How would you keep the "shun" function from being abused, for example as a quick way to gain invulnerability against a certain player, or group of players?
Consider this. Player A is fighting a monster. Monster dies and drops a valuable item. Player B teleports in and grabs both items. Player A is helpless to stop him because C has A set to "shun", so he can't hurt him or talk to him.
The problem as I see it is that the "ghosts" who were shunned would still be able to interact with the game world. By using the "shun" function themselves, the "ghosts" could become like invulnerable poltergeists, wreaking even more havoc for the non-asshole players. No thanks.
I think the best solution is to have age limits, pay-to-play accounts that only allow one character per account, and unique identifiers for each account so you can tell who someone is even if he kills his character and creates a new one. Add to this admins with the authority to cancel a person's account if foul play is suspected. Obviously, account cancellations should not lead to refunds and there would be a period of at least a month before a player whose account was cancelled would be allowed to re-register. This would hit the assholes where everyone hurts the most: the wallet. Ouch:)
The leaked Half-Life 2 source contains GPL:ed code. Makes one wonder, would we ever have known it was there if it wasn't for this leak? Or were Valve planning a sneaky GPL violation?
Here's the beginning comment from "hl2_src\src_main\ivp\havana\havok\hk_math\odesolv e.cpp":
/*
Dynamics/Kinematics modeling and simulation library.
Copyright (C) 1999 by Michael Alexander Ewert
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
Library General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public
License along with this library; if not, write to the Free
Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
It's not, (unfortunately). Paste from LocalNetworkBackdoor.h follows:
// This class facilitates a fast path for networking when running a single-player game. // Instead of the server bit-packing entities, delta'ing them, encoding deltas, then decoding the states, // it just hands the server entity's data to the client, which copies the data over directly.
Not really, from poking around the source I can tell it seems to be using an utter fuckload of DLL's to do its magic. Thus, the actual main executable doesn't really have to be that big. I know lots of (big) games that have sub-200kB executables.
Some early results from the picking apart of the source are here and here.
I tried compiling the code, it won't work in Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 (apparently it was developed in Visual Studio 6.0 and the version inconsistencies break the code. It's not exactly standard C++:). According to unverified rumours, Visual Studio 6.0 with SP5 will compile the source.
With a few exceptions, all valid C code is also valid C++ code. The exceptions are listed in section B.2.2 of The C++ Programming Language (Stroustrup), and most of them concern things that most programmers won't usually come across, or which constitute bad style and are thus best avoided even in C.
I don't see any reason why C code shouldn't be able to compete if it complies with the C++ specifications - I'd just be C++ but without any C++ features. Unless of course you by C mean C99, in which case there would be other differences, as not all C99 features are supported by C++. Still, writing code that is valid in both C++ and C should pose no great obstacle to any programmer skilled enough to compete in a competition such as the one in question.
Personally I think a few years in jail for a child porn collector causes a bit less grieve then a child being raped and killed. Apperantly you don't.
You're missing the point. The problem isn't that one child porn collector might go to jail. The problem is that someone who had no intention of downloading child porn, but got it on his computer anyway for whatever reason, might go to jail and be labeled a pedophile for the rest of his life. Now, imagine that not just one, but ten innocent guys have their lives trashed because of a trojan horse, and we've far outweighed the sufferings of the child in Russia.
You make another mistake in your post - I quote again:
You are presuming that downloading/buying child porn is a victimless crime like say growing weed. Quite how you seem to arrive at this conclusion is a bit of a mysterie to me.
Downloading and buying child porn are not the same thing. Someone who buys child porn is indeed paying the wages of the people who would molest, rape and kill children in Russia and whatnot. Someone who downloads child porn that is available for free is not in any way contributing to the child porn merchants' activities - in other words, he's committing a victimless crime.
In my opinion, possession of child pornography should be decriminalized. Go after the people who produce it and sell it, they're the real criminals. If some sicko wants to jerk off to a picture of a 7-year-old he downloaded off Usenet, why not let him? He's not hurting anyone but himself, and the law that would punish him for his activities could also be used to ruin innocent people's lives.
Having to manually modify the C code of the drivers to my network card just to get it to compile (getting it into the kernel was a whole other story). The drivers were only available as source from 3Com, and not included in RH9, this for a somewhat common card that had been on the market since 1995 (3Com Etherlink 3XP, for the curious).
Lack of drivers, even for pretty common products, and hassles installing them is the greatest single problem with Linux, and though the fault lies heavily with the manufacturers of said products, whose responsibility it should be to release such drivers, the installation process could be made one hell of a lot simpler.
