After the russian KI moves to keeping their nuke inventory on Diablo II:
"mm... I amving my +5-50 Fire damage Nuke of the Sickle and Hammer... oh shit i got logged off!... Its gone! Why does this always happen to us????"
"The solar sail launched by the russians today was fine until it unexplicably exploded 2 minutes after launch. This is a sad day for the space industry, as solar sails could have paved the way to cheap interplanetary exploration."
"In other news, Boeing announced today that they won't be conducting their planned missile defense system test today. An official at Boeing commented, 'We feel confident that our system will work. There is no reason to shoot down any more expensive American ICBMs...'"
;-)
As has been said 1000 times already on/. the problem is not that they are a monopoly. That has long been established and monopolies ARE allowed in the USA, only when they harm the consumer (a very hard thing to define) that they can be smacked with anti-trust law. So by binding E to the OS they are harming the consumer by limiting his choices and thus can bend over the DoJ's knee for a paddling. They *will* be punished, do not doubt. There is too much supporting evidence and 2 courts have already said that MS is guilty as sin. But there are 2 obstacles: first they can delay until it isn't such an issue anymore, as they are doing now. Second they could have a weak punishment... look up the Ford/Standard Oil/ Firestone fiasco, when they destroyed all of the trolly systems in the united states and replaced them with busses, and in the process created greyhound, and forced everyone to use cars. They caused untold damage to the american consumer, and we will never have that public transportation system back. And they were found guilty of anti-trust... i think ford and firestone combined had to pay a fine of 5$ or something. Ouch.
At least we don't see many FUD tactics from intel. I mean, they could shout out all day that AMD makes unstable chips that melt and then turn you sterile.
The funny thing is that intel has been trying to move away from the clunky old x86 architecture for a long time now. Itanium wasn't even supposed to be compatible with it originally. But while they know they are riding a dead horse and are trying to get off, it has too much weight behind it. Intel buying Alpha (if they even did BUY Alpha) from compaq could help us get away from x86, a WHOLE lot more than AMD would.
While everyone is so worried about monopolies and chips and their precious overclocked athlons, I would rather see would happen if Intel could get a fresh start on a chip. They have the resources, and they aren't lacking for innovation. But the thing that most of their revenue comes from is the thing that they want to get away from. So this is kinda... hard.
You just don't know anything about the intel design teams. The pentium III design team is seperate from the pentium IV. So P4 is in development while P three is getting shipped everywhere and tweaked still, and then P four is supposed to take over when the tweaking is done. P4's architecture is actually quite interesting, i suggest in particular that you examine the register renaming methods, which get around the legacy issues of the 80386 architecture quite nicely. You can find the manuals at http://developer.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manuals /
What has happened is that the pentium III team discovered more tweaks than they thought there would be in their processor. And since the pentium 4 hasn't been able to capitalize on many of its improvements... YET, the pentium 3 has comparable performance when it is fully tweaked out. This 'older chip outperforms newer chip' thing isn't a new thing for intel either. The pentium and the pentium pro had this problem too: intel assumed that the 32 bit OS promise from MS would happen, and they were wrong, and 16 bit programs ran faster on the pentium than on the pentium pro. The celeron was actually a newer chip than the pentium 2, so it isn't quite the same thing.
Also the thing that intel really has to watch out for is the competition between AMD's 64-bit dual processor system (32 bit w/ 32 bit coprocessor) and its new IA-64 (which is also a very interesting architecture, and has been in development by intel and HP for almost a decade(!!!)) Personally i'm going to wait for the next big stepping in Pentium 4 to get a new computer. The architecture has the potential to blow away everything else around, it just hasn't been realized yet.
Slashdot Mirror
After the russian KI moves to keeping their nuke inventory on Diablo II:
"mm... I amving my +5-50 Fire damage Nuke of the Sickle and Hammer... oh shit i got logged off!... Its gone! Why does this always happen to us????"
"The solar sail launched by the russians today was fine until it unexplicably exploded 2 minutes after launch. This is a sad day for the space industry, as solar sails could have paved the way to cheap interplanetary exploration."
"In other news, Boeing announced today that they won't be conducting their planned missile defense system test today. An official at Boeing commented, 'We feel confident that our system will work. There is no reason to shoot down any more expensive American ICBMs...'"
;-)
As has been said 1000 times already on /. the problem is not that they are a monopoly. That has long been established and monopolies ARE allowed in the USA, only when they harm the consumer (a very hard thing to define) that they can be smacked with anti-trust law. So by binding E to the OS they are harming the consumer by limiting his choices and thus can bend over the DoJ's knee for a paddling. They *will* be punished, do not doubt. There is too much supporting evidence and 2 courts have already said that MS is guilty as sin. But there are 2 obstacles: first they can delay until it isn't such an issue anymore, as they are doing now. Second they could have a weak punishment... look up the Ford /Standard Oil/ Firestone fiasco, when they destroyed all of the trolly systems in the united states and replaced them with busses, and in the process created greyhound, and forced everyone to use cars. They caused untold damage to the american consumer, and we will never have that public transportation system back. And they were found guilty of anti-trust... i think ford and firestone combined had to pay a fine of 5$ or something. Ouch.
At least we don't see many FUD tactics from intel. I mean, they could shout out all day that AMD makes unstable chips that melt and then turn you sterile. The funny thing is that intel has been trying to move away from the clunky old x86 architecture for a long time now. Itanium wasn't even supposed to be compatible with it originally. But while they know they are riding a dead horse and are trying to get off, it has too much weight behind it. Intel buying Alpha (if they even did BUY Alpha) from compaq could help us get away from x86, a WHOLE lot more than AMD would. While everyone is so worried about monopolies and chips and their precious overclocked athlons, I would rather see would happen if Intel could get a fresh start on a chip. They have the resources, and they aren't lacking for innovation. But the thing that most of their revenue comes from is the thing that they want to get away from. So this is kinda... hard.
You just don't know anything about the intel design teams. The pentium III design team is seperate from the pentium IV. So P4 is in development while P three is getting shipped everywhere and tweaked still, and then P four is supposed to take over when the tweaking is done. P4's architecture is actually quite interesting, i suggest in particular that you examine the register renaming methods, which get around the legacy issues of the 80386 architecture quite nicely. You can find the manuals at http://developer.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manuals /
What has happened is that the pentium III team discovered more tweaks than they thought there would be in their processor. And since the pentium 4 hasn't been able to capitalize on many of its improvements... YET, the pentium 3 has comparable performance when it is fully tweaked out. This 'older chip outperforms newer chip' thing isn't a new thing for intel either. The pentium and the pentium pro had this problem too: intel assumed that the 32 bit OS promise from MS would happen, and they were wrong, and 16 bit programs ran faster on the pentium than on the pentium pro. The celeron was actually a newer chip than the pentium 2, so it isn't quite the same thing.
Also the thing that intel really has to watch out for is the competition between AMD's 64-bit dual processor system (32 bit w/ 32 bit coprocessor) and its new IA-64 (which is also a very interesting architecture, and has been in development by intel and HP for almost a decade(!!!)) Personally i'm going to wait for the next big stepping in Pentium 4 to get a new computer. The architecture has the potential to blow away everything else around, it just hasn't been realized yet.