Maybe some people (you, apparently) are all nostalgic about seeing the old Nintendo or Coleco under the TV, but most don't seem to care.
I don't. I can use my old controllers on my computer and beam the picture to my TV from this infra-red video thingy. It "feels" like I'm playing Super Mario Bros. The picture and the sound are both exactly like the original..
I like computer hardware like the next guy, but talking about preserving hardware and talking about emulation are two seperate subjects, and I think you're getting a little too outwardly defensive about it.
I've given away or tossed some old game systems, because I don't use them anymore. Just like how I throw away a VCR - I keep the movies (as I keep ROMS on my PC) but I don't keep the old VCR that's just taking up space in the closet, forcing me to move it all whenever I move to a new place.
Wow, you wrote a friggin essay on two words I used, "pixel perfect."
While, no, I have not studied an SNES game with a magnifying glass on both an emulator and then on the real console system, hell if I can tell a difference on the 100 or so games I own.
I can't tell the difference on the Genesis, NES, TB16, Atari 2600 - 7800's either.
So fine, maybe that wasn't the right word to use - so how about this: "Pixel 'I can't tell the fucking difference so it might as well be perfect to 99% of the people playing them.'" That work for you?
You also mentioned that "almost" all of the adapters for the SNES suck, well, that insinuates that SOME don't. Hey, I never said buy a shitty convertor.
" but if we all throw away the real thing too early, we will end up with subpar emulation that isn't as good as the real thing. "
I didn't say we should. But these systems WILL die out, some day. You won't be able to get them easily, the games won't work, etc.. And even if you could, who cares? If emulation is as good as it is with some game systems, I don't see the point. Why would I have 12 game systems all wired up in a big mess to my TV when I could just run them all on a single XBox or PC?
And, I don't know too many people that play SNES games all day long anymore. It's usually every once in awhile to play a few of their favorites for a little while, then it's back to the Doom 3's, Far Cry's, and Everquests.
"What if nobody's made an emulator for your favorite obscure system?"
There's not very many of these, although there are a few like the Jaguar that aren't emulated very well.
"What if the emulator doesn't play it right?"
Unless you're talking about the same few from the question above, you will find that most emulators play games perfectly down to the last pixel, and in some cases, they look a lot better (as is the case with the playstation games.)
"What if you want to use the original controller?"
They make adapters so you can use SNES, PSX, Genesis, N64, and other controller types, right on the USB port.
"What if you believe in respecting copyright law, no matter how ridiculous it may be?"
If you believe emulators themselves are breaking laws, well, go nuts I guess. But they aren't. Downloading ROMS of games you don't own is, but why said anything about that?
Lots of holes in your arguement, man.
Personally, I believe emulators will be the only way to preserve these games given enough time.
"Who are in the majority by at least 3 million, according to a survey conducted a couple of days ago.:-)"
If only it were that simple - people simply look away when their person is shown in the light.
Bush and his cohorts have done a lot of really sordid stuff but people just choose not to listen.
A lot of them voted for Bush just because they think everyone that lives in New England is rich, that we all drive a Mercedes, eat fine dining every night, and put a nose up to everyone else.
It's not true, but tell that to some dude living in the mid-west..
"First off, there's no "MIGHT" about it. He's a spammer,"
I didn't say he DIDN'T send SOMEONE a spam. I stated that he might have sent YOU a spam message. People around here were saying "Lock him up throw away the key" but they probably never got a spam from him.
"Secondly, committing a crime and getting caught has consequences. "
No shit. I just don't think 9 years is appropriate for the crime.
"I'm stunned to see how soft-hearted many of the Slashdot folks here are. He's not going to be tortured, he's not going to be wallowing in the worst conditions"
He's going to be in JAIL. He won't be able to leave. I don't care how fluffy you make this out to be, prison is crap no matter where it is.
"After one or two years he'll be paroled to make room for someone else."
So what is it then? Do you think he deserves a nine year sentence or a one year sentence? I don't think it matter how long it will be before a likely paroll. His crime was non-violent, and it only theoretically hurt people in the pocketbook. Companies.
