True, but employees get stock options, and they'd rather like it if the price was driven higher.
More importantly, the price had been driven down by hedge funds and other such evil selling over 64 million shares short. Now that AMD has blown past their previous 52-week high, those short sellers are now all under water. Some of them are going to start getting margin calls on Monday, meaning they'll have to buy AMD shares to cover their short sales regardless of price. We could be looking at the Mother of All Short-Covering Rallies next week. AMD is still well short of their all-time high of 48, and they're way better positioned this time.
Or Dell could say "Just kidding" and the hedgies could drive the stock down again, just in case anyone was thinking of going on margin.
I cringe when I hear CEOs say "IT is not a core competency" of their company. I want to smack them with a cluebat and yell:
"When the crew you outsourced your IT to screws up, how long will your company stay in business? If the answer is 'Not long', then you'd better MAKE IT A CORE COMPETENCY!"
The problem is that far too many people in executive management have no common sense whatsoever, and writing new laws won't change that. I don't know what will, other than easing up on the red tape that holds back the small businesses that by rights ought to wipe out many of the big and stupid ones.
IT is such a huge force multiplier when it's done correctly that it's monumentally stupid for any business of significant size to take risks with outsourcing.
Also, have the execs read "The Goal" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Most of it is common sense to anyone with good problem-solving instincts but I still picked up a few things from it.
I purchased a HP notebook last spring with a single Infineon PC2700 256MB SODIMM. I replaced it with a pair of Corsair PC2700 512MB SODIMMs... and got BSODs. Switching to the original SODIMM and an Infineon 512MB stick also caused BSODs. Two 256MB sticks worked. Any single stick by itself worked. Finally, I tracked down a pair of Crucial/Micron PC2700 512MB sticks and those worked perfectly.
I'm told that subsequent BIOS updates have fixed many of the compatibility problems, but several hours on the phone with an American HP tech failed to convince HP that an updated BIOS was needed ('twas my first guess). Near as I can tell their American techs aren't a whole lot better than their Indian ones, you just get their useless answers more efficiently since you'll understand their words the first time around. Very nice people, they genuinely want to help, but HP's training program must be a fscking joke.
How much you wanna bet they only tested with Micron memory and just assumed that everything else would work?
Stick with Crucial/Micron and (maybe) Kingston for notebook memory if you value your sanity.
WinXP SP2 works best on Athlon 64 PCs, since SP2 enables support for the NX (No eXecute) bit, aka Data Execution Prevention, aka buffer overrun protection. Since that's the main vector for autonomous worms (versus the social engineering type), it'll cut your risk of infection quite a bit. Intel doesn't have it (yet) on their x86 CPUs.
And PowerNOW! power management will cut your company's electric bill quite a bit...
Just make sure you've dewormed your PC before installing SP2. It's liable to crash on bootup if you didn't, in which case boot in safe mode and kill the critter.
See here for an example. People can and do oppose drug criminalization on conservative principles. I'd vote for decriminalizing marijuana, I'm less certain about the harder drugs. (No, I don't smoke. Or drink. Boring as hell am I...)
That's the real question. If the pro-gay-marriage advocates get the federal legislature to rewrite the law, fine, so be it, that's our Constitutionally-limited government at work. But this business of having UNELECTED JUDGES rewrite law in clear violation of their Constitutional restraints has got to stop. The anti-gay-marraige amendment is just a ham-handed (and ultimately ineffective) swipe at the root issue.
Original intent matters. If the Constitution is a "living document" that means whatever the hell a judge says it means, law becomes arbitrary and we're on the road to dictatorship.
Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds...
Only until thisWednesday. These new 90nm chips run cooler too, 1.4V core instead of 1.5V. The 90nm 3500+ goes on sale Monday. I'd expect Newegg, MWave, and the rest of the usual suspects to get them around then or shortly thereafter.
DDR2 has much higher latency than DDR1 (negating one of the major AMD64 advantages) and costs twice as much. I don't know why AMD would bother with it. PCI-Express boards will be here soon enough, well before Christmas, if you absolutely have to have one.
