XP has support for IPv6 already. Direct3D 10 supposedly can be grafted into XP- it's only a question of whether the driver will need to be hacked to do so or not. New hardware can prove to be a thorny issue as 64-bit Vista and Vienna drivers cannot load into a 32-bit XP kernel.
64-bit CPUs show up on pretty much all desktop computers today, regardless of price, and have done so for some time. The "budget" chips are generally just lower-clocked main-line with smaller buses and less cache. If the parent chip is 64-bit, then the budget chip will also be 64-bit. Why take it out if it's already there? Intel and AMD have been making 64-bit chips for 3 years and there wasn't that big of a delay between the top-line chips being 64-bits and the cut-down budget versions being made. There is a little delay to sell used-to-be top-line chips in budget systems, but the catch-up is rather quick. The only exception to this rule is in notebooks, where the parent chips were 32-bit Pentium Ms and Core Duos. The budget chips didn't magically grow x86_64 extensions that the parent chips didn't have, so they are 32-bit. But all new notebook chips are 64-bit and thus the budget chips will be also.
The really poor countries generally have a real hodgepodge of old and cast-off hardware, so who really knows what they're running. There aren't generally all that many machines in those countries anyway, and the ones they do have probably can't handle a completely new OS anyway. And it's not like somebody with an annual income of $500 would spend 80% of it on a Microsoft Windows license anyway. So that point is pretty well moot.
There are still many notebooks being shipped with 32-bit Core Duo and Celeron M processors even today, and not just in low-end machines. It will be some time and probably a new CPU/chipset (past the Santa Rosa refresh, that is) generation to push the Core Duos out. Penryn and the 30-series chipsets ought to force a refresh of most notebooks that Santa Rosa/G965 and the Core 2 Duo didn't catch, and those are supposed to come out late 2007. Windows "Vienna" is supposed to ship in about 3 years, so it's entirely plausible that somebody would try to put a new OS on a machine that's a little over 2 years old instead of buying new. This will not be an issue for desktops as most new desktops were 64-bit starting in 2004, with the last 32-bit desktop Semprons and Northwood Celerons bowing out around the end of 2005.The last 32-bit desktops would be roughly 5-6 years old when "Vienna" ships, so they'll be candidates for replacement rather than upgrade.
A computer bought in 2001 could probably run Vista, especially if somebody was willing to drop some more now-much-cheaper RAM (if it's not RDRAM:D ) and a low-end AGP Direct3D 9-capable video card in there. My folks got a 1.8 GHz P4 Willamette in late 2001 and it has an ancient NV TNT2 AGP GPU, a 120 GB HDD, and 512 MB DDR-266, upgradeable to 2 GB. Replacing the old AGP card with something like an ATi x1300 in AGP and putting the full 2 GB RAM in the machine would enable it to run Vista. Would it be fast? Not really as the P4 Willy isn't all that fast even with XP. But it will certainly run Vista if somebody put $150 into it.
There are a lot more Windows boxes out there run by idiots who don't keep them patched than there are Linux servers. But the biggest reason that you can crack 50M Windows boxes in the time that it takes to crack 150-200 Linux servers is that Windows is much easier to crack. Why bash your head against the wall to get into one Linux machine when there are 50 M Windows ones that require one click to crack? It's no coincidence that IIS-on-Windows Web servers are cracked with a much greater regularity than Linux Web servers, even though there are a lot fewer Windows servers than Linux ones (roughly 65% Linux vs. high teens % Windows.)
But the value of a single desktop is still a lot lower than the value of a server. It's just that 50 M desktops are an aggregate bigger asset than 150-200 Linux servers.
There is a big difference between the value (to the cracker) of a compromised Linux server versus a relatively anemic Windows desktop or notebook. The Linux server is much more valuable of a target because:
1. Its Internet connection is far faster than the desktop/notebook's connection. This greatly increases the number of spam e-mails sent out or illegal files served/stored in any one time period.
2. The server has much more disk space to hold illegal files, and a good server's disk system is much, much faster, allowing for more users to use the illegal server. A notebook or laptop has a relatively small, slow drive that grinds under the load of far fewer connected users.
