Yes, actually. Spymac is pretty awful in my experience. The mail service is no exception.
First, they ask you for about six pages of information vs. Gmail's two fields. Next, their 'activation' mailing takes two weeks Then you find out that you have a 10MB attachment limit on your 1GB mail account. Then you find out that the advertized POP3 access doesn't, you know...work. (It doesn't at this very moment on my account.)
The end result is a pretty run-of-the-mill webmail service. It made me realize that the promising thing about Gmail isn't the 1GB, it's the features.
Mercifully (in a way), a semi-recent update changed the fan kick-in temperature to a lower threshold, meaning less built-up heat but a lower battery life. Expect the batteries on the new PowerBooks to not quite last as long as they're listed as, though they'd probably last long enough as is. For a college student like me, just having them last through class so that I can go back to my dorm and plug in for the evening's homework is fine.
Should you ever want to change the fan-temperature back (meaning more battery life and less fan noise), you can install Silent Night using Pacifist (Silent Night's installer doesn't always work right).
I for one couldn't stand the fan being on all the time, but then, I use my PowerBook on a desk most of the time, and I found the heat kind of plesant during the winter. YMMV.
Why does Apple never drop the price of current hardware instead?
Because eventually, so the theory goes, you will cave in and buy at the price that Apple sets. They're not trying to "get rid of" PowerBooks -- they're interested in the money made. Why should they sell you one for $600 today if you might be willing to pay $1200 six months from now? One of the side-effects of doing so would be that you would be less likely to ever be willing to pay more. Multiply that by the thousands that would love to scoop up a 'cheap' PowerBook and you can see how big a dent that would make into their income.
....the first step in allowing us linux and BSD users to listen to iTunes shared music. While we can share music (and its well documented) we cannot, to the best of my knowledge, listen to others music without using iTunes. Perhaps if this is doable, somebody can make a hack to allow us to listen to shared music?
It's already been done. Personally, I don't know how well it works, but it sounds promising. IIRC, the Rhythmbox (iTunes clone for GNOME) guys are planning on including it when it's "ready".
(The hack in this article is unrelated to iTunes' sharing.)
why didn't apple make itunes work with any browser to begin with?
Because they were going for seamless integration with iTunes the app and the iPod. What good would it be to use a browser interface be if you had to use iTunes to play the music anyway?
It may seem like a nice idea to use a web browser interface, but it would completely shatter the sense of integration that they were going for, and succeeded at.
But, if Apple (and this applies to Adobe too) was truly interested in "protecting" what is theirs, they'd implement their ideas in a more unbreakable fashion.
Oh, come on! If you understand why the DMCA is so bad, you certainly realize that nothing can be made "unbreakable", and further, that the harder you try to lock something down, the more you invite (and even force) people to try to break it.
Indeed, Apple seemed to have realized this in their DRM implementation, imposing such lax restrictions that fewer people need or want to circumvent it. I doubt it would have taken this long for a tool like this come out if FairPlay were more restrictive. (Barring, for this discussion, the proof-of-concept implementations like DVD Jon's and VLC's undocumented support, neither of which produced a usable file alone.)
I was on the verge of buying my first Mac because of OSX, but you know, it's hard to financially support a company that does this kind of shit.
I suppose you also don't pay taxes to the government that created the DMCA in the first place?
When the DMCA gets repealed, what are you going to do Apple? Hire thugs instead to find software authors, and deal with it that way??
That's rediculous. However fucked up it may be, the DMCA is law, and Apple's has a legal right to do what it's doing. To suggest that their willingness to do something legal (though deplorable to some) means that they'd be equally likely to do something illegal, like hire violent thugs, is misleading hyperbole.
Most of the 'silly patents' stories describe things like patents on simple software techniques intended to block competitors from the market (OneClick, for example), or companies using very old and broadly worded patents to extort money from an industry that grew up unaware of same (BT's hyperlinking patent).
It's usually pretty obvious that these are bad, yes, very bad.
Here you have a case of kneejerk anti-Apple trolling posing as a story.