"I'm stunned to see how soft-hearted many of the Slashdot folks here are."
I'm stunned that someone believes that nine years for sending spam messages is fair. It's cruel and unusual punishment.
I hate this spammer. He should pay. But what the hell? Nine years for annoying people? Shit, we'd all be in jail for life is annoying people was a crime.
Not sure why they use a plural "recent versions" in that. Only Outlook 2003 will block executables and scripts by default.
Outlook XP won't block these scripts by default. It's only a couple years out, and I don't consider it to be OLD software. Expecting people to buy new versions of office every year (Office XP = 2002, and then Office 2003 a year later?) to protect themselves is silly.
I don't excuse people for opening attachments, though, not completely. It's been years of "Don't open files you don't trust" bombardment across the board now that most people should frigging know better. But no, they don't, and people will keep opening these attachments over and over and over again.
My number one problem has been motherboards DOA. At least one from each vendor; Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.. I've never had a problem with bad RAM. I have hundreds of sticks of all types of RAM sitting in a shoe box, and whenever I need one for whatever old system or whatever else needs them (like my MPC-2000), they always work like a charm.
I've had crappy RAM, that you have to run at terrible timings, but they work allright.
I have no doubt that RAM is a commonly bad part though. There's so much potential for something to go terribly wrong, and there's a lot of manufacturers. It's not like AMD or Intel with their super-duper billion dollar lab factories for their CPU's - when putting out a line of bad chips could be very, very bad (specifically for AMD.)
As most people around here probably do, buying your RAM from a 3rd party can save you a lot of money. But getting some quality RAM these days won't cost you all that much more and it's worth it for the performance factor alone.
Apparently, I'm the only one out of of these assholes around here that agrees with you.
I don't think crimes that (in this case, theoretically) cost people money should be nearly as harsh as they usually are. Someone kills someone and gets 30 years, but some shmuck steals 150K from the bank he works at and gets 60. It's not right.
Non-violent crimes shouldn't command such sentences. It's bullshit. Sure, I hate spam, and these people wasted a little bit of my time perhaps. But give me a break, 9 years?
It's easy for someone to say "LOCK THEM UP!!! LOL!!' But that's NINE YEARS of someone's life, because what, they MIGHT have sent you a spam message, that was probably filtered by your spam filter anyways?
Putting these people in jail won't stop any of your spam. And it also won't deter other spammers from spamming, it will simply make them hide behind more servers.
I say, fine them. Make them pay financially. Fine them $200,000, or some other value that will REALLY fuck them for a long time.
In a world where executives of companies steal millions and millions of dollars and get six months in jail, why should we put this guy away for nine years?
The hell with it! In fact, let them look through my desk at work whenever they want! Who cares! Hey, it's cool, you wanna search my house next? Go ahead, as long as you do it when I don't know about it! I'm not doing anything wrong, so who cares about privacy? I don't! More power to you!
I've been using Mozilla exclusively on Windows, except for Outlook Web Access 2003, for all my browsing needs. And I have not had an encounter with Spyware on any of my machines for over a year.
Of course, I also don't install Bearshare, Kazaa, and the other Spyware floodgates.
It's up to you to qualify anything said on Slashdot, as this is not a trusted source of information.
I get a lot of great information from people posting on Slashdot, and I just use a little common sense to decide what I think is correct, and what I want to research further.
If you want everyone to be as much of an uber geek as you, well, then I guess you can just go play with your BSD in your mom's basement and leave the light conversation to the rest of us.
Sure, most of the apps we use today might not get a HUGE performance increase from 64-bit x86. However.
Can you imagine a 16-bit version of Office 2003? Or a media player? Or any of the other pretty heavy apps you run now a days?
A 64-bit platform opens new doors for doing things that would require a much faster IA-32 chip to perform. Since we're not going to be seeing the huge Ghz increases in clock speed for awhile, it's a decent thing to focus on.
"Don't get me wrong it's good that code is optimised, but I think that RC4 would fly faster on an IA64 than an opteron if specifically optimised to take advantage of the CPU's features."
