I think the reduction of maintenance costs is minimal since the feature is already supported by their software & db. Keeping it going should be very small cost. Taking it out, in fact, will cost b/c they will have to test the changes to the system.
Sounds to me like they want to encourage > 1 paying account per household, unfortunate.
"More to the point, if they were military labs, the schlubs responsible for the security cockups would have been in the brig and awaiting a court-martial long ago."
I believe this is incorrect. As far as I know, only military personnel can be court martialled. Many, if not most, employees at military labs are PhD researchers or engineers. A mix of civil servants and contractors. There are military personnel there as well, of course.
"The study was based on comScore's regular panels for measuring Internet audiences, rather than MySpace's registration information, where users often lie about their age."
I don't see anything particularly exciting in the current AMD roadmap. They have quad core, but so will intel. The only advantage I see left for AMD now is that their memory system scales better, so for 4 & 8 way servers they may still have an advantage. That and joining w/ ATI, possible hypertransport gfx/ integrated CPU & GFX core anyone? but that stuff will probably take a _while_ to get to market.
as far as faith... well that's just plain silly. AMD is a company that want's your dollar just as bad as Intel. This isn't Linux vs Microsoft, where there is a huge philosopical / ethical difference between the two offerings, regardless of how well either one works.
AMD has come a long way in the last 10 years, from cheap knock of to industry leader w/ x64 and the 32 bit athlon was strong particularly in the early p4 days. Eventually their chips will leapfrog Intel's, but until then the core-duo is hands down the best pc chip out there.
AMD's major contribution is healthy competition to the market. But buying an inferior product just to artificially support competition is anti-market. It promotes inefficency. Make AMD work for your dollar. That's what intel did. They had to drop netburst & start from scratch. But they now have the better product, not the least of motivation behind it was beating AMD's then superior product.
"Putting laptop drives in desktops is an exceptionally bad idea." boy, that's pretty bad! You don't leave much room in your vocabulary for people like Micheal Jackson & the guy who drove a rocket car into a mountain!
Yes, theoretically the support is there, but in practice it is not used. not even by the people who wrote the OS. One of the themes of this discussion is that MS is not following their own rules. Yes they set up HKLM separate from HKCU. But they don't allow even their own apps to install into user space only (Office, Visual Studio, etc...). Yes they set up priviledged and non-priviledged users. but they don't even really use this feature as it should be used in their own offices. So they couldn't have been that serious about it when they designed it.
You can certainly say that the 'convention' of most apps to write to HKLM, or %SYSTEMROOT% or %PROGRAMFILES% w/out alternative option is descended from a long line of operating systems (esp W9X) which had very little multi-user support. NT ('Network Technology' has been around forever & it's always had these problems. Even if they do fix all this stuff in Vista, it's at least a decade too late.
my guess is that python doesn't make _nearly_ as much use of the registry, esp. the system portion of the registry. this allows them to install either entirely in user space or in both. most big apps don't have this option as they need the system registry or system folders in filesystem. I am aware of several programs that offer this 'one user' or 'multi user' option on install, but most of them are open source or linux based. i don't remember such options w/ Visual Studio or Office, real player, for exacmple. i do remember such options for cygwin, python, ghostscript/ghostview, miktex, etc...
it is true that applications developers do not strictly need admin rights to develop in windows. But this only works if they need infrequent installs of software packages. Some places this works, particularly if everyone is on same project or same exact development environment. but other places not so well. Also, developers are generally power users. While they may be ok w/ out full admin, they certainly want to be able to install software on their own from time to time. everyone has their favorite utilities & apps, etc... also people want the freedom to try new tools on their own (beta version of visual studio, for example). In UNIX, this freedom is no problem. In windows it is tough to make it work.
Once again, the point is evinced by the fact that MS still has everyone running as admin. that is a security joke! In the internet age, no one should be 'working' as admin except administrators and even then adminstrators should be doing email, browsing, research, etc.. as non-admin user & only switch to admin when making real system changes. It is difficult to pull this off with windows and it shouldn't be.
In this message, when I refer to a 'real' operating system, I mean a multiuser operating system with a viable security model. Theorectially windows has this support, but I think that practially speaking (and the overwhelming majority of messages on this thread seem to agree with me), all desktop and workstation versions of MS Windows up to this point are difficult or impossible to use for serious work without the interactive user having admin priviledges. 10 years ago, it may have made sense to have a pc run in single user mode... this is entirely unacceptable in the internet age b/c it means that the main user is admin all the time and malicious code which is downloaded in any way can have it's run with the system.