3. The Linux machine has many more tools built-in that can be used to wreak havoc on other computers. Windows doesn't have much more than tracert and ping installed and cannot spoof packet sources like Linux can (at least XP SP2 and 9x/Me can't.)
4. Servers often hold a lot of things that are of interest to people for nefarious reasons- lots of SSNs, CC numbers, medical records, etc, regardless of OS. My university just has 22,300 SSNs stolen from it off a server (a Windows server, actually.) The average desktop rarely contains anything more interesting than one or two SSNs or cached CC numbers. Cracking one machine is much less intensive than cracking 22,300 of them to get the same information.
5. Desktops and laptops generally use DHCP while servers have fixed IPs. This makes the server much easier to nail and then access after it's been cracked.
So servers, especially Linux servers, are a much better target than Windows desktops are. If they were equally difficult, the servers would be THE target as they are far more high-value than a desktop or laptop is. Think of it this way- would you rather rob a bum or a bank if both were equally easy to do and get away with?
They used to make a version of Internet Explorer for UNIX (SunOS and HP-UX) a while back. Also, the last two versions of Office for Mac were for OS X and thus at least somewhat Unixy.
The Core Duo had two big downfalls compared to the X2s: one was that it was a 32-bit chip and not a 64-bit chip. The second was that the Core Duo had the Pentium III/M's relatively weak FPU compared to the much more powerful FPU units in the X2. This made the Core Duo roughly as fast per clock as the X2s in 32-bit applications that did not stress the FPU much, but FPU-straining apps had the X2s pull away mightily from the Core Duo. I'd never seen a direct comparison between an X2 running in 64-bit mode versus a Core Duo, but other tests with X2s in 32- and 64-bit mode show about a 10% increase in performance by running in long mode. Thus, the X2s were potentially a bit faster than the Core Duo was if each was allowed to run optimal setups.
They are either a masochist or a lawyer. Probably a lawyer as there is only so much self-flagellation that a masochist can take before he uses the safety word.
I think I'd want a pickup truck to haul around the 1.5 kids. The one kid wouldn't be a problem, but that half of a kid would be awfully messy to have inside the vehicle.
1. After 9/11, Gore would have made some big talk in front of the U.N. about terrorist groups. But the U.N. would have done exactly what it did do: nothing. The terrorists would have seen us as unwilling to defend ourselves and would have made subsequent attacks on us. This cues more rhetoric from Gore and eventually he and the U.N. would try to negotiate a truce with the terrorists, which would have given them "legitimate" status and guaranteed more attacks in the future.
2. The federal budget would be no more balanced than it is today, although anybody making even a few thousand more than the median income would pay significantly more in taxes. There would also likely be a socialized health care system, which would be modeled after Canada's. This would pretty much destroy any specialists in the U.S. as they would be paid a pittance and they'd move elsewhere. A lot of Americans would go to other countries to avoid years-long waits on elective and cosmetic procedures, and there would be a big exodus of people from the medical field as it doesn't pay to rack up $150k+ debts and spend 8 years in college, then 3-8 years in residency to be a government employee making what a teacher in a better school district makes.
3. The U.S. government would be regarded as a joke by most of the rest of the world as unwilling to really stand up for itself after anything happens. We'd be like the old man that goes outside and shakes his fist at kids who egg his house instead of calling the police on them.
4. There probably wouldn't be as many jails, period, as we'd have let pretty much everybody who commits any kind of crime. The only people who'd get jailed are corporate execs who defrauded people as well any white person convicted of crime against any non-white person. As a result, crime would be horrible, made forse as private gun ownership would be restricted much more severely than it is now.
5. The Supreme Court would have a couple of special interest group apologist, we-know-what's-better-for-you-than-you-do excuses for jurists who do nothing but legislate from the bench.
6. The various federal agencies would have been populated with a bunch of incompetent bleeding-heart political tools. And there would be many more of them.
"They are the same" to the extent that they all do stupid things. It's only the extent of the damage and the exact methods employed that differ. It's a frying pan or the oven kind of comparison; neither are very appealing.
