To clarify: With Apple's platform, I meant iOS for the iPhone, where a normal user can get apps only through the App Store (short of jailbreaking). It is true that the OS X for Mac desktops does not have the same restrictions.
IIRC, it is the latter and the "Interlagos" 16core server parts actually contain the quivalent of two 8core FX parts. So I guess the PR was wrong/confused. Not really surprising, AMD marketing is often confused;-)
Also since the days of yore (1980s?), there have been general use PCs. My first one was the Commodore 64, released in 1982. By today's standards a piece of crap, but it was clearly a machine that was open to programming by the user.
Today, we have the IBM compatibles with Linux, and even Windows allows the user to run applications of his choice. Game consoles are explicitly not general purpose machines, and even before Sony killed the Linux option on the PS3, it was of limited interest for, say, office use.
In the future, I expect that either the x86 PC will remain entrenched, or a new general use platform will emerge. Maybe Android on tablets without locked boot loaders.
Free and open source does not mean that the author has to offer the software on the platform of your choice. In the case of open source it does mean that you can take and redistribute the software yourself.
If the TOS of the platform (for instance Apple's) get in the way, that is the fault of the platform.
In short, if you want free software, avoid un-free platforms;-)
Given how ARM has been all conquering on portables & embeddeds and in a position to take on laptops, I'm not surprised that AMD is thinking along these lines @ all. If they were to drop 32-bit support from their CPUs, then the 64-bit only CPU would be a RISC CPU, from what I understand, and AMD would find it easier to match promised performances. As for Windoes XP, MS no longer sells it or supports it, and so XP only needs to support existing boxes. If it was just an issue b/w XP and 7, AMD could have dropped 32-bit compatibility already. I think Windows 8 is going to be the point where one sees support for CISC instructions being dropped.
I guess the portable market will keep growing and together with MS supporting ARM in Windows 8, eventually it will be big enough to make ARM serious competition for being the most widespread architecture.
How much of that will be due to Windows 8 remains to be seen. Not being able to run most existing x86 software will be a big disadvantage, and Android may win after all.
The same caveats apply to dropping 32 bit compatibility from x86. Right now x86-64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64) still supports 32 bit programs in compatibility mode. Dropping that compatibility would reduce the available software a lot. Five years from now, it might be different.
Overall, I doubt it is realistic for AMD to try and resurrect Alpha or another almost-extinct architecture. The opportunity to do so comes maybe once in 20 years, when the dominant architecture is poorly suited to a new class of products. The last such class were smartphones and tablets, and ARM has taken that opportunity. But AMD going mostly-ARM and delivering high end, desktop ARM chips? Quite possible, i think.
Even so, some organizations seem to consider it worthwhile even at elevated prices. In the forums of www.Spiegel.de (a German news magazine), I sometimes notice first-time posters who defend $CORPORATE_POINT_OF_VIEW with rather eloquent wording. To me that looks a lot like professional advertisers being paid to influence the discussion.
There's no way all that drugs would be legalized and keeped cheap. Cigarettes and Alcohol are facing increased tax to fund the medical care need by their abuse, don't think that mahijuana and others would be dealt differently.
I think that legalizing and taxing drugs (but taxing only to a point where hidden backyard manufacturing remains unprofitable) would be the best solution. This way, we could put the cartels out of business but still have a bit of a financial incentive to keep consumption low.
The taxes could be used for therapy in those cases where people cannot handle the newfound freedom to get high. As others wrote, it is not guaranteed that they would be used for that purpose. But that is a different topic that belongs in a thread about general fiscal irresponsibility of governments;-)
It still makes a difference if they can teach. From my own university time, I remember both -professors who actually were good teachers -and those who would simply read from a textbook and were not inclined to answer questions either. Now with the former kind, you arguably get your tuition's worth. With the latter kind, you might as well buy the textbook (which will cost a fraction of tuition) and learn by yourself. In other words, you pay not for "access to their expertise" but for the privilege to take exams at that university. Big difference.
Having agnostics as a third category besides believers and atheists provides that distinction
A useless distinction to allow insecure folks some kind of pointless illusion of non-confrontational middle ground. Either you're a Believer, or you're not. Period. Have some courage in your (non-)convictions.
I still think it is a useful distinction for academic discussions. And for those who only care if I'm a fellow Believer or not, I've given my answer in my previous post: I don't care about your God and I won't worship it.