One reason Windows is impossible to use this way is b/c you generally can't install a software package w/out admin priviledges. This means that a non-priviledged user can only perform a certain set of pre-ordained tasks. This might be fine for a data entry terminal, but obviously it's no good for most developers. This may create the false impression amongst those who are used to windows only that root access is necessary for developers, but the reality is that it is somethings specific to windows and not to development in general.
'Real' operating systems, like UNIX, allow users to install their own software in their own space. We have UNIX and linux machines w/ dozens to hundreds of users working on dozens of projects. They each have their own version of compilers, scripting languages, dynamic libraries, etc.... none of the users has admin priviledges to the system.
with 'real' operating systems, only system level developers should need admin rights on their own systems. most of the time, application developers should not need admin rights to the system. the only exception is when testing the install system, particularly for server software.
So when microsoft says the're 'considering' moving most of their users off of admin rights, i think "Wow! they should have been doing that 10 years ago! The fact that they're still not sure means that there operating system is still not really a multi-user operating system! Had they made it so, at the possible expense of losing some backwrad compatibility, all the trojans & backdoors & other fun malware out there would have had much more trouble spreading. Modern internet environment requires proper user security model & Microsoft hasn't really provided it. A lot of those viruses out there are MS's fault."
summary: The 'need' for admin by most users in windows a misconception due to poor design by MS. They chose this design b/c they knew it would sell to the lazy masses who want something easy now & complain later when they are beseiged by viruses. This design 'decision' by MS allows for all kinds of malware damage & it costs the world much anguish and money. OS-X model, w/ autmated 'su' as needed, is far superior. What's more, the requirement of admin to install software is retarded. A user should be able to install software in his own space.
you cool things by exposing them to large quantities of colder air. This is subtly different than moving hot air away. blowing towards allows you to direct high speed air to a precise location. i.e. the air coming out of the fan is mostly going in the same direction, straight out of the fan. when you suck, you're basically creating a low pressure zone which gets filled in from all directions. so the air flow going into a fan is coming from many different angles and is therefore kind of spread out and not as intense. this is why all the cpu fans and gpu fans (i've seen) blow air onto the heatsink instead of sucking it away from the heatsink. if you blow onto the heatsink you guarantee that a larger portion of your airflow contacts the heatsink. if you suck away from the heatsink you are wasting airflow on the air that gets sucked from places further from the heatsink. sucking still works though & in certain physical configurations its your only option. no suck & blow jokes please!
this reply is not necessarily directed at parent, just at this portion of discussion in general.
i wish people would stop giving emotional reviews based on the one board they tried!
even the best companies have some failures, so don't blame the whole brand just cuz yours broke!
what's more, if it worked for years, that's great. but it's like Chris Rock said... 'people are always trying to get credit for what they s'posed to do!'. It's great that it worked for years, but it supPOSED to work for years ya big dummy!
my experience is 2 ECS boards. 1 K7S5A & 1 K7SEM.
basically i had such bad luck w/ VIA KT133A boards (ASUS A7V133 & ABIT KT7-RAID) that i wanted a replacement which took PC133 ram & there weren't many that were not based on the same KT133 chipset.
my k7s5a was unstable w/ 2 slots of PC133 but stable with only one (either one). newsgroups confirmed this so i upgraded to pc2100.
since then it has run like a champ. stil my main box at work (soon to be ugraded to Athlon64, gigabit spare no expense this time!:). i compile a lot, rip dvd's, multitask & generally run it pretty hard every day. never a problem.
mind you the a7a266 w/ the ALi chipset was one of the only other boards that offered either DDR or SDR ram for the athlon. (i'm typing this on one & it has been good for me so far but did need bios & driver updates to get stable.)
K7SEM gave me no problems from day 1. but it was not used real hard that much.
so i was certainly dissapointed by the inability to run 2 simultaneous srd sdram slots & the fact that it was endemic to k7s5a in general & not just mine means that the boards were simply not well enough tested.... no way around that.
so while many of their boards run ok, from my perspective it's clear that ECS at the time was not testing their boards enough. this was of course evident in their rock bottom prices.
Now the guys who have seen the returns should know better b/c they have seen bigger numbers. but remember that it's all proporional to units sold. ECS sells a lot of boards cuz they're so cheap, so you need to expect a lot of returns.