Apple is patenting the design of the iPod's unique UI. It is not a patent on all MP3 players, it is not a patent on all MP3-player UIs. Unless you're trying to rip off the iPod, you won't be infringing upon it. That's the idea. Apple gets ripped off all the time -- this is how they protect against it.
You claim to have read the list of claims, but it's obvious that you haven't, or else haven't understood them properly, because the example you give is not among them. The only times the term MP3 shows up are as an example of a kind of file the UI could be used to navigate, and in a description of 'related art', which basically says "MP3 players exist, and they need interfaces."
If we admit that Apple's patent is reasonable, we should also admit that OneClick is reasonable.
Nope, sorry, totally different thing.
The problem most people here have with OneClick is that it is an incredibly obvious and simple idea that doesn't appear to have required any real work on the part of anyone at Amazon.
What Apple is trying to do with this design patent is protect the work of those that conceived of the iPod's unique UI. To suggest that imagining the thing in the first place isn't "work" shows an ignorance of industrial design and of aesthetics in general.
Frankly, I don't think that UI elements should be patentable. It's already extremely difficult to write software without infringing on a patent. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to design user interfaces without infringing on any mechanisms.
They aren't patenting particular elements of the UI like "menu" and "scroll wheel" (granted, the iPod's scroll whell is patented separately) -- but the combination in form and function that characterizes the iPod. You won't infringe upon this patent unless you're intentionally ripping off the iPod.
As one of the few companies with dedication to design, and one of fewer that gets it right consistently, Apple gets copied all the time. Why should they not try to protect their work?
Up until very recently, XviD.org, "The Home Of The XviD Codec" didn't have any public binaries, or any links to any. I believe the official stance was "It's not done yet, so nobody should be using it. Piss off."
Though I agree with the sentiment, it's worth noting that by default, Windows XP won't connect to unencrypted access points, and that Microsoft-brand access points are encrypted by default.
Of course, we all know that WEP is next to worthless, but having it enabled by default is one thing that Microsoft does right.
"jpkunst noticed over at macslash.org they are running a story about an article on kernelthread by Amit Singh etc etc...
How do you know that jpkunst reads MacSlash?
Is it not entirely possible for someone to have discovered the article on his own? Does it have to have been "stolen" from MacSlash, just because it was linked from there previously?
For all you know, MacSlash or jpkunst might have "stolen" it from the RSS feed on Amit Singh's blog.
I'll admit that I should have elaborated in more detail, as apparently everyone that's read my three-sentence post has misunderstood it.
I wasn't implying that the GPL is the only way, so much as Free Software/Open Source/Creative Commons/public domain, and reasonable-length copyrights are "as it should be". I used the GPL as an example only because I thought the parent poster drew a deeply flawed analogy with it.
I fully agree with the notion that the creator of a work should be able to control how their work is used. That's why we have copyright, and software licenses, in the first place.
But, I think it's a horrifying thing that a faceless corporate entity can excersize this control over a recording of which there are millions upon millions of copies of, 35 years after it was produced, when half of it's creators are already dead.
There comes a point where copyright protection stops being used by the artist to protect his or her rights, and starts being used by a corporation to protect it's profits.
Does EMI speak for The Beatles, or does EMI speak for EMI?
So by your logic, since the GPL is a propriety license now and impeeds my and the code's freedom, I'm free to include/distribute it as BSDed or public domain software, yes?
I don't know whose logic that is, but it's certaintly not mine. I didn't say that at all. Not even close. That's what the poster I was responding to said, and I pointed out that "That's completely incomparable.".
Yeah, so what if want to take it and stick with something that's not GPL'd and say "fuck you, I'm a code artist, I can do whatever I want. Fuck you and the license you rode in on." That is the analogue of this musical situation.
I wasn't making an analogy. But you are, and you're wrong. Just like the guy before you.
What I meant when I emphasised "as it fucking should be" was that the GPL, and more generally, open source, and even more generally, public domain works, Creative Commons licenses, etc. are better for mankind than things like software patents, DRM, and absurdly long copyright terms that serve more to protect corporate profits (EMI) than artists (the poor, starving, Beatles).