I don't know whether there is a god or not, nor do I particularly care.
So, you don't believe there is a God. Atheist. Got it.
On the other hand, an atheist believes that there is no god - again, I don't know whether there is a god or not, I don't particularly care either way, so I'm not an atheist.
No. The concept that atheists actively believe in the existence of a non-God is a lie made up by the church to discredit atheists. I don't believe there is a God. That doesn't mean that I do believe there isn't a God. But, because I don't believe in God, I'm an atheist. You don't believe in God. You are an atheist. You have some particular aversion to that descriptor, so you claim another.
FYI, the Wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic#Types_of_agnosticism) seems to agree with GP. It is also consistent with what I know from other discussions. Personally, I find it useful to have a distinction between people who strongly believe in the non-existence of God (I think those exist, not only as a lie by the church) and those who view that question as somehow undecided. Having agnostics as a third category besides believers and atheists provides that distinction.
BTW, I consider myself a pragmatic agnostic as in the Wikipedia definition, but feel free to call me an atheist if it makes you happy. I don't particularly care;-)
It's the difference between shooting at an armed suspect, knowing you might hit a bystander, or opening fire in a crowded theater because you want to get a better seat.
Are you honestly so dim that you can't understand why the former is ok, and the latter is not?
Good example, and no, in most cases I don't think shooting at an armed suspect when bystanders are too close for a safe shot is acceptable. If the armed suspect is already wildly shooting, then shooting might be the lesser evil. Because in that case, taking him down quickly will be the lesser danger to the bystanders.
Fortunately, most police forces seem to understand this and are not quite as trigger happy as you suggest.
Your post got me curious, because I always had the impression that Linux is better than Windows in supporting old hardware. So I did some digging and found, yes, they do drop old stuff, but usually it is really old stuff. So old that few people will use it anymore.
For instance, this article http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg0Mg is about old graphics hardware that will be dropped in upcoming X.org releases. Typically, these chips were released in the late 1990s, so if you have a PC bought around the year 2000, you might have one of those.
But how many people do? I consider myself a bit of a pack rat, but even so I draw the line at keeping the three most recent "sets" of PC hardware. - a Pentium 4 from 2004, with board/ GPU/ power supply from the same year, now sitting in an old case from 1996. To my best knowledge, none of the components is scheduled for de-supporting in Linux anytime soon. -an AMD Athlon64 X2 from 2007. -a new AMD quad core, recently assembled into the (really nice) case from 2004. This one is my new primary PC.
Most geeks change their PCs more often, so by geek standards, I think my oldest PC is rather ancient. Corporate users seem to have a 5-6 year replacement cycle these years. At my place of work, most PCs are Core2Duos these days, with a few Pentium D still hanging around. Most single-core P4 are already gone.
That leaves underfunded schools and administrations (especially in third world countries) as the most likely candidates to have hardware from 2000 or older. Maybe it would be a good idea for them to maintain a distro for older hardware. The basis could be something like Debian stable (which is a few years behind the bleeding edge anyway;-).
Obviously, a big difference can be in the license terms. Can you legally change the reference designs, re-distribute the result without paying royalties and allow the recipient to do the same?
If yes, you have the equivalent of Open Source in software.
If no, then there is a difference and "open source hardware" is actually something new.
A big difference to Open Source software is in the cost of the manufacturing equipment. Where you can get a nice PC for programming for $1000, including screen, chip manufacturing hardware is a lot more expensive. The Open Graphics project, for instance, is still looking for investors to make an ASIC version possible. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project
That will exclude those hobbyists who just want to tinker with the design a bit. Only the most determined, who are willing to embark on a multi-year project, have a chance of getting somewhere. And companies with plenty of money, of course.
I remember driving my dad's Audi 100, the last family car without power steering we had. It was relatively lightweight at 2500 pounds empty, and for better leverage it had a larger steering wheel than what is common these days. When parking, it did require some strength to turn the wheels, but above maybe 5 mph it was easy. That non-power steering also had one nice property I miss on my current Audi A4: You could feel the bumps in the road as vibrations in the steering wheel, as well as uneven traction which would show up as pull on the steering wheel. That was a bit of feedback many cars with power steering have lost.
The Llano is one of these cases, as the CPU has to share the memory bandwidth with the built-in GPU. A review I've read (can't remember where) showed it to be really bandwidth limited, an Athlon II X4 with discrete GPU (that was not much stronger on paper) performed much better.
