The problem is you're assuming that AMD will run out of cash first.
AMD has about $1 Billion in the bank. Intel has about $7 Billion in the bank. Intel's expenses are about 10 times as much as AMD. So if both companies were to give away their processors, Intel would run out of money first.
The assumption that Intel would automatically win a price war is very questionable.
The plants being closed were mainly used for foundry business. AMD does not want to be a foundry: the TSMC's of the world do that much better, and AMD wants to focus on their core competencies: processors and flash. The foundry business is almost accidental. It generally comes from AMD spinoffs designing communications and analog IC's who were transitioning to traditional foundries. Now they'll just have to transition faster.
The Gateway move was also not unexpected. Gateway is in lots of trouble. They want their big friends (Intel) to help them out, and so they are demonstrating their loyalty to their big friends.
JC had something interesting to say about this. (www.jc-news.com). Here's an excerpt. Click the link to get the whole thing:
There will be some resistance against this, but let me tell you why the resistance is really there: People were not turned off from the "PR" ratings (hmmm, that's a redundant way of saying it, isn't it? "Performance Rating ratings"??) because they were there or because they failed. People were turned off from them because they did not represent actual performance. A "PR400" Cyrix chip did not run as fast as a 400MHz Pentium II. Heck, it didn't even run as fast as a 400MHz Celeron! In order to find the performance of that particular Cyrix chip, you had to take a 400MHz K6-2 and downclock the chipset from 100MHz to 66MHz (even though the Cyrix chip was running at 100MHz chipset setting). Then, the Cyrix chip only matched the K6-2-400 as a *best case scenario*. In most other benchmarks, said chip did not even outperform equally clocked K6 chips, and in certain nontrivial circumstances, the Cyrix chip performed like much lower frequency processors Frankly, it was insulting to the masses, but it was insulting not because it was a performance rating, but because it was abused.
Currently, systems are sold on equally misleading ratings called "clock frequency". "Clock frequency" is not quite as bad as the abuse that Cyrix gave to their performance ratings, but it is pretty misleading. I'm surprised that system vendors have not been taken to task for customer abuse relating to implication that frequency is an accurate determinant of processor performance between microarchitectures (especially where the Celeron and VIA C3 is involved!). So, you see, I view the Athlon model numbering scheme as being more honest to the consumer than the overly abused megahertz rating.
if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
The right answer is "no". But turn the question around.
If you two could get copyright law overturned, would you do it?
Here, the answer is an obvious "yes". Microsoft could still get people to sign licenses: after all, a contract is a contract. But then they have to follow the chain of contracts, and sue for breach of contract.
For example:
They sell you Windows 2007 and you sign a contract saying that you will not give it to anybody else. Then you give a copy to a friend, who gives a copy to a distributor who makes and sells millions of copies. Microsoft would have trouble suing the distributor: he did not breach any contract, and he did not deprive anybody of their copy. Microsoft could sue you: the court would probably restrict your damages to a small multiple of the purchase price. That's if they could find you in the first place.
On the other hand, your contract may state the penalty that breach of contract is the full development price of the product: say a billion dollars or so. So how is Microsoft going to get 1 billion out of you? And WTF were you doing signing that contract in the first place?
But we did not deprive Microsoft of any flerbage, did we? They could still sell under any sort of contract they want to. And they can enforce that contract.
Sci-Tec instruments (now kipp & zonen) used them as embedded computers to control a lot of tank gauging equipment all across the Canadian prairies. Awesome things, they are still going.
I managed to buy two of them off Sci-Tec for $10 a piece back in 1995, and used them all throughout University to take notes. Much superior to a "real" laptop, they were smaller, lighter, had a rocking battery life and an awesome keyboard. 32K of RAM stored about a week's worth of notes, easy to transfer with a null modem cable. Several times I even used the built in 300 baud modem to transfer my notes from the lounge at school.
I bought 2 because I figured I'd need one for spare parts. After all, they were heavily abused and about 10 years old. Hah. They're still going strong. Every once in a while I still throw it in my knapsack when I want to type something up in the middle of the park.
