Yeah, the only interesting thing that is allowed are hypothetical questions. One I would ask Bush would be:
What would you call two people that under an investigation that require all of the following to be true in order to participate in that investigation? 1) That the two people must be allowed to testify jointly 2) That they would not be required to take an oath before testifying; 3) That the testimony would not be recorded electronically or transcribed, and that the only record would be notes taken by one of the commission staffers; and finally 4) That these notes would not be made public.
For those that don't know these were the requirements posed by Bush and Cheney in order to participate in the investigation of the largest attack on our nation within our borders.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions and vote accordingly.
You might want to try the cops, but they don't know the law, they just enforce laws they think are important and easy to catch people doing. A lawyer is your best bet, their job is to know the law, especially since the laws vary from state to state.
I do know that I've seen issues about this in public places (cameras in bathrooms) and the use of cameras in places like this were found to be illegal.
Actually, a quicker cheaper thing to do would be go get a baseball bat and teach the person a lesson regarding this. Someone that does something like this is a pretty sick fuck and should be treated as such.
Wants to introduce compulsory biometric ID cards, despite massive opposition
Many people would consider me a tin foil hat conspiracy theory nutjob, but even I don't have a problem with this. After all, I'm required to provide a picture ID to do anything that requires and ID, and that is a weak form of biometric ID.
They should be required to spend more time reviewing and repealing existing laws than in making new ones.
Reviewing and repealing laws is in the judicial branch. Making more laws keeps both the legislative and judicial branches in business. That was my point to begin with -- people have to justify their existance today.
All of this is inevitable. Think about it. If your not someone along the line of someone builds houses or a farmer or something that provides the basic necesities in life, you have to justify your existance in society.
Lawyers are people who are employed because they know the rules of society. That is how complex our society has become. And these people are given tons of respect. Lawyers, doctors, and NASA employees for some reason give people glassy eyes when they hear that someone works in one of those professions. A majority of lawyers have really dull jobs. They monkey around with contracts and other paper formalities. A good number of doctors today are those idiot doctors that work in those "Doc in a box" places. Try to get some useful health information from a doctor like diet and exercise, and not something that comes from a prescription. My usual contact with a doctor is stop smoking and take these pills. Usually the pills are something that I ask for because I already know what is wrong with me, however, I just cant get my prescriptions filled without talking and paying one of these bozos.
My point being is that we simply have to put up with all of these extra layers of crap in our society because machinery and automation have made so many jobs obsolete. Think about how much time effort and money (ie salaries paid) was involved in getting "Attention: Hot" on coffee cups. We as a society need this extra layer of fluff. Othewise, people would just get drunk and stoned all the time. We can't have that now can we?
I'm just speculating here, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm guessing that this is in response to rampant piracy in Russia and other areas. What Microsoft is doing is basically trying to get _some kind_ of a Microsoft tax from OEMs in those nations. I'm guessing that it is common in those markets that people are getting computers without any OS on them at all and many of them are just getting pirated versions of Windows and putting it on them.
Microsoft cannot devalue their product by selling it at an affordable price in those countries, because the rest of the people paying "full retail" will bitch about it. So what they do is tell OEMs that they can only pay $30 or whatever for the crippled version of the OS, and then the customer can pirate to get the real version.
Its kinda clever actually.
Now, how do I punch the checkbox on my/. preferences for the "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" to _really_ exclude Windows? Huh????
Red Hat back-patches the fix to version x and makes a new funny version number to signify this.
Yeah, RH does this all the time, and it sucks. The thing that sucks is that they do an x+1 revision on the RPM, but they often do not do any kind of increment in the announce string (like when you do ssh -v or telnet HOST 80; HEAD / HTTP/1.0).
I know that your "supposed" to register with RH and do all your updates from there, but its not worth the time for me. Especially since many of my boxes are on DMZs and I would have to go through a proxy or NAT configuration. Also, I have many machines that are the same, so I just copy an RPM from one to another or even rsync them.
Please stop treating your customers like idiots and give us information; information that we can use.
Please stop crying like a crack whore on welfare. If you want timely information from Microsoft pay for it. Or pick something different.
Sheesh, does this guy think he's the first guy to complain about Microsoft's security and the information and sketchy patches and service packs? I've known this was just par for the course for years.
