It's not just Windows--it's "Microsoft Windows." Just like "Microsoft Word," "Microsoft SQL Server," "Microsoft Bob." They prefix with their company name.
We can bitch about how they use the generic word Windows, but they don't just use Windows, they call it, say, "Microsoft Windows NT Workstation(tm) SP4."
Your right, you should always compare the current nVidia chip to the theoretical non existent ATI chip that your brothers friends cousin heard about. Only then can you have an unbiased comparison.
The X800 is due out in a couple of weeks, moron! Jeesh.
I'm glad he cleared that up for us. Because this little known company called SGI didn't develop OpenGL back in 1992. In fact, were it not for MS, we would still be in the computer graphics dark ages.
All he said was that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows. This is true--the point of DirectX is exactly what was stated. What does OpenGL have to do with anything when the article is simply explaining what DirectX is when talking about a DirectX 9 card? How does that make them not "have a clues what they are talking about?" Everything they said was true.
If you're playing some suspenseful, quiet game where you're listening for enemy footsteps in the hallway beside you, I wouldn't want to hear "VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR", would you?
I agree--Radeons aren't like this, and they've been beating NVidia's cards specs-wise for a while now. I'm really curious to see how the X800 will compare in that department, which is the Huge 'n' Clunky department.
From the article:
Arguably one of the worst kept secrets regarding GeForce 6800 Ultra is its 16-pipeline architecture. That's right, 16 pixel pipelines!
The X800 will have 16 rendering pipelines as well. This is shaping up to be an interesting competitive year for video cards, but at the least I'm pretty sure ATI's will be a little quieter and not require two power connections and 480 watts (!). However, this new GeForce really puts NVidia back in the game. In the game, it'll come down to price, along with those few other factors.
ATI will ship its much-anticipated R420 chip later this month as the Radeon X800 Pro. The part's 26 April debut will be followed a month later by the Radeon X800 XT on 31 May.
So claims Anandtech, citing unnamed vendor sources and a glance at ATI's roadmap.
If the date is accurate, it puts ATI just 13 days behind Nvidia's NV40 launch on 13 April. NV40 will surface as the GeForce 6800 and is likely to form the basis for other series 6000 GeForce parts. Note the lack of the 'FX' branding - Nvidia has dropped it, Anandtech claims.
The X800 Pro will ship with 256MB of GDDR 3 graphics RAM across a 256-bit memory bus, but a revised version with 512MB of memory is expected later this year. The report also forecasts the arrival of an X800 SE, which supports 128MB of vanilla DDR SDRAM.
The R420 is an AGP 8x part - the native PCI Express version, the R423, will launch on 14 June, the report claims. It too will be offered as the Radeon X800. Both versions are expected to clock at around 500MHz with 1GHz memory clock frequencies. They feature eight-stage pipelines with six vertex shaders.
Expect to see Radeon X600 and X300 products in due course, we're told, as the RV380 and RV370 parts come on stream. These represent ATI's first 110nm parts.
Meanwhile, ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP is due for an update, apparently, in a few months' time. The revision, codenamed 'RS350', will support Intel's LGA775 CPU interface.
Further down the line, late in Q3, ATI will offer three new Pentium 4 chipsets, currently dubbed the RS400, RC400 and RU400. The first provides PCI Express graphics and non-graphics add-in card buses, along with a dual-channel memory controller. The other two will offer single-channel memory support, while the latter will not support external graphics cards.
AMD isn't being left out, courtesy of RS480 and RX480 chipsets, the first with integrated graphics the second without it. ®
Only weeks before the release, ATI Technologies decided to boost performance of its next-generation code-named R420 processor by increasing the number of pixel pipelines inside the chip. Industry source told X-bit labs that the story is not about redesign, but about enabling "big guns" that were "hidden" inside the chip from the very beginning.