Opterons are much cheaper then IA-64, and they run 32-bit x86 stuff at full speed. They make porting application easy because, it's still x86. So whether or not the Itanium is faster/better, is moot. They are way expensive and way nitche.
"RC4 isn't really that relavent in real life as wep is crap & also easily done in hardware anyway."
Yea, so might as well completely dismiss the whole thing just because you don't see value in it.. It's not the application, it's the fact that some optimizations made that much of a difference.
"The 64 bit advantage will suffer thesame fate as the 32bit advantage did for the 486, pentium & especially the Pentium Pro."
If AMD64 "suffers" the same fate as IA-32, then that's great! That means that up the road, ALL software, millions of packages, will all be on AMD64. Awesome! You didn't expect people to just switch all everything everywhere immediately, did you? As long as the trend follows toward AMD64, we're in good shape.
"Problem is that your generally better off saving your cash, buying a cheap CPU (32bit in this case) and waiting for the 2nd/3rd Generation CPU."
There's a problem in there?
"By that time prices will more reasonable and you will see the full advantages as programs will use the extra bits properly."
You're being ridiculous. AMD64 is cheap. It's here now, and it's even in the Prescott P4's. Basically, unless you want something OLD, you're going to get AMD64 whether you like it or not, in the near future. This is a GOOD thing.
So unless you're trying to say that we should hold off on spending the HUGE AMOUNT of $100 on an Athlon 64, then you're just flaimbaiting here.
Well, you can disagree, but I didn't really make a straight point for you to exactly disagree with.
Disk space should really not be a concern these days. When you can buy a 200GB drive for $120 at Best Buy, I can't see this as being a big issue.
But the other problems, well, I don't own an Athlon 64 yet so I couldn't say one way or another for sure if it's worth the trouble. As far as I've heard, the 32-bit drivers for the ATI suck anyways =) nVidia supplies AMD64 drivers, so that's a nice thing (I don't care what anyone says, I think it's great to have nVidia supporting Linux even if they don't open source the thing.)
I'm sure you have to install compatibility layers on all distributions, just as Windows 64 must do the same (Microsoft uses the old Windows on Windows trick they did with Win16 apps.) On other distributions this may be a lot less of a headache since you usually don't have to compile everything, but at the same time it will likely cause trouble with some packages that aren't expecting to find some 64-bit libraries in place of 32-bit ones.
AMD64 does bring a complex set of issues to the table - we want compatibility to run 32-bit stuff and we want to run 64-bit native when possible. Although I have seen some dispair with Linux on AMD64, it really hasn't been too bad yet and considering what it is, it sounds like there's some resonable drawbacks at this point. Since all the source code for most apps is available, getting stuff to run in AMD64 is probably not too daunting of a task.
And you're lucky if you can get OpenOffice to compile on anything, nevermind AMD64! I've set up a clean, new Gentoo box and tried to install OO with all the correct versions of whatever it needs, and STILL have it fail on me. Of course, there's a chance you could get it to work, and that's more then AMD64, at least. But like you said, you can use the 32 bit version.
There's a few closed source games that seem to work normally in AMD64, such as Doom3 and UT. I presume that once all those "EMT64" chips from Intel start being used more, with the popularity of the Athlon 64's, all these bugs will be worked out in due time, and it will probably help other 64-bit platforms in doing so. I'm always amazed at the speed in which OSS software moves.
Good information, though. I'm planning on getting a couple Athlon 64's soon, one for Linux and one for Windows.
These vendors already give their drivers out to everyone with Windows distributions. And the drivers are freely available to download from their web sites.
So what would stop this now?
You can't be paranoid about every possible possibility especially when the risk has already been taken.
That's crap! If you yourself have had as you say 1000 AMD chips DOA, and only 1-10 Intel chips DOA, that's complete madness!
Don't you think that it would be this huge top issue with AMD chips? Why haven't I read one single article on any web sites or magazines about this apparently epidemic issue?
