Intel processors certainly do not scale better than AMD... AMD has a dedicated interconnect between processors, and a seperate memory bus for each processor, so adding an additional processor effectively doubles your memory bandwidth with a NUMA aware OS. Intel on the other hand, effectively halves it's per processor memory bandwidth each time the processor count is doubled. The shared bus has to be shared for everything, inter-processor communication, memory access and IO device access. Also, their quad core chips are effectively just a pair of dual cores, so aside from needing less physical sockets they have no real advantage over AMD's dual cores... Infact, a pair of dual cores has a memory bandwidth advantage over a single intel quad core.
As for transistor count, do remember that current AMD processors do more than current Intel processors... They have the memory controller, hypertransport controller and some other logic on cpu whereas Intel requires this to be on the motherboard.
Die shrink - lets not forget the die shrink to 90nm for intel initially resulted in p4 chips which were even hotter and slower than their 130nm counterparts. It takes time to perfect a new production process.
As for Core2 being better than current AMD offerings, sure for small systems it does, but it still doesnt scale, so they have yet to trounce AMD across the board. Lets not forget that a couple of years ago, it was AMD who had a significantly better architecture and actually was trouncing Intel across the board.
If it weren't for AMD, Intel would still be pushing the P4 and the old "MHz is king" mantra. The chips would cost much more than they do now, we wouldn't have core2 at all. Intel became complacent while they had no serious competition, so they got trounced by AMD. Then, with the P4 being such a joke AMD became complacent instead while Intel pulled their fingers out. We need AMD and Intel competing, otherwise progress and advancement will slow to a crawl.
Even more ironic, is that microsoft are pretending to offer a solution to the problem they themselves created. The national archive really shouldn't let themselves fall for this, or they will just find themselves in the same situation again in a few years time.
It's all about numbers... People don't just create opensource software for fun, they do it for a reason... That reason could be because their company derives money from selling support contracts or selling hardware (IBM, Sun), or it could be because they want/need to use the software themselves. Mass market software has more users, so more potential support contracts and more chance that some of those users will be competent coders. Niche market open source only really works where the niche is a technical one (like development tools, compilers etc) and the people in that niche are competent coders.
To give a counter example that i encountered recently, a cricket scoring program, i doubt there are too many people who both play cricket and know how to code.
Bringing down MS would actually suit their business goals of making money tho... As it stands, Dell are dependant upon MS... It's not a good position for your business to be in, when a single third party could fuck your business up overnight. If MS decided to charge Dell full retail price for copies of windows, they would no longer be able to compete with all the other manufacturers out there, and would rapidly lose marketshare and go probably bankrupt. If i was in charge of such a business, i would be doing everything i could to get out of such a dangerous position. On the other hand, there is noone who can screw over dell's linux systems. Regardless of what Ubuntu does, Dell can still obtain it for free under the terms of the GPL, putting them in the same boat as everyone else. Plus, there are many other linux distributions they could move to if they have a disagreement with Ubuntu.
There will always be niche markets, just as there are today, and CAD is very much a niche market... Where the product model will disappear, is in the mass market arena, where there is a big push to create applications so that companies and end users aren't locked in to highly expensive proprietary apps.
That said, eventually free software will descend into the smaller niche markets too, it's just that too many people are concentrating on reverse engineering proprietary protocols and formats nowadays.
Why the hell do people think having to sign something ever made anything even remotely secure?
a, it only has to match whats on the back of the card anyway b, noone ever checks c, even if they do, if you have the card you can copy it from the back d, if you clone the card, you can sign it yourself in any which way you please
*ANYTHING* would be more secure than requiring the purchaser to make some arbitrary random mark on a piece of paper.
Re:Egomanical monitoring of the populace?
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How about people who pay for bandwidth usage? Would you be able to charge microsoft for the bandwidth used by this unwanted feature?
Does anyone use 64bit windows? I tried 64bit XP, and it had incredibly poor support for my hardware.... Vista was just as bad too. As for apps, lots of games that use ridiculous anti-piracy kernel drivers fail to work on 64bit windows too. The 64bit version does run faster, especially if you have lots of ram since it doesnt need to use nasty kludges like PAE, but that gets thrown out the window if it runs your video using a generic driver.
Amongst the hardware not supported on my AMD64 machine... An early revision radeon card wouldnt work A DEC tulip ethernet card wouldnt work (and these cards were actually designed for 64bit machines, over 10 years ago) My soundblaster pci128 card (i think) wouldnt work...
