Besides the guy being a jerk/flake/weenie head, he would never admit to being wrong. I have been stubborn way too many times, but when it comes to technical issues I have to keep an open mind. If I don't, then my purpose isn't to create the best solution within my abilities, it is to stroke my massive hulking indestructible ego ( and when someone is as talented as me, they must have an ego... 8^} ).
If you follow some of Kop Killa's usenet posts, you should run across some of his not wrong at any cost threads. I didn't participate on coding on the LRP project, but if he behaved anything like on usenet, my trust of his code would hover somewhere between first semester VB sample CLI window guru and C helloworld code monkey.
On second thought, just narrow it down to zero respect or confidence in everything being right without a code audit. Just the thing for a router project, isn't it?
It is the same guy. He has been a nutcase for years. If I had realized that Dave 'kill a cop' Cinege was the force behind the Linux Router Project, I would have never used it. He was the first person I encountered on usenet that convinced me of two things:
1 - He is more than a little unstable. 2 - The internet can be a dangerous place.
Don't worry Dave, if you can't find work then someone, somewhere is holding a padded cell just for you.
Is this related to Transmeta wanting to distance themselves from Linux until the SCO bull$hit is resolved? Hopefully it will be quick, but I can't help but wonder what kind of ace SCO is holding in reserve. Even if they don't really have an ace, businesses seem to be preparing themselves for the possibility that SCO may win a partial victory.
Excessive speed is excessive speed. Matters not if it was 20 over the limit or 90 over the limit.
Then Criminal Speed may come as a suprise to you. Yup, criminal charges for speeding, putting you in the same catagory as assault, burglary and posting goatse links. I didn't know there was such a thing until a friend got charged for 105 in a 65 zone.
It sounds like the guy was going to be accountable anyhow. 60 mph in a residential neighborhood is still extreme reckless driving.
60mph sounds reasonable to most people because they drive that fast about every day. This guy was traveling almost twice as fast as he was willing to admit. That is 84mph over the speed limit. Look at it this way, whatever the stopping distance of his car is (was) at 30mph, he was traveling almost 4 times faster. His stopping distance isn't increased 4 times, it would be closer to 16 times as far as his 30-0 braking distance.
Check here and here for some braking distances up to 100mph. Note the measured 30-0 versus the 100-0 stopping distances. A 2002 Corvette Z06 takes 108feet (60 - 0 mph) and 312feet (100 - 0 mph), 114mph would take the vette over 400feet.
This equates to the two drivers having 1/16th of the time and distances to react and make corrections. He was traveling at 114*5280/60/60=167.2 feet per second. His car weighed over 3600lbs with him inside, convert weight to mass, 3600/32.17=111.91lb (167.2^2)*111.91/2=1,564,269. 0272ft/lb of energy. To convert, 1 ft-lb equals 1.356 Joules
He was wielding a kinetic energy of over 1.5 million ft/lb, more than enough to destroy a school bus or go through a house, etc.
In my opinion, he wasn't even close to being accountable by admitting to 60mph.
I don't have any problem with people choosing to use MS Office if they really like the product or need the support. It does seem that a local government paying for a product that ties up important data in proprietary formats is a poor investment of the taxpayers money. It wouldn't take many local governments to combine their business to get a movement started.
Think of how much time various employees have spent entering common data like word processing documents and simple spreadsheets into closed formats. Literally millions of hours. Quite an investment, expensive data.
First, yes the story says they are considering the switch, second, the header dosen't contain the word "may".
I wonder about pressure that local governments can apply externally on businesses. People resist moving from Windows and MS Office saying it will be too hard to convert to something else because file formats are a problem. Yet San Francisco can mandate that any company that deals with the city must have gay friendly policies in place across the entire corporation at the local, state and country levels.
Why can't this same pressure be used to ensure that documents sent to local governments must be readable by freely available packages like Openoffice.org or the companies can not continue doing government business? Make it a requirement and watch the barriers to free and opensource software drop. Then if a local government is having a financial crunch, let them convert older systems to linux/freebsd/whatever without worrying that common document formats can't be read. This way governments could cut computing costs and hire another teacher or policeman, heck maybe even fund youth baseball for a season ( not cheap).