Personally, I believe that installing Linux and Oracle in May of 2001 for mission critical business operations is, well, pretty stupid. Oracle only certified installation on Linux with Suse 7.1 in June of 2001. Oracle is not cheap. I doubt they saved any significant amount of cash by running Oracle on Linux vs Solaris. Back then, anyone reputable would run Oracle on Solaris, period. If it were up to me, I would probably still run Oracle on Solaris.
Also, from the link, there is a significant difference in the whole design of the new Solaris/Oracle setup with clustering and whatnot. I would attribute this change as a learning experience with the sysadmins.
Oh, and the grandparent asked for a _new_ project that chose Solaris over Linux, the linked article is for a switch from Linux to Solaris and a switch in Oracle versions/configurations as well.
Although I don't know of any projects off the top of my head, I would say that there are a number of Solaris/Oracle new installs where Linux was either not considered at all, or not considered for very long. If I were to use Linux and a database I'd use MySQL or postgress. If my reputation was on the line and the people had money and cared about integrity, I would still to this day go with Solaris/Oracle over Linux/Oracle.
I can only wish that PC hardware was designed so well.
Well designed PC hardware is available. You get what you pay for. PC hardware ranges from about $200 to $10,000 and beyond depending on the configuration. Frankly, I don't see too much of a need for too much extra engineering for one box. If something is that important your going to ensure reliability through redundancy. The best computer in the world can't do too much when some careless bozo spills coffee on it or if there is a, lord forbid, user error while the system is running
With computer components being as cheap as they are, this could change. All that's needed is a decent replacement to the PC BIOS infrastructure. Something like OpenFirmware would significantly improve the ability for the software to interface with the hardware.
This too is underway. Take a look here or here. However, I wouldn't hold your breath. People seem to like the 70s technology in most PCs, including Linus.
One of the reasons Solaris is slower than Linux is because it checks everything. It is one extremely anal system, and it never ever goes down.
No contest indeed; Solaris kicks the shit out of Linux.
I disagree. I would say that Linux and Solaris in terms of stability are about equal and both _very_ stable. Using the "latest and greatest" of both OSes is not recommended. There have been some issues with Solaris on Sun's lower end servers with IDE drives where the IDE driver was buggy and it would cause the system to freeze. I havn't had a production Linux system crash unexpectedly in over 6 years or so. And Linux does a pretty damn good job of "checking everything" as well. I've had Linux systems stay running with 1 of 2 processors frozen, and I've seen Linux carry on with about every hardware failure possible, and when Linux has found one of these hardware failures, it reports it, and keeps running as much as it can.
I tell you, if they open source Solaris (yeah right) we're going to be looking at some pretty amazing code. Some of the best hackers ever have hacked that thing.
I would say that all of the big kernel hackers are pretty damn good, beit AIX, *BSD, Solaris, or Linux. Although Linux is the baby of the bunch, they are all proven systems. I've worked with all of them. They all have plusses and minuses, and they are all pretty slick.
Netflix has specialized videos that Blockbuster won't carry....pr0n and import anime, for instance.
In my crystal ball, I see flat rate media service oriented companies like netflix being common in the near future. I thnk it would be best to control the flow of content at the provider level. Instead of going with XYZ cable internet provider or PDQ DSL service, you would go with something like Netflix or BMG, pay for bandwidth and content and your done. Anything you want to watch you can, on demand. The trick here is to completely flood the market with content so that P2P cannot keep up with demand. Hell, the companies could do QOS on their end and make it too painful for doing large P2P stuff.
The only problem I see with this is advertising. I can almost hear the cry of thousands of marketing types that will be upset because they can nolonger push goods and services that we probably don't want or need on us. But I personally would not care if I ever saw or heard another ad again.
Whats different is that CNN or Fox News is not an interactive forum like slashdot. If there were to be something significant in the cnn link that was not in the original post, then someone could post that like like the many other links. A duplicate story just unnecessarily divides the discussion. And also, most all of the discussion in a duplicate post is people like me bitching about it being a dupe.
I've never looked at the administrative part of slash, but I'm sure that there either could be an admin page that at least could at least show the titles of the past couple days of posts, or hell even just do a SQL query. Its not that tough.
Do you think it's right for China to have the "Most Favored Nation" status in foreign trade, even though they continually violate people's human rights?
Commies are in now. Disliking them is so 20th century. Ask Suddam about who is the new enemy of the US and its zero tolerance policy towards human rights violators.*
Do you fair trade is fair to the American worker when people overseas can live on less than half the money Americans need to survive here, and companies overseas have no labor laws. Isn't "Fair Trade" as it is championed today just an excuse for US businesses to get cheap, powerless labor?
