The motherboards that I most regret purchasing in the last decade were the two K6-2 boards I bought.
Granted, they're the last AMD systems I ever purchased. My brother-in-law has an Athlon system. He can play Rocket Simulator without the machine even needing to be fully booted up.
I have an IBM PC Server 704, with four CPUs and a RAID array of 12 fast SCSI drives in it that's louder, though, so I win the decibels-per-box competition.
The fact that you apparently shopped at a retail outlet that had all AMD-chip notebooks is more a reflection on where you shopped for a notebook than anything else.
You could have gone into an Apple Store, and you would have found not only no notebooks with Intel Processors, but none that had a mandatory Windows bundled with the notebook, either.
Your elation would have been shortsighted, however.
OS X: Because Apple finally gave up on producing their much heralded 'Next Generation MacOS' and just put a layer of fresh makeup on NeXT's OS instead.
It's unclear why you believe that there is an either/or choice to be made that either traps you on Apple or Microsoft's closed-source platform. There are alternatives you know, for those of us who choose.
Don't worry. You'll get your spyware, if Apple ever achives a meaningful market share.
If you think an integrated 3C905 ethernet isn't 'high quality components' you should stuck to your TrendNet or Linksys NIC, I guess. Or whatever crap chips from Taiwan they're shoveling on the noname motherboards at present.
Dell makes products on numerous 'tiers'. The Optiplex isn't what you get when you order a crummy consumer Dell box.
I haven't found anything on my Optiplex motherboards that isn't supported with Slackware.
ATI video chipset 3Com ethernet
The integrated sound is kinda crappy. Right down at the level of quality on the 'built it yourself' Taiwanese clone motherboard scuzz.
Be careful. Don't cut your hand on the rough edge on that crappy ATX clone case, now....
The personnel make a differenc, too. AMD essentially 'nabbed' a lot of the Dec Alpha development team when Digital was acquired by Compaq. Which resulted in a lot of the good features of the Athlon. Before this point, AMD parts were lackluster Intel clones.
To clarify the parent's comment: the stamping on the package of many ICs designates the country where packaging was done.
IC Packaging is a lesser-level technology and commonly completed in the third world. Dies are shipped in sealed packages from the fabs in First World countries to the third world for wire bonding and sealing into the package. The wire bonding and packaging are labor intensive and require far less of an infrastructure than fabbing the dies.
So people sometimes get the wrong impression that all chips are made in third world backwater nations, which is not the case. Most of these localities aren't anywhere near capable of hosting a current-tech fab.
I took Freshman Comp back in 1977. Took the second term of Freshman Comp in 1978 where we read and studied 'Shockwave Rider' by John Brunner (the original cyberpunk novel). Were you out of the nursery by then?
Consider taking a reading comprehensive course. It's probably a remedial course at your Junior College.
AMD made their own bit-slice processor line, along with a lot of other chip types, before they became a second source producer of Intel x86 processor chips. And it was technicalities in their agreement with Intel to produce x86 second source processors (in the 8088 days) that let them get into the 486 clone business to start with.
It's also quite telling that Intel was forced to adopt the AMD64 instruction set (even if it's calling it something else).;-)
Why is that 'telling'? The whole success of AMD is predicated on their presumed 'right' to the Intel instruction set that they appropriated due to them being a second-source producer of 8088 and 80286 processors in the past. AMD grabbed and ran with that. So Intel is now making use of the bits and pieces of extensions that AMD added to that instruction set.
I bought my last 80 computers as Dell Optiplexes on a skid at auction. The ones I kept and am using are Pentium III boxes. The whole package of 80 boxes was $40. And they were all Intel boxes.
I am done hand-building machines. I'm tired of Taiwanese chipsets (Optiplexes have Intel chipsets, integrated ATI video chips, integrated 3Com ethernet chips, etc.) The equivalent 'screwdriver shop' clone motherboard has shit taiwanese chips on it.
I used to say I would never buy a proprietary-motherboard system. Now I look back at all the cut-corners screwdriver shop junk I used to cram into cases with 250% more mounting holes than were being used. It's lowest-common-denominator crap for the most part.
How could code that is public domain be included in the kernel. Once said code reverted to public domain it would have to be excised. It can't be 'linked against' GPL'd code otherwise.
Okay. So every contributor to the Linux kernel would have to submit a renewal notice. Somebody would have to make it their full time job to make sure that every contributor's code, copyrighted by them, was kept up to date.
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The Apple II used the 6502 processor, which has a 16 bit address bus, and thus can address 64K of memory without bank switching.
The motherboards that I most regret purchasing in the last decade were the two K6-2 boards I bought.
Granted, they're the last AMD systems I ever purchased. My brother-in-law has an Athlon system. He can play Rocket Simulator without the machine even needing to be fully booted up.
I have an IBM PC Server 704, with four CPUs and a RAID array of 12 fast SCSI drives in it that's louder, though, so I win the decibels-per-box competition.
GO AMD! Your cheap parts rock for us poor college gamers!
Wouldn't a PlayStation 2 be an even better deal?
The fact that you apparently shopped at a retail outlet that had all AMD-chip notebooks is more a reflection on where you shopped for a notebook than anything else.
You could have gone into an Apple Store, and you would have found not only no notebooks with Intel Processors, but none that had a mandatory Windows bundled with the notebook, either.
Your elation would have been shortsighted, however.
You forgot to include an additional category of taxpayer:
The people too stupid to file early, who discovered their Tax Refund windfall near the April 15th deadline.