The P6 micro-architecture of the Core 2 line is older than the PIII as it debuted in 1995 with the Pentium Pro. However, the P6 core was a solid one and was vastly reworked into the Core 2. The K10 is a derivative of the 1999 K7 Athlon, and like the Core 2, it's a very tweaked and reworked version of that.
The newest x86 architecture was killed off last year with the late 2000-era NetBurst being scrapped after it hit the thermal wall and the K8s smoked them. Newer isn't always better.
Konqueror plays back Ogg Vorbis stuff using either Xine or GStreamer and the libogg/libvorbis codec files. It's all open-source stuff so you're not teeing off Stallmann.
A true *nix screen gets kicked off of Macs because the Mac people think that covering the screen in xterms is either heresy or "hacking" and get PO'd about it. (Been there, done that, I now avoid the Mac labs on campus.) A true *nix geek might get a secondhand Apple computer from an Apple person that thinks that the MacBookPro going from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo chips is a major upgrade, but the *nix geek would probably just run a real *nix with X11 and all that because it's simpler than hacking at OS X to return it to its original BSD state.
I wouldn't necessarily say that greed is the thing that breaks up communism, it's the lack of motivation of the general populace and the intense corruption of those who administer the system. Just like the Pentium 4, communism looks great on paper but falls well short of the mark in the real world.
Next you're going to say country music singers should just shut up and sing.
It's bullshit. Being good at something does not take away your right to hold or express political views.
No, it doesn't. But it also doesn't make you any more credible or better at espousing said beliefs than the next Joe, even though you might think that you are.
All Intel P6 chips with SpeedStep (Pentium III-M, Pentium M, Core Solo/Duo, Core 2 Duo/Quad) have their lowest speed defined by 6x whatever the actual FSB clock is. The Pentium III-M, Pentium M Banias, and Pentium M Dothan 400 FSB all have a 100 MHz FSB clock tick, which gives a 600 MHz idle speed. My brother has a Pentium M 755 with a 400 MHz effective FSB, and it certainly idles at 600 MHz. 133 MHz FSB chips like your Pentium M 760 would idle at 800 MHz, which is a 6x multiplier. So does the Core Duo T20x0 and Pentium Dual Core chips with a 533 MHz effective FSB. The Core Solo/Duo and Core 2 Duo laptop chips have a 166 MHz FSB clock tick, which sets the idle at 1 GHz, the Core 2 Duo E4x00 with its 200 MHz clock tick idles at 1.20 GHz, and the 1066 MHz Core 2 Duo desktop chips will idle at 1.60 GHz. The 1333 MHz FSB chips idle at 2 GHz. Setting the 6x multiplier as "the" multiplier for SpeedStep idling was done across the line and simply never updated. AMD did a similar thing with setting the 4x multiplier on the K8s for 800 MHz on mobile chips and the 5x multiplier on desktop and server chips as the idle speed. But on the K8s, the base clock tick doesn't matter as much as it does on a CPU with an FSB.
The Intel TDP is generally thought to be calculated somewhat close to the U.L. spec for heat-producing devices. That works out to be a 75% duty cycle. One certainly can exceed the TDP on Intel CPUs, particularly the higher-clocked chips for a given TDP bracket. It wouldn't necessarily take a power virus or specialized burn-in application either, just something that runs the CPU at full load and gives it a good workout. Certain scientific programs and simulations certainly can push what a CPU can deliver and run a long time too. But those applications generally aren't used by "the average user" and somebody who'd be running a tough application on a high-clocked CPU for long periods of time will probably upgrade the cooling anyway.
Low thermal dissipation is a much more prevalent theme for AMD than it is for Intel, especially outside of the notebook sector. Yes, Intel has some 1.06 and 1.20 GHz Core 2 Duo ULVs for laptops and those have a 10-watt or so thermal dissipation while AMD's lowest-TDP mobile chips rate in at 25 watts (Turion 64 MT/Sempron.) Intel also has the single-core Core Solo series at 1.06-1.33 GHz that dissipates 5.5 watts. However, those chips are very rarely seen in any notebooks larger than a 12" screen size. You'd be much more likely to see a 31-watt Core Duo or 34-watt Core 2 Duo sitting in an average laptop than a 10-watt C2D ULV. AMD's Turion X2s have similar TDPs, ranging from 31 to 35 watts. All of the processors have similar frequency and voltage scaling mechanisms and battery life is roughly similar.
