Again everyone seems to be selectively ignoring the smoking gun. if ANY of this was actually true, why would the cripple the Pentium III? After all who knows more about what the chip is doing than the vendor that made it?
The answer is simple and proof of dirty dealing: It simply doesn't have a damned thing about what implementation of SSE does what and is instead a way to cripple the competition in benchmarks and in every program that uses ICC. At the time the cripple code was first released the benchmarks consistently shows the late model P3 STOMPING the early model P4s by as much as 40%. the cripple code is added and voila! On the next release benches on the SAME CHIPS are showing the P4 WINNING by 40%! Wow, isn't that just amazing?
This is NO different than what MSFT did to DR-DOS and their little "Windows isn't done unless Lotus won't run" gag. the P4 was a disaster, one reviewer (I believed the Register) called in an "marchitecture" as it sacrificed everything so the marketing people could claim clock speed (The MHZ wars) but quickly found out it was useless in mobile and when ramped hit a thermal wall. so instead of accepting they lost this round they rigged the market both by bribing OEMs and with the cripple code. this is why you couldn't hardly find a single OEM with an Athlon chip, only Duron/Sempron, even though athlon was winning awards and competitions. Simply put their kickbacks were tied to how many AMD CPUs you sold and what type, the crappy chips were allowed, Athlon was not. Again no different than how MSFT tied Windows lower price to how many of the OTHER OSes you sold.
So please don't forget the smoking gun, because it simply blows the entire argument out of the water and makes what SSE the chip has moot. if ANYTHING that you said above was the actual reason then there wouldn't have been a reason for the P3 to have been crippled but it was. That is why Intel coughed up 1.25 BILLION rather than go to court because just that fact alone would have been a slam dunk for AMD.
Actually more of a case of "We need to convince the public to let loose the dogs of war AGAIN" because a US district court is NOW saying Iran did 9/11 which of course is a codeword for "Here are the brown people we are gonna murder while robbing your coffers this week!". Gotta give 'em credit, they have their lapdogs in the courts and MSM well trained by now and they are gonna milk that false flag for every dime they can.
I personally think they know the lie of infinite growth that the west's economies was built on is coming to an end and that we've hit or are about to hit pretty much peak everything and they are gonna grab as much as they can before they grab that last chopper out of Saigon while the country burns.
If there are any Iranians reading this? As an American allow me to say I'm sorry for the millions of your people that are about to die to fuel the greed of Zionists, the "Jesus won't come back if there ain't Jews in Zion!" religious nutbars that support them, and finally our corrupt government that will be taking massive kickbacks and using it as an excuse to make us even more of a police state. Please don't blame the American people as we have no more control over the war machine than you do over the mullahs and all we can do is watch the slaughter done in our name while being given a "Coke VS Pepsi" choice of one rich whore or the other. Sorry.
We are talking bulk storage, the guy never said anything about RAID. If it were a RAID sitch i'd agree 100% but I've used PCI SATA for bulk storage and it'll stream movie speed just fine. But considering there are Asrock boards with 3 PCIe slots for like $50 it isn't like you can't go AMD quad and have lots of PCIe if you want, and those include 6 SATA native. So add that in with the $55 quad i linked to you are still right at or under $200 depending on where you get the rest of the parts, for a quad server that's really damned cheap.
Bimbo Newton Crosby. These articles are nothing but trollbait, hell they might as well have trollface for the icon and the tag "U mad bro?". This is no different than " Will (insert Linux distro or FOSS in general) have a (insert massive fail or massive success) in (insert position)" or "Microsoft (insert buys company, kicks puppies) and thereby (insert horrible scenario) for the (insert web, country, or FOSS)".
I hate to say it but Mikey 400 accounts is right, slashdot does equal stagnated. I remember when we'd have posts running 200 counts or more arguing the merits or demerits of file systems, formats, technologies, and even if you disagreed with a position you learned something. now all we have is "nigger faggot cocksucker" either directly or in the form of shill astroturfer troll, militant flag waving and enough fangirl squees and squicks you'd think we were at a damned Justin beiber concert.
Personally I blame ACs and think there ought to be a simple way to just block AC posts completely or hide them instantly from view so anyone with an account never knows they even exist. There is NO cost to make an account (if there was Mikey 400 would be filing chp 11) and by making people take the couple of minutes to make an account then people would at least have to stand by their statements or spend all their times making accounts like Mikey 400. Anyone who has read my posting can see i call it as I see it, never minced words or gave a shit about mods and have been at excellent for more years than i can count so it isn't like your account is gonna go negative unless you are just being a douche for the sake of trolling, so there really is ZERO reason for having ACs and a shitload of reasons why we shouldn't have them. i mean look at this comment section, I bet more than 50% will be ACs, and in some posts they are closer to 90%. that is fucking nuts folks, lets get rid of ACs and cut out the bullshit.
Really? I thought the reason we are hated is the country has been taken over with war mongers and profiteers that will milk a false flag for everything its worth like how we are now saying Iran did 9/11 which I have to give them credit, first bin Laden, then Iraq and now Iran, they are milking the living hell out of that single "terrorist attack" to enact the neo-con design Wolfowitz came up with back in the 90s.
Of the countries he listed for conquest all that is left is Iran and Syria and it looks like the CIA will astroturf Syria like they did Libya with the Qatar soldiers (oh and while Al Qaeda helped naturally) so you really have to give the US war machine credit, they recycle their bullshit!
DivX 5 AVIs will play on damned near anything from that $30 Walamrt STB on up, you can get some pretty damned decent file sizes while having great picture and they are really easy to make with a wealth of converters out there.
Now as I said on my other post the AMD Phenom I quad CULV I linked to is only $55 and AMD AM2+ boards are dirt cheap now so that would take care of the hardware and if it were me and I were setting it up I'd use an old XP license sitting around to legit a copy of "XP Tiny Edition" that runs in just 56Mb of RAM (or if you don't give a shit about licenses they also have Tiny 2K3 but it'll take you a while to find a copy as the server version isn't as popular as Tiny XP and 7) and slap on Virtualdub and just have it convert in batches when the machine wasn't in use.
With the above parts and software you'd have a cheap quad server with tons of space that'll convert your videos to one of the most popular and widely supported formats easy peasy. Hell there are several tutorials on how to change aspect ratio to whatever your native is via VDub if you want to go to the extra trouble, me I have the VDub settings for 4x3 saved as a file for when my mom wants movies so she can watch them on her big old set (which she refuses to let me replace because "It works just fine for me") and have my Phenom II 6 core whip them off while i snooze. Can't get easier to use frankly.
If he just wants to go cheap and its gonna be stuck in some garage anyway i'd say white trash it like we did at my last shop. Me and the boss took a couple of the biggest cheapo ATX cases we could get our hands on, took out the motherboard mount and cut the frame on one, and finally a couple of small weld stuck them together. We ended up with something like 16 SCSI drives in that sucker for a total of 2Tb when most folks were still getting 80Gb drives. with those babies loaded with every single driver for just about every piece of hardware up to that point it was quick work to reload a PC.
:As for the board I'd go with something like a cheap AMD board with a nice cheap Phenom low power quad. you can get a Phenom I quad for $55 at Starmicro and add a couple of Gb of DDR 2 for maybe $25, board for around $40 and finally a decent HSF for around $15.