Freshmeat shows 31 versions of biff and most of them look useful for different configurations. Keep in mind that when people program for free that they generally work on projects that they find interesting. Please point us to the remaining 14,623 biff replacements, some of them may be useful.
Thanks for adding me to your foes list, I will be sleeping better now that my life dosen't revolve around meeting your 'socially redeeming value' scale.
...there is no socially redeeming value whatsoever.
...but there is no socially redeeming value to doing that either.
Slashdot is now a forum for discussing ony those things that you think to be socially redeeming? What a pompus ass you must be in the real world. Yup, the standard by which all opensource software projects will be judged against will henceforth be your 'socially redeeming value' litmus test. Thanks for opening our eyes.
If I buy an xbox, I'll do with it what I please. That won't change until they start leasing the game equipment to end users. And just how many would lease an xbox? Not many.
If I use the 007 savegame method, there isn't even any hardware modifying needed to get linux running. For gaming I already have a much better platform. Have you compared playing UT on a playstation2 versus a pc with good keyboard and mouse? The pc wins easily, makes me wonder why people want consoles for playing games...:)
Let me make sure this is clear: Hacking the XBOX is a waste of E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y'S time.
That is your opinion, don't be surprised when others disagree with you.
Except you're not getting interesting hardware for a cheaper price here. Sorry, nothing of value here, especially when there's no software to drive them.
Again, uninteresting to you, not to others. If capable people hack, then software becomes available and value increases. Modified xboxes are showing up in cars as mp3 players with a small 640x480 lcd screen. They can make nice divx players for home theater too. All this without vga out.
If it goes to court, 'fair use' will not hold up as long as there's no reason to hack the XBOX.
Are you giving legal advice on Slashdot? You seem to be giving legal case outcome predictions at a minimum. A quote from Stanford, "The "fair use" doctrine allows limited reproduction of copyrighted works for educational and research purposes." I think you may be misapplying the "fair use" phrase with respect to hacking. The hacking projects are replacing code, not copying.
DVD copying and running Linux on a hacked xbox aren't the same thing.
The XBOX is a DRM (digital rights management) PC type system, not a standard boot-any-x86-OS PC. Hacking on this hardware is nothing like hacking on standard x86 stuff.
I think you meant to say that hacking the XBOX is a waste of your time. Also, the XBOX won't have a killer app. Apps are traditional applications and the XBOX runs games. As long as MS wants to sell these things cheaper than the cost of manufacture, people will want to buy it to potentially replace low end PCs, can't say I blame them.
I bet MS appreciates your attempt to slow the hacking of the XBOX, however little it may help.
Any car with an OBD-II (1997 and later IIRC) port has an embedded computer that stores operating and error conditions. Many early 90's cars had varying levels of storage and monitoring capabilities.
One interesting thing is that my 1990 Eclipse has an ecu that I can use to disable individual fuel injectors, count how many knock sensor signals were detected, etc. My 2001 Jetta 1.8t can't do all these things. The data sample rate on the eclipse ecu is about 70/sec, about 3/sec through the OBD-II port.
The VW ecu tracks highest road speed, highest engine rpm achieved average shift rpm and more. Basically, the newer car computers track more info that will be useful for the manufacturer, and less that is useful for the owner.
You are quibbling about power transfer methods. Simply put though, air resistance becomes much greater than your friction level contact between drive wheel and surface. Once you loose traction and spin at 400+ mph, you do serious damage to the friction material on your wheel, which won't be anything like you know as a pneumatic tire/wheel setup. The last land speed vehicles have had aluminum wheels with no rubber, it wouldn't stay attached at the speeds reached anyway. Then the matter of trying to get traction with smooth aluminum wheels shows the reason that wheel drive isn't very practical over 450mph or so.
