Only if they don't follow through on the brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign donations.
--Blair
"Which, interestingly enough, come from the same addresses..."
Re:Informative - More like criminal action actuall
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 2
Dude, you're allowed to walk down the street for free, I can't believe you'd bitch about the cops pushing flyers in your pockets and searching you for doobs on every corner.
The account isn't free. It's got banner ads all over it. That's my eyeball time purchased by Microsoft's sponsors. And they count the page hits for their own advertising. That's the price paid for my account. I also to spend my valuable time observing, and in some cases stopping GIF animations and Flash4 loops on, those ads. But I have the legal right to stop them from mixing their spam with my email.
Microsoft is breaking the law. They offered a box to check to opt out of spam from all sources, and I checked it. They know the law. They choose to flout it, going so far as to design software to get around all attempts to block their spam, and to train customer-support personnel in evading the issue and delaying its resolution. My indignation is completely justified.
It's not any less a crime just because some people think it's okay to be victimized. I expect people to disagree with that. I expect people to vote against it. I expect some people still to elect fascists and communists into power in their countries. No issue is 100%.
Microsoft is committing this crime against millions of us, when all they have to do is pay attention to that checkbox and they won't be committing that crime against any of us. What's so hard about that?
The 845 is only a POS with SDRAM because SDRAM is much, much slower than DDR or RDRAM. Half and a third as fast, respectively. If it can beat the VIA DDR chipset (which is only 5-7% slower than the i850 RDRAM chipset), it will give near-RDRAM performance with DDR memory.
The P4 was derated in order to get it to market ASAP because P3 was not going to keep up with Athlon at all. If AMD hadn't made that leapfrog (with help from some former DEC Alpha engineers), Intel would have had time to make P4 work more efficiently. But this is what they have. Not that they ever stop. They're usually doing R&D three designs out (not steppings or shrinks, but families).
P4 will have to stay 20-30% ahead of Athlon in Clock Speed and will have to make 845 fly on DDR in order to compete box-for-box. Bus speeds will probably start ticking up with time, too.
AMD will be in trouble nonetheless. The GHz/GHz comparisons do have a powerful marketing effect, capable of overcoming hundreds of dollars worth of valuation difference. The benchmarks are split. (It's funny to watch people argue over that, saying one side's wins are due to "biased" benchmarks. There's no such thing as a biased benchmark; there's only better performance with a given piece of software.)
A top-end Intel chip using Rambus runs circles around the fastest possible factory-spec AMD-based system. (Overclocking works for both, and is a micro-niche, so it's economically moot.) One you buy today could hold that advantage for a year. Yes it's 50% more expensive, but that 50% is now $6-700, not the $1.5-2k that used to separate the top boxen. Hell, with the deflation in computer prices, you could buy *both* and have change left over for an Ethernet switch.
Intel thought it could ignore AMD, and that cost it a bunch, but now it's turned to face AMD directly, and AMD's more likely to lose ground than to gain.
(1) applies to the concept "if Bill Gates uses HotMail," which was implicit in my post; and (2) applies to the concept "then surely some one of the thousands of underutilized teenage typing resources infesting the internet would have found one of Bill Gates' messages and posted it by now."
You're a literalist. You might want to have that looked at.
AMD's already underwater on profits. Intel just needs to hold AMD's head under while it floats just above breakeven, and AMD will drown. Flash won't save AMD (Intel makes flash too; they both do well at it) if Intel can make its performance targets on the P4 roadmap.
In a week the P4-2GHz will be out. They've already made noises about stepping to 6GHz in fab lines under construction, and someone let slip that they think the P4 design can reach 10GHz. P4 is going to be around for a very long time. AMD has nothing like that kind of roadmap; they have cute things like nForce or whatever it's called. They are broadening with no plan for going up.
AMD doesn't have the capital to keep up with Intel in a real footrace. They only grabbed market share because Intel made a strategic error in committing itself to RDRAM instead of making it just a high-high-end option. With the new 845 chipset (SDRAM now, DDR in the near future) and some flanking help by VIA (DDR chipset now) Intel is clearly back in the driver's seat.
You're right about how they "help keep Intel on their toes". AMD's actions are benefitting the consumer in a gigantic way. Prices are clearly moving to our benefit, and the technology choices (SDRAM, DDR-SDRAM, RDRAM, motherboards, overclocking) are multiplying. Intel is adopting all of these, giving AMD no niche it can dominate for any length of time.