Maybe our business dealings with China more accurately answers this and question 1 than my silly answer.
* Its OK to ignore our human rights violations such as the PATRIOT act. That constitution thing is wayyy overrated.
War is an idiology that is used to manipulate people into working harder and paying more taxes so that the government can provide direct and indirect military economies. The perpetuation of this idiology is though irrational fear of imaginary enemies. The best example was the "Cold War" and our irrational fear and hate of communism.
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
What concrete actions have you done to improve our national security and to make advances on the "War on terror"?
I have heard no admittance that our air defense and that of NORAD had failed on 9/11/01, nor have I heard of any changes to those systems that would prevent a similar air attack. I also would like to know why our military does not physically defend our land and sea borders. With a defense fiscal budget of over 420 billion dollars for 2005 its pretty embarassing that most anyone (and millions do) just walk into this country without a question asked.
1) When the IA-64 design first became public, it was clear that they'd made some incredibly poor decisions. For example, the architectural design was based on the assumption that the chip would not do out-of-order execution in hardware. Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.
The Intel fortran, C, and C++ compilers for the Itanium for Windows and Linux are pretty godlike in my experience. Look at AMD benchmarks and usually they are done with the Intel compiler. Intel has also licensed the compiler technology to at least Microsoft for VC++.
2) These predictions were borne out by the fact that Itanium performance has always sucked, especially considering the enormous die size, cost and heat dissipation.
Your definition of sucked differs from mine. Yeah, the Itanium1s did suck. Yeah, the Itaniums put out tons of heat, but much of the current work at Intel is not with uping the MHz game, but in lowering power consumption and heat dissipation. Currently available examples are the PentiumM and the low voltage Itanium2 processors which are only available at 1GHz now, but the whole line is supposed to be available in 2005.
3) It looked like Itanium might win in the market despite its technical limitations, just because of Intel's vast marketing budget, its momentum, and its monopoly leverage forcing OEMs to stay away from technically superior alternatives like AMD64.
Coke does the same thing over RC cola. Windows does this over OS X. It just comes from being the market leader. People buy what they are familiar and comfortable with and can afford.
4) Thankfully this hasn't happened. The technically superior, open solution is winning. Thanks AMD.
FWIW, Itaniums can run 32bit binaries right out of the box. I've done this with i386 rpms, installed them straigh from the rpm. I don't know about windows support for 32bit binaries on Itaniums.
I know that AMD being the underdog gets all the praise around here, but Intel is still the leader. AMD chipsets support slower CPU to memory times than Intel (32bit or 64bit) counterparts. AMD does not ship an optimized compiler for their CPUs for windows or linux, and in fact most benchmarks for AMD processors are using the Intel compiler in 32bit mode. However, at this time AMD does all in all provide a better bang for your buck, and current sales figures are reflecting this.
Another thing that Intel is leading the market in which is very important are low voltage CPUs with the PentiumM and the low voltage Itaniums. To my knowledge, this is an area that AMD has not even touched yet. For server rooms and large business PC/workstation installs, power and heat become an issue pretty quickly.
This could be interesting. This is some kind of "autolinking", and I guess like language it would change and evolve over time. So instead of linking to hard urls, one would link to abstract ideas. We do this today in our speach when we talk in America today about "our president" we mean George W. Bush. But in another country, or even again in the US the context could be different to mean something like the president of our company or club. So in the future we will have these intelilinks like: Weapons of mass destruction or Litigious Bastards, or Miserable Failure, which all go to links that are relavent to today in the here and now, but who knows? Sometime in the future a search for "Weapons of mass destruction", or "Litigious Bastards", or "Miserable Failure" will show completely different results, yet these results will be "correct" at the current time and context.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the only interesting thing that is allowed are hypothetical questions. One I would ask Bush would be:
What would you call two people that under an investigation that require all of the following to be true in order to participate in that investigation? 1) That the two people must be allowed to testify jointly 2) That they would not be required to take an oath before testifying; 3) That the testimony would not be recorded electronically or transcribed, and that the only record would be notes taken by one of the commission staffers; and finally 4) That these notes would not be made public.
For those that don't know these were the requirements posed by Bush and Cheney in order to participate in the investigation of the largest attack on our nation within our borders.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions and vote accordingly.