AMD released the 90nm Athlon 64 3000+ Low-Voltage notebook CPUs today. Acer gets the first batch for their new Ferarri 3400 and Europe gets the first batch of those. Oh well, I'm holding out for an Athlon 64 notebook with a high-end nVidia GPU anyhow since ATI apparently can't be bothered to write decent 64-bit Linux drivers.
So THAT'S why I've been been clobbering Windows users in UT2004 Onslaught under 64-bit Fedora Core 2 Linux. I thought I was just that good. Shhh, don't tell nobody;-).
Seriously, I'd been wondering why my Aquamark benchmark scores dropped around 10%. Now I know. Outside of benchmarks I haven't noticed the difference (but I don't use my Windows notebook for gaming). If you run WinXP you should definitely get the SP2 update, just make damn sure you've dewormed your machine first as SP2 has been known to cause previously undetected worm infections to crash the system on startup, especially if you have the good sense to be running an Athlon 64 CPU (has hardware-assisted buffer overrun protection that SP2 enables).
China seems to have achieved the social stability and unity of purpose normally associated with totalitarianism, without sacrificing the rising standards of living afforded by capitalism. It's actually a pretty cool model.
I still think Hong Kong had the best model, right before the ChiComs took over. Minimalist but competent government, simple 15% flat tax (complexity == corruption when it comes to laws), and at least near-American standard of living. Damned if I know how the system could be replicated.
The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist.
Sadly I have to agree here, but I disagree with the reasons. I'd blame an overabundance of lawyers (and the resulting defenses against them) and the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow and their members to vote themselves more resources. Too many Republican politicians (including our President) have given up fighting these trends and are trying to co-opt them instead (the "No Child Left Behind" act, etc). It's driving right-wingers like me nuts. Remember the 1994 "Contract with America"? We lost, statism won.
National Review is ideal if you're looking for a right-wing source to balance the usual suspects. You'll be a LOT less confused about the right-wing American viewpoint if you read it. Between that, my local newspaper (here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor), and Yahoo! News (or Google News) I get fairly comprehensive coverage of the entire political spectrum without spending an insane amount of time.
Note that NR has, in addition to the free daily online-only articles, a Digital Edition of their dead trees mag for $20/year. They did it right too, each issue is one big HTML file and back issues (since the Digital Edition began) stay online. Very, very convenient.
Naquada generators are way cheaper and much more plentiful than ZPMs. Though in honor of Windows (and Intel overclocking) stability a naquadria generator might be more appropriate.
I used to overclock, but squeezing out the highest performence-per-watt is more fun these days. I read about it on silentpcreview.com and gave it a try. It turns out that Athlon 64 CPUs can usually run full speed at 1.3V (vs. 1.5V), which cuts power consumption almost in half. 1.8GHz (3000+) at 1.2V (35W max), 1.4GHz at 1V, and 1GHz at 0.85V (maybe a dozen watts) work well too. Someone with a newer CPU than I have managed 1.2GHz @ 0.875V. Use ClockGen to tweak the clock multiplier and core voltage under Windows. (Does anyone know of a Linux equivalent? 64-bit compatible?)
I watched a bit over 3 hours of DVD video on my HP zv5000z with the CPU set to 1GHz @ 0.85V before the 12-cell battery ran out. Normal screen brightness and everything.
Of course, this won't work all that well on Intel CPUs. Maybe Alienware will include a free naquada generator with their "4GHz" P4's.
Well, Sadr met with a top Iranian official and had a big pile of money when he came home. This is what the NYT would call mere "circumstantial evidence", but...
They've caught Iranian intelligence agents in Iraq too, not necessarily in cahoots with Sadr.
Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire". A lot of people in the West freaked out but it helped put the Soviets on the defensive, trying in vain to prove that they weren't. W's "Axis of Evil" line made the same attempt, and received about the same Western reaction. Sometimes a rhetorical two-by-four upside the head is useful. W's no Reagan but he is getting the job done.
Word is the original plan was to have Kurd and Shia fighters invade from the north under American air cover (shades of Afghanistan and the Northern Alliance), picking up supporters along the way, and a largely American/British force coming in from the south. The State Dept. and CIA (mostly the former) managed to scuttle that though (remember all the "leaked" crap in the newspapers about the Iraqi National Congress?), and Turkey kept us from using our bases in their country (supposedly the French talked them into that, something to do with the EU membership they still don't have), so we changed plans. W really, really needs to fire a huge chunk of the State Dept., but he needs to learn to fire lousy people in general first.