Hehehe, the people that buy this "highspeed" modem cable would be horrified to see the phone cable inside the wall. Then trace the phone wiring in the basement and see how close it is to the power wiring. They must be selling the placebo effect modem cable.
All of these replies have been helpful and thought provoking. A big problem in the main area I been looking is that much of my consulting work has been here. I worked for and then took over a successful consulting company in the area, my reputation does preceed me. I wrote software years ago that is still used in some companies that you would know of (in the US). That limits some of my dumbing down options in a town of less than 20,000.
I do have a couple of different versions of my resume, but the 13 year span at the consulting company keeps me from trimming much substance unless I limited it to my janitorial type duties.:)
My best lead so far is a bank that is putting on 50 new people in their credit collections division . Hopefully the businesses that need people badly will take the end of the war as a sign to try some expansion.
I have recently switched to Gentoo and like it quite a bit. I started with Linux in '94 with slackware and redhat. Been the mandrake route the last couple of years. Seriously considered FreeBSD because of rpm nightmares from upgrading from cooker packages to get needed updates. Gentoo is all compiled from source and easy to upgrade. Installing is the hardest part, installing new stuff is quite easy if you can edit text files. The gentoo forums are calmer than usenet too if you need help.
I have traveled to three other states besides my own looking for work. It has been just over a year since I was 'downsized' and things are very tight. Friends that know my capabilities have recommended me to their companies and they have need for more people, but not one is hiring to fill the need. My contact at the unemployment office told me last week that he may be job hunting soon, they are going to have to cut back too.
I am capable and willing to work, even starting a business of my own. Then I got to watch my savings burn up while every single business I did work for waited months to pay me. If it were just withholding payment for services, that wouldn't have been so bad, but I paid for hardware that they were using. It took me four months to get paid for a couple of large jobs and that was my limit. I closed the business and went job hunting.
Now I am in the trap of being way over qualified for the advertised openings like roofing labor and convience store clerk. They either don't want someone they know will be gone as soon as the first decent job is offered or they don't want to hire someone that has much more managment experience than they have. Some quirk about not hiring their own successor, go figure. Thanks for letting me know that my previous employer was just providing me with income because of my good looks and not because I was the highest paid technical employee they had.
OK, I now know several things for certain. I was wrong about your WinXP cpu model display. There is something I hadn't considered at play here and we were both describing our experiences with Athlon processors and different motherboards.
Long story trimmed down to reasonable size can be found here. The extended name string in the Athlon processor is programmable by the bios via password protected MSRs ( Machine Status Registers). The bios writers get access to protected things AMD & Intel don't want us regular folks messing with.
I wrote a small asm program to dump the extended name via the cpuid instruction. My Abit boards and my Dad's Shuttle boards behave very differently. On my Abit boards, the only time the extended name matches the sold-as-speed model number is when it is set as a 1700+ in the bios. The motherboard knows the cpu is a 1700+ because of the default multiplier bridges and the fsb sense pins. If the cpu is set as user defined at 11x133=1467, the default for a 1700+, the extended name is just "AMD Athlon(tm)". On the Shuttle boards, they try to match the speed to the model numbers the bios recognises, regardless of multiplier and bus speeds.
Check out the first screenshot , scroll down one message. The cpu is an actual 2100+, reported as a 2700+ with the extended name and running at 2.595GHz, much faster than the 2.17GHz a 2700+ actually runs. It just happens that a 2700+ is the fastest cpu his board recognises by model number.
Look at the shots here and notice that none of the Athlon names include a model number. Their bioses didn't set an extended name so it is still defined as AMD set it. Athlons don't have the model number embedded in the cpu except as read via the multiplier/fsb bridges and the bios sets the extended name to include the model number, not AMD. If you want a copy of my 193 byte util, just email me. Also, this was my next brilliant theory. 8^}
It just happens that all of the boards I routinely use to build systems do not try to always match cpu speed to model numbers. At least I learned something today.