The difference is easy if you look at it economically:
Trademarks are really "property": they are a limited resource. Once somebody has used "MySQL" to uniquely name a product, nobody else can uniquely name their product "MySQL". Therefore, standard property rules should apply to them: they can be bought and sold, and laws should prevent theft.
Whereas software can be inifinitely copied. The only limit on the number of copies of MySQL that can be made is the information/energy content of the universe.
trademark is good IP. copyright and patent laws may be a way of encouraging the creation of software, but they are not provably efficient like standard property is.
"blows out of the water for compatibility". There I disagree. He got everything working except sound, and that will work soon. I might wait on buying an ibook until sound does work, but to say that's the major difference is really exagerattion.
And they are two different beasts. Yours has that gorgeous 15" screen and better 3D graphics. His is a lot smaller, a lot quieter, has a built in Firewire port, built in wireless ethernet antenna, bigger RAM capacity, longer battery life, built in TV out.
Yours is a desktop replacement.
I'm tempted by the iBook as well. Because it's quiet, it's got TV out and a 1394 port it would actually work well hooked up to the entertainment centre.
But I don't want to spend that cash right now. I'll probably build a quiet system around an nForce. Dolby digital out moves that D->A stage outside of the very electrically noisy computer. Hopefully I can turn off compression for 2 channel sound and I can get it to work in Linux.
- junkyards. The metal junkyard on our farm was a source of inspiration for me. Most of the time you couldn't tell what a piece of junk came from, trying to figure that out stretched the brain. Of course the pieces themselves would then be assembled into giant robots. Just make sure your kid is up to date on his tetanus shots...
- unconnected computers. (not even to a BBS) Since you can't download games or surf the web, and you can't afford to buy them, you have to make your own, or else try to crack the games you've borrowed for friends.
There's nothing wrong with the policy. The problem was that the policy was not clearly stated.
If the policy ended up saving ACME a lot of money (recovering stolen cars, few accidents -> cheaper insurance) and they passed the savings on to me, sure I'd rent from them. I don't speed: Cheaper rentals would be awesome.
"You could probably save money by getting about 4 phone lines and isp accounts and combining the bandwidth."
OK, let's figure this out. We'll use my parent's farm as an example.
First of all, we need more than 4 phone lines: because they are out in the boonies, their maximum connect rate with a 56K modem is 24kbps. So rather than 4 phone lines, we need about 16 to reach 400kbps. 16x$25 / month gives me $400 / month.
Installation costs? SaskTel might actually have 16 pairs running to the farm. Once you start digging up the ground, you might as well run enough pairs. What does it cost to run cable, especially in rocky terrain, for short distances? I'll use $50,000 per mile. That's off the top of my head, but I think it's about right. And we need about a mile to reach the trunk.
And it's the nature of telephone companies: whether or not they have to dig new lines or not, that's about what they'd charge. They only charged about $2,000 to hook us up originally, reasonably priced access for everyone is a condition of their monopoly. They'd jump at the price to get their full sunk cost back.
$150 for high speed internet is cheap. As an example, my parents used to pay $70 a month just to get real-time agriculture commodity price information delivered via satellite to the farm.
$150 a month for high speed internet makes living in the country an option for people like me, who depend on quality internet access to do their work. You save the money elsewhere: you can buy a nice house for $20K. When my brother bought a house, he bought it on a line of credit: it was cheaper to pay the extra interest than to pay the mortgage fees.
Bryan
Re:What are the ethical implications here?
on
BoyCott Advance
·
· Score: 1
"What is so hard to understand about the fact that just because something isn't physical doesn't mean it isn't property?"
Intellectual works are fundamentally different from limited economic goods. To pretend they are the same is pure foolishness.
The word "property" implies something that can be taken away from you. Nobody can take intellectual works away from you unless they steal the physical disk that it's stored on.
If intellectual works were truly property and followed the laws of economics, their price would be basically the "marginal" cost of production. Fixed costs have very little relevance in the pricing of commodities. Granted, video games aren't commodities, but there are enough producers around that it should be a true marketplace. But it isn't, due to government intervention in the market.
Bryan
possible confusing part in FAQ
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
RE: I want to distribute binaries of a GPL-covered program without accompanying sources. Instead of sending source code later to users who order it, can I just put the source on an Internet server?