The nVidia drivers for Linux are a nice example. Yes, nVidia supplied a nice text-mode installer, but I had to exit X to run it. Which, on RH9, included manually editing a config file (big no-no! end user should never have to do that!) and rebooting(!). Twice. Sure, I could probably have done it w/o rebooting.. but nowhere did it say how (I understand there's a service I need to disable, but the services aren't described in the services manager so I couldn't tell which did what) so I simply followed nVidia's instructions. Funny how installing the Windows drivers for the same hardware is all done via a simple Wizard, from within Windows, requiring just one reboot on completion.
Note, and note well: This was on RH9, possibly the most newbie-friendly distro there is at the moment. I've had working/playing with computers as my primary hobby for 15 years. I know C/C++ pretty well. I did manage to get everything working at last but it was a major pain in the ass to install just two drivers. Had I been Joe Sixpack, I'd have given up when I saw that the drivers were only available as source (for the NIC drivers) or when I first couldn't get X to shut down (nVidia drivers). Suffice to say, in the area of drivers, and installation of such, there's a lot of improvement left to be made.
There's a longer essay about my experiences installing RH9 in my journal.
Jobs that don't require training are pretty hard to find...
Jobs that don't require training are actually a lot more easy to find if you're looking for the type of jobs that involve heavy physical activity (construction, warehouse work, et cetera.. the common denominator being jobs requiring above-average physical fitness but only sufficient intelligence to follow orders).. but I guess the kind of guy/gal who thinks sitting in a cheap-o office chair for six hours harrassing random strangers via phone is a nice way to earn money would be less interested in a job that actually required them to.. *gasp*.. _sweat_ for their money.
It's worth noting that some of these "sweaty" jobs actually pay quite well. I'm working in a warehouse over summer (pre-university) and I'm paid about $13/hr, $25/hr on weekends, before taxes. A respectable bit above minimum wage, and this on a job that required NO education and only two days of training (which I was paid to attend).
Finding a job that requires neither physical fitness nor education, however, is hard. I'm thinking that's why all those college kids are having such a hard time.
Re:POSIX,LSB,BSD,heck, where is everything?
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
C:\Program Files\
Yet another problem of something Windows got right from the start (a default place to install everything) but which (most distros of) Linux are still struggling with.
Read the replies to the LKML post. It's RMS who is trolling, not McVoy. Most of the LKML posters saw it (used to frequent exposure to RMS no doubt), but the Slashdot crowd obviously doesn't, judging from the comments so far. How unusual.
The Free Software movement needs more people like Linus and fewer like RMS, this is yet another proof of that.
Oh, come on, even I know the answer to this one: Money. Copyright holders have it (lots!) but individuals usually don't.
Politicians always side with the money. The government consists of politicians, ergo, the government always sides with the money, in this case, the copyright holders.
Tom's Hardware got it right. I was referring to the website of the LAN itself which _does_ use the term "largest lanparty[sic] in the world".
Btw, of course you don't have mod points, you're an AC. Though I bet you have a real/. account too and is posting as AC to avoid the downvotes and the resulting loss of karma. Coward, indeed.
Firstly, this must be one of the most poorly written/. "news" items in the history of the website. "Tom's Hardware has an overview about one of the biggest Lan Parties". That sorry excuse for a sentence alone makes me sick.
Second, with LANs like DreamHack attracting I believe around 5000 visitors each year (actually twice each year, since there's both DH Summer and DH Winter nowadays), a LAN of merely a thousand peeps hardly qualifies as "one of the biggest" IMO. Reading the official website they seem to really think they're the largest LAN party in the world, judging from the "about" page. A bit US-centric are we? Morons.
I won't even go into how the whole thing seems more like a giant marketing gig (the people attending are basically paying $30/day to be fed advertisments from AMD, ASUS et al) than a LAN party.
Thank you for adding a bit of common sense to this discussion. I agree completely with you.
However, the argument someone else made that Microsoft's worst fear is people buying Xboxes but no games is pretty solid as well. And with a signed Linux bootloader (or an easy-to-use crack), they'd be able to do just that.
Before you praise AVG and tell everyone how cool it is and that it's available for free, maybe you should read their website.
The website specifies that the free edition of AVG Anti-Virus "can not" (doesn't specify whether it can not or may not - I find the latter more likely) be installed on servers, or in any networked environment.. The Internet is a network, so technically, you can't use this if your computer has an Internet connection. You also can't use it when your computer is connected to a LAN of any kind. I personally don't own any computers that aren't.