Well, I'm an athiest and I'm somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun. Abortion is murder (simple biological fact, aborted human life == dead human), gay marriage is just a continuation of our unelected judges writing law in clear violation of their Constitutional restraints, sex ed shouldn't be entrusted to the government education monopoly, social programs should be funded by voluntary contributions and not tax money confiscated by force (try not paying your taxes sometime), a rather large subset of Muslims have declared war on all Americans who don't think and act as they do (that includes you) and we have to deal with that, and we shouldn't make environmentalism a substitute for traditional religion.
Most people are wired for religion. Most atheists are frauds who find substitute deities (environmentalism, Communism, heck just look at all the Castro worshippers). If people have to have a religion, Christianity is a lot more benign than many of the alternatives.
The only real difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that the insugency doesn't have any state backing them with weapons.
Er, no. Iran is bankrolling a hefty chunk of the insurgency, including Sadr. The Iranian dictatorship is terrified that if the fledgling Iraqi democracy succeeds it'll give their people all sorts of bright ideas, or at least speed up the near-inevitable demise if the dictatorship. (Iran is where the Soviet Union was in the late 1980's.)
Syria's chipping in for the same reasons but to a much lesser extent (purely due to their limited resources).
No, we're not going to invade Iran, mostly because the Iranian dissidents (unlike the Iraqi dissidents) don't want us to. But we ought to be doing a helluva lot more to help those dissidents.
Window unit and whole-house unit. They bring in outside air, do heat and humidity exchange with the indoor air, then vent the stale indoor air.
Newer homes are sealed up so tight for energy-efficiency reasons that they don't "breathe" very well. Throw in paint fumes and whatever else and if you already have allergies, all that will make them worse. (Use low-VOC indoor paint!)
A moment of silence, then a call is placed to Dell.
At which point a million AMD fanboys say: "No wonder your servers melt down. Buy a frickin' dual or quad processor Opteron machine and install 64-bit Linux already..."
I watched an entire 3 hour Stargate:SG-1 series DVD on my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 notebook with 12 cell battery (just barely, the notebook automatically went into suspend mode afterwards with 3% battery capacity remaining). I achieved this in part by using ClockGen for nVidia nForce3 to undervolt the CPU to 1GHz at 0.85V. (I haven't figured out how to do this under 64-bit Linux yet, anyone know?) The current CG-stepping Athlon 64's use 1GHz @ 0.95V as their slowest PowerNOW! setting, which ought to give you close to the same battery life (I have the older C0 stepping). Mind you, I'm using the least-efficient Athlon 64 notebook chip. (DTR series, Mobile and Low-Voltage are the other two). 1.4GHz @ 1V and 2GHz @ 1.3V (full speed, 3200+ rating) also work.
Too bad HP put a Linux-hostile Broadcom WiFi card in this thing and rigged the BIOS to reject non-HP wireless miniPCI cards (see page 8-1 of the relevant HP Hardware Guide). And they used the 3-year-old GeForce 440 Go video chip (like putting bicycle wheels on a Ferarri). The slow 4200RPM HD and optical drive were easily replaced with proper components. The 1680x1050 widescreen is REALLY nice. Great notebook for getting work done, but the 440 Go can barely handle Doom 3 at 640x480 res. I swear, did Intel pay HP to cripple their AMD notebooks?
And it's starting to happen. As soon as the FCC backed off their mandate that the telcos had to share their shiny new plant with competitors at regulated prices, SBC and Verizon said they'd build Fiber-to-the-Home (or the next thing to it). Now, whether they'll follow through will be interesting, but you get the point. If the telcos do follow through, the cable companies will be under pressure to up the bandwidth they allocate to Internet access. Someone new could come in and start wiring up neighborhoods. There are already lots of mon-and-pop wireless ISPs. Everyone build a network and let the Darwinian competition begin!
But ENOUGH with the slap-a-different-marketing-layer-on-the-same-netwo rk-and-call-it-competition garbage! That's not going to get hardware built.
We know that SP2 is bad because people who use it say it is.