I assume that this doesn't apply to the case where I put the binaries & source on the Internet, Jane Doe downloads it off of the internet, gives it to her brother John who lives at the north pole without internet access. It's Jane who has the responsibility to get John the source, not me, right?
Basically, I believe it means that you should probably be prepared to distribute source every way you distribute binaries. If you ship floppies full of binaries in the mail, expect to ship floppies full of source. If you don't, don't worry about it.
If it's not that hard, how come you follow up somebody who got it right, with something wrong?
The original TBird and the "Athlon C" are basically the same core, with a minor revision to eek out a few hundred more megahertz of speed.
1) K7: Original Slot A Athlon at 0.25 microns
2) K75: Slot A Athlon at 0.18 microns
3) Thunderbird. AKA "Athlon with Performance Enhancing Cache". Socket A, although some Slot A's were made. This may be a faster cache, but it is also smaller than the 512K external cache that the first two Athlons had. The original version of Thunderbird barely made it to 1.2GHz. The "C" revision looks like it'll go to about 1.5GHz.
4) Palomino, or "Athlon 4".
I hope they use a different name for the desktop version. It sounds good as a mobile version, because Intel doesn't have a Pentium 4 mobile, but I think AMD will want to make sure that people make fundamental comparisons on the desktop rather than superficial.
You always hear (friend of a friend) stories about people who paint pictures, value them at $1000, then donate them to the local Red Cross or YMCA.
My impression is that's a good way to get yourself audited, but if you can sell other paintings for $1000, it is legal.
I've had companies charge $150 an hour for my time, so why can't I donate code to the FSF or other charitable group, and get myself a nice fat charitable donation?
Intel recommends it, but of course it's somewhat overkill. If you've got the recommended 1lb heatsink on the P4, you're putting a lot of flex on your motherboard. If you moved it around everday, I suppose you eventually might kill it....
We've got a lot fewer components inside each computer, but they work at much higher frequencies. And higher frequencies generally imply more power. Not only are processor speeds higher, but so are bus speeds. Even your hard drive spins at 7-10 000 RPM.
I remember PC's that shipped with 85W power supplies. That wasn't enough, but it should tell you something.
Look at all the components in your computer with a heat sink, and or fan on them: your processor, your video card, your northbridge, your voltage regulator transistors.
The other problem is that a 250W power supply supplies power at 3 or 4 different voltages. You can max out one with lots of headroom left on the others.
If you have an Athlon or a P4, you need either a rock-solid 250W power supply or a higher rated one.
It's surprising how many marginal PC's there are out there. That Blue Screen of Death might not be Microsoft's fault. Try Linux on it. If it panics under load, you've probably got a memory or power supply problem.
Unfortunately, even if they gave away P4's for free, a P4 system will not be a budget system, at least not until it supports SDRAM.
1) Motherboards for P4 are almost $100 more expensive than for P3's or Athlons. The cheapest P4 motherboard on Pricewatch is $175. This will go down somewhat as volumes get better, but not much. A P4 motherboard has two strikes against it: It's hard to lay out because it has to support the 400MHz Rambus clocks (dual channel, even), and because the Intel chipset that supports the P4 is more expensive than the Via chipsets you can get for P3 or Athlon
2) RAM is way more expensive. You need 2 sticks of RDRAM. A single 64Meg stick of rdram costs $60 ($120 for 2). You can get 128Meg of PC133 for $30. I put 256MB in the last budget PC I put together, so that makes things even worse.
3) You need a special case. Add a few more dollars.
4) You need a good power supply. Well, so does the Athlon. A 1.333GHz Athlon and a 1.5GHz P4 both have about the same max power (73Watts). (comparing apples to apples). But the P3 and the Via C3 (now that's a budget processor) both can get by with cheap power supplies.
In total, you have to add about $200 to the price of that P4. You can get a high end Athlon for about $200. Kind of makes it hard for Intel to compete, doesn't it?
When I first saw this article I thought, what an excellent idea! Make a browser plug in for the clueless people so we can get a critical mass, so this might actually succeed, unlike AlterNIC and al the other failures. There's nothing stopping me from fixing my resolv.conf rather than using the stupid plugin.