ATI Technologies' chip known as R420 will be called RADEON X800 PRO and is likely to be launched on the 26th of April, 2004. Higher-speed flavour of the R420 - the RADEON X800 XT - is expected to debut on the 31st of May, 2004, if the assumptions posted earlier this week are correct. PCI Express x16 solution powered by the R423 architecture will see the light of the day on the 14th of June. ATI on Tuesday began marketing campaign on its web-site to support the launch of the new graphics architecture.
I think the submitter must be something of an Nvidia fan.:) Most people wouldn't ridiculously compare a new next-gen card to today's months-old cards, not even mentioning that ATI has a new one due out in weeks. But he sure did mention an over 100% speed increase over those old cards, didn't he?
Personally I don't get the fanboy rivalries--I have a Radeon in my laptop and a Geforce in my desktop, and that's just what I happened to buy at the time, no fanboy adherism going on.
You're saying we should ignore everything else being bad because nobody complained about controls not being worse or its thickness. You're kidding, right? It's a nice piece of kit because nobody complained about those two things?
Great, now "Linux vulnerabilities" incude every commercial product which run on Linux.
Nope--they aren't Linux vulnerabilities, they're vulnerabilities in those Linux distributions. That is to say, the Gentoo Linux operating system has several security advisories announced every week. I don't see a difference between that and Windows.
Actually, there haven't been Critical Updates posted to Windows Update since the beginning of this year. On the contrary, LinuxSecurity.com posts more advisories every day.
But, hey, you used the term "Microcrap," and who can argue with that?
Or, you could read farther than the past 15 vulnerabilities.:P I've seen plenty of remote root exploits.
Besides, local privilege escalation exploits are up there as being just as bad in my book.
Nothing's perfect--it's all in how it's reported. On Slashdot, it's spun so that Windows is portrayed as hole-ridden and Linux is pristine. That's simply not the case, and that's what I was pointing out--both the non-pristine and the spin that hides it.
LinuxSecurity.com Advisories. It gives you the last 15 advisories (right now it's 15 in the past three days!), and you can click on each distro, including the BSDs, and get archived advisories for each one. Very useful, complete with links to the actual bulletins.
Yes, you are right--these things never appear on Slashdot except when there are major kernel exploits. To be honest, I've noticed lately a dissident tide in Slashdot, where people are a little weary of the anti-Microsoft spin. Nothing wrong with posting about Windows vulnerabilities, of course, but you do have to view the context with which it's posted--an OSDN-owned website that posts pro-Linux articles and just so happens never to mention Linux security advisories. But a user-run executable will become front page news as a new "Microsoft Worm."
I've just noticed more people annoyed by it lately, even the partyline pro-OSS guys. Simplistic agendas shouldn't be something to embrace on a site that is touted as the epicenter for geek tech news on the Internet. I guess my sig reflects that I've become one of those people as well who feels the need to balance out the spin going on...:P
It's funny how, despite security advisories constantly being announced for Linux distros at placed like Linuxsecurity, and also breakins to Savannah, Gentoo, Debian, Gnome, GNU...hell, I can't keep track of them all...Slashdot still falls over itself posting "Microsoft Critical Vulnerabilities" fast enough. One would be naive to pretend there isn't an implied agenda--which is to say "Look! Windows still isn't secure! In your face, Bill!" It's silly because Linux is no better--and according to that study Slashdot posted a couple of months back, Linux is the most-breached operating system anyway.
Moral of the story--nothing is secure, every OS releases security patches (Linux has even had to update for outright kernel exploits), and sysadmins who keep systems up to date are the key. Stop the agenda BS. We know you editors don't like Windows.
LinuxSecurity lists the following vulnerabilities across all distros, just the last fifteen advisories (15!):
4/13/2004 9:06 - Conectiva: squid Conectiva: 'squid' ACL bypass vulnerability This update fixes a vulnerability that allows a malicious user to bypass url_regex ACLs by using a specially crafted URL.
4/12/2004 9:05 - Conectiva: mod_python Conectiva: 'mod_python' DoS This update fixes a remote denial of service vulnerabiliy in Apache web-servers which have mod_python enabled.