I'm running it on my Athlon 64 notebook and while there are some bugs (mostly interoperability issues with my Samba server, CPU usage occassionally jumps to 100% and stays there and I have to reboot to get rid of it, it's probably Explorer bugs rather than anything to do with Samba specifically) it's pretty decent for a Release Candidate. Microsoft is planning to carpet bomb the world with SP2 upgrade CDs though so they want to make Absolutely Sure they get it right. I'm not overly surprised that it's been delayed so much to accomplish this.
Can MS really be so crap as to take years and years to make a 64 bit version of windows where a bunch of hippies had it ready in days?
It took a lot longer than that, but 64-bit Linux has been solid for at least a few months now. That said, the delay to 1H2005 for 64-bit WinXP is rather disturbing.
Who was it, Dave Cutler at Microsoft I think who worked with AMD to help design the AMD64 architecture? Microsoft needed AMD64. They didn't want to deal with Itanic. Don't worry, eventually they'll cough up a 64-bit WinXP release, but if we've all gone 64-bit Linux by then, that's OK too.
No. The current public 64-bit WinXP beta is from last September. Wait for the next one.
Do be sure to get 64-bit Linux of course. FC2 works well for me. If you have a nVidia video card, nVidia's current 64-bit drivers work exceptionally well.
I've heard similar complaints about 32-bit SuSE 9.1 (well, okay, one guy on the local LUG email list who's very cranky about his upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1). 64-bit Fedora Core 2 has worked well for me, give that a try. That's the nice thing about Linux, if one distro gives you trouble, we've got more! Do make sure you get the current updates for FC2.
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True, but employees get stock options, and they'd rather like it if the price was driven higher.
More importantly, the price had been driven down by hedge funds and other such evil selling over 64 million shares short. Now that AMD has blown past their previous 52-week high, those short sellers are now all under water. Some of them are going to start getting margin calls on Monday, meaning they'll have to buy AMD shares to cover their short sales regardless of price. We could be looking at the Mother of All Short-Covering Rallies next week. AMD is still well short of their all-time high of 48, and they're way better positioned this time.
Or Dell could say "Just kidding" and the hedgies could drive the stock down again, just in case anyone was thinking of going on margin.
I cringe when I hear CEOs say "IT is not a core competency" of their company. I want to smack them with a cluebat and yell:
"When the crew you outsourced your IT to screws up, how long will your company stay in business? If the answer is 'Not long', then you'd better MAKE IT A CORE COMPETENCY!"
The problem is that far too many people in executive management have no common sense whatsoever, and writing new laws won't change that. I don't know what will, other than easing up on the red tape that holds back the small businesses that by rights ought to wipe out many of the big and stupid ones.
IT is such a huge force multiplier when it's done correctly that it's monumentally stupid for any business of significant size to take risks with outsourcing.
Also, have the execs read "The Goal" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Most of it is common sense to anyone with good problem-solving instincts but I still picked up a few things from it.
I purchased a HP notebook last spring with a single Infineon PC2700 256MB SODIMM. I replaced it with a pair of Corsair PC2700 512MB SODIMMs... and got BSODs. Switching to the original SODIMM and an Infineon 512MB stick also caused BSODs. Two 256MB sticks worked. Any single stick by itself worked. Finally, I tracked down a pair of Crucial/Micron PC2700 512MB sticks and those worked perfectly.
I'm told that subsequent BIOS updates have fixed many of the compatibility problems, but several hours on the phone with an American HP tech failed to convince HP that an updated BIOS was needed ('twas my first guess). Near as I can tell their American techs aren't a whole lot better than their Indian ones, you just get their useless answers more efficiently since you'll understand their words the first time around. Very nice people, they genuinely want to help, but HP's training program must be a fscking joke.
How much you wanna bet they only tested with Micron memory and just assumed that everything else would work?
Stick with Crucial/Micron and (maybe) Kingston for notebook memory if you value your sanity.
Go ahead and move to the moon. We'll be up there to "liberate" the moon soon enough. Dubya wants to reduce our dependency on foreign cheese.
Wisconsin voted for Kerry. Fsck 'em.
(Wisconsin is a big dairy state, just so you foreigners get the joke...)
