled; I could more or less care less if I did in fact copy those programs, because that's the consequences you suffer for breaking the law. What angered me was that after politely telling my principal that I didn't do it, he told me that I would have to find out who did it myself and get him/her to confess to it before I would get my account back. That is quite clearly against their own rules -- copying the model in the Constitution, the school district's rules say that they can't do anything to me unless they can prove I did it, and they can't make me prove my innocence. He even said that I should have been grateful that he didn't call the police.
The only way I got them to back down was by coming back the next day and politely telling him that they should go ahead and call in the police and ask them to press criminal charges, and we would see who the police sided with. I even offered to dial the phone for him. Needless to say, the principal quickly changed his mind once he saw he was dealing with someone who understood his rights.
The point I'm making here is that the school didn't really care what was right or legal when they dealt out the punishment because of who I was. Although I'm not exactly a trouble-maker (I have no criminal record, and my school record is spotless, and my teachers would say that I was a model student) I was (and still am) a dissident of sorts. I was a vocal opponent of a number of the school's policies, and they were just looking for something to nail me with.
Lest you think this is sour grapes, I can cite case after case from our school alone where our school dealt harshly with people who acted just slightly out of the norm. A group of students, who felt that our pep rallies had become too much like 1984-ish loyalty tests, protested by reading newspapers during the pep rally, and they were given detentions. Letters to the editor in the school newspaper in opposition of school decisions have been censored. And a meeting used to pass a matter that was kept a secret for months and that many students opposed was the information was accidentally (?) leaked by a teacher inadvertently (?) leaving a memo from one of the closed meetings in the library, was not announced and was scheduled in conflict of an extra-curricular activity that many of the vocal students attended. (Or perhaps better stated, would have attended -- the meeting was flooded by angry students and parents nonetheless.)
The point I'm trying to make is that today American school systems (excluding higher education, who are thankfully mostly free from such problems) train their students for absolutely loyalty, and they punish anyone who disagrees with them. I'm not the only one to complain about this -- both fellow students and teachers have told me they agree, though they wouldn't tell the administration so. The school in question here apparently decided that they didn't like the student giving other people at the prom ideas, so they shut him down. What better way to make an example of what happens to you if you oppose policy than to publicly punish him at a heavily-attended school function?
Do admire what he did? Absolutely. Do I agree with you? Of course. Do I think it matters? No. So long as we as a society put up with the current school system, this is going to keep happening. Personally this scares me; my school robbed me of my faith in democracy and in education, and I don't want this to happen to future generations.
Although I don't know about the specifics here, usually prom nominations are non-declinable -- that is, if you're nominated you don't have a choice in the matter. You don't "run" per se because if a certain number of people nominate you for king or queen then you're put on the ballot whether on not you want to be. You can campaign, assuming it's not prohibited by the rules, but I'm guessing he wasn't exactly campaigning here.
Calling him "selfish" is just a little bit out of line. Some friends of mine actually threatened to do there very same thing with me -- nominate me and then try to get everyone they could to vote for me so that on the off-chance I won I could stand up at the podium and refuse the crown just to show everyone how ridiculous the whole thing was. (I told them not to do it, since I'm sure my school would have done the same thing they did to this guy to me; while I was hardly a trouble-maker, I was a very vocal opponent of many of the school's practices and policies, and they probably wouldn't have had a whole lot of patience with me.)
What this student did was make an admirable statement -- he wasn't willing to even be a part of the institution that he opposed, so he just left. Plus, just walking off the spot is much less dicey than actually saying something -- if he said something that someone could possibly take as offensive or negative, then the school could legally use it as an excuse to suspend him. The school certainly couldn't suspend him on the grounds of what he didn't say, so he has much more grounds for appeal since he kept silent.
I disagree that he should have even been escorted out. He wasn't causing a disruption; he simply refused to participate in an activity that he wasn't obligated to participate in. He never signed any legal document stating that by being nominated or by attending the prom he had to agree to accept the crown -- since the school never prohibited it, he had the option to not accept the crown all along, and it's neither right nor legal for the school to simply make up rules when he does something that they don't like and then punish him retroactively.