For desktops, most of Intel's newer Core 2 Duo processors have an average thermal dissipation of 65 watts. The fastest Core 2 Duo, the 2.93 GHz X6800, has a 75-watt average TDP. The quad-core chips range from 105 watts for the 2.40 GHz Q6600 to the 130-watt QX6700. These chips have a very reduced version of the SpeedStep that Intel puts in its laptop chips. The lowest core speed of the 800 MHz FSB chips is 1.20 GHz and 1.6 GHz for the 1066 MHz FSB chips. AMD's current new desktop processors start from a maximum thermal dissipation of 35 watts for the single-core Sempron EE and go up to 45 watts for the Athlon 64 single-cores (Lima), 65 watts for the Athlon 64 X2 models from the 3600+ to the 5200+, 89 watts for the 5400+ and 5600+, and 125 watts for the X2 6000+ and FX-70 series. The AMD chips all clock down to 1 GHz at idle. AMD also rates the chips on their absolute maximum thermal dissipation rather than an average thermal dissipation like Intel does, so a 65 watt AMD chip will usually end up drawing less power than an Intel 65-watt chip. The AMD chips also draw significantly less power at idle due to their lower clock speed.
The scenario is much the same for servers. AMD has their High Efficieny line of dual-core chips that draw 68 watts, the normal line that draws 95 watts, and the SE line that draws 125 watts. Intel has a few low-voltage Xeons, but those are very uncommon and pretty much limited to blade server vendors. AMD sells its Opteron HEs through a wide range of vendors.
Coprocessors are certainly coming back to computers, just look at AMD's Torrenza and Intel's version of that (Geneseo?) These won't be on-chip, but they will certainly hook up to the CPU/chipset over high-speed links.
Putting the FPGA on-chip would be a bit faster, but make for more expensive chips due to not only putting the FPGA on-chip but making different chips with different kinds of FPGAs or no FPGA. I'd settle for an off-chip, upgradeable FPGA rather than have to upgrade the CPU to upgrade the FPGA coprocessor.
Think of quad-cores or more rather than dual cores. Having four cores at a moderate clock speed where one can get ramped up to a high clock speed will give you the large speed boost of many slower cores for multithreaded applications and a high-clock-speed single core for single-threaded applications. The four or more slower cores will beat the one higher-clocked one in multithreaded applications.
I use an ATi x1900GT under 64-bit Linux and it works fine for me after the one bug it had, crashing X when using XVideo, was completely fixed in 8.35.5. The card runs two 1600x1200 LCDs and it does just fine with that and it wasn't hard to set up at all. A lot of people decry the lack of AIGLX and Compiz, but since that never worked on dual-head setups with ANY GPU, it doesn't matter much to me. ATi's drivers used to be pretty poor but since the x1k series came out and forced ATi to write a driver as the Xorg "radeon" driver didn't do R500, the quality has been much improved.
No, Pidgin has an automatic pidgin translator. The first message sent over Pidgin was to lament the AOL lawsuit:
"Dese AOL beyotches, they be hatin on us little guys jus' because they be bigger than we is an think they can push us around an shit. We been in dis here turf first an then they come an try to take id away...that's not coo' man, not coo'. Gotta give a homie his space man, y'all know the rulz..."
WebCT (college course webpage system) crashed and burned under IE6.1, went to Firefox 0.7, which worked well. Didn't have Excel because the computer had Word + Outlook in its default install so I got OpenOffice 1.1 to be able to graph with. It worked okay enough to not pay $133 for MS Office. Windows Messenger crashed all the time, so I got GAIM and it worked fine. I didn't want to pay $$$ for Photoshop, so I got The GIMP and it worked fine. Reinstall of WinDVD on XP SP1 failed, so I went with VLC, which worked fine for playing DVDs.
XP SP2 broke most of my drivers, so I decided to migrate to Linux. It has worked well enough that I have stuck with it for the last 3 years or so.