At some point, AMD's pocketbook is going to have to give. Unless they can be bought by some giant (and it could be anyone from Tyco to Texas Instruments to Warren Buffett) they will be in debt with no net income.
--Blair
P.S. The CPU/chipset stuff should all be pretty fresh at www.tomshardware.com [thanks for repeating that].
Re:System Prices are so cheap right now
on
The New Athlons
·
· Score: 2
Wait a few weeks. Intel and VIA will settle over VIA's licensing forgetfulness on the P4 connection, and VIA's P4/DDR mobos will be out.
No, I wouldn't, because it didn't say anything about anything I asked about.
--Blair
"Keep it unreal."
Re:Informative - More like criminal action actuall
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That's okay.
Microsoft's hotmail operation is in flagrant violation of the opt-out provisions of existing privacy laws.
Microsoft sends email to users' inboxes by going around the entire email system, circumventing all attempts to opt out, block, or filter the spam. These emails come from "staff@hotmail.com" and are clearly not normal messages, because they have to power to disable the Reply buttons.
When told they are breaking the law, Microsoft sends back boilerplate that alternately denies the spam is from Microsoft or gives the instructions for the aforementioned nonworking methods of blocking spam.
--Blair
P.S. As it turns out, their monthly spam-o-gram came very shortly after I opened my first--and only--hotmail account, so just about all of the correspondence that has ever transited that account has been my complaints, their responses, and more spam from them. I think the balance is one or two non-microsoft spams and one email from a guy who runs an anti-spam website to whom I'd mailed the long transcript of nonsense that had occurred.
Bluetooth is "secure" in that its range is relatively short.
Using Bluetooth is like conversing out loud in a room.
Using 802.11b is like hooking your phone up to a Deep Purple sized sound system in your backyard.
As with all things Internet-Aged, if you want to assuage your paranoia you need to encrypt your data before you send it and not rely on the network to be secure.
There were rumors that Metricom and Ricochet were still selling modems up to the day they shut off the network (Aug. 8).
The auction was done on Aug. 16. There are no details as yet, but the reports read like the spectrum was all the value it had left. The equipment may truly have been sold for scrap.
Anyone with a bad idea and enough money can get any nonsense turned into a law.
--Blair
"Democracy is a wonderful thing. I wish we had some."
Re:Lower sales for the monopolist
on
$1200 Cheap!
·
· Score: 2
> This is so stupid I'm in awe. > Not to mention that Bill Gates is personally guilt of nothing, it's Microsoft that has been deemed "a monopoly" by a judge who was judged biased, if not corrupt.
>"Did I get it?
>
>--Blair
>"I love a good meme joke."
But it does show up when I hit "reply" (i.e., I couldn't read it in the normal threading, but I can cut and paste it here, although it's been misformatted because the preview added a lot of tags I didn't use...)
> So tell me, if Union can correctly hand-count their ballots and be home before midnight
Correctly? By what alternate means of counting was the correctness of the count asserted?
Since we assume that hand-counting is the last resort and most correct method, resorting to it first results in the assumption that we have made the count correctly and avoided the error-prone methods.
But why do you think we started using polling machines in the first place?
And why return to mechanical technologies with lots of fragile moving parts, susceptibility to (albeit massive) shock and dust, and way more current drain?
...since they can already deliver their own state by hand, they will use the information gained to use the Internet to remotely subvert the Constitution in other states.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they don't follow through on the brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign donations.
--Blair
"Which, interestingly enough, come from the same addresses..."
Dude, you're allowed to walk down the street for free, I can't believe you'd bitch about the cops pushing flyers in your pockets and searching you for doobs on every corner.
The account isn't free. It's got banner ads all over it. That's my eyeball time purchased by Microsoft's sponsors. And they count the page hits for their own advertising. That's the price paid for my account. I also to spend my valuable time observing, and in some cases stopping GIF animations and Flash4 loops on, those ads. But I have the legal right to stop them from mixing their spam with my email.
Microsoft is breaking the law. They offered a box to check to opt out of spam from all sources, and I checked it. They know the law. They choose to flout it, going so far as to design software to get around all attempts to block their spam, and to train customer-support personnel in evading the issue and delaying its resolution. My indignation is completely justified.