4/9/2004 15:18 - Mandrake: ipsec-tools Signature non-verification vulnerability Racoon does not verify the RSA signature during phase one of a connection using either main or aggressive mode. Only the certificate of the client is verified, the certificate is not used to verify the client's signature.
4/9/2004 15:15 - Gentoo: Scorched 3D Format string attack vulnerability Scorched 3D is vulnerable to a format string attack in the chat box that leads to Denial of Service on the game server and possibly allows execution of arbitrary code.
4/9/2004 15:14 - Gentoo: pwlib Multiple vulnerabilities Multiple vulnerabilites have been found in pwlib that may lead to a remote denial of service or buffer overflow attack.
4/9/2004 15:13 - Gentoo: iproute Denial of service vulnerability The iproute package allows local users to cause a denial of service.
4/9/2004 15:07 - Gentoo: Heimdal Cross-realm scripting vulnerability Heimdal contains cross-realm vulnerability allowing someone with control over a realm to impersonate anyone in the cross-realm trust path.
4/9/2004 9:08 - Gentoo: scorched3d Gentoo: 'Scorched 3D' vulnerability Scorched 3D (build 36.2 and before) does not properly check the text entered in the Chat box (T key).
4/8/2004 12:34 - Gentoo: Automake Symbolic link vulnerability Automake may be vulnerable to a symbolic link attack which may allow an attacker to modify data or elevate their privileges.
4/7/2004 16:27 - Gentoo: ClamAV Denial of service vulnerability ClamAV is vulnerable to a denial of service attack when processing certain RAR archives.
4/7/2004 14:04 - Gentoo: util-linux Information leak vulnerability Due to a pointer error, the 'login' program might leak sensitive information.
4/7/2004 11:19 - Gentoo: ipsec-tools Key non-verification vulnerability racoon (a utility in the ipsec-tools package) does not verify digital signatures on Phase1 packets.
4/7/2004 10:27 - Turbolinux: apache/httpd/libxml2/mod_python Multiple vulnerabilities Many fixes for buffer overflows and DOS attacks.
4/7/2004 10:25 - Mandrake: fileutils/coreutils Denial of service vulnerability 'ls' can be made to segfault upon listing directories with large numbers of files on an amd64 platform.
4/7/2004 10:24 - Gentoo: sysstat Multiple vulnerabilities Multiple vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or overwrite arbitrary files.
Of course, you never see a single bit of any of it ever mentioned on Slashdot, even though new advisories come out almost every single day. But three new Windows vulnerabilities after months of no new needed updates on Windows Update becomes front page news on Slashdot.
I don't get why people obsess over developing more and more sidebars and button panels while forgetting very basic desktop elements like binary installation/uninstallation APIs. Those should have been in place by Gnome/KDE 2.0 in the 90s. After that should be a unified GUI toolkit akin to.NET or Cocoa in its level of intuitiveness. This ridiculous situation where I have to install QT, KDElibs, GTK, Gnomelibs, Gnomebase, KDEbase, etc. just to be able to run each other's apps, is ridiculous and so hilariously unprofessional (especially in the way people seem to overlook that fact).
Same thing with how XFree86 took a decade to be able to change its own video resolution (not the same as the keystroke combination which didn't change resolution in the way that RandR/Windows/etc. does...believe it or not, the user might have a reason to change resolutions and that is their choice).
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just Windows--it's "Microsoft Windows." Just like "Microsoft Word," "Microsoft SQL Server," "Microsoft Bob." They prefix with their company name.
We can bitch about how they use the generic word Windows, but they don't just use Windows, they call it, say, "Microsoft Windows NT Workstation(tm) SP4."
Is there something in the water that prevents any OSS or Linux-related project from having a good name?
Lindows was horrible; Linspire is worse.
Your right, you should always compare the current nVidia chip to the theoretical non existent ATI chip that your brothers friends cousin heard about. Only then can you have an unbiased comparison.
The X800 is due out in a couple of weeks, moron! Jeesh.