If The White Album had become part of the public domain X number of years ago (as I feel it should have), this wouldn't be an issue. Danger Mouse would be able to make his artistic contribution and the folks at EMI would have to do something more productive than milk every last dime out of a 35-year old record.
In the same spirit, Danger Mouse could have approached EMI after he created the remix but before he released it to the general public.
A run of 3000 is not much of a public release, but it's about average for that class of underground record. You have to remember that this is basically a guy in his bedroom with a sampler, not someone whose record your going to find at the mall.
If he went to EMI, they might say something like "We want $100k and 15%.", he'd be fucked, because it'd only cost him $3000 to get CDs pressed. Where he might be expecting to pay rent for a few months, or get a new bit of gear from the profits, it's not even worth EMI's time to talk to him if he can't come up with some big money.
So if I decide I don't like the terms of the GPL, I can just take their software and violate their copyright?
That's completely incomparable. If something is GPLed, you can take it and combine it with other GPLed code, without violating anything. As it fucking should be.
I think it's important to note that there is another artist that's been sampled here, whose opinion on the matter is obviously different. The Grey Album wouldn't have happened at all if not for Jay-Z releasing an acapella version of The Black Album for the explicit purpose of remixing. There's a hell of a lot more of his work in the Grey Album than the Beatles'.
Your point seems to be that they (EMI) have a legal right to do as they are, and right you are about that. The question is should they (and if so, why)? Are they afraid that this underground release is going to cut into new sales of The White Album? Fat fucking chance. This breed of remixing isn't about stealing someone else's work for your own gain -- it's about creating something new out of something else.
This wouldn't even be a debatable subject our culture still viewed music as art instead of product.
It's worth quoting from the article that he has been hired by Valve (upcoming Half Life 2) to use his expertise for their Steam content distributing system.
Does this mean he'll stop begging for donations every time someone installs BitTorrent on Windows?
I won't give them a break if they're intentionally hiding the good songs on otherwise crap albums
Blame the record company. They decide what makes it onto the store and what doesn't much more than Apple does. In this case, and many others, the particular song is probably missing because the record company knows that it would cut into album sales to have that track available by itself.
Other times, it's because the (or one of the) songwriters hasn't given permission for that kind of distribution.
Other times, it's because the (or one of the) copyright holder of a sample used in the song hasn't given permission of that kind of distribution.
So, there are lots of reasons that certain songs might be missing. But it's extremely doubtful that Apple is doing such a thing intentionally.
Slap in a DVD-/+RW drive and just don't tell anyone.
The reason they don't tell is because that's not always true. Apple uses several different brands of drive, some of which support RW, some of which don't. Apple avoids that kind of inconsistency both for marketing and support purposes. It's easier to say "All of our SuperDrives support DVD-R." than "SuperDrives in models X, Y, and Z, revision B, built in the Fall, during the full moon, support DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-XYZ, DVD-GLTH..." and so on.
Did an overclocker kill your parents or something, or are you just a pompous asshole?
A few years ago, I (and a lot of other people), bought a Celeron 366A for $70, and overclocked it by changing the frontside bus speed from 66MHz (the default for Celerons) to 100MHz (the default for Pentium 3s), making it run at 550MHz. The fastest available P3 at the time was 550MHz, and it cost something like $500.
This took about a minute to do, didn't require any extra cooling (except for $2 worth of thermal paste on the stock heatsink), and the chip has run flawlessly since then, giving me within 5% of the performance of a P3 550MHz in most applications.
To summarize, I bought $500 worth of performance for $70. Or, I saved myself $430 by overclocking.
Thousands of other people took advantage of this same underselling, it was a huge deal at the time. (Others might recount tales of overclocking the Celeron 300A to 450MHz in similar fashion -- it was a 'good year' for those chips.) Intel was selling these chips underclocked so as not to cut into the profits from the more expensive chips. (Today, in the case of new Celerons, they sell them with sky-high clock speeds to mask the fact that they've got horrificly poor performance.)