You could try this page, and if they move it the steps are:
- amd.com - Technical Resources link at top - Technical Documentation at top left - AMD Athlon(tm) XP Tech Docs
System makers can brand executables, but it is more common for them to use oeminfo.ini. If the General tab under system properties doesn't have a "Computer:" heading and does have a "Manufactured and Supported by:" heading, manufacturers logo or Support Information button, then your system has been branded by the OEM. If you have an oem system then it is about 99% certain that when it was branded, the cpu model ( 1700+ ) was created during.
So, which company made your computer system? I don't have to ask if you built it yourself. We wouldn't be having this discussion if you had.
I have built thousands of systems from scratch and generally know what I am speaking about, but have been wrong before and will be wrong again. I have kept a civil tongue while you made snide remarks like "What's your next brilliant theory?". I have provided detailed information, you quoted WinXP as an unquestionable resource. Check the Forums at overclockers.com, one of the many places on the web to get good info and meet strange new people. BTW, with watercooling, my AthlonXP 1700+ DLT3C (1.5v) chip will run 2.55GHz and pass the prime95 torture test.
Well, MY AthlonXP 1700+ is running at 2.26 GHz at the moment under WinXP. My system info under System Properties is:
Computer:
AMD Athlon(tm) XP
2.26 GHz
512 MB of RAM
If you have anything else, it is because you bought your computer and the manufacturer added a file called oeminfo.ini in your \windows\system32 (\windows\system in Win95-WinME) directory. Inside that file is an entry that will list your processor type as a 1700+ and it is purely a text entry. You could lower your system speed to 500MHz and it will still show up as a 1700+ because of your oeminfo.ini file.
I've built computer systems ( workstations and servers) since 1987 and have hand crafted a few oeminfo files, but don't take my word for it, go look at the file yourself. Change it to whatever you wish and see that not only does WindowsXP not read the sold-as-speed of your processor, but your processor does not have a method of identifying itself as a 1700+. Go get some tech docs from AMD and check out the CPUID instruction. You will find that you can check for 3Dnow!(tm), MMX(tm), SSE(tm) and many other things with the bits returned from the CPUID extended information. The speed info is no where to be found from either an AMD Athlon or an Intel P4. I have 4 Athlon systems, 2 TBred-B 1700+, 1 Palamino 1700+ and 1 TBird 1400. None of them report any speed info in any manner. AMD dosen't document a method of model detection other than measuring speed with the TSC register and using their speed->model number guide. Linux has a wealth of info at/proc/cpuinfo, but can't identify my 1700+ as anything but a 2261MHz processor. I can't paste the cpuinfo because of the lameness filter complaining about extraneous characters.
Now, I repeat that I wish they would add a model designation extension for the CPUID instruction. It would make it easier for them to nail folks that sell overclocked systems ( very few indeed) and allow people that wish to overclock the freedom to tweak with fewer hassles.
No, the storing of processor sold-as-speed is a better solution. I never said anything about a bios message, which you are correct in saying can be changed. I said a utility can be provided to pull the sold-as-speed just as the processor serial number is currently, if activated. No amount of bios hacking would prevent reading of speed info from the cpu once the OS has taken control.
It could even be embedded in the results of the CPUID instruction. MS, Dell, HP, etc... could even track if your CPU was overclocked and suggest you slow it down to rated speed before giving you tech support for windows system crashes.
This argument has gone around at least twice. The Pentium 75MHz was the first clock limited Intel cpu. If overclocked more than 5MHz or so it would just halt. This was not an overclocking crash, a literal halt of the cpu. When Intel started locking the multiplier on the P-IIIs, they cited the need to prevent people from selling overclocked systems. The suggested alternative was to place a speed identification in the processor just like the processor serial number they had just put into the P-III so people could use a utility to check the actual sold-as-speed against the running clockrate.
Intel balked at this. The only reason they would balk at that suggestion was because it didn't address their real concern. Their real concern is limiting you to a set level of performance that you pay for. It dosen't matter if you want to take a chance on a crash or invest in better cooling, they intend to control what you can do with the product.