So I guess the Llano could really use quad channel memory. Probably not going to happen, but at least you want to utilize those two available memory channels.
Couple of 10 bucks, more likely. I've recently bought parts for an AMD-based PC upgrade (in Germany) and the price differences were
- about 7 euros more for 2x2GB ECC Ram, compared to the same amount of non-ECC. Both Kingston Value RAM BTW. - maybe 10-20 euros more for a board that supports ECC. That one is not as clear-cut BTW, it is more a case of having less choices if you want ECC, and the cheapest boards tend to not support ECC.
In dollars, that's maybe 40 bucks difference total. Or 50 bucks if you want 2x4GB and assume a similar price difference. Of course, if you buy Intel, it will be a couple of hundred bucks because their desktop CPUs don't support ECC at all. That means getting a Xeon, and those are expensive.
True, you have to check in advance which motherboards support ECC. It seems that many vendors don't want the effort of testing it or whatever, so the just kill the feature. But with a bit of looking around, you can usually find a board that supports ECC. Asus for instance supports it in many (but not all) AM3 boards.
My own current upgrade (parts bought, but not installed yet) consists of an Asus board and a Phenom II X4 because of ECC. Call me paranoid if you like, but the error protection seemed more important than the extra performance of a Sandy Bridge quad core.
Panel prices are in fact dropping. In recent years, they dropped even faster than the guaranteed (subsidized) price in Germany for solar electricity.
The idea is that the whole subsidies are only transitional, and eventually the solar panel industry will be a normal industry working in a free market. It seems to work.
OSX is built on a BSD variant, and to my best knowledge Apple did not violate the license terms. But they were not all that eager to contribute to the further develoment of BSD. Apple offered some of its OSX code for download, but never all of it. And the available part dwindled over the years.
For instance, several years ago when Linux drivers for ATI were in a deplorable state, Apple was offering the ATI 9600 series and obviously had OS X drivers for them. Out of curiosity, I looked at the Apple website if those drivers were available as Open Source. Might have been worthwhile to port them over - but I found nothing.
Behavior like that is the reason the GPL exists. Some people will just leech but not share, unless you add a bit of pressure;-)
Then use the German model: Subsidies by guaranteed, but gradually falling prices you get (from the electric utility company) for solar generated electricity. Eventually, the subsidized prices per kWh will be lower than the normal end user price and we are back at normal market pricing.
CO2 concentrations have already significantly increased due to human influence (burning of fossil fuels). So there should be more than enough for the growth of plants.
The contribution to the Greenhouse effect is estimated at 9-26% of all greenhouse gases according to Wikipedia. Not dominating, but not negligible either.
So GP was either uninformed or trolling. Probably the latter.
If none of the people involved have an ambition to make extra money, just releasing the IP under some Creative Commons license would do and make the materials available to other schools and students too.
If there is no consensus to do that, I personally feel that the teacher has the stronger claim. But even so, putting an automatic license for the school into the work contract seems only fair and would not hurt the teacher's interests much. After all, the worst case for the teacher would be losing sales to one school out of many.
The CPU power of even these crappy-low-end-cheap Atoms beat most P-IV CPUs for which this PCI card would be interesting, and as a bonus you'd get pretty capable integrated graphics.
I'm a bit skeptical here, after I compared a Lenovo Netbook (low end Atom, 1.6 GHz, Windows 7, 1GB RAM) to an old P-IV (2.4GHz, XP, 1GB RAM). Test application was an in-house piece of code I'm writing for my employer, single threaded, minimal disk I/O, no swapping on both machines thanks to modest memory use. Where the P-IV needed around 400ms for one calculation, the Atom needed around 600ms. A Core2Duo I also tested was far superior...
However, most of the "being defective" really seems to be completely screwed up Redmond Installations. It is actually very rare that the hardware itself is defective.
Around here (Germany), people seem to be a bit more parsimonious. While the P-IV generation is gradually thrown out for being obsolete at my place of work, a fair percentage of dumpster content is actually broken at the hardware level. Newer generations are still rare as throwaways. So far I got one Core2Duo, without RAM and with an incomplete case. If I find more of these (with not the same parts missing) there might actually be a free PC in it;-)
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You mean the decisions based on Microsoft's claims about how great IE6 was when it came out, so they locked critical business apps to it?
Exactly. Don't trust the salesman, his job is done once you buy.