It's not any less a crime just because some people think it's okay to be victimized. I expect people to disagree with that. I expect people to vote against it. I expect some people still to elect fascists and communists into power in their countries. No issue is 100%.
Microsoft is committing this crime against millions of us, when all they have to do is pay attention to that checkbox and they won't be committing that crime against any of us. What's so hard about that?
--Blair
The 845 is only a POS with SDRAM because SDRAM is much, much slower than DDR or RDRAM. Half and a third as fast, respectively. If it can beat the VIA DDR chipset (which is only 5-7% slower than the i850 RDRAM chipset), it will give near-RDRAM performance with DDR memory.
The P4 was derated in order to get it to market ASAP because P3 was not going to keep up with Athlon at all. If AMD hadn't made that leapfrog (with help from some former DEC Alpha engineers), Intel would have had time to make P4 work more efficiently. But this is what they have. Not that they ever stop. They're usually doing R&D three designs out (not steppings or shrinks, but families).
P4 will have to stay 20-30% ahead of Athlon in Clock Speed and will have to make 845 fly on DDR in order to compete box-for-box. Bus speeds will probably start ticking up with time, too.
AMD will be in trouble nonetheless. The GHz/GHz comparisons do have a powerful marketing effect, capable of overcoming hundreds of dollars worth of valuation difference. The benchmarks are split. (It's funny to watch people argue over that, saying one side's wins are due to "biased" benchmarks. There's no such thing as a biased benchmark; there's only better performance with a given piece of software.)
A top-end Intel chip using Rambus runs circles around the fastest possible factory-spec AMD-based system. (Overclocking works for both, and is a micro-niche, so it's economically moot.) One you buy today could hold that advantage for a year. Yes it's 50% more expensive, but that 50% is now $6-700, not the $1.5-2k that used to separate the top boxen. Hell, with the deflation in computer prices, you could buy *both* and have change left over for an Ethernet switch.
Intel thought it could ignore AMD, and that cost it a bunch, but now it's turned to face AMD directly, and AMD's more likely to lose ground than to gain.
--Blair
Ah. I see. You
1. Don't understand humor.
2. Don't understand the tenacity of h4xx0rs.
(1) applies to the concept "if Bill Gates uses HotMail," which was implicit in my post; and (2) applies to the concept "then surely some one of the thousands of underutilized teenage typing resources infesting the internet would have found one of Bill Gates' messages and posted it by now."
You're a literalist. You might want to have that looked at.
--Blair
AMD's already underwater on profits. Intel just needs to hold AMD's head under while it floats just above breakeven, and AMD will drown. Flash won't save AMD (Intel makes flash too; they both do well at it) if Intel can make its performance targets on the P4 roadmap.
In a week the P4-2GHz will be out. They've already made noises about stepping to 6GHz in fab lines under construction, and someone let slip that they think the P4 design can reach 10GHz. P4 is going to be around for a very long time. AMD has nothing like that kind of roadmap; they have cute things like nForce or whatever it's called. They are broadening with no plan for going up.
AMD doesn't have the capital to keep up with Intel in a real footrace. They only grabbed market share because Intel made a strategic error in committing itself to RDRAM instead of making it just a high-high-end option. With the new 845 chipset (SDRAM now, DDR in the near future) and some flanking help by VIA (DDR chipset now) Intel is clearly back in the driver's seat.
You're right about how they "help keep Intel on their toes". AMD's actions are benefitting the consumer in a gigantic way. Prices are clearly moving to our benefit, and the technology choices (SDRAM, DDR-SDRAM, RDRAM, motherboards, overclocking) are multiplying. Intel is adopting all of these, giving AMD no niche it can dominate for any length of time.
At some point, AMD's pocketbook is going to have to give. Unless they can be bought by some giant (and it could be anyone from Tyco to Texas Instruments to Warren Buffett) they will be in debt with no net income.
--Blair
P.S. The CPU/chipset stuff should all be pretty fresh at www.tomshardware.com [thanks for repeating that].
Wait a few weeks. Intel and VIA will settle over VIA's licensing forgetfulness on the P4 connection, and VIA's P4/DDR mobos will be out.
--Blair
No, I wouldn't, because it didn't say anything about anything I asked about.
--Blair
"Keep it unreal."
That's okay.