Part of the draw was that you didn't have to buy some fancy heatsink or run your motherboard at some strange frequency, or have to have any idea what you're doing beyond a few simple steps.
It's not usually quite that easy, and it's you're less likely to get the same 30%-50% clock speed gains with today's GHz+ chips, but there are still plenty of opportunities to get top-of-the-line performance from middle-tier chips without much cost or effort. Every time I build a new system, I look around to see whether any current chips in my price range are good overclockers. Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't.
My point is that not all overclocking is the same. What Tom's Hardware, and a lot of other enthusiast sites do is just 'experimenting' to get the most performance out of what is already among the fastest and most expensive chips out there.
The article bills itself as a 'record attempt', not something practical or cost-effective. There is (as I've described) cost- and time-effective overclocking, but when someone breaks out the liquid nitrogen, it's pretty obvious that they're doing it just for fun.
Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.
That's among the stupidest things I have ever heard. That's exactly what Intel and AMD do! Intel especially is focused on ramping up clock speed to get more performance out of the same basic chip. The only difference is that they control over more variables in the process. Sometimes it's in the design phase, but a lot of the incremental speed ups (From say 2.5GHz to 2.6GHz) come from just cranking the clock speed up and seeing if it still works. That's overclocking if you ask me. They just happen to be the ones that decide (when they lock the multiplier and label the chip) what's "over" and what's not.
If that doesn't work, they rely on refinements in the manufacturing to give them more headroom. When they overshoot and make chips that can run much faster than they want to sell them -- well, that's where the overclockers come in.
Slashdot Mirror
seems strange that they have a 1 GB email account, yet only give you 350 MB of storage.
Even stranger is that 250 of that is for pictures in the Spymac gallery, which means you can only store 100MB of Real Actual Files.
First of all, what is Spymac, chopped liver?
Yes, actually. Spymac is pretty awful in my experience. The mail service is no exception.
First, they ask you for about six pages of information vs. Gmail's two fields. Next, their 'activation' mailing takes two weeks Then you find out that you have a 10MB attachment limit on your 1GB mail account. Then you find out that the advertized POP3 access doesn't, you know...work. (It doesn't at this very moment on my account.)
The end result is a pretty run-of-the-mill webmail service. It made me realize that the promising thing about Gmail isn't the 1GB, it's the features.
Mercifully (in a way), a semi-recent update changed the fan kick-in temperature to a lower threshold, meaning less built-up heat but a lower battery life. Expect the batteries on the new PowerBooks to not quite last as long as they're listed as, though they'd probably last long enough as is. For a college student like me, just having them last through class so that I can go back to my dorm and plug in for the evening's homework is fine.
Should you ever want to change the fan-temperature back (meaning more battery life and less fan noise), you can install Silent Night using Pacifist (Silent Night's installer doesn't always work right).
I for one couldn't stand the fan being on all the time, but then, I use my PowerBook on a desk most of the time, and I found the heat kind of plesant during the winter. YMMV.
Why does Apple never drop the price of current hardware instead?
Because eventually, so the theory goes, you will cave in and buy at the price that Apple sets. They're not trying to "get rid of" PowerBooks -- they're interested in the money made. Why should they sell you one for $600 today if you might be willing to pay $1200 six months from now? One of the side-effects of doing so would be that you would be less likely to ever be willing to pay more. Multiply that by the thousands that would love to scoop up a 'cheap' PowerBook and you can see how big a dent that would make into their income.
....the first step in allowing us linux and BSD users to listen to iTunes shared music. While we can share music (and its well documented) we cannot, to the best of my knowledge, listen to others music without using iTunes. Perhaps if this is doable, somebody can make a hack to allow us to listen to shared music?
It's already been done. Personally, I don't know how well it works, but it sounds promising. IIRC, the Rhythmbox (iTunes clone for GNOME) guys are planning on including it when it's "ready".