I'm glad he cleared that up for us. Because this little known company called SGI didn't develop OpenGL back in 1992. In fact, were it not for MS, we would still be in the computer graphics dark ages.
All he said was that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows. This is true--the point of DirectX is exactly what was stated. What does OpenGL have to do with anything when the article is simply explaining what DirectX is when talking about a DirectX 9 card? How does that make them not "have a clues what they are talking about?" Everything they said was true.
Take off the anti-"M$" blinders.
If you're playing some suspenseful, quiet game where you're listening for enemy footsteps in the hallway beside you, I wouldn't want to hear "VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR", would you?
What does Bill Gates have to do with a video card article? Let's not get predictable here.
I agree--Radeons aren't like this, and they've been beating NVidia's cards specs-wise for a while now. I'm really curious to see how the X800 will compare in that department, which is the Huge 'n' Clunky department.
From the article:
Arguably one of the worst kept secrets regarding GeForce 6800 Ultra is its 16-pipeline architecture. That's right, 16 pixel pipelines!
The X800 will have 16 rendering pipelines as well. This is shaping up to be an interesting competitive year for video cards, but at the least I'm pretty sure ATI's will be a little quieter and not require two power connections and 480 watts (!). However, this new GeForce really puts NVidia back in the game. In the game, it'll come down to price, along with those few other factors.
When you're running 480 FUCKING WATTS through your circuitry, you can do anything, boy.
...so it's even sillier that the submitter would say that. But, hey, it's healthy fanboyism I guess.
Here's what the Register says:
ATI will ship its much-anticipated R420 chip later this month as the Radeon X800 Pro. The part's 26 April debut will be followed a month later by the Radeon X800 XT on 31 May.
So claims Anandtech, citing unnamed vendor sources and a glance at ATI's roadmap.
If the date is accurate, it puts ATI just 13 days behind Nvidia's NV40 launch on 13 April. NV40 will surface as the GeForce 6800 and is likely to form the basis for other series 6000 GeForce parts. Note the lack of the 'FX' branding - Nvidia has dropped it, Anandtech claims.
The X800 Pro will ship with 256MB of GDDR 3 graphics RAM across a 256-bit memory bus, but a revised version with 512MB of memory is expected later this year. The report also forecasts the arrival of an X800 SE, which supports 128MB of vanilla DDR SDRAM.
The R420 is an AGP 8x part - the native PCI Express version, the R423, will launch on 14 June, the report claims. It too will be offered as the Radeon X800. Both versions are expected to clock at around 500MHz with 1GHz memory clock frequencies. They feature eight-stage pipelines with six vertex shaders.
Expect to see Radeon X600 and X300 products in due course, we're told, as the RV380 and RV370 parts come on stream. These represent ATI's first 110nm parts.
Meanwhile, ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP is due for an update, apparently, in a few months' time. The revision, codenamed 'RS350', will support Intel's LGA775 CPU interface.
Further down the line, late in Q3, ATI will offer three new Pentium 4 chipsets, currently dubbed the RS400, RC400 and RU400. The first provides PCI Express graphics and non-graphics add-in card buses, along with a dual-channel memory controller. The other two will offer single-channel memory support, while the latter will not support external graphics cards.
AMD isn't being left out, courtesy of RS480 and RX480 chipsets, the first with integrated graphics the second without it. ®
Here's a little more info from Rage3d:
Only weeks before the release, ATI Technologies decided to boost performance of its next-generation code-named R420 processor by increasing the number of pixel pipelines inside the chip. Industry source told X-bit labs that the story is not about redesign, but about enabling "big guns" that were "hidden" inside the chip from the very beginning.
ATI Technologies' chip known as R420 will be called RADEON X800 PRO and is likely to be launched on the 26th of April, 2004. Higher-speed flavour of the R420 - the RADEON X800 XT - is expected to debut on the 31st of May, 2004, if the assumptions posted earlier this week are correct. PCI Express x16 solution powered by the R423 architecture will see the light of the day on the 14th of June. ATI on Tuesday began marketing campaign on its web-site to support the launch of the new graphics architecture.