Remember too that every manufacturer has had bad lots. We bought a batch of the old IBM deathstars & go screwed! almost every single one broke! Internal IBM leaks later revealed that they knew the disks were bad! Top of the line enermax 350w power supplies also screwed us. every single one broke! the fortrons, however, are still kicking!
so really you need statistics, everything else even if you bought 10 bad ones is just anecdotal. really, newegg & monarch should list the return rates on the products, but i bet the manufacturers wouldn't like that!
aargh i keep going! there's no way to win w/ pc parts. b/c by the time you know if a model is reliable it's obselete by definition. all the review guys test for a week put out some benchmarks & move on! doesn't tell you how well it will last for 3 years of heavy use!
ok done now:)
bye
A coworker of mine is running VxWorks and is using FAT on flash memory. He tells me that he's actually running another filesystem layer underneath FAT which uses some algorithm to spread out the updates more evenly so that one particular section of the flash memory is not wornd out much faster than the rest of the memory.
Unfortunately I don't know any of the details offhand.
it's not clear whether it is A: total polulation of county or B: popoluation density of county.
my gues is A is used, due to the height of Alaska, which has a relatively low population density, but actually looks pretty high on the map. I'm figuring the alaskan counties sparsely populated but very large in area giving them a relatively substantial total population.
Personally, I think that method B would be better and here's why. Method A results in rural counties having a larger volume per citizen on the map than urban counties. This causes rural counties to 'look' much larger (and therefore influential) than they actually are.
to avoid confusion i will explain in more detail.
1) Assume that the 'size' of a county should be proportional to it's population. When talking about votes in an election, this makes the most sense.
2) assume that we want (in a 3 dimensional image) volume to represent apparent 'size' (and therefore 'population'). If we wanted population to be expressed by anything else (area or color) we'd use a different type of map.
method A, where height = population.
Volume = area * height = area * population
volume is very UNproportional to population.
method B, where height = population density.
Volume = area * desnsity = area * population/area = population.
so B gives us the propotionaltiy that we want.
but I don't think they used that method in this map. Which is a shame. The main reason for a map like this is to get a better feel for the distribution of votes as the standard 2d map makes the election look like a landslide when it was actually quite close. But actually rural (i.e. mostly red) couties are still highly overrepresented in this map.
he does mentiont that the SciMark benchmark is only in C. Should I then assume that all the other tests are C++? Otherwise great article and I'd love to see more on the topic.
just wondering. these service packs replace more or less every file in the operating system. the files/registry might have been fragmented somewhat, or perhaps the newer files weren't all grouped together nicely for quick access. Laptop disks are usually slower than desktops, i believe they only started shipping 7200 RPM disks in the high end laptops recently (and we all know how much difference 7200 rpm drives made when we started getting them in desktops 4-5 years ago).
just a theory, but I would have fully defragged sp1 (including registry hives, pagefile etc...), benched, installed sp2, defragged again and benched.
probably wouldn't account for all the slowness, i'm sure bufferchecking and sending personal information to mothership take up plenty of resources as well.
as usual with techies, everyone gets caught up in bolstering their own egos over performing some job.
is compiling better? sometimes. are packages better? sometimes. anybody who's 'diehard' anything is usually closeminded.
diehard linux? there's things that windows does better, hate to break it to ya.
diehard windows? well, anyway...
diehard C,C++,Assembler,Perl,PHP,Python.... who gives a crap?
ok fine, 'C' is objectively the best, but that's another story;)
ask yourself this: am I doing ______ in order to get the job done better? or am I doing _____ for my self?
selfish motivations include:
1) doing it the hard way so you understand every detail. a commendable method no doubt, but do you need to know every detail of Apache to use it? Not if apache is any good, which it is. If understanding apache is not your job description, which it's not you are WASTING TIME AND MONEY.
2) going to extensive efforts to improve efficiency. again 99% chance you will never recoup the hours you spend benchmarking and compiling in CPU cycles. once again you're probably wasting time and money.
3) using 1 method because you HATE XXXX corp. possibly dumb if XXX corp happens to have a product that does what you need better.