(The hack in this article is unrelated to iTunes' sharing.)
why didn't apple make itunes work with any browser to begin with?
Because they were going for seamless integration with iTunes the app and the iPod. What good would it be to use a browser interface be if you had to use iTunes to play the music anyway?
It may seem like a nice idea to use a web browser interface, but it would completely shatter the sense of integration that they were going for, and succeeded at.
But, if Apple (and this applies to Adobe too) was truly interested in "protecting" what is theirs, they'd implement their ideas in a more unbreakable fashion.
Oh, come on! If you understand why the DMCA is so bad, you certainly realize that nothing can be made "unbreakable", and further, that the harder you try to lock something down, the more you invite (and even force) people to try to break it.
Indeed, Apple seemed to have realized this in their DRM implementation, imposing such lax restrictions that fewer people need or want to circumvent it. I doubt it would have taken this long for a tool like this come out if FairPlay were more restrictive. (Barring, for this discussion, the proof-of-concept implementations like DVD Jon's and VLC's undocumented support, neither of which produced a usable file alone.)
I was on the verge of buying my first Mac because of OSX, but you know, it's hard to financially support a company that does this kind of shit.
I suppose you also don't pay taxes to the government that created the DMCA in the first place?
When the DMCA gets repealed, what are you going to do Apple? Hire thugs instead to find software authors, and deal with it that way??
That's rediculous. However fucked up it may be, the DMCA is law, and Apple's has a legal right to do what it's doing. To suggest that their willingness to do something legal (though deplorable to some) means that they'd be equally likely to do something illegal, like hire violent thugs, is misleading hyperbole.
It's ready!
Most of the 'silly patents' stories describe things like patents on simple software techniques intended to block competitors from the market (OneClick, for example), or companies using very old and broadly worded patents to extort money from an industry that grew up unaware of same (BT's hyperlinking patent).
It's usually pretty obvious that these are bad, yes, very bad.
Here you have a case of kneejerk anti-Apple trolling posing as a story.
Apple is patenting the design of the iPod's unique UI. It is not a patent on all MP3 players, it is not a patent on all MP3-player UIs. Unless you're trying to rip off the iPod, you won't be infringing upon it. That's the idea. Apple gets ripped off all the time -- this is how they protect against it.
You claim to have read the list of claims, but it's obvious that you haven't, or else haven't understood them properly, because the example you give is not among them. The only times the term MP3 shows up are as an example of a kind of file the UI could be used to navigate, and in a description of 'related art', which basically says "MP3 players exist, and they need interfaces."
If we admit that Apple's patent is reasonable, we should also admit that OneClick is reasonable.
Nope, sorry, totally different thing.
The problem most people here have with OneClick is that it is an incredibly obvious and simple idea that doesn't appear to have required any real work on the part of anyone at Amazon.
What Apple is trying to do with this design patent is protect the work of those that conceived of the iPod's unique UI. To suggest that imagining the thing in the first place isn't "work" shows an ignorance of industrial design and of aesthetics in general.
Frankly, I don't think that UI elements should be patentable. It's already extremely difficult to write software without infringing on a patent. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to design user interfaces without infringing on any mechanisms.
They aren't patenting particular elements of the UI like "menu" and "scroll wheel" (granted, the iPod's scroll whell is patented separately) -- but the combination in form and function that characterizes the iPod. You won't infringe upon this patent unless you're intentionally ripping off the iPod.
As one of the few companies with dedication to design, and one of fewer that gets it right consistently, Apple gets copied all the time. Why should they not try to protect their work?
Up until very recently, XviD.org, "The Home Of The XviD Codec" didn't have any public binaries, or any links to any. I believe the official stance was "It's not done yet, so nobody should be using it. Piss off."
Maybe that's why they didn't review it.
Though I agree with the sentiment, it's worth noting that by default, Windows XP won't connect to unencrypted access points, and that Microsoft-brand access points are encrypted by default.
Of course, we all know that WEP is next to worthless, but having it enabled by default is one thing that Microsoft does right.