Everytime I have been in a consulting role, the decision making process included me in it. There was no need to come back and tell me to just do something new. I would have gone back to the decision makers to ensure we were still on the same page and proceed. If a consultant is hired for their expertise, this is how events unfold. If they are hired to be a scapegoat, then I can see your scenario happening. Sounds like a nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides the guy being a jerk/flake/weenie head, he would never admit to being wrong. I have been stubborn way too many times, but when it comes to technical issues I have to keep an open mind. If I don't, then my purpose isn't to create the best solution within my abilities, it is to stroke my massive hulking indestructible ego ( and when someone is as talented as me, they must have an ego... 8^} ).
If you follow some of Kop Killa's usenet posts, you should run across some of his not wrong at any cost threads. I didn't participate on coding on the LRP project, but if he behaved anything like on usenet, my trust of his code would hover somewhere between first semester VB sample CLI window guru and C helloworld code monkey.
On second thought, just narrow it down to zero respect or confidence in everything being right without a code audit. Just the thing for a router project, isn't it?
It is the same guy. He has been a nutcase for years. If I had realized that Dave 'kill a cop' Cinege was the force behind the Linux Router Project, I would have never used it. He was the first person I encountered on usenet that convinced me of two things:
1 - He is more than a little unstable.
2 - The internet can be a dangerous place.
Don't worry Dave, if you can't find work then someone, somewhere is holding a padded cell just for you.
Is this related to Transmeta wanting to distance themselves from Linux until the SCO bull$hit is resolved? Hopefully it will be quick, but I can't help but wonder what kind of ace SCO is holding in reserve. Even if they don't really have an ace, businesses seem to be preparing themselves for the possibility that SCO may win a partial victory.
Then Criminal Speed may come as a suprise to you. Yup, criminal charges for speeding, putting you in the same catagory as assault, burglary and posting goatse links. I didn't know there was such a thing until a friend got charged for 105 in a 65 zone.
60mph sounds reasonable to most people because they drive that fast about every day. This guy was traveling almost twice as fast as he was willing to admit. That is 84mph over the speed limit. Look at it this way, whatever the stopping distance of his car is (was) at 30mph, he was traveling almost 4 times faster. His stopping distance isn't increased 4 times, it would be closer to 16 times as far as his 30-0 braking distance.
Check here and here for some braking distances up to 100mph. Note the measured 30-0 versus the 100-0 stopping distances. A 2002 Corvette Z06 takes 108feet (60 - 0 mph) and 312feet (100 - 0 mph), 114mph would take the vette over 400feet.
This equates to the two drivers having 1/16th of the time and distances to react and make corrections. He was traveling at
114*5280/60/60=167.2 feet per second. His car weighed over 3600lbs with him inside, convert weight to mass, 3600/32.17=111.91lb
(167.2^2)*111.91/2=1,564,269
He was wielding a kinetic energy of over 1.5 million ft/lb, more than enough to destroy a school bus or go through a house, etc.
In my opinion, he wasn't even close to being accountable by admitting to 60mph.
I don't have any problem with people choosing to use MS Office if they really like the product or need the support. It does seem that a local government paying for a product that ties up important data in proprietary formats is a poor investment of the taxpayers money. It wouldn't take many local governments to combine their business to get a movement started.
Think of how much time various employees have spent entering common data like word processing documents and simple spreadsheets into closed formats. Literally millions of hours. Quite an investment, expensive data.
First, yes the story says they are considering the switch, second, the header dosen't contain the word "may".
I wonder about pressure that local governments can apply externally on businesses. People resist moving from Windows and MS Office saying it will be too hard to convert to something else because file formats are a problem. Yet San Francisco can mandate that any company that deals with the city must have gay friendly policies in place across the entire corporation at the local, state and country levels.
Why can't this same pressure be used to ensure that documents sent to local governments must be readable by freely available packages like Openoffice.org or the companies can not continue doing government business? Make it a requirement and watch the barriers to free and opensource software drop. Then if a local government is having a financial crunch, let them convert older systems to linux/freebsd/whatever without worrying that common document formats can't be read. This way governments could cut computing costs and hire another teacher or policeman, heck maybe even fund youth baseball for a season ( not cheap).