A recommendation from an IT guy who has to support the thing once it is rolled out might be a bit more reliable ;-)
To clarify:
With Apple's platform, I meant iOS for the iPhone, where a normal user can get apps only through the App Store (short of jailbreaking).
It is true that the OS X for Mac desktops does not have the same restrictions.
IIRC, it is the latter and the "Interlagos" 16core server parts actually contain the quivalent of two 8core FX parts. So I guess the PR was wrong/confused. Not really surprising, AMD marketing is often confused ;-)
Also since the days of yore (1980s?), there have been general use PCs. My first one was the Commodore 64, released in 1982. By today's standards a piece of crap, but it was clearly a machine that was open to programming by the user.
Today, we have the IBM compatibles with Linux, and even Windows allows the user to run applications of his choice. Game consoles are explicitly not general purpose machines, and even before Sony killed the Linux option on the PS3, it was of limited interest for, say, office use.
In the future, I expect that either the x86 PC will remain entrenched, or a new general use platform will emerge. Maybe Android on tablets without locked boot loaders.
Free and open source does not mean that the author has to offer the software on the platform of your choice. In the case of open source it does mean that you can take and redistribute the software yourself.
If the TOS of the platform (for instance Apple's) get in the way, that is the fault of the platform.
In short, if you want free software, avoid un-free platforms ;-)
Given how ARM has been all conquering on portables & embeddeds and in a position to take on laptops, I'm not surprised that AMD is thinking along these lines @ all. If they were to drop 32-bit support from their CPUs, then the 64-bit only CPU would be a RISC CPU, from what I understand, and AMD would find it easier to match promised performances. As for Windoes XP, MS no longer sells it or supports it, and so XP only needs to support existing boxes. If it was just an issue b/w XP and 7, AMD could have dropped 32-bit compatibility already. I think Windows 8 is going to be the point where one sees support for CISC instructions being dropped.
I guess the portable market will keep growing and together with MS supporting ARM in Windows 8, eventually it will be big enough to make ARM serious competition for being the most widespread architecture.
How much of that will be due to Windows 8 remains to be seen. Not being able to run most existing x86 software will be a big disadvantage, and Android may win after all.
The same caveats apply to dropping 32 bit compatibility from x86. Right now x86-64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64) still supports 32 bit programs in compatibility mode. Dropping that compatibility would reduce the available software a lot. Five years from now, it might be different.
Overall, I doubt it is realistic for AMD to try and resurrect Alpha or another almost-extinct architecture. The opportunity to do so comes maybe once in 20 years, when the dominant architecture is poorly suited to a new class of products. The last such class were smartphones and tablets, and ARM has taken that opportunity.
But AMD going mostly-ARM and delivering high end, desktop ARM chips? Quite possible, i think.
Even so, some organizations seem to consider it worthwhile even at elevated prices. In the forums of www.Spiegel.de (a German news magazine), I sometimes notice first-time posters who defend $CORPORATE_POINT_OF_VIEW with rather eloquent wording. To me that looks a lot like professional advertisers being paid to influence the discussion.
There's no way all that drugs would be legalized and keeped cheap. Cigarettes and Alcohol are facing increased tax to fund the medical care need by their abuse, don't think that mahijuana and others would be dealt differently.
I think that legalizing and taxing drugs (but taxing only to a point where hidden backyard manufacturing remains unprofitable) would be the best solution. This way, we could put the cartels out of business but still have a bit of a financial incentive to keep consumption low.
The taxes could be used for therapy in those cases where people cannot handle the newfound freedom to get high. As others wrote, it is not guaranteed that they would be used for that purpose. But that is a different topic that belongs in a thread about general fiscal irresponsibility of governments ;-)
It still makes a difference if they can teach. From my own university time, I remember both
-professors who actually were good teachers
-and those who would simply read from a textbook and were not inclined to answer questions either.
Now with the former kind, you arguably get your tuition's worth. With the latter kind, you might as well buy the textbook (which will cost a fraction of tuition) and learn by yourself. In other words, you pay not for "access to their expertise" but for the privilege to take exams at that university. Big difference.
Having agnostics as a third category besides believers and atheists provides that distinction
A useless distinction to allow insecure folks some kind of pointless illusion of non-confrontational middle ground. Either you're a Believer, or you're not. Period. Have some courage in your (non-)convictions.