I mean, if you, some guy working at some computer shop for the last 7 years has seen 1000 DOA AMD chips, and there's probably at least 5,000 of these shops in the USA alone.. that's over 5 MILLION DOA chips in the last 7 years, from small shops alone?
I don't think so.
Since you posted your post, I've been curious enough to call a few shops in the area, two of which I know the guys pretty well after having visited many times. They both said they've seen the exact number of AMD DOA's as Intel - and that's next to zero.
AMD designed the Athlon 64/Opterons to be cutting-edge X86 CPU's, and that's 32-bit x86, while at the same time providing 64-bit instructions and other functionality such as large memory addressing (which kind of comes hand in hand with the 64-bit extensions.)
The idea was, build a CPU that will run all of your software today, at the highest performance possible - but at the same time provide 64-bit compatibility with an easy upgrade path.
They've done it with AMD64. Some will argue that it's just extending the life of an already aged platform, but some very smart people at Intel and AMD prove over and over that they can do amazing things with x86. The Opteron has been compared to Apple's new processor and the Itanium, and performs quite acceptably put next to these "true 64-bit" chips. So well, in fact, that even SGI is using Opterons for their latest "SuperCluster Computers."
So no, 32-bit was not an afterthought - it was the primary concern. If the Athlon 64's and Opterons dogged it on IA-32 stuff, nobody would buy it. AMD positioned Opteron to compete against Xeon, and Athlon 64 to compete against the P4 - both 32-bit chips.
The 64-bit stuff is a bonus, an upgrade path, and it's there on all of AMD's chips so when software makers say "okay, this 64-bit stuff is great, but who can run it?" there will already be a base of users with the capability.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some people (you, apparently) are all nostalgic about seeing the old Nintendo or Coleco under the TV, but most don't seem to care.
I don't. I can use my old controllers on my computer and beam the picture to my TV from this infra-red video thingy. It "feels" like I'm playing Super Mario Bros. The picture and the sound are both exactly like the original..
I like computer hardware like the next guy, but talking about preserving hardware and talking about emulation are two seperate subjects, and I think you're getting a little too outwardly defensive about it.
I've given away or tossed some old game systems, because I don't use them anymore. Just like how I throw away a VCR - I keep the movies (as I keep ROMS on my PC) but I don't keep the old VCR that's just taking up space in the closet, forcing me to move it all whenever I move to a new place.
Wow, you wrote a friggin essay on two words I used, "pixel perfect."
While, no, I have not studied an SNES game with a magnifying glass on both an emulator and then on the real console system, hell if I can tell a difference on the 100 or so games I own.
I can't tell the difference on the Genesis, NES, TB16, Atari 2600 - 7800's either.
So fine, maybe that wasn't the right word to use - so how about this: "Pixel 'I can't tell the fucking difference so it might as well be perfect to 99% of the people playing them.'" That work for you?
You also mentioned that "almost" all of the adapters for the SNES suck, well, that insinuates that SOME don't. Hey, I never said buy a shitty convertor.
" but if we all throw away the real thing too early, we will end up with subpar emulation that isn't as good as the real thing. "
I didn't say we should. But these systems WILL die out, some day. You won't be able to get them easily, the games won't work, etc.. And even if you could, who cares? If emulation is as good as it is with some game systems, I don't see the point. Why would I have 12 game systems all wired up in a big mess to my TV when I could just run them all on a single XBox or PC?
And, I don't know too many people that play SNES games all day long anymore. It's usually every once in awhile to play a few of their favorites for a little while, then it's back to the Doom 3's, Far Cry's, and Everquests.
"What if nobody's made an emulator for your favorite obscure system?"
There's not very many of these, although there are a few like the Jaguar that aren't emulated very well.
"What if the emulator doesn't play it right?"
Unless you're talking about the same few from the question above, you will find that most emulators play games perfectly down to the last pixel, and in some cases, they look a lot better (as is the case with the playstation games.)
"What if you want to use the original controller?"
They make adapters so you can use SNES, PSX, Genesis, N64, and other controller types, right on the USB port.
"What if you believe in respecting copyright law, no matter how ridiculous it may be?"