I have a friend who had to drive me out from my college (about 20 - 30 minutes away from her house) just so I could fix her DVD player. She thought the blasted thing was broken because all of her DVDs (except for The Wizard of Oz, which I'm guessing wasn't copy protected) kept playing really bright and then really dark.
As you might have guessed, her TV had only one set of inputs, so she ran the DVD player through the VCR the same way most people do. Macrovision kicked in, and she couldn't watch her DVDs right. I tried looking for firmware hacks, but the only I found was firmware binaries, which didn't do my any could since I didn't have a EEPROM programmer and I really didn't feel like voiding my friend's player warranty, especially since she had to get a firmware upgrade anyway to get The Matrix to play. If not for the warranty voiding and the cost I would have told her to get a mod chip for the blasted thing just to make somebody in the movie industry mad.
I ended up having to go with her to Radio Shack and get a $30 adapter that would work with the various video connectors she was using and her TV. The guy there told me that last Christmas people kept coming to him and buying the same thing, since they found out that thanks to the movie industry you can't run an unmodded DVD player through a VCR.
The point I'm making is that if the movie industry doesn't get a little looser on their restrictions, then they're going to cut off their own growth. Sure, it all worked out for my friend since she knew someone who would dealt with this kind of thing all of the time, but what are the odds that most people have a techie friend to fix their DVD players for them? Even once I got it fixed, she was completely confused when I tried to explain exactly what Macrovision was to her, and I don't blame her.
People just want to put in a DVD and play it like a VCR tape, not buy adapters and cables so the movie industry can be sure that she can't copy the movies she has with a VCR. The irony here is that the very thing that the movie industry has created to preserve its DVD sales may kill it prematurely if people can't figure out how to hook up their own DVD players. I trust my parents to hook up a VCR, but not a DVD player (which fortunately hasn't become an issue yet), and that's not the right way to have to handle thing is DVDs are supposed to supplant VCRs.
The important part of the crack wasn't the source code, if they got it. So yippee, terrific, we've got some source code -- but what do you expect to do with it?
Many posters have noted that Microsoft's source code is notoriously bad, and from what code I've seen (i.e. what they distribute with their SDKs) they're right. The whole thing is one gigantic ugly hack -- they're living in a world where strict C and object-oriented C++ mix freely, and the only thing they do consistently is their stupid variable naming scheme. People whine about Netscape 4.x being an ugly hack, but Microsoft code is much much worse -- it just has the advantage of loading at OS boot time.
That said, there's very little anyone could pull from any source code they got. Picking it apart looking for weaknesses or trade secrets would be fruitless -- picking apart the source code to their DirectX demos is bad enough, let alone a whole OS. Even before you figure in the legal issues, it's much easier to just reverse engineer the blasted thing.
What's important here is now Microsoft has to admit that their products are exploit-ridden. One of the greatest problems that computer security advisors have had recently is Microsoft's attitude towards the VBScript exploits; basically, they think that their codebase is good enough as is, with maybe a few patches needed here and there, and if in the meantime a few exploits make their way through then tough. (In fact, security experts rightly point to Outlook Express as the sole reason that worms like Melissa can even exist.) After all, the Microsoft PR people say, it's good enough for us.
But now someone has forced them to own up to the fact that the security in their products is a joke. Before this exploit, Microsoft spent many a PR dollar blasting Linux for the 'inherit insecurity' of its open-source nature, pointing to the fact that Microsoft itself uses Windows NT/2000 for its servers and nobody's broken into them before. Now that's all changed, and someone has shown that not even Microsoft can trust their own products for maximum security operations.
The irony is that Microsoft has become a victim of its own policy -- if it works for the most part, there's no point in patching up the little security holes. Well, guess what -- those little security holes added up to one major security hole that struck Microsoft at its core!
So what does this mean to the average consumer? It means that Microsoft is going to have to work really hard to fix up its codebase. After such a high-profile attack, Fortune 500 companies are probably going to think twice before using Microsoft software for mission-critical operations. Microsoft really is going to have to prove itself in the future, and that means no more quick-fix patches to security holes that fix one hole but don't really fix the overall problem, like the series of IE and Outlook Express patches that come out after every new ActiveX or VBScript exploit is revealed.
"A short, usually one-sentence, submission to a news site, that presents information regarding a news story of minimal but peculiar interest or consequence."