You might want to try the cops, but they don't know the law, they just enforce laws they think are important and easy to catch people doing. A lawyer is your best bet, their job is to know the law, especially since the laws vary from state to state.
I do know that I've seen issues about this in public places (cameras in bathrooms) and the use of cameras in places like this were found to be illegal.
Actually, a quicker cheaper thing to do would be go get a baseball bat and teach the person a lesson regarding this. Someone that does something like this is a pretty sick fuck and should be treated as such.
I don't think Mr Gates can be considered influential
I don't either, but then again I don't consider Michael Dell any more influential either. He just owns a mail order company that sells computers.
Wants to introduce compulsory biometric ID cards, despite massive opposition
Many people would consider me a tin foil hat conspiracy theory nutjob, but even I don't have a problem with this. After all, I'm required to provide a picture ID to do anything that requires and ID, and that is a weak form of biometric ID.
They should be required to spend more time reviewing and repealing existing laws than in making new ones.
Reviewing and repealing laws is in the judicial branch. Making more laws keeps both the legislative and judicial branches in business. That was my point to begin with -- people have to justify their existance today.
As a society we need a rework.
All of this is inevitable. Think about it. If your not someone along the line of someone builds houses or a farmer or something that provides the basic necesities in life, you have to justify your existance in society.
Lawyers are people who are employed because they know the rules of society. That is how complex our society has become. And these people are given tons of respect. Lawyers, doctors, and NASA employees for some reason give people glassy eyes when they hear that someone works in one of those professions. A majority of lawyers have really dull jobs. They monkey around with contracts and other paper formalities. A good number of doctors today are those idiot doctors that work in those "Doc in a box" places. Try to get some useful health information from a doctor like diet and exercise, and not something that comes from a prescription. My usual contact with a doctor is stop smoking and take these pills. Usually the pills are something that I ask for because I already know what is wrong with me, however, I just cant get my prescriptions filled without talking and paying one of these bozos.
My point being is that we simply have to put up with all of these extra layers of crap in our society because machinery and automation have made so many jobs obsolete. Think about how much time effort and money (ie salaries paid) was involved in getting "Attention: Hot" on coffee cups. We as a society need this extra layer of fluff. Othewise, people would just get drunk and stoned all the time. We can't have that now can we?
You have free linux that can do 10000x as much, and is cheaper.
I've always needed an internet connection with linux in order to figure out how to use it, get meaninful software etc.
I'm just speculating here, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
/. preferences for the "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" to _really_ exclude Windows? Huh????
I'm guessing that this is in response to rampant piracy in Russia and other areas. What Microsoft is doing is basically trying to get _some kind_ of a Microsoft tax from OEMs in those nations. I'm guessing that it is common in those markets that people are getting computers without any OS on them at all and many of them are just getting pirated versions of Windows and putting it on them.
Microsoft cannot devalue their product by selling it at an affordable price in those countries, because the rest of the people paying "full retail" will bitch about it. So what they do is tell OEMs that they can only pay $30 or whatever for the crippled version of the OS, and then the customer can pirate to get the real version.
Its kinda clever actually.
Now, how do I punch the checkbox on my
Red Hat back-patches the fix to version x and makes a new funny version number to signify this.
Yeah, RH does this all the time, and it sucks. The thing that sucks is that they do an x+1 revision on the RPM, but they often do not do any kind of increment in the announce string (like when you do ssh -v or telnet HOST 80; HEAD / HTTP/1.0).
I know that your "supposed" to register with RH and do all your updates from there, but its not worth the time for me. Especially since many of my boxes are on DMZs and I would have to go through a proxy or NAT configuration. Also, I have many machines that are the same, so I just copy an RPM from one to another or even rsync them.
This has been a gripe for some time.
Please stop treating your customers like idiots and give us information; information that we can use.
Please stop crying like a crack whore on welfare. If you want timely information from Microsoft pay for it. Or pick something different.
Sheesh, does this guy think he's the first guy to complain about Microsoft's security and the information and sketchy patches and service packs? I've known this was just par for the course for years.
Grandparent Can anyone cite a real life example where Solaris was used in place of linux on a new project for a valid reason?
l
parent The reasons? Linux couldn't handle emergencies, and wasn't always available.