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
"Manufacture anything for no cost? I think you've seen too much Star Trek. What about the cost in energy? And the associated costs of getting the energy?"
By this definition, Linux is non-free as well. Heck, you need a ~$1000 computer to run it, plus a few dollars a month for electricity. This does not make Linux non-free. The bandwidth to download it is non-free: many people find it cheaper to buy a $2 cheap bytes CD than to pay for the bandwidth.
Is Linux free as in "free beer"? To the end user it isn't, it costs a few bucks to install. As far as the market is concerned, it is: the cost is exactly zero, and the economics of unlimited goods apply, rather than the standard supply and demand of scarce goods that everybody understands.
The best measure of how much technology is affecting society is the average life span. Pollution and car accidents make it go down, modern plumbing, modern medicine and good information transfer make it go up.
So how are we doing? A link from a previous slashdot article indicated that life expectancy is going up by 120 days per year. I'd say that increases are coming as fast and furious as they used to be.
I'm not sure about the States, but many jurisdictions count the number of "ruined ballots", which most people consider a protest vote. I have written "none of the above" across my ballots before.
Back when the K6 was still competitive, AMD people thought Tom had a strong anti-AMD bias. Later, AMD just about went bankrupt as the Celeron started dumping all over the K6.
Back when 3dfx was still competitive, people though Tom had an anti-3dfx bias. Today, 3dfx is in a lot of trouble.
Now Tom has an anti-Intel bias? Based on experience, I'd be worried for Intel, not for Tom....
The marginal cost of information is zero. Therefore, in a rational marketplace, by economic theory, the marginal price of information should be just above zero.
That's what the statement means to me. No moral judgement, but it means that any market where the marginal cost of information is not basically zero is not a rational marketplace.
Copyrights are not rational or efficient in economic terms, and require government intervention to protect. Whether they are morally right or not is a different debate.
I would hardly call it a "major issue for development".
Putting it on Slashdot is like shooting gophers with a double-barreled shotgun. Sure, it'll probably solve the problem, but the gore left behind will disgust messy.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is you're assuming that AMD will run out of cash first.
AMD has about $1 Billion in the bank. Intel has about $7 Billion in the bank. Intel's expenses are about 10 times as much as AMD. So if both companies were to give away their processors, Intel would run out of money first.
The assumption that Intel would automatically win a price war is very questionable.
Bryan
There's not much unexpected here.
The plants being closed were mainly used for foundry business. AMD does not want to be a foundry: the TSMC's of the world do that much better, and AMD wants to focus on their core competencies: processors and flash. The foundry business is almost accidental. It generally comes from AMD spinoffs designing communications and analog IC's who were transitioning to traditional foundries. Now they'll just have to transition faster.
The Gateway move was also not unexpected. Gateway is in lots of trouble. They want their big friends (Intel) to help them out, and so they are demonstrating their loyalty to their big friends.
Bryan
There will be some resistance against this, but let me tell you why the resistance is really there: People were not turned off from the "PR" ratings (hmmm, that's a redundant way of saying it, isn't it? "Performance Rating ratings"??) because they were there or because they failed. People were turned off from them because they did not represent actual performance. A "PR400" Cyrix chip did not run as fast as a 400MHz Pentium II. Heck, it didn't even run as fast as a 400MHz Celeron! In order to find the performance of that particular Cyrix chip, you had to take a 400MHz K6-2 and downclock the chipset from 100MHz to 66MHz (even though the Cyrix chip was running at 100MHz chipset setting). Then, the Cyrix chip only matched the K6-2-400 as a *best case scenario*. In most other benchmarks, said chip did not even outperform equally clocked K6 chips, and in certain nontrivial circumstances, the Cyrix chip performed like much lower frequency processors Frankly, it was insulting to the masses, but it was insulting not because it was a performance rating, but because it was abused.
Currently, systems are sold on equally misleading ratings called "clock frequency". "Clock frequency" is not quite as bad as the abuse that Cyrix gave to their performance ratings, but it is pretty misleading. I'm surprised that system vendors have not been taken to task for customer abuse relating to implication that frequency is an accurate determinant of processor performance between microarchitectures (especially where the Celeron and VIA C3 is involved!). So, you see, I view the Athlon model numbering scheme as being more honest to the consumer than the overly abused megahertz rating.
if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
The right answer is "no". But turn the question around.