We can probably actually prove that Slashdot came up with this first. We could then use the royalties to fund Slashdot, FSF, etc.
You're mistaken.
First of all, this is not a hardware issue, it's a software issue. There's a bug in the VIA AGP driver that causes memory corruption. This is neither a hardware problem or an AMD problem. Microsoft incorrectly associated these problems with problems with the processor when in fact it's a seperate (but somewhat related) issue. It's a bug, not a hardware incompatibility.
And when they mean AGP video they are talking about using AGP's extra features, like sidebanding and AGP texturing. This only affects 3D programs, and programs have to be specifically written with AGP in mind to use most of these features.
As far as the GeForce issues, it's a problem with motherboard compatibility, not the processor. A lot of the first Athlon boards didn't provide enough power to the AGP slot, which GeForce cards need. If you turned the I/O voltage up to 3.4V from 3.3 (or replacedd your motherboard) then it worked fine.
And I know a lot of dealers who would recommend AMD over Intel. I'm not a dealer, but I recommend AMD, and I use AMD processors exclusively. Case in point: somebody on my floor has an SMP dual P3-700. Besides the processor (I have a single Athlon 750) and motherboard (I have a KA7-100, he has some BX board, don't remember which) our computers are pretty much identical. His crashes all the time, and he's shocked at how fast and reliable my Athlon rig is. (Yes, we are both using Win2K, so he does get SMP.) And mine cost hundreds less. Need I say more?
I think what Microsoft is looking for is exactly what you said: to make other companies' products parts of their own. But I think you missed something very, very important.
Look back at Microsoft's history of "innovation." In other words, pretty much none. What they did is take ideas from competitors.
Do you see what I'm driving at? Without Corel, Microsoft has no real competition, and hence nowhere to take new ideas from. Without a constant stream of new ideas, they can't convince people to upgrade Microsoft Office every new release -- and so having Corel around is good for Microsoft's business, too.
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Nothing can improve *more* than linearly with clock speed (which I assume when you say "CPU power"). Linear increase is the upperbound. Often the increase is lower due to memory (and other) bottlenecks.
When I said linear, I meant linear with a slope of 1. My mistake. (The slope is greater than 1 -- that is, a 10% increase in clock speed can give a slightly greater than 10% performance boost -- because of the constant overhead of Windows, device drivers, IDE CPU utilization, FlasK MPEG, etc., that is less relative to higher clock speeds.)
The original purpose behind the P4 is to be able to crank up the clock speed. Looks like they have reached their goal and even increase the IPC by just a little. So it looks like this will be a win for Intel. When the Athlon reached its max clock speed, and the P4 continues to crank up its speed all the way up to 10Ghz, you'll see.
The original idea was to introduce a new architecture. Intel claimed that the Willamette (sp?) core would greatly increase the speed per clock cycle -- in other words, a 1.5 GHz P4 would be as fast as a faster (in GHz) Athlon. That's what we're paying a premium for. What this shows is that in the best case scenario, when something is specfically recompiled for the P4 and it's a task that it performs best, the P4's advantage is almost statistically unimportant.
Again, its only real advantage here is the clock speed versus the Athlon. True, the P4 is very scalable, but so is AMD's next processor core. The P3 was also very scalable, but AMD ended up beating out Intel when they introduced the Thunderbird core revision. The same thing's likely to happen here -- Intel has the technicaly advantage here that they can crank up the clock speed in the future, but by the time they actually do it, AMD will have its next core ready, and they'll be able to do it to.
Before anybody shoots this down as anti-Intel flamebait, think about it. Why else would Intel risk the bad publicity of using an "illegal" program for benchmarking purposes? I mean, why not recompile gcc or OpenUT for P4 optimizations? Because they knew the P4 would do well at MPEG4 compression.
That's not to say that it would do any better than the Athlon. Some of the speed difference could be attributed to the P4's higher clock speed, but a lot of it is because of the Intel-compiled FlasK's SSE2 support. Had AMD recompiled FlasK to support the Athlon's 3DNow+ MPEG extensions, I'm sure the Athlon would have gained a lot of ground too.