WinXP SP2 works best on Athlon 64 PCs, since SP2 enables support for the NX (No eXecute) bit, aka Data Execution Prevention, aka buffer overrun protection. Since that's the main vector for autonomous worms (versus the social engineering type), it'll cut your risk of infection quite a bit. Intel doesn't have it (yet) on their x86 CPUs.
And PowerNOW! power management will cut your company's electric bill quite a bit...
Just make sure you've dewormed your PC before installing SP2. It's liable to crash on bootup if you didn't, in which case boot in safe mode and kill the critter.
See here for an example. People can and do oppose drug criminalization on conservative principles. I'd vote for decriminalizing marijuana, I'm less certain about the harder drugs. (No, I don't smoke. Or drink. Boring as hell am I...)
That's the real question. If the pro-gay-marriage advocates get the federal legislature to rewrite the law, fine, so be it, that's our Constitutionally-limited government at work. But this business of having UNELECTED JUDGES rewrite law in clear violation of their Constitutional restraints has got to stop. The anti-gay-marraige amendment is just a ham-handed (and ultimately ineffective) swipe at the root issue.
Original intent matters. If the Constitution is a "living document" that means whatever the hell a judge says it means, law becomes arbitrary and we're on the road to dictatorship.
Socket 754 chips generally cost far less than the s939 ones at comparable speeds...
Only until this Wednesday. These new 90nm chips run cooler too, 1.4V core instead of 1.5V. The 90nm 3500+ goes on sale Monday. I'd expect Newegg, MWave, and the rest of the usual suspects to get them around then or shortly thereafter.
DDR2 has much higher latency than DDR1 (negating one of the major AMD64 advantages) and costs twice as much. I don't know why AMD would bother with it. PCI-Express boards will be here soon enough, well before Christmas, if you absolutely have to have one.
AMD released the 90nm Athlon 64 3000+ Low-Voltage notebook CPUs today. Acer gets the first batch for their new Ferarri 3400 and Europe gets the first batch of those. Oh well, I'm holding out for an Athlon 64 notebook with a high-end nVidia GPU anyhow since ATI apparently can't be bothered to write decent 64-bit Linux drivers.
So THAT'S why I've been been clobbering Windows users in UT2004 Onslaught under 64-bit Fedora Core 2 Linux. I thought I was just that good. Shhh, don't tell nobody ;-).
Seriously, I'd been wondering why my Aquamark benchmark scores dropped around 10%. Now I know. Outside of benchmarks I haven't noticed the difference (but I don't use my Windows notebook for gaming). If you run WinXP you should definitely get the SP2 update, just make damn sure you've dewormed your machine first as SP2 has been known to cause previously undetected worm infections to crash the system on startup, especially if you have the good sense to be running an Athlon 64 CPU (has hardware-assisted buffer overrun protection that SP2 enables).
Actually, I did run across a HDTV USB2.0 tuner but I don't know much about it.
China seems to have achieved the social stability and unity of purpose normally associated with totalitarianism, without sacrificing the rising standards of living afforded by capitalism. It's actually a pretty cool model.
Oh yeah, really cool.
I still think Hong Kong had the best model, right before the ChiComs took over. Minimalist but competent government, simple 15% flat tax (complexity == corruption when it comes to laws), and at least near-American standard of living. Damned if I know how the system could be replicated.
The West still has a political requirement to appear free and capitalistic, but is increasingly becoming more statist.
Sadly I have to agree here, but I disagree with the reasons. I'd blame an overabundance of lawyers (and the resulting defenses against them) and the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow and their members to vote themselves more resources. Too many Republican politicians (including our President) have given up fighting these trends and are trying to co-opt them instead (the "No Child Left Behind" act, etc). It's driving right-wingers like me nuts. Remember the 1994 "Contract with America"? We lost, statism won.
National Review is ideal if you're looking for a right-wing source to balance the usual suspects. You'll be a LOT less confused about the right-wing American viewpoint if you read it. Between that, my local newspaper (here in the People's Republic of Ann Arbor), and Yahoo! News (or Google News) I get fairly comprehensive coverage of the entire political spectrum without spending an insane amount of time.