Now i can understand removing support for some old ISA devices, since i'm not aware of any 64bit machines supporting them.... But is it really so hard to recompile the 32bit pci drivers for 64bit? It seems to work ok for linux.
Just face it, proprietary software and microsoft especially are keeping people stuck in the 32bit dark ages just like they did with 16bit many years ago. There were 64bit processors and OS's before microsoft even came out with a 32bit version of windows.
It comes with a USB cable, which for me is much better than a power brick... I travel around a lot, but always carrying a laptop. Wherever i am, there is a power source for my ipod, and a usb cable is much smaller than yet another power brick.
The mobile phone market is already well established, the iphone will have a fight to become dominant, if it ever does... There's also the network operators, who have the ability to relegate any phone they dont like to a small niche market. The MP3 player market on the other hand, was very new when the ipod came around and there was very little viable competition for it.
They should have a third party security testing company investigate the PC... Also, since theyre claiming liability based on the security of your PC, you should have the right to investigate the security of their server.
Or worse, you can use a tool like xremote to hijack the keyboard/mouse and interact with the programs you have running, including root shells if you have one open! We need a way to restrict xauth, so you can grant a host/user limited access to your X server, such that they can only interact with their own clients and cant keylog or kill other X resources etc.
Well, yes... In the corporate world, vista's marketshare is currently massively smaller than xp/2003, and smaller than linux, solaris, macos and hpux too... Businesses won't deploy vista for another year or more. For this reason, vulnerability researchers will not be focusing on vista yet, tho if they find a vulnerability in earlier versions of windows they may check to see if it's still present in vista. Linux, which has a sizeable server marketshare is a significant target for vulnerability research, and that research is much easier to perform because the source code is available, so you get more value from your time doing research on a platform for which you have source, which goes some way to counterbalance the number of people actively looking.
Reported issues is also an unfair comparison. If an issue is found in open source software, it is typically published openly and patched. If the original author finds an issue, he will fix it and tell people about it so his end users can patch themselves. By contrast, if a vulnerability is found internally to microsoft it will still get fixed, but the fix will be rolled in with other fixes. It won't get published, and microsoft won't admit to the vulnerability unless it's already public. A good example being the ASN.1 vulnerability from a couple of years back, there were actually 2 issues fixed in the same patch, but microsoft only admitted to one of them because the other wasnt public. It was found later by reverse engineering the update.
As much as i like OSX (using it now) it does have it's down sides relative to linux...
It's costly (to obtain legally) Hardware to run it (legally) is costly It's only available from one vendor (wheres your exit strategy?) Hardware to run it is also only available from one vendor (again no exit strategy or backup plan) The system as a whole is not as flexible as linux The interface is inflexible - if the apple way doesnt suit you, you have no other choice It just works, or just *doesnt* work, if something does go wrong (and granted this is rare) its very difficult to fix
That said, all the above (aside from the hardware issues) and then some, apply to windows, and to a much worse degree. And many linux applications will run just fine on OSX
Openoffice can replace msoffice, it is more than functional enough to satisfy almost all users... Multimedia works very well on linux too...
What's hindering linux more than anything, is proprietary formats and services which are locked in to windows. theres no technical advantage to windows, no price advantage, it retains market share through a combination of user ignorance and lock-in via proprietary formats, like the one discussed in this story. If apps were cross platform, and formats were open, linux market share would have overtaken windows many years ago for sure, due to cost moreso than anything else.
Having rails everywhere instead of roads would force you to take the train, and prevent you from using a car. Would you rather take the train everywhere?
But by taking this responsibility to cater to _all_, would this be valid grounds to demand the specs be opened up so that third parties can create compatible players? I imagine microsoft would refuse to license their formats to the bbc if a court ruled they had to open up the specs.
I was in this situation a few years ago... I eventually got an old commodore monitor which accepted the scanrate used by tv/games consoles, but had no tuner... had no more visits after they saw that.
Slashdot Mirror
Mips per dollar
Mips per watt
Processor X uses 100 watts, produces 3000 MIPS and costs $500
Processor Y uses 50 watts, produces 2800 MIPS and costs $200
etc..
Or use mflops if that floats your boat.
Intel processors certainly do not scale better than AMD...
AMD has a dedicated interconnect between processors, and a seperate memory bus for each processor, so adding an additional processor effectively doubles your memory bandwidth with a NUMA aware OS.