The fact that it made such massive gains on all processors just speaks to that theory. I mean, think about it -- if Intel's compiler could magically make your average program run twice as fast, like it did for FlasK MPEG, developers would be lining up outside of Intel's offices for copies. This means that either (a) Intel changed the internals of the program to "cheat" by lowering quality and skip the parts that the P4 did poorly at, or (b) FlasK MPEG is a special case.
And the numbers aren't quite as amazing as Tom suggests. If you take the x87 version and assume for simplification that FPS scales up linearly as MHz increases (which is not true -- if anything, something as CPU intensive as MPEG compression will probably improve significantly better than linearly with CPU power) then virtually all of the speed is accounted for by the fact that the P4 is 1.5 GHz -- the Athlon gets 9.28 frames per GHz, whereas the P4 gets 9.35 frames per GHz.
I know this is a terrible method for comparing CPU power, but it shows the basic idea here -- that most of the P4's advantage is due to its speed in MHz, not the architecture. While this is all well and good for Intel if all programs are recompiled overnight for the P4 and Intel can continue to out-clock AMD (given Intel's recent history that's not too likely), in the real world AMD still has the advantage.
So what about those SSE2 scores? Tom glosses over the fact that all but the lowest score are for lower-quality encoding. So yay, we're getting 22.85 FPS . . . in the lowest-quality setting. The high-quality SSE2 setting gives a not-so-stunning 4 FPS boost over the x87 version, which isn't that great of a boost, considering that an Intel engineer hand-optimized the program to work better with P4s. (Well, Intel claims they just recompiled it. But I have yet to see a compiler that adds SSE2 instructions on its own, let alone one that can add new options to a dialog box with SSE2 features.)
At any rate, none of this helps the Office benchmarks, or the UT benchmarks, or the 3DS Max benchmarks . . . or any other benchmark that reflects performance computer users might get except in special cases. Not every computer user can use exclusively GPL software that he/she can recompile at will to support his/her new processor. Besides, that would take a while, since the gcc scores aren't very good either. :)
(And am I the only one that noticed that Intel modified a GPLed program and refused to distribute the source or allow Tom to redistribute it? Isn't that illegal?)
"Now doctors can perform complicated surgery with the reliablility of the Windows (R) platform," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced in a press conference today. "Provided that they pay the appropriate license fees, of course."
Microsoft has plans to license the OS on a per-machine basis, for a low price of $10.00 a nanomachine. Industry speculators predict that the sheer number of nanomachines required for many surgeries will provide Microsoft with a very large profit margin. Microsoft officials would neither confirm nor deny rampant rumors that license fees would be charged for the future children of users whose lives are saved by these operations.
Microsoft also announced its plans to market the .NET version of Windows NE, which would allow users to rent Windows NE on a monthly basis. "All we are asking for is a small fee every month for saving a number of lives," Gates told reporters. "Of course, if said fee is not paid, then said life will automatically be revoked by the advanced licensing system of Windows NE."
However, some of Microsoft's competitors were very vocal in their opposition to Microsoft's announcement. Larry Ellison lambasted Microsoft's announcement, stating that "Microsoft isn't thinking about the future. In the future, medical operations won't be limited to just computers and nanomachines -- ordinary household pens will be able to drill into your skin to perform routine surgery." Not coincidentally, Oracle announced today its intent to develop an OS to power ink, which it plans to market primarily to tattoo parlors worldwide.
Oh, wait. Damn.
I was speaking hypothetically about ATI not manufacturing their own video cards; I didn't actually expect them to change their business plans. The Rage 128, like the Radeon, was an excellent product at its annoucement, but the time between its unveiling and its actual release was so great that the products it was trying to beat were already supplanted by a newer, faster generation of chips. ATI aimed for the hardcore gamer market but missed, because what would have top-of-the-line had it been released on time was behind nVidia's latest offering by the time it was actually released.
The fact that the Radeon was a large success with the hardcore gamer market owes a lot to the fact that it was delivered on time, which in turn owes a lot to ATI's expansion. Without the extra fabs, engineers, techs, etc., ATI would probably have had to push the release date much further back, which means they would have to face much hotter technology.