Microsoft's hotmail operation is in flagrant violation of the opt-out provisions of existing privacy laws.
Microsoft sends email to users' inboxes by going around the entire email system, circumventing all attempts to opt out, block, or filter the spam. These emails come from "staff@hotmail.com" and are clearly not normal messages, because they have to power to disable the Reply buttons.
When told they are breaking the law, Microsoft sends back boilerplate that alternately denies the spam is from Microsoft or gives the instructions for the aforementioned nonworking methods of blocking spam.
--Blair
P.S. As it turns out, their monthly spam-o-gram came very shortly after I opened my first--and only--hotmail account, so just about all of the correspondence that has ever transited that account has been my complaints, their responses, and more spam from them. I think the balance is one or two non-microsoft spams and one email from a guy who runs an anti-spam website to whom I'd mailed the long transcript of nonsense that had occurred.
Okay. If this isn't a hoax, then why hasn't anyone posted the contents of billgates@hotmail.com yet?
--Blair
Picking your front teeth and picking your back teeth are different uses, and have had different devices patented to accomplish them.
I would rather have 802.11b for my big-house RFnet, but BlueTooth for when I'm in a hotel room and just want to upload data to my shaver.
--Blair
"Something wonderful."
-Clarke/Kubrick
Bluetooth is "secure" in that its range is relatively short.
Using Bluetooth is like conversing out loud in a room.
Using 802.11b is like hooking your phone up to a Deep Purple sized sound system in your backyard.
As with all things Internet-Aged, if you want to assuage your paranoia you need to encrypt your data before you send it and not rely on the network to be secure.
--Blair
Y'know what?
They shut off my 400kbit-max Ricochet pipe a couple of weeks ago.
I broke back to using my 56(53(49))kbit-max V.90 phoneline modem.
I only miss the FatPipe[tm] when I want to see the Really Large Streaming Video, which is about once a week.
Then again, 10 hours a day I'm at work where we have enough BW to melt all those unlit transcontinental sillystrings.
--Blair
There were rumors that Metricom and Ricochet were still selling modems up to the day they shut off the network (Aug. 8).
The auction was done on Aug. 16. There are no details as yet, but the reports read like the spectrum was all the value it had left. The equipment may truly have been sold for scrap.
Bookmark this Yahoo News search for articles that might soon reveal the truth, or its journalistic equivalent, the facts.
--Blair
Little models are better than rendering because computer programmers still don't know shit about texture and (un)rigidity and natural motion.
A two-foot piece of plastic with funky lighting looks a hell of a lot more real than a wire-frame sprite with a shaded skin.
--Blair
I still do Usenet in a VT100-emulating terminal on a UNIX box using rn.
--Blair
"A flaming logo would be cool."
Anyone with a bad idea and enough money can get any nonsense turned into a law.
--Blair
"Democracy is a wonderful thing. I wish we had some."
> This is so stupid I'm in awe.
> Not to mention that Bill Gates is personally guilt of nothing, it's Microsoft that has been deemed "a monopoly" by a judge who was judged biased, if not corrupt.
Learned hand, heal thyself.
--Blair
Try reading through www.safeweb.com. It blocks cookies for you, if you configure it to do that.
Could be that's why I'm having so much trouble with slash today...
--Blair
Bugs bugs bugs.
The text of that joke is missing. It read:
>"Did I get it?
>
>--Blair
>"I love a good meme joke."
But it does show up when I hit "reply" (i.e., I couldn't read it in the normal threading, but I can cut and paste it here, although it's been misformatted because the preview added a lot of tags I didn't use...)
Did I get it?
--Blair
"I love a good meme joke."
server or am I the lucky one?
--Blair
"Nyah-ha-haaaaah."
And what color is the ethernet cabling in your world?
--Blair
> So tell me, if Union can correctly hand-count their ballots and be home before midnight
Correctly? By what alternate means of counting was the correctness of the count asserted?
Since we assume that hand-counting is the last resort and most correct method, resorting to it first results in the assumption that we have made the count correctly and avoided the error-prone methods.
But why do you think we started using polling machines in the first place?
--Blair
And why return to mechanical technologies with lots of fragile moving parts, susceptibility to (albeit massive) shock and dust, and way more current drain?
--Blair
...since they can already deliver their own state by hand, they will use the information gained to use the Internet to remotely subvert the Constitution in other states.
--Blair