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XP has support for IPv6 already. Direct3D 10 supposedly can be grafted into XP- it's only a question of whether the driver will need to be hacked to do so or not. New hardware can prove to be a thorny issue as 64-bit Vista and Vienna drivers cannot load into a 32-bit XP kernel.
64-bit CPUs show up on pretty much all desktop computers today, regardless of price, and have done so for some time. The "budget" chips are generally just lower-clocked main-line with smaller buses and less cache. If the parent chip is 64-bit, then the budget chip will also be 64-bit. Why take it out if it's already there? Intel and AMD have been making 64-bit chips for 3 years and there wasn't that big of a delay between the top-line chips being 64-bits and the cut-down budget versions being made. There is a little delay to sell used-to-be top-line chips in budget systems, but the catch-up is rather quick. The only exception to this rule is in notebooks, where the parent chips were 32-bit Pentium Ms and Core Duos. The budget chips didn't magically grow x86_64 extensions that the parent chips didn't have, so they are 32-bit. But all new notebook chips are 64-bit and thus the budget chips will be also.
The really poor countries generally have a real hodgepodge of old and cast-off hardware, so who really knows what they're running. There aren't generally all that many machines in those countries anyway, and the ones they do have probably can't handle a completely new OS anyway. And it's not like somebody with an annual income of $500 would spend 80% of it on a Microsoft Windows license anyway. So that point is pretty well moot.
There are still many notebooks being shipped with 32-bit Core Duo and Celeron M processors even today, and not just in low-end machines. It will be some time and probably a new CPU/chipset (past the Santa Rosa refresh, that is) generation to push the Core Duos out. Penryn and the 30-series chipsets ought to force a refresh of most notebooks that Santa Rosa/G965 and the Core 2 Duo didn't catch, and those are supposed to come out late 2007. Windows "Vienna" is supposed to ship in about 3 years, so it's entirely plausible that somebody would try to put a new OS on a machine that's a little over 2 years old instead of buying new. This will not be an issue for desktops as most new desktops were 64-bit starting in 2004, with the last 32-bit desktop Semprons and Northwood Celerons bowing out around the end of 2005.The last 32-bit desktops would be roughly 5-6 years old when "Vienna" ships, so they'll be candidates for replacement rather than upgrade.
:D ) and a low-end AGP Direct3D 9-capable video card in there. My folks got a 1.8 GHz P4 Willamette in late 2001 and it has an ancient NV TNT2 AGP GPU, a 120 GB HDD, and 512 MB DDR-266, upgradeable to 2 GB. Replacing the old AGP card with something like an ATi x1300 in AGP and putting the full 2 GB RAM in the machine would enable it to run Vista. Would it be fast? Not really as the P4 Willy isn't all that fast even with XP. But it will certainly run Vista if somebody put $150 into it.
A computer bought in 2001 could probably run Vista, especially if somebody was willing to drop some more now-much-cheaper RAM (if it's not RDRAM
There are a lot more Windows boxes out there run by idiots who don't keep them patched than there are Linux servers. But the biggest reason that you can crack 50M Windows boxes in the time that it takes to crack 150-200 Linux servers is that Windows is much easier to crack. Why bash your head against the wall to get into one Linux machine when there are 50 M Windows ones that require one click to crack? It's no coincidence that IIS-on-Windows Web servers are cracked with a much greater regularity than Linux Web servers, even though there are a lot fewer Windows servers than Linux ones (roughly 65% Linux vs. high teens % Windows.)
But the value of a single desktop is still a lot lower than the value of a server. It's just that 50 M desktops are an aggregate bigger asset than 150-200 Linux servers.
There is a big difference between the value (to the cracker) of a compromised Linux server versus a relatively anemic Windows desktop or notebook. The Linux server is much more valuable of a target because:
1. Its Internet connection is far faster than the desktop/notebook's connection. This greatly increases the number of spam e-mails sent out or illegal files served/stored in any one time period.
2. The server has much more disk space to hold illegal files, and a good server's disk system is much, much faster, allowing for more users to use the illegal server. A notebook or laptop has a relatively small, slow drive that grinds under the load of far fewer connected users.
3. The Linux machine has many more tools built-in that can be used to wreak havoc on other computers. Windows doesn't have much more than tracert and ping installed and cannot spoof packet sources like Linux can (at least XP SP2 and 9x/Me can't.)