If you two could get copyright law overturned, would you do it?
Here, the answer is an obvious "yes". Microsoft could still get people to sign licenses: after all, a contract is a contract. But then they have to follow the chain of contracts, and sue for breach of contract.
For example:
They sell you Windows 2007 and you sign a contract saying that you will not give it to anybody else. Then you give a copy to a friend, who gives a copy to a distributor who makes and sells millions of copies. Microsoft would have trouble suing the distributor: he did not breach any contract, and he did not deprive anybody of their copy. Microsoft could sue you: the court would probably restrict your damages to a small multiple of the purchase price. That's if they could find you in the first place.
On the other hand, your contract may state the penalty that breach of contract is the full development price of the product: say a billion dollars or so. So how is Microsoft going to get 1 billion out of you? And WTF were you doing signing that contract in the first place?
But we did not deprive Microsoft of any flerbage, did we? They could still sell under any sort of contract they want to. And they can enforce that contract.
Bryan
Sci-Tec instruments (now kipp & zonen) used them as embedded computers to control a lot of tank gauging equipment all across the Canadian prairies. Awesome things, they are still going.
I managed to buy two of them off Sci-Tec for $10 a piece back in 1995, and used them all throughout University to take notes. Much superior to a "real" laptop, they were smaller, lighter, had a rocking battery life and an awesome keyboard. 32K of RAM stored about a week's worth of notes, easy to transfer with a null modem cable. Several times I even used the built in 300 baud modem to transfer my notes from the lounge at school.
I bought 2 because I figured I'd need one for spare parts. After all, they were heavily abused and about 10 years old. Hah. They're still going strong. Every once in a while I still throw it in my knapsack when I want to type something up in the middle of the park.
Bryan
The difference is easy if you look at it economically:
Trademarks are really "property": they are a limited resource. Once somebody has used "MySQL" to uniquely name a product, nobody else can uniquely name their product "MySQL". Therefore, standard property rules should apply to them: they can be bought and sold, and laws should prevent theft.
Whereas software can be inifinitely copied. The only limit on the number of copies of MySQL that can be made is the information/energy content of the universe.
trademark is good IP. copyright and patent laws may be a way of encouraging the creation of software, but they are not provably efficient like standard property is.
Bryan
"blows out of the water for compatibility". There I disagree. He got everything working except sound, and that will work soon. I might wait on buying an ibook until sound does work, but to say that's the major difference is really exagerattion.
And they are two different beasts. Yours has that gorgeous 15" screen and better 3D graphics. His is a lot smaller, a lot quieter, has a built in Firewire port, built in wireless ethernet antenna, bigger RAM capacity, longer battery life, built in TV out.
Yours is a desktop replacement.
I'm tempted by the iBook as well. Because it's quiet, it's got TV out and a 1394 port it would actually work well hooked up to the entertainment centre.
But I don't want to spend that cash right now. I'll probably build a quiet system around an nForce. Dolby digital out moves that D->A stage outside of the very electrically noisy computer. Hopefully I can turn off compression for 2 channel sound and I can get it to work in Linux.
Bryan
- junkyards. The metal junkyard on our farm was a source of inspiration for me. Most of the time you couldn't tell what a piece of junk came from, trying to figure that out stretched the brain. Of course the pieces themselves would then be assembled into giant robots. Just make sure your kid is up to date on his tetanus shots...
- unconnected computers. (not even to a BBS) Since you can't download games or surf the web, and you can't afford to buy them, you have to make your own, or else try to crack the games you've borrowed for friends.
Bryan
There's nothing wrong with the policy. The problem was that the policy was not clearly stated.
If the policy ended up saving ACME a lot of money (recovering stolen cars, few accidents -> cheaper insurance) and they passed the savings on to me, sure I'd rent from them. I don't speed: Cheaper rentals would be awesome.
Bryan
"You could probably save money by getting about 4 phone lines and isp accounts and combining the bandwidth."
OK, let's figure this out. We'll use my parent's farm as an example.