4) using 1 method becuase you got burned doing it a different way before. understandable, but things change & maybe you're work around is no longer necessary & again a waste of time.
argh, i don't know, i guess i'm done.
ok i'm done:)
I know people who have had trouble getting their intel 875P to work in linux, particularly the SATA controller.
this is not an issue w/ amd vs intel. just that it takes linux time to get drivers for new hardware. hopefully as linux continues to grow. the hardware vendors will be a scrupulous in making sure they have good linux drivers available as they are w/ windows (they are economically FORCED to release windows drivers w/ their hardware, but not for Linux).
both of these processors are priced WAY of the pricing curve for the VAST majority of people. They are really server chips in disguise. In both cases they cost twice as much as the chips in the 'standard' lines & they only offer a few percentage points performance increase. Heck for the price of 1 or these 'elite' chips you could buy TWO athlon MP 2800's w/ a super reliable & high quality TYAN motherboard (PCI/PCI-X AND AGP). I'm pretty sure a system like this would crush any single cpu system in a compiler benchmark, that's for sure! That's 5.6 virtual gigahertz!
I suspect that these chips exist entirely for marketing purposes & are there really to have the 'fastest desktop cpu on the market title'. But a much more VALUABLE question to ask is 'what's the best chip for $400, $300, $200, $100?, heck even $50!!'.
every time i look at these benchmarks, i have to cut out the EE's & the FX's & just see how the P4's compare to the althon-64's & XP's. because in my mind these 'elite' chips don't exist. They're toys. there's no remotely reasonable reason to buy them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reduction of maintenance costs is minimal since the feature is already supported by their software & db. Keeping it going should be very small cost. Taking it out, in fact, will cost b/c they will have to test the changes to the system. Sounds to me like they want to encourage > 1 paying account per household, unfortunate.
"More to the point, if they were military labs, the schlubs responsible for the security cockups would have been in the brig and awaiting a court-martial long ago."
I believe this is incorrect. As far as I know, only military personnel can be court martialled. Many, if not most, employees at military labs are PhD researchers or engineers. A mix of civil servants and contractors. There are military personnel there as well, of course.
"The study was based on comScore's regular panels for measuring Internet audiences, rather than MySpace's registration information, where users often lie about their age."
I don't see anything particularly exciting in the current AMD roadmap. They have quad core, but so will intel.
The only advantage I see left for AMD now is that their memory system scales better, so for 4 & 8 way servers they may still have an advantage.
That and joining w/ ATI, possible hypertransport gfx/ integrated CPU & GFX core anyone? but that stuff will probably take a _while_ to get to market.
as far as faith... well that's just plain silly. AMD is a company that want's your dollar just as bad as Intel. This isn't Linux vs Microsoft, where there is a huge philosopical / ethical difference between the two offerings, regardless of how well either one works.
AMD has come a long way in the last 10 years, from cheap knock of to industry leader w/ x64 and the 32 bit athlon was strong particularly in the early p4 days. Eventually their chips will leapfrog Intel's, but until then the core-duo is hands down the best pc chip out there.
AMD's major contribution is healthy competition to the market. But buying an inferior product just to artificially support competition is anti-market. It promotes inefficency. Make AMD work for your dollar. That's what intel did. They had to drop netburst & start from scratch. But they now have the better product, not the least of motivation behind it was beating AMD's then superior product.
"Putting laptop drives in desktops is an exceptionally bad idea."
boy, that's pretty bad!
You don't leave much room in your vocabulary for people like Micheal Jackson & the guy who drove a rocket car into a mountain!
You can certainly say that the 'convention' of most apps to write to HKLM, or %SYSTEMROOT% or %PROGRAMFILES% w/out alternative option is descended from a long line of operating systems (esp W9X) which had very little multi-user support. NT ('Network Technology' has been around forever & it's always had these problems. Even if they do fix all this stuff in Vista, it's at least a decade too late.
it is true that applications developers do not strictly need admin rights to develop in windows. But this only works if they need infrequent installs of software packages. Some places this works, particularly if everyone is on same project or same exact development environment. but other places not so well. Also, developers are generally power users. While they may be ok w/ out full admin, they certainly want to be able to install software on their own from time to time. everyone has their favorite utilities & apps, etc... also people want the freedom to try new tools on their own (beta version of visual studio, for example). In UNIX, this freedom is no problem. In windows it is tough to make it work.
Once again, the point is evinced by the fact that MS still has everyone running as admin. that is a security joke! In the internet age, no one should be 'working' as admin except administrators and even then adminstrators should be doing email, browsing, research, etc.. as non-admin user & only switch to admin when making real system changes. It is difficult to pull this off with windows and it shouldn't be.
One reason Windows is impossible to use this way is b/c you generally can't install a software package w/out admin priviledges. This means that a non-priviledged user can only perform a certain set of pre-ordained tasks. This might be fine for a data entry terminal, but obviously it's no good for most developers. This may create the false impression amongst those who are used to windows only that root access is necessary for developers, but the reality is that it is somethings specific to windows and not to development in general.