The EULA for the free edition allows only one copy per user and PC, and only on home or "non-commercial organization" computers. So if you have two computers, you can only run AVG on one, and you can't run it at work.
You are required to submit to AVG a large amount of personal information in order to download the software. You're also forced to submit a valid e-mail, which I understand is considered a problem considering the large amount of whining every time Slashdot links to NYT. God only knows what they'll use all that personal information for - I wouldn't trust them not to sell it.
Let it be noted that I'm in no way naive enough to believe that everyone who downloads AVG Anti-Virus will actually bother with following the terms of the EULA. I just felt that this was worthy of pointing out, since the parent poster only gave half the story about AVG.
I personally use McAfee VirusScan, which I'm very pleased with. I lost all trust in Norton products some time ago when I bought (yes bought) their AV software and it broke Windows XP (something very easily done, I admit). Even after they fixed it, Norton AV seemed really slow and bloated. Sorry, I'd rather use those 30 megs of RAM for something else. By comparison, VirusScan's background service uses 8 megs, and I can never tell it's there unless it's found a virus (which rarely happens as I don't run untrusted binaries).
At 1024x768 maximum resolution this monitor is useless for use with a computer. Would make a nice TV though. Well, I suppose you could play games on it.. but Windows at 1024x768 is just painful to watch. And considering what it costs, and its sheer size, I don't see many people using this as their primary monitor. The cost alone would prevent anyone sane from bringing it to a LAN.
I for one would love to have an LCD monitor rather than my bulky CRT, but I'm waiting for those 20" beauties that at least support 1600x1200 to drop in price.
Sorry, I realized afterwards that I was incorrect in that statement. It's not illegal as such, it's just that the copyright holders generally don't mind. Unlike the RIAA/MPAA, they've realized that sharing does help sales and increase popularity. Especially on a market that would otherwise be hard for them to get into.
See this E2 write-up for more information on the ethics of fansubbing.
I thought you were trolling at first, but then I realized, you do have a point. Allow me to re-phrase:
"So-called unlicensed episodes are episodes which you're highly unlikely to get into legal trouble for sharing, because there are no licensees outside of Asia, and the licensees that do exist largely tolerate the practice, because it helps sales when the anime in question is eventually brought to market in the rest of the world."
Sorry for messing that up in the original posting. I really should know better.
I did think about manga, but it would take quite a few scans to fill up even a single GB, let alone 150GB. That's why I didn't mention it. Of course, you could convert them to BMP instead of JPG/GIF/PNG, but that's cheating and some of the stricter DC hubs would ban you for making your share seem larger than it is.
For the interested, Toriyama's World has some nice manga fansubs for download.
Anime. Unlicensed episodes which are not illegal to distribute because there are no licensees outside of Asia. At 150-200 megs per episode, you'd be able to fit quite a few series into 150GB.
An excellent source for unlicensed anime epsiodes, subtitled in English, is AnimeSuki, where they're downloadable via BitTorrent - you know, the P2P App with Brains. Downloads are usually quite snappy.
As an added advantage to collecting unlicensed anime, it's usually quite fun to watch. The downside is that once a series becomes licensed, you have to stop sharing it. Right now, there are several good series being released. I recommend Naruto, Mahoromatic and Wolf's Rain.
You are referring to the Emulators.com site. The guy who wrote it which considers "winning the war" to be equal to having the fastest CPU on the market. I don't. He and I are talking about different things when we say "CPU war". Also, I was referring to that page because it documents the flaws in the Intel Pentium IV's design, not as a proof that the Athlon XP is a better CPU (though that's essentially what it says - that the Athlon is a better, but slower, CPU).
I see this alot nowadays - people saying that AMD have "lost their edge", or "been taking it easy for a while"... that is simply not true. An AMD Athlon XP 2800+ _will_ beat an Intel Pentium IV at 2.8 GHz in most benchmarks (and the 3.06 GHz P4 in quite a few - see the latest ones at THG or AT if you don't trust me), just as it is supposed to. And you can still practically get two Athlons (not 2800+'s mind you) for the same price as one high-end Pentium IV. Surely no-one here thinks that a single P4, HT or no HT, stands a chance against a true SMP system (given apps that take advantage of both CPU's)?