First of all, we need more than 4 phone lines: because they are out in the boonies, their maximum connect rate with a 56K modem is 24kbps. So rather than 4 phone lines, we need about 16 to reach 400kbps. 16x$25 / month gives me $400 / month.
Installation costs? SaskTel might actually have 16 pairs running to the farm. Once you start digging up the ground, you might as well run enough pairs. What does it cost to run cable, especially in rocky terrain, for short distances? I'll use $50,000 per mile. That's off the top of my head, but I think it's about right. And we need about a mile to reach the trunk.
And it's the nature of telephone companies: whether or not they have to dig new lines or not, that's about what they'd charge. They only charged about $2,000 to hook us up originally, reasonably priced access for everyone is a condition of their monopoly. They'd jump at the price to get their full sunk cost back.
$150 for high speed internet is cheap. As an example, my parents used to pay $70 a month just to get real-time agriculture commodity price information delivered via satellite to the farm.
$150 a month for high speed internet makes living in the country an option for people like me, who depend on quality internet access to do their work. You save the money elsewhere: you can buy a nice house for $20K. When my brother bought a house, he bought it on a line of credit: it was cheaper to pay the extra interest than to pay the mortgage fees.
Bryan
It means that you haven't been brainwashed.
Here's what the Free Software Foundation has to say about the word "property".
Intellectual works are fundamentally different from limited economic goods. To pretend they are the same is pure foolishness.
The word "property" implies something that can be taken away from you. Nobody can take intellectual works away from you unless they steal the physical disk that it's stored on.
If intellectual works were truly property and followed the laws of economics, their price would be basically the "marginal" cost of production. Fixed costs have very little relevance in the pricing of commodities. Granted, video games aren't commodities, but there are enough producers around that it should be a true marketplace. But it isn't, due to government intervention in the market.
Bryan
RE: I want to distribute binaries of a GPL-covered program without accompanying sources. Instead of sending source code later to users who order it, can I just put the source on an Internet server?
I assume that this doesn't apply to the case where I put the binaries & source on the Internet, Jane Doe downloads it off of the internet, gives it to her brother John who lives at the north pole without internet access. It's Jane who has the responsibility to get John the source, not me, right?
Basically, I believe it means that you should probably be prepared to distribute source every way you distribute binaries. If you ship floppies full of binaries in the mail, expect to ship floppies full of source. If you don't, don't worry about it.
This answer should be clarified, I think.
If it's not that hard, how come you follow up somebody who got it right, with something wrong?
The original TBird and the "Athlon C" are basically the same core, with a minor revision to eek out a few hundred more megahertz of speed.
1) K7: Original Slot A Athlon at 0.25 microns
2) K75: Slot A Athlon at 0.18 microns
3) Thunderbird. AKA "Athlon with Performance Enhancing Cache". Socket A, although some Slot A's were made. This may be a faster cache, but it is also smaller than the 512K external cache that the first two Athlons had. The original version of Thunderbird barely made it to 1.2GHz. The "C" revision looks like it'll go to about 1.5GHz.
4) Palomino, or "Athlon 4".
I hope they use a different name for the desktop version. It sounds good as a mobile version, because Intel doesn't have a Pentium 4 mobile, but I think AMD will want to make sure that people make fundamental comparisons on the desktop rather than superficial.
Bryan
You always hear (friend of a friend) stories about people who paint pictures, value them at $1000, then donate them to the local Red Cross or YMCA.
My impression is that's a good way to get yourself audited, but if you can sell other paintings for $1000, it is legal.
I've had companies charge $150 an hour for my time, so why can't I donate code to the FSF or other charitable group, and get myself a nice fat charitable donation?
Bryan
Intel recommends it, but of course it's somewhat overkill. If you've got the recommended 1lb heatsink on the P4, you're putting a lot of flex on your motherboard. If you moved it around everday, I suppose you eventually might kill it....
Some things use less power, some things use more.
We've got a lot fewer components inside each computer, but they work at much higher frequencies. And higher frequencies generally imply more power. Not only are processor speeds higher, but so are bus speeds. Even your hard drive spins at 7-10 000 RPM.
I remember PC's that shipped with 85W power supplies. That wasn't enough, but it should tell you something.