I think the submitter must be something of an Nvidia fan. :) Most people wouldn't ridiculously compare a new next-gen card to today's months-old cards, not even mentioning that ATI has a new one due out in weeks. But he sure did mention an over 100% speed increase over those old cards, didn't he?
Personally I don't get the fanboy rivalries--I have a Radeon in my laptop and a Geforce in my desktop, and that's just what I happened to buy at the time, no fanboy adherism going on.
...that is, until ATI releases their next card too.
I wouldn't expect a new card NOT to beat out the current cards. ATI and Nvidia have played this catchup game with each other for years.
You're saying we should ignore everything else being bad because nobody complained about controls not being worse or its thickness. You're kidding, right? It's a nice piece of kit because nobody complained about those two things?
Great, now "Linux vulnerabilities" incude every commercial product which run on Linux.
:)
Nope--they aren't Linux vulnerabilities, they're vulnerabilities in those Linux distributions. That is to say, the Gentoo Linux operating system has several security advisories announced every week. I don't see a difference between that and Windows.
Nice try, though.
The term "Micro$oft" sucks.
Actually, there haven't been Critical Updates posted to Windows Update since the beginning of this year. On the contrary, LinuxSecurity.com posts more advisories every day.
But, hey, you used the term "Microcrap," and who can argue with that?
I guess I'm not one to ignore certain vulnerabilities and glorify others simply because one comes from Windows.
Besides, Linux has had plenty--and has had many public break-ins in the past six months.
Everyone you know hates Windows. Can't argue with that kind of research.
But the people pointing out the one-sided reporting on Slashdot are right.
Windows Critical Vulnerabilities come every few weeks...doubtless they'll get them all in time.
They haven't had a critical update patch on Windows Update since the beginning of this year.
According to CmdrTaco, the majority of Slashdot visitors use IE. Kind of puts things into perspective as far as the "movement" goes.
Or, you could read farther than the past 15 vulnerabilities. :P I've seen plenty of remote root exploits.
Besides, local privilege escalation exploits are up there as being just as bad in my book.
Nothing's perfect--it's all in how it's reported. On Slashdot, it's spun so that Windows is portrayed as hole-ridden and Linux is pristine. That's simply not the case, and that's what I was pointing out--both the non-pristine and the spin that hides it.
LinuxSecurity.com Advisories. It gives you the last 15 advisories (right now it's 15 in the past three days!), and you can click on each distro, including the BSDs, and get archived advisories for each one. Very useful, complete with links to the actual bulletins.
:P
Yes, you are right--these things never appear on Slashdot except when there are major kernel exploits. To be honest, I've noticed lately a dissident tide in Slashdot, where people are a little weary of the anti-Microsoft spin. Nothing wrong with posting about Windows vulnerabilities, of course, but you do have to view the context with which it's posted--an OSDN-owned website that posts pro-Linux articles and just so happens never to mention Linux security advisories. But a user-run executable will become front page news as a new "Microsoft Worm."
I've just noticed more people annoyed by it lately, even the partyline pro-OSS guys. Simplistic agendas shouldn't be something to embrace on a site that is touted as the epicenter for geek tech news on the Internet. I guess my sig reflects that I've become one of those people as well who feels the need to balance out the spin going on...
It's funny how, despite security advisories constantly being announced for Linux distros at placed like Linuxsecurity, and also breakins to Savannah, Gentoo, Debian, Gnome, GNU...hell, I can't keep track of them all...Slashdot still falls over itself posting "Microsoft Critical Vulnerabilities" fast enough. One would be naive to pretend there isn't an implied agenda--which is to say "Look! Windows still isn't secure! In your face, Bill!" It's silly because Linux is no better--and according to that study Slashdot posted a couple of months back, Linux is the most-breached operating system anyway.
Moral of the story--nothing is secure, every OS releases security patches (Linux has even had to update for outright kernel exploits), and sysadmins who keep systems up to date are the key. Stop the agenda BS. We know you editors don't like Windows.