The same class of people who go into the store and buy a eMachines box (with AMD processor) because it's case is the one they're most attracted to.
Maybe they're the ones buying all the AMD parts in the consumer channel, eh?
It's unclear why you believe that there is an either/or choice to be made that either traps you on Apple or Microsoft's closed-source platform. There are alternatives you know, for those of us who choose.
Don't worry. You'll get your spyware, if Apple ever achives a meaningful market share.
If you think an integrated 3C905 ethernet isn't 'high quality components' you should stuck to your TrendNet or Linksys NIC, I guess. Or whatever crap chips from Taiwan they're shoveling on the noname motherboards at present.
Dell makes products on numerous 'tiers'. The Optiplex isn't what you get when you order a crummy consumer Dell box.
I haven't found anything on my Optiplex motherboards that isn't supported with Slackware.
ATI video chipset
3Com ethernet
The integrated sound is kinda crappy. Right down at the level of quality on the 'built it yourself' Taiwanese clone motherboard scuzz.
Be careful. Don't cut your hand on the rough edge on that crappy ATX clone case, now....
It can be both true and a statistical fluke, ya know.
This is a narrowly-derived statistic that has very little to do with actual market share or total sales volume of parts from the respective vendors.
Do some research and find out what they used to charge for a Pentium Pro processor with 2MB of cache.
Microsoft has been selling a bundle that includes GPL'd software, even including the GNU C Compiler, for quite a few years now....
Formerly known as Interix, now called Services for UNIX.
(It's the big brother of Cygwin. Not a Win32 DLL kludge like Cygwin, but a full POSIX subsystem for the NT kernel.)
The personnel make a differenc, too. AMD essentially 'nabbed' a lot of the Dec Alpha development team when Digital was acquired by Compaq. Which resulted in a lot of the good features of the Athlon. Before this point, AMD parts were lackluster Intel clones.
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I view it as a good thing that wealth is concentrated in the locations where wealth is created.
Not sure if you meant to imply that, or if you view it as a problem or not....
To clarify the parent's comment: the stamping on the package of many ICs designates the country where packaging was done.
IC Packaging is a lesser-level technology and commonly completed in the third world. Dies are shipped in sealed packages from the fabs in First World countries to the third world for wire bonding and sealing into the package. The wire bonding and packaging are labor intensive and require far less of an infrastructure than fabbing the dies.
So people sometimes get the wrong impression that all chips are made in third world backwater nations, which is not the case. Most of these localities aren't anywhere near capable of hosting a current-tech fab.
Ireland, Germany, the US, etc. are all capable.
I took Freshman Comp back in 1977. Took the second term of Freshman Comp in 1978 where we read and studied 'Shockwave Rider' by John Brunner (the original cyberpunk novel). Were you out of the nursery by then?
Consider taking a reading comprehensive course. It's probably a remedial course at your Junior College.
AMD made their own bit-slice processor line, along with a lot of other chip types, before they became a second source producer of Intel x86 processor chips. And it was technicalities in their agreement with Intel to produce x86 second source processors (in the 8088 days) that let them get into the 486 clone business to start with.
A new sales slogan should be mounted:
"AMD. Good enough for all those eMachines boxes."
Yeah! That will bring 'em in!
Presumably Intel has abandoned all the old x86 croft to the cheap cloners and 'compatible' vendors.
Except it sounds like they're now going to continue to sell some crippled 'compatible kludge' chips of their own.
my Duron based Linux box
I thought 'Linux' was a brand of laundry detergent. Now you claim it's based on a brand of condom?
That's right. It's a good thing AMD has parts competing with the Intel parts. It keeps the Intel parts innovative and less expensive for me to buy.
Someone else can keep the AMD parts, though. I had enough AMD parts after buying a couple of K6 boxes back in the day.
AMD used to make good TTL chips, though. I'll grant them that.
It's also quite telling that Intel was forced to adopt the AMD64 instruction set (even if it's calling it something else). ;-)
Why is that 'telling'? The whole success of AMD is predicated on their presumed 'right' to the Intel instruction set that they appropriated due to them being a second-source producer of 8088 and 80286 processors in the past. AMD grabbed and ran with that. So Intel is now making use of the bits and pieces of extensions that AMD added to that instruction set.
I bought my last 80 computers as Dell Optiplexes on a skid at auction. The ones I kept and am using are Pentium III boxes. The whole package of 80 boxes was $40. And they were all Intel boxes.
I am done hand-building machines. I'm tired of Taiwanese chipsets (Optiplexes have Intel chipsets, integrated ATI video chips, integrated 3Com ethernet chips, etc.) The equivalent 'screwdriver shop' clone motherboard has shit taiwanese chips on it.
I used to say I would never buy a proprietary-motherboard system. Now I look back at all the cut-corners screwdriver shop junk I used to cram into cases with 250% more mounting holes than were being used. It's lowest-common-denominator crap for the most part.
How could code that is public domain be included in the kernel. Once said code reverted to public domain it would have to be excised. It can't be 'linked against' GPL'd code otherwise.
Okay. So every contributor to the Linux kernel would have to submit a renewal notice. Somebody would have to make it their full time job to make sure that every contributor's code, copyrighted by them, was kept up to date.
Hmmm...
Without the copyright protection of GPL licensed works, anybody who wanted would come along, take the code and do whatever they wanted with it.
There would be new forks of everything shortly thereafter. Ten different forks of the Linux kernel.
Twisty passages in all directions.