'Real' operating systems, like UNIX, allow users to install their own software in their own space. We have UNIX and linux machines w/ dozens to hundreds of users working on dozens of projects. They each have their own version of compilers, scripting languages, dynamic libraries, etc.... none of the users has admin priviledges to the system.
with 'real' operating systems, only system level developers should need admin rights on their own systems.
most of the time, application developers should not need admin rights to the system.
the only exception is when testing the install system, particularly for server software.
So when microsoft says the're 'considering' moving most of their users off of admin rights, i think "Wow! they should have been doing that 10 years ago! The fact that they're still not sure means that there operating system is still not really a multi-user operating system! Had they made it so, at the possible expense of losing some backwrad compatibility, all the trojans & backdoors & other fun malware out there would have had much more trouble spreading. Modern internet environment requires proper user security model & Microsoft hasn't really provided it. A lot of those viruses out there are MS's fault."
summary: The 'need' for admin by most users in windows a misconception due to poor design by MS. They chose this design b/c they knew it would sell to the lazy masses who want something easy now & complain later when they are beseiged by viruses. This design 'decision' by MS allows for all kinds of malware damage & it costs the world much anguish and money. OS-X model, w/ autmated 'su' as needed, is far superior. What's more, the requirement of admin to install software is retarded. A user should be able to install software in his own space.
does unix even have a 'debugging' priveledge?
This particular link takes a little effort to find. Them initial post links to the 5 CD collection, but I'll bet most would rather have the DVD image.
hows this for unqualified speculation?
you cool things by exposing them to large quantities of colder air. This is subtly different than moving hot air away.
blowing towards allows you to direct high speed air to a precise location. i.e. the air coming out of the fan is mostly going in the same direction, straight out of the fan.
when you suck, you're basically creating a low pressure zone which gets filled in from all directions.
so the air flow going into a fan is coming from many different angles and is therefore kind of spread out and not as intense.
this is why all the cpu fans and gpu fans (i've seen) blow air onto the heatsink instead of sucking it away from the heatsink.
if you blow onto the heatsink you guarantee that a larger portion of your airflow contacts the heatsink. if you suck away from the heatsink you are wasting airflow on the air that gets sucked from places further from the heatsink.
sucking still works though & in certain physical configurations its your only option.
no suck & blow jokes please!
this reply is not necessarily directed at parent, just at this portion of discussion in general. i wish people would stop giving emotional reviews based on the one board they tried! even the best companies have some failures, so don't blame the whole brand just cuz yours broke! what's more, if it worked for years, that's great. but it's like Chris Rock said... 'people are always trying to get credit for what they s'posed to do!'. It's great that it worked for years, but it supPOSED to work for years ya big dummy! my experience is 2 ECS boards. 1 K7S5A & 1 K7SEM. basically i had such bad luck w/ VIA KT133A boards (ASUS A7V133 & ABIT KT7-RAID) that i wanted a replacement which took PC133 ram & there weren't many that were not based on the same KT133 chipset. my k7s5a was unstable w/ 2 slots of PC133 but stable with only one (either one). newsgroups confirmed this so i upgraded to pc2100. since then it has run like a champ. stil my main box at work (soon to be ugraded to Athlon64, gigabit spare no expense this time!:). i compile a lot, rip dvd's, multitask & generally run it pretty hard every day. never a problem. mind you the a7a266 w/ the ALi chipset was one of the only other boards that offered either DDR or SDR ram for the athlon. (i'm typing this on one & it has been good for me so far but did need bios & driver updates to get stable.) K7SEM gave me no problems from day 1. but it was not used real hard that much. so i was certainly dissapointed by the inability to run 2 simultaneous srd sdram slots & the fact that it was endemic to k7s5a in general & not just mine means that the boards were simply not well enough tested.... no way around that. so while many of their boards run ok, from my perspective it's clear that ECS at the time was not testing their boards enough. this was of course evident in their rock bottom prices. Now the guys who have seen the returns should know better b/c they have seen bigger numbers. but remember that it's all proporional to units sold. ECS sells a lot of boards cuz they're so cheap, so you need to expect a lot of returns. Remember too that every manufacturer has had bad lots. We bought a batch of the old IBM deathstars & go screwed! almost every single one broke! Internal IBM leaks later revealed that they knew the disks were bad! Top of the line enermax 350w power supplies also screwed us. every single one broke! the fortrons, however, are still kicking! so really you need statistics, everything else even if you bought 10 bad ones is just anecdotal. really, newegg & monarch should list the return rates on the products, but i bet the manufacturers wouldn't like that! aargh i keep going! there's no way to win w/ pc parts. b/c by the time you know if a model is reliable it's obselete by definition. all the review guys test for a week put out some benchmarks & move on! doesn't tell you how well it will last for 3 years of heavy use! ok done now :)
bye
I for one am not interested in a ramdisk unless I pay at least $10 per meg!