If you believe emulators themselves are breaking laws, well, go nuts I guess. But they aren't. Downloading ROMS of games you don't own is, but why said anything about that?
Lots of holes in your arguement, man.
Personally, I believe emulators will be the only way to preserve these games given enough time.
"Who are in the majority by at least 3 million, according to a survey conducted a couple of days ago. :-)"
If only it were that simple - people simply look away when their person is shown in the light.
Bush and his cohorts have done a lot of really sordid stuff but people just choose not to listen.
A lot of them voted for Bush just because they think everyone that lives in New England is rich, that we all drive a Mercedes, eat fine dining every night, and put a nose up to everyone else.
It's not true, but tell that to some dude living in the mid-west..
There's a big difference.
The saying goes "Lie to yourself long enough and you might believe it" not "Lie to yourself long enough and it will come true."
"First off, there's no "MIGHT" about it. He's a spammer,"
I didn't say he DIDN'T send SOMEONE a spam. I stated that he might have sent YOU a spam message. People around here were saying "Lock him up throw away the key" but they probably never got a spam from him.
"Secondly, committing a crime and getting caught has consequences. "
No shit. I just don't think 9 years is appropriate for the crime.
"I'm stunned to see how soft-hearted many of the Slashdot folks here are. He's not going to be tortured, he's not going to be wallowing in the worst conditions"
He's going to be in JAIL. He won't be able to leave. I don't care how fluffy you make this out to be, prison is crap no matter where it is.
"After one or two years he'll be paroled to make room for someone else."
So what is it then? Do you think he deserves a nine year sentence or a one year sentence? I don't think it matter how long it will be before a likely paroll. His crime was non-violent, and it only theoretically hurt people in the pocketbook. Companies.
"I'm stunned to see how soft-hearted many of the Slashdot folks here are."
I'm stunned that someone believes that nine years for sending spam messages is fair. It's cruel and unusual punishment.
I hate this spammer. He should pay. But what the hell? Nine years for annoying people? Shit, we'd all be in jail for life is annoying people was a crime.
If I knew someone as arrogant as you, I'd just pay you off with a few bucks.
Netscape IS Mozilla - it even looks exactly the same.
Not sure why they use a plural "recent versions" in that. Only Outlook 2003 will block executables and scripts by default.
Outlook XP won't block these scripts by default. It's only a couple years out, and I don't consider it to be OLD software. Expecting people to buy new versions of office every year (Office XP = 2002, and then Office 2003 a year later?) to protect themselves is silly.
I don't excuse people for opening attachments, though, not completely. It's been years of "Don't open files you don't trust" bombardment across the board now that most people should frigging know better. But no, they don't, and people will keep opening these attachments over and over and over again.
"Don't tell me what I need or don't need in my software."
Then what the hell are you doing using Microsoft software?
My number one problem has been motherboards DOA. At least one from each vendor; Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.. I've never had a problem with bad RAM. I have hundreds of sticks of all types of RAM sitting in a shoe box, and whenever I need one for whatever old system or whatever else needs them (like my MPC-2000), they always work like a charm.
I've had crappy RAM, that you have to run at terrible timings, but they work allright.
I have no doubt that RAM is a commonly bad part though. There's so much potential for something to go terribly wrong, and there's a lot of manufacturers. It's not like AMD or Intel with their super-duper billion dollar lab factories for their CPU's - when putting out a line of bad chips could be very, very bad (specifically for AMD.)
As most people around here probably do, buying your RAM from a 3rd party can save you a lot of money. But getting some quality RAM these days won't cost you all that much more and it's worth it for the performance factor alone.
Apparently, I'm the only one out of of these assholes around here that agrees with you.
I don't think crimes that (in this case, theoretically) cost people money should be nearly as harsh as they usually are. Someone kills someone and gets 30 years, but some shmuck steals 150K from the bank he works at and gets 60. It's not right.
Non-violent crimes shouldn't command such sentences. It's bullshit. Sure, I hate spam, and these people wasted a little bit of my time perhaps. But give me a break, 9 years?