So when you figure in the cases which with no PSU can be had for less than $20 a piece from many places like Geeks you are looking at a final total of around $185 for a quad with 2Gb of RAM with an add on card for adding more SATA slots. Sure it won't be the prettiest thing around but if its just gonna be serving files from a corner somewhere who cares? I'd add a little more and get a full size board with lots of SATA slots and 3 PCI slots for adding more SATA cards and you'd have a thing you could load to the brim and with the low power Phenom quad you'll have plenty of power for controlling the whole deal and maybe even it doing some of the transcoding work via scripts at night when its not serving files.
Ya know, that is what i never understood. What was with the hard on for the towers? Wasn't that like the third hit on them? you'd think if they'd have wanted to hurt the USA they'd have hit the statue of liberty or at least rammed it down Wall Street (of course they could be forgiven for not knowing Goldman Sachs is the devil) instead of hitting the towers. did their pilots simply not have the ability to hit anything that wasn't the biggest thing in the area?
The only explanation I heard that kinda makes sense is that in ME countries there is usually a single building like "ministry of finance" to hit and with it called the world trade center maybe they thought you could do real damage to the economy by taking it out. but you'd think they would have hit the symbols first.
As for TFA allow me to personally thank all those that yanked their domains off GoDaddy, its nice to see some standing up for what you believe in. Its like how I switched to an AMD only shop when i found out Intel was (and still is) rigging the market. while i know that ultimately a single shop won't even make a dent at least my money isn't being used by them to rig the markets and stifle competition. Ultimately the vote with your wallet is pretty much the only vote we have now, what with congress critters bought before they are even sworn in nowadays.
so for all those that switched thanks, for all those that haven't please do. They are still supporting SOPA and are merely blowing smoke, and if i had domains they sure as hell wouldn't be with GoDaddy.
The problem with natural selection is gangbangers are notorious for being bad shots and tend to take out some family while shooting at some guy halfway down the block. look at the one a few weeks back where they spot a rival filming a rap video and unload, completely miss ALL their targets but hit a one year old being carried by his dad down the block right in the back of the head. Personally i'd be all for a "gangbanger arena" where they could go and blast the fuck out of each other with NO penalties. hell we could put it on PPV. If we had that then yes let Darwin sort them out.
Now as for methheads? you'd be surprised how well armed the metheads that are dealing are. That was the reason my friend quit being a cop, he was tired of pulling over someone for swerving and finding a dumbass cooking in a moving car with a BPV on and enough firepower to make Rambo go "Ya know, maybe you shouldn't carry so much hardware". Sure they may not have food for their kids but they'll have every weapon they can get their hands on. And once these guys get tweaked? Man. One of them he arrested had emptied something like 800 rounds at a tree. Why a tree? he was sure that tree had an FBI spycam hidden in it so he was gonna take it out. That is why one of those dipshits with a pack of hydras would be dangerous because they'd get tweaked and decide that car full of college kids was actually an unmarked and you'd have kiddie giblets all over the street.
As for the national guard? those things are already leaking like sieves, their weapons end up with bikers, militias, hell there was a local guy that got arrested who had real hand grenades and was using them as "really cool paperweights". But living in the south i can tell you the fed rolls the tanks and not only will every NG armory suddenly come up dry as a bone, not only will every vehicle they have that runs be gone, but every machine shop will be mounting tripods on the backs of all these pickups we have and turning them into technicals. From what I was told a good welder can whip off a top notch tripod mount for a 50 cal in under 40 minutes flat. I doubt seriously with all the firepower we have sitting in all these armories that we have to worry about a one sided battle if the feds rolled the tanks. That of course don't count all the IEDs that would be butt simple to cook up, after this this is a place where we have 3 or 4 guys a year busted for using dynamite as a fishing pole.
Thanks and that is why when it came out Intel was (and still is BTW) rigging their compiler and was bribing OEMs I switched to an AMD only shop simply because i know without competition frankly it would seriously suck. I mean if MSFT had rigged Windows to tie a boat anchor to GPL code can you imagine the screams? yet they'll still support a company that has admitted to bribery and rigging the benchmarks (again still are as one reviewer who didn't know about the ICC cripple code remarked when reviewing netbooks "The benches say that the Atom dual is faster than the AMD E series yet the real world doesn't bare this out for some reason" yeah its called "quack.exe" and is as old as putting your thumb on the scale) yet they'll still buy.
On the browser front I use as well as switched my customers over to Comodo Dragon and frankly everyone couldn't be happier. Its light, its snappy even on this 1.8GHz Sempron that I use as a nettop, its default settings have some really nice security features like using Comodo Secure DNS in the browser ONLY which is fast and stops malware and phishing sites you may stumble across, it even has an option to make it portable and run it off a thumbstick. i heartily recommend it. And of course the more competition we have in the market the better it is for ALL of us because they have to bring their A game or lose.
Dude you never tried the Dragon? it fucking rocks man! It by default (you can change it on install or after in options if you wish) will set it up so the browser and ONLY the browser uses the Comodo secure DNS which is not only excellent at blocking malware and driveby sites but if your regular DNS goes down its easy to spot with Comodo using a different DNS. It also supports all the chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox, is VERY fast and most importantly (at least for me) there is NO tracking. They remove ALL the google ID and phone home behavior of Chrome. You should try it, they even have an option on install that will make it portable and install to a thumbdrive if you wish. Just a rock solid browser and since switching my customers over i haven't heard a single complaint as they all just love the speed and ease of use!
Now this is OT but this is something that most folks forgets about that needs to be said: Today i invited a guy down the hall to Xmas dinner with my family, I just assumed everyone here would have somewhere to go but when the guy invited me to go with him to try to find a food joint open on Xmas it hit me the guy literally had nobody, nobody at all that gave a damn. I get to talking to him and his whole family is dead and the few that are left are distant kin that probably wouldn't even bother to show up to the man's funeral. So I told him to hop in the truck and I'd take him where we would get some REAL food, brought him out to my mom's and had a real old fashioned Xmas dinner with roast turkey and beef, all the fixings, and pies and pudding for dessert. I swear he ate like 3 helpings and was just thanking us over and over because i found out later his Xmas dinner was gonna be a TV dinner.
So on this holiday when so many of us have so much, family and friends, GFs/wives, more tech junk than we could ever use (I just counted and I'm up to 4 PCs and a netbook, how did THAT happen?) please don't forget to ask around and make sure that those around you aren't spending this Xmas alone because that is just damned depressing. After supper i loaded a couple of dozen movies off my USB drive onto his PC for him to watch and mom loaded him down with leftovers so at least i know they'll be one less person out there that had to have a sucky Xmas simply because nobody gave a damn. So do your little part to make this world a better place, okay?
I'll tell you why certain weapons shouldn't be sold...morons. I have a friend that used to be a cop and i'll never forget one of his stories: They pull over this car driving slow and acting funny, when they search the car they find four gangbangers and an RPG in the back seat. Now when my friend said "WTF were you planning to do with an RPG boy?" do you know what they said? Driveby. That's right, they were gonna try to shoot a rocket out of a moving 4 door at a rival's house. Needless to say they were shocked when my friend told them that if they would have tried to fire that thing the backblast have blown them up real good.
So that is why you can't buy a hellfire, because some dipshit that has seen too many Rambo movies will get a hold of it and try to do a driveby on his ex with the damned thing. I mean can you imagine some methhead all paranoid with a pack of hydra missiles and a launcher?