Furthermore, there's no app or game available on this earth, and there probably won't be for at least two years to come, where the speed difference between an AXP/2800+ and a P4/3GHz is big enough to really mean anything to anyone other than the fanatical overclocking crowd, who will spend any amount of money just to have the fastest stuff on the market, only to use it for stuff like playing Counter-Strike, which uses perhaps 20% of the total CPU and graphics card capacity. Well, if you're into that sort of stuff, sure. Get a P4 and enjoy having the fastest CPU there is.. until the next model P4/AXP is out, that is.
For the rest of us, who base our computer purchases on common sense, for speed, stability and price, the obvious choice is still the Athlon XP.
Besides, the Pentium IV still has a pretty fucked up design. See this page if you don't know what I'm talking about. I always laugh at people who whine that Windows is poorly designed, only to praise Intel CPU's in the next breath.
Anyone care to disagree? Remember, modding me down is so much easier than posting an intelligent reply.
Slashdot Mirror
How would you keep the "shun" function from being abused, for example as a quick way to gain invulnerability against a certain player, or group of players?
:)
Consider this. Player A is fighting a monster. Monster dies and drops a valuable item. Player B teleports in and grabs both items. Player A is helpless to stop him because C has A set to "shun", so he can't hurt him or talk to him.
The problem as I see it is that the "ghosts" who were shunned would still be able to interact with the game world. By using the "shun" function themselves, the "ghosts" could become like invulnerable poltergeists, wreaking even more havoc for the non-asshole players. No thanks.
I think the best solution is to have age limits, pay-to-play accounts that only allow one character per account, and unique identifiers for each account so you can tell who someone is even if he kills his character and creates a new one. Add to this admins with the authority to cancel a person's account if foul play is suspected. Obviously, account cancellations should not lead to refunds and there would be a period of at least a month before a player whose account was cancelled would be allowed to re-register. This would hit the assholes where everyone hurts the most: the wallet. Ouch
Just my 5 cents.
Heh, what a relief. For once I'm glad to have been completely out in the blue. What dumbass modded me +5?
Here's the beginning comment from "hl2_src\src_main\ivp\havana\havok\hk_math\odesol
Not really, from poking around the source I can tell it seems to be using an utter fuckload of DLL's to do its magic. Thus, the actual main executable doesn't really have to be that big. I know lots of (big) games that have sub-200kB executables.
Some early results from the picking apart of the source are here and here.
:). According to unverified rumours, Visual Studio 6.0 with SP5 will compile the source.
I tried compiling the code, it won't work in Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 (apparently it was developed in Visual Studio 6.0 and the version inconsistencies break the code. It's not exactly standard C++
Someone already managed to squeeze a HL2.EXE and TF2.EXE out of the source. Behold:
http://www.devils-children.com/hl2_1.jpg
It's being picked apart in #HL2-Source on irc.quakenet.org at the moment. Fun fun.
With a few exceptions, all valid C code is also valid C++ code. The exceptions are listed in section B.2.2 of The C++ Programming Language (Stroustrup), and most of them concern things that most programmers won't usually come across, or which constitute bad style and are thus best avoided even in C.
I don't see any reason why C code shouldn't be able to compete if it complies with the C++ specifications - I'd just be C++ but without any C++ features. Unless of course you by C mean C99, in which case there would be other differences, as not all C99 features are supported by C++. Still, writing code that is valid in both C++ and C should pose no great obstacle to any programmer skilled enough to compete in a competition such as the one in question.
You make another mistake in your post - I quote again:
Downloading and buying child porn are not the same thing. Someone who buys child porn is indeed paying the wages of the people who would molest, rape and kill children in Russia and whatnot. Someone who downloads child porn that is available for free is not in any way contributing to the child porn merchants' activities - in other words, he's committing a victimless crime.
In my opinion, possession of child pornography should be decriminalized. Go after the people who produce it and sell it, they're the real criminals. If some sicko wants to jerk off to a picture of a 7-year-old he downloaded off Usenet, why not let him? He's not hurting anyone but himself, and the law that would punish him for his activities could also be used to ruin innocent people's lives.
Having to manually modify the C code of the drivers to my network card just to get it to compile (getting it into the kernel was a whole other story). The drivers were only available as source from 3Com, and not included in RH9, this for a somewhat common card that had been on the market since 1995 (3Com Etherlink 3XP, for the curious).
Lack of drivers, even for pretty common products, and hassles installing them is the greatest single problem with Linux, and though the fault lies heavily with the manufacturers of said products, whose responsibility it should be to release such drivers, the installation process could be made one hell of a lot simpler.