After reading http://sartryck.idg.se/Art/Skistar_cs62003eng.htm
Personally, I believe that installing Linux and Oracle in May of 2001 for mission critical business operations is, well, pretty stupid. Oracle only certified installation on Linux with Suse 7.1 in June of 2001. Oracle is not cheap. I doubt they saved any significant amount of cash by running Oracle on Linux vs Solaris. Back then, anyone reputable would run Oracle on Solaris, period. If it were up to me, I would probably still run Oracle on Solaris.
Also, from the link, there is a significant difference in the whole design of the new Solaris/Oracle setup with clustering and whatnot. I would attribute this change as a learning experience with the sysadmins.
Oh, and the grandparent asked for a _new_ project that chose Solaris over Linux, the linked article is for a switch from Linux to Solaris and a switch in Oracle versions/configurations as well.
Although I don't know of any projects off the top of my head, I would say that there are a number of Solaris/Oracle new installs where Linux was either not considered at all, or not considered for very long. If I were to use Linux and a database I'd use MySQL or postgress. If my reputation was on the line and the people had money and cared about integrity, I would still to this day go with Solaris/Oracle over Linux/Oracle.
I can only wish that PC hardware was designed so well.
Well designed PC hardware is available. You get what you pay for. PC hardware ranges from about $200 to $10,000 and beyond depending on the configuration. Frankly, I don't see too much of a need for too much extra engineering for one box. If something is that important your going to ensure reliability through redundancy. The best computer in the world can't do too much when some careless bozo spills coffee on it or if there is a, lord forbid, user error while the system is running
With computer components being as cheap as they are, this could change. All that's needed is a decent replacement to the PC BIOS infrastructure. Something like OpenFirmware would significantly improve the ability for the software to interface with the hardware.
This too is underway. Take a look here or here. However, I wouldn't hold your breath. People seem to like the 70s technology in most PCs, including Linus.
One of the reasons Solaris is slower than Linux is because it checks everything. It is one extremely anal system, and it never ever goes down.
No contest indeed; Solaris kicks the shit out of Linux.
I disagree. I would say that Linux and Solaris in terms of stability are about equal and both _very_ stable. Using the "latest and greatest" of both OSes is not recommended. There have been some issues with Solaris on Sun's lower end servers with IDE drives where the IDE driver was buggy and it would cause the system to freeze. I havn't had a production Linux system crash unexpectedly in over 6 years or so. And Linux does a pretty damn good job of "checking everything" as well. I've had Linux systems stay running with 1 of 2 processors frozen, and I've seen Linux carry on with about every hardware failure possible, and when Linux has found one of these hardware failures, it reports it, and keeps running as much as it can.
I tell you, if they open source Solaris (yeah right) we're going to be looking at some pretty amazing code. Some of the best hackers ever have hacked that thing.
Hmm, I guess you havn't heard about solaris going open source.
I would say that all of the big kernel hackers are pretty damn good, beit AIX, *BSD, Solaris, or Linux. Although Linux is the baby of the bunch, they are all proven systems. I've worked with all of them. They all have plusses and minuses, and they are all pretty slick.
Netflix has specialized videos that Blockbuster won't carry....pr0n and import anime, for instance.
In my crystal ball, I see flat rate media service oriented companies like netflix being common in the near future. I thnk it would be best to control the flow of content at the provider level. Instead of going with XYZ cable internet provider or PDQ DSL service, you would go with something like Netflix or BMG, pay for bandwidth and content and your done. Anything you want to watch you can, on demand. The trick here is to completely flood the market with content so that P2P cannot keep up with demand. Hell, the companies could do QOS on their end and make it too painful for doing large P2P stuff.
The only problem I see with this is advertising. I can almost hear the cry of thousands of marketing types that will be upset because they can nolonger push goods and services that we probably don't want or need on us. But I personally would not care if I ever saw or heard another ad again.
We have an electoral college for the same reason we have a senate: to keep the more populous states from walking all over the less populous states.
So we have the electorial college and senate, which part is redundant?
Never watched CNN, or Fox News have you?
Whats different is that CNN or Fox News is not an interactive forum like slashdot. If there were to be something significant in the cnn link that was not in the original post, then someone could post that like like the many other links. A duplicate story just unnecessarily divides the discussion. And also, most all of the discussion in a duplicate post is people like me bitching about it being a dupe.
I've never looked at the administrative part of slash, but I'm sure that there either could be an admin page that at least could at least show the titles of the past couple days of posts, or hell even just do a SQL query. Its not that tough.
What do you think is the cause of this severe imbalance in law enforcement and the judicial process, and what can be done to correct the problem?