Note that NR has, in addition to the free daily online-only articles, a Digital Edition of their dead trees mag for $20/year. They did it right too, each issue is one big HTML file and back issues (since the Digital Edition began) stay online. Very, very convenient.
Naquada generators are way cheaper and much more plentiful than ZPMs. Though in honor of Windows (and Intel overclocking) stability a naquadria generator might be more appropriate.
Intel's reserving the ZPMs for Itanium buyers.
I used to overclock, but squeezing out the highest performence-per-watt is more fun these days. I read about it on silentpcreview.com and gave it a try. It turns out that Athlon 64 CPUs can usually run full speed at 1.3V (vs. 1.5V), which cuts power consumption almost in half. 1.8GHz (3000+) at 1.2V (35W max), 1.4GHz at 1V, and 1GHz at 0.85V (maybe a dozen watts) work well too. Someone with a newer CPU than I have managed 1.2GHz @ 0.875V. Use ClockGen to tweak the clock multiplier and core voltage under Windows. (Does anyone know of a Linux equivalent? 64-bit compatible?)
I watched a bit over 3 hours of DVD video on my HP zv5000z with the CPU set to 1GHz @ 0.85V before the 12-cell battery ran out. Normal screen brightness and everything.
Of course, this won't work all that well on Intel CPUs. Maybe Alienware will include a free naquada generator with their "4GHz" P4's.
Kerry has prohibited the republishing of his 1971 book, "The New Soldier". Fortunately, you can read an OCR'd copy free online.
C-SPAN has been replaying Kerry's "Winter Soldier" Senate testimony too. Surely someone's ripped it and posted it online somewhere?
It's hard to make stuff disappear down the memory hole when it's backed up on the Internet.
Well, Sadr met with a top Iranian official and had a big pile of money when he came home. This is what the NYT would call mere "circumstantial evidence", but...
They've caught Iranian intelligence agents in Iraq too, not necessarily in cahoots with Sadr.
Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire". A lot of people in the West freaked out but it helped put the Soviets on the defensive, trying in vain to prove that they weren't. W's "Axis of Evil" line made the same attempt, and received about the same Western reaction. Sometimes a rhetorical two-by-four upside the head is useful. W's no Reagan but he is getting the job done.
Word is the original plan was to have Kurd and Shia fighters invade from the north under American air cover (shades of Afghanistan and the Northern Alliance), picking up supporters along the way, and a largely American/British force coming in from the south. The State Dept. and CIA (mostly the former) managed to scuttle that though (remember all the "leaked" crap in the newspapers about the Iraqi National Congress?), and Turkey kept us from using our bases in their country (supposedly the French talked them into that, something to do with the EU membership they still don't have), so we changed plans. W really, really needs to fire a huge chunk of the State Dept., but he needs to learn to fire lousy people in general first.
Well, I'm an athiest and I'm somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun. Abortion is murder (simple biological fact, aborted human life == dead human), gay marriage is just a continuation of our unelected judges writing law in clear violation of their Constitutional restraints, sex ed shouldn't be entrusted to the government education monopoly, social programs should be funded by voluntary contributions and not tax money confiscated by force (try not paying your taxes sometime), a rather large subset of Muslims have declared war on all Americans who don't think and act as they do (that includes you) and we have to deal with that, and we shouldn't make environmentalism a substitute for traditional religion.
Most people are wired for religion. Most atheists are frauds who find substitute deities (environmentalism, Communism, heck just look at all the Castro worshippers). If people have to have a religion, Christianity is a lot more benign than many of the alternatives.
The only real difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that the insugency doesn't have any state backing them with weapons.
Er, no. Iran is bankrolling a hefty chunk of the insurgency, including Sadr. The Iranian dictatorship is terrified that if the fledgling Iraqi democracy succeeds it'll give their people all sorts of bright ideas, or at least speed up the near-inevitable demise if the dictatorship. (Iran is where the Soviet Union was in the late 1980's.)
Syria's chipping in for the same reasons but to a much lesser extent (purely due to their limited resources).
No, we're not going to invade Iran, mostly because the Iranian dissidents (unlike the Iraqi dissidents) don't want us to. But we ought to be doing a helluva lot more to help those dissidents.
See the Iraq the Model blog.