The nVidia drivers for Linux are a nice example. Yes, nVidia supplied a nice text-mode installer, but I had to exit X to run it. Which, on RH9, included manually editing a config file (big no-no! end user should never have to do that!) and rebooting(!). Twice. Sure, I could probably have done it w/o rebooting .. but nowhere did it say how (I understand there's a service I need to disable, but the services aren't described in the services manager so I couldn't tell which did what) so I simply followed nVidia's instructions. Funny how installing the Windows drivers for the same hardware is all done via a simple Wizard, from within Windows, requiring just one reboot on completion.
Note, and note well: This was on RH9, possibly the most newbie-friendly distro there is at the moment. I've had working/playing with computers as my primary hobby for 15 years. I know C/C++ pretty well. I did manage to get everything working at last but it was a major pain in the ass to install just two drivers. Had I been Joe Sixpack, I'd have given up when I saw that the drivers were only available as source (for the NIC drivers) or when I first couldn't get X to shut down (nVidia drivers). Suffice to say, in the area of drivers, and installation of such, there's a lot of improvement left to be made.
There's a longer essay about my experiences installing RH9 in my journal.It's worth noting that some of these "sweaty" jobs actually pay quite well. I'm working in a warehouse over summer (pre-university) and I'm paid about $13/hr, $25/hr on weekends, before taxes. A respectable bit above minimum wage, and this on a job that required NO education and only two days of training (which I was paid to attend).
Finding a job that requires neither physical fitness nor education, however, is hard. I'm thinking that's why all those college kids are having such a hard time.
C:\Program Files\
Yet another problem of something Windows got right from the start (a default place to install everything) but which (most distros of) Linux are still struggling with.
Read the replies to the LKML post. It's RMS who is trolling, not McVoy. Most of the LKML posters saw it (used to frequent exposure to RMS no doubt), but the Slashdot crowd obviously doesn't, judging from the comments so far. How unusual.
The Free Software movement needs more people like Linus and fewer like RMS, this is yet another proof of that.
Oh, come on, even I know the answer to this one: Money. Copyright holders have it (lots!) but individuals usually don't.
Politicians always side with the money. The government consists of politicians, ergo, the government always sides with the money, in this case, the copyright holders.
Tom's Hardware got it right. I was referring to the website of the LAN itself which _does_ use the term "largest lanparty[sic] in the world".
/. account too and is posting as AC to avoid the downvotes and the resulting loss of karma. Coward, indeed.
Btw, of course you don't have mod points, you're an AC. Though I bet you have a real
Firstly, this must be one of the most poorly written /. "news" items in the history of the website. "Tom's Hardware has an overview about one of the biggest Lan Parties". That sorry excuse for a sentence alone makes me sick.
Second, with LANs like DreamHack attracting I believe around 5000 visitors each year (actually twice each year, since there's both DH Summer and DH Winter nowadays), a LAN of merely a thousand peeps hardly qualifies as "one of the biggest" IMO. Reading the official website they seem to really think they're the largest LAN party in the world, judging from the "about" page. A bit US-centric are we? Morons.
I won't even go into how the whole thing seems more like a giant marketing gig (the people attending are basically paying $30/day to be fed advertisments from AMD, ASUS et al) than a LAN party.
Thank you for adding a bit of common sense to this discussion. I agree completely with you.
However, the argument someone else made that Microsoft's worst fear is people buying Xboxes but no games is pretty solid as well. And with a signed Linux bootloader (or an easy-to-use crack), they'd be able to do just that.
- The website specifies that the free edition of AVG Anti-Virus "can not" (doesn't specify whether it can not or may not - I find the latter more likely) be installed on servers, or in any networked environment.. The Internet is a network, so technically, you can't use this if your computer has an Internet connection. You also can't use it when your computer is connected to a LAN of any kind. I personally don't own any computers that aren't.
- The EULA for the free edition allows only one copy per user and PC, and only on home or "non-commercial organization" computers. So if you have two computers, you can only run AVG on one, and you can't run it at work.
- You are required to submit to AVG a large amount of personal information in order to download the software. You're also forced to submit a valid e-mail, which I understand is considered a problem considering the large amount of whining every time Slashdot links to NYT. God only knows what they'll use all that personal information for - I wouldn't trust them not to sell it.