Look at all the components in your computer with a heat sink, and or fan on them: your processor, your video card, your northbridge, your voltage regulator transistors.
The other problem is that a 250W power supply supplies power at 3 or 4 different voltages. You can max out one with lots of headroom left on the others.
If you have an Athlon or a P4, you need either a rock-solid 250W power supply or a higher rated one.
It's surprising how many marginal PC's there are out there. That Blue Screen of Death might not be Microsoft's fault. Try Linux on it. If it panics under load, you've probably got a memory or power supply problem.
Bryan
Unfortunately, even if they gave away P4's for free, a P4 system will not be a budget system, at least not until it supports SDRAM.
1) Motherboards for P4 are almost $100 more expensive than for P3's or Athlons. The cheapest P4 motherboard on Pricewatch is $175. This will go down somewhat as volumes get better, but not much. A P4 motherboard has two strikes against it: It's hard to lay out because it has to support the 400MHz Rambus clocks (dual channel, even), and because the Intel chipset that supports the P4 is more expensive than the Via chipsets you can get for P3 or Athlon
2) RAM is way more expensive. You need 2 sticks of RDRAM. A single 64Meg stick of rdram costs $60 ($120 for 2). You can get 128Meg of PC133 for $30. I put 256MB in the last budget PC I put together, so that makes things even worse.
3) You need a special case. Add a few more dollars.
4) You need a good power supply. Well, so does the Athlon. A 1.333GHz Athlon and a 1.5GHz P4 both have about the same max power (73Watts). (comparing apples to apples). But the P3 and the Via C3 (now that's a budget processor) both can get by with cheap power supplies.
In total, you have to add about $200 to the price of that P4. You can get a high end Athlon for about $200. Kind of makes it hard for Intel to compete, doesn't it?
Bryan
When I first saw this article I thought, what an excellent idea! Make a browser plug in for the clueless people so we can get a critical mass, so this might actually succeed, unlike AlterNIC and al the other failures. There's nothing stopping me from fixing my resolv.conf rather than using the stupid plugin.
"Manufacture anything for no cost? I think you've seen too much Star Trek. What about the cost in energy? And the associated costs of getting the energy?"
By this definition, Linux is non-free as well. Heck, you need a ~$1000 computer to run it, plus a few dollars a month for electricity. This does not make Linux non-free. The bandwidth to download it is non-free: many people find it cheaper to buy a $2 cheap bytes CD than to pay for the bandwidth.
Is Linux free as in "free beer"? To the end user it isn't, it costs a few bucks to install. As far as the market is concerned, it is: the cost is exactly zero, and the economics of unlimited goods apply, rather than the standard supply and demand of scarce goods that everybody understands.
The best measure of how much technology is affecting society is the average life span. Pollution and car accidents make it go down, modern plumbing, modern medicine and good information transfer make it go up.
So how are we doing? A link from a previous slashdot article indicated that life expectancy is going up by 120 days per year. I'd say that increases are coming as fast and furious as they used to be.
Bryan
I'm not sure about the States, but many jurisdictions count the number of "ruined ballots", which most people consider a protest vote. I have written "none of the above" across my ballots before.
Back when the K6 was still competitive, AMD people thought Tom had a strong anti-AMD bias. Later, AMD just about went bankrupt as the Celeron started dumping all over the K6.
Back when 3dfx was still competitive, people though Tom had an anti-3dfx bias. Today, 3dfx is in a lot of trouble.
Now Tom has an anti-Intel bias? Based on experience, I'd be worried for Intel, not for Tom....
Bryan
The marginal cost of information is zero. Therefore, in a rational marketplace, by economic theory, the marginal price of information should be just above zero.
That's what the statement means to me. No moral judgement, but it means that any market where the marginal cost of information is not basically zero is not a rational marketplace.
Copyrights are not rational or efficient in economic terms, and require government intervention to protect. Whether they are morally right or not is a different debate.
Bryan
That's V1.1. Read the V1.4 posted instead.
I would hardly call it a "major issue for development".
Putting it on Slashdot is like shooting gophers with a double-barreled shotgun. Sure, it'll probably solve the problem, but the gore left behind will disgust messy.