Window unit and whole-house unit. They bring in outside air, do heat and humidity exchange with the indoor air, then vent the stale indoor air.
Newer homes are sealed up so tight for energy-efficiency reasons that they don't "breathe" very well. Throw in paint fumes and whatever else and if you already have allergies, all that will make them worse. (Use low-VOC indoor paint!)
A moment of silence, then a call is placed to Dell.
At which point a million AMD fanboys say: "No wonder your servers melt down. Buy a frickin' dual or quad processor Opteron machine and install 64-bit Linux already..."
I watched an entire 3 hour Stargate:SG-1 series DVD on my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 notebook with 12 cell battery (just barely, the notebook automatically went into suspend mode afterwards with 3% battery capacity remaining). I achieved this in part by using ClockGen for nVidia nForce3 to undervolt the CPU to 1GHz at 0.85V. (I haven't figured out how to do this under 64-bit Linux yet, anyone know?) The current CG-stepping Athlon 64's use 1GHz @ 0.95V as their slowest PowerNOW! setting, which ought to give you close to the same battery life (I have the older C0 stepping). Mind you, I'm using the least-efficient Athlon 64 notebook chip. (DTR series, Mobile and Low-Voltage are the other two). 1.4GHz @ 1V and 2GHz @ 1.3V (full speed, 3200+ rating) also work.
Too bad HP put a Linux-hostile Broadcom WiFi card in this thing and rigged the BIOS to reject non-HP wireless miniPCI cards (see page 8-1 of the relevant HP Hardware Guide). And they used the 3-year-old GeForce 440 Go video chip (like putting bicycle wheels on a Ferarri). The slow 4200RPM HD and optical drive were easily replaced with proper components. The 1680x1050 widescreen is REALLY nice. Great notebook for getting work done, but the 440 Go can barely handle Doom 3 at 640x480 res. I swear, did Intel pay HP to cripple their AMD notebooks?
And it's starting to happen. As soon as the FCC backed off their mandate that the telcos had to share their shiny new plant with competitors at regulated prices, SBC and Verizon said they'd build Fiber-to-the-Home (or the next thing to it). Now, whether they'll follow through will be interesting, but you get the point. If the telcos do follow through, the cable companies will be under pressure to up the bandwidth they allocate to Internet access. Someone new could come in and start wiring up neighborhoods. There are already lots of mon-and-pop wireless ISPs. Everyone build a network and let the Darwinian competition begin!
o rk-and-call-it-competition garbage! That's not going to get hardware built.
But ENOUGH with the slap-a-different-marketing-layer-on-the-same-netw
We know that SP2 is bad because people who use it say it is.
I'm running it on my Athlon 64 notebook and while there are some bugs (mostly interoperability issues with my Samba server, CPU usage occassionally jumps to 100% and stays there and I have to reboot to get rid of it, it's probably Explorer bugs rather than anything to do with Samba specifically) it's pretty decent for a Release Candidate. Microsoft is planning to carpet bomb the world with SP2 upgrade CDs though so they want to make Absolutely Sure they get it right. I'm not overly surprised that it's been delayed so much to accomplish this.
Can MS really be so crap as to take years and years to make a 64 bit version of windows where a bunch of hippies had it ready in days?
It took a lot longer than that, but 64-bit Linux has been solid for at least a few months now. That said, the delay to 1H2005 for 64-bit WinXP is rather disturbing.
Who was it, Dave Cutler at Microsoft I think who worked with AMD to help design the AMD64 architecture? Microsoft needed AMD64. They didn't want to deal with Itanic. Don't worry, eventually they'll cough up a 64-bit WinXP release, but if we've all gone 64-bit Linux by then, that's OK too.
No. The current public 64-bit WinXP beta is from last September. Wait for the next one.
Do be sure to get 64-bit Linux of course. FC2 works well for me. If you have a nVidia video card, nVidia's current 64-bit drivers work exceptionally well.
I've heard similar complaints about 32-bit SuSE 9.1 (well, okay, one guy on the local LUG email list who's very cranky about his upgrade from 9.0 to 9.1). 64-bit Fedora Core 2 has worked well for me, give that a try. That's the nice thing about Linux, if one distro gives you trouble, we've got more! Do make sure you get the current updates for FC2.