That was the purpose of the laws, and they are working well. See here for more info.
http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/george_w__bush_-_wo rld_s_leadi.html
Do you think it's right for China to have the "Most Favored Nation" status in foreign trade, even though they continually violate people's human rights?
Commies are in now. Disliking them is so 20th century. Ask Suddam about who is the new enemy of the US and its zero tolerance policy towards human rights violators.*
Do you fair trade is fair to the American worker when people overseas can live on less than half the money Americans need to survive here, and companies overseas have no labor laws. Isn't "Fair Trade" as it is championed today just an excuse for US businesses to get cheap, powerless labor?
Maybe our business dealings with China more accurately answers this and question 1 than my silly answer.
* Its OK to ignore our human rights violations such as the PATRIOT act. That constitution thing is wayyy overrated.
War is an idiology that is used to manipulate people into working harder and paying more taxes so that the government can provide direct and indirect military economies. The perpetuation of this idiology is though irrational fear of imaginary enemies. The best example was the "Cold War" and our irrational fear and hate of communism.
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Presidient Bush,
What concrete actions have you done to improve our national security and to make advances on the "War on terror"?
I have heard no admittance that our air defense and that of NORAD had failed on 9/11/01, nor have I heard of any changes to those systems that would prevent a similar air attack. I also would like to know why our military does not physically defend our land and sea borders. With a defense fiscal budget of over 420 billion dollars for 2005 its pretty embarassing that most anyone (and millions do) just walk into this country without a question asked.
1) When the IA-64 design first became public, it was clear that they'd made some incredibly poor decisions. For example, the architectural design was based on the assumption that the chip would not do out-of-order execution in hardware. Such deficiences were to be remedied by a god-like compiler that would emerge at some later date. Unsurprisingly, it never has.
The Intel fortran, C, and C++ compilers for the Itanium for Windows and Linux are pretty godlike in my experience. Look at AMD benchmarks and usually they are done with the Intel compiler. Intel has also licensed the compiler technology to at least Microsoft for VC++.
2) These predictions were borne out by the fact that Itanium performance has always sucked, especially considering the enormous die size, cost and heat dissipation.
Your definition of sucked differs from mine. Yeah, the Itanium1s did suck. Yeah, the Itaniums put out tons of heat, but much of the current work at Intel is not with uping the MHz game, but in lowering power consumption and heat dissipation. Currently available examples are the PentiumM and the low voltage Itanium2 processors which are only available at 1GHz now, but the whole line is supposed to be available in 2005.
3) It looked like Itanium might win in the market despite its technical limitations, just because of Intel's vast marketing budget, its momentum, and its monopoly leverage forcing OEMs to stay away from technically superior alternatives like AMD64.
Coke does the same thing over RC cola. Windows does this over OS X. It just comes from being the market leader. People buy what they are familiar and comfortable with and can afford.
4) Thankfully this hasn't happened. The technically superior, open solution is winning. Thanks AMD.
No comment.
FWIW, Itaniums can run 32bit binaries right out of the box. I've done this with i386 rpms, installed them straigh from the rpm. I don't know about windows support for 32bit binaries on Itaniums.
I know that AMD being the underdog gets all the praise around here, but Intel is still the leader. AMD chipsets support slower CPU to memory times than Intel (32bit or 64bit) counterparts. AMD does not ship an optimized compiler for their CPUs for windows or linux, and in fact most benchmarks for AMD processors are using the Intel compiler in 32bit mode. However, at this time AMD does all in all provide a better bang for your buck, and current sales figures are reflecting this.
Another thing that Intel is leading the market in which is very important are low voltage CPUs with the PentiumM and the low voltage Itaniums. To my knowledge, this is an area that AMD has not even touched yet. For server rooms and large business PC/workstation installs, power and heat become an issue pretty quickly.
This could be interesting. This is some kind of "autolinking", and I guess like language it would change and evolve over time. So instead of linking to hard urls, one would link to abstract ideas. We do this today in our speach when we talk in America today about "our president" we mean George W. Bush. But in another country, or even again in the US the context could be different to mean something like the president of our company or club. So in the future we will have these intelilinks like: Weapons of mass destruction or Litigious Bastards, or Miserable Failure, which all go to links that are relavent to today in the here and now, but who knows? Sometime in the future a search for "Weapons of mass destruction", or "Litigious Bastards", or "Miserable Failure" will show completely different results, yet these results will be "correct" at the current time and context.