Yup, a link for Freevo and the xbox+freevo lovin' is here.
Freshmeat shows 31 versions of biff and most of them look useful for different configurations. Keep in mind that when people program for free that they generally work on projects that they find interesting. Please point us to the remaining 14,623 biff replacements, some of them may be useful.
Thanks for adding me to your foes list, I will be sleeping better now that my life dosen't revolve around meeting your 'socially redeeming value' scale.
Slashdot is now a forum for discussing ony those things that you think to be socially redeeming? What a pompus ass you must be in the real world. Yup, the standard by which all opensource software projects will be judged against will henceforth be your 'socially redeeming value' litmus test. Thanks for opening our eyes.
If I buy an xbox, I'll do with it what I please. That won't change until they start leasing the game equipment to end users. And just how many would lease an xbox? Not many.
If I use the 007 savegame method, there isn't even any hardware modifying needed to get linux running. For gaming I already have a much better platform. Have you compared playing UT on a playstation2 versus a pc with good keyboard and mouse? The pc wins easily, makes me wonder why people want consoles for playing games...
That is your opinion, don't be surprised when others disagree with you.
Again, uninteresting to you, not to others. If capable people hack, then software becomes available and value increases. Modified xboxes are showing up in cars as mp3 players with a small 640x480 lcd screen. They can make nice divx players for home theater too. All this without vga out.
Are you giving legal advice on Slashdot? You seem to be giving legal case outcome predictions at a minimum. A quote from Stanford, "The "fair use" doctrine allows limited reproduction of copyrighted works for educational and research purposes." I think you may be misapplying the "fair use" phrase with respect to hacking. The hacking projects are replacing code, not copying.
DVD copying and running Linux on a hacked xbox aren't the same thing.
The XBOX is a DRM (digital rights management) PC type system, not a standard boot-any-x86-OS PC. Hacking on this hardware is nothing like hacking on standard x86 stuff.
I think you meant to say that hacking the XBOX is a waste of your time. Also, the XBOX won't have a killer app. Apps are traditional applications and the XBOX runs games. As long as MS wants to sell these things cheaper than the cost of manufacture, people will want to buy it to potentially replace low end PCs, can't say I blame them.
I bet MS appreciates your attempt to slow the hacking of the XBOX, however little it may help.
Any car with an OBD-II (1997 and later IIRC) port has an embedded computer that stores operating and error conditions. Many early 90's cars had varying levels of storage and monitoring capabilities.
One interesting thing is that my 1990 Eclipse has an ecu that I can use to disable individual fuel injectors, count how many knock sensor signals were detected, etc. My 2001 Jetta 1.8t can't do all these things. The data sample rate on the eclipse ecu is about 70/sec, about 3/sec through the OBD-II port.
The VW ecu tracks highest road speed, highest engine rpm achieved average shift rpm and more. Basically, the newer car computers track more info that will be useful for the manufacturer, and less that is useful for the owner.
You are quibbling about power transfer methods. Simply put though, air resistance becomes much greater than your friction level contact between drive wheel and surface. Once you loose traction and spin at 400+ mph, you do serious damage to the friction material on your wheel, which won't be anything like you know as a pneumatic tire/wheel setup. The last land speed vehicles have had aluminum wheels with no rubber, it wouldn't stay attached at the speeds reached anyway. Then the matter of trying to get traction with smooth aluminum wheels shows the reason that wheel drive isn't very practical over 450mph or so.
Hehehe, the people that buy this "highspeed" modem cable would be horrified to see the phone cable inside the wall. Then trace the phone wiring in the basement and see how close it is to the power wiring. They must be selling the placebo effect modem cable.
All of these replies have been helpful and thought provoking. A big problem in the main area I been looking is that much of my consulting work has been here. I worked for and then took over a successful consulting company in the area, my reputation does preceed me. I wrote software years ago that is still used in some companies that you would know of (in the US). That limits some of my dumbing down options in a town of less than 20,000.