"jpkunst noticed over at macslash.org they are running a story about an article on kernelthread by Amit Singh etc etc...
How do you know that jpkunst reads MacSlash?
Is it not entirely possible for someone to have discovered
the article on his own? Does it have to have been "stolen" from
MacSlash, just because it was linked from there previously?
For all you know, MacSlash or jpkunst might have "stolen" it from the RSS feed on Amit Singh's blog.
I'll admit that I should have elaborated in more detail, as apparently everyone that's read my three-sentence post has misunderstood it.
I wasn't implying that the GPL is the only way, so much as Free Software/Open Source/Creative Commons/public domain, and reasonable-length copyrights are "as it should be". I used the GPL as an example only because I thought the parent poster drew a deeply flawed analogy with it.
I fully agree with the notion that the creator of a work should be able to control how their work is used. That's why we have copyright, and software licenses, in the first place.
But, I think it's a horrifying thing that a faceless corporate entity can excersize this control over a recording of which there are millions upon millions of copies of, 35 years after it was produced, when half of it's creators are already dead.
There comes a point where copyright protection stops being used by the artist to protect his or her rights, and starts being used by a corporation to protect it's profits.
Does EMI speak for The Beatles, or does EMI speak for EMI?
But I can't combine it with BSDed code.
True.
Or any other open code license.
Not at all true. There are a number of GPL-compatable licenses.
So by your logic, since the GPL is a propriety license now and impeeds my and the code's freedom, I'm free to include/distribute it as BSDed or public domain software, yes?
I don't know whose logic that is, but it's certaintly not mine. I didn't say that at all. Not even close. That's what the poster I was responding to said, and I pointed out that "That's completely incomparable.".
Yeah, so what if want to take it and stick with something that's not GPL'd and say "fuck you, I'm a code artist, I can do whatever I want. Fuck you and the license you rode in on." That is the analogue of this musical situation.
I wasn't making an analogy. But you are, and you're wrong. Just like the guy before you.
What I meant when I emphasised "as it fucking should be" was that the GPL, and more generally, open source, and even more generally, public domain works, Creative Commons licenses, etc. are better for mankind than things like software patents, DRM, and absurdly long copyright terms that serve more to protect corporate profits (EMI) than artists (the poor, starving, Beatles).
If The White Album had become part of the public domain X number of years ago (as I feel it should have), this wouldn't be an issue. Danger Mouse would be able to make his artistic contribution and the folks at EMI would have to do something more productive than milk every last dime out of a 35-year old record.
In the same spirit, Danger Mouse could have approached EMI after he created the remix but before he released it to the general public.
A run of 3000 is not much of a public release, but it's about average for that class of underground record. You have to remember that this is basically a guy in his bedroom with a sampler, not someone whose record your going to find at the mall.
If he went to EMI, they might say something like "We want $100k and 15%.", he'd be fucked, because it'd only cost him $3000 to get CDs pressed. Where he might be expecting to pay rent for a few months, or get a new bit of gear from the profits, it's not even worth EMI's time to talk to him if he can't come up with some big money.
So if I decide I don't like the terms of the GPL, I can just take their software and violate their copyright?
That's completely incomparable. If something is GPLed, you can take it and combine it with other GPLed code, without violating anything. As it fucking should be.
I think it's important to note that there is another artist that's been sampled here, whose opinion on the matter is obviously different. The Grey Album wouldn't have happened at all if not for Jay-Z releasing an acapella version of The Black Album for the explicit purpose of remixing. There's a hell of a lot more of his work in the Grey Album than the Beatles'.
Your point seems to be that they (EMI) have a legal right to do as they are, and right you are about that. The question is should they (and if so, why)? Are they afraid that this underground release is going to cut into new sales of The White Album? Fat fucking chance. This breed of remixing isn't about stealing someone else's work for your own gain -- it's about creating something new out of something else.
This wouldn't even be a debatable subject our culture still viewed music as art instead of product.
It's worth quoting from the article that he has been hired by Valve (upcoming Half Life 2) to use his expertise for their Steam content distributing system.