But don't worry friend because if the government ever rolls the tanks i'm sure the national guard armories will be nicely emptied faster than you can say Arab Spring.
Uhhhh...that don't make any sense friend as it isn't like MSFT and Apple where if Apple went tits up in the 90s MSFT stood there alone with a big old bullseye. If Mozilla closed shop tomorrow you'd still have Chromium AND Opera AND Safari AND IE AND Dragon AND probably another half a dozen I haven't thought of. Google is about as far from risking antitrust on the browser front as they can get and i'd argue if anything we are swimming in choices more than we have ever had before.
No lets cut through the bullshit and get to the real truth okay? Its not about "advancing the web" or any of that other bullshit its about two things and two things only: Advertising revenue and market share, plain and simple. All of Google's products come down to one thing, selling ads. Even with their numbers declining Mozilla brings them a LOT of eyeballs. if they didn't buy those eyeballs MSFT would have been more than happy to buy those eyeballs so Google shelled out, plain and simple.
Don't you just wish that once, just once, they'd quit with the marketspeak and just tell the truth? I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?
Why is NASA gonna look at the thing when somebody on the yahoo forums pointed out what it was and even provided a link? Sorry i don't have the link but, and excuse me if i don't get the make and model right as it was over a week ago, it was a hydrazine 104 liter tank, commonly used on some sats. anyway the guy provided a link and it looked pretty much dead on for what they found complete with the points on the end where the hoses go and everything.
Maybe NASA just doesn't have anything to do ATM with the end of the shuttle and the Russian rockets grounded?
Yeah but see where they get you is the weapons. You ever price a hellfire or a maverick? Them damned things ain't cheap friend, hell it'd be cheaper to buy a brand new ford Mustang and just drive it into someone's house than it would be to fire a single missile! I mean where's the damned Chinese knockoff when you need them huh? How the hell are you supposed to get rid of that crazy ex or deal with the asshole boss if you can't even get affordable heat seeks? This is America dammit, what good is the second amendment if I can't even get a good deal on some rockets for my drone!
As for TFA I'd say he's SOL. they are selling support and installation which is 100% fine and dandy by the GPL, just ask Red Hat. If you didn't want others to be able to profit from your work you should have released as a proprietary module and not the GPL.
The flip side of this though is why i think we'll never see a truly kick ass Linux desktop that can stand toe to toe with the polish of OSX and Windows, and that's because it takes millions of dollars worth of code to put that level of polish and with GPL somebody could just offer all the work you did for free if you built in on Linux which is why Jobs used BSD for Apple. that's why at least for me every time I try to deal with a Linux desktop it feels like a bazillion little programs all built without a care in the world in how they were gonna integrate together beyond CLI because...well that's pretty much what it is, tons of coders scratching personal itches instead of working together for a solid unified whole.
In the end the GPL is a double edged sword in that on the one hand it ensures that if you hand out code under GPL then under GPL it will stay but the flip side is nobody is gonna invest the insane levels of money it would take to make a truly integrated world class desktop out of it because like with Ubuntu there would be 50 free knockoffs and it would be damned hard to recoup your investment much less make a profit. i mean has Canonical even made a profit yet?
Yeah but they might end up with a memory that will last a lifetime! ya know how I found out there was no Santa? 1976 I hear a noise in the living room and snek down in my PJs to see Santa....only to see my dad cursing like a sailor with a Huffy Evel Knievel bike in like 300 pieces around him and the instructions taped to the wall. i can still hear him going "Stupid damned not put together/blam!/ who the hell built this stupid ass/slam/ where the hell does this go?".
But that and the gift my grandfather got me for my birthday that year taught me that what matters is family. I wanted an Electroman but apparently 1976 technology was pretty much shit in toys because he made no less than 4 round trips to the USAFB PX trying to get one that worked for more than a minute before giving up. First regular batteries...white smoke. Then alkaline batteries..white smoke...then duracells...white smoke...before finally he tried to use some no name brand...white smoke and sizzle. Finally he was like "How about a nice pinball machine instead?" . He must have racked up 200 miles on his car just trying to get a unit that would function for more than a couple of minutes.
Actually there is a simple way they can have a generous return policy, sell the returns as used AND end up making more money on the deal and it is this: Don't give them cash, give them a gift card for that amount.
I had an old teacher that spent many years managing an entire chain of stores down in FLA and he said 'if you give them cash you're an idiot' because if you give them a card they always spend over the card because they will NEVER find something the exact amount and they won't be able to stand leaving money in the store's pockets. He even told his managers to ignore corp policy of not accepting returns on personal items like bikinis and panties and he saw sales jump over 20% simply by giving them gift cards.
so this is one case where you actually CAN eat your cake and have it too simply because of human nature. he said he watched people spend $30 just to redeem every cent on an $18 gift card because they just couldn't stand that the store would get to "keep some of their money" even though all they were doing is giving the store more of THEIR money instead!
Exactly and you are 100% correct except that isn't what Intel did because they frankly didn't give a wet fart about producing the fastest code but crippling the competition since the ICC was known to be used (and still is BTW) on most benchmarking software!
What amazes and saddens me is frankly how badly/. has become infected by rampant fanboyism and flag waving. Doesn't ANYONE remember "Windows isn't done unless lotus won't run"? if this were MSFT putting in a code that made GPL code run like dogshit wouldn't everyone have a fit? wouldn't they be screaming for boycotts or calling for an antitrust investigation?
Well here have a company that not only bribed OEMs, one of which testified that Intel kickbacks were "like cocaine" and during the price wars there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell made were in the form of Intel kickbacks, if that wasn't enough they rigged their compiler to cripple the chips they didn't make or like and then lied their sorry asses off about it! look at the blog i linked to, he has emails straight from intel going back years where first they outright lie and say their compiler isn't doing anything and then when the evidence is shoved in their face they come up with the lame "Oh its just to make sure SSE works" which is complete and total horseshit because if that were the case there would be NO REASON to cripple their own Pentium III!
No my friend this is rigging the market plain and simple. it isn't like the SSE opcodes are a secret, it would be trivial to have the code check for the SSE flag and then simply run the appropriate SSE for the CPU. AMD has had the SSE 1 through SSE 3 as intel for several years now and the ONLY differences between them is SSE 4. So they could run completely safely on SSE 1- 3 and there would be NO argument from anybody, but they don't.
As I said the smoking gun that proves this was and is market rigging is the Pentium III. At the time the code rigging was first detected in ICC the Pentium III was stomping the P4 by a good 30% on many tasks but after the ICC rig magically their own Pentium III lost to the P4 by 40% even though we are talking the SAME chips on the SAME machines and the ONLY difference was the cripple code.
I was a lifelong Intel man, going back to the 386sx but after reading of this and looking at the evidence i can't in good conscience condone such behavior by buying a damned thing from a company that so blatantly rigs the market in such a matter. if you win because you have a better chip fine and dandy i'm happy for you. But as it is now we frankly can't use ANY of the most used benchmarks because they tie a boat anchor to non intel CPU as that netbook reviewer found out when trying to compare the Atom 525 to an E-350. Even though we all know that as an in order CPU the Atom is gonna lose to an out of order CPU of similar speed the benches consistently show the Atom as faster simply because of the cripple code.