:)
I do have a couple of different versions of my resume, but the 13 year span at the consulting company keeps me from trimming much substance unless I limited it to my janitorial type duties.
My best lead so far is a bank that is putting on 50 new people in their credit collections division . Hopefully the businesses that need people badly will take the end of the war as a sign to try some expansion.
I have recently switched to Gentoo and like it quite a bit. I started with Linux in '94 with slackware and redhat. Been the mandrake route the last couple of years. Seriously considered FreeBSD because of rpm nightmares from upgrading from cooker packages to get needed updates. Gentoo is all compiled from source and easy to upgrade. Installing is the hardest part, installing new stuff is quite easy if you can edit text files. The gentoo forums are calmer than usenet too if you need help.
I have traveled to three other states besides my own looking for work. It has been just over a year since I was 'downsized' and things are very tight. Friends that know my capabilities have recommended me to their companies and they have need for more people, but not one is hiring to fill the need. My contact at the unemployment office told me last week that he may be job hunting soon, they are going to have to cut back too.
I am capable and willing to work, even starting a business of my own. Then I got to watch my savings burn up while every single business I did work for waited months to pay me. If it were just withholding payment for services, that wouldn't have been so bad, but I paid for hardware that they were using. It took me four months to get paid for a couple of large jobs and that was my limit. I closed the business and went job hunting.
Now I am in the trap of being way over qualified for the advertised openings like roofing labor and convience store clerk. They either don't want someone they know will be gone as soon as the first decent job is offered or they don't want to hire someone that has much more managment experience than they have. Some quirk about not hiring their own successor, go figure. Thanks for letting me know that my previous employer was just providing me with income because of my good looks and not because I was the highest paid technical employee they had.
OK, I now know several things for certain. I was wrong about your WinXP cpu model display. There is something I hadn't considered at play here and we were both describing our experiences with Athlon processors and different motherboards.
Long story trimmed down to reasonable size can be found here. The extended name string in the Athlon processor is programmable by the bios via password protected MSRs ( Machine Status Registers). The bios writers get access to protected things AMD & Intel don't want us regular folks messing with.
I wrote a small asm program to dump the extended name via the cpuid instruction. My Abit boards and my Dad's Shuttle boards behave very differently. On my Abit boards, the only time the extended name matches the sold-as-speed model number is when it is set as a 1700+ in the bios. The motherboard knows the cpu is a 1700+ because of the default multiplier bridges and the fsb sense pins. If the cpu is set as user defined at 11x133=1467, the default for a 1700+, the extended name is just "AMD Athlon(tm)". On the Shuttle boards, they try to match the speed to the model numbers the bios recognises, regardless of multiplier and bus speeds.
Check out the first screenshot , scroll down one message. The cpu is an actual 2100+, reported as a 2700+ with the extended name and running at 2.595GHz, much faster than the 2.17GHz a 2700+ actually runs. It just happens that a 2700+ is the fastest cpu his board recognises by model number.
Look at the shots here and notice that none of the Athlon names include a model number. Their bioses didn't set an extended name so it is still defined as AMD set it. Athlons don't have the model number embedded in the cpu except as read via the multiplier/fsb bridges and the bios sets the extended name to include the model number, not AMD. If you want a copy of my 193 byte util, just email me. Also, this was my next brilliant theory. 8^}
It just happens that all of the boards I routinely use to build systems do not try to always match cpu speed to model numbers. At least I learned something today.
You could try this page, and if they move it the steps are:
- amd.com
- Technical Resources link at top
- Technical Documentation at top left
- AMD Athlon(tm) XP Tech Docs
System makers can brand executables, but it is more common for them to use oeminfo.ini. If the General tab under system properties doesn't have a "Computer:" heading and does have a "Manufactured and Supported by:" heading, manufacturers logo or Support Information button, then your system has been branded by the OEM. If you have an oem system then it is about 99% certain that when it was branded, the cpu model ( 1700+ ) was created during.
So, which company made your computer system? I don't have to ask if you built it yourself. We wouldn't be having this discussion if you had.