4. Servers often hold a lot of things that are of interest to people for nefarious reasons- lots of SSNs, CC numbers, medical records, etc, regardless of OS. My university just has 22,300 SSNs stolen from it off a server (a Windows server, actually.) The average desktop rarely contains anything more interesting than one or two SSNs or cached CC numbers. Cracking one machine is much less intensive than cracking 22,300 of them to get the same information.
5. Desktops and laptops generally use DHCP while servers have fixed IPs. This makes the server much easier to nail and then access after it's been cracked.
So servers, especially Linux servers, are a much better target than Windows desktops are. If they were equally difficult, the servers would be THE target as they are far more high-value than a desktop or laptop is. Think of it this way- would you rather rob a bum or a bank if both were equally easy to do and get away with?
They used to make a version of Internet Explorer for UNIX (SunOS and HP-UX) a while back. Also, the last two versions of Office for Mac were for OS X and thus at least somewhat Unixy.
The Core Duo had two big downfalls compared to the X2s: one was that it was a 32-bit chip and not a 64-bit chip. The second was that the Core Duo had the Pentium III/M's relatively weak FPU compared to the much more powerful FPU units in the X2. This made the Core Duo roughly as fast per clock as the X2s in 32-bit applications that did not stress the FPU much, but FPU-straining apps had the X2s pull away mightily from the Core Duo. I'd never seen a direct comparison between an X2 running in 64-bit mode versus a Core Duo, but other tests with X2s in 32- and 64-bit mode show about a 10% increase in performance by running in long mode. Thus, the X2s were potentially a bit faster than the Core Duo was if each was allowed to run optimal setups.
They are either a masochist or a lawyer. Probably a lawyer as there is only so much self-flagellation that a masochist can take before he uses the safety word.
I think I'd want a pickup truck to haul around the 1.5 kids. The one kid wouldn't be a problem, but that half of a kid would be awfully messy to have inside the vehicle.
Yeah, my high school still uses 700 MHz Durons with SDRAM, so maybe they just *might* migrate to computers with DDR RAM in 3 years.
Well, not better off, but certainly different:
1. After 9/11, Gore would have made some big talk in front of the U.N. about terrorist groups. But the U.N. would have done exactly what it did do: nothing. The terrorists would have seen us as unwilling to defend ourselves and would have made subsequent attacks on us. This cues more rhetoric from Gore and eventually he and the U.N. would try to negotiate a truce with the terrorists, which would have given them "legitimate" status and guaranteed more attacks in the future.
2. The federal budget would be no more balanced than it is today, although anybody making even a few thousand more than the median income would pay significantly more in taxes. There would also likely be a socialized health care system, which would be modeled after Canada's. This would pretty much destroy any specialists in the U.S. as they would be paid a pittance and they'd move elsewhere. A lot of Americans would go to other countries to avoid years-long waits on elective and cosmetic procedures, and there would be a big exodus of people from the medical field as it doesn't pay to rack up $150k+ debts and spend 8 years in college, then 3-8 years in residency to be a government employee making what a teacher in a better school district makes.
3. The U.S. government would be regarded as a joke by most of the rest of the world as unwilling to really stand up for itself after anything happens. We'd be like the old man that goes outside and shakes his fist at kids who egg his house instead of calling the police on them.
4. There probably wouldn't be as many jails, period, as we'd have let pretty much everybody who commits any kind of crime. The only people who'd get jailed are corporate execs who defrauded people as well any white person convicted of crime against any non-white person. As a result, crime would be horrible, made forse as private gun ownership would be restricted much more severely than it is now.
5. The Supreme Court would have a couple of special interest group apologist, we-know-what's-better-for-you-than-you-do excuses for jurists who do nothing but legislate from the bench.
6. The various federal agencies would have been populated with a bunch of incompetent bleeding-heart political tools. And there would be many more of them.
"They are the same" to the extent that they all do stupid things. It's only the extent of the damage and the exact methods employed that differ. It's a frying pan or the oven kind of comparison; neither are very appealing.