I'm certainly not suggesting that ATI's business model isn't sound. I've used a lot of ATI products in many of my computers (especially the cheaper ones) since the mid 90's, and I'm pleased with the results, although admittedly I still would probably prefer a GeForce 2 card over a Radeon card. I was pointing out that ATI was one of the few companies where their strategy did work, which owes a lot to their size and expertise in the field. You can't expect any old chip manufacturer like S3 or 3dfx to duplicate ATI's success by suddenly turning into a full-fledged card manufacturers. These companies succeeded in making 3D chips because of their nimbleness, and suddenly strapping on a manufacturing division crippled them when they found out that they simply didn't have the resources to spread around.
3dfx learned a very difficult and expensive lesson with its purchase of STB: it's too easy to spread yourself too thin. As a chip manufacturer, 3Dfx only had to deal with designing the chips, manufacturing them, writing drivers, and selling the chips to manufacturers.
Once 3dfx decided to make its own video cards, it had to worry about technical support, more extensive marketing (actual product promotion, not just brand promotion), the manufacturing of the rest of the components, etc. It's very hard to do all of these and do a decent job of them. The once-nimble 3dfx fell behind nVidia in product release schedule, and many of the products it did released were far from polished enough (remember the shoddy quality of the first Voodoo 3 drivers?) to win over the very same gamers that once used Voodoo 2 SLI rigs religiously.
The only company to date that's pulled this off well is ATI, and they didn't exactly do it right overnight. The constant delays of the Rage 128 line cost ATI valuable market share, because in the time that ATI took to finally ship the Rage 128 nVidia had released the TNT2, which was superior to ATI's offering. Had ATI not needed to worry about actually manufacturing and supporting the video cards, it could have probably gotten the Rage 128 out on time, and ATI could have gotten a lot greater sales out of it. ATI only managed the minor coup that it pulled with Radeon because it has expanded greatly in the past year or so to be able to manufacture both chips and cards.
Incidentally, this is hardly the first failure of video-chip-manufacturers-turned-video-card-makers. S3 also suffered huge losses after buying Diamond Multimedia, with a large part of the blame lying in the decision to maufacture their own video cards, and they eventually had to sell their graphics chip business to Via. Of course, Diamond's infamously bad tech support and drivers probably helped destroy S3's video business just as much as the extra "dead weight" that video card manufacturing brought on, but then again S3 wouldn't have had to consider that if they just manufactured video chips and left the product support to somebody else.
On a lighter note, do you think they'll bring back the capital D in 3Dfx? :)
This even happened to me during high school, so I'm not being delusional. During my junior year of high school, I discovered that my computer account was disabled. I E-mailed the system administrator, who told me to talk with my principal, who wanted my accound disabled.
I met with the principal, who told me that my account was terminated because it contained copies of three copyrighted programs on the school computers. It quickly became obvious that someone stole my password for my account and used it to copy copyrighted software onto my account. This is quite easily accomplished, since our passwords were our student ID numbers, and we were required to wear our IDs around our neck at all times (something I was a vocal opponent of), and we couldn't change our passwords. After seeing the list of what was on my account, it was obvious that this is exactly what happened -- someone (I still don't know who) who didn't like me decided to get me in trouble and didn't have much difficulty doing it thanks to the school's computer "security" system.
What made me mad wasn't the fact that it was disabled; I could more or less care less if I did in fact copy those programs, because that's the consequences you suffer for breaking the law. What angered me was that after politely telling my principal that I didn't do it, he told me that I would have to find out who did it myself and get him/her to confess to it before I would get my account back. That is quite clearly against their own rules -- copying the model in the Constitution, the school district's rules say that they can't do anything to me unless they can prove I did it, and they can't make me prove my innocence. He even said that I should have been grateful that he didn't call the police.
The only way I got them to back down was by coming back the next day and politely telling him that they should go ahead and call in the police and ask them to press criminal charges, and we would see who the police sided with. I even offered to dial the phone for him. Needless to say, the principal quickly changed his mind once he saw he was dealing with someone who understood his rights.
The point I'm making here is that the school didn't really care what was right or legal when they dealt out the punishment because of who I was. Although I'm not exactly a trouble-maker (I have no criminal record, and my school record is spotless, and my teachers would say that I was a model student) I was (and still am) a dissident of sorts. I was a vocal opponent of a number of the school's policies, and they were just looking for something to nail me with.