It's easy for someone to say "LOCK THEM UP!!! LOL!!' But that's NINE YEARS of someone's life, because what, they MIGHT have sent you a spam message, that was probably filtered by your spam filter anyways?
Putting these people in jail won't stop any of your spam. And it also won't deter other spammers from spamming, it will simply make them hide behind more servers.
I say, fine them. Make them pay financially. Fine them $200,000, or some other value that will REALLY fuck them for a long time.
In a world where executives of companies steal millions and millions of dollars and get six months in jail, why should we put this guy away for nine years?
Really, get over yourself.
"The SKY IS FALLING omg!!"
The hell with it! In fact, let them look through my desk at work whenever they want! Who cares! Hey, it's cool, you wanna search my house next? Go ahead, as long as you do it when I don't know about it! I'm not doing anything wrong, so who cares about privacy? I don't! More power to you!
My signature explains it all.
I've been using Mozilla exclusively on Windows, except for Outlook Web Access 2003, for all my browsing needs. And I have not had an encounter with Spyware on any of my machines for over a year.
Of course, I also don't install Bearshare, Kazaa, and the other Spyware floodgates.
It's up to you to qualify anything said on Slashdot, as this is not a trusted source of information.
I get a lot of great information from people posting on Slashdot, and I just use a little common sense to decide what I think is correct, and what I want to research further.
If you want everyone to be as much of an uber geek as you, well, then I guess you can just go play with your BSD in your mom's basement and leave the light conversation to the rest of us.
Sure, most of the apps we use today might not get a HUGE performance increase from 64-bit x86. However.
Can you imagine a 16-bit version of Office 2003? Or a media player? Or any of the other pretty heavy apps you run now a days?
A 64-bit platform opens new doors for doing things that would require a much faster IA-32 chip to perform. Since we're not going to be seeing the huge Ghz increases in clock speed for awhile, it's a decent thing to focus on.
"Don't get me wrong it's good that code is optimised, but I think that RC4 would fly faster on an IA64 than an opteron if specifically optimised to take advantage of the CPU's features."
Opterons are much cheaper then IA-64, and they run 32-bit x86 stuff at full speed. They make porting application easy because, it's still x86. So whether or not the Itanium is faster/better, is moot. They are way expensive and way nitche.
"RC4 isn't really that relavent in real life as wep is crap & also easily done in hardware anyway."
Yea, so might as well completely dismiss the whole thing just because you don't see value in it.. It's not the application, it's the fact that some optimizations made that much of a difference.
"The 64 bit advantage will suffer thesame fate as the 32bit advantage did for the 486, pentium & especially the Pentium Pro."
If AMD64 "suffers" the same fate as IA-32, then that's great! That means that up the road, ALL software, millions of packages, will all be on AMD64. Awesome! You didn't expect people to just switch all everything everywhere immediately, did you? As long as the trend follows toward AMD64, we're in good shape.
"Problem is that your generally better off saving your cash, buying a cheap CPU (32bit in this case) and waiting for the 2nd/3rd Generation CPU."
There's a problem in there?
"By that time prices will more reasonable and you will see the full advantages as programs will use the extra bits properly."
You're being ridiculous. AMD64 is cheap. It's here now, and it's even in the Prescott P4's. Basically, unless you want something OLD, you're going to get AMD64 whether you like it or not, in the near future. This is a GOOD thing.
So unless you're trying to say that we should hold off on spending the HUGE AMOUNT of $100 on an Athlon 64, then you're just flaimbaiting here.
Well, you can disagree, but I didn't really make a straight point for you to exactly disagree with.
Disk space should really not be a concern these days. When you can buy a 200GB drive for $120 at Best Buy, I can't see this as being a big issue.
But the other problems, well, I don't own an Athlon 64 yet so I couldn't say one way or another for sure if it's worth the trouble. As far as I've heard, the 32-bit drivers for the ATI suck anyways =) nVidia supplies AMD64 drivers, so that's a nice thing (I don't care what anyone says, I think it's great to have nVidia supporting Linux even if they don't open source the thing.)