The P6 micro-architecture of the Core 2 line is older than the PIII as it debuted in 1995 with the Pentium Pro. However, the P6 core was a solid one and was vastly reworked into the Core 2. The K10 is a derivative of the 1999 K7 Athlon, and like the Core 2, it's a very tweaked and reworked version of that.
The newest x86 architecture was killed off last year with the late 2000-era NetBurst being scrapped after it hit the thermal wall and the K8s smoked them. Newer isn't always better.
Konqueror plays back Ogg Vorbis stuff using either Xine or GStreamer and the libogg/libvorbis codec files. It's all open-source stuff so you're not teeing off Stallmann.
A true *nix screen gets kicked off of Macs because the Mac people think that covering the screen in xterms is either heresy or "hacking" and get PO'd about it. (Been there, done that, I now avoid the Mac labs on campus.) A true *nix geek might get a secondhand Apple computer from an Apple person that thinks that the MacBookPro going from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo chips is a major upgrade, but the *nix geek would probably just run a real *nix with X11 and all that because it's simpler than hacking at OS X to return it to its original BSD state.
I wouldn't necessarily say that greed is the thing that breaks up communism, it's the lack of motivation of the general populace and the intense corruption of those who administer the system. Just like the Pentium 4, communism looks great on paper but falls well short of the mark in the real world.
No, it doesn't. But it also doesn't make you any more credible or better at espousing said beliefs than the next Joe, even though you might think that you are.
All Intel P6 chips with SpeedStep (Pentium III-M, Pentium M, Core Solo/Duo, Core 2 Duo/Quad) have their lowest speed defined by 6x whatever the actual FSB clock is. The Pentium III-M, Pentium M Banias, and Pentium M Dothan 400 FSB all have a 100 MHz FSB clock tick, which gives a 600 MHz idle speed. My brother has a Pentium M 755 with a 400 MHz effective FSB, and it certainly idles at 600 MHz. 133 MHz FSB chips like your Pentium M 760 would idle at 800 MHz, which is a 6x multiplier. So does the Core Duo T20x0 and Pentium Dual Core chips with a 533 MHz effective FSB. The Core Solo/Duo and Core 2 Duo laptop chips have a 166 MHz FSB clock tick, which sets the idle at 1 GHz, the Core 2 Duo E4x00 with its 200 MHz clock tick idles at 1.20 GHz, and the 1066 MHz Core 2 Duo desktop chips will idle at 1.60 GHz. The 1333 MHz FSB chips idle at 2 GHz. Setting the 6x multiplier as "the" multiplier for SpeedStep idling was done across the line and simply never updated. AMD did a similar thing with setting the 4x multiplier on the K8s for 800 MHz on mobile chips and the 5x multiplier on desktop and server chips as the idle speed. But on the K8s, the base clock tick doesn't matter as much as it does on a CPU with an FSB.
The Intel TDP is generally thought to be calculated somewhat close to the U.L. spec for heat-producing devices. That works out to be a 75% duty cycle. One certainly can exceed the TDP on Intel CPUs, particularly the higher-clocked chips for a given TDP bracket. It wouldn't necessarily take a power virus or specialized burn-in application either, just something that runs the CPU at full load and gives it a good workout. Certain scientific programs and simulations certainly can push what a CPU can deliver and run a long time too. But those applications generally aren't used by "the average user" and somebody who'd be running a tough application on a high-clocked CPU for long periods of time will probably upgrade the cooling anyway.
Low thermal dissipation is a much more prevalent theme for AMD than it is for Intel, especially outside of the notebook sector. Yes, Intel has some 1.06 and 1.20 GHz Core 2 Duo ULVs for laptops and those have a 10-watt or so thermal dissipation while AMD's lowest-TDP mobile chips rate in at 25 watts (Turion 64 MT/Sempron.) Intel also has the single-core Core Solo series at 1.06-1.33 GHz that dissipates 5.5 watts. However, those chips are very rarely seen in any notebooks larger than a 12" screen size. You'd be much more likely to see a 31-watt Core Duo or 34-watt Core 2 Duo sitting in an average laptop than a 10-watt C2D ULV. AMD's Turion X2s have similar TDPs, ranging from 31 to 35 watts. All of the processors have similar frequency and voltage scaling mechanisms and battery life is roughly similar.