Does this mean he'll stop begging for donations every time someone installs BitTorrent on Windows?
I have no idea if it actually lives up to the hype
It doesn't. They've got a pretty stale product, dispite being based upon some extremely interesting research.
I won't give them a break if they're intentionally hiding the good songs on otherwise crap albums
Blame the record company. They decide what makes it onto the store and what doesn't much more than Apple does. In this case, and many others, the particular song is probably missing because the record company knows that it would cut into album sales to have that track available by itself.
Other times, it's because the (or one of the) songwriters hasn't given permission for that kind of distribution.
Other times, it's because the (or one of the) copyright holder of a sample used in the song hasn't given permission of that kind of distribution.
So, there are lots of reasons that certain songs might be missing. But it's extremely doubtful that Apple is doing such a thing intentionally.
Sharing bookmarks on a LAN is both great and troublesome. How do you implement this easily and quickly in a Windows environment without Rendezvous?
That's easy. Port it.
Slap in a DVD-/+RW drive and just don't tell anyone.
The reason they don't tell is because that's not always true. Apple uses several different brands of drive, some of which support RW, some of which don't. Apple avoids that kind of inconsistency both for marketing and support purposes. It's easier to say "All of our SuperDrives support DVD-R." than "SuperDrives in models X, Y, and Z, revision B, built in the Fall, during the full moon, support DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-XYZ, DVD-GLTH..." and so on.
Did an overclocker kill your parents or something, or are you just a pompous asshole?
A few years ago, I (and a lot of other people), bought a Celeron 366A for $70, and overclocked it by changing the frontside bus speed from 66MHz (the default for Celerons) to 100MHz (the default for Pentium 3s), making it run at 550MHz. The fastest available P3 at the time was 550MHz, and it cost something like $500.
This took about a minute to do, didn't require any extra cooling (except for $2 worth of thermal paste on the stock heatsink), and the chip has run flawlessly since then, giving me within 5% of the performance of a P3 550MHz in most applications.
To summarize, I bought $500 worth of performance for $70. Or, I saved myself $430 by overclocking.
Thousands of other people took advantage of this same underselling, it was a huge deal at the time. (Others might recount tales of overclocking the Celeron 300A to 450MHz in similar fashion -- it was a 'good year' for those chips.) Intel was selling these chips underclocked so as not to cut into the profits from the more expensive chips. (Today, in the case of new Celerons, they sell them with sky-high clock speeds to mask the fact that they've got horrificly poor performance.)
Part of the draw was that you didn't have to buy some fancy heatsink or run your motherboard at some strange frequency, or have to have any idea what you're doing beyond a few simple steps.
It's not usually quite that easy, and it's you're less likely to get the same 30%-50% clock speed gains with today's GHz+ chips, but there are still plenty of opportunities to get top-of-the-line performance from middle-tier chips without much cost or effort. Every time I build a new system, I look around to see whether any current chips in my price range are good overclockers. Sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't.
My point is that not all overclocking is the same. What Tom's Hardware, and a lot of other enthusiast sites do is just 'experimenting' to get the most performance out of what is already among the fastest and most expensive chips out there.
The article bills itself as a 'record attempt', not something practical or cost-effective. There is (as I've described) cost- and time-effective overclocking, but when someone breaks out the liquid nitrogen, it's pretty obvious that they're doing it just for fun.
Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.
That's among the stupidest things I have ever heard. That's exactly what Intel and AMD do! Intel especially is focused on ramping up clock speed to get more performance out of the same basic chip. The only difference is that they control over more variables in the process. Sometimes it's in the design phase, but a lot of the incremental speed ups (From say 2.5GHz to 2.6GHz) come from just cranking the clock speed up and seeing if it still works. That's overclocking if you ask me. They just happen to be the ones that decide (when they lock the multiplier and label the chip) what's "over" and what's not.
If that doesn't work, they rely on refinements in the manufacturing to give them more headroom. When they overshoot and make chips that can run much faster than they want to sell them -- well, that's where the overclockers come in.