In the end it comes down to this: They KNEW the Pentium 4 netburst arch was a turkey but they had nothing in the pipeline and they KNEW in a free market the one that had the better chip would win so they simply rigged the market to their favor. Now that they have (possibly because again we can't use benchmarking software and the only fair tests would be programs known to be compiled with GCC) a faster CPU they have simply kept the cripple code because it makes their chips look that much faster and lets them charge a higher premium. they should be busted for filing false statements, for presenting false data for every Intel CPU bought by the US gov, and they should be busted under Sherman antitrust both for the cripple code and for bribery. its just THAT simple and if any other company would have done it we'd be asking for their heads!
I may not be able to do much but at least i can highlight the lies when i see them and not a single new Intel chip will come through my shop.;
Riddle me this: how will they fulfill that mission if they are dead broke hmmm? ALL of their money comes from one thing and one thing only, and that is how many people use their browser. As was documented here on slashdot their numbers are in freefall and the Google deal is only good for 3 years. So how do they fulfill that mission if the next time the deal comes around Google doesn't want their search? Hell the way their numbers are falling they may not even get MSFT to buy their search as they are gonna end up with the same numbers as "Bob's browser' if the trend continues!
So I stand by my statement: If they don't get back to basics they damned well better become an OS company because their not gonna have enough users in 3 years to get even the spammers to buy their search rights!
I'm afraid you have been misinformed. you see, which has been documented (and was turned over to AMD's attorneys and was rumored to be part of why Intel quickly settled for 1.25 BILLION) quite extensively here the way Intel had their compiler rigged (which they do to this very day BTW, now they simply document it) is this:
1.-Any and all code compiled with the Intel compiler unless patched beforehand not to shall look at the CPUID for Genuine Intel. 2.- If Genuine Intel found run all optimization including the latest SSEs 3.- If not Genuine Intel drop code to slowest code path, X87 mode which ties a boat anchor to the program, to the tune of 40%+.
The smoking gun, the one that proves you've been misinformed is simply this: If Intel was only afraid of an incomplete SSE then why did They cripple the Pentium III as well as AMD hmmm? Surely the ones that INVENTED the Pentium III would know which SSEs it truly supported yes? It was actually a simple answer: At the time benchmarks had the PIII stomping the early P4s by as much as 30% in some tasks, but guess what happened after the cripple code got put in? Why suddenly the P4 is WINNING by 30%! Isn't that amazing?
You've been had friend, hell you are being had to this very day every time you look at a benchmark. Even one of the netbook sites I was looking at the reviewer posted "For some reason the Atom benches higher than the E series AMD chips, but real world tests don't seem to bear the benches out" well no shit because thanks to Intel the benches might as well be named Quack.exe! Hell don't believe me, run a benchmark on your I'm sure Intel CPU then use one of the many tools out there that will let you fake a different CPUID and watch what happens!
Don't forget to use the magic uncripple settings if you do that Mr AC or you'll be tying a boat anchor to every non Intel chip that tries to run you code.
Notice you had to post AC, that is pretty much all you can do with all the flag waving fangirls around here. And I was talking about their ORIGINAL mission, the one they announced when they switched from the suite to Firefox? Forget that one? hell their whole selling point was "to make the browser leaner and meaner, to get rid of cruft and old code, to make a truly great browser".
Well considering how many people are running to the hills and how even some of the Linux distros are switching to Chromium for default I'd say that mission is a big giant fail wouldn't you? I mean when i can sit on my XP box and literally watch the CPU jump with each letter typed in a fricking text box to steal the chorus of an old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". I have to support everything from netbooks and older office machines to the latest multicore and the simple facts are 1.- Firefox runs like shit now on AMD, especially on AMD netbooks and single cores. 2.- It sucks the life right out of netbooks thanks to all the CPU spiking, 3.- Sucks RAM like a drunk sucking booze at a free minibar, hell just try leaving it running overnight and write down how much memory it was using when you left and how much it was using when it came back and watch the numbers jump!, 4.-In my own tests I've found it to be pretty much unsuitable for purpose on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT and even then its a little iffy, dual cores are the minimum to get some performance across the board!
Its a fricking browser folks, but its getting like that old Emacs joke about "Its an OS that has a half ass editor included" only in this case its a half ass browser. its not like I'm the only one that has noticed it either and I bet if everyone here were to post their horror stories of FF the list would be longer than your arm!
So waste your mod points, stick your fingers in your ears and go "la la la' but that won't change reality which is FF numbers are dropping like a rock FOR A REASON folks. The whole reason i had to find an alternative browser was because I got tired of customers bitching about how damned slow and sucky FF was, with the CPU spiking getting fricking ridiculous not to mention the version numbers spinning like a top and breaking extensions and I was afraid they'd go back to IE.
Frankly I predict if they don't focus on their core business they damned well better hope they can become an OS developer because when the contract is up again they won't have enough users to sell their search engine rights for a dollar!
Frankly I just wish they'd go back to their mission statement of making a fast and lean browser because its gotten kinda ridiculous with the memory and CPU spiking, at least on Windows.
I mean we've just been given WebOS and so far at least Google has been pretty damned open with android (ts the carriers you have to worry about anyway) so do we REALLY need yet ANOTHER cell phone OS? That gives us RIM, WinPhone, Android, WebOS and then whatever it is they run on the lower end phones (Java maybe?) so I don't see how with a field that crowded they are gonna do any real good and if they can't get a major phone manufacturer to pick it up it'll be dead as MeeGo anyway.
Finally lets not forget the ONLY reason Google gives them any money at all is because they have a large enough market to make it worth the money but as we saw in Sept there numbers are going DOWN and not up.
So wouldn't the smart move be to concentrate on the browser and get the numbers back up instead of going off in a bunch of different directions?
Its the slang that'll throw you. I've talked to Aussies, Afrikaans and Brits and from hardest to easiest to understand was OZ, and then i'd say it would be a toss up for the other two because frankly other than a few slang words they both spoke pretty straight English.
Of course it was pretty funny to see their reactions to my southern drawl, the Aussie thought it was "cute" and kept wanting me to say something, the Afrikaan didn't get what the big deal was and the Brit was annoyed because "Can't you talk ANY faster?". of course having a southern drawl can be a boon, my GF sells vacation packages and she sells probably twice as many to northerners, after they get done with their "Hey Joey i gotta put this on the speaker, listen to how she talks!" bit.
Actually I've found Chromium based to frankly have a VERY limited vocabulary and when it gets confused it "runs home to mama" and will suggest words that aren't even close. When that is the case i simply right click on the word and have Yahoo search for it which will of course give the correct spelling but I can see someone simply not having the time or not knowing their browser has the ability to right click search specific words and missing a few.
Just because there is a spellcheck doesn't mean the thing is right you know. Dragon just redlined spellcheck and while a space and a hyphen are options there is also spellbinder and spellbound and under redline the first word it suggests is recliner, not exactly what i was going for. I've found the farther one gets from common words the worse that the built in spellchecks will do. Give it time, i'm sure it'll get better. And I don't know how the current IE and FF do as I've not used them in awhile but I bet they have about the same pass/fail ratio. For example dragon will redline if I put "i've" without the capital I but doesn't seem to care about "i'm" at all, curious.