Lest you think this is sour grapes, I can cite case after case from our school alone where our school dealt harshly with people who acted just slightly out of the norm. A group of students, who felt that our pep rallies had become too much like 1984-ish loyalty tests, protested by reading newspapers during the pep rally, and they were given detentions. Letters to the editor in the school newspaper in opposition of school decisions have been censored. And a meeting used to pass a matter that was kept a secret for months and that many students opposed was the information was accidentally (?) leaked by a teacher inadvertently (?) leaving a memo from one of the closed meetings in the library, was not announced and was scheduled in conflict of an extra-curricular activity that many of the vocal students attended. (Or perhaps better stated, would have attended -- the meeting was flooded by angry students and parents nonetheless.)
The point I'm trying to make is that today American school systems (excluding higher education, who are thankfully mostly free from such problems) train their students for absolutely loyalty, and they punish anyone who disagrees with them. I'm not the only one to complain about this -- both fellow students and teachers have told me they agree, though they wouldn't tell the administration so. The school in question here apparently decided that they didn't like the student giving other people at the prom ideas, so they shut him down. What better way to make an example of what happens to you if you oppose policy than to publicly punish him at a heavily-attended school function?
Do admire what he did? Absolutely. Do I agree with you? Of course. Do I think it matters? No. So long as we as a society put up with the current school system, this is going to keep happening. Personally this scares me; my school robbed me of my faith in democracy and in education, and I don't want this to happen to future generations.
Calling him "selfish" is just a little bit out of line. Some friends of mine actually threatened to do there very same thing with me -- nominate me and then try to get everyone they could to vote for me so that on the off-chance I won I could stand up at the podium and refuse the crown just to show everyone how ridiculous the whole thing was. (I told them not to do it, since I'm sure my school would have done the same thing they did to this guy to me; while I was hardly a trouble-maker, I was a very vocal opponent of many of the school's practices and policies, and they probably wouldn't have had a whole lot of patience with me.)
What this student did was make an admirable statement -- he wasn't willing to even be a part of the institution that he opposed, so he just left. Plus, just walking off the spot is much less dicey than actually saying something -- if he said something that someone could possibly take as offensive or negative, then the school could legally use it as an excuse to suspend him. The school certainly couldn't suspend him on the grounds of what he didn't say, so he has much more grounds for appeal since he kept silent.
I disagree that he should have even been escorted out. He wasn't causing a disruption; he simply refused to participate in an activity that he wasn't obligated to participate in. He never signed any legal document stating that by being nominated or by attending the prom he had to agree to accept the crown -- since the school never prohibited it, he had the option to not accept the crown all along, and it's neither right nor legal for the school to simply make up rules when he does something that they don't like and then punish him retroactively.
As you might have guessed, her TV had only one set of inputs, so she ran the DVD player through the VCR the same way most people do. Macrovision kicked in, and she couldn't watch her DVDs right. I tried looking for firmware hacks, but the only I found was firmware binaries, which didn't do my any could since I didn't have a EEPROM programmer and I really didn't feel like voiding my friend's player warranty, especially since she had to get a firmware upgrade anyway to get The Matrix to play. If not for the warranty voiding and the cost I would have told her to get a mod chip for the blasted thing just to make somebody in the movie industry mad.
I ended up having to go with her to Radio Shack and get a $30 adapter that would work with the various video connectors she was using and her TV. The guy there told me that last Christmas people kept coming to him and buying the same thing, since they found out that thanks to the movie industry you can't run an unmodded DVD player through a VCR.
The point I'm making is that if the movie industry doesn't get a little looser on their restrictions, then they're going to cut off their own growth. Sure, it all worked out for my friend since she knew someone who would dealt with this kind of thing all of the time, but what are the odds that most people have a techie friend to fix their DVD players for them? Even once I got it fixed, she was completely confused when I tried to explain exactly what Macrovision was to her, and I don't blame her.
People just want to put in a DVD and play it like a VCR tape, not buy adapters and cables so the movie industry can be sure that she can't copy the movies she has with a VCR. The irony here is that the very thing that the movie industry has created to preserve its DVD sales may kill it prematurely if people can't figure out how to hook up their own DVD players. I trust my parents to hook up a VCR, but not a DVD player (which fortunately hasn't become an issue yet), and that's not the right way to have to handle thing is DVDs are supposed to supplant VCRs.