LinuxSecurity lists the following vulnerabilities across all distros, just the last fifteen advisories (15!):
4/13/2004 9:06 - Conectiva: squid Conectiva: 'squid' ACL bypass vulnerability
This update fixes a vulnerability that allows a malicious user to bypass url_regex ACLs by using a specially crafted URL.
4/12/2004 9:05 - Conectiva: mod_python Conectiva: 'mod_python' DoS
This update fixes a remote denial of service vulnerabiliy in Apache web-servers which have mod_python enabled.
4/9/2004 15:18 - Mandrake: ipsec-tools Signature non-verification vulnerability
Racoon does not verify the RSA signature during phase one of a connection using either main or aggressive mode. Only the certificate of the client is verified, the certificate is not used to verify the client's signature.
4/9/2004 15:15 - Gentoo: Scorched 3D Format string attack vulnerability
Scorched 3D is vulnerable to a format string attack in the chat box that leads to Denial of Service on the game server and possibly allows execution of arbitrary code.
4/9/2004 15:14 - Gentoo: pwlib Multiple vulnerabilities
Multiple vulnerabilites have been found in pwlib that may lead to a remote denial of service or buffer overflow attack.
4/9/2004 15:13 - Gentoo: iproute Denial of service vulnerability
The iproute package allows local users to cause a denial of service.
4/9/2004 15:07 - Gentoo: Heimdal Cross-realm scripting vulnerability
Heimdal contains cross-realm vulnerability allowing someone with control over a realm to impersonate anyone in the cross-realm trust path.
4/9/2004 9:08 - Gentoo: scorched3d Gentoo: 'Scorched 3D' vulnerability
Scorched 3D (build 36.2 and before) does not properly check the text entered in the Chat box (T key).
4/8/2004 12:34 - Gentoo: Automake Symbolic link vulnerability
Automake may be vulnerable to a symbolic link attack which may allow an attacker to modify data or elevate their privileges.
4/7/2004 16:27 - Gentoo: ClamAV Denial of service vulnerability
ClamAV is vulnerable to a denial of service attack when processing certain RAR archives.
4/7/2004 14:04 - Gentoo: util-linux Information leak vulnerability
Due to a pointer error, the 'login' program might leak sensitive information.
4/7/2004 11:19 - Gentoo: ipsec-tools Key non-verification vulnerability
racoon (a utility in the ipsec-tools package) does not verify digital signatures on Phase1 packets.
4/7/2004 10:27 - Turbolinux: apache/httpd/libxml2/mod_python Multiple vulnerabilities
Many fixes for buffer overflows and DOS attacks.
4/7/2004 10:25 - Mandrake: fileutils/coreutils Denial of service vulnerability
'ls' can be made to segfault upon listing directories with large numbers of files on an amd64 platform.
4/7/2004 10:24 - Gentoo: sysstat Multiple vulnerabilities
Multiple vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or overwrite arbitrary files.
Of course, you never see a single bit of any of it ever mentioned on Slashdot, even though new advisories come out almost every single day. But three new Windows vulnerabilities after months of no new needed updates on Windows Update becomes front page news on Slashdot.
I don't get why people obsess over developing more and more sidebars and button panels while forgetting very basic desktop elements like binary installation/uninstallation APIs. Those should have been in place by Gnome/KDE 2.0 in the 90s. After that should be a unified GUI toolkit akin to .NET or Cocoa in its level of intuitiveness. This ridiculous situation where I have to install QT, KDElibs, GTK, Gnomelibs, Gnomebase, KDEbase, etc. just to be able to run each other's apps, is ridiculous and so hilariously unprofessional (especially in the way people seem to overlook that fact).
Same thing with how XFree86 took a decade to be able to change its own video resolution (not the same as the keystroke combination which didn't change resolution in the way that RandR/Windows/etc. does...believe it or not, the user might have a reason to change resolutions and that is their choice).