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Again everyone seems to be selectively ignoring the smoking gun. if ANY of this was actually true, why would the cripple the Pentium III? After all who knows more about what the chip is doing than the vendor that made it?
The answer is simple and proof of dirty dealing: It simply doesn't have a damned thing about what implementation of SSE does what and is instead a way to cripple the competition in benchmarks and in every program that uses ICC. At the time the cripple code was first released the benchmarks consistently shows the late model P3 STOMPING the early model P4s by as much as 40%. the cripple code is added and voila! On the next release benches on the SAME CHIPS are showing the P4 WINNING by 40%! Wow, isn't that just amazing?
This is NO different than what MSFT did to DR-DOS and their little "Windows isn't done unless Lotus won't run" gag. the P4 was a disaster, one reviewer (I believed the Register) called in an "marchitecture" as it sacrificed everything so the marketing people could claim clock speed (The MHZ wars) but quickly found out it was useless in mobile and when ramped hit a thermal wall. so instead of accepting they lost this round they rigged the market both by bribing OEMs and with the cripple code. this is why you couldn't hardly find a single OEM with an Athlon chip, only Duron/Sempron, even though athlon was winning awards and competitions. Simply put their kickbacks were tied to how many AMD CPUs you sold and what type, the crappy chips were allowed, Athlon was not. Again no different than how MSFT tied Windows lower price to how many of the OTHER OSes you sold.
So please don't forget the smoking gun, because it simply blows the entire argument out of the water and makes what SSE the chip has moot. if ANYTHING that you said above was the actual reason then there wouldn't have been a reason for the P3 to have been crippled but it was. That is why Intel coughed up 1.25 BILLION rather than go to court because just that fact alone would have been a slam dunk for AMD.
Actually more of a case of "We need to convince the public to let loose the dogs of war AGAIN" because a US district court is NOW saying Iran did 9/11 which of course is a codeword for "Here are the brown people we are gonna murder while robbing your coffers this week!". Gotta give 'em credit, they have their lapdogs in the courts and MSM well trained by now and they are gonna milk that false flag for every dime they can.
I personally think they know the lie of infinite growth that the west's economies was built on is coming to an end and that we've hit or are about to hit pretty much peak everything and they are gonna grab as much as they can before they grab that last chopper out of Saigon while the country burns.
If there are any Iranians reading this? As an American allow me to say I'm sorry for the millions of your people that are about to die to fuel the greed of Zionists, the "Jesus won't come back if there ain't Jews in Zion!" religious nutbars that support them, and finally our corrupt government that will be taking massive kickbacks and using it as an excuse to make us even more of a police state. Please don't blame the American people as we have no more control over the war machine than you do over the mullahs and all we can do is watch the slaughter done in our name while being given a "Coke VS Pepsi" choice of one rich whore or the other. Sorry.
We are talking bulk storage, the guy never said anything about RAID. If it were a RAID sitch i'd agree 100% but I've used PCI SATA for bulk storage and it'll stream movie speed just fine. But considering there are Asrock boards with 3 PCIe slots for like $50 it isn't like you can't go AMD quad and have lots of PCIe if you want, and those include 6 SATA native. So add that in with the $55 quad i linked to you are still right at or under $200 depending on where you get the rest of the parts, for a quad server that's really damned cheap.
Bimbo Newton Crosby. These articles are nothing but trollbait, hell they might as well have trollface for the icon and the tag "U mad bro?". This is no different than " Will (insert Linux distro or FOSS in general) have a (insert massive fail or massive success) in (insert position)" or "Microsoft (insert buys company, kicks puppies) and thereby (insert horrible scenario) for the (insert web, country, or FOSS)".
I hate to say it but Mikey 400 accounts is right, slashdot does equal stagnated. I remember when we'd have posts running 200 counts or more arguing the merits or demerits of file systems, formats, technologies, and even if you disagreed with a position you learned something. now all we have is "nigger faggot cocksucker" either directly or in the form of shill astroturfer troll, militant flag waving and enough fangirl squees and squicks you'd think we were at a damned Justin beiber concert.
Personally I blame ACs and think there ought to be a simple way to just block AC posts completely or hide them instantly from view so anyone with an account never knows they even exist. There is NO cost to make an account (if there was Mikey 400 would be filing chp 11) and by making people take the couple of minutes to make an account then people would at least have to stand by their statements or spend all their times making accounts like Mikey 400. Anyone who has read my posting can see i call it as I see it, never minced words or gave a shit about mods and have been at excellent for more years than i can count so it isn't like your account is gonna go negative unless you are just being a douche for the sake of trolling, so there really is ZERO reason for having ACs and a shitload of reasons why we shouldn't have them. i mean look at this comment section, I bet more than 50% will be ACs, and in some posts they are closer to 90%. that is fucking nuts folks, lets get rid of ACs and cut out the bullshit.
Really? I thought the reason we are hated is the country has been taken over with war mongers and profiteers that will milk a false flag for everything its worth like how we are now saying Iran did 9/11 which I have to give them credit, first bin Laden, then Iraq and now Iran, they are milking the living hell out of that single "terrorist attack" to enact the neo-con design Wolfowitz came up with back in the 90s.
Of the countries he listed for conquest all that is left is Iran and Syria and it looks like the CIA will astroturf Syria like they did Libya with the Qatar soldiers (oh and while Al Qaeda helped naturally) so you really have to give the US war machine credit, they recycle their bullshit!
DivX 5 AVIs will play on damned near anything from that $30 Walamrt STB on up, you can get some pretty damned decent file sizes while having great picture and they are really easy to make with a wealth of converters out there.
Now as I said on my other post the AMD Phenom I quad CULV I linked to is only $55 and AMD AM2+ boards are dirt cheap now so that would take care of the hardware and if it were me and I were setting it up I'd use an old XP license sitting around to legit a copy of "XP Tiny Edition" that runs in just 56Mb of RAM (or if you don't give a shit about licenses they also have Tiny 2K3 but it'll take you a while to find a copy as the server version isn't as popular as Tiny XP and 7) and slap on Virtualdub and just have it convert in batches when the machine wasn't in use.
With the above parts and software you'd have a cheap quad server with tons of space that'll convert your videos to one of the most popular and widely supported formats easy peasy. Hell there are several tutorials on how to change aspect ratio to whatever your native is via VDub if you want to go to the extra trouble, me I have the VDub settings for 4x3 saved as a file for when my mom wants movies so she can watch them on her big old set (which she refuses to let me replace because "It works just fine for me") and have my Phenom II 6 core whip them off while i snooze. Can't get easier to use frankly.
If he just wants to go cheap and its gonna be stuck in some garage anyway i'd say white trash it like we did at my last shop. Me and the boss took a couple of the biggest cheapo ATX cases we could get our hands on, took out the motherboard mount and cut the frame on one, and finally a couple of small weld stuck them together. We ended up with something like 16 SCSI drives in that sucker for a total of 2Tb when most folks were still getting 80Gb drives. with those babies loaded with every single driver for just about every piece of hardware up to that point it was quick work to reload a PC.
:As for the board I'd go with something like a cheap AMD board with a nice cheap Phenom low power quad. you can get a Phenom I quad for $55 at Starmicro and add a couple of Gb of DDR 2 for maybe $25, board for around $40 and finally a decent HSF for around $15.