I'm sure you have to install compatibility layers on all distributions, just as Windows 64 must do the same (Microsoft uses the old Windows on Windows trick they did with Win16 apps.) On other distributions this may be a lot less of a headache since you usually don't have to compile everything, but at the same time it will likely cause trouble with some packages that aren't expecting to find some 64-bit libraries in place of 32-bit ones.
AMD64 does bring a complex set of issues to the table - we want compatibility to run 32-bit stuff and we want to run 64-bit native when possible. Although I have seen some dispair with Linux on AMD64, it really hasn't been too bad yet and considering what it is, it sounds like there's some resonable drawbacks at this point. Since all the source code for most apps is available, getting stuff to run in AMD64 is probably not too daunting of a task.
And you're lucky if you can get OpenOffice to compile on anything, nevermind AMD64! I've set up a clean, new Gentoo box and tried to install OO with all the correct versions of whatever it needs, and STILL have it fail on me. Of course, there's a chance you could get it to work, and that's more then AMD64, at least. But like you said, you can use the 32 bit version.
There's a few closed source games that seem to work normally in AMD64, such as Doom3 and UT. I presume that once all those "EMT64" chips from Intel start being used more, with the popularity of the Athlon 64's, all these bugs will be worked out in due time, and it will probably help other 64-bit platforms in doing so. I'm always amazed at the speed in which OSS software moves.
Good information, though. I'm planning on getting a couple Athlon 64's soon, one for Linux and one for Windows.
These vendors already give their drivers out to everyone with Windows distributions. And the drivers are freely available to download from their web sites.
So what would stop this now?
You can't be paranoid about every possible possibility especially when the risk has already been taken.
And a lot of them already do that, in the form of a built-in Windows driver.
Never!
1) Make product
2) Make product cheaper to manufacture
3) Charge the same price
I would love it if they used caddies for these things. No more worries about stupid CD cases, no more worries about scratching.
They could make them thinner then a DVD-RAM disc caddy, and they could even make them replacable if the caddy broke.
But noooo... people want these fragile little optical discs hanging around everywhere just waiting to be broken, cracked, and scratched.
That's crap! If you yourself have had as you say 1000 AMD chips DOA, and only 1-10 Intel chips DOA, that's complete madness!
Don't you think that it would be this huge top issue with AMD chips? Why haven't I read one single article on any web sites or magazines about this apparently epidemic issue?
I mean, if you, some guy working at some computer shop for the last 7 years has seen 1000 DOA AMD chips, and there's probably at least 5,000 of these shops in the USA alone.. that's over 5 MILLION DOA chips in the last 7 years, from small shops alone?
I don't think so.
Since you posted your post, I've been curious enough to call a few shops in the area, two of which I know the guys pretty well after having visited many times. They both said they've seen the exact number of AMD DOA's as Intel - and that's next to zero.
Sorry, but that's kinda not correct.
AMD designed the Athlon 64/Opterons to be cutting-edge X86 CPU's, and that's 32-bit x86, while at the same time providing 64-bit instructions and other functionality such as large memory addressing (which kind of comes hand in hand with the 64-bit extensions.)
The idea was, build a CPU that will run all of your software today, at the highest performance possible - but at the same time provide 64-bit compatibility with an easy upgrade path.
They've done it with AMD64. Some will argue that it's just extending the life of an already aged platform, but some very smart people at Intel and AMD prove over and over that they can do amazing things with x86. The Opteron has been compared to Apple's new processor and the Itanium, and performs quite acceptably put next to these "true 64-bit" chips. So well, in fact, that even SGI is using Opterons for their latest "SuperCluster Computers."
So no, 32-bit was not an afterthought - it was the primary concern. If the Athlon 64's and Opterons dogged it on IA-32 stuff, nobody would buy it. AMD positioned Opteron to compete against Xeon, and Athlon 64 to compete against the P4 - both 32-bit chips.
The 64-bit stuff is a bonus, an upgrade path, and it's there on all of AMD's chips so when software makers say "okay, this 64-bit stuff is great, but who can run it?" there will already be a base of users with the capability.