Many posters have noted that Microsoft's source code is notoriously bad, and from what code I've seen (i.e. what they distribute with their SDKs) they're right. The whole thing is one gigantic ugly hack -- they're living in a world where strict C and object-oriented C++ mix freely, and the only thing they do consistently is their stupid variable naming scheme. People whine about Netscape 4.x being an ugly hack, but Microsoft code is much much worse -- it just has the advantage of loading at OS boot time.
That said, there's very little anyone could pull from any source code they got. Picking it apart looking for weaknesses or trade secrets would be fruitless -- picking apart the source code to their DirectX demos is bad enough, let alone a whole OS. Even before you figure in the legal issues, it's much easier to just reverse engineer the blasted thing.
What's important here is now Microsoft has to admit that their products are exploit-ridden. One of the greatest problems that computer security advisors have had recently is Microsoft's attitude towards the VBScript exploits; basically, they think that their codebase is good enough as is, with maybe a few patches needed here and there, and if in the meantime a few exploits make their way through then tough. (In fact, security experts rightly point to Outlook Express as the sole reason that worms like Melissa can even exist.) After all, the Microsoft PR people say, it's good enough for us.
But now someone has forced them to own up to the fact that the security in their products is a joke. Before this exploit, Microsoft spent many a PR dollar blasting Linux for the 'inherit insecurity' of its open-source nature, pointing to the fact that Microsoft itself uses Windows NT/2000 for its servers and nobody's broken into them before. Now that's all changed, and someone has shown that not even Microsoft can trust their own products for maximum security operations.
The irony is that Microsoft has become a victim of its own policy -- if it works for the most part, there's no point in patching up the little security holes. Well, guess what -- those little security holes added up to one major security hole that struck Microsoft at its core!
So what does this mean to the average consumer? It means that Microsoft is going to have to work really hard to fix up its codebase. After such a high-profile attack, Fortune 500 companies are probably going to think twice before using Microsoft software for mission-critical operations. Microsoft really is going to have to prove itself in the future, and that means no more quick-fix patches to security holes that fix one hole but don't really fix the overall problem, like the series of IE and Outlook Express patches that come out after every new ActiveX or VBScript exploit is revealed.
Sorry, the idea's been taken, though not patented. See The Jargon File's entry on "write-only memory".
We can probably actually prove that Slashdot came up with this first. We could then use the royalties to fund Slashdot, FSF, etc.
You're mistaken. First of all, this is not a hardware issue, it's a software issue. There's a bug in the VIA AGP driver that causes memory corruption. This is neither a hardware problem or an AMD problem. Microsoft incorrectly associated these problems with problems with the processor when in fact it's a seperate (but somewhat related) issue. It's a bug, not a hardware incompatibility. And when they mean AGP video they are talking about using AGP's extra features, like sidebanding and AGP texturing. This only affects 3D programs, and programs have to be specifically written with AGP in mind to use most of these features. As far as the GeForce issues, it's a problem with motherboard compatibility, not the processor. A lot of the first Athlon boards didn't provide enough power to the AGP slot, which GeForce cards need. If you turned the I/O voltage up to 3.4V from 3.3 (or replacedd your motherboard) then it worked fine. And I know a lot of dealers who would recommend AMD over Intel. I'm not a dealer, but I recommend AMD, and I use AMD processors exclusively. Case in point: somebody on my floor has an SMP dual P3-700. Besides the processor (I have a single Athlon 750) and motherboard (I have a KA7-100, he has some BX board, don't remember which) our computers are pretty much identical. His crashes all the time, and he's shocked at how fast and reliable my Athlon rig is. (Yes, we are both using Win2K, so he does get SMP.) And mine cost hundreds less. Need I say more?
I think what Microsoft is looking for is exactly what you said: to make other companies' products parts of their own. But I think you missed something very, very important.
Look back at Microsoft's history of "innovation." In other words, pretty much none. What they did is take ideas from competitors.
Do you see what I'm driving at? Without Corel, Microsoft has no real competition, and hence nowhere to take new ideas from. Without a constant stream of new ideas, they can't convince people to upgrade Microsoft Office every new release -- and so having Corel around is good for Microsoft's business, too.