So when you figure in the cases which with no PSU can be had for less than $20 a piece from many places like Geeks you are looking at a final total of around $185 for a quad with 2Gb of RAM with an add on card for adding more SATA slots. Sure it won't be the prettiest thing around but if its just gonna be serving files from a corner somewhere who cares? I'd add a little more and get a full size board with lots of SATA slots and 3 PCI slots for adding more SATA cards and you'd have a thing you could load to the brim and with the low power Phenom quad you'll have plenty of power for controlling the whole deal and maybe even it doing some of the transcoding work via scripts at night when its not serving files.
Ya know, that is what i never understood. What was with the hard on for the towers? Wasn't that like the third hit on them? you'd think if they'd have wanted to hurt the USA they'd have hit the statue of liberty or at least rammed it down Wall Street (of course they could be forgiven for not knowing Goldman Sachs is the devil) instead of hitting the towers. did their pilots simply not have the ability to hit anything that wasn't the biggest thing in the area?
The only explanation I heard that kinda makes sense is that in ME countries there is usually a single building like "ministry of finance" to hit and with it called the world trade center maybe they thought you could do real damage to the economy by taking it out. but you'd think they would have hit the symbols first.
As for TFA allow me to personally thank all those that yanked their domains off GoDaddy, its nice to see some standing up for what you believe in. Its like how I switched to an AMD only shop when i found out Intel was (and still is) rigging the market. while i know that ultimately a single shop won't even make a dent at least my money isn't being used by them to rig the markets and stifle competition. Ultimately the vote with your wallet is pretty much the only vote we have now, what with congress critters bought before they are even sworn in nowadays.
so for all those that switched thanks, for all those that haven't please do. They are still supporting SOPA and are merely blowing smoke, and if i had domains they sure as hell wouldn't be with GoDaddy.
The problem with natural selection is gangbangers are notorious for being bad shots and tend to take out some family while shooting at some guy halfway down the block. look at the one a few weeks back where they spot a rival filming a rap video and unload, completely miss ALL their targets but hit a one year old being carried by his dad down the block right in the back of the head. Personally i'd be all for a "gangbanger arena" where they could go and blast the fuck out of each other with NO penalties. hell we could put it on PPV. If we had that then yes let Darwin sort them out.
Now as for methheads? you'd be surprised how well armed the metheads that are dealing are. That was the reason my friend quit being a cop, he was tired of pulling over someone for swerving and finding a dumbass cooking in a moving car with a BPV on and enough firepower to make Rambo go "Ya know, maybe you shouldn't carry so much hardware". Sure they may not have food for their kids but they'll have every weapon they can get their hands on. And once these guys get tweaked? Man. One of them he arrested had emptied something like 800 rounds at a tree. Why a tree? he was sure that tree had an FBI spycam hidden in it so he was gonna take it out. That is why one of those dipshits with a pack of hydras would be dangerous because they'd get tweaked and decide that car full of college kids was actually an unmarked and you'd have kiddie giblets all over the street.
As for the national guard? those things are already leaking like sieves, their weapons end up with bikers, militias, hell there was a local guy that got arrested who had real hand grenades and was using them as "really cool paperweights". But living in the south i can tell you the fed rolls the tanks and not only will every NG armory suddenly come up dry as a bone, not only will every vehicle they have that runs be gone, but every machine shop will be mounting tripods on the backs of all these pickups we have and turning them into technicals. From what I was told a good welder can whip off a top notch tripod mount for a 50 cal in under 40 minutes flat. I doubt seriously with all the firepower we have sitting in all these armories that we have to worry about a one sided battle if the feds rolled the tanks. That of course don't count all the IEDs that would be butt simple to cook up, after this this is a place where we have 3 or 4 guys a year busted for using dynamite as a fishing pole.
Thanks and that is why when it came out Intel was (and still is BTW) rigging their compiler and was bribing OEMs I switched to an AMD only shop simply because i know without competition frankly it would seriously suck. I mean if MSFT had rigged Windows to tie a boat anchor to GPL code can you imagine the screams? yet they'll still support a company that has admitted to bribery and rigging the benchmarks (again still are as one reviewer who didn't know about the ICC cripple code remarked when reviewing netbooks "The benches say that the Atom dual is faster than the AMD E series yet the real world doesn't bare this out for some reason" yeah its called "quack.exe" and is as old as putting your thumb on the scale) yet they'll still buy.
On the browser front I use as well as switched my customers over to Comodo Dragon and frankly everyone couldn't be happier. Its light, its snappy even on this 1.8GHz Sempron that I use as a nettop, its default settings have some really nice security features like using Comodo Secure DNS in the browser ONLY which is fast and stops malware and phishing sites you may stumble across, it even has an option to make it portable and run it off a thumbstick. i heartily recommend it. And of course the more competition we have in the market the better it is for ALL of us because they have to bring their A game or lose.
Dude you never tried the Dragon? it fucking rocks man! It by default (you can change it on install or after in options if you wish) will set it up so the browser and ONLY the browser uses the Comodo secure DNS which is not only excellent at blocking malware and driveby sites but if your regular DNS goes down its easy to spot with Comodo using a different DNS. It also supports all the chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox, is VERY fast and most importantly (at least for me) there is NO tracking. They remove ALL the google ID and phone home behavior of Chrome. You should try it, they even have an option on install that will make it portable and install to a thumbdrive if you wish. Just a rock solid browser and since switching my customers over i haven't heard a single complaint as they all just love the speed and ease of use!
Now this is OT but this is something that most folks forgets about that needs to be said: Today i invited a guy down the hall to Xmas dinner with my family, I just assumed everyone here would have somewhere to go but when the guy invited me to go with him to try to find a food joint open on Xmas it hit me the guy literally had nobody, nobody at all that gave a damn. I get to talking to him and his whole family is dead and the few that are left are distant kin that probably wouldn't even bother to show up to the man's funeral. So I told him to hop in the truck and I'd take him where we would get some REAL food, brought him out to my mom's and had a real old fashioned Xmas dinner with roast turkey and beef, all the fixings, and pies and pudding for dessert. I swear he ate like 3 helpings and was just thanking us over and over because i found out later his Xmas dinner was gonna be a TV dinner.
So on this holiday when so many of us have so much, family and friends, GFs/wives, more tech junk than we could ever use (I just counted and I'm up to 4 PCs and a netbook, how did THAT happen?) please don't forget to ask around and make sure that those around you aren't spending this Xmas alone because that is just damned depressing. After supper i loaded a couple of dozen movies off my USB drive onto his PC for him to watch and mom loaded him down with leftovers so at least i know they'll be one less person out there that had to have a sucky Xmas simply because nobody gave a damn. So do your little part to make this world a better place, okay?
I'll tell you why certain weapons shouldn't be sold...morons. I have a friend that used to be a cop and i'll never forget one of his stories: They pull over this car driving slow and acting funny, when they search the car they find four gangbangers and an RPG in the back seat. Now when my friend said "WTF were you planning to do with an RPG boy?" do you know what they said? Driveby. That's right, they were gonna try to shoot a rocket out of a moving 4 door at a rival's house. Needless to say they were shocked when my friend told them that if they would have tried to fire that thing the backblast have blown them up real good.
So that is why you can't buy a hellfire, because some dipshit that has seen too many Rambo movies will get a hold of it and try to do a driveby on his ex with the damned thing. I mean can you imagine some methhead all paranoid with a pack of hydra missiles and a launcher?