Unfortunately I don't know any of the details offhand.
i don't know whether to laugh or to cry!
Personally, I think that method B would be better and here's why. Method A results in rural counties having a larger volume per citizen on the map than urban counties. This causes rural counties to 'look' much larger (and therefore influential) than they actually are.
to avoid confusion i will explain in more detail.
1) Assume that the 'size' of a county should be proportional to it's population. When talking about votes in an election, this makes the most sense.
2) assume that we want (in a 3 dimensional image) volume to represent apparent 'size' (and therefore 'population'). If we wanted population to be expressed by anything else (area or color) we'd use a different type of map.
method A, where height = population. Volume = area * height = area * population volume is very UNproportional to population.
method B, where height = population density. Volume = area * desnsity = area * population/area = population.
so B gives us the propotionaltiy that we want. but I don't think they used that method in this map. Which is a shame. The main reason for a map like this is to get a better feel for the distribution of votes as the standard 2d map makes the election look like a landslide when it was actually quite close. But actually rural (i.e. mostly red) couties are still highly overrepresented in this map.
he does mentiont that the SciMark benchmark is only in C. Should I then assume that all the other tests are C++? Otherwise great article and I'd love to see more on the topic.
just wondering. these service packs replace more or less every file in the operating system. the files/registry might have been fragmented somewhat, or perhaps the newer files weren't all grouped together nicely for quick access. Laptop disks are usually slower than desktops, i believe they only started shipping 7200 RPM disks in the high end laptops recently (and we all know how much difference 7200 rpm drives made when we started getting them in desktops 4-5 years ago). just a theory, but I would have fully defragged sp1 (including registry hives, pagefile etc...), benched, installed sp2, defragged again and benched. probably wouldn't account for all the slowness, i'm sure bufferchecking and sending personal information to mothership take up plenty of resources as well.
tape drives are still slow!
is compiling better? sometimes. are packages better? sometimes. anybody who's 'diehard' anything is usually closeminded.
diehard linux? there's things that windows does better, hate to break it to ya.
diehard windows? well, anyway...
diehard C,C++,Assembler,Perl,PHP,Python.... who gives a crap?
ok fine, 'C' is objectively the best, but that's another story ;)
ask yourself this: am I doing ______ in order to get the job done better? or am I doing _____ for my self?
selfish motivations include:
1) doing it the hard way so you understand every detail. a commendable method no doubt, but do you need to know every detail of Apache to use it? Not if apache is any good, which it is. If understanding apache is not your job description, which it's not you are WASTING TIME AND MONEY.
2) going to extensive efforts to improve efficiency. again 99% chance you will never recoup the hours you spend benchmarking and compiling in CPU cycles. once again you're probably wasting time and money.
3) using 1 method because you HATE XXXX corp. possibly dumb if XXX corp happens to have a product that does what you need better.
4) using 1 method becuase you got burned doing it a different way before. understandable, but things change & maybe you're work around is no longer necessary & again a waste of time. argh, i don't know, i guess i'm done. ok i'm done :)
I know people who have had trouble getting their intel 875P to work in linux, particularly the SATA controller. this is not an issue w/ amd vs intel. just that it takes linux time to get drivers for new hardware. hopefully as linux continues to grow. the hardware vendors will be a scrupulous in making sure they have good linux drivers available as they are w/ windows (they are economically FORCED to release windows drivers w/ their hardware, but not for Linux).
I suspect that these chips exist entirely for marketing purposes & are there really to have the 'fastest desktop cpu on the market title'. But a much more VALUABLE question to ask is 'what's the best chip for $400, $300, $200, $100?, heck even $50!!'.
every time i look at these benchmarks, i have to cut out the EE's & the FX's & just see how the P4's compare to the althon-64's & XP's. because in my mind these 'elite' chips don't exist. They're toys. there's no remotely reasonable reason to buy them.
1993 for a p120?? you must have had some very special friends. Either that or you were overclocking heavily!
he want's to fork xfree86 huh? well, fork HIM!
now that's an interesting peice of data. where did you getit?