For desktops, most of Intel's newer Core 2 Duo processors have an average thermal dissipation of 65 watts. The fastest Core 2 Duo, the 2.93 GHz X6800, has a 75-watt average TDP. The quad-core chips range from 105 watts for the 2.40 GHz Q6600 to the 130-watt QX6700. These chips have a very reduced version of the SpeedStep that Intel puts in its laptop chips. The lowest core speed of the 800 MHz FSB chips is 1.20 GHz and 1.6 GHz for the 1066 MHz FSB chips. AMD's current new desktop processors start from a maximum thermal dissipation of 35 watts for the single-core Sempron EE and go up to 45 watts for the Athlon 64 single-cores (Lima), 65 watts for the Athlon 64 X2 models from the 3600+ to the 5200+, 89 watts for the 5400+ and 5600+, and 125 watts for the X2 6000+ and FX-70 series. The AMD chips all clock down to 1 GHz at idle. AMD also rates the chips on their absolute maximum thermal dissipation rather than an average thermal dissipation like Intel does, so a 65 watt AMD chip will usually end up drawing less power than an Intel 65-watt chip. The AMD chips also draw significantly less power at idle due to their lower clock speed.
The scenario is much the same for servers. AMD has their High Efficieny line of dual-core chips that draw 68 watts, the normal line that draws 95 watts, and the SE line that draws 125 watts. Intel has a few low-voltage Xeons, but those are very uncommon and pretty much limited to blade server vendors. AMD sells its Opteron HEs through a wide range of vendors.
Yes, I'll buy every processor Apple makes.
Coprocessors are certainly coming back to computers, just look at AMD's Torrenza and Intel's version of that (Geneseo?) These won't be on-chip, but they will certainly hook up to the CPU/chipset over high-speed links.
Putting the FPGA on-chip would be a bit faster, but make for more expensive chips due to not only putting the FPGA on-chip but making different chips with different kinds of FPGAs or no FPGA. I'd settle for an off-chip, upgradeable FPGA rather than have to upgrade the CPU to upgrade the FPGA coprocessor.
Think of quad-cores or more rather than dual cores. Having four cores at a moderate clock speed where one can get ramped up to a high clock speed will give you the large speed boost of many slower cores for multithreaded applications and a high-clock-speed single core for single-threaded applications. The four or more slower cores will beat the one higher-clocked one in multithreaded applications.
I use an ATi x1900GT under 64-bit Linux and it works fine for me after the one bug it had, crashing X when using XVideo, was completely fixed in 8.35.5. The card runs two 1600x1200 LCDs and it does just fine with that and it wasn't hard to set up at all. A lot of people decry the lack of AIGLX and Compiz, but since that never worked on dual-head setups with ANY GPU, it doesn't matter much to me. ATi's drivers used to be pretty poor but since the x1k series came out and forced ATi to write a driver as the Xorg "radeon" driver didn't do R500, the quality has been much improved.
Don't mind if I do: I'm Chuck Norris and I'm going to kick your ass unless you give me your bank account number! I'm waiting...
No, Pidgin has an automatic pidgin translator. The first message sent over Pidgin was to lament the AOL lawsuit:
"Dese AOL beyotches, they be hatin on us little guys jus' because they be bigger than we is an think they can push us around an shit. We been in dis here turf first an then they come an try to take id away...that's not coo' man, not coo'. Gotta give a homie his space man, y'all know the rulz..."
I had a very similar experience:
WebCT (college course webpage system) crashed and burned under IE6.1, went to Firefox 0.7, which worked well.
Didn't have Excel because the computer had Word + Outlook in its default install so I got OpenOffice 1.1 to be able to graph with. It worked okay enough to not pay $133 for MS Office.
Windows Messenger crashed all the time, so I got GAIM and it worked fine.
I didn't want to pay $$$ for Photoshop, so I got The GIMP and it worked fine.
Reinstall of WinDVD on XP SP1 failed, so I went with VLC, which worked fine for playing DVDs.
XP SP2 broke most of my drivers, so I decided to migrate to Linux. It has worked well enough that I have stuck with it for the last 3 years or so.