I still think it is a useful distinction for academic discussions. And for those who only care if I'm a fellow Believer or not, I've given my answer in my previous post:
I don't care about your God and I won't worship it.
I don't know whether there is a god or not, nor do I particularly care.
So, you don't believe there is a God. Atheist. Got it.
On the other hand, an atheist believes that there is no god - again, I don't know whether there is a god or not, I don't particularly care either way, so I'm not an atheist.
No. The concept that atheists actively believe in the existence of a non-God is a lie made up by the church to discredit atheists. I don't believe there is a God. That doesn't mean that I do believe there isn't a God. But, because I don't believe in God, I'm an atheist. You don't believe in God. You are an atheist. You have some particular aversion to that descriptor, so you claim another.
FYI, the Wikipedia definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic#Types_of_agnosticism) seems to agree with GP. It is also consistent with what I know from other discussions.
Personally, I find it useful to have a distinction between people who strongly believe in the non-existence of God (I think those exist, not only as a lie by the church) and those who view that question as somehow undecided. Having agnostics as a third category besides believers and atheists provides that distinction.
BTW, I consider myself a pragmatic agnostic as in the Wikipedia definition, but feel free to call me an atheist if it makes you happy. I don't particularly care ;-)
It's the difference between shooting at an armed suspect, knowing you might hit a bystander, or opening fire in a crowded theater because you want to get a better seat.
Are you honestly so dim that you can't understand why the former is ok, and the latter is not?
Good example, and no, in most cases I don't think shooting at an armed suspect when bystanders are too close for a safe shot is acceptable. If the armed suspect is already wildly shooting, then shooting might be the lesser evil. Because in that case, taking him down quickly will be the lesser danger to the bystanders.
Fortunately, most police forces seem to understand this and are not quite as trigger happy as you suggest.
Your post got me curious, because I always had the impression that Linux is better than Windows in supporting old hardware. So I did some digging and found, yes, they do drop old stuff, but usually it is really old stuff. So old that few people will use it anymore.
For instance, this article http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTg0Mg is about old graphics hardware that will be dropped in upcoming X.org releases. Typically, these chips were released in the late 1990s, so if you have a PC bought around the year 2000, you might have one of those.
But how many people do? I consider myself a bit of a pack rat, but even so I draw the line at keeping the three most recent "sets" of PC hardware.
- a Pentium 4 from 2004, with board/ GPU/ power supply from the same year, now sitting in an old case from 1996. To my best knowledge, none of the components is scheduled for de-supporting in Linux anytime soon.
-an AMD Athlon64 X2 from 2007.
-a new AMD quad core, recently assembled into the (really nice) case from 2004. This one is my new primary PC.
Most geeks change their PCs more often, so by geek standards, I think my oldest PC is rather ancient.
Corporate users seem to have a 5-6 year replacement cycle these years. At my place of work, most PCs are Core2Duos these days, with a few Pentium D still hanging around. Most single-core P4 are already gone.
That leaves underfunded schools and administrations (especially in third world countries) as the most likely candidates to have hardware from 2000 or older. Maybe it would be a good idea for them to maintain a distro for older hardware. The basis could be something like Debian stable (which is a few years behind the bleeding edge anyway ;-).
Obviously, a big difference can be in the license terms. Can you legally change the reference designs, re-distribute the result without paying royalties and allow the recipient to do the same?
If yes, you have the equivalent of Open Source in software.
If no, then there is a difference and "open source hardware" is actually something new.
A big difference to Open Source software is in the cost of the manufacturing equipment. Where you can get a nice PC for programming for $1000, including screen, chip manufacturing hardware is a lot more expensive. The Open Graphics project, for instance, is still looking for investors to make an ASIC version possible. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project
That will exclude those hobbyists who just want to tinker with the design a bit. Only the most determined, who are willing to embark on a multi-year project, have a chance of getting somewhere. And companies with plenty of money, of course.
I remember driving my dad's Audi 100, the last family car without power steering we had. It was relatively lightweight at 2500 pounds empty, and for better leverage it had a larger steering wheel than what is common these days.
When parking, it did require some strength to turn the wheels, but above maybe 5 mph it was easy. That non-power steering also had one nice property I miss on my current Audi A4:
You could feel the bumps in the road as vibrations in the steering wheel, as well as uneven traction which would show up as pull on the steering wheel. That was a bit of feedback many cars with power steering have lost.