Some well respected software that won't/can't tell you your sold-as-speed, Sandra 2003, wcpuid, CPU-Z and the Linux kernel.
I have built thousands of systems from scratch and generally know what I am speaking about, but have been wrong before and will be wrong again. I have kept a civil tongue while you made snide remarks like "What's your next brilliant theory?". I have provided detailed information, you quoted WinXP as an unquestionable resource. Check the Forums at overclockers.com, one of the many places on the web to get good info and meet strange new people. BTW, with watercooling, my AthlonXP 1700+ DLT3C (1.5v) chip will run 2.55GHz and pass the prime95 torture test.
Have a great Palm Sunday.
Well, MY AthlonXP 1700+ is running at 2.26 GHz at the moment under WinXP. My system info under System Properties is:
/proc/cpuinfo, but can't identify my 1700+ as anything but a 2261MHz processor. I can't paste the cpuinfo because of the lameness filter complaining about extraneous characters.
Computer:
AMD Athlon(tm) XP
2.26 GHz
512 MB of RAM
If you have anything else, it is because you bought your computer and the manufacturer added a file called oeminfo.ini in your \windows\system32 (\windows\system in Win95-WinME) directory. Inside that file is an entry that will list your processor type as a 1700+ and it is purely a text entry. You could lower your system speed to 500MHz and it will still show up as a 1700+ because of your oeminfo.ini file.
I've built computer systems ( workstations and servers) since 1987 and have hand crafted a few oeminfo files, but don't take my word for it, go look at the file yourself. Change it to whatever you wish and see that not only does WindowsXP not read the sold-as-speed of your processor, but your processor does not have a method of identifying itself as a 1700+. Go get some tech docs from AMD and check out the CPUID instruction. You will find that you can check for 3Dnow!(tm), MMX(tm), SSE(tm) and many other things with the bits returned from the CPUID extended information. The speed info is no where to be found from either an AMD Athlon or an Intel P4. I have 4 Athlon systems, 2 TBred-B 1700+, 1 Palamino 1700+ and 1 TBird 1400. None of them report any speed info in any manner. AMD dosen't document a method of model detection other than measuring speed with the TSC register and using their speed->model number guide. Linux has a wealth of info at
Now, I repeat that I wish they would add a model designation extension for the CPUID instruction. It would make it easier for them to nail folks that sell overclocked systems ( very few indeed) and allow people that wish to overclock the freedom to tweak with fewer hassles.
No, the storing of processor sold-as-speed is a better solution. I never said anything about a bios message, which you are correct in saying can be changed. I said a utility can be provided to pull the sold-as-speed just as the processor serial number is currently, if activated. No amount of bios hacking would prevent reading of speed info from the cpu once the OS has taken control.
It could even be embedded in the results of the CPUID instruction. MS, Dell, HP, etc... could even track if your CPU was overclocked and suggest you slow it down to rated speed before giving you tech support for windows system crashes.
On the cheap motherboards, the bios messages would probably look just about like that. For more, visit engrish.com.
This argument has gone around at least twice. The Pentium 75MHz was the first clock limited Intel cpu. If overclocked more than 5MHz or so it would just halt. This was not an overclocking crash, a literal halt of the cpu. When Intel started locking the multiplier on the P-IIIs, they cited the need to prevent people from selling overclocked systems. The suggested alternative was to place a speed identification in the processor just like the processor serial number they had just put into the P-III so people could use a utility to check the actual sold-as-speed against the running clockrate.
Intel balked at this. The only reason they would balk at that suggestion was because it didn't address their real concern. Their real concern is limiting you to a set level of performance that you pay for. It dosen't matter if you want to take a chance on a crash or invest in better cooling, they intend to control what you can do with the product.
Everytime I have been in a consulting role, the decision making process included me in it. There was no need to come back and tell me to just do something new. I would have gone back to the decision makers to ensure we were still on the same page and proceed. If a consultant is hired for their expertise, this is how events unfold. If they are hired to be a scapegoat, then I can see your scenario happening. Sounds like a nightmare.