But don't worry friend because if the government ever rolls the tanks i'm sure the national guard armories will be nicely emptied faster than you can say Arab Spring.
Uhhhh...that don't make any sense friend as it isn't like MSFT and Apple where if Apple went tits up in the 90s MSFT stood there alone with a big old bullseye. If Mozilla closed shop tomorrow you'd still have Chromium AND Opera AND Safari AND IE AND Dragon AND probably another half a dozen I haven't thought of. Google is about as far from risking antitrust on the browser front as they can get and i'd argue if anything we are swimming in choices more than we have ever had before.
No lets cut through the bullshit and get to the real truth okay? Its not about "advancing the web" or any of that other bullshit its about two things and two things only: Advertising revenue and market share, plain and simple. All of Google's products come down to one thing, selling ads. Even with their numbers declining Mozilla brings them a LOT of eyeballs. if they didn't buy those eyeballs MSFT would have been more than happy to buy those eyeballs so Google shelled out, plain and simple.
Don't you just wish that once, just once, they'd quit with the marketspeak and just tell the truth? I mean how refreshing would it have been for them to say "We make money from ads and searches and Mozilla brings us more revenue, what's to understand?' and left it at that?
Why is NASA gonna look at the thing when somebody on the yahoo forums pointed out what it was and even provided a link? Sorry i don't have the link but, and excuse me if i don't get the make and model right as it was over a week ago, it was a hydrazine 104 liter tank, commonly used on some sats. anyway the guy provided a link and it looked pretty much dead on for what they found complete with the points on the end where the hoses go and everything.
Maybe NASA just doesn't have anything to do ATM with the end of the shuttle and the Russian rockets grounded?
Yeah but see where they get you is the weapons. You ever price a hellfire or a maverick? Them damned things ain't cheap friend, hell it'd be cheaper to buy a brand new ford Mustang and just drive it into someone's house than it would be to fire a single missile! I mean where's the damned Chinese knockoff when you need them huh? How the hell are you supposed to get rid of that crazy ex or deal with the asshole boss if you can't even get affordable heat seeks? This is America dammit, what good is the second amendment if I can't even get a good deal on some rockets for my drone!
As for TFA I'd say he's SOL. they are selling support and installation which is 100% fine and dandy by the GPL, just ask Red Hat. If you didn't want others to be able to profit from your work you should have released as a proprietary module and not the GPL.
The flip side of this though is why i think we'll never see a truly kick ass Linux desktop that can stand toe to toe with the polish of OSX and Windows, and that's because it takes millions of dollars worth of code to put that level of polish and with GPL somebody could just offer all the work you did for free if you built in on Linux which is why Jobs used BSD for Apple. that's why at least for me every time I try to deal with a Linux desktop it feels like a bazillion little programs all built without a care in the world in how they were gonna integrate together beyond CLI because...well that's pretty much what it is, tons of coders scratching personal itches instead of working together for a solid unified whole.
In the end the GPL is a double edged sword in that on the one hand it ensures that if you hand out code under GPL then under GPL it will stay but the flip side is nobody is gonna invest the insane levels of money it would take to make a truly integrated world class desktop out of it because like with Ubuntu there would be 50 free knockoffs and it would be damned hard to recoup your investment much less make a profit. i mean has Canonical even made a profit yet?
Yeah but they might end up with a memory that will last a lifetime! ya know how I found out there was no Santa? 1976 I hear a noise in the living room and snek down in my PJs to see Santa....only to see my dad cursing like a sailor with a Huffy Evel Knievel bike in like 300 pieces around him and the instructions taped to the wall. i can still hear him going "Stupid damned not put together /blam!/ who the hell built this stupid ass /slam/ where the hell does this go?".
But that and the gift my grandfather got me for my birthday that year taught me that what matters is family. I wanted an Electroman but apparently 1976 technology was pretty much shit in toys because he made no less than 4 round trips to the USAFB PX trying to get one that worked for more than a minute before giving up. First regular batteries...white smoke. Then alkaline batteries..white smoke...then duracells...white smoke...before finally he tried to use some no name brand...white smoke and sizzle. Finally he was like "How about a nice pinball machine instead?" . He must have racked up 200 miles on his car just trying to get a unit that would function for more than a couple of minutes.
Actually there is a simple way they can have a generous return policy, sell the returns as used AND end up making more money on the deal and it is this: Don't give them cash, give them a gift card for that amount.
I had an old teacher that spent many years managing an entire chain of stores down in FLA and he said 'if you give them cash you're an idiot' because if you give them a card they always spend over the card because they will NEVER find something the exact amount and they won't be able to stand leaving money in the store's pockets. He even told his managers to ignore corp policy of not accepting returns on personal items like bikinis and panties and he saw sales jump over 20% simply by giving them gift cards.
so this is one case where you actually CAN eat your cake and have it too simply because of human nature. he said he watched people spend $30 just to redeem every cent on an $18 gift card because they just couldn't stand that the store would get to "keep some of their money" even though all they were doing is giving the store more of THEIR money instead!
Exactly and you are 100% correct except that isn't what Intel did because they frankly didn't give a wet fart about producing the fastest code but crippling the competition since the ICC was known to be used (and still is BTW) on most benchmarking software!
What amazes and saddens me is frankly how badly /. has become infected by rampant fanboyism and flag waving. Doesn't ANYONE remember "Windows isn't done unless lotus won't run"? if this were MSFT putting in a code that made GPL code run like dogshit wouldn't everyone have a fit? wouldn't they be screaming for boycotts or calling for an antitrust investigation?
Well here have a company that not only bribed OEMs, one of which testified that Intel kickbacks were "like cocaine" and during the price wars there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell made were in the form of Intel kickbacks, if that wasn't enough they rigged their compiler to cripple the chips they didn't make or like and then lied their sorry asses off about it! look at the blog i linked to, he has emails straight from intel going back years where first they outright lie and say their compiler isn't doing anything and then when the evidence is shoved in their face they come up with the lame "Oh its just to make sure SSE works" which is complete and total horseshit because if that were the case there would be NO REASON to cripple their own Pentium III!
No my friend this is rigging the market plain and simple. it isn't like the SSE opcodes are a secret, it would be trivial to have the code check for the SSE flag and then simply run the appropriate SSE for the CPU. AMD has had the SSE 1 through SSE 3 as intel for several years now and the ONLY differences between them is SSE 4. So they could run completely safely on SSE 1- 3 and there would be NO argument from anybody, but they don't.
As I said the smoking gun that proves this was and is market rigging is the Pentium III. At the time the code rigging was first detected in ICC the Pentium III was stomping the P4 by a good 30% on many tasks but after the ICC rig magically their own Pentium III lost to the P4 by 40% even though we are talking the SAME chips on the SAME machines and the ONLY difference was the cripple code.
I was a lifelong Intel man, going back to the 386sx but after reading of this and looking at the evidence i can't in good conscience condone such behavior by buying a damned thing from a company that so blatantly rigs the market in such a matter. if you win because you have a better chip fine and dandy i'm happy for you. But as it is now we frankly can't use ANY of the most used benchmarks because they tie a boat anchor to non intel CPU as that netbook reviewer found out when trying to compare the Atom 525 to an E-350. Even though we all know that as an in order CPU the Atom is gonna lose to an out of order CPU of similar speed the benches consistently show the Atom as faster simply because of the cripple code.