Let it be noted that I'm in no way naive enough to believe that everyone who downloads AVG Anti-Virus will actually bother with following the terms of the EULA. I just felt that this was worthy of pointing out, since the parent poster only gave half the story about AVG.I personally use McAfee VirusScan, which I'm very pleased with. I lost all trust in Norton products some time ago when I bought (yes bought) their AV software and it broke Windows XP (something very easily done, I admit). Even after they fixed it, Norton AV seemed really slow and bloated. Sorry, I'd rather use those 30 megs of RAM for something else. By comparison, VirusScan's background service uses 8 megs, and I can never tell it's there unless it's found a virus (which rarely happens as I don't run untrusted binaries).
At 1024x768 maximum resolution this monitor is useless for use with a computer. Would make a nice TV though. Well, I suppose you could play games on it .. but Windows at 1024x768 is just painful to watch. And considering what it costs, and its sheer size, I don't see many people using this as their primary monitor. The cost alone would prevent anyone sane from bringing it to a LAN.
I for one would love to have an LCD monitor rather than my bulky CRT, but I'm waiting for those 20" beauties that at least support 1600x1200 to drop in price.
Sorry, I realized afterwards that I was incorrect in that statement. It's not illegal as such, it's just that the copyright holders generally don't mind. Unlike the RIAA/MPAA, they've realized that sharing does help sales and increase popularity. Especially on a market that would otherwise be hard for them to get into.
See this E2 write-up for more information on the ethics of fansubbing.
I thought you were trolling at first, but then I realized, you do have a point. Allow me to re-phrase:
"So-called unlicensed episodes are episodes which you're highly unlikely to get into legal trouble for sharing, because there are no licensees outside of Asia, and the licensees that do exist largely tolerate the practice, because it helps sales when the anime in question is eventually brought to market in the rest of the world."
Sorry for messing that up in the original posting. I really should know better.
I did think about manga, but it would take quite a few scans to fill up even a single GB, let alone 150GB. That's why I didn't mention it. Of course, you could convert them to BMP instead of JPG/GIF/PNG, but that's cheating and some of the stricter DC hubs would ban you for making your share seem larger than it is.
For the interested, Toriyama's World has some nice manga fansubs for download.
Anime. Unlicensed episodes which are not illegal to distribute because there are no licensees outside of Asia. At 150-200 megs per episode, you'd be able to fit quite a few series into 150GB.
An excellent source for unlicensed anime epsiodes, subtitled in English, is AnimeSuki, where they're downloadable via BitTorrent - you know, the P2P App with Brains. Downloads are usually quite snappy.
As an added advantage to collecting unlicensed anime, it's usually quite fun to watch. The downside is that once a series becomes licensed, you have to stop sharing it. Right now, there are several good series being released. I recommend Naruto, Mahoromatic and Wolf's Rain.
You are referring to the Emulators.com site. The guy who wrote it which considers "winning the war" to be equal to having the fastest CPU on the market. I don't. He and I are talking about different things when we say "CPU war". Also, I was referring to that page because it documents the flaws in the Intel Pentium IV's design, not as a proof that the Athlon XP is a better CPU (though that's essentially what it says - that the Athlon is a better, but slower, CPU).
I see this alot nowadays - people saying that AMD have "lost their edge", or "been taking it easy for a while" ... that is simply not true. An AMD Athlon XP 2800+ _will_ beat an Intel Pentium IV at 2.8 GHz in most benchmarks (and the 3.06 GHz P4 in quite a few - see the latest ones at THG or AT if you don't trust me), just as it is supposed to. And you can still practically get two Athlons (not 2800+'s mind you) for the same price as one high-end Pentium IV. Surely no-one here thinks that a single P4, HT or no HT, stands a chance against a true SMP system (given apps that take advantage of both CPU's)?
.. until the next model P4/AXP is out, that is.
Furthermore, there's no app or game available on this earth, and there probably won't be for at least two years to come, where the speed difference between an AXP/2800+ and a P4/3GHz is big enough to really mean anything to anyone other than the fanatical overclocking crowd, who will spend any amount of money just to have the fastest stuff on the market, only to use it for stuff like playing Counter-Strike, which uses perhaps 20% of the total CPU and graphics card capacity. Well, if you're into that sort of stuff, sure. Get a P4 and enjoy having the fastest CPU there is
For the rest of us, who base our computer purchases on common sense, for speed, stability and price, the obvious choice is still the Athlon XP.
Besides, the Pentium IV still has a pretty fucked up design. See this page if you don't know what I'm talking about. I always laugh at people who whine that Windows is poorly designed, only to praise Intel CPU's in the next breath.
Anyone care to disagree? Remember, modding me down is so much easier than posting an intelligent reply.