Intel on the other hand, effectively halves it's per processor memory bandwidth each time the processor count is doubled. The shared bus has to be shared for everything, inter-processor communication, memory access and IO device access. Also, their quad core chips are effectively just a pair of dual cores, so aside from needing less physical sockets they have no real advantage over AMD's dual cores... Infact, a pair of dual cores has a memory bandwidth advantage over a single intel quad core.
As for transistor count, do remember that current AMD processors do more than current Intel processors... They have the memory controller, hypertransport controller and some other logic on cpu whereas Intel requires this to be on the motherboard.
Die shrink - lets not forget the die shrink to 90nm for intel initially resulted in p4 chips which were even hotter and slower than their 130nm counterparts. It takes time to perfect a new production process.
As for Core2 being better than current AMD offerings, sure for small systems it does, but it still doesnt scale, so they have yet to trounce AMD across the board. Lets not forget that a couple of years ago, it was AMD who had a significantly better architecture and actually was trouncing Intel across the board.
If it weren't for AMD, Intel would still be pushing the P4 and the old "MHz is king" mantra. The chips would cost much more than they do now, we wouldn't have core2 at all.
Intel became complacent while they had no serious competition, so they got trounced by AMD. Then, with the P4 being such a joke AMD became complacent instead while Intel pulled their fingers out. We need AMD and Intel competing, otherwise progress and advancement will slow to a crawl.
Even more ironic, is that microsoft are pretending to offer a solution to the problem they themselves created.
The national archive really shouldn't let themselves fall for this, or they will just find themselves in the same situation again in a few years time.
It's all about numbers...
People don't just create opensource software for fun, they do it for a reason... That reason could be because their company derives money from selling support contracts or selling hardware (IBM, Sun), or it could be because they want/need to use the software themselves.
Mass market software has more users, so more potential support contracts and more chance that some of those users will be competent coders.
Niche market open source only really works where the niche is a technical one (like development tools, compilers etc) and the people in that niche are competent coders.
To give a counter example that i encountered recently, a cricket scoring program, i doubt there are too many people who both play cricket and know how to code.
Bringing down MS would actually suit their business goals of making money tho...
As it stands, Dell are dependant upon MS... It's not a good position for your business to be in, when a single third party could fuck your business up overnight. If MS decided to charge Dell full retail price for copies of windows, they would no longer be able to compete with all the other manufacturers out there, and would rapidly lose marketshare and go probably bankrupt. If i was in charge of such a business, i would be doing everything i could to get out of such a dangerous position.
On the other hand, there is noone who can screw over dell's linux systems. Regardless of what Ubuntu does, Dell can still obtain it for free under the terms of the GPL, putting them in the same boat as everyone else. Plus, there are many other linux distributions they could move to if they have a disagreement with Ubuntu.
Well, but you can also buy redhat enterprise from dell, which costs considerably more.
There will always be niche markets, just as there are today, and CAD is very much a niche market...
Where the product model will disappear, is in the mass market arena, where there is a big push to create applications so that companies and end users aren't locked in to highly expensive proprietary apps.
That said, eventually free software will descend into the smaller niche markets too, it's just that too many people are concentrating on reverse engineering proprietary protocols and formats nowadays.
Why the hell do people think having to sign something ever made anything even remotely secure?
a, it only has to match whats on the back of the card anyway
b, noone ever checks
c, even if they do, if you have the card you can copy it from the back
d, if you clone the card, you can sign it yourself in any which way you please
*ANYTHING* would be more secure than requiring the purchaser to make some arbitrary random mark on a piece of paper.
How about people who pay for bandwidth usage?
Would you be able to charge microsoft for the bandwidth used by this unwanted feature?
Does anyone use 64bit windows?
I tried 64bit XP, and it had incredibly poor support for my hardware.... Vista was just as bad too.
As for apps, lots of games that use ridiculous anti-piracy kernel drivers fail to work on 64bit windows too.
The 64bit version does run faster, especially if you have lots of ram since it doesnt need to use nasty kludges like PAE, but that gets thrown out the window if it runs your video using a generic driver.
Amongst the hardware not supported on my AMD64 machine...
An early revision radeon card wouldnt work
A DEC tulip ethernet card wouldnt work (and these cards were actually designed for 64bit machines, over 10 years ago)
My soundblaster pci128 card (i think) wouldnt work...
Now i can understand removing support for some old ISA devices, since i'm not aware of any 64bit machines supporting them.... But is it really so hard to recompile the 32bit pci drivers for 64bit? It seems to work ok for linux.