In the end it comes down to this: They KNEW the Pentium 4 netburst arch was a turkey but they had nothing in the pipeline and they KNEW in a free market the one that had the better chip would win so they simply rigged the market to their favor. Now that they have (possibly because again we can't use benchmarking software and the only fair tests would be programs known to be compiled with GCC) a faster CPU they have simply kept the cripple code because it makes their chips look that much faster and lets them charge a higher premium. they should be busted for filing false statements, for presenting false data for every Intel CPU bought by the US gov, and they should be busted under Sherman antitrust both for the cripple code and for bribery. its just THAT simple and if any other company would have done it we'd be asking for their heads!
I may not be able to do much but at least i can highlight the lies when i see them and not a single new Intel chip will come through my shop.;
Riddle me this: how will they fulfill that mission if they are dead broke hmmm? ALL of their money comes from one thing and one thing only, and that is how many people use their browser. As was documented here on slashdot their numbers are in freefall and the Google deal is only good for 3 years. So how do they fulfill that mission if the next time the deal comes around Google doesn't want their search? Hell the way their numbers are falling they may not even get MSFT to buy their search as they are gonna end up with the same numbers as "Bob's browser' if the trend continues!
So I stand by my statement: If they don't get back to basics they damned well better become an OS company because their not gonna have enough users in 3 years to get even the spammers to buy their search rights!
I'm afraid you have been misinformed. you see, which has been documented (and was turned over to AMD's attorneys and was rumored to be part of why Intel quickly settled for 1.25 BILLION) quite extensively here the way Intel had their compiler rigged (which they do to this very day BTW, now they simply document it) is this:
1.-Any and all code compiled with the Intel compiler unless patched beforehand not to shall look at the CPUID for Genuine Intel. 2.- If Genuine Intel found run all optimization including the latest SSEs 3.- If not Genuine Intel drop code to slowest code path, X87 mode which ties a boat anchor to the program, to the tune of 40%+.
The smoking gun, the one that proves you've been misinformed is simply this: If Intel was only afraid of an incomplete SSE then why did They cripple the Pentium III as well as AMD hmmm? Surely the ones that INVENTED the Pentium III would know which SSEs it truly supported yes? It was actually a simple answer: At the time benchmarks had the PIII stomping the early P4s by as much as 30% in some tasks, but guess what happened after the cripple code got put in? Why suddenly the P4 is WINNING by 30%! Isn't that amazing?
You've been had friend, hell you are being had to this very day every time you look at a benchmark. Even one of the netbook sites I was looking at the reviewer posted "For some reason the Atom benches higher than the E series AMD chips, but real world tests don't seem to bear the benches out" well no shit because thanks to Intel the benches might as well be named Quack.exe! Hell don't believe me, run a benchmark on your I'm sure Intel CPU then use one of the many tools out there that will let you fake a different CPUID and watch what happens!
Don't forget to use the magic uncripple settings if you do that Mr AC or you'll be tying a boat anchor to every non Intel chip that tries to run you code.
Notice you had to post AC, that is pretty much all you can do with all the flag waving fangirls around here. And I was talking about their ORIGINAL mission, the one they announced when they switched from the suite to Firefox? Forget that one? hell their whole selling point was "to make the browser leaner and meaner, to get rid of cruft and old code, to make a truly great browser".
Well considering how many people are running to the hills and how even some of the Linux distros are switching to Chromium for default I'd say that mission is a big giant fail wouldn't you? I mean when i can sit on my XP box and literally watch the CPU jump with each letter typed in a fricking text box to steal the chorus of an old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". I have to support everything from netbooks and older office machines to the latest multicore and the simple facts are 1.- Firefox runs like shit now on AMD, especially on AMD netbooks and single cores. 2.- It sucks the life right out of netbooks thanks to all the CPU spiking, 3.- Sucks RAM like a drunk sucking booze at a free minibar, hell just try leaving it running overnight and write down how much memory it was using when you left and how much it was using when it came back and watch the numbers jump!, 4.-In my own tests I've found it to be pretty much unsuitable for purpose on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT and even then its a little iffy, dual cores are the minimum to get some performance across the board!
Its a fricking browser folks, but its getting like that old Emacs joke about "Its an OS that has a half ass editor included" only in this case its a half ass browser. its not like I'm the only one that has noticed it either and I bet if everyone here were to post their horror stories of FF the list would be longer than your arm!
So waste your mod points, stick your fingers in your ears and go "la la la' but that won't change reality which is FF numbers are dropping like a rock FOR A REASON folks. The whole reason i had to find an alternative browser was because I got tired of customers bitching about how damned slow and sucky FF was, with the CPU spiking getting fricking ridiculous not to mention the version numbers spinning like a top and breaking extensions and I was afraid they'd go back to IE.
Frankly I predict if they don't focus on their core business they damned well better hope they can become an OS developer because when the contract is up again they won't have enough users to sell their search engine rights for a dollar!
Frankly I just wish they'd go back to their mission statement of making a fast and lean browser because its gotten kinda ridiculous with the memory and CPU spiking, at least on Windows.
I mean we've just been given WebOS and so far at least Google has been pretty damned open with android (ts the carriers you have to worry about anyway) so do we REALLY need yet ANOTHER cell phone OS? That gives us RIM, WinPhone, Android, WebOS and then whatever it is they run on the lower end phones (Java maybe?) so I don't see how with a field that crowded they are gonna do any real good and if they can't get a major phone manufacturer to pick it up it'll be dead as MeeGo anyway.
Finally lets not forget the ONLY reason Google gives them any money at all is because they have a large enough market to make it worth the money but as we saw in Sept there numbers are going DOWN and not up.
So wouldn't the smart move be to concentrate on the browser and get the numbers back up instead of going off in a bunch of different directions?
Its the slang that'll throw you. I've talked to Aussies, Afrikaans and Brits and from hardest to easiest to understand was OZ, and then i'd say it would be a toss up for the other two because frankly other than a few slang words they both spoke pretty straight English.
Of course it was pretty funny to see their reactions to my southern drawl, the Aussie thought it was "cute" and kept wanting me to say something, the Afrikaan didn't get what the big deal was and the Brit was annoyed because "Can't you talk ANY faster?". of course having a southern drawl can be a boon, my GF sells vacation packages and she sells probably twice as many to northerners, after they get done with their "Hey Joey i gotta put this on the speaker, listen to how she talks!" bit.
Actually I've found Chromium based to frankly have a VERY limited vocabulary and when it gets confused it "runs home to mama" and will suggest words that aren't even close. When that is the case i simply right click on the word and have Yahoo search for it which will of course give the correct spelling but I can see someone simply not having the time or not knowing their browser has the ability to right click search specific words and missing a few.
Just because there is a spellcheck doesn't mean the thing is right you know. Dragon just redlined spellcheck and while a space and a hyphen are options there is also spellbinder and spellbound and under redline the first word it suggests is recliner, not exactly what i was going for. I've found the farther one gets from common words the worse that the built in spellchecks will do. Give it time, i'm sure it'll get better. And I don't know how the current IE and FF do as I've not used them in awhile but I bet they have about the same pass/fail ratio. For example dragon will redline if I put "i've" without the capital I but doesn't seem to care about "i'm" at all, curious.