The Llano is one of these cases, as the CPU has to share the memory bandwidth with the built-in GPU. A review I've read (can't remember where) showed it to be really bandwidth limited, an Athlon II X4 with discrete GPU (that was not much stronger on paper) performed much better.
So I guess the Llano could really use quad channel memory. Probably not going to happen, but at least you want to utilize those two available memory channels.
Couple of 10 bucks, more likely. I've recently bought parts for an AMD-based PC upgrade (in Germany) and the price differences were
- about 7 euros more for 2x2GB ECC Ram, compared to the same amount of non-ECC. Both Kingston Value RAM BTW.
- maybe 10-20 euros more for a board that supports ECC. That one is not as clear-cut BTW, it is more a case of having less choices if you want ECC, and the cheapest boards tend to not support ECC.
In dollars, that's maybe 40 bucks difference total. Or 50 bucks if you want 2x4GB and assume a similar price difference.
Of course, if you buy Intel, it will be a couple of hundred bucks because their desktop CPUs don't support ECC at all. That means getting a Xeon, and those are expensive.
True, you have to check in advance which motherboards support ECC. It seems that many vendors don't want the effort of testing it or whatever, so the just kill the feature. But with a bit of looking around, you can usually find a board that supports ECC. Asus for instance supports it in many (but not all) AM3 boards.
My own current upgrade (parts bought, but not installed yet) consists of an Asus board and a Phenom II X4 because of ECC. Call me paranoid if you like, but the error protection seemed more important than the extra performance of a Sandy Bridge quad core.
Panel prices are in fact dropping. In recent years, they dropped even faster than the guaranteed (subsidized) price in Germany for solar electricity.
The idea is that the whole subsidies are only transitional, and eventually the solar panel industry will be a normal industry working in a free market. It seems to work.
OSX is built on a BSD variant, and to my best knowledge Apple did not violate the license terms. But they were not all that eager to contribute to the further develoment of BSD. Apple offered some of its OSX code for download, but never all of it. And the available part dwindled over the years.
For instance, several years ago when Linux drivers for ATI were in a deplorable state, Apple was offering the ATI 9600 series and obviously had OS X drivers for them. Out of curiosity, I looked at the Apple website if those drivers were available as Open Source. Might have been worthwhile to port them over - but I found nothing.
Behavior like that is the reason the GPL exists. Some people will just leech but not share, unless you add a bit of pressure ;-)
Then use the German model: Subsidies by guaranteed, but gradually falling prices you get (from the electric utility company) for solar generated electricity.
Eventually, the subsidized prices per kWh will be lower than the normal end user price and we are back at normal market pricing.
CO2 concentrations have already significantly increased due to human influence (burning of fossil fuels). So there should be more than enough for the growth of plants.
The contribution to the Greenhouse effect is estimated at 9-26% of all greenhouse gases according to Wikipedia. Not dominating, but not negligible either.
So GP was either uninformed or trolling. Probably the latter.
If none of the people involved have an ambition to make extra money, just releasing the IP under some Creative Commons license would do and make the materials available to other schools and students too.
If there is no consensus to do that, I personally feel that the teacher has the stronger claim. But even so, putting an automatic license for the school into the work contract seems only fair and would not hurt the teacher's interests much. After all, the worst case for the teacher would be losing sales to one school out of many.
The CPU power of even these crappy-low-end-cheap Atoms beat most P-IV CPUs for which this PCI card would be interesting, and as a bonus you'd get pretty capable integrated graphics.
I'm a bit skeptical here, after I compared a Lenovo Netbook (low end Atom, 1.6 GHz, Windows 7, 1GB RAM) to an old P-IV (2.4GHz, XP, 1GB RAM).
Test application was an in-house piece of code I'm writing for my employer, single threaded, minimal disk I/O, no swapping on both machines thanks to modest memory use. Where the P-IV needed around 400ms for one calculation, the Atom needed around 600ms. A Core2Duo I also tested was far superior...
However, most of the "being defective" really seems to be completely screwed up Redmond Installations. It is actually very rare that the hardware itself is defective.
Around here (Germany), people seem to be a bit more parsimonious. While the P-IV generation is gradually thrown out for being obsolete at my place of work, a fair percentage of dumpster content is actually broken at the hardware level. ;-)
Newer generations are still rare as throwaways. So far I got one Core2Duo, without RAM and with an incomplete case. If I find more of these (with not the same parts missing) there might actually be a free PC in it