Just face it, proprietary software and microsoft especially are keeping people stuck in the 32bit dark ages just like they did with 16bit many years ago. There were 64bit processors and OS's before microsoft even came out with a 32bit version of windows.
It comes with a USB cable, which for me is much better than a power brick...
I travel around a lot, but always carrying a laptop. Wherever i am, there is a power source for my ipod, and a usb cable is much smaller than yet another power brick.
The mobile phone market is already well established, the iphone will have a fight to become dominant, if it ever does... There's also the network operators, who have the ability to relegate any phone they dont like to a small niche market.
The MP3 player market on the other hand, was very new when the ipod came around and there was very little viable competition for it.
Proprietary is better for manufacturers..
Open is better for consumers...
But until enough people are vocal enough about having open products, consumers will continue to get ripped off all over the place.
Not on software? OSX doesn't even demand you enter a license code as you install it, nor does it enforce any kind of activation...
They should have a third party security testing company investigate the PC...
Also, since theyre claiming liability based on the security of your PC, you should have the right to investigate the security of their server.
And i'm sure people will steal stickers from other people's items and put them on their own.
Here, old couches/mattresses get dumped and then set on fire... My route was blocked a few days ago by a burning couch in the middle of the road.
And people will put their trash outside the neighbours house, or outside unoccupied houses, or even just in public bins.
Or worse, you can use a tool like xremote to hijack the keyboard/mouse and interact with the programs you have running, including root shells if you have one open!
We need a way to restrict xauth, so you can grant a host/user limited access to your X server, such that they can only interact with their own clients and cant keylog or kill other X resources etc.
Well, yes...
In the corporate world, vista's marketshare is currently massively smaller than xp/2003, and smaller than linux, solaris, macos and hpux too... Businesses won't deploy vista for another year or more.
For this reason, vulnerability researchers will not be focusing on vista yet, tho if they find a vulnerability in earlier versions of windows they may check to see if it's still present in vista.
Linux, which has a sizeable server marketshare is a significant target for vulnerability research, and that research is much easier to perform because the source code is available, so you get more value from your time doing research on a platform for which you have source, which goes some way to counterbalance the number of people actively looking.
Reported issues is also an unfair comparison.
If an issue is found in open source software, it is typically published openly and patched. If the original author finds an issue, he will fix it and tell people about it so his end users can patch themselves.
By contrast, if a vulnerability is found internally to microsoft it will still get fixed, but the fix will be rolled in with other fixes. It won't get published, and microsoft won't admit to the vulnerability unless it's already public. A good example being the ASN.1 vulnerability from a couple of years back, there were actually 2 issues fixed in the same patch, but microsoft only admitted to one of them because the other wasnt public. It was found later by reverse engineering the update.
As much as i like OSX (using it now) it does have it's down sides relative to linux...
It's costly (to obtain legally)
Hardware to run it (legally) is costly
It's only available from one vendor (wheres your exit strategy?)
Hardware to run it is also only available from one vendor (again no exit strategy or backup plan)
The system as a whole is not as flexible as linux
The interface is inflexible - if the apple way doesnt suit you, you have no other choice
It just works, or just *doesnt* work, if something does go wrong (and granted this is rare) its very difficult to fix
That said, all the above (aside from the hardware issues) and then some, apply to windows, and to a much worse degree. And many linux applications will run just fine on OSX
Openoffice can replace msoffice, it is more than functional enough to satisfy almost all users...
Multimedia works very well on linux too...
What's hindering linux more than anything, is proprietary formats and services which are locked in to windows. theres no technical advantage to windows, no price advantage, it retains market share through a combination of user ignorance and lock-in via proprietary formats, like the one discussed in this story.
If apps were cross platform, and formats were open, linux market share would have overtaken windows many years ago for sure, due to cost moreso than anything else.
Having rails everywhere instead of roads would force you to take the train, and prevent you from using a car. Would you rather take the train everywhere?
But by taking this responsibility to cater to _all_, would this be valid grounds to demand the specs be opened up so that third parties can create compatible players? I imagine microsoft would refuse to license their formats to the bbc if a court ruled they had to open up the specs.
I was in this situation a few years ago...
I eventually got an old commodore monitor which accepted the scanrate used by tv/games consoles, but had no tuner... had no more visits after they saw that.
Or they could make the media available in an openly documented